"And you called me first?"

"Yes. In case you want to come with me."

A moment of choice, a crossroads for Julia Brennan. If Robert Reid took a camera crew out to the warehouse, they would contaminate the crime scene irrevocably, a.s.suming there was a crime scene to be contaminated. The smart move here was to insist that her uncle notify the task force, maybe call Harry Clark directly. She, herself, now that he'd phoned her first, had an obligation to ... Julia tossed her hair and smiled, imagining herself warning Clark, Clark beating the reporters to the scene. Instant redemption.

"Julia, this is the biggest story of my career. Potentially. And I have to ask you about the silver platters. Are they details from the crime scene? Do you know what they mean? Off the record?"

"Yeah, Uncle Bob, they are. And that's why I'm not going with you." She gave him a moment to think it over. "I'm on vacation, remember? And this call? It never happened."

"So, if I get another one of these you don't want to hear from me?"

Her bluff having been thoroughly called, Julia beat a hasty retreat. "I didn't say that, Uncle Bob. Of course, I want to know everything. I just don't want anybody to know that I know."

Two hours later, Julia locked the front door of her house and headed off to the Twelfth Street Tavern in search of Peter Foley.

TWENTY.

"I THINK what it is," Peter Foley told Julia Brennan as they sat in Julia's gray Cherokee, sipping at styrofoam containers of bitter coffee, "is that I had a happy childhood. Too happy. I wasn't prepared, you know, for what happened to Kirstin and Patti." Foley's tone was matter-of-fact, betraying nothing of the joy he'd felt when Julia walked into the Twelfth Street Tavern. His heart had jumped in his chest at her appearance, as if trying to force its way between his ribs, as if trying to escape his body. "My folks really got along, even though my old man was a cop and had to do rotating tours, and my mom worked at an insurance agency. I mean, they weren't around all that much, but I always felt safe."

Foley paused, but Julia didn't respond, didn't so much as look at him. She hadn't responded to his warm greeting, either, when she walked into the bar. Instead, every inch the superior officer, she'd crooked a finger, said, "C'mon, Foley, let's have a little talk."

"I was only thirty," Foley continued, "when my mom died, and thirty-five when my father had a cardiac arrest. I'm not saying I wasn't affected, that I didn't grieve, but what I felt, it cleaned me out.

And I still had my own family, of course. My wife was a rock. She was there every minute."

He broke off again, but Julia still refused to so much as glance in his direction. Instead, as though speaking to someone outside the driver's side window, she said, "Come tomorrow, you're going to report to Lily Han, swear that you filled out a change of address form and handed it over to the Duty Sergeant when you moved. You're going to appear contrite, demonstrate submission, convince the bosses that you won't do it again. That way you'll most likely get off with a reprimand and a notation in your file."

It was Foley's turn to extend the silence as he tried not to smile. Thinking if it wasn't for Julia Brennan he'd already be an ex-cop, that he'd planned all along to quit. Carrying a badge had become more of a hindrance than a help.

"Anja's dead," he finally told Julia. "Anja Dascalescu is dead and so are her pimps and you'll never know what she was thinking. She might have been r.e.t.a.r.ded, or emotionally disturbed. Maybe that's why her parents got rid of her in the first place. Because she wasn't perfect."

Julia shrugged, apparently at ease with the change of subject. "I'm just trying to find my focus," she announced, "while covering my a.s.s at the same time."

"Does that mean you don't know why you're here?"

"Why I'm here with you?"

"Either way."

"Well, as it turns out, I know exactly why I dragged you away from the Twelfth Street Tavern. You were right, by the way, about Anja. There's nothing we can do for her, and if she'd been living in that apartment alone I'd be home now having dinner."

"Ah, you're after the other children and you don't trust the task force. I should have known."

"The task force, they're thinking blackmail."

Foley shook his head. "A setup like that, it's got a realistic lifetime of six months. The blackmail wouldn't start until the Mandrakes had already moved out. What would be the point? At two thousand dollars a trick, they were making plenty of money."

"A detail," Julia returned, "that you shouldn't know."

Foley folded his hands across his chest and tilted his head to the left. "Hey, lieutenant," he said, "Let's make a deal. I show you mine, you show me yours."

I'VE GOT the details of Anja's immigration case file," Foley said once his offer was accepted. "She was adopted in Romania by an American couple. Not the Mandrakes. The couple, Joe and Carla Norton, have vanished, likewise for the INS worker, Christopher Inman, who pa.s.sed off on the adoption."

"And that's it?" Julia asked when it became clear that Foley was waiting for her response. "Now I've seen everything you have?"

"Not everything, but I may be down to my thong."

"Leather, I a.s.sume."

"Sequined, actually."

Julia unwrapped a b.u.t.tered corn m.u.f.fin and nibbled at the edge, knowing full well that no matter how careful, she'd end up with a lap-ful of crumbs. "So now it's my turn?"

"That's right."

As she retrieved her cell phone, punched in David Lane's cell phone number with her free hand, Julia's attention shifted to her daughter. Despite the divorce, Julia had fought hard to give Corry a stable life. Everything's okay was the message conveyed by the little house in its proper middle-cla.s.s neighborhood, Julia's conservative wardrobe, the steady paycheck she brought home, even her personal ambition. The last thing pre-adolescent Corry needed, after thirteen years of sanity, was her mother partnered with a psycho like Peter Foley.

Lane did most of the talking in the one-sided conversation that followed. Julia took a few notes, thanked him profusely, then hung up. "More homicides," she told Foley. "Mandrake-related."

Foley's gaze, as he turned it on Julia, was mild. "How so?" he asked.

"Well, it seems a newspaper columnist, Robert Reid, who just happens to be my uncle, received an anonymous e-mail directing him to a currently unoccupied warehouse in Queens. Because the e-mail contained details that could only be known to the Mandrakes' killer, and also because Uncle Bob is curious by nature, he went out to the warehouse, where he discovered three bodies hanging from a light fixture in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Two of the bodies were badly decomposed, but the third was in good shape. It belongs to a man named Theodore Goodman. You remember him, don't you?"

Foley ignored the question. "And that's what you're showing? That you're inside the task force, that you'll keep me .. . us informed? I stripped down to my thong, Julia. You took off your earrings. I don't think that's fair."

Julia shrugged, smiled. "Would you believe that's the best I can do?" she asked.

"No."

"And why is that."

"That's because there are too many other issues."

"Like?"

"You've been a cop for twelve years, Julia, and in that time you've obtained a master's degree in Criminal Justice, advanced to the rank of detective-lieutenant, and aced the captain's exam. Very nice, like your starter home in Queens, and your new car, and your thirteen-year-old daughter attending Stuyvesant High School, one of the best schools in New York City." Foley tapped the Jeep's dashboard. "It's a good life you've got, a very good life. I oughta know, because I used to have it."

He paused long enough to finish his coffee, to enjoy Julia's accusing, "You've been in my case file."

"The mutts we're going after, they won't be like Teddy Goodman, or even like the Mandrakes. The INS worker who okayed Anja's entry into the States? He's the director of the adoption section, a career bureaucrat, or so I'm told, and he oversees several thousand foreign adoptions every year. How much trouble would it be to rubber-stamp five, six, maybe even ten applications?"

"Not much," Julia admitted.

"How many tricks, at two grand per, do you think three girls could turn in six months? How much revenue would the sale of the videotapes generate? How much from the follow-up blackmail operation?" Foley crossed his legs, feeling very comfortable. "More to the point," he continued, "how much risk would the investors be willing to take for that kind of return? How far will they go to protect their investment?"

"You think I'm scared? What kind of s.e.xist bulls.h.i.t is that?"

"Hear me out. If we were dealing with a bunch of Teddy Goodmans, it'd be easy. You saw how scared he was. But that's not the case, at least not the way I see it. I think we're up against professionals and our questions are gonna have to be firmly put. Are you ready for that? Because me, if I have a stopping point, I haven't found it."

"You done now?"

Foley reminded himself that no matter what they did together, good fight or not, Julia would bust him if she thought he was involved in the killings. In fact, he had to admit, he wouldn't be surprised if that was among the reasons she'd come to the Twelfth Street Tavern. It was a big problem for him, this contradiction, the good Julia, the wicked Julia. But it was also part of the attraction, imagining what she'd be like cut free of the chain of command.

"Yes, I'm done."

It was again time for Julia to nibble, to sip, to pause long enough to ease the tightness in her chest, to let her adrenals settle down. Foley was an impossible read, even when she knew he was lying. She had to accept the fact, and not let him get beneath her skin. "You want a commitment? That's what this is all about? You want me to tell you I won't back off, no matter what the consequences?"

"Something like that."

Julia rummaged through her bag for a moment, then brought out a spiral notebook. She flipped through the pages, the gesture as theatrical as she could make it. Finally, she nodded before looking up at Foley. "The way I've got it, Foley, your loving mother died when you were two years old, and your faithful father married and divorced three times in the next fifteen years. You graduated from Holy Cross High School and spent a year at the University of Arizona on an athletic scholarship. Then you joined the cops after an injury capped your dreams of glory."

"You've been through my service record." He smiled, opening laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. "I should have expected it."

But he had, Julia suddenly realized. He'd expected her to check him out, and wanted to confirm his judgement. Thus, he'd baited the hook with a few lies, and she'd bitten hard, and now he knew. Score one for Peter Foley. At least he hadn't underestimated her.

"You know what I think, Foley? I think we're both still dressed. I think we haven't even unb.u.t.toned our coats. I think we need to sleep on this conversation and start again tomorrow morning. After you've cleaned up your problems with the New York Police Department."

TWENTY-ONE.

ROBERT REID dialed his niece's telephone number for the third time in two hours. He was in his Central Park West apartment, using an antique phone, the base, receiver and mouthpiece carved from ivory. The phone weighed a ton, but conveyed the human voice with a clarity his cellular didn't approach.

"h.e.l.lo."

"Ah, Julia, I've been trying to reach you for hours."

"I was on the road and I had my phone turned off. Sorry."

As Reid could hear nothing in Julia's tone that even vaguely resembled repentance, he abandoned the guilt trip and got right down to business. "We found three men ..."

"I know, Uncle Bob. I know what the crime scene looked like. I checked with a friend on the task force about an hour ago."

"And that's it? You have nothing to say? Julia, it's the first big New York crime story of the twenty-first century."

"The very new twenty-first century."

Reid carried the telephone to a cane-back chair, sat down, heard the chair creak in response. Though a mere reproduction of an eighteenth-century original manufactured in Ipswich, Ma.s.sachusetts, the chair had cost more than his first six months' salary as a cub reporter.

He took a breath, calmed himself, finally asked, "How are you, Julia?"

"I'll be better when Corry gets home."

"When is she due?"

"In about a half-hour. She's rehearsing tonight."

"Isn't it a little too early to worry?"

"You're a.s.suming the worry stops and starts. In fact, these days, it's always there, like a pilot light on a stove. You crank the dial .. . WHOM Pr Reid hesitated, hearing something beyond Julia's flippancy, an uncertainty foreign to him. He'd seen her angry many times, seen her sad as well, and of course he knew her kindness firsthand. But not uncertainty, that was novel.

"Uncle Bob, you still there?"

"I am." He cleared his throat. "It was horrible, Julia. Two of the bodies were decayed to the bone and the other one's face was covered with rat bites. The rat t.u.r.ds crunched when you walked across the room, like rice at a wedding."

"You walked onto the crime scene?"

"Only far enough to take photos. Then we backed away."

"I'm sure that made Inspector Thurlow feel much better."

"Actually, he was pretty upset. He reminded me of my civic duty to report crimes to the police and my liability under the penal code for shirking that duty. I told him there was nothing in the e-mail I received to indicate that a crime had been committed, that my const.i.tutional rights as a journalist trumped his police powers, and that if he arrested me it would put the book I intended to write on the bestseller list."

Reid brightened when Julia laughed, wondering what she'd say if he told her that he worried as much about her as she did about Corry. His worry, of course, ran along a different line. Reid wasn't afraid that his niece would be kidnapped or a.s.saulted. No, what he feared was that Julia had so tightly controlled every aspect of her life for so long that she'd fly off like a skyrocket if she let go. "The good inspector, he never stopped smiling. Do you know him?"

"Never met the guy."

"Well, he's somebody's yes-man. Greasy is the word that come to mind. Good for me, bad for the task force."

"Ya know, Uncle Bob, the more I think on it, the luckier I feel about what happened. The task force isn't going anywhere and the blame's gonna fall on somebody else. Praise the Lord."

"Can I quote you on that?"

"Only if you want to destroy what's left of my once-promising career."

"Perish the thought. But, look, I did call you for a reason. Thurlow, before he left, told me he thought we could work together in the future. Even gave me his card. I suggested that he encourage my cooperation by telling me if Theodore Goodman, now dangling at the end of a rope, was somehow connected to Anja Dascalescu. He told me he'd think it over."

"How'd you know? The name, I mean."

"Goodman's driver's license, bearing his photo, was lying on a workbench. Face-up."

Julia muttered, "Alright," then hesitated long enough to arrange her thoughts. When she spoke again, her tone was all business. "Uncle Bob, what I tell you now, I don't want you to print it until you confirm it from another source."

"No problem."

"And when you do confirm, if you confirm, I want you to attribute the information to multiple police sources."

Reid was encouraged by Julia's caution, by her reversion to a Julia with whom he was both more comfortable and more familiar. "Scout's honor," he said. "Now cough it up."