Time to talk to Aimee Biel's parents. It was six in the morning. County investigator Loren Muse sat on her floor cross-legged. She wore shorts, and the quasi-shag carpeting made her legs itch. Police files and reports were spread out everywhere. In the center was the timetable she'd made up . A harsh snoring came from the other room. Loren had lived alone in this same crappy apartment for more than a decade now. They called them garden apartments, though the only thing that seemed to grow was a monotonous red brick. They were sturdy structures with the personality of prison cells, way stations for people on the way up or on the way down, or, for a very few, stuck in a sort of personal-life purgatory . The snoring did not come from a boyfriend. Loren had one a total loser named Pete but her mother, the multimarried, oncedesirable, now-flabby Carmen Valos Muse Brewster Whatever was between men and thus living with her. Her snoring had the phlegm of a lifelong smoker, mixed with a few too many years of cheap wine and tacky song . Cracker crumbs dominated the counter. An open jar of peanut butter, the knife sticking out like Excalibur, stood in the middle like a watchtower. Loren studied the phone logs, the credit card charges, the E-ZPass reports. They painted an interesting picture . Okay, Loren thought, let's map this out.

1:56 A. M.: Aimee Biel uses the 52nd Street Citibank ATM machine the same one used by Katie Rochester three months ago. Weird.

2:16 A. M.: Aimee Biel places a call to the Livingston residence of Myron Bolitar. The call lasts only seconds.

2:17 A. M.: Aimee places a call to a mobile phone registered to Myron Bolitar. The call lasts three minutes.

Loren nodded to herself. It seemed logical that Aimee Biel had first tried Bolitar's home and when he didn't answer that would explain the brevity of the first call she called his mobile. Back to it: 2:21 A . M.: Myron Bolitar calls Aimee Biel. This call lasts one minute . From what they'd been able to dig up, Bolitar often stayed in New York City at the Dakota apartment of a friend named Windsor Horne Lockwood III. Lockwood was known to police; despite a ritzy, Main Line upbringing, he was a suspect in several assaults and, yes, even a couple of homicides. The man had the craziest reputation Loren had ever seen. But again, that did not seem relevant to the case at hand . The point here was, Bolitar was probably staying at Lockwood's apartment in Manhattan. He kept his car in a nearby lot. According to the night attendant, Bolitar had taken the car out sometime around2:30 A . M. They had no proof yet, but Loren was fairly sure Bolitar had gone to midtown and picked up Aimee Biel. They were working on getting surveillance videos from the nearby businesses. Maybe Bolitar's car would be on one. But for now, it seemed like a fairly likely conclusion . More from the time line: 3:11 A. M.: There was a credit card charge on Bolitar's Visa account from an Exxon gas station on Route 4 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, right off the George Washington Bridge.