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victim? Which was it?
    At nine o’clock he went into Frank’s office and asked to be assigned to the case. “I really want to stay on it. It’s important.”
    â€œOne of your hunches?” Shea asked.
    â€œYep.”
    â€œI think you’re wrong, but it won’t hurt to be thorough. Go ahead.”
    At ten Nat was at the memorial service. No eulogy for the poor kid, he thought. What did the stony faces of Vivian Carpenter’s parents and sisters hide? Grief that it was noblesse oblige to conceal from prying eyes? Anger at a senseless tragedy? Guilt? The media had written plenty about Vivian Carpenter’s forlorn history. It was nothing like that of her older sisters, one of them a surgeon, one a diplomat, both suitably married, whereas Vivian, thrown out of boarding school for smoking pot, later became a college dropout. Although she didn’t need the money, when she moved to the Cape she took a job, then gave it up, something she would do a half-dozen times.
    Scott Covey sat alone in the first pew, weeping through the service. He looks the way I’d feel if something happened to Deb, Nat Coogan thought. Almost convinced that he was barking up the wrong tree, he left the church at the end of the service, then hungaround outside to pick up the remarks people were making.
    They made good listening. “Poor Vivian. I’m so sorry for her, but she kind of wore you out, didn’t she?”
    The middle-aged woman who had been addressed sighed. “I know. She could never just relax.”
    Nat remembered that Covey had said that he had unsuccessfully urged his wife to keep napping while he went scuba diving.
    A television reporter was rounding up people to tape. Nat watched as an attractive blond woman went to the reporter on her own. He recognized her, Elaine Atkins, the real estate agent. He sidled over to hear her comments.
    When she was finished, Nat jotted down a note. Elaine Atkins said that the Coveys had been looking for a new house and were planning to start a family. She seemed to know them reasonably well. He decided he would have to talk to Miss Atkins himself.
    When he got back to the office, he took out the autopsy pictures again, trying to figure out what it was that bothered him about them.

9
    M ently wiggled from under Adam’s arm and moved quietly to her side of the bed. He half murmured her name but did not awaken. She got up, slipped on her robe and looked down at him, a smile tugging at her lips.
    The dynamic criminal lawyer who could sway juries with his rhetoric looked utterly defenseless in sleep. He was lying on his side, his head pillowed on one arm. His hair was tousled, the patches of gray more apparent, the faint beginning of a tonsure clearly visible.
    The room was chilly, so Menley leaned down and drew the blanket over his shoulders, brushing her lips against his forehead. On her twenty-fifth birthday she’d decided that she’d probably never find anyone she wanted to marry. Two weeks later, she’d met Adam on an ocean liner, the Sagafjord. The ship was making a round-the-world tour, and because she had written extensively about the Far East, Menley had been invited to lecture on the leg between Bali and Singapore.
    On the second day out, Adam had stopped by her deck chair to chat. He’d been taking depositions in Australia and impulsively signed up for the same legof the voyage. “Great stops along the way, and I can use a week’s vacation,” he’d explained. By the end of that day, she had realized that Adam was the reason she’d broken her engagement three years earlier.
    It had been different for him. He’d fallen in love with her gradually, over the course of the next year. Menley sometimes wondered whether she would ever have heard from him again if they hadn’t lived three blocks apart in Manhattan.
    It helped that they had some important things in common. Both were active New Yorkers and each