“But these pictures aren’t?” I picked up the stills of me at the entrance to the Freedom Center building. “That’s good. I’ll show them to Sister Carolyn, see if she knows who this might be. Given that someone was in Sister Frances’s apartment that night, she might recognize who.”

“If you weren’t there, how do you know someone was in the dead nun’s apartment?” Torgeson pounced.

“You just told me.” I got to my feet, holding the stills. The woman from OEM leaned over, spraying me with her fetid breath, and grabbed the pictures.

“These are government property and are highly classified.”

“I know,” I said. “‘An investigation linked to our national security. ’ ”

She glared at me. “I’d strongly advise you not to suggest to a nun that she take a bolt cutter to a room that’s been secured by the police.”

I smiled at her. We were playing a game where the person who keeps her temper longest wins. “You know, we live in a county where patronage workers get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year not to work. So it cheers me no end to see that you really are earning the salary my tax dollars pay for. You’ve been hard at it, and I’ll see you get a note stuck in your personnel file.”

30 - LINE SPINNERS

30

LINE SPINNERS

EVEN THOUGH I’D WALKED AWAY TRIUMPHANT FROM THAT skirmish, there was no way I could win a larger battle with the law. The real question, if I could get my tired brain to return to duty, was why they cared so much. Their questions, their whole attitude, seemed more about Sister Frances’s and my conversation than her murder.

I had to be honest enough to admit my arrival at the murder scene two days later warranted investigation. But why did they have such an elaborate stakeout on the building in the first place?

The interrogation had worn me out. I tried to make some notes, in big block capitals with a felt-tipped marker, but the effort put me to sleep. When I woke, it was because the doorman was calling on the house phone: Sister Carolyn Zabinska had arrived.

“You don’t look well. Are you up to talking?” she greeted me.

Her own face was pinched and gray with grief. She was tall and sturdily built, but her shoulders were bent forward with pain.

“It’s just my hair,” I said, steering myself away from self-pity. “I tried to trim it with sewing shears and was singularly inept. The FBI was ruder. They said I looked like the losing end of a catfight.”

“Yes, the FBI. That’s what I want to talk about … One of the things, anyway.”