He flipped through the News as he rode up to his third-floor apartment in the building’s dingy, vandal-proofed elevator—the original polished mahogany walls were covered with a wallboard as grim as it was hard: someone’s penknife had been able to make only the thinnest scratches in the stuff. The News had four pages on the Brennan killing, including a sidebar on the Brennan family history, another on Joe’s death, and a third—the first complete story, if you wanted to believe a word of it—on Jane Milburn. According to the girl with whom Milburn shared an Upper West Side apartment, a fashion editor for Cosmopolitan magazine, Milburn had met Jack Brennan last fall, at a private fund-raiser Anita Brennan had not attended.

Jack called Milburn the following week, and by the end of January, when the two were able to sneak a weekend at St. Croix, they were having an out-and-out affair.…

La roommate’s story accounted for everything but the welts on Jack Brennan’s body, and that his killers—the people who had operated Lopez—had known exactly where Brennan would be late yesterday afternoon. And for that matter, what he would be doing, or more accurately, who would be doing it to him.…

Devlin had left lights on, and the coffee maker. He had done that before, letting two cups of fluid cook down to a crusty mass in the bottom of the glass pot. A twenty-minute cleaning chore. Not this time. He turned the power off and emptied the pot, promising himself to clean it before he left, when the glass would be cool to the touch.

As he turned from the stove, he saw a piece of notepaper, creamy yellow, folded, on the carpet a foot inside the front door. He had missed it when he had come in. It was a note, too; advertising didn’t look like this. Devlin put on his reading glasses as he headed into the bedroom, where the morning sun still slanted in through the venetian blinds.

The answering machine light was blinking. A call had come in since he had left this morning. He read the note.

Frank:

Call me from an outside location after 5 P.M.

Marcia Feldman

No telephone number.

He didn’t know any Marcia Feldman.