“The police came almost as soon as you’d left. They wanted to know who broke the seal on Frankie’s door. I told them it must have been the intruder we chased down the stairs. They put a padlock on the door, so we can’t get in.”

“Bolt cutters,” I said absently, flexing my fingers inside their gauze wrappers, imagining working a pick into the padlock.

“We’ll think about that,” the nun said drily. “But I want to know who’s watching our building. When you were here, you said it was the federal government.”

“The feds came to see me in the hospital: someone from Homeland Security, someone from the FBI, and local guys from the Bomb and Arson squad. It was the day after the fire, so I don’t remember it clearly. They know who lives in your building, all the families. Come to think of it, they’re probably listening to this conversation, so forget the bolt cutters.”

“Eavesdropping!” Zabinska was almost speechless with fury.

I suggested she come see me at Lotty’s so we could talk about it privately. I wanted to speak to her anyway, now that I was more alert mentally, to learn anything Sister Frankie might have said to her about Steve Sawyer’s involvement in Harmony Newsome’s murder.

Before Lotty left, she had made me promise to stay inside. But I wanted to be in motion. After doing as much of a workout as I could handle, and having a phone meeting with Marilyn Klimpton at my office, I wandered restlessly around Lotty’s apartment. In the side room where she keeps her television (off-limits) and her library overflow (off-limits), I found a sewing basket with a pair of shears in it. I went into the bathroom and started chopping my hair.

When I was five, my father gave me a doll for Christmas that had a huge halo of dark hair. It was JFK’s first year in office, and dolls all had the Jackie do. Boom-Boom and I took a pair of scissors to that doll, and, by the time we’d finished, she looked much as I did now. Dentists shouldn’t drill their own teeth and detectives shouldn’t cut their own hair. At least, not when their hands were wrapped up in boxer’s tape.

A little after one, when I thought I might go mad from inaction, the cops showed up. They knew I’d been sprung; they probably knew Lotty wasn’t home. It was time to talk.

I put on my heavy dark glasses to underline my invalid status. Just to be prudent, I rode the elevator to the lobby to make sure they were really cops, not robbers. I hadn’t actually seen any of their faces in the hospital, but their voices told me these were essentially the same players who’d interrogated me last week.