Rider glanced over at Hook, who could feel the hope draining out of him like blood from a cadaver now, and being replaced by the clear cold fluid of hatred. He had to admire the way she sat there, a girl alone in a small room with two big men, one a detective and the other the father of her victim, and yet there was not a ripple on the still surface of her composure. She was as totally in control as a girl on a Vogue cover, not a touch of gaucheness or doubt or weakness anywhere, not from her thick careless hair to the expensive but acceptably worn suede jacket to the tooled-leather moccasins that said she wore not some fag designer’s careful ensembles but what she damned well pleased.

Rider was nodding thoughtfully to her, in apparent agreement. “Well now, that was exactly our problem with the letter,” he told her. “I mean it’s hard to read a letter like this and try to square it with—what was it you said he kept repeating out at the house?—that he had nothing to live for? Wasn’t that it?”

She agreed. “Yes. It doesn’t sound like the same person.”

Smiling ruefully, the sergeant pretended to think long and hard about that. “But, you see, the problem is—it is the same person. Christopher Hook did write the letter. The handwriting is his. And the boy did stay with this photographer Icarus for a few days. And Icarus says Christopher seemed to him to be very happy and easygoing. In fact—” Rider casually reached over and picked up the mounted photograph, which had been lying facedown on the corner of his desk. Now he held it out in front of her. “In fact, he took this picture the day before Chris left.”

It had come almost too suddenly for Hook as well as for Miss Madera. But he did not miss her eyes just before she closed them now and turned away. They had been open wounds, sockets of pain. And her tanned face had gone white, whether in anger or shock Hook did not know.

The sergeant returned the photograph to the top of his desk. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

But she was already in control again. “No. Of course not.” She flipped it at him, dry, subtle, not an obvious sarcasm.

“So you see our problem,” Rider said.

“I’m afraid not.”

The sergeant tapped the letter with his index finger. “Well, this boy and the one in your statement—they just don’t seem to be the same person.”

“I don’t see that it’s a problem at all. He had to be pretending either in the letter or to us, to Mrs. Rubin and me.” She paused for a moment, looking at Hook and then back at the sergeant before she slammed the lid shut on them now. “And you did find his body, didn’t you? I’d say he wasn’t pretending there. I’d say that was real.”