Author's webpage: http://www.trickster.org/storybook

THE THIRD WOMAN

I'm not a big fan of the third season of Due South, and so have created my own alternate universe season in which Ray Vecchio never left on any bizarre - dare I say *stupid* - undercover missions. This "faux" third season represents my take on how the season *should* have gone and include not only stories I've written, but stories friends have written that fit the criteria for an episode of the show (for instance: a crime committed, Fraser & Ray solving said crime, a plot, a sub-plot, humour, emotional sub-text, etc.)

Comments? Please e-mail me at vecchio@trickster.org

"The Third Woman" is what would be considered a "February Sweeps" two-parter - as the commercials would say, "Don't miss this Very Special episode of Due South!" ;)

The Third Woman
Adapted to the DS universe from Graham Greene's "The Third Man"

by Celeste Hotaling-Lyons

You never know when life is gonna walk up to you and hit you one right in the chops.

I remember thinking when I first heard the news over the police wire, 'Good! That's the end of her; the end of this whole damn thing! Serves the bitch right!'; and about how bad it could have been if she hadn't... if she had come back to him alive. But when I saw Benny standing there at the funeral, the look on his face - well, for that moment at least, the past didn't seem to matter. See, the thing about Benny is this: whenever a woman walks past him, he looks at her like... like she's just a person or something. Even when they push it, he usually acts like he'd really rather not be bothered, or he's embarrassed. But this woman, she was something else. And I've never been sure exactly what it was she was.

It was February, and the grave diggers, union by the sound of them, were bitching about having to use electric drills to break open the ground which was, this being your typical nightmare of a Chicago winter, frozen through. Even the ground didn't want to take her in, it seemed; but they'd somehow made a hole big enough for the coffin, and got it slid down there without too much of a problem, considering how cold it was. The mourners were just me and Benny, two more than she deserved; and him wearing that stupid hat, his black coat covering up the dress uniform he'd worn for some weird, Canadian reason - to honor her passing or something. After they dropped the coffin down there and got the ropes and pulley off of it, the gravediggers started dropping in the chunks of frozen-solid dirt, and Benny turned and walked away like he wanted to run, but was keeping it to a fast walk for dignity's sake. I'm as tall as him, and most of that is leg, and I still had trouble keeping up with him. I figured he was crying, but it could have been the cold. My nose was running and my eyes tearing up, and I sure as hell wasn't all torn up about Victoria Metcalfe's death. No, I don't think it was the cold, with him. Benton Fraser believes in love, and that was why what happened later was a worse shock to him than it would have been to you or me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want you to understand this story I'm telling you, and to do that, I have to give you some background - about a love affair that stretched out over some ten years, and how love and hate are the same thing for some sick, twisted people; and about how sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and being kind can be the ultimate cruelty. And about how sometimes letting go is impossible, especially when there's no kind of real ending to a relationship, just a reaching out to emptiness and a fading away. Say what you will about Ange, about my marriage, but man, when she threw my suits out the window into the street, screaming her lungs out at me - now that was a real, definitive end. So now, we can see each other and just nod. Because it's over.

Chicago is my town. I've been to New York City, and it's just too much, too many people, too big buildings, too much in your face; and I've been to other cities, and they were all too small, too nothing. Only Chicago is just right. Except in the winter after the holidays, during that long stretch of raw weather with no Christmas decorations to keep you smiling. January, February, March; then, the Windy City is hard to take, even for someone who loves her like I do. That wind blows around corners and through your hat, down your collar. You don't think you'll ever get warm or see Spring again. You'll see a woman going by who would be a looker if she wasn't red-nosed, wearing a puffy down parka and big boots, and she'll have her bag clutched in her arms like it's the only thing keeping her together or she'd shatter from the cold. Or you'll drive past an empty lot, the blacktop half black ice, the snow pushed up high on one side, and there'll be a few scraggly gang kids try to shoot baskets through a hoop with stalactites - or is it stalagmites? - of ice dripping off it. The only good thing to say about Chicago on days like this is that it keeps the crime stats down. Even the pick-pockets are hanging out in coffee shops, keeping their fingers warm around a paper cup of java instead of in some rich guy's expensive camel-hair coat pocket.

This is the Chicago that Victoria died in that February. I put two and two together from what Benny told me, to try to figure out exactly what happened, and this is as accurate as I could make it - I don't want to invent any dialogue, but I think Benny's memory, usually as accurate as a Swiss timepiece; well, it may be a little off on some of this.

Jesus, life's a bitch. This story is pretty ugly - though the thing with Benny and the lecture was pretty funny. It's like life gives you just about as much as you can take, and then it gives you a few minutes of comic relief, so you can go back and take even more of the rough stuff it's going to hand out.

Benton Fraser got himself in trouble in Canada when he went and arrested the bastard who had his father killed; seems it's a Mountie thing that you don't turn in one of "your own," even when one of your own killed someone else who was one of your own. You get me? I mean, I would have thought the fact that the guy Gerrard killed was Fraser's father would have been enough, but then there was the fact that Bob Fraser was also a Mountie, and one of "your own," that should have taken the curse off of it. Then again, maybe all the weird stuff Fraser must have pulled when on assignment up there in Canada was a factor in his disfavor - and knowing him like I do, there was probably a whole lot of weird stuff; I'd give anything to get just one peek at the file folder marked 'Benton Fraser' in Meggy T's office file cabinet. So what I'm saying is, maybe they didn't really hold Benny turning in Gerrard against him, they just wanted him out of their hair. That makes sense to me. Sometimes I want him out of my hair, what little there is left of it, and he's my best friend.

So. Here's this Canadian citizen on the streets of Chicago, spreading his multi-colored cash all over the place and making this town a decent, safe place to live in whether it wants to be or not, not to mention occasionally driving me crazy, and he goes and makes me shoot him in the back over this woman, this criminal, this Victoria Metcalfe bitch-goddess from hell. Like she was worth all this trouble, all the shit she put him through. I've said it before and I'll say it again - God, I hate tourists.

But life goes on. Benny pulls himself together, and I pull myself together, and we both somehow pull ourselves together; and life goes on.

Anyway, something weird happens at this diner that Fraser and I go to sometimes, where I bounce stuff about my cases off of him. We're sitting there and he's ignoring the waitresses who are trying to catch his eye, chowing down on a cheeseburger and greasy fries like he hasn't had a bite to eat in three days - which, knowing him, just might be the truth, he probably up and gave all of his food to some homeless family - when this guy comes to the table who you could recognize from a mile away as a reporter. I don't trust reporters any further than I can comfortably spit out a rat, to coin a phrase.

"You Mr. Fraser?" he asks.

"Um. Ah. Yes," mumbles Fraser around a mouthful, that deer-in-the-headlights look on his face.

"You look younger than your photographs," this guy says. "Want to make a statement? I'm from the Chicago Sun-Times, I work for the Out-And-About Town section. We'd like to know what you think of Chicago."

"Um. It's fine. I like it fine... Ray?" he looks at me for help, chewing. I figure he just doesn't like having to talk with his mouth full, he got pretty good at handling reporters with that Randall Bolt incident of some eight months ago. I take pity on him.

"What can I do ya for?" I ask the reporter. The reporter surprises me.

He points at a little guy in a corner booth with buck teeth, nibbling at a chunk of bread the way a beaver, which he totally looks like, would nibble at a nice piece of knotty pine. "Happen to know if that's McCabe?"

Fraser and I look at each other. He swallows and answers for us both. "No, sir. Who is Mr. McCabe?"

The reporter snorts. "You real men! It's like you're from another planet - guess that would be Mars, right? See ya at McCormick Place this weekend. McCabe's my real assignment," and we watch him make across the room for the great McCabe, who greets him with a big smile plastered across his buck teeth.

"What the hell was that all about?" I ask Fraser.

"I don't know, Ray," he says, and tucks back into his hamburger. He's done in no time flat, and his fries are gone, half of mine with them, and it's time for him to go. He puts that stupid Mountie hat back on his head that doesn't even cover his ears, and his coat on over the brown uniform he's wearing, to head back out into the snow that's drifting down thin and soft and cold as it lays a fresh, white canvas for the bus fumes to write on, on top of the dirty gray drifts that have been part of the cityscape since mid-December.

When he arrived back at the Canadian Consulate, there was a cryptic message on his desk for him from someone he had never heard of called Wiener. 'We expected you tomorrow. Please stay where you are. Hotel room booked.' But Fraser didn't want to stay where he was, he had things to do before he could go home that night; and though he didn't mention it, I have a feeling the hotel reference kinda threw him. Cryptic messages about hotel rooms from God-knows-who had a way of devolving into embarrassing incidents involving nubile young ladies, and with his on-again-off-again sort-of romance developing with The Dragon Lady, he didn't want any more incidents. Besides - incidents had a way of turning into sentry duty in front of the Consulate, and it was too damned cold, even for Fraser, to have to stand out there. Fraser probably even sternly lectured himself, 'I've had about enough of these incidents. No more incidents.' And this just before he found himself hip-deep in the most serious incident of an extremely incident-prone life.

So Fraser honestly wasn't curious about this 'Wiener' message; he'll never admit it, but I'm pretty sure he assumed it was one of the many mash notes he was always finding stuck in his mailbox or tucked under his plate in restaurants. I told you about those waitresses before, didn't I? He balled the slip of paper up and tossed it at the head of the wolf who was sleeping under his desk, who woke up. "Come along, Diefenbaker," he said to the wolf. It's not like they were gonna go off and do some big Mountie thing that needs a wolf to get it done; no, Fraser was just off to do one of the thousand useless, demeaning things The Dragon Lady likes to assign him to during those brief lulls between saving babies from burning buildings and American cities from nuclear holocaust, like picking up her dry cleaning. He wanted the wolf with him because he's afraid Dief's getting soft, and some exposure to the below-freezing Chicago outdoors would put some fluff back in the wolf's fur. And when they got back from their errand, who's waiting there at Fraser's desk but yours truly, having gotten the info not half an hour ago off the wire, and me not wanting to break this sort of thing to him on his office voicemail.

"It's Victoria," I said, not pulling any punches, and a look comes over his face so fast, it's like not a single minute has passed since what happened back on the train station. It's wanting and dread and longing all rolled up into a set of big, soft Mountie eyes asking the question before he says it.

"Is she back?" and the voice betrays a hope I really wished wasn't there to be heard.

"Back and gone again," I said. "She's dead, Benny. She's dead and I'm sorry." And at that moment, I truly meant it.

Even Benny had to sit down for that one. "Dead?" he muttered, disbelieving. That's normal. Nobody ever believes it at first. "How?"

"Car accident." He raised his head at that, but I beat him to it. "No, not like last time - this time it's for real. No foul play. An accident, pure and simple. Witnesses, unimpeachable ones; leading citizens of Chicago-type witnesses. A body. A funeral, this afternoon."

"So fast, Ray? Won't someone investigate...?"

"Yeah. But not me. I'm too close to the case, after my little contretemps with Internal Affairs over Ms. Metcalfe that first time. I got too much positive emotion invested in her bein' dead." A muscle in his cheek did a brief shimmy, so I know I got to him with that one. Okay, so I twisted the knife a little. Hey, I love Benny like a brother, but you sometimes gotta hurt the ones you love, just to teach 'em. I almost lost my house to the bail bondsman over that one, you know. I'd do it again in a millisecond, but still.

He stood up, shaky on his pins. "The funeral. Where--?"

I smiled and patted my breast pocket. "I got the info right here. Should be interesting." That got me a look, and I shut up for a while after that.

After a quick stop at Fraser's place for the red jacket and ceremonial uniform belt he insisted he had to have, I pointed the Riv straight out of town to the 'burbs where Central City Cemetery is. It's one of those modern graveyards, with row after row of identical white markers, each with identical white snowcaps, an endless chain of puff-topped headstones reaching off miles on either side.

It was sheer luck, Fraser-style luck, that we found the funeral in time; the only brown spot in the place, the coffin about to be lowered into the hole. Surprise, surprise; there were no mourners standing around but us two. The wind sliced through my coat - a nice lookin' Armani, charcoal gray, the lining warm enough for maybe walking through a parking garage to your car - but I stood by him until it was over. And when it was over, he walked away from the grave, back to the Riv. He didn't look back, and he didn't say a word until he was safe in his usual place in the front passenger seat. "The office," he said. "I believe it's up the road, that way...," and he nodded in the direction of a building I could see that looked like it could be a fancy mausoleum. It had marble walls and steps, and stone gargoyles dripping icicles from their fangs off the roof, but you could see there were lights in the windows and a red car, one of those mini-Japanese-types, parked in what looked like a small parking lot right next to it.

I've got twenty-six case files open and they're all sitting on my desk, waiting for me, so naturally I drove up the road and parked the Riv next to the little red Honda.

The office was as fancy as the outside looked, nice antique furniture and a working fireplace, but all I cared about was it was warm. I stood by the fire, hands held out to its life-giving crackling heat, while Fraser had a chat with the blonde sitting reception. Typical Fraser, he quickly got all the info he wanted about who had arranged Victoria Metcalfe's 'digs,' but missed the fact that the receptionist was trying desperately to get him to call her. He does the old, respectful tip of the Mountie hat to her, and excuses himself like a nicely-brought up kid in grade school would bid adieu to his old maiden aunt, and the receptionist grips her desk like she's stopping herself jumping over it after him as he leaves. It totally makes me want to puke sometimes. I followed him back out into the wind-chill-factor-from-hell; a gift, no doubt, from the whereabouts of Fraser's home town and I hope freezing his butt off makes him feel 'to home.'

"Dr. Kartnerstrasse," Fraser said to me when we were back in the Riv. "Her office is on 20th and Kelsey." I immediately knew what part of town that was - we're talking gentrification city, with a lot of old brownstones being taken over by yuppies for homes and professional offices - so off we go, back to the greatest city in the world.

There was a whole lot of silence in that car until we crossed over the city line. Fraser cleared his throat as we blew along the highway, past the 'Welcome to Chicago' sign - nice to know there hadn't been a palace insurrection during our short jaunt out of town and Richard M. Daley was still our Mayor. "Unless I am very much mistaken," said Fraser, who'd obviously been thinking about it during all that silence, "Dr. Lilly Kartnerstrasse is the humanitarian who was recently honored by several international agencies for having saved the lives of countless orphaned children in Rumania."

I shrugged, I'd read this on the info sheet I'd got off the wire about Victoria's death; the good doctor had been one of the people who identified The Vickster's body. Fraser hadn't read the report yet, I think he'd been in too much shock to ask to see it - but he speed-reads at least three newspapers a day, so he must have gotten the name that way. "Okay, so the Big Question of the Day is this: what is Dr. Mother Theresa doin' buying a gravesite for Victoria Metcalfe, who was, you might remember, a noted sociopath wanted by the cops in, at the very least, two countries?"

He looked at me, hurt, but I'm not sorry I said it. I could say stuff much worse.

"Well, Ray," he said carefully, "Is it so far-fetched to think that perhaps Victoria had somehow helped this woman with her humanitarian efforts? And the good doctor was moved to return the favor with Victoria's death?"

It wasn't funny, but I laughed; but then it wasn't a funny laugh. I reached into my breast pocket for the police report, which I handed over to him. He read it in the fading light of the late-winter afternoon, but didn't get car-sick like any other normal human being reading in a car would.

"Interesting," he said, folding the report in half. His hands came together like he was praying, the report between them. "Carol Jones, a well-known philanthropist, and Ms. Anna Sachet, an entrepreneur in the computer industry, were witness to the incident. Both of these unimpeachable citizens identified Victoria as the accident victim in addition to Dr. Kartnerstrasse."

"Look, Benny, if it's any consolation, it happened so quick, she never saw it comin'. At least she wasn't in any pain."

"Yes, it does say that much, doesn't it," he said. "And not much else."

It was true - three pages long, and it didn't tell him any of the things he desperately wanted to know. "Are you sure you really wanna stir up this mess, Benny?" I asked, trying to warn him against, well, I didn't have the slightest idea what I was trying to warn him against. I guess it was just one of my hunches, that the info he'd be digging up was gonna screw with his mind.

"We'll ask Dr. Kartnerstrasse about it," he said, full of determination. Great. Already I could tell I was going to find myself in a shitload of trouble, poking my nose into places where Internal Affairs would just love to chop it off....

I found a spot and parked the Riv. Neither of us thought to point out to the other that the name Victoria Metcalfe had been going by this time around was Victoria Fraser.

Lilly Kartnerstrasse was at home, or at least in her office. Fraser told the receptionist that he was a friend of Victoria's and it was like magic, we were ushered right in.

The waiting-room we were shown to looked like some sort of museum - a religious museum. There were more crucifixes than you'd find in my crazy Aunt Serose's bedroom, all kinds; fancy scrolly metal ones, hand-carved ones, and simple two-sticks-of-wood-and-some-twine ones. There were statues of martyrs with their hands held out to either side, looking up beseechingly at the heavens - 'course if they were martyrs, nobody was listening to 'em, that's what makes them martyrs. There were even old-fashioned frames with little bits of God-knows-what in them, you could read the plaque on the frame and discover that it was a piece of the body of a saint in there. Kind of creepy if you think about it - some guy does what he feels he's got to do for himself and for his Lord, and gets himself killed for it, and his patella gets worshipped by some religious nut a thousand years later.

But there was one thing that made the place even weirder than it already was - all that junk, all those knick-knacks, and there wasn't a speck of dust in the place - even my Ma doesn't keep her house that spotless, and she prides herself on her housekeeping. I picked up an antique leather-bound Bible and was just about to remark to Fraser how creepy-sanitary the joint was, when somebody sneezed.

Dr. Kartnerstrasse was a wiry old broad, and one of the cleanest-looking people I ever laid eyes on. She was very tiny and neat, in a black suit with a little white, stiff lace collar; her black shoes were shiny patent leather jobs; her makeup perfectly applied to her little monkey face. She sneezed again, like a cat, as if to shame me for raising a cloud of non-existent dust into her air. She said, "Mr. Fraser?"

All of a sudden, I was overtaken with a disgraceful, irrational, but also irresistible desire to do a number on the prim and proper Dr. Kartnerstrasse. Sometimes this happens when I meet someone for the first time and I just can't help myself. Before Benny could identify himself as Mr. Fraser, I said, "Dr. Carter-street?"

"Kart-ner-strass-a." She carefully enunciated the name like someone who was used to having to correct dim lummoxes like me all the time.

"This is one interesting collection ya got here." I could feel myself grinning at her like an idiot.

"Yes."

"These saints' bones...."

"The bones of chickens and rabbits," she dismissed her impressive collection with a wave of one tiny, wrinkled paw; then took a starched, linen hankie out of her sleeve like a magician pulling a bouquet of flowers out of a magic wand and blew her nose delicately, twice. I wondered if she'd throw out the hankie now that it was dirty. "Would you mind, Mr. Fraser, telling me the purpose of your visit? I have patients awaiting my attention."

"I am Benton Fraser," Fraser jumped in before I could embarrass us both any further, "and this is Detective Vecchio. Like you, we were both friends of Ms. Victoria... Fraser." I let that whopper pass as arguing with the Mountie about who was or wasn't a friend of Icky Vickie's ain't a good idea in front of a witness, but don't ever tell me Benton Fraser can't lie.

"Ah. I was her medical adviser and business associate," Dr. Kartnerstrasse corrected him and stood, stiffly, between her crucifixes.

"I didn't hear of her death until earlier today, when Detective Vecchio got the information off the police wire, so I was too late for the inquest. After the funeral, Detective Vecchio and I enquired as to who had made the arrangements for burial."

"Very sad," Dr. Kartnerstrasse said. "She had a small insurance policy to cover expenses and had made her own funerary arrangements. I merely set them in motion after signing the death certificate. Her friend, Ms. Sachet, was supposed to see to the arrangements, but that party was somewhat... indisposed... after the accident. One steps in."

"Very responsible of you, ma'am. Naturally, under the circumstances, I want to learn all I can about the accident."

"If you have read the police report, there is nothing I can tell you that you don't know. I did not actually see the occurrence. I was told she saw a friend of hers across the street and went to cross. She did not make it to the other side. She was dead when I arrived."

"Would she have been conscious at all?"

"I understand she was for a short time, while they carried her into the house."

"In great pain?"

"Not necessarily."

"You are quite certain that it was an accident?"

Dr. Kartnerstrasse put out a hand and straightened a crucifix. "I was not there. My opinion is limited to the cause of death. Have you any reason to be dissatisfied?"

Now, Fraser is always professional about his job, but he can also be somewhat reckless. What we're talking about here is a guy who'd jump off a 60-foot cliff just to make a point. He said, "Some months ago, the police had implicated Victoria in a serious conspiracy to commit grand larceny and murder. It is my opinion that she, herself, might have been murdered - or even killed herself."

"I do not feel competent to pass an opinion on this subject," Dr. Kartnerstrasse said.

"Do you know a Ms. Anna Sachet?"

"She was witness to the incident. I recall her being at the scene."

"But you knew her before...."

Dr. Kartnerstrasse shrugged minutely. "There are a limited number of charitable functions in this city, Mr. Fraser - that does not necessarily lead to an in-depth acquaintance."

Dr. Kartnerstrasse was not only the cleanest, but also the most cautious doctor I ever saw. Her statements were so limited that you could not find the slightest amount of wiggle room in them. If she had been called in to diagnose a case of chicken pox, I get the feeling she would have stated that a rash was present, that the kid's temperature was thus-and-so. She would never have allowed herself to be in error at an inquest hearing.

"Had you been Victoria's doctor for long?" It seemed to me at the time that this prissy old broad was kind of an odd person for Victoria to pick as her doctor. Vickie didn't like authority figures.

"Ms. Fraser first consulted with me last year. I suppose, considering the circumstances, it does no harm to reveal it was a simple matter of a routine checkup. She was a healthy young woman. It is a pity her life was ended in that violent manner."

I thought it seemed like a fitting end to Victoria's life, but I didn't say it.

Fraser sighed. I guess he didn't have else anything worth saying either, because he just said, "Thank you kindly, ma'am, for taking the time to see us." The doctor dipped her chin at us and I swear I heard a creak, which reminded me of an old commercial for dish detergent from when I was a kid - 'so clean, it squeaks!' was the line. "We mustn't keep you from your patients any longer," said Fraser, turning away. He was brought up short by yet another crucifix. It was hanging just at eye level, the arms nailed above the head, the face carved in a horrible wail of agony. "That's a... strange... crucifix," he said.

"Jansenist," Dr. Kartnerstrasse commented, then closed her carefully out-lined, lipsticked mouth sharply as though she had somehow given too much away.

Fraser is always up to collect fresh knowledge to fuel that little computer he has stashed between his ears. "Jansenist?" he pronounced, interested. "Why are the arms above the head?"

Dr. Kartnerstrasse said disapprovingly, "Because wide-open arms would encompass all of humanity, and He died, in their elitist view, only for the select few."

Well, that was pretty much enough for me for one day, so I dropped Fraser off at the Canadian Consulate and went back to my office. I didn't harbor the slightest hope that he'd keep out of trouble, but I had to get back to the twenty-six case files on my desk even if only to look like I was giving them some attention... besides, I have a friend in the C.I.A. I thought I'd drop a line to, just for the heck of it, and I didn't want Benny to know. At any rate, it didn't seem to me that Victoria could hurt Benny all that much from the grave. I honestly thought he'd nose around and satisfy his curiosity, confirming what the cops on the scene had put in their report, and that's it. Whatever Victoria had been up to this time, I was hoping against hope she didn't have enough time to put it in motion before she'd gotten herself offed. It really did seem to me like a case of accidental death. I mean - I wouldn't have just cut him loose like that to get himself or anyone else killed or anything, you know?

He went to his office, shrugging off both his coat and the attentions of Turnbull, who had only about half the facts and was actually pretty worried about Fraser; he did what he could to sooth Turnbull's wrinkled brow and eventually managed to shoo him away, then shut the door behind him. Fraser was exhausted, and dropped onto the only comfortable chair in the room, stretching his legs out in front of him. Within a minute, he had left Chicago far behind and was walking through the woods, ankle-deep in snow. An owl hooted, and he suddenly felt lonely and scared. He was looking for someone, but the woods were so thick and the snow was falling all around him, how could he find anyone in that? He saw a figure and ran towards it, filled with relief and joy at not being alone any more. The figure turned, but it wasn't Victoria at all - just a stranger with long, dark, curly hair, who grinned at him, while the owl hooted again and again. He woke suddenly to hear the telephone ringing on his desk. He lurched for it and picked it up.

The voice of a woman - with a bit of a Southern accent - said, "Is this Constable Benton Fraser?"

"Yes."

"You don't know me," the voice said unnecessarily, "but I was a friend of Victoria Fraser's."

It felt good to hear someone, anyone, say they were a friend of Victoria's, and Fraser warmed towards the stranger immediately even in his half-dazed, newly-awakened state of not-quite-all-there. He said, "Can I meet with you?"

"I'm just around the corner from the Canadian Consulate, at a little restaurant called 'The Old Vienna'. You know... dear Vickie asked me to see that you were all right, that night. I was with her when she passed off this mortal coil."

"Ah... then this would be... Ms. Anna Sachet?"

The voice was, in fact, a low and flirty one, and the laugh Fraser's question brought was pretty damned sexy. "Oh, my; yes it is - but it's pronounced 'Sah-shay,' not 'Satch-ette,' sugar! You just must be some sort of lil,' ole Sherlock Holmes," she said, the accent getting pretty thick all of a sudden.

"Not at all, ma'am - aware as I am that Ms. Anna Sachet and Ms. Carol Jones were with Victoria when she died, I had a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly."

She laughed again. Fraser was really wowing her, and she hadn't even seen him yet, so it wasn't the uniform. "Well, it's about dinnertime, and a lady must eat. Why don't you come on over and I'd be pleased to stand you a hot meal while we talk about Vickie, Ben." This chick was a fast worker, she had him on a first-name basis already.

"How will I know you?"

"Well... I'm wearing a fur coat, and I have long, red hair. Red hair's pretty unusual, don't you think? 'Sides, I'll wave to you when I see you - how many Mounties are going to walk into The Old Vienna tonight, right?" The voice had a load of charm to it and sounded so damned reasonable, that Fraser couldn't help but agree before hanging up. But after he'd hung up, he couldn't help wondering about this Anna Sachet. The only colleagues of Victoria's he'd ever met before had all immediately tried to kill him. Had Victoria really been trying to turn over a new leaf and go straight with these new, respectable associates of her, or was this Anna Sachet going to prove to be yet another of Victoria's criminal associates?

Only one way to find out - he threw on his coat, found the wolf, who he told to mind his manners and he'd be back in an hour or so, then went back out into the cold of Chicago to find a restaurant called The Old Vienna, and Ms. Anna 'Sah-shay.'

"What I am afraid I disliked about her immediately," confessed Benny to me later on, "was her hair. I do hate making these value judgments, but her hair was so obviously a wig - bright red and heavily curled and lacquered. It struck me that there must be something, I don't know... *insincere*... about a woman with that much false hair on her head."

"Yeah, she sounds like a real, live wicked city woman," I said to him, straight-faced.

He shot me a look. "Now, that's just silly, Ray. What I mean to say is that she looked as though she was trying to appear as something other than what she was."

I'd seen Sachet by then and had come to the conclusion that she was a pretty hot-looking chick, with or without the wig, but I could see his point. All that phony Southern belle, clinging-vine charm could get a pretty tired, pretty quick - and what did all that charm cover up? "So you were tellin' me about Sachet."

He picked Anna Sachet out of the crowd of diners easily. She was there making a big deal out of searching the faces of every man who entered the restaurant, her lace-gloved hands folded, lady-like, on the tabletop. She was wearing an amazingly expensive-looking fur coat and had this attitude of dramatic soap-opera expectancy, as if she were awaiting her long-lost love, or a brother she'd been separated from since birth. As Fraser sat down, carefully placing his hat on the table, she said, "Oh, I'm so pleased you decided to accept my invitation!"

"Ms. Sachet, you knew Victoria Fraser?" Benny cut to the chase.

"I'm probably the one person who knew her best!" but Sachet added after a slight pause, after she registered her error, "well, excepting of course for yourself, my dear."

Fraser ducked his head. "It is funny you should say that," he said. "Because I have already come to the conclusion that I never knew her at all."

"Oh, now, honey; you're just depressed. What you need is a hot toddy to take the chill off. I ordered myself a 'Warm Daddy' - just what every little girl needs on a cold night like this."

Fraser, as usual, ignored any offer of a drink that contained alcohol. "Tell me how she died."

"As I said on the phone, I was with her. We came down the front stairs together, and Vickie saw a friend she knew across the street - she said something like, 'oh, look, that's Jonesy!' Well, of course I found out later that the woman's name was Jones. So Vickie waved to her friend and started across the street to her - when a taxi came tearing around the corner and just knocked that poor girl right off her feet. I felt so badly for that poor cabdriver; it's true, he shouldn't have been driving so fast what with the ice and all, but Vickie has to share the blame...."

"I'd heard somewhere that she'd died instantaneously."

"I do wish she had, the poor little thing. She died before the ambulance showed up, though."

"She could speak, then?"

"Yes! Even though she was in such awful agony, she worried about you."

"What did she say?"

"My goodness, I was so nervous and upset. I can't give you the exact words she spoke, Ben... may I call you 'Ben'? Vickie always called you that when she spoke of you. I feel I know you already. Well, let me see... she wanted me to tell you that she loved you; always had and always would. She made me promise to tell you that...."

"But then why didn't she contact me? Before...?"

"She couldn't! Not until she'd made it right, she said. I met her at a charitable function - we were both involved in the Feed The World Project. She headed several charitable organizations. She said she was trying to help mankind where she'd only hurt it, used it, before. And when she'd redressed the balance of the scales, and could live with herself again, only then could she show her face to the world she'd so wronged - to the man she'd so wronged." Sachet sniffed tearfully... and took a lady-like sip of her hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps.

Now, me, I would have wondered if this was Anna Sachet's line of bull, or if she was just regurgitating the line of bull Vickie'd fed her; but Benny was reassured by this little tale of redemption. It was exactly what he would have wanted for Vickie - a change of heart. The only thing he would have changed in this Perfect World scenario would be Vickie not coming to him for help right off the bat - and of course, her not getting killed.

"You said you knew her well." Fraser, for once in his straight-arrow life, was playing it cagey.

"Yes. We got on with each other right off, told each other all our little secrets; you know, girl-talk. I felt as if I'd known her for years."

"Then you knew about her... background?"

"If you mean about the time she spent incarcerated... yes, I knew about that. But Vickie had it in her to transcend all that - she was one of the finest people I ever met."

"It is because of that background that I'm suspicious of the circumstances of her death."

"Oh, now, sweetie; don't you be getting yourself in a tizzy. It's all very simple; accidents do happen!"

"I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to investigate the particulars of her death... and her life."

Sachet turned her head sharply and the wig shifted very slightly, showing a bit more of her forehead. There was a sheen of sweat there, but then she was wearing a heavy wig and a sable coat in a warm room. She said, "Nothing can bring Victoria back."

"I'm going to start working backwards from her death. You were there, as well as Ms. Jones and the cabdriver. You could give me their addresses."

"I don't know the cabdriver's."

"I can get it from my contact in the Chicago police."

"I'm quite a rich woman," Sachet said. "I promised Vickie I'd look after you...."

"You needn't worry about money," Fraser said. "But I will make a bet with you - Canadian dollars against American dollars - that there's more than mere accident to Victoria Metcalfe's death."

That was a just shot in the dark on Fraser's part, but he was having one of my hunches, and this time it didn't feel so good. Sachet had her Warm Daddy half-way to her lips and Fraser watched her. The shot apparently went wide; a steady hand held the cup to the mouth and Sachet took a long, satisfied swallow. Then she put down the cup and said, "How do you mean 'more than mere accident?'"

"A year and a half ago, Victoria was involved with people who made a career out of being in violation of the law - people who would have killed her without a thought. She survived that experience handily. But now, even as she struggled to get her life in order, to associate herself with respectable people, to perhaps pay her debt to society; she dies in a street accident?" As he spoke, he thought that maybe Sachet wasn't as unaffected by his wild statement as she looked. He knew from experience that it's only in the movies that the bad guy drops a glass, showing everybody how guilty he is. More likely a real 'bad guy' goes in the other direction, acting too calm when confronted. Sachet had drunk her Warm Daddy like she didn't have a care in the world, and, more importantly, hadn't batted an eyelash when Benny had called Victoria by her real name, "Metcalfe," not Fraser.

"Well...," she took another sip, "...of course I wish you luck, though I don't for a minute think there's anything to find. Accidents do happen. But just you ask me if there's anything at all I can do for you, honey."

"I want Ms. Jones' address."

"Surely. I'll write that down for you. Here it is, her office address and number. Oh, and sugar? I put my address and number just underneath. I'm serious about wanting to help you; you just call me any lil' ole time it comes into your head now, y'hear?" She smiled one of her Southern belle smiles, the charm carefully painted onto her lips and cheeks and eyelids. "Now you be sure to keep in touch!" As he reached for his hat, she leaned across the table and slid her lace-gloved hand over his, looking deeply into his eyes. "I'm so very happy to have met you; Victoria's secret love! Imagine!" and her other hand smoothed her wig as she spoke. That smile followed him all the way out of the restaurant, he could feel it burning into the exposed nape of his neck, just under his hat brim.

Benny sat on a hard chair at his desk in the dark. He had some time to think, he was calmer now than before. When the light snapped on overhead, he didn't even turn to take a look; he knew who was there by the scent of her perfume. No, that was wrong - she didn't wear perfume, she didn't like perfume - and yet there was still that signature scent immediately identifying who stood in the doorway, her hand still on the light switch.

It was not until she spoke, "Constable Fraser?" that he looked up at the face that watched him from across the room.

It wasn't that she was beautiful, he patiently explained to me, when I teased him about it. She just had an honest face; dark hair and eyes which in that light looked brown; a wide forehead, a small mouth that wasn't trying to charm him.

She said, "For God's sake, Fraser, what are you doing, sitting alone in the dark? If your wolf hadn't been in the hall, nose pressed up against your door, I'd never have known you were here."

The wolf poked his head around the door and whined a question at Fraser.

"Quisling," was his reply. The wolf withdrew.

There are some people, he explained to me carefully, that you just automatically recognize as a friend. You can be at ease with them because you know that with them, you will never be in danger. "That was Margaret Thatcher," he said, and I asked him if he was out of his mind. All the crap she'd heaped on him, firing him, yelling at him, making him wear a dead animal-hat on his hea - but that was just the job, Ray, he explained. That wasn't *her*. The real Margaret Thatcher had been slowly revealed as time went on, just as he knew she would be.

She looked at him sharply, searching his face, and stated, "I am going to make you a cup of tea."

"I'd like a cup," he said, but if there was one thing he didn't want at the moment, it was tea. He followed her to the Canadian Consulate's employee lounge, empty at that hour, and watched her while she made it. She made it, of course, all wrong, like everybody does today: the water not quite boiling, styrofoam cups, American tea bags that tasted like little bags of sawdust. He remember his mother making tea, with real Indian tea leaves in a teapot, and real cream. Thatcher said, "I've never quite understood the attraction of tea. I've never really liked it - I suppose it gives your hands something warm to hold."

He sucked down his cupful like it was medicine and watched her carefully sip at hers. He said, "I suppose you want to talk about Victoria."

It was one of those awful moments; he could see her mouth stiffen to meet it.

"If you want to."

"You've read the report. The *reports*," he amended. That neatly covered the "Death of a Canadian Citizen on Foreign Soil" paperwork Turnbull had stuffed, in triplicate, in the Inspector's in-box earlier that day; plus the flurry of Victoria-related reports she'd found waiting for her upon taking command of the Consulate eighteen months ago.

"Yes."

"I met her some ten years ago, saved her life, then destroyed it by arresting her."

"She had committed the crime...."

"Yes. She had. So justice prevailed. Then she came to Chicago after serving out her eight-year sentence."

"Only to commit another crime. Or a series of crimes, rather. Remember that, Ben; she didn't have to do what she did."

"Didn't she?"

"She was intelligent and self-motivated - she had what it took to go straight. She chose not to."

Now, Benny is the kind of guy who can talk your ear off for hours about whether humanity has Free Will or if Predestination is the ticket; but you know these philosophical arguments always just boil down to opinion in the end. He smiled at her. "She may have chosen to go straight this time, you know."

Thatcher shrugged. "I read of her many charitable works in the report. Surprising. Amazing how quickly she was able to set it all up."

"She tried to use her talents for good, instead of evil," Benny said, like a character from one of those old pulp novels where the Mountie always gets his man. I sometimes wonder if he's spoofing himself, or if he really means the things he says.

"If you can think of her that way now, it's all to the good, don't you think? What's the use of torturing yourself otherwise?"

"I loved her."

Thatcher took that like the little trooper she is, but there is a limit to what anyone can take. "But she's gone now. There's nothing really for us to talk about, is there?"

"Everything. The police would have arrested Victoria if they'd known who she was, their feelings about her charitable works notwithstanding."

Thatcher digested that along with her tea. "Ten years ago, you arrested Ms. Metcalfe, your feelings notwithstanding. Despite Mr. Vecchio's carefully worded police report on the incident, I... I somehow got the feeling that... I suspected that...."

"...that I wasn't trying to arrest Victoria on the train station that day." With that statement, Benny looked her straight in the eye, neither confirming or denying her suspicions.

Thatcher stared right back, as if daring him to try and finesse her. She finally said, "That's over and done with, too. We'll put my 'methinks he doth protest too much' misgivings down to Mr. Vecchio's obnoxious style of police-report writing and let it go. But... but I can't help wondering, useless as it may be to do so; I cannot help but wonder just what would have happened if history repeated itself a third time. If she weren't dead, and you were given the opportunity to arrest her again - what would you do?"

He had no answer for her. He didn't know himself. So instead he said, "I'll walk you out."

The dark was complete; the snow had started coming down again, in gentle drifts. Dief close by his side, he watched her from a distance as her cab pulled away, her head silhouetted in the back seat against the glow of the city lights shining through the snowfall.

As I see it, at this point Benny could have cut his losses and knocked off, secure in the knowledge that he'd done his civic duty and confirmed that Victoria Fraser, ne Metcalfe, had died an accidental death. He had shown an unhealthy curiosity, but you couldn't say it had developed into terminal curiosity yet. The wall of lies someone had taken the trouble to build was smooth as glass, and he hadn't been able to get any kind of a grip on it yet, to pull himself over it. He could have gone home with the wolf and slept the sleep of a man who'd laid his worries to rest. Unfortunately for him - and there would always be times the rest of his life when he would regret his decision - he chose to visit Victoria's apartment building. He debated for a moment whether or not to first visit Ms. Jones, but decided to visit the scene of the accident instead. The police report had quoted one guy who'd claimed to be Victoria's upstairs neighbor, who'd said he'd witnessed the accident - but who hadn't really said all that much in the end, claiming he was late for a business appointment after making his statement, refusing to elaborate on his answers to the cops' questions. There had been other witnesses, more cooperative ones, so the uniforms had pretty much cut this guy loose.

Victoria's nameplate was still on her mailbox - seeing "V. Fraser" gave him quite a turn, even though he knew she'd been using his name. "H. Koch" was the name on the apartment above hers. Benny rang the buzzer.

Maybe the little guy - his name was Howie - had had a good day at the office, or maybe it was just a Mountie in full, red-suited, parade regalia, wolf by his side, struck him as funny, but when Fraser rang his doorbell, he was friendly and ready to have a chat, and invited them both right in. He had just had his dinner, there was a dirty dish and a half-glass of orange juice on a table that also held a partially-completed model of a ship. "Nice dog. So, your last name's 'Fraser,' too , huh? Ex-husband?" the guy said. "She musta still been carryin' the torch. She had, like, an 8-by-10 of you in her apartment. No offense, buddy - I mean, I never scored with her or nothing, but you can't blame a guy for tryin'. I helped her bring her stuff up from the laundry room once and got as far as the living-room. After I dropped her laundry, she didn't exactly encourage me to hang around. She had a picture of you framed on her desk, so I figured, hey, she's got a boyfriend, and he looks like he could take me apart, so I didn't push it, you know?"

Now, Fraser didn't know whether to be depressed or happy that Vickie had kept a photo of him in her living-room, so he dismissed it from his mind and concentrated on asking some pertinent questions. "You told the police that you were a witness to the accident?"

Our boy Howie gave that a thought and apparently decided it was safe to talk to this one. "Well, yeah. You know, I may be the only one who wasn't directly involved who actually saw it. Though, to be fair, I didn't really see it, I heard it. See, I was gluing a hatch on the Potemkin here," and he gestured to the model ship on the table, "and I had the window open. You open the window or you get pretty high with this glue, see? So I heard the brakes put on and the sound of the skid, and I got to the window in time to see them carry her body to the building."

"But didn't you give evidence to the police?"

"Hey, she was a good-looking woman, but I hardly knew her. I didn't need to get my butt dragged down to the station, it bein' an accident and all. Besides, I didn't really see it, like I said."

"Was she in great pain?"

"Buddy, she was dead. I looked right down from that window there and saw her face. I know when someone is dead or not. It's kinda my business. I work at Paederman and Son - the biggest mortuary in Chicago. I'm in Sales."

"But the others say that she didn't die at once."

"Maybe they just don't know death like I do."

"She was dead, of course, when the doctor arrived. The doctor herself told me that."

"I'm tellin' ya, she was dead right off. You can take that to the bank, buddy."

"I really think, Mr. Koch, that you should give the police this evidence."

"Oh, for cryin' out - gimme a break! Why should I get involved? I wasn't the only one there!"

"What do you mean?"

"There were the three women who helped carry her into the house. You know, you ain't supposed to move someone who's been in an accident; but then she was dead already, so I guess it didn't--"

"*Three* women? I had assumed the driver was a man."

"Oh, the cabby didn't move from behind the wheel! He was a nervous wreck; I saw him later, shakin' like a leaf!"

"Three women...." It was like suddenly, while fingering that glass wall, he had found himself maybe not a crack, but a rough patch that hadn't been smoothed over by the builders. "Could you describe the women?"

But good old Howie wasn't trained to observe the living; only the one in the fur coat and the red wig had attracted his attention - the other two were just women in bulky winter coats with their heads down, bent over the body. He had seen them from the second floor; they had not looked up, and he had quickly looked away and closed the window, realizing it might not be such a bright idea to be witnessing this.

"So there really was no evidence for me to give."

No evidence, Benny thought, no evidence! He no longer doubted that Vickie's death had been a murder. Why else had he been lied to about the moment of death? Had someone wanted to shut him up with a tender story of Victoria's final words of love? And the third woman? Who was she?

He said, "Did you see Victoria go out?"

"No."

"Did you hear a scream?"

"Only the brakes screamed, buddy, only the brakes."

It occurred to Fraser that there was nothing - except the word of Jones and Sachet and the cabby - to prove that in fact Vickie had been killed at that precise moment. There was the medical evidence, but that could not prove more than that she had died, say, within a half-hour or so. "I think," said Fraser more to himself than to Howie, "I think there is a very good chance that Victoria was murdered."

"Murdered?" Howie's buddy-buddy attitude disappeared real quick. He said, "Whaddaya mean, murder? No, don't tell me, just get out. Both of you." He hustled Benny and Dief out the door into the hall, and his last words before slamming it shut behind him were, "It's none of my business, ya get me?" Poor old Howie - sometimes you don't get to choose your own business, it chooses you.

Still Fraser couldn't let it go. He stopped by the building super's office and inquired after the apartment that he'd heard had just opened up on the first floor. The super, a tired-looking old guy in a droopy pair of coveralls with a cigarette hanging off his lip, didn't question where Benny'd heard about the place; it's an old trick in the apartment-hunting game to read the obituaries for tips on openings. "We don't take pets," the super said, staring at Diefenbaker.

"That's all right, he's not interested in the rental," Fraser told him.

Apparently that made it okay, because the super got the keys and led the way into the apartment that had been Victoria's. Even through the cigarette smoke dribbling from the super's lip, Benny caught a whiff of that scent he always associated with Victoria - clean and cold and fresh. It seemed weird that a woman's scent could cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the woman herself was dead, decayed, gone.

The living-room was bare - too bare, it seemed to Benny. A couch, a desk - the framed photo, gone. There was no dust and no papers, either on the desk or in the wastepaper basket. The parquet reflected the light like a mirror. The super opened the door and showed him the bedroom; the bed neatly made with clean sheets. In the bathroom, no shampoo bottles, no used soap; nothing to show that mere days before, a living woman had occupied the premises. Only the cigarette smoke hanging in the air gave a sense of occupation, and that was nothing to do with Victoria at all.

"My wife did a good job on the place," the super said, "it's ready to lease; furnished or non-furnished, whatever you want."

The super's wife certainly had done a good job. After a death, there should have been more litter left than this. A person can't go suddenly and unexpectedly on her longest journey without forgetting this or that, without leaving a bill unpaid, an official form unanswered, a dog-eared magazine left by a chair. "I understood the previous tenant fell victim to an unfortunate accident, sir. Were there no papers left behind?"

"She was a good tenant, very tidy. Her waste-paper basket was full, and her desk, but her friend took all that away."

"Her friend? Ah, the woman with the red hair?"

"Yeah, that would be her - hey! You interested in the place or not?"

"Interested, yes. But I don't wish to rent it, thank you." With that, Benny excused himself. Later, when I was questioning him, I asked, "Did you see anyone on the stairs, or in the street outside?"

"Nobody." He is usually really good about stuff like that, so I believed him. He said, "I noticed how quiet and dead the street looked. The snow had only just stopped falling and the moon was out, shining on the snow-covered cars. It was so very silent. I could hear my boots creaking as I walked."

"Of course, there is the laundry room in the basement where anybody who followed you could have hidden. The snow would have filled in their footprints."

"Yes."

"Jeez, Benny - what would that famous Real Man, Benjamin Fraser, think, you not bein' able to tell someone was trackin' ya?" Whenever I remind him about Mr. Wiener, that poor, harassed rep from Boxbush Books, Ltd., Benny goes pink with annoyance, embarrassment or shame; pick one.

True to form, Fraser had been driving Wiener crazy, and he wasn't even trying. When he got to his apartment that night, Mr. Mustafi gave him a desperate letter that had been couriered over from the Consulate. The envelope said: To B. Fraser. URGENT!

"Dear Mr. Fraser. I have been trying to get in touch with you all day," Wiener wrote. "It is essential that we get together and work out a proper program for you, working around your appearances at the convention center. This morning by telephone, I arranged lectures for you in Oak Park and Wheaton, but I have to have your consent on the subjects, so that I can get a program hand-out printed up. I suggest two subjects: "The Real Man, Cast Adrift In The Modern World" (you are very respected as the founder of the Real Man movement in Canada, but please keep the misogenic comments down, as we've found many women buy your books as gifts for the men in their lives) and "Rediscovering the Roots of Our Manhood." The same lectures could be given in New York and Boston a month from now. Apart from this, there are a great many people who would like to meet you, and I want to arrange a book-signing for next week." The letter ended on a hectoring note. "You will be at the chat tomorrow afternoon, won't you? We all expect you at 3:00 and, I don't have to say, look forward to your arrival with great anticipation. I will send a car for you at 2:45 sharp."

Fraser read the letter and, figuring he'd get this nonsense straightened out tomorrow, went to bed.

Fraser spent the morning in his office, going over the reports of the inquest I'd sent over to him, which if Welsh finds out I did, I'm in deep trouble, even deeper than usual. It was lunch time when he reached Carol Jones' office without calling first - once again, declaring himself a friend of Victoria's got him into the place like he had an 'E' ticket.

Carol Jones proved to be a pleasant-looking older woman with straight, gray hair and a worried, kindly face with wide, concerned eyes; the kind of humanitarian who turns up to help out at a plague or a civil war or a refugee camp before anyone else even knows the place exists in the first place. Her warm, firm handshake went far to put Fraser at ease. He felt he might actually get trustworthy answers from her.

"Any friend of Victoria's is a friend of mine," Jones said. "I've heard of you, of course."

"From Victoria?"

"Well, yes - once I asked her why she did what she did, went to such great lengths for the Feed The World Project, the Rumanian Orphan Fund, that chain of A.I.D.S. hospices; my goodness, at least a half-dozen other causes she ran like a rat on a treadmill to find funding for - and she said, simply, 'I'm doing it for Ben Fraser.' Funny, I'd always assumed from the way she said it that Ben Fraser had, well, passed on. Are you her brother? Husband?"

"I was a friend. You were there, weren't you? If you could just tell me about Victoria's death."

"It was horrible," Jones said. "I was just crossing the street to go to Victoria. She and Ms. Sachet were on the opposite sidewalk. Maybe if I hadn't started across the street, she'd have stayed where she was. But she saw me and stepped straight off to meet me, and this taxi - it was terrible, terrible. The cab driver tried to brake, but with all that ice he didn't stand a chance. Will you have a drink, Mr. Fraser? I think I will. I relive it every time I think about it." She said as she splashed the soda into her Scotch, "Despite the fact that I've been all over the world, in some awful places, I've never seen someone killed violently right in front of my eyes before."

"Was the other woman in the taxi?"

Jones took a long drink and then measured what was left in her glass with her tired, kindly eyes. "What woman do you mean, Mr. Fraser?"

"I was told there was another woman there."

"I don't know how you got that idea. There were just the three of us - me and Ms. Sachet and the driver. Oh, you must mean the doctor, Victoria's doctor was a woman. Is that who you mean, Mr. Fraser?"

"No. I spoke to a man who witnessed the accident, and he said he saw three women and the driver. This was long before the doctor and the ambulance arrived."

"No one said that at the inquest."

"He didn't want to get involved."

"That's terrible! It was his duty to speak up!" Jones brooded sadly over her glass. "It's an odd thing, Mr. Fraser, with accidents. You'll never get two reports that coincide. Why, even Ms. Sachet and I disagreed about the details. The thing happens so suddenly, you don't notice things, until bang! crash! Then you have to reconstruct, remember. I expect your witness got too tangled up trying to sort out what happened before and after, to distinguish the four of us."

"The four?"

"I was counting Victoria. What else did he see, Mr. Fraser?"

"Nothing of interest - except he says Victoria was dead when she was carried into the apartment building."

"Well, she was dying - not much difference there. Won't you have a drink, Mr. Fraser?"

"No, I don't think I will."

"Well, I think I will have another. I was very fond of dear Victoria, Mr. Fraser, and I don't like talking about this." The phone rang, and Jones drained her glass. "Hello," she said. "Why, yes." Then she sat with the receiver at her ear and an expression of sad patience, while some voice a long way off droned on. "Yes," she said once. Her eyes were on Fraser's face, but he got the feeling she was looking beyond him; flat and tired and kindly, she might have been gazing out across an ocean. She said, "You did quite right," in a tone of approval, and then, sharply, "Of course they'll be delivered. I gave you my word. Good-bye."

She put the receiver down and dragged her hand across her forehead like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. She seemed distracted, as if she were trying to remember something she had to do. Fraser asked, "Is there anyone you can think of who might wish to see some harm befall Victoria?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Victoria. Can you think of anyone who might profit from her untimely demise?"

"Oh, no!" Jones said. "No. That's quite impossible. She was a well-respected person in the community. She had a great sense of duty and a genuine love of the down-trodden. Such a loss, a very great loss."

"Yes, ma'am," Fraser said.

Fraser wandered, distracted, back to the Canadian Consulate. The picture Carol Jones had painted of Victoria was so far out-of-whack with the one Fraser had of her, that it was bothering him something fierce. What was worse, he felt like he was betraying Victoria by not believing a word of it. Aren't you supposed to believe the best of the person you love, give them the benefit of the doubt no matter what? And that was another thing - for ten years, he had thought of Victoria Metcalfe as the love of his life, but now she was dead - did that mean he had to go on loving her forever? Or would he prove to be as fickle as any other guy and go find himself another love of his life?

He went up the stairs thinking to hide out in his office, only to bump into Thatcher on her way down. Him on the lower step and her two steps up put her at about eye-level with him, and she stared into his face with some concern. "You look terrible," Ms. Tact said, then, "Come along!" Never looking back, never doubting he was following her for a minute, she went back to her office. He stood at attention as he had so many times before when she'd chewed him out, but this time she waved him into the chair in front of her desk as she picked up her phone. "Ovitz! Cancel my luncheon appointment and hold all calls."

Next thing you know, he found himself telling her about all the people he'd seen since yesterday, when he'd found out about Victoria's fatal accident. "I was not impressed with Ms. Sachet, but Lilly Kartnerstrasse has an international reputation and seems an unimpeachable witness," he told her, "and Ms. Jones, I actually liked her upon meeting her - but the trouble is, if they are right, then Mr. Koch is wrong, and that just doesn't make sense."

"I think I missed something - who's this Koch when he's at home?"

Fraser explained how he had gone to Victoria's apartment building and the scene of the accident and described his interview with Koch and his story of the third woman.

"If it's true," she said, "it's very important."

"But it proves nothing. After all, Mr. Koch backed out of the inquest; so might this third woman."

"That's scarcely the point," she said. "Don't you get it? It means that they lied; Sachet and Jones. It's one thing to soft-pedal, letting you think her last words were about you; that could be construed as a kindness. But it's another thing entirely to omit the presence of a witness of a possible manslaughter in a deposition to the police."

"They might have lied so as not to embarrass or inconvenience this third woman - if she was a friend."

"Yes, but where's this woman Jones' honesty then?"

"I confess, I don't quite know what to do next. Mr. Koch was most uncooperative; he literally threw me and Diefenbaker out of his apartment."

"Well, he won't throw *me* out," she said, a fire in her eye. "I can be very persuasive when I want to be."

"I don't doubt that for a second," Fraser said. Sometimes you just gotta love The Dragon Lady... when she's in your corner, that is.

They walked to the apartment building together; the snow had been pushed to the sides of the streets by the Chicago Snow Removal guys, making it easier to drive, but creating mountains at every street corner for the pedestrians to scramble over. You'd think pedestrians don't pay taxes, too. Panting with the exertion of yet another mini-ascent, Thatcher gasped, "Is it far?"

"Not at all. Do you see that crowd of people up ahead? It's somewhere near there." The group milled about, spread out. When they got closer, Fraser said, "That's the building. What do you suppose that is, a political demonstration?"

"Perhaps someone's being evicted...." Thatcher stopped. She said thoughtfully, "Who else did you tell about Mr. Koch."

"Only you, and a somewhat more oblique reference to Ms. Jones. Why?"

She had her eyes fixed on the crowd. "Oh, dear," she said, and took his arm. He felt her small, gloved hand clutch at him, he felt her strength and her fear; he put his hand over hers. They walked slowly towards the crowd, the snow sticking to their boots. It wasn't a political demonstration, no one was carrying a sign and no one was giving a speech. When they reached the fringes of the crowd, he knew for certain that it was the right apartment building. Some guy looked at him and said, "Are you another one of them?"

"What?"

"The cops."

"No. What are they doing?"

"They've been in and out, in and out."

"What are you waiting for?"

"They're gonna bring him out."

"Who?"

"Someone said the guy on the second floor." The vague horror that Benny'd been feeling since he first sighted the crowd threatened to engulf him, and he found his hand tightening over Thatcher's in return. He said, "What has he done?"

"It ain't what he did. It's that he's dead. It might be murder!"

"The man on the second floor?"

"Yeah!"

A little kid, a squirt with a runny nose in a stocking cap, came skipping up to Benny's new buddy and pulled on his hand. "Daddy! Daddy! I seen them!"

"What'd ya see, honey?"

"I saw blood on the tiles! I heard them talking through the grate!"

"The kid's a pistol, ain't he? What'd they say, honey?"

"The man who runs the building said a big man came by yesterday, and the cops wanted to know what he looked like!"

"Oh, so they do think it's murder! I mean, why would a guy go down to the laundry room just to cut his own throat, right?"

"Daddy?"

"Yes, honey?"

The kid stared up at Benny, little red nose running, and said, "This is a big man, too; isn't he, Daddy?"

Benny's buddy gave a big laugh that caused a dozen heads to turn. "Lissen to the kid, willya?" he said. "He thinks you did it just because you're a big guy. A basketball team comes through here, and the kid'll be hidin' under the daybed for a week!"

"Daddy! Daddy! They're comin' out!"

A crowd of uniforms surrounded the covered stretcher which they cautiously guided down the stairs, careful not to slide on the packed snow, and into the ambulance parked outside. This block had seen more action in the past week than it'd seen the previous fifty years. The building super came stumbling down the steps after them, cigarette still attached to lip, and he looked around with a hopeless, tired gaze at the crowd of strangers, looking from face to face. Thinking quick, Thatcher tugged at Benny's arm, and when he glanced down at her, she hissed, "Brush the show off my shoe!" Uncomprehending, he bent to the task - and saw at his own eyes' level the evil, cold-blooded gnome-gaze of the snot-nosed kid.

Thatcher tugged at his arm again, this time to indicate her desire to leave. Walking back down the street, he looked back one more time. The kid was pulling at his father's hand and Benny could see the lips forming around those syllables like the chorus from a grim old blues song, "Daddy! Daddy!"

Thatcher said to him, "Your Mr. Koch has been murdered. Time for a chat with Detective Vecchio, I think." Bless her. They walked away as quickly as the snow would let them. His mind was going a mile a minute, so he paid no attention when she said to him, "Koch was telling the truth. There was a third woman," and was still working his way through the guilt a little later when she said, "It must have been murder. You don't kill someone to hide anything less."

He had snapped out of it somewhat when they reached the Canadian Consulate - without thinking, they had retraced their steps. Insisting that Thatcher had no part in this 'at-tall,' he shooed her into the Consulate, promising her that he would go directly to the 27 District Building in Area 7, and my desk. Before she left him, she said, "For heaven's sake, take a cab, have the Consulate re-imburse you." No greater love hath a superior officer for her subordinate than to offer to pay him back for traveling expenses to his own lynching.

The poor, Canadian, yutz-in-a-hat who was standing sentry outside the Consulate looked rigid with cold, but he was human, he had a face, one of those honest, open Mountie faces. The third woman had no face; only the top of a head seen from a second-story window. Fraser turned just as what had to be an unmarked cop car pulled up to the curb with a screech, and a big guy who had 'plain-clothes detective' written all over him stepped out of the car, came forward, grabbed Fraser's arm, and said, "Get in the car, sir." He threw open the door and firmly guided Fraser into the back seat. Fraser surrendered without protest, he knew the investigators would have to have their curiosity as to his part in this satisfied eventually, might as well be now as later. He really would have preferred to turn himself in, it would have looked better, but it was not to be.

The driver drove too fast for safety on the frozen street, and Fraser protested politely. All he got was a sullen grunt and a muttered sentence containing the word 'orders.'

To Fraser's alarm, the car pulled up to a building he did not recognize. The driver led the way up a couple of flights of stairs; he rang the bell of a fancy-looking double-door, and Fraser was aware of voices chattering away on the other side of it. He turned to the driver and said, "Excuse me sir, but what...?" but the driver was halfway down the stairs, and the double-doors were opening. His eyes were dazzled from the darkness by the lights inside; he heard, but he could hardly see, someone bearing down on him. "Oh, Mr. Fraser, we have been so anxious, but better late than never. I'm Leonard Weiner," the figure said, confident that Fraser knew who the heck Leonard Weiner was. "Let me introduce you to Ms. Wilbraham, president of the Dearborn Street Book Club, and Mr. Meyersdorf, our host." Fraser's eyes were getting used to the light, so he could just make out that Weiner was a skinny little guy with a neatly trimmed beard and a nervous twitch in one eye.

A buffet with coffee cups and a steaming urn of coffee; a woman doling out paper plates of bundt cake and plastic forks; some young guys smiling so much, they looked liked sixth-graders who'd been sprung from school for a really fun outing; a woman in black who stared at him with hostility; and, huddled in the background, a hoary-looking gang of earnest, cheery book-reading types. Fraser looked around, but the door had closed behind him. He was trapped.

He said desperately to Mr. Wiener, "Excuse me? I'm sorry, but--"

"Don't think any more about it," Mr. Wiener said. "One cup of coffee and then let's go on to the discussion, shall we? We have a very good gathering this afternoon, some new faces. They'll keep you on your toes, Mr. Fraser." One of the young guys stuck a cup of coffee in his hand, the other poured the half-and-half before he could say he wanted it black. The younger guy breathed into his ear, "Afterwards, would you minding signing one of your books for me, Mr. Fraser?" The woman in black came charging up and said, "I don't care if Mr. Meyersdorf does hear me, Mr. Fraser, I want to make it perfectly clear that I don't like your books, I don't approve of them. The idea that man's status has descended in modern times as women's status has ascended is positively Neanderthal!"

"Well, that's the point, my dear," said a man who Fraser assumed was Meyersdorf. "But this will keep 'til question time."

"I'm sure that Mr. Fraser doesn't mind honest criticism, him being a Real Man and all."

"Drink up, drink up," Wiener said and hustled him through into another room where a bunch of college kids - fraternity geeks by the look of them - were already sitting at the edges of their seats, in a semi-circle of chairs set up around a raised dais.

Fraser couldn't tell me much about the meeting of the Dearborn Street Book Club, his mind was still in a daze with the death he suspected was his own fault; when he looked at the crowd he half expected the drippy-nosed kid to pop up, yelling, "Daddy! Daddy!", pointing the mittened finger of blame at him. He vaguely remembered Wiener starting off the meeting by touching lightly on "the technique of writing one's non-fiction experience of self-discovery, the use of the first person as point of view, the passage of time as an 'encapsulation of experience device'" - then he opened the meeting to questions from the audience.

"It was very odd, Ray," Fraser confessed to me, looking worried. "They all knew me, calling me 'Mr. Fraser' and even 'Ben,' but I still had the distinct impression it was a case of mistaken identity. Every time I was on the verge of protesting that they'd somehow gotten hold of the wrong man, they'd ask me a question about survival in the Canadian woods that I could answer, so I'd be back to wondering if perhaps they did know who I was, I'd just missed a communique along the line. They were so enthusiastic, it seemed a breach of etiquette to quell their enthusiasm with the cold, hard fact that I didn't know what they were on about."

Enthusiastic, yeah - the frat boys greeted virtually every sentence Fraser uttered with a round of Arsenio-Hall-style 'woof-woof-woof' yells, wind-milling their fists in the air as they barked; that sure didn't do a lot for his nerves.

Naturally it wasn't until after the fact that Fraser got the 411 on what was going on. Benjamin Fraser, the founder of the Real Man movement in Canada and writer of a half-dozen best-selling non-fiction books - well, best-selling in Canada, anyways - was supposed to do a little book tour in the states to drum up his U.S. sales. He had to opt out due to breaking both his legs during one of his communes with Mom Nature. Seems upper management-types remove a thousand bucks from their expensive leather wallets and give it to this other Fraser, whereupon he takes them into the woods and they sit around getting primitive for the weekend; beating on drums and chanting. Go figure. When the medics evacuated him to the hospital on a helicopter, he was so pumped full of painkillers that he told everybody he was a little teapot, short and stout; so you can't really blame the guy for forgetting to tell them he couldn't make the book tour. Every time the Consulate got a message for Mr. B. Fraser, Turnbull sent it on to Benny - who had been too wrapped up in his investigation of Victoria's death to pay attention.

He missed the first question altogether, but luckily Wiener jumped in with the answer. Then a guy wearing a Bulls jacket said, with the kind of passionate interest you'd think he'd reserve for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, "Fraser! You writing another book? Because I gotta tell you, your stuff really helps me put the little woman in her place."

This caused a general disturbance among the crowd, several of the woman actually booing, the frat boys barking.

"Uh, no - no. I'm not writing a book. In fact--"

Another question from another questioner. "Mr. Fraser, could you tell us who has been the chief influence in your life?"

"Ah. Well, my father - although, actually, to be honest, it wasn't until he passed on and I read his journals that--"

"Oh! So you could say that your literary style as a diarist charting the day-to-day occurrences in your life on the way to a deep philosophical awakening had its beginnings in your own father's journals. Fascinating. That's fascinating." Some of the student-types in the audience quickly wrote this down.

It went on like this for some time. There was a general outburst when the woman in black who had accosted Fraser earlier said something insulting about 'penis-bearers' under her breath, and one of frat boys heard her and said something unprintable back. Amid the twittering and barking, Benny sat gloomily back and thought about the snow, the stretcher, the tired face of the building super. He thought, if I had never asked questions, would Mr. Koch still be alive? How had he benefitted Victoria by supplying another victim - a victim sacrificed to lessen the fear of the killer; but who? Anna Sachet, Carol Jones, Dr. Lilly Kartnerstrasse? None of them seemed up to the murder in the laundry room; he knew it's a lot easier to pull a trigger and kill from a distance than to slit someone's throat at close quarters. He could hear the kid with the drippy nose saying, "I saw blood on the tiles!" and a figure turned towards him a blank face without features, the third woman.

Fraser told me he had no idea how he got through the rest of the meeting. The next thing he knew, Wiener was making a little speech about what it honor it was to have such a famous writer in their midst, let's all give him a hand. Then one of the young guys led him to a table stacked with books and told him to sign them. "One book per member."

"What? What do you want me to do?"

"Just a signature, 'Ben Fraser' or 'B. Fraser' will do, it's all they expect. This is my copy of 'Real Manhood - What Our Forefathers Knew'. I would be so grateful if you'd just write a little something personal...."

Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, Benny grabbed the book and wrote, "Best Wishes from B. Fraser. May you live in interesting times."

"It was all I could think of at the moment," he explained to me. "It's an old Chinese curse, 'may you live in interesting times,' and all I could think was, by that definition, I was experiencing one of the most interesting days of my life."

As Benny sat down and started signing Benjamin Fraser's title pages, he could see in a mirror the young guy showing the personalized inscription to Wiener. Wiener smiled weakly and stroked his chin, then turned to give the Mountie the old fish eye. 'B. Fraser, B. Fraser, B. Fraser," Benny wrote rapidly - it wasn't, after all, a lie. One by one, the books were collected by their owners and the pile got smaller. He started to get irritated with this Benjamin Fraser as he signed the twenty-seventh copy, and the owner of the book, the woman in black who had seemed so pissed off at him earlier, leaned across the table and indicated that there might be a suspension of hostilities if he'd join her for a drink after the meeting; Fraser excused himself politely. Where was Benjamin Fraser in all this? Why wasn't he enduring this torture? The members of the book club and the Real Man retinue were beginning to go home with their spoils, the room was emptying. Suddenly in the mirror, much to his eternal relief, Benny saw a familiar face: Detective Jack Huey, come to take him away.

"Fraser! We been lookin' for you."

"I lost my way," Benny said.

"Yep. We figured that was what happened."

If Turnbull ever shows up dead in some kind of a locked room murder mystery, the first person Homicide should question is me. I take that back - the list of people who want to kill Turnbull is a long one, and growing every day.

Elaine stopped by my desk to tell me about the murder at the Vickie's apartment building; that, plus the info faxed to me from my friend in the C.I.A., told me it was time to reel Fraser in - see, I'd had a hunch about Vickie and her charity work and I'm almost sorry to say it panned out. At any rate, I figured if I stayed at the district, it would only make it easier for Internal Affairs to find me, so I went over to the Canadian Consulate. Turnbull told me Fraser wasn't there, the Dragon Lady popped her head out of her office and demanded to know where Fraser was, and the next thing I knew, the two of us were doing this back-and-forth, Abbot and Costello routine.

"Where's Constable Fraser?"

"I was just lookin' for him myself."

"I thought he was with you."

"Whaddaya mean, with me? I thought he was here."

"I sent him to you over an hour ago."

"I appreciate the thought, but the package didn't get delivered."

"I told him to take a cab."

"I don't care if you told him to take a dog sled, he never got there!"

"Well then, Detective Vecchio, WHERE IS HE?!"

"Constable Fraser is at the Dearborn Street Book Club," Turnbull said.

Me and Thatcher looked at Turnbull like he just sprouted another head.

"What the hell," I said, "is Fraser doin' at the Dearborn Street Book Club?"

"I don't know," Turnbull said. He leaned towards me and the Dragon Lady and tapped the side of his nose, a gesture I figure he picked up watching some spy movie. "I assumed that information was on a need-to-know basis," he said.

I was gonna go get Fraser, but instead I called up Duck Man and sent him over to rescue the Mountie because I wanted to talk to Thatcher.

She brought me up to date on Fraser's last twenty-four hours; he had been getting around quite a bit. Then she told me about their aborted mission to tackle the upstairs neighbor, and I laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Nothin'. I just got this image of you two playing Good Cop, Bad Cop with Koch. I wish you'd gotten the chance."

"Believe me, so do I! Constable Fraser thinks his having mentioned a witness to the accident to Ms. Jones might have been the cause of his murder."

"Nah, Koch was dead more than twelve hours by then. That don't let Fraser totally off the hook, though - I think Koch was killed shortly after Fraser left the apartment building. I think someone was tailing him and stayed behind to clean up house."

"The third woman!"

"Maybe." I checked out The Dragon Lady; the excitement of the chase had put some color in her cheeks and sparkle in her eyes. I've seen this before, all cops get juiced up like that when they've got ahold of a case that's on the verge of breaking open, but on Thatcher it looked particularly good. I was going to give her the info I had gotten from my friend in the C.I.A.; I would have liked to have commiserated with her on it - it stands to reason, the one thing I share with Thatcher is a deep dislike of Victoria - but that's when Jack showed up with Fraser.

Thatcher made like she wanted to talk to him, but I just shook my head a little and she sat back in her chair, a worried look on her face. I grabbed his arm and hustled him into his office; what I had to tell him needed privacy. He was graciously bidding Detective Huey a pleasant afternoon, thanking him for the ride even as I shut the door in Jack's face. I pushed him into his chair and put the desk between us. He seemed a little put out by my rough handling, but sat there, looking game and probably wondering what I had up my sleeve. "You been getting around quite a bit," I said, "Thatcher brought me up to speed about your last twenty-four hours."

"Yes," he said. "It was under my nose, but I didn't want to believe it."

"What?"

"That she was murdered." That took me by surprise: not that she'd been murdered, but that Fraser accepted it so calmly.

"Go on," I said. I wanted to hear it first-hand from him, now that I'd heard it mostly second-hand from Thatcher. He told the story pretty much as she had, talking about a witness who had seen the accident and the third woman. He obviously placed a lot of importance on this third woman - it was really bothering him, this loose end - that, and Koch's murder.

"She did not turn up at the inquest, and the others lied to keep her existence a secret. Koch was safe until he told me about her - then they murdered him"

"As far as we know, you were the last person to see him alive." Like I said before, I asked him if he'd seen anyone on the stairs, or in the street; he hadn't. "Homicide is gonna stick this one on you, we don't figure this out. The super told them he saw you there last night - a Mountie accompanied by his wolf, not like there's a question about who that is. Who else knew about Koch?"

"I told Carol Jones." His eyes narrowed, and for a moment I thought he was wincing. "Is it possible immediately I left her office, she telephoned someone - perhaps the third woman? They had to silence Koch."

"When you told Jones about Koch, he was dead already. That night, he went down to the laundry room to run his skivvies through the gentle cycle, and--" I made a gesture with my thumb cutting across my throat.

"Ah. I was gone by then."

"Did you go straight home after you saw Victoria's apartment? Because the coroner put the death at about nine."

He shook his head. "No. Diefenbaker and I got home at about nine-thirty."

"Where were you before that?"

He said gloomily, "Wandering around the city, trying to sort things out. It was so beautiful and quiet."

"Any evidence of your movements?"

"No."

"One way or another, you are in big trouble, Benny. Although what they're gonna come up with for motive, I don't know." It was time for me to tell him, and I didn't want to. As depressed as he was now, in a few minutes, he was going to be more depressed. "Benny? I called a friend of mine in the C.I.A. and got some info on Victoria. Sorry - just pokin' my nose in where it ain't wanted, what else is new. You're not gonna like this."

"She was involved some sort of illegal activity, wasn't she, Ray."

"Yeah, Benny."

"Let me guess. Money-laundering?"

"No. Nothin' so harmless."

That made him sit up. "Perhaps - perhaps Victoria did get mixed up in something criminal. Perhaps she was trying to clear out again, and that's why they murdered her."

"Or maybe," I said, "somebody wanted a bigger cut of the loot. Thieves fall out."

To my surprise, he took that without any anger at all. He said, "We'll never agree about her motives, Ray."

I could have let it lay... but I couldn't. He had to know. I said, "I'll give you the facts in Victoria's case, Benny. But don't go flyin' off the handle on me. This is gonna hurt."

It could not help but hurt. This kind of racket was a new one on me, never having been outside of the US of A, where if you get sick, your doctor writes you a prescription and you get it filled at the corner drugstore, no problem. There are few things in the world more vile, more disgusting, than the black-market drug dealers who work places like Bosnia, or Rumania, or any of the Third World countries, where daily struggle for survival is a way of life. People like that are vultures, feeding off of the human misery and pain you find in those parts of the world, with their black market drugs.

Because we're not talking narcotics here; we're talking, for instance, penicillin. Say it's in short supply in one of these countries, air-lifted into the country every so often by a charity or something, so it brings a good price on the street. It starts off with an orderly maybe stealing some from the hospital he works at to sell it for the pocket-change it'll bring him. Then it starts getting organized - the big boys see big money in it, and they start running the racket like a business. Next step, the big boys begin to think they're maybe not making enough money, they want the profits bigger, and to get it quicker while the getting is good. So they start diluting the product. Sometimes, if the patients are lucky, they're injected with a weak dose of penicillin - if they're lucky, they only develop an immunity to the drug, or lose a foot or a leg to an infection that doesn't get cured. Because sometimes the stuff it's cut with is a little more dangerous than tap water.

That was Victoria's racket, with her charitable works in all those places that so desperately needed help as a perfect cover. The C.I.A. was on to her specifically in Rumania. They were able to form a link to Victoria through a woman she'd black-mailed into helping them there, a nurse named Nadia Dumansky, who was up to her under-paid elbows in corruption when Interpol had sussed her out. She led them to the person who cut and packaged the drugs, Anna Sachet. Penicillin traced back to this particular business enterprise was thought to be responsible for the deaths of an entire ward of children in some tiny, backwater town's pathetic excuse for a hospital.

"Anna Sachet!" Fraser looked confused. "But why haven't arrested her yet?"

"Soon, Benny - according to my friend, zero hour is almost here."

Sachet had been a big step for the Feds, because she was in direct communications with Victoria. I passed him a copy of a note to Sachet that had been intercepted, my friend had faxed it over to my office. "Familiar handwriting?"

"It's... it's in Victoria's hand." He read it through. He read it through again.

"She was the boss, Benny; the brains, the big cheese. Victoria." He didn't say anything - I suppose when the world is ending, you find there's not a lot to say. Because a world was ending for Benny; a world of snow and cold and finding one person to share your warmth with in that world; a clean, white place that had come into being ten years ago and had somehow remained untouched despite what had happened in Chicago a year-and-a-half ago. Every memory - those few days they'd spent together, the morning smiles over the cups of coffee, the afternoons in front of a television without sound, the nights in a bed too small for one adult, let alone two - every shared experience was suddenly and simultaneously tainted, like - like the land around Chernobyl. No one's going to walk there safely for a good, long time, if you know what I mean.

He sat there, looking at his hands. I wished he was a drinking man, I wanted to push a whisky at him or something; heck, I could have used one myself.

He said slowly, "They are certain she was the real organizer?"

"They were pretty thorough, Benny."

"I suppose," he said, "I suppose she could have been black-mailed into it, if someone knew who she was and that the police were looking for her."

"It's possible." I didn't contradict him, I knew he would get around to the truth eventually, when it didn't hurt so much.

"And they murdered her to stop her from talking when she was arrested."

"Not impossible."

"I wouldn't have liked to have seen her arrested. I don't think she would have been able to stand being incarcerated again. It would have destroyed her." He folded the copy of the note and placed it carefully on his desk in a strange little movement, very precise, as if to that, 'well, that's that.'

"When we find the third woman...," I said.

"I'd like to see her arrested," he said. "That bitch."

After he left me, Fraser went straight out of the Consulate, for one of his walks through the city; thinking, fitting the pieces together, working out his next move. He walked through Chinatown, through the park, through the financial district; through good neighborhoods, then a bad one, then a good one again. He was alone; Diefenbaker had decided to stick with me while Fraser was acting so weird. The afternoon shadows lengthened into evening, and the street lights came on; and still he walked, his mind revolving in circles - from sentiment to cynicism and back again from belief to fear. The snow began to drift down again, muffling the street noises and blurring the neon lights, and he was in his own little world as he walked.

It must have been almost midnight when he came back down to earth and realized that he was standing in front of the Dragon Lady's swanky building. He knew the townhouse on sight - he'd picked her up there on many an occasion when chauffeuring her to charity balls and benefits. He was nearly frozen through by that time and had only one idea in his head, that she had to be told about Victoria, too. When Thatcher opened the door to him, astonished at the sight of him shivering on the threshold, it never occurred to him that she might turn him away. She didn't.

He said, "I've found out everything."

"Get in here!" she snapped, "What's wrong with you, Fraser? Don't you know enough to come in out of this weather?" She was wrapped up in a pink chenille robe, legs in striped flannel pajama bottoms, her feet bare. Her place was as tidy as you'd expect the Dragon Lady to keep her lair, except for some files spread across the coffee table in the living room she ushered him into.

"Now," she said, while he stood there, fumbling for words, "what is it? Are the Chicago police after you?"

"No. Well, possibly. Perhaps. No."

She looked at him dubiously. "Are you drunk, Constable?"

He was shocked. "Certainly not!" the meeting seemed to him to have derailed somewhere along the way. He said, "I'm sorry."

"Why? What did Detective Vecchio say to you to get you in this state. I thought you'd stop by my office before you left, imagine my surprise when I found you'd bolted. Vecchio wouldn't tell me anything - bizarrely, he tapped his nose and told me the information was on a 'need-to-know' basis. I wonder about that man sometimes."

Fraser said, "Detective Vecchio... Ray has been in contact with a friend of his in the C.I.A. He passed information from them on to me, about Victoria. I've learned everything. Victoria was involved in corruption on a grand scale."

"You'd better tell me," Thatcher said. She sat down on the couch and waved him to sit, too, but he wouldn't, and stood there, swaying slightly beside the coffee table where her files about the work-a-day, common, everyday occurrences at the Consulate still lay open. He probably told it to her pretty confusedly, dwelling chiefly on what had stuck most in his mind - the Rumanian children's ward, silent, the children dead of pneumonia and poison. He stopped and there was a moment of silence. Then she said, "Is that it?"

"Yes."

"They proved it to you beyond a shadow of a doubt?"

"Yes." He added wearily, "So there you have it, that was Victoria."

"I don't know why you're so surprised. Anyone who would shoot an animal at point-blank range for no reason other than to hurt its owner would certainly be capable of that sort of behavior."

He finally sank into her couch, bone-tired. He said hopelessly, "I'd always assumed her accomplice, Jolly, broke into the apartment and shot Diefenbaker."

She gave him a look of disbelief.

He shrugged. "I feel as though she never really existed, that I had somehow dreamed her up. Was she laughing at fools like me all the time?"

"Very probably. What does it matter now?" she said. "Relax. Take off your coat, for heaven's sake." Fraser didn't take off his coat, nor did he relax, but he watched her, listening. She went on, "If Victoria was alive now, she might be able to explain her actions to you, but she's not, so she can't. You thought you knew her, but there's always so many things that one doesn't know about a person, even a person one loves - good things, bad things. There's room enough in any personality for both. Even in Victoria Metcalfe's."

"Those children--"

She said angrily, "For God's sake, stop acting as though you're responsible for the things she did. She was involved in a drug-selling conspiracy. She did bad things. What can you do about it now? She's gone, and what you felt for her was outside of what she did. That was part of you, what you did and felt, Fraser, not her. It wasn't evil or dirty or even stupid."

He shook his head and said, "Words of wisdom... but it's only talk, it's not real. I can't just turn off how I feel. And when I mourn for her, I almost feel... ashamed." For that moment, exhausted, he actually relaxed into the couch, his head tilted back against the headrest. "Did you know," he spoke to the ceiling, not meeting her eyes, "that I actually thought there could never be another after her? That what we had was meant to last forever? But it didn't. Because it's you I love now."

She looked at him, apparently astonished at the turn the conversation had just taken. "Me?"

"Yes, you. You don't kill people with fake drugs. You don't lie or cheat or steal. You don't smuggle diamonds, burn down cabins, or shoot other people's wolves. The most mean-spirited thing I've ever seen you do is make people stand outside the Consulate in all kinds of weather. It pales, comparatively."

"But I'm your commanding officer. It's against the rules...."

"As opposed to what? Becoming enamored of a murderous criminal who frames your best friend for her crimes, then allowing her to escape arrest? I repeat, as a breach of the rules, it pales, comparatively." He tilted his head just enough to look her in the eye. "I don't think love is meant to necessarily conform to any rules," he explained carefully to her.

"Oh." That was all she could come up with. It was late, she'd had a rough day.

Suddenly restless, he stood and went to the window, pulling aside the curtain to watch the light snow filter down to the street below. Something odd caught his eye in that moment - a long shadow that had moved, or maybe it was just a cloud passing in front of the moon, but whatever it was, it was motionless again.

She said, "You still love Victoria, don't you?"

"Yes. I suppose I do in a way. I don't know." He dropped the curtain and said, "I think I'd better leave now."

He walked rapidly away from the townhouse, not looking behind him. He knew, he just knew, he was being followed, and it somehow seemed important to him at the time to get whoever it was as far from Thatcher as possible. You know, the usual misplaced Mountie chivalry. At the end of a street, he turned, and there, just around the corner, was a figure in a bulky coat, pressed against a wall to escape his notice. Fraser stopped and stared. There was something familiar about the figure. Perhaps, he thought, it's one of the Chicago P.D.'s detectives of homicide, shadowing me for my involvement with Mr. Koch's death. Fraser just stood there, twenty yards away, staring at the silent motionless figure in the dark side street, who stared right back. A cop? Or maybe not, maybe it was one of the people who had corrupted Victoria first and then killed her - or maybe it was even the third woman?

The face was not familiar to Fraser - he couldn't make out even the merest hint of a feature in the dark, the snow still coming down in fits and starts; it wasn't the movement either, because whoever it was stood so still that Fraser began to think the whole thing was an illusion. You know, like when you're a kid and it's dark in your room, and your coat hanging on a closet door becomes an ax-murderer who's going to kill you first, then take care of the rest of your family. He couldn't bring himself to walk towards the figure, but he couldn't just walk away - so he called out, "Can I help you?" The figure didn't reply. "Answer, can't you?" and an answer came, because a window curtain was pulled back by somebody checking out what idiot was yelling in the street in the middle of the night, and the light fell straight across the way and lit up the features of Victoria Metcalfe.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Fraser asked me.

"Do you?"

"Yes. Oh, yes."

"Yeah, well; I also believe that if a man really wants to see someone again, he might see her even though she isn't really there."

It was two in the morning, and Fraser had come straight to me with his story. I only cussed him out for five minutes for waking me up before I sat down to listen to him. He looked terrible - the worst I'd ever seen the usually band-box perfect Mountie look; he needed a shave and had a haunted look in his eyes. I decided to add yet more joy to his life. "You're gonna love this one, Fraser - once the facts about Koch's death hit the news, your friend Ms. Jones called up Homicide and reported to them that you'd been there to see her and told her you'd seen Koch - she said it was her 'civic duty as a citizen' to report the matter. They thanked her kindly and told her they'd see to it - no warrants for your arrest from them yet, I think she weirded them out. Like you're weirding me out right now."

"I'm sorry, Ray. If it had been just the face, I wouldn't have worried. I had been thinking about Victoria, so why wouldn't I see her in a stranger's face? Some woman walking along a dark street late at night, frightened by a man she thinks might be following her, pressing herself against a wall, hoping he'll miss her. The light was turned off again immediately, you see; I only got the one glimpse. Then whoever it was took off down the street. There was no cross-street for quite a ways, but I was so shocked, I just stood there, giving whoever it was a good thirty yards' start. There was a truck parked there, and the figure went out of sight for a moment. I ran after her. It only took me ten seconds to reach the truck, but the odd thing was that she never appeared again. There wasn't anyone there. The street was very dark, but it was empty - the footprints just... stopped. She couldn't have reached a doorway, I would have seen it, heard the door creak on its hinges in the cold. What I could see of the truck, it was covered with snow and untouched. The woman, whoever it was, had simply vanished."

"Maybe it was a ghost, Fraze."

"No."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because Victoria was a blonde."

"What?!"

"She was wearing a thick, bulky down coat, the hood pulled as far over her face as she could get it. But a wisp of straight, ash blonde hair managed to escape the confines of the hood. Now, if she were a ghost, why would the ghost have been a blonde?"

"Nicely logicked, Sherlock. It cannot have been a ghost because a ghost would not have dyed its hair. But a felon on the lam... now that's another story." I wasn't totally convinced, but I was getting there. It wasn't until the attempt on Margaret Thatcher's life that I was certain.

"Yes, Ray. Thank you, Ray."

I put on some running pants over my pajamas, and an old P.A.L. sweatshirt, and snowboots, and threw on my heaviest winter coat. It wasn't Armani, but then it was almost two-thirty in the morning, a horrific hour for anyone who isn't a vampire, and I had a hunch where Victoria had gone. I took the heavy-duty flashlight from under the sink where Ma keeps it, and traded looks with Diefenbaker, who was curled up in a box by the kitchen radiator. "You comin'?" His tail thumped a few times against the side of the box, but then he tucked his head back under the plaid blanket my sister Frannie had draped over him. I suddenly realized it was my blanket she'd given him. So that's where it had gotten to.

Thank God it had stopped snowing. Fraser and I piled into the Riv and took off for the place where Victoria had vanished. "Over there, Ray," Fraser said and I pulled up and double-parked. With all the snow heaped up against the curbs, finding a space would be impossible. He led me to the truck - a big, orange U-Haul - and I could see that no one had hidden in it, even in the dim light of a street lamp about six yards away. The snow sticking to the doors of the cab and on the top of the lock on the back door was smooth and undisturbed. We walked around to the other side of the truck. The street lamp had been broken, and it was pitch dark on that side, as well as under the truck. Ma's flashlight came to the rescue, and I shone it around the tires, then lay down on the icy, snow-packed ground and threw the beam of light under it. The beam revealed a round pool of inky darkness under the truck - a manhole, without its cover. "There ya go!"

Fraser joined me in the gutter to see. "Good God, I didn't imagine her!"

"I figured it'd be something weird like this. Does this chick love to mess with your mind, or what? She ran like hell, then threw herself down and rolled under the truck, and slid down the open hole. She probably even broke that street light. She must have known you'd be showing up at Thatcher's eventually and made arrangements beforehand. "

"But I didn't know I'd be visiting the Inspector!"

"Yeah? Well, maybe Victoria knows you better than you know yourself. I hope the sewer rats get her."

"So, you really believe it was Victoria?"

"Who else would pull this kinda shit on you?"

"Then who did they bury?"

"I don't know. But we soon will, because we are gonna dig her up again. No, not you and me with a shovel, Benny. I will get a court order." He looked relieved. "I bet you Koch wasn't the only inconvenience they got rid of."

"It's a bit of a shock, Ray."

"You could say that, Benny." I noticed his face had suddenly gone all wary. "What?"

"Victoria. As you said, Ray. She knows about... saw me at Margaret's... at the Inspector's apartment."

"So if Victoria's running true to form...."

"...Margaret is in extreme danger."

The Dragon Lady's townhouse wasn't very far. There was another car pulling out, so I actually got a parking spot directly in front. No one answered when we hammered on Thatcher's door, so we broke it down. Fraser hit it so hard, it splintered right off the hinges. Except for the broken door, the place looked untouched - but there was no Thatcher in evidence.

I remembered then how easy it was to get a space in front of the townhouse and the hair went up on the back of my neck. "Fraser! That car! The blue Chevy with the smoked-glass windows!" He raced out of the building, me a half-a-step behind all the way, and we jumped into the Riv. Fraser slapped the light onto her roof and we went screaming down the street after them, the siren winning us no friends in the neighborhood. Driving on hard-packed snow and black ice is no joy ride at the best of times, but the Riv's new snow tires took the speed like a champ. The Chevy didn't have much of a head start on us, and we pulled up close behind them, but how in the hell were we going to force them to pull over? A high-speed chase under those conditions was insane, but there we were, doing ninety the wrong way down a one-way street in one of Chicago's prime residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night. The Chevy took the corner hard at Batchelder Street, shaving the paint off of a parked Saab, then went down High towards the water. The windows were too dark to see what was going on inside, so you can imagine my surprise when the Chevy suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, smooth as you please. I pulled the Riv over and threw open the door, then crouched behind it, gun drawn.

"Right! Outa the car nice 'n easy, you wanna live to see tomorrow!" I bellowed, and the two doors on the driver's side cracked open in unison. I was doubly surprised to see a thug carefully decanting himself from behind the wheel, and a livid-looking Margaret Thatcher, gun pointed in the general direction of the scumbag's head, sliding out from the back seat. The thug assumed the position like he was born to it, without being told. "Guess you probably done this before; huh, buddy?" I patted him down and put the cuffs on him after relieving him of some hardware.

Fraser was checking on the goon in the front passenger seat. "He's out cold, Ray. At a guess, I'd say he was somewhat... concussed."

"There's no mistaking that noxious car you drive, Detective," Thatcher said. "When I saw it was you following us, I demanded the driver pull over. When he ignored me, I insisted. That's when he," and she tilted her chin in the direction of the car's napping passenger, "pulled a gun on me. I relieved him of it, and repeated my request that the driver pull over, this time with the threat of reprisal if he didn't comply."

"So you just pulled over, huh?" I asked the cuffed thug. "What did you think she was gonna do, put a bullet in your head when the car's goin' ninety miles an hour?"

The thug was white as a sheet. "It wasn't my head she was pointin' the gun at, at the time," he said. Ah, yes. I guess there are some things a man just doesn't want to take chances with.

"Resourceful," Fraser said. He held up a perfect counterfeit of a cop I.D. that he'd found in the breast pocket of the sleeping thug. "I assume they mis-represented themselves to gain your initial compliance?"

"They said they were with the Chicago police department, and that they'd come to get me because... because you'd...," to my surprise, as God is my witness, Thatcher, Dragon Lady Supreme, actually choked on her words here, "...and I remembered the odd way you acted when you left my apartment, how distraught you were. They said you'd taken Detective Vecchio's gun and... and.... They were taking me to the morgue to identify your body."

Victoria's main talent, I think, is the art of knowing exactly how to push someone's buttons.

Without a word, Fraser came around the car and very gently took her into his arms. She didn't cry, just stood there, face pressed against his chest, left arm looped around his back, right arm pointed at the ground, the gun she took off of Vickie's goon still held loosely in her grip.

"Hey, Benny," I said, "is now a good time to tell her we trashed her front door?"

I was at my desk, finishing up the report on the attempted kidnapping, and misspelling every other word due to getting about three hours sleep last night. Fraser had somehow found a moment to shave in the changing room, and had taken Thatcher to breakfast and then home after she'd filed charges. I would not have forgiven him that breakfast if he hadn't shown up with a hot meatball sandwich and a large coffee for me - the breakfast of the gods. He looked a world better than he had when he'd knocked at my door in the middle of the night with his ghost story. I rubbed some grit out of my eyes. "You know, Victoria is a cop's nightmare - a crook who's aces at planning things in advance, with clever back up contingency plans; plus she knows how to take advantage of last-minute opportunities and think fast on her feet when things go wrong. She's Moriarity in a dress, except - she screws up over you, every time. With you out of the picture, Benny, this chick could take over the world. Did you ever think of that?"

"No, Ray, I hadn't. I wish I could speak to her."

"I have a feeling Victoria won't be able to resist giving you the chance now," I said.

"I still find it hard to believe. I only saw her face for the barest moment. I thought my heart would stop in my chest."

"She's got to know the Feds are closing in. Why else the phony funeral? Now that she's been found out, I can't believe she'll tap-dance her way out of this one. She might think she can, though. That'll get her killed."

"The only person who has the remotest chance of getting her to give herself up is me, Ray."

"Remote is right. You know too much, she'll kill you."

"No, she won't. And I don't want to play decoy, Ray. I just want to speak to her. I'll arrange it with Ms. Sachet. She gave me her address."

"You're an idiot! Without backup, there's no way to protect you."

"I want to clear this whole thing up," Fraser said, "but no wires, no undercover. I'll talk to her. That's all."

It had dawned a cold, clear day, not a cloud in the sky, and a sharp breeze made his eyes water a bit as he approached the street of turn-of-the-century mansions Sachet lived on. He didn't call her, gave her no warning of his visit. There was nothing to fear, but all the same, in this huge, empty street, where all you could hear was the wind whistling in your ears and your own official Mountie boots creaking with cold, it was hard for him not to get paranoid and start looking around for a sniper.

He had no trouble finding Sachet's house, and when he rang the bell the door was opened quickly, as though Sachet was expecting a visitor, by Sachet herself.

"Oh!" Sachet said, "Heavens! It's you, Ben," and she made a move with her hand to her head that stopped before it got there. Fraser had been wondering what it was that was different about her, and now he knew. She wasn't wearing her wig. Her dark brown hair was rather short, cut close to her head - a perfectly nice head of hair, and he wondered why she bothered with the wig at all. She said, "It would have been better had you telephoned you were coming over, Ben. You almost missed me; I have to go out now."

"May I come in for a moment?"

"Sure, sugar. C'mon in."

In the hall on a table was what looked like a large, round hat box with the words "Suisse Natural Hair Replacements - weaving, repair, cleaning" printed on it, and a pink receipt stuck to it. His sharp eyes caught that the box contained one curly brunette wig that had been cleaned and returned with some slight but necessary re-weaving done to it, according to the receipt. It suddenly occurred to Fraser how useful a curly brunette wig might have been on the day of the accident. He looked up and saw in the hall mirror a look of hatred and fear on the face of Sachet as she caught him noticing the box, but when he turned, it had been replaced by a flirtatious smile. "A girl has her beauty secrets," she said.

"Never mind," he said, all business. "I am here to see Victoria."

"Victoria?"

"I need to speak with her."

"Darlin', have you gone mad?"

"I am in a hurry, ma'am, so let us assume that I have. If you should see Victoria - or her ghost - please let her know that I want to talk to her. A ghost shouldn't be afraid of a man - surely it's the other way around? I will be waiting on top of the Sears tower for the next three hours - if you can get in touch with the dead. I will be alone. I would appreciate it if she would extend to me that same kindness?" He added, "Remember, I was Victoria's secret love."

Sachet said nothing, but somewhere, in a room off the hall, someone cleared her throat. Fraser threw open a door; he half expected to see the dead rise yet again, but it was only little Dr. Kartnerstrasse who rose from a kitchen chair.

"Dr. Kartnerstrasse," Fraser said. Dr. Kartnerstrasse in her tidy gray business suit looked oddly out of place in the feminine-looking kitchen, with its frilly yellow curtains and matching table-cloth, and pink striped wallpaper. The remains of lunch littered the kitchen table.

Fraser said to Sachet, "Please tell the doctor about my madness. She might be able to make a diagnosis. And remember the place - the top of the Sears tower. Or do ghosts only rise at night?" He left the house.

For hours he waited, walking up and down to keep warm, on the observation deck of the World's Tallest Building. Despite the cold, there were people, sightseers and tourists, who milled around, getting an eyeful of the best city on the face of the planet, until they were driven back inside to the warmth of the souvenir counter and the bank of elevators. Fraser wondered who would come for him. Was there enough love left in Victoria for her to come alone, or would she send more of her hired goons? It was obvious from the attempted kidnapping of Margaret Thatcher that he still had a certain pull on Victoria. As the hours passed, he began to wonder, "Am I really mad? Is this whole thing an invention of my mind? Are they digging up Victoria's body now in Central City Cemetery?"

Suddenly, oddly, as it sometimes does at the tops of the world's tallest skyscrapers, it began to snow... upwards. It was a freak weather condition - it wasn't snowing at all over the rest of Chicago - just at the top of the tower. The tourists oohed and aahed their delight. Fraser shivered and waited. Was it fear or excitement that made his heart beat faster - or just memory, because life had always somehow gotten realer, more vivid, when Victoria showed up, just as she showed up now.

"Ben."

"Hello, Victoria."

Don't picture Victoria as some sort of sexy-looking criminal bimbo. Don't think of her as a beauty queen, or a delicate flower, or made up like a femme fatale to twist men's minds and make them do her bidding. Fraser has a picture of Victoria that he doesn't know I know he has. It's not a bad shot of her; a candid shot someone, I don't know who, took of her when she wasn't looking. She's actually a nice-looking woman; lots of long, curly brown hair floating around her head, pale skin, kind of tall and bony for my taste; but still, an attractive woman, with cheekbones and dark eyes. She's standing outside in front of a brick wall, looking off to the side with a smile on her face, a real smile, you can see it in her eyes - maybe she's looking at Benny; like I said, I don't know when the picture was taken. An attractive, but still somehow ordinary-looking woman.

She didn't make the mistake of trying to kiss him, probably didn't want to chance he might pull away, but she put a hand on his arm and said, "How are things?"

"We have to talk, Victoria."

"You didn't say how you like my new look, Ben." She reached up and smoothed a blonde curl over her ear, and the snow swirled around her head. As Fraser had noted the night before, her mass of brown hair had been cut off, and what was left had been bleached an ash-blonde color. "I tried straightening it, but it just keeps curling up again."

"You still look like Victoria to me."

"I'm not sure how to take that," she laughed.

Fraser looked away from her, scanning the Chicago skyline that stood out clear in the cold winter sunshine. "I was at your burial."

"That was pretty clever of me, don't you think?"

"Not so clever of you to stage it in Chicago - anywhere else, and I'd never have found out about it until it was too late to do any investigating."

"I suppose part of me wanted you to know. I wanted my death to hurt you. I wanted to see how much you still loved me."

"Were you going to cut me in on the spoils of your business ventures?"

"My offer is still open, if that's what you mean." She smiled at Fraser, who could remember her smiling just that way the time she'd sent him off to deal with diamond thieves who then tried to kill him; sure of herself, sure of what he'd do for her.

Fraser said, "Have you ever visited the children's hospital? Have you seen any of your victims?"

"*My* victims? Don't be so melodramatic - you're as bad as Lilly. It's not like Anna and I sat there and measured out the drugs into the vials ourselves. We hired a local crew in Rumania to handle the hands-on part of the business - you know the expression, 'it's so hard to find good help nowadays'? Those idiots. If it weren't for their greediness, the authorities would never have decided to make an example of us. Oh, now - don't look at me that way! Of course, it's terrible what happened to those poor children. But it really wasn't my fault." Victoria fished around in her pocket for a quarter, found one, dropped it into one of those pay-view binoculars they have on the observation deck, and took a look at the toy landscape below. "Oh look, Ben! The people look just like ants down there! Ben, if I were to give you a box with a button on the top, and tell you that every time you pressed that button, an ant would stop moving, but you'd get a million dollars, how many times would you press it? Would you really tell me to keep my money? Without hesitation? Or would you calculate just how many ants the world could afford to spare?" She turned from the eye-piece and smiled conspiratorially at him. "Tax-free, Ben."

"You're finished now. The authorities know about you."

"They won't catch me, Ben. You'll see."

"They're exhuming your grave even as we speak. Who will they find?"

"Nadia Dumansky," Victoria replied simply. She put her hand up as if to catch the snow, saying, "Look at the sky!"

"Why did you try to kidnap Inspector Thatcher?"

That brought a frown. "I suppose I could say it was just for old time's sake, but I must be honest, Ben. I resent even the suggestion that I'm so easy to replace in your affections."

"What would you have done to her?"

The smile was back, almost flirting. "Well, we'll never know for sure now, will we? Until the next time, of course."

Like I said, Victoria is good at pushing buttons. Fraser was suddenly as angry as he'd ever been in his life, as angry as the time Gerrard handed him a bankbook and told him his father was dirty. "I'd like to pick you up and throw you off this building," he said.

"But you won't, darling. I trust you, Ben. Anna tried to persuade me not to come, but I know you. Then she tried to persuade me to, well, arrange a little accident for you. She told me it would be easy in a crowd like this, just take a second, and her man would be back on the elevator before anyone even realized you were dead."

"I could take you in right now."

"If you touch me, I'll scream. They'd grab you, not the frightened woman you attacked. And I'm gone in the confusion." Fraser didn't answer this, but he didn't move, either. The crowd shuffled around them, oblivious, enjoying the snow flurry. He knew that if Victoria screamed, they would come to her aid. They didn't know they were doomed to be victims, if not Victoria's, then someone else's. She sighed and put her hand on his arm. "Darling. What fools we are, talking this way. I'm leaving Chicago. Come with me. We would be so good together. You know we would."

"What about Ms. Sachet and Dr. Kartnerstrasse."

"Don't worry about them. They're nothing." She had a thought. "How's Ray doing? And his family? I never thanked them for putting me up in their home."

"Keep away from them, Victoria."

"Give Ray my regards, Ben. If you change your mind, you can reach me through Anna, but don't leave it too long." She moved away from him towards the elevators, waving gaily until she disappeared into the crowd. Fraser suddenly called after her, "Don't trust me, Victoria," but it was too late, she was gone.

I met Fraser in the Riv a few blocks from the Sears tower. He gave me the scoop on what had just happened. "If we're gonna pick up Victoria, we have to act fast," I said to him. "The C.I.A. is hot to put the moves on Sachet and Kartnerstrasse, and if they pick them up, we've lost our link to Victoria." Fraser looked like he was on another planet, so I poked him in the arm. "Earth to Mountie; come in, Mountie. What's with you, Benny?" Like I didn't know.

"What? What do you want me to do?"

This was not good. I knew I had to get him in the program, but set it up so a last-minute hesitation on his part wouldn't sink us. See, I trust Fraser totally on everything - except for Victoria. I didn't want to put him and us in a position where a decision on his part would be the difference between success or failure - or get someone killed. "The body in the coffin isn't Victoria's - we'll put in a formal request to the C.I.A. to arrest her, that'll keep the paperwork straight. But there isn't a hope in hell they can track her down - only you can bring her out into the open, Benny. Think you can do it?"

"Be your decoy? I think I can handle that."

"What do you mean 'your decoy'? - Benny, you have to be a part of this, not just used by us; you have to take some ownership for this one. It can't be just me."

He nodded tiredly. "Ray, you've forgotten Carol Jones - we can't prove she's a part of the drug racket, but she did give false testimony about Victoria's death. She might even be liable as an accessory after the fact in Nadia Dumansky's murder."

"Oh, she's in this up to her sanctimonious eyeballs; you bet."

"I have an idea as to how to do this in such a way that it seems real enough to draw Victoria out, as well as put her off her guard."

"I'm all ears."

"I cannot go to Ms. Sachet - I suspect that any message I might give her would not be relayed to Victoria, but might result in my own death at the hands of her operatives instead. But Ms. Jones - I can go to her with a story that I must get in touch with Victoria, warn her that the C.I.A. is closing in on both her and her cohorts. I will tell her that I can't go to Anna Sachet or Dr. Kartnerstrasse, they're under C.I.A. surveillance and I'm wanted by the police for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, with regards to Mr. Koch. This necessitates my leaving the city with Victoria. Does that sound authentic to you?"

"It has that ring of truth. I've actually had my eye out for a warrant for your arrest since yesterday; knock on wood nobody in Homicide gets cute on us."

"I can arrange to meet Victoria at some place...," he seemed at a loss for words here, as if his plan had brought him along this far, and no further.

"We'll find a place. We'll get our people in there long before she gets there; it'll work Benny. We'll pick her up, and nobody gets hurt. You don't have to be there, Benny; we can pick her up without you being there."

He shook his head. "That won't work and you know it, Ray. It's just that - I told Victoria not to trust me, but she didn't hear me. I wish she'd heard me. This wouldn't be quite the betrayal it is if she had."

"Can you do this, Benny? Are you sure?"

I had tossed the report from my friend in the C.I.A. onto the front seat and forgotten about it - I didn't mean to leave it there for Fraser to find, but as Freudian slips go, it wasn't a bad idea to bring home the facts to him one last time. He picked up the folder and weighed it in his hand.

"Yes," he said. "I'm sure."

The arrangements went like clock-work. The Feds jumped at a chance to get at Victoria, and agreed to hold off hauling in Kartnerstrasse and Sachet until Fraser had a chance to talk to Jones. I think Jones shocked Fraser. She greeted him without embarrassment - she was practically condescending. "How nice to see you, Constable Fraser. I'm pleased you were able to work out your little problem with Chicago Homicide."

"I wasn't," Fraser said.

"I hope you don't bear me any ill-will, about my letting them know you'd been to see that poor Mr. Koch. I figured that if you were innocent, you'd clear yourself right away, and if you were guilty, well, the fact that I liked you shouldn't stand in the way of justice. A citizen has her duty."

"Like giving false evidence at an inquest?"

Jones said, "Oh, dear, I'm afraid you are mad at me, aren't you. Look at it this way, young man, any citizen of a country, owing allegiance to - "

"The police dug up the body. They'll be after Dr. Kartnerstrasse and Ms. Sachet and possibly after you as well. I want you to warn Victoria."

"I don't understand...."

"Yes, you do." Fraser laid his trap and got out of there quick. He couldn't stand looking at that phony humanitarian face any longer than he had to.

And now all we had to do was bait the trap and haul in our prey. We had gone over maps of the Chicago sewer system and had to put the kibosh on several likely meeting spots for one reason or another, when Fraser had a brainstorm. The restaurant he'd met Anna Sachet at a day ago - The Old Vienna. Victoria had to know about that meeting, so if Fraser suggested she meet him there, it would sound more like it was his last-minute inspiration instead of some kind of set-up. There was a manhole that linked to the main line literally around the corner of the place, so she'd think she could get in and out right under our noses even if he was being tailed. She'd take the chance, I knew she would. All she had to do was come up through the ground, walk twenty yards to the restaurant, grab Fraser, and sink back into the sewer like the rat that she was. We'd get her before she went underground again, that would be the easiest. Also less dangerous to Fraser.

So Fraser sat in the big bay window of The Old Vienna, drinking cup after cup of coffee for hours. We had operatives as customers, as waiters, the girl who sat people at their tables was ours. They were the lucky ones - those of us who were known by Victoria were stuck outside, and it was cold as a bitch out there. Me and Jack Huey were well out of the way around the block, holed up in the Riv; Welsh was in the C.I.A.'s communications vehicle - a big moving van full of more computer hardware than Bill Gates' playroom. We couldn't see what was going on, but we had a wire on Fraser and could talk to him, keep his spirits up. He wasn't talking back, if she saw him talking to his lapel, she'd know something fishy was going down. Which is why I nearly passed out when I heard:

"Excuse me, sir? Which way is it to the men's room?"

"Fraser!!! What are you doin'?"

I knew he'd walked away from the bay window by then, because he took the chance to say, "I don't wish to be indelicate, Ray, but I have had six cups of coffee over the course of two and one-half hours. What do you think I am doing?"

Well, I couldn't argue with him there. "Just get back to your seat as quick as you can!"

Fraser's voice said suddenly, "My God, Ray! She's here!" and then the wire went crazy; snap, crackle, pop. I yelled to Welsh over the radio, "Give the signal to guard all the manholes!" and I heard him telling the troops, "We're going down." We jumped out of the Riv and took off for the restaurant, Jack going one way, me the other.

This is what happened: Fraser went down the stairs to find the restroom; there's a hallway down there with the men's room on one side and the ladies on the other. At the end of the hall is the building's furnace room, the door with an "Employees Only" sign on it over one of those little glass windows with chicken-wire running through it. Slick Vickie'd slipped through the delivery bay in back and come through the furnace room, and had got there just in time to look through the little window to see Fraser telling me off. Talk about your lousy timing. When he caught sight of her turning away from the window, he yelled she was there and took off after her. All of the pipes in the furnace room was why the wire went nuts - the metal interfered with sound transmission.

Fraser jumped down from the building's loading dock and met Jack Huey. If he'd pointed her out then it would have been an easy shot, but to Fraser it wasn't Metcalfe, international drug runner, escaping down the street, it was Victoria. He hesitated just long enough for Vickie to turn the corner; then he yelled out, "There she goes," but Vickie had already shot our guy by the manhole and escaped down it. After making sure the agent wasn't hurt too badly - he had a bullet-proof vest on, thank God - Jack and Fraser followed her down the hole, like Alice after the White Rabbit.

Since I met Fraser almost two years ago, he's dragged me down below the streets of this city more times than I would care to mention - it's a strange world down there. You don't realize it, but we live over a dark domain of rushing rivers and empty, echoing concrete-and-brick caverns; it's like a science fiction movie or something, but with a bad smell. I was with Welsh over in the main sewer - it's enormous, with waterfalls crashing so loud, you can't hear yourself think. Fraser and Jack went down the metal ladder to find themselves in a little side-canal, it was quiet and the water was shallow, with all kinds of disgusting scum floating gently on the surface - though they could hear the rushing waters of the main channel in the distance. Jack shone his flashlight along the edge of the water and Fraser saw which way Vickie had gone; she'd left a clear trail through the surface scum of old orange peels, cigarette stubs, used condoms, and God knows what else; it was as unmistakable as if she'd left footprints in the mud. Jack pulled his gun at this point, he had the flashlight in one hand and the gun in the other. "Get behind me, man," he said to Fraser.

"Why?"

At that instant, Jack must have experienced one of those dealing-with-Fraser moments that make me so grouchy. "Because you don't have a gun, man!" he said, sounding exasperated. He kept the light on the scum-trail, and they inched along, keeping to the shallow edge, up to their knees in filthy, cold water. He went on, "What is it with this bitch? She hasn't got a chance in hell. The manholes are all guarded and the streets are cordoned off. All we have to do is make a sweep through the side-passages from the manholes." He handed off the flashlight to Fraser for a second and took his walkie-talkie from his breast pocket, listening in at a pre-arranged frequency to the search party for a moment, then stuck it back in his pocket. Taking his flashlight from Fraser, Jack said, "Man, oh, man - it's like an army is down here now. The cops, the Feds - " At that moment, the shot came. The flashlight flew out of Jack's hand and fell into the water. "Son of a goddamn bitch!" he yelped.

"My God, are you hurt?"

"Nah, she must have shot at the light, the bullet just nicked my hand. Here, Fraser - take this other flashlight, I'm gonna wrap up my hand. No, don't shine it. She's right up ahead of us." Fraser took the light and Jack used his walkie-talkie to let everyone know where Victoria was. The noise of the shot still reverberated throughout the entire sewer system, so I think everyone already had an idea that something had happened.

"I'm going up there to talk to her," Fraser said.

"You crazy, man? Vecchio will kill me you get blown away! Fraser, get back here, dammit!"

Fraser didn't listen. He waded along towards where Victoria was hidden, towards the rushing waters of the main channel, Jack cursing softly close behind him. Fraser called out, "Victoria!" and the name echoed down the tunnel, "Victoria, Victoria, Victoria!" Nothing. He called again, "Victoria! Come on out! It's no use!"

A voice alarmingly close made them hug the wall. "Is that you, Ben?" it called. "What do you want me to do?"

"Come on out with your hands up!"

"I don't have a flashlight, Ben. I can't see a thing."

"Don't trust her, Fraser," Jack said.

"Go back, Detective Huey. She won't shoot at me," Fraser said. "Victoria, I'm going to shine the light. Give yourself up, it's the only way." He turned the light on, and twenty feet away, at the edge of the light and the water, Victoria stepped into view. "Put your hands up, Victoria." Victoria raised her hand and fired. The shot ricocheted against the wall a foot from Fraser's head, and he heard Jack cry out. At that same moment, a huge searchlight was turned on, illuminating the whole cavern, catching Victoria in its beam, bright enough for Fraser to see the staring eyes of Jack Huey slumped at the water's edge. Our little army had arrived on the scene, finally.

Fraser dropped to his side, but it was no use, Jack was dead. "Don't shoot!" I yelled to the Feds around me over the noise of the water, "you'll hit Fraser!" Victoria was blinded by the light; she pressed herself up against the wall, her hand in front of her eyes, trying to suss out what to do next. Her only choices were to go towards us, or back through Fraser's tunnel. So naturally, she found herself a third choice - she took a flying leap into the deep central rushing stream. When the Feds turned their lights on her, she was submerged, and the current of the sewer carried her rapidly on, past Jack's body, out of the searchlight into the dark. What makes someone, without hope, do anything she can to cling for just a few more seconds to freedom?

Fraser stood at the edge of the searchlight beam, staring downstream. He had Jack's gun in his hand now, and he was the only one who could fire with safety. I thought I saw a movement and called out to him, "There! Shoot! Shoot, dammit!" He lifted Jack's gun and fired. A cry of pain came back up the tunnel; a cry of blame, a call for help. "You got her!" I yelled out, wading up to where Fraser stood over Jack's body. "We got her, Huey," I whispered to Jack, closing his staring eyes.

When I looked up, Fraser was out of sight in the darkness. I screamed his name and got nothing but my own voice back at me, echoing over and over, until his name was lost in the rush and roar of the underground river. That's when I heard a third shot.

Fraser told me later, "I walked downstream to find her. I didn't use the light, I was afraid she's shoot at the beam. She must have been struck by my bullet just at the entrance of a side passage - she had crawled up the passage to the foot of an iron ladder. Only a few yards above her head was an open manhole, and freedom, but she hadn't the strength to make the climb, and even if she had, there were Federal agents waiting for her above. She must have known that, but something in her made her try, doomed to failure though she was. She was just making the attempt, crawling up out of the dark towards the light, when I came into view down the tunnel. She lifted her gun at me and smiled - Ray! she smiled! - and I shot her dead with Detective Huey's gun. And now I'm left wondering if she would have killed me, or if it was her way of getting me to kill her."

"Forget about it, Benny," I said.

Benny said, "I never shall."

A thaw came to Chicago that night, melting the glacier the town had been in the grip of for over two months. Burials were a lot easier after that than they had been a week earlier when electric drills had been needed to break open the frozen ground. It was almost like a spring day when Victoria Metcalfe had her second funeral. I was glad she was being put under the earth for good this time, but knew that it had taken another two men's deaths to do it. This time, the group by the grave was increased by fifty percent: me, Fraser, and Margaret Thatcher. This time there weren't any tears.

After the coffin had been lowered, Thatcher wandered away from the grave site for a moment, making like she was interested in reading epitaphs, but really giving me and Benny a second alone. He reached down and picked up a handful of dirt, and dropped it on the coffin. Then he stood there, gazing down into the grave, that stupid little muscle in his cheek twitching.

"Benny, for Christ's sake, snap out of it! You survived; you're alive, your Mountie honor intact! It was her sick game, but you won it!"

"I haven't won," he said. "I've lost."

There was no arguing with him, so I just shrugged. "The Riv's parked up the road. Want a lift?"

"No," he said, "I'll take Margaret's car back." I watched him striding off after Thatcher. He caught up to her and they walked side by side. I don't think he said a word to her; but before they turned up the road out of my sight, her hand was through his arm. Jeez, I wonder where that's going, and do I really want to hear about it. He's a moron, a Pollyanna who insists on thinking the best of people, that anyone can be redeemed - okay, so ninety-nine percent of the time he's right, but look out for that one-percent when he's not.

Oh, and Wiener? Wiener is still arguing with Boxbush Books about Fraser's expenses. They say they won't pay up for his book tour since they figure they're already paying his hospital expenses in Canada. Poor Wiener. Poor all of us, if you know what I mean.

Fin.

Please e-mail me at vecchio@trickster.org if you wish to comment.