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just go on from one to the other in a chain."
    So there it was—Al had told Lou he was working on an old case because she wouldn't have understood a friendship with a girl half her age. She wouldn't believe Al just came here to talk and listen, a release from the prison of the house, a chance to laugh with someone young.
    "I had no idea he was depressed," she said. "I just couldn't believe it when I heard he shot himself. There was no sign of anything like that. He was happy when he was here. Sometimes we'd order in Chinese food like tonight, and he'd stay on until I'd throw him out. 'Go home, DiMona ,' I'd tell him. 'Get your butt out of here so I can take a bath.' We'd listen to music. Play chess and talk. He seemed a reasonably happy man."
    "He kept it from you, obviously. You were probably the only nice thing he had going the last few months."
    "But why , Janek ? Why did he do it?"
    He shrugged. "Old detectives, cops—it happens to us a lot. One of the highest suicide rates. No one's sure exactly why. They warn us about it. Preach to us about depression. Something to do with the job. We end up tired, disillusioned, bored. All that stress and tension, that confrontation every day year in, year out, and then suddenly nothing but your thoughts and then you start to brood. Guys take it different ways. I knew Al twenty-five years and I wouldn't have figured him for what he did. Except I've known other guys I didn't figure for that kind of move, and they surprised me, too, so now I'm not all that surprised."
    He helped her carry the dishes to the galley, rolled up his sleeves, rinsed the dishes, then handed them to her so she could place them in the dishwasher.
    "This is very domestic. You're a domestic guy."
    "It's been a while," he said. "I'm divorced a couple years. I usually eat at a delicatessen, or buy carry-out and eat off paper plates. Not much in the way of appliances where I live. Got a coffee maker and a toaster. That's about it."
    They sat in her chrome-and-leather chairs after everything was stowed away, and she told him about her current book, the one she was working on now. It was called, tentatively, Aggression . The blowups on the walls were part of it. She was shooting men at moments of physical stress: prize-fighters, football and hockey players, a truck driver yelling at a pedestrian, a cop collaring a thief, lawyers quarreling, a fencer about to thrust, a bullfighter facing horns. "The aesthetic of male aggression," she told him. "It's always fascinated me. Maybe that's why I like talking to cops so much. You guys see it all the time. You live with it constantly. Most of us just see people in vapid moments, but you see them at the heights of stress."
    "Interesting. Sort of a curious subject for a woman."
    "Come on, Janek , you don't believe in stereotypes. Anyway, male aggression can be a turn-on. I saw more than my share of it when I was covering the war, and I found myself attracted at times. So, the subject is aggression, but there's a strong erotic theme. What's next? I wonder. Still lifes ? Water swirls in the sand?" She shook her head. "Wish I knew. Not going backwards, that's for sure."
    It was nearly midnight when he left. It had been an exhausting day—the funeral, the switched-heads case—but for all of that he felt refreshed. Caroline Wallace was extraordinary; he couldn't put her out of his mind. As he drove back to Manhattan he found himself starting to envy Al. Friendship with a woman like that—how very lucky Al had been.

The Mystery of Destruction
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    C hief Medical Examiner Gerald Heyman was not his usual cheerful self. "I told Hart straight out," he said, "don't send any more of your goons down here."
    Dr. Heyman was in his early fifties, with a permanent tan and the look of a man who jogged laps around Central Park at dawn. His iron-gray hair was parted in the middle. His chin was squared off and he sat rigidly in his chair behind his precisely ordered desk.
    "We