“I got no problem with that. By the way, just because you didn’t know Jennifer Deighton don’t mean she didn’t know you.”

I waited for him to explain.

“I’ve been thinking about your hang ups. You’re on TV, in the papers. Maybe she knew someone was after her, didn’t know where to turn, and reached out to you for help. When she got your machine, she was too paranoid to leave a message.”

“That’s a very depressing thought.”

“Almost everything we think in this joint is depressing.”

He got up from his chair.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check her house. Tell me if you find any feather pillows, down-filled jackets, feather dusters, anything relating to feathers.”

“Why?”

“I found a small feather on her gown.”

“Sure. I’ll let you know. Are you leaving?”

I glanced past him as I heard the elevator doors open and shut. “Was that Stevens? “I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got a few more things to do before I go home,” I said.

After Marino got on the elevator, I went to a window at the end of the hall that overlooked the parking loon back. I wanted to make sure Ben Stevens’s Jeep was gone. It was, and I watched as Marino emerged from the budding, picking his way through crushed snow lit up by street lamps. He trudged to his car and stopped to vigorously shake snow off his feet, like a cat that’s stepped in water, before sliding behind the wheel. God forbid that anything should violate the freshened au and Armor All of his inner sanctum. I wondered ft he had plans for Christmas and was dismayed that I had not thought to invite him in for dinner. This would be his AS Christmas since he and Doris had divorced.

As I made my way back down the empty hall, I ducked into each office along the way to check computer terminals. Unfortunately, no one was logged in, and the only cable tagged with a device number was Fielding’s. It was neither tty07 nor tty14. Frustrated, I unlocked Margaret’s office and switched on the light.

Typically, it looked as if a fierce wind had blown through, scattering papers across her desk, tipping books over in the bookcase and knocking others on the floor. Stacks of continuous-paper printouts spilled over like accordions, and indecipherable notes and telephone numbers were taped to walls and terminal screens. The minicomputer hummed like an electronic insect and lights danced across banks of modems on a shelf. Sitting in her chair before the system terminal, I slid open a drawer to my right and began rapidly walking my fingers through file tabs, I found several with promising labels such as “users” and “networking;” but nothing I perused told me what I needed to know. Looking around as I thought ,I noticed a thick bundle of cables that ran up the wall behind the computer and disappeared through the ceiling. Each cable was tagged.

Both tty07 and tty14 were connected directly to the computer. Unplugging tty07 first, I roamed from terminal to terminal to see which had been disconnected as a result. The terminal in Ben Stevens’s office was down, then up again when I reconnected the cable. Next I set about to trace tty14, and was perplexed when the unplugging of that cable seemed to illicit no response. Terminals on the desks of my staff continued to work without pause. Then I remembered Susan. Her office was downstairs in the morgue.