Marino slipped a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “Anything else comes to mind that you think I ought to know about, you give me a call.”

“Yes, sir,” she said weakly. “I promise I will.”

“You doing the post tonight?” Marino asked me after the front door shut.

Snow was ankle-deep and still coming down.

“In the morning,” I said, fishing keys out of my coat pocket.

“What do you think?”

“I think her unusual occupation put her at great risk for the wrong sort of person to come along. I also think her apparent isolated existence, as Mrs. Clary described it, and the fact that it appears she opened her Christmas presents early makes suicide an easy assumption. But her clean socks are a major problem.”

“You got that right,” he said.

Jennifer Deighton’s house was lit up, and a flatbed truck with chains on its tires had backed into the drive way. Voices of men working were muted by the snow, and every car on the street was solid white and soft around the edges.

I followed Marino’s gaze above the roof of Miss Deighton’s house. Several blocks away, the church was etched against the pearl gray sky, me steeple shaped weirdly like a witch’s hat. Arches in the arcade stared back at us with mournful, empty eyes when suddenly the light blinked on. It filled spaces and painted surfaces a luminescent ocher, the arcade an unsmiling but gentle face floating in the night.

I glanced over at the Clary house as curtains moved in the kitchen window.

“Jesus, I’m out of here.” Marino headed across the street.

“You want me to alert Neils about her car?” I called after him.

“Yeah,” he yelled back. “That’d be good.”

My house was lit up when I got home and good smells came from the kitchen. A fire blazed and two places had been set on the butler’s table in front of it. Dropping my medical bag on the couch, I looked around and listened. From my study across the hall came the faint, rapid clicking of keys.

“Lucy?” I called out, slipping off my gloves and unbuttoning my coat.

“I’m in here.”

Keys continued to click.

“What have you been cooking?”

“Dinner.”

I headed for my study, where I found my niece sitting at my desk staring intensely at the computer monitor. I was stunned when I noticed the pound sign prompt. She was in UNIX. Somehow she had dialed into the computer downtown.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “I didn’t tell you the dial-in command, user name, password, or anything.”

‘You didn’t have to tell me. I found the file that told me what the bat command is. Plus, you’ve got some programs in here with your user name and password coded in so you don’t get prompted for them. A good shortcut but risky. Your user name is Marley and password is brain.”

“You’re dangerous.” I pulled up a chair.