I FINALLY RETURNED TO MORRELL’S PLACE, TOO WORN BY my emotional storm to do anything but sleep. When I woke again, it was after six. I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and found that Max had slid a note through the back door on his way home.

Karen Lennon was looking for you this afternoon. She says your client, Miss Claudia, is slipping out of this life but has asked for you off and on all day. Captain Mallory called on Lotty at her clinic this afternoon. He needs to see you urgently but wouldn’t tell Lotty why. I got the news that you’re safe to Mr. Contreras and Lotty, but felt I shouldn’t let them know where you are.

Max

I drank tea, slowly. I felt like someone convalescing from a devastating illness, that if I moved too quickly the fever would return and carry me away for good.

Bobby wanted to see me. He had gone to the clinic in person, hadn’t sent a minion. He knows Lotty, knows that the sight of a police badge stirs such terrible memories in her that even the best cop in the world receives a hostile reception, but, even so, for a routine inquiry he would have sent Terry Finchley. So he needed me badly and he needed me privately.

But Miss Claudia was slipping out of this life. She might have died while I was weeping in Millennium Park. I finished the tea and carefully washed the mug. Morrell would be quite cross if he came home from Afghanistan to find it dirty in his sink.

I looked wistfully at the phone. The trouble with the Age of Fear is that you don’t know who is listening in on your conversations. You don’t know if you can talk safely or not. Probably I could talk to Karen Lennon without anyone else catching the call, but the possibility that I’d jeopardize my safe house meant I couldn’t work on probabilities.

It was too late in the day to expect to find Karen at Lionsgate Manor. I drove down to Howard Street, the honky-tonk dividing line between Chicago’s Mexican-Pakistani-Russian north border and the very much more staid Evanston, and found a pay phone at the El stop there. Even more amazing, the phone’s cord and handset were both attached, and the phone asked me to deposit a dollar when I listened to it. I put my battery in my cellphone just long enough to look up Karen Lennon’s contact information, then called her cell from the pay phone.