"Come on, Nellie. You know he's not a killer. What do you say? The minimum, okay? Two to six, okay?"

"I'll give you a straight five to fifteen. And we'll oppose parole after five."

"You're a hard woman."

"I'll also throw in the cat. Have we got a deal?" "A hard woman,"

Moscowitz said, shaking his head. "Yes or no?"

"What choice do I have?"

"Good. Let's go home."

It was almost twelve' thirty when Carella and Hawes finished all the paperwork. They both looked bone-weary.

"Go home," Byrnes told them, "it's been along night."

"Uh-huh," Carella said. "Get some sleep." "Uh-huh," Hawes said.

"You've still got a dead hooker on your plate," Byrnes reminded them.

To qualify, a school had to answer positively to two questions: "Do you have a football team?" and "Are your school colors navy blue and white?"

Didn't matter if he was talking to St. Peter's High or John Parker High. If he got an affirmative answer to both questions, he saddled his horse and rode on over.

By one o'clock that afternoon, Fat Ollie Weeks had personally visited all of the qualifying P schools in the metropolitan area and had struck nothing even faintly resembling pay dirt.

Only twelve of the blue and white schools had football teams. Only eight of those had parkas with a big white P on the back of them. Of those, only two had a white football logo under the letter P. Ollie talked to some sixty football players, all of them shitting their pants, trying to determine what each and every one of them had been doing this past weekend while a white hooker and two black dudes were respectively being eviscerated, drowned, and stabbed. These kids were used to TV violence, but man, this was real life.

The way Ollie looked at it, nobody in this country was really concerned about violence, anyway. If they were, they'd put the V-chip on football and hockey

games. What really bugged Americans was sex. It was okay to talk about it obliquely on all those morning and afternoon TV programs, but show two people actually doing it, and, man, the house suddenly got hushed, and all at once everybody was running to protect the little kiddies smoking crack in the next room. Sex was The Great American Hang-up, legacy of those fuckin Puritans who came over from England.

Speaking of which, he hadn't had any in a week and a half sex, not Puritans and here he was shagging ass all over the universe trying to find three football players who maybe had got a little bit sexy and violent off the playing field, and whose head hairs might just match those he already had.

He was back in the squad room again by a quarter past one.

He checked his computer list again.

Began making phone calls again.

At two-fifteen that afternoon, he began driving upstate to a school named Pierce Academy, whose colors were blue and white and whose football team wore hooded parkas with a white letter P and a white football logo on the back.

At two-thirty that afternoon, Georgie looked up the name Karen Todd in the Isola directory and found a listing for a K. Todd at 1217 Lincoln Street. He dialed the number, and her answering machine told him she could be reached at work and gave him the number for St. Mary's Hospital.

He hadn't known she was a nurse, if she was a nurse, This only whetted his appetite.

He dialed the number and was connected to a woman who said, "Records Office," immediately shattering a young boy's dreams.

"Karen Todd, please," he said.

When she came on the line, he told her who he was, and reminded her that he'd been to see her earlier this morning, did she remember, the tall good-looking guy,

he actually said, with the black hair and brown eyes "I was with a blond woman and another man."

"Oh, yes"' she said, "of course. Svetlana's granddaughter, in fact."

"Yes," he said.

"I remember you, sure," she said. "Did you have any luck finding that guy who delivered the fish?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "The police have him. He killed her, I guess. Was what I could gather."

"No kidding? Wow."

"Yeah," he said. "Uh, Karen," he said, "do you think you might perhaps care to join me for dinner tonight?"

"Sure, why not?" she said.

From where Richard the First stood in the back row of the choir, he could see out over the heads of the two other Richards and all the other singers. Like a true monarch surveying his lordly domain, he looked down the center aisle of the church and beyond the transept to the huge oaken entrance doors. Late afternoon sunlight streamed through the leaded stained-glass windows on either side of the massive, vaulted space, illuminating it as if a religious miracle were in progress. Professor Eaton, the choirmaster, had just given them notes on how badly they'd sung the hymn

the last time around. They were now waiting for his hand signal to start the third chorus all over again.

Hand and head dipped at precisely the same moment.

"Keep Thou my all, O Lord, hide my life in thine... "Oh let Thy sacred light o'er my pathway shine..." The central portal doors opened.

A very fat man stepped into the narthex and looked up the aisle.

"Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear... "Hear Thou and grant my prayer..." "Professor Eaton?" The fat man.

Calling from the back of the church.

"Hold it, hold it," Eaton said, and turned with obvious annoyance toward where the fat man who was coming down the aisle now, a lightweight trench coat open over his beer barrel belly. Under the trench coat Richard could see a plaid sports jacket, also unbuttoned, and a very loud tie. Now he was reaching into the back pocket of his trousers.

"What is it?" Eaton asked.

Now he was holding some kind of small leather case in his hand, a fob, whatever it was, the flap falling open as he waddled toward the altar.

Sunlight caught glittering gold and enameled blue, sending shivers of reflected light into the echoing stillness of the church.

"Detective Oliver Weeks," he said. "There's some hairs I need to match. You got any singing football players?"

Georgie was expecting her at six-thirty. The arrangement was that she'd stop by at her own apartment to change her clothes after work, and then come to his place for a drink before they went to dinner. That was why he'd gone downstairs to the liquor store to pick up a bottle of Canadian Club, because what she drank was Canadian Club and ginger ale, she'd informed him on the phone. He was downstairs for no more than fifteen minutes. The phone was ringing when he got back to the apartment. He put the brown paper bag with the booze in it on the pass-through between the kitchen and living room, yanked the wall phone from the hook and said, "Hello?"

It was Tony again.

"What time do you think you'll be here?" he asked.

"Sometime after dinner," Georgie said. "But I may be a little late."

"Like how late?"