"This is about Isabella?"

"No, no, no. Not at all. She was nothing. This is about Jed Segal."

Crystal clear. answer tonight is erotomania, and now I knew the question: "What killed Isabella Lascar?"

Sitting before me was the person who had shot Iz through the center of that magnificent head, and she did it because of an obsession with a man who barely knew her: Jed Segal.

This must be the woman who had stalked Jed in California, a woman whose delusion had already driven her to kill. I was about to become Ellen Goldman's next victim, and I was struggling to call up the things I had read about her mental disorder erotomania before I fell asleep last night, hoping that something would trigger how to deal with this otherwise intelligent, functional human being.

The stillness of the night was cut by the shrill squeal of my beeper, ringing out high-pitched tones from its perch on my waistband. Ellen stood and reached down to rip the small black device from me, clicked it to the off position, and pressed the lever on the illuminated dial to see the caller's number.

"Who's looking for you? It's a nine one seven number who is it?"

"It must be someone from my office. This happens all the time, Ellen.

There must be a new case." I tried to urge her to take me to a phone booth, sure that I could signal some kind of distress if I could get on the phone with Mike or Mercer or Sarah.

"They'll look for me if I don't get back to them soon. Please let us call in, and then we can walk away from this rationally, Ellen. Please?

I'm through with Jed, we can-' "Well, he's not through with you. Nor am I. Who is this trying to reach you now?" She repeated the nine one seven area code and began to recite the rest of the number to me.

It was Chapman's cell phone. He was somewhere in the field, roaming, probably in some joint having a beer and getting ready to hit on a girl at the next table, with no idea that I was sitting under a tree in Central Park with a lunatic.

I lied to Goldman: "I don't recognize the number. It could be from any squad. I'm on call tonight, all night. Let's just go on up to the street, we'll phone them back and you can listen to the conversation."

Chapman had tried to reach me at the Special Victims office during the line-ups tonight and I had put off the ie calls. Maybe that was Mike trying to contact me as I was on about to get in Goldman's car, when the cop was yelling to me from the steps of the station house. Of course, as he must have spoken with David Mitchell after David's rer appointment with Jed at seven-thirty this evening. They he had probably put some of this together tonight and wanted to tell me about it. Had they figured out that perhaps there ier was another connection between Jed and Isabella that both of them were being stalked by the same person one whom she wanted desperately, and one whom she desperately wanted out of the way? Maybe they had figured it out, but never dreamed she would be waiting for me as I emerged from the station house at the end of my long evening.

Goldman took the silenced beeper and stuck it in the pocket of the jacket.

"You're the woman who met Jed in California, aren't you?" I asked her as she loomed over me, looking around at the grounds above us, as though to see whether the loud 'beeps' had attracted any attention on the road or pathways.

Engage her. Do it gently. She's not crazy, the book says, in any other way. She just has this delusion about Jed. Apart from that, she's not odd or bizarre. I hope these fucking shrinks know what they're talking about.

"Didn't you meet him when he was running for the Senate, in California?

You were in graduate school out there."

Goldman cocked her head and looked back down at me.

"Why, did Jed talk to you about me?"

"Yes, yes he did."

"Did he say I was crazy? Did he tell you he didn't want anything to do with me?"

Keep lying. They all do it to you.

"No, Ellen, he never said that." Flatter her, tell her what she wanted to hear. Tell her that the unfaithful bastard really wanted her.

"I never had the idea he got to know you very well, but he used to tell me you came to all his speeches, his events said you were very smart."

She was thinking now, thinking about what I was feeding her, and whether there was any kernel of truth in it. It had to at least intrigue her, I told myself, that Jed had spent any time talking about her when he moved East. At least it kept her on her feet, with that blade away from me, as I sat in place, my body aching and my mind trying to give her some thread back to life.

"Jed was in love with me, you know. There was a time when we first met that he wanted to go out with me," Goldman told me.

"I didn't know that." Let her talk. Let her tell me any bizarre imagining that popped into her twisted brain.

"I'm not surprised he didn't tell you that. That's what got him in trouble with his wife."

That and the thirty-six other women he had probably screwed behind her back.

"I know he felt terrible when the police arrested you in L.A." I said.

Find out why that didn't make her turn against him. It's hard to believe anybody sane wouldn't give up after that.

"That wasn't his fault, Alex. Didn't he tell you that? His wife was insanely jealous. Every time he saw me at a rally or a cocktail party, the minute he wanted to make his way across a room to me, his miserable wife would get one of his aides to stop him. You were much luckier he finally got smart enough to get rid of her before he moved to New York. She was the reason I was in jail until the end of the summer. They arrested me because she complained that I was harassing her.

That explains a lot. No wonder Jed never mentioned anybody bothering him here, in New York, when we started dating in June. There was no interference from Goldman, that I was aware of, as of the last week.

But obviously, her approach to me which started before Isabella's death was a pivotal part of it. I had never even asked Jed the name of the California stalker. It hadn't seemed relevant.

Goldman kneeled in front of me again.

"What else did Jed tell you about me, anything?"

Maybe this is part of my lifeline. Enough about you, Goldman must be thinking, now let's hear what Jed thinks about me. Use your imagination, Cooper. Fill her with whatever will fuel her fantasies of life with Segal. Keep talking to her.

"Well, yes, Ellen. You must know that what we had is over, ended.

Maybe that's why he was talking about you so-' "Don't lie to me, Alex, you know it wasn't over."

"But for me it is, I swear to you. I can talk to him about you, I can arrange for you to be with him." You two creeps really deserve each other, I thought. I'll even spring for the hotel room just let me out of this deathtrap alive, please.

Why did Ellen Goldman think it wasn't over with me and Segal? She knew about Jed and Isabella. She must have thought I would break up with him once I found out about it, too. Didn't she kill Isabella because that temptress, that irresistible goddess, stood in the way of her reunion with Jed? I wanted to remind her of that, to give my breakup with Jed more credence. And yet I didn't want to make her think of Iz the rational part of her must have some consciousness of guilt for shooting another human being to death.

I tried it out on her gently.

"I - I broke up with Jed this week, Ellen. I'm not going to see him anymore."

"That's what you say tonight, but I've heard him talk to you, I've heard him beg you," she sneered at me.

Where? I thought. What could she have heard?

She went on.

"You still got in his car, didn't you?

Accepted his flowers?"

The same observations that "Dr' Cordelia Jeffers made in the letter that arrived today. Were those letters also a device of Goldman's?

"No, Ellen I've ended the whole goddamn thing. It was much too painful for me. I don't want to be with Jed Segal and he isn't begging me to come back to him, I swear to you."

"I'm the one who knows exactly what he's up to, and you'll fall for it sooner or later. You'll take him back, too, now that your competition Isabella Lascar is out of the way. I know you won't throw away everything he offers you. I'm sick of his pleading with you."