Their cab stopped at a traffic light. Marie-Thérèse looked out her window to find a large truck next to them. “Mr. Kaminsky, please get out of the cab,” she said, “and walk away.”

He looked at her. “In the middle of the street?”

“Yes, please.”

Kaminsky opened the left rear door and stepped out of the cab. As he did so, Marie-Thérèse handed the driver a twenty. “Keep your meter running until Thirty-fourth Street, and don’t pick up anybody,” she said. She opened her door as little as possible, fell out of the taxi onto the street, and began rolling her way under the truck. She had just cleared it when the light changed, and the truck drove away. She rolled under a parked car and waited.

A block behind her cab, a detective radioed the precinct. “Tell Bacchetti the lawyer got out of the cab at Seventy-seventh Street,” he said. “We’re still following.” The light changed, and he drove on down Second Avenue.

Marie-Thérèse waited for the next change of the traffic light before she rolled from under the parked car, dusted off her clothes, and disappeared into the night.

33

Stone got Carpenter into a cab.

“I’m exhausted,” Carpenter said.

“Let the cops and your people do their work,” Stone said. “You can get some sleep at my house.”

“That was a humiliating experience,” Carpenter sighed, as they rode downtown.

“You might have mentioned to Dino earlier the fact that there were no charges against her in Europe.”

“We didn’t want Interpol or the various police agencies to interfere,” she said.

“You just wanted to find her and quietly kill her. Is that it?”

Carpenter didn’t reply.

“If there were no charges against her, how did you gather all this information about her—the people she’s killed, and her methods?”

“From people we’ve . . . interrogated,” Carpenter replied.

“Can’t the testimony of those people be used to file charges against her, so Dino can make an arrest?”

“Those people are . . . no longer available to testify,” Carpenter said.

Stone took a deep breath. “Oh,” he said.

The detective following La Biche’s taxi radioed in. “Tell Bacchetti the cab didn’t go to the hotel. It’s continuing downtown.”

“This is Bacchetti,” Dino said. “Where is the cab now?”

“At Second and Thirty-fourth, stopped at a light,” the detective replied. “Wait a minute. The cab’s light is on and a guy is getting in.”

“Stop the cab,” Dino said. “Arrest her for tampering with evidence. She stole the pistol.”

The detective switched on his flashing light and drove up next to the cab. His partner got out and shone a light into the rear seat, then got back in. “Lieutenant,” he said into the radio, “she’s not in the cab anymore.”

“What?”

“She’s not there. We saw the lawyer get out, but not the woman. We thought she was still inside.”