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about?”
    “Alice Sims didn’t just ask him a lot of questions—he answered them.”
    “While he was handcuffed to the pole?”
    “Yup.”
    “Jesus, she’s meaner than I thought. That’s pretty heartless.”
    “Pretty obnoxious too. The morning edition already has the story on page one and every asshole in town has been calling up with one tune or another.”
    “So that’s why Max is so pissed off.” Murphy chuckled.
    “Yeah. She bawled me out too. Still, it’s no joke. This could become a great local gag, right up there with pet rocks. At least that’s the way the selectmen seem to see it, or the ones who called the Chief, who then had the good graces to sic them onto me.”
    “Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
    “Yeah.” Frank pulled at his lower lip, which was a form of “period-paragraph” body language he’d developed for changing the subject. “What about last night’s shooting?”
    I shrugged. “You seen George’s report yet?”
    Murphy nodded.
    “Then you know what we found. Tyler and some uniforms are going over the house today, dusting for prints and all… I doubt they’ll find much more than we got. They’re going to re-interview Reitz once she gets back on keel.
    “I visited Jamie Phillips’s house and talked to his wife. She had this wild story about their dog being kidnapped and held for ransom—a thousand dollars to be paid at Thelma Reitz’s back door. The message was: ‘Don’t knock—walk right in.’ Unless it was a setup to have him blasted by Reitz, that’s a pretty unlikely deal.”
    “So you believe her?”
    “No reason not to yet. I have someone looking into the Phillipses as an item: whether they got along, if they had any money problems, possible insurance angles, stuff like that. He was a little strange, I guess—had a real thing for the dog. And she was the one who let it out of the house the day it got snatched. There might be something there, but again I doubt it. We’ll talk to everybody a few more times just to nail it down, but if gut instincts are worth anything, I’d say what we see there is what we got. There is one interesting little tidbit: both Phillips and Reitz served on the Kimberly Harris jury.”
    Murphy sat up straight, suddenly agitated. “Are you kidding?”
    “Nope. I was about to pull the jury list when you hit me with Woll.”
    “Oh, Christ, not that again. Once was bad enough.” He stood up, no longer jocular. “Do what you will, but keep it under your hat, okay? No mention of it in the daily reports, no chitchat with anyone but me. After the Woll thing, people are going to have us under a microscope for a while and I don’t want them catching sight of you digging up Kimberly Harris. You got that?”
    I snapped a salute. “ Oui, mon capitaine .”
    He gave me a deadly look and left. Murphy would never have been described as a laid-back, laconic type, but his reaction surprised me. The Harris killing had been sensational in itself, but its solution had been quick and easy and the legal rigmarole hadn’t hit any snags from start to finish.
    I shook it off and left my office, heading for the central corridor and the stairs leading up.
    A familiar voice stopped me as I put my hand on the handrail. It was Stan Katz, the reporter I’d seen at the Reitz house. “Hi, Joe. Running for cover?”
    I didn’t care for Katz—he had too much ambition and too little tact. “Meaning?”
    “No offense. Just a little joke. What with Woll’s car being hijacked, I thought you guys might be a little shy of the press.”
    “Stanley, I’m always shy of the press, you know that.”
    He smiled. “That’s true. You could never be accused of being one of my prime sources.”
    “So why do you keep trying?”
    “It’s the job. So what about Woll?”
    “Nothing. We’re working on it. We’ll let you know. Why are you on this anyhow? I thought it belonged to Alice Sims.”
    “She answered the phone, that’s why she went. This is