“Stone,” Dino said, “will you do that?”

Stone walked past Adele’s corpse and into the kitchen, where something in a copper skillet was sizzling. He shut down the large Viking range and looked around. There was a door at the rear of the kitchen, closed. He opened it and found a back hall with a staircase and an elevator, then he returned to the living room.

The two EMTs were helping the chef onto a gurney.

“Bartkowski,” Dino said, “go downstairs and help Salero with the dinner guests’ statements. I’ll hold down the fort here until the ME arrives. When you’re done downstairs, if nobody sounds like a suspect, send them all home and come back up here.”

Stone took Dino to the kitchen and showed him the service entrance.

Dino checked the door. “Unlocked,” he said. “Anybody could have walked in.”

“Whoever walked in was pretty businesslike,” Stone said. “Took out the chef, then Adele.”

The ME arrived and started his work.

NINETEEN

Stone and Dino sat in the living room while the medical examiner did his work in the dining room. They had worked the apartment and found everything in perfect order, except the dining room. The criminalist arrived, did his work, and reported no physical evidence. Salero and Bartkowski came back from the lobby to report.

“Tell me,” Dino said.

“They all had the same story,” he said. “They arrived at about the same time, and when the doorman called up, nobody answered at first, then the cook called downstairs. They all say they were invited for dinner.”

“I can confirm that,” Stone said. “Adele called me about one this afternoon and asked me to dinner, then told me that she had invited a couple visiting from out of town and her nephew David Gunn and his girlfriend. The Whartons and I arrived simultaneously, Mia Meadow a couple of minutes later, and David Gunn a couple of minutes after her.”

Bartkowski scribbled all that in his notebook.

“Okay, fellas,” Dino said, “get back to the precinct and start working this. Confirm all the names and addresses. I’ll vouch for Barrington.”

The two men left, and Dino stared at Stone. “You don’t look so good, pal.”

Stone sighed. “It’s not every day that my dinner date gets murdered.”

“How well did you know her?”

“Met her last week at Jack Gunn’s daughter’s wedding, and we spent the weekend together in Maine.”

“You got a witness who can put you in Maine?”

“The caretaker and his wife. Oh, and Lance Cabot.”

“Lance was visiting you?” Dino knew Cabot from several meetings at Elaine’s.

“No, it was really weird: I hadn’t told anybody where we were going, but I got a call from Lance on Dick’s line to the Agency, which, I guess, is still working.”

“How did he know you were there?”

“I went out to the airfield to check on whether there was any snow accumulation on the airplane, and this black helicopter shows up with Lance aboard. He practically kidnaps me and takes me to a nearby island where his people are interrogating some Chinese spy.”