Dead Mans Hand

Back in the living room, he noticed the bars on the window. He went through the apartment once again to check. There were thick iron bars on every window, even in the white porcelain ruins of the bathroom. The bars looked new. Installed within the past year, Jay would be willing to bet. It looked as though Digger had been as security conscious as Chrysalis, not that it had done him much good. The windows were all locked. Whoever had done this had come in the same way Jay had, through the front door.

Unless maybe they'd come in through a wall.

Jay looked around for an ace of spades, not really expecting to find one. Yeoman might be a psychopath, but his killings had always been accomplished with a certain cool, professional efficiency. This, and the butchery out in the hall, looked like the work of some rabid animal. Jay could easily imagine the killer foaming at the mouth as he went from room to room, destroying.

He was making one final, methodical sweep through the apartment when he spotted the notebooks on the bedroom floor, jumbled up with the latest celebrity bios, a few reference books, and a wide selection of paperbacks by Anonymous with soft-focus covers of women in Victorian undergarments. Not more than one book in five was intact. The corner of one wire-bound notebook was sticking out from under a snowdrift of loose pages, and the plain cardboard cover caught his eye. He dug through the paper and found three more of them, and parts of a fourth. Reporter's notebooks, filled with a hurried, semilegible scrawl. A long diagonal chunk was missing from one book, but you could still read most of it.

Each notebook was dated. Jay sat gingerly on what remained of Digger's mattress and opened the most recent. The last article Digger had worked up was called "The Farmer of Park Avenue," about an eight-year-old girl whose miniature farm filled an entire floor in her daddy's Park Avenue town home. The farm had model houses, painted rivers, felt grass, toy cars and trucks, and an electric train that circled the property. Her farm animals were real. Cows four inches long, tiny little sheepdogs, suckling pigs the size of cockroaches, all shrunken to their present diminutive size by the freckle-faced little farmer, who just loved animals.

Somehow Jay didn't think eight-year-old Jessica von der Stadt was a likely suspect. He flipped back to older material, looking for any mention of Chrysalis, death threats, or homicidal maniacs with or without buzz saws. He found the address of a photographer who had gotten some spicy shots of Peregrine breast-feeding, bios of the government aces assigned to protect the presidential candidates, Hiram's recipe for chocolate mango pie, quotes for a cover profile of Mister Magnet, and Mistral's fond reminiscences of the day her daddy had taught her to fly.

Jay flipped the notebook aside in disgust, and found himself possessed of an overpowering urge to get the hell out of this place.

Bre

Chrysalis's death was already old news. Only the Jokertown Cry was still ru

Bre

It was definitely him. Bre

"Long time no see," Bre

There was a short silence. Bre

"Bre

"Bre

"It's me."

"Christ. I guess it's been a long time. So is this a social call to renew old acquaintances?"

"Of a type," Bre

"About what, after all these years?"

"About Chrysalis's murder."

"What's your interest in that?"

"Personal. She was a friend of mine."

"Mmm. You always did take things personal. Okay. Where shall we have this chat?"

Bre

"That's a little rich for a cop's pay."

"My treat."

"How can I resist?"

1:00 P.M.

"More coffee, Jay?" Flo asked him.

"Please," Jay said, pushing the cup across the Formica counter. It was his fourth cup. Flo had removed the evidence of his patty melt and fries twenty minutes ago.

"Working a puzzle?" the waitress asked as she refilled his cup. Some of the coffee slopped over into the saucer. "Something like that," Jay admitted. The list was spread out on the counter. He'd been going over it name by name while he ate. A translucent smudge on the paper marked the spot where a bit of onion had slid out of his patty melt. "Well, call me if you need any help," Flo said. "I work them TV Guide crosswords every week." She went off with her coffeepot to a booth in back, where a chicken hawk in a white linen suit was trying to recruit a blond boy fresh off the bus from St. Paul. The Java joint was on Forty-second Street between Times Square and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, sandwiched in between the Wet Pussycat Theater and an adult bookstore. The food wasn't quite up to Aces High, but Jay liked the prices. Besides, it was a half block from his office.

He chewed on the pencil he'd bummed from Flo and looked at the list again. The original nineteen finalists were down to eleven. Snotman was in jail at the moment; he'd gone first. Most of the one-star candidates had followed in short order. Chrysalis's office wasn't big enough to hold an elephant, which eliminated Radha O'Reilly. Modular Man and Starshine had both made the list strictly on the basis of geography; neither had any particular reason to want Chrysalis dead. Carnifex had been in Atlanta, as had Jack Braun. Jay knew Elmo hadn't done it, no matter how many stars the computer had assigned him. That left the list looking like this: