“Decaf.” How old was she now, forty? Forty-one? He’d known her first as the younger sister of a kid in his grammar school class. After Jim Brennan threw him out of the rich life, Devlin found her working as a public defender in Manhattan Criminal Court. Still under thirty, idealistic, trim, straight, and full of ambition, she told him he’d been a hero to her since childhood, even more after he’d become part of the Brennan clan. He was still in his downspin, and maybe it was all very romantic to her, but somehow something ignited between them. He was still thinking of Maryellen every day, sick over her, determined to prove something to himself. In the end the booze made him nasty, abusive, maybe even sadistic, and Liz left him, hung up on him when he called, threatened to get a restraining order if he didn’t leave her alone. When he saw her again, almost a decade later, after his mother was dead and his father was in a tailspin of his own, Liz had been married and divorced. Devlin saw a panic in her and thought he owed her something from their previous go-around. Wrong on both counts. In 1979, ’80, and ’81 he saw something that had been hidden before, undeveloped, ugly, unstable. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he and Liz had shared their lives perhaps as best as they had been able. A drunk and a screwball, out of sync with each other. Until he read her note this morning, Devlin had assumed he was never going to see this woman again. Done … Finished … And looking at her, he knew that that was still in the bottom of his heart, truly—that, and his sad dread, which he felt to be akin to walking into a funeral parlor to view the corpse of a friend.

“I had a call about you last week from the FBI. They wanted to know what I knew about you.”

“When was this?”

“Thursday. I think they believed what I said. God knows where they got my name. When did we go out, 1980?”

She knew better. He decided to ignore her. “Details, kid. What kind of questions did they ask you?”

“Boy, that’s cold.”

He sighed. “I don’t mean to be. I have a lot on my mind.”

“The feds wanted me to tell them about you. They wanted to know how we met. Since we live in the same neighborhood and, except for intervals, always have, I told them more or less the truth, that I had known you since grade school. I didn’t tell them about anything between us before 1980. That earlier stuff is something else.”

“Why did you do that?”