I didn’t like the way he kept saying my name. I didn’t like the shape of it on his tongue. It was a tactic I’d used before, a way to instill comradeship, build trust in the person across from you. I didn’t like it one bit.

“She didn’t make me a murderer,” I snapped, “because I didn’t kill anybody.” And I wished, so badly, that were true.

“It doesn’t matter,” MacLeish said wearily. “Don’t you get that? It doesn’t matter if you did or not. It looks an awful lot like you might have. It looks enough like that that you should start talking.”

“This is what I have,” I said, gesturing at the photographs, the proof of our blackmail. “And I’ve met her. Peroxided hair and a blue tattoo on her wrist. Her name is . . . Rita. Rita Palmer.” The name came out of me before I’d fully given it permission, and I coughed, almost in shock, after I said it. Self-preservation was a more powerful reflex than I thought. I tapped the phone bill. “Her phone number for you, too.”

Lafferty leaned forward and studied the pictures. MacLeish jotted something in his notebook. After a moment, and without a word between the two of them, he grabbed the phone bill and left the room.

“Where’s he going?” I half stood up out of the chair, craning my head after him. Lafferty put a hand on my shoulder, pushed me back into my chair, not roughly.

Unlike his former partner, Lafferty hadn’t taken notes of anything that I’d said. I had the feeling that all this information was more useful to him on a personal level. But now, Lafferty stretched out a hand and pressed the record button on the machine. “And how does the business work?”

I summarized for him our work—that the names came from the Lady, hired by someone, we didn’t know who, or picked by her as the occasion dictated. That they were always men, rich men, usually rich and despicable men, and that it was my job to find the girls who would most appeal to them, who would help me leave a trail that we could use. That most often we let them pay for the photographs, but that occasionally—and, I suspected, most closely associated with those names most personal to the Lady—we sent them to the paper. Or the man’s boss. Or his wife.

MacLeish came back in, threw two photographs down on the desk.

“Is that her?” he asked.