He didn't move.

"There's pretty good evidence, Mr. Tripp, that your wife's name is not, in fact, Olivia Nelson."

Nothing.

"That she was sleeping with Senator Stratton, and maybe with others."

Still nothing. Except his shoulders hunched slightly and his head began to shake slowly, back and forth, in metronomic denial.

"I've seen pictures of two different people, both of whom look like your wife."

His head went back and forth. No. No. No.

"Have you ever heard of anyone named Cheryl Anne Rankin?"

No. No. No.

"Your retainer check bounced," I said.

The silence was so thick it seemed hard to breathe. Tripp's stillness had become implacable. I waited. Tripp stood, his head still negating. Back and forth, denying everything. I got up and left.

chapter thirty.

QUIRK AND FARRELL and Belson and I were in Quirk's office. Quirk told us that while he was in Alton he had learned exactly nothing.

"Everybody agrees that Olivia Nelson is married to a Kenyan citizen named Mano Kuanda and living in Nairobi. Embassy guy talked with her, took her fingerprints. We've compared them to her Peace Corps prints. She hasn't been in the United States since 1982. Never been in Boston. Has no idea who the victim is."

"She know anything about Cheryl Anne Rankin?" I said.

"No."

"Never heard the name?"

"No," Quirk said.

"You talk to Stratton?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

"He says he was sleeping with Tripp's wife regularly, and that he wasn't the only one."

Quirk raised his eyebrows.

"Our Bobby?" he said.

"Shocking," Belson said. "And him a Senator and all."

"That's why he tried to chase you off?"

"So he says. Says he was afraid I'd find out about them and it would spoil his chances for the nomination next year."

"For President?" Quirk said.

"Yeah."

"Jesus," Belson said. "President Stratton."

"How about Tripp?"

"I talked to him."

"And?"

"He says everything was perfect."

"You got anything, Lee?" Quirk said.

Farrell jerked a little, as if he'd not been paying close attention.

"No, Lieutenant, no, I don't."

"Why should you be different?" Quirk said. He kept his eyes on Farrell for a long moment.

"One thing," I said. "I don't know why you would have, but has anyone run a credit check on Tripp?"

"Worried about your fee?" Belson said.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon and his thin face already sported a five o'clock shadow. He was one of those guys who looked cleanshaven for about an hour in the morning.

"In fact, his check bounced. But I think there's something goofy about his finances."

I told them about the checkbook. "Might be something," I said.

"Lee?" Quirk said.

Farrell nodded.

"I'll find out," he said. "Anything else?"

"The name Dr. Mildred Cockburn shows up in his checkbook a lot."

"Written like that?" Belson said.

I nodded.

"Probably not a medical doctor," Belson said.

"Yeah," I said, "then the check would be to Mildred Cockburn, DMD, or Mildred Cockburn, MD."

"Maybe she's a shrink," Belson said.

"Or a chiropractor, or a doctor of podiatry," I said.

"Hope for a shrink," Quirk said.

chapter thirty-one.

SUSAN AND I had dinner at Michela's in Cambridge with Dennis and Nancy Upper. Susan knew Dennis from them both being shrinks. Nancy turned out to be an ex-dancer, so I was able to dazzle her with the knowledge of dance I had gained from Paul Giacomin, while Susan and Dennis talked about patients they had known.

I asked if either of them had heard of Dr. Mildred Cockburn. Neither of them had. Still, there was risotto with crab meat and a pistachio pesto. The room was elegant, and the bartender made the best martinis I'd ever drunk.

"I've got to find out how he does that," I said to Susan on the ride home.

"Well, you're a detective."

"And how complicated a recipe can it be?" I said.

"Vodka and vermouth?"

"Yeah."

"Sounds complicated to me," Susan said.

"Recipes are not the best thing you do," I said.

We were on Memorial Drive. Across the river the Boston skyline looked like a contrivance. The State House stood on its low hill, the downtown skyscrapers loomed behind it. And strung out along the flatness of the Back Bay, with the insurance towers in the background, the apartment houses were soft with the glow of lighted living rooms. It was Friday night. I was going to stay with Susan.

"Why do you want to know about Mildred Cockburn?" Susan said.

"Saw her name in Loudon Tripp's checkbook, 'Dr. Mildred Cockburn,' every month, checks for five hundred dollars. So I looked her up in the phone book. She's listed as a therapist with an office on Hilliard Street in Cambridge."

"Odd," Susan said.

"You'd expect to know her?"

"Yes."

"When I talk with her, what is it reasonable to expect her to tell me?" I said.

"Ethically?" Susan said.

"Yes."

"I can't say in the abstract," Susan said. "She should be guided by the best interests of her patient."

On our left, the surface of the river had a quick-silver gloss in the moonlight. A small cabin cruiser with its running lights on moved silently upstream, passing under the barrel-arched bridges, its wake a glassy furrow in the surface. Susan's street was silent, the buildings dark, the trees, half unleaved, made spectral by the street lamps shining through them.

Susan lived in an ornate Victorian house. On the first floor her office was on one side of the front hall, and her big waiting room was on the other. We went up the curving staircase to the second floor where she lived. When we opened the door, Pearl dashed at us, and jumped up, and tore Susan's hose, and lapped our faces, and ran to the couch and got a pillow and shook it violently until it was dead, and came back to show us.

"Cute," Susan said.

We took Pearl down and let her out into the fenced-in backyard. It was shadowy in the moonlight, but not dark, and we could watch her as she hurried about the yard, looking for the proper spot.

Later we lay in bed, the three of us, and talked, looking up at the ceiling in the moonbright darkness. Pearl had little to say, but she compensated by taking up the most room in the bed.

"Is this Olivia Nelson thing making you crazy?" Susan said. We were holding hands under the covers, across Pearl's back.

"Nothing is turning out to be the way it appeared to be," I said.

"Things do that," Susan said.

"Wow," I said.

"I'm a graduate of Harvard University," Susan said.

chapter thirty-two.

DR. MILDRED COCKBURN had office space in a tired-looking, brown-shingled house on Hilliard Street, down from the American Repertory Theater. There was a low wrought-iron fence with some rust spots around the yard. The fence had shifted over the years as the ground froze each winter and melted each spring, and it was now canted out toward the sidewalk. There was some grass in the yard, and a lot of hard-packed dirt. The front walk was brick, which had heaved with the fence. The bricks were skewed and weeds had grown up among them. Many of the brown shingles had cracked, and a couple had split on through, and the front door had been inadequately scraped before being painted over. Cambridge was not a hotbed of pretentious neatness.

A sign said Enter, which I did, and took a seat in a narrow foyer with doors leading out of it through each wall. I had an eleven o'clock appointment, and it was five of. The walls of the foyer were cream colored, though once they might have been white. There were a couple of travel posters on the walls, and an inexpensive print of one of Monet's paintings of his garden. There was also the insistent odor of cat. The low deal table beside the one straight chair had two recent copies of Psychology Today, and a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education from last May.

At 11:06, the office door opened and a pale woman with a thin face, and her gray-streaked hair in a bun, came out of the office. She did not look at me. She took a long tweed coat from the coatrack, and put it on, and buttoned it carefully, and went out the door, maneuvering in the mailbox-sized foyer without ever acknowledging another presence.

There was a three- or four-minute wait thereafter, and then the office door opened again and Dr. Cockburn said, "Mr. Spenser?"

She wore a black turban and a large flowing black garment which I couldn't quite identify, something between a housecoat and an open parachute. She was obviously heavy, though the extent of her garment left the exact heaviness in doubt. Her skin was pale. She wore a lot of eye makeup and no lipstick.

I stood, and she ushered me past her into the office. The office was draped in maroon fabric. The window had louvered blinds, opened over the top half, closed on the bottom. There was a Victorian sofa, upholstered in dark green velvet, against the wall to the right of the door, and a high-backed mahogany chair with ugly wooden arms, facing a wing chair upholstered in the same green. She sat across from me in the wing chair. She made a barely visible affirmative movement with her head, and then waited, her hands folded in her lap.