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She looked under the door, saw his hand, sort of outstretched, and all that blood. She phoned it in to 911 right away. Me and Tony—my partner—were the first here, and we broke down the door in case the guy might still be alive, but one look told us he wasn’t. Then we found the other guy in the kitchen.”
    “The bathroom door was locked from inside?” Jack asked.
    The patrolman scratched his square, dimpled chin. “Well, sure. Sure, it was locked from inside. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had to break it down, would we? And see here? See the way it works? It’s what the locksmiths call a ‘privacy set.’ It can’t be locked from outside the bathroom.”
    Rebecca scowled. “So the killer couldn’t possibly have locked it after he was finished with Vastagliano?”
    “No,” Jack said, examining the broken lock more closely. “Looks like the victim locked himself in to avoid whoever was after him.”
    “But he was wasted anyway,” Rebecca said.
    “Yeah.”
    “In a locked room.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Where the biggest window is only a narrow slit.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Too narrow for the killer to escape that way.”
    “Much too narrow.”
    “So how was it done?”
    “Damned if I know,” Jack said.
    She scowled at him.
    She said, “Don’t go mystical on me again.”
    He said, “I never.”
    “There’s an explanation.”
    “I’m sure there is.”
    “And we’ll find it.”
    “I’m sure we will.”
    “A logical explanation.”
    “Of course.”

4
    That morning, something bad happened to Penny Dawson when she went to school.
    The Wellton School, a private institution, was in a large, converted, four-story brownstone on a clean, tree-lined street in a quite respectable neighborhood. The bottom floor had been remodeled to provide an acoustically perfect music room and a small gymnasium. The second floor was given over to classrooms for grades one through three, while grades four through six received their instruction on the third level. The business offices and records room were on the fourth floor.
    As a sixth grader, Penny attended class on the third floor. It was there, in the bustling and somewhat overheated cloakroom, that the bad thing happened.
    At that hour, shortly before the start of school, the cloakroom was filled with chattering kids struggling out of heavy coats and boots and galoshes. Although snow hadn’t been falling this morning, the weather forecast called for precipitation by mid-afternoon, and everyone was dressed accordingly.
    Snow! The first snow of the year. Even though city kids didn’t have fields and country hills and woods in which to enjoy winter games, the first snow of the season was nevertheless a magic event. Anticipation of the storm put an edge on the usual morning excitement. There was much giggling, name-calling, teasing, talk about television shows and homework, joke-telling, riddle-making, exaggerations about just how much snow they were supposed to be in for, and whispered conspiracy, the rustle of coats being shed, the slap of books on benches, the clank and rattle of metal lunch-boxes.
    Standing with her back to the whirl of activity, stripping off her gloves and then pulling off her long woolen scarf, Penny noticed that the door of her tall, narrow, metal locker was dented at the bottom and bent out slightly along one edge, as if someone had been prying at it. On closer inspection, she saw the combination lock was broken, too.
    Frowning, she opened the door—and jumped back in surprise as an avalanche of paper spilled out at her feet. She had left the contents of her locker in a neat, orderly arrangement. Now, everything was jumbled together in one big mess. Worse than that, every one of her books had been torn apart, the pages ripped free of the bindings; some pages were shredded, too, and some were crumpled. Her yellow, lined tablet had been reduced to a pile of confetti. Her pencils had been broken into small pieces.
    Her pocket calculator was