“Am I supposed to have been jealous of Czernin?” Morrell said. “Marcena and I are old friends, which is why I’m putting her up, but we’re not lovers. She has wide-ranging and eclectic tastes. When we were in Afghanistan last winter, she got involved with one of the orderlies at Humane Medicine, a Pakistani army major, and someone from the Slovenian wire services, and those were the three I knew about. Believe me, if I were a jealous lover who wanted her dead I would have done it up in the Pathan hills where no one would have cared.”

Conrad grunted: maybe he believed it, maybe he didn’t. “What about her work? What was she writing?”

Morrell shook his head. “The series was on the America Europe doesn’t know. After she met Czernin, she decided to focus on South Chicago. She spent time out at By-Smart headquarters—old Mr. Bysen seemed to like her, and she had a couple of private meetings with him. That’s all I can tell you: she played her cards close to her chest.”

“Not that close, if you knew about her Pakistani major and the orderly and so on,” Conrad said. “I want to see her notes.”

“You think the attack had to do with the story she was working on? Not someone who was out to get Bron and hit her because she was there?”

“I don’t have a theory,” Conrad grumbled. “I only have a woman whose daddy is in the British Foreign Office, so the consul has called the super five times and he’s called me ten times. Czernin gave horns to any number of guys in South Chicago, and we’re looking at that. I don’t think it was a routine gangbanging, because whatever happened to them took a lot of work, and even though my punks in South Chicago have way too much time on their hands they don’t go in for elaborate murder. So I’m looking at people Czernin pissed off, and I’m looking at what Love was working on. I can get a warrant to search your place, Morrell, easy, because the mayor is yanking the super’s chain and the super is yanking mine—any judge will be happy to oblige. But it would be real, real nice if you’d save me the trouble.”

Morrell studied him thoughtfully. “Police departments are walking off with people’s files these days under cover of the Patriot Act. I don’t want to invite police into my home so that they can take my machine or someone else’s.”

“So you want me to waste time on a warrant.”