'Yes.'

'And that's it.'

'That's it.'

'You sure?'

'Yes.'

'You didn't see anybody else?'

'No.'

'You didn't see her after that?'

'No.'

No, of course not. That was it.

Spencer turned off the tape recorder. His head shuddered involuntarily and he dropped the receiver.

Will Baker and Ed Landers from the crime lab were waiting for him at the Feldberg parking lot.

'Where've you been?' said Will in a hushed but strident voice.

Spencer raised his eyebrows. 'Looking for Krishna's killer, Will. How about you?'

Ed Landers was a tall man with gold-rimmed glasses and extremely large, protruding ears, about which Ed was painfully self-conscious. No one in the department was allowed to make jokes about them, certainly not to Ed's face. Spencer liked Ed. He was a good guy and a thorough professional, and he didn't take a lot of shit.

In Kristina's room, Spencer asked Landers to dust the Southern Comfort bottle and Baker to bag it. The bottle was half empty. Spencer found the cap nearby, and then got down on his hands and knees and smelled the floor where the liquor had spilled. The carpet smelled moldy, like a bum's clothes at Penn Station in New York. If Kristina had drunk something the night she died, this wasn't it.

Then Spencer methodically examined the room. He started with the clothes on the bed and went down on the floor on his hands and knees. What am I looking for? he thought, searching under the bed. What am I hoping to find here?

On her desk, he found Conni's note, carelessly thrown on top of a text-book. Dear Krissy, we took Aristotle with us to Long Island. Wish you could've come, too. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Love, Conni.

Spencer read the note several times, then gave it to Will.

The closet had some interesting periodicals in it, all bagged by Baker: People magazines from the seventies and early eighties, Newsweeks arranged as if they had been looked through recently a November 15, 1993, issue was right next to an November 10, 1988, issue, which in turn was underneath an August 27, 1993, issue. Some recent Life magazines, one Time with the Dalai Lama on the cover. And a copy of a newspaper called Greenwich Time with a subscription sticker torn off. 'Put that one in a separate bag, Baker,' Spencer said. What would a girl from Brooklyn Heights be doing with the Greenwich Time?

It took Spencer three hours to sift through Kristina's papers. Landers dusted nearly everything, but Spencer didn't have much hope for fingerprints in this case unless they were right on Kristina's pale neck. He was certain fingerprinting would show that every one of her three friends and most of her basketball teammates had prints all over her desk, her chair, and maybe even her bed.

The men barely spoke as they worked. Once in a while, Spencer asked Baker to bag something, or Landers to dust a drawer or inside a closet shelf, but Landers and Baker knew their jobs very well.

The drawers in Kristina's desk and her closet contained few personal items. She had some college textbooks and term papers, but there were no journals and no diaries. Her class notebooks had no doodling on them surprising for someone with such an untidy room. Sloppy and distracted note-taking usually went along with room contents, but not in Kristina's case. Her class notes were meticulous, written in beautiful, book-perfect penmanship. How did that mass of hair, those loose clothes, this messy room, and the spilled bottle of Southern Comfort go with such refined handwriting?

Spencer was looking for stronger, more personal clues: a photograph, a canceled check, a bank statement. Spencer O'Malley was a desperate man the day a bank statement became personal. But the clues in this room were as obscure as Kristina's admission records. This was the place she called her home, and yet it was a game of Clue with two suspects and three murder weapons missing. In fact, the room screamed to Spencer that there was something wrong.

A room kept so devoid of personal belongings was not an accident. A girl so seemingly careless would be careless with everything. Kristina was only outwardly careless, Spencer realized. Almost as if to make a pretense of carelessness. But why? Was it to hide the very fact that she took great pains to eliminate every single item from her room that might speak of who and what she really was?

Everything that might shed any light on her had been removed, and that shed more light on her than anything. It was like a beautifully wrapped gift that turned out to be an empty box. Kristina monthly, daily, hourly, emptied that box.

What came crashing into her room every hour of every day that she needed to keep it so thoroughly cleansed?

Spencer searched in vain for a photo, one single photo of anything. Or a Rubik's Cube, an Eagles cassette, a newspaper article, a picture of her mother. Anything. But what really tipped him off was the absence of canceled checks or statements or bank information of any sort. No ATM receipts. No deposit receipts. Kristina Kim had been a careful person. Spencer looked again through her purse; there was nothing in it. There was a brown leather man's wallet, very worn and old, with shredded seams and the plastic credit card dividers long gone. A cash card from New Hampshire Savings Bank told Spencer there should have been bank information. An American Express card. A Dartmouth College green debit card. Three singles. A folded, blank piece of paper. And that was it. There wasn't even a receipt for the black boots that Spencer knew Kristina had bought only two days before she died. That receipt must have been thrown out immediately, as matter of course. But why throw out a silly shoe receipt? Unless it was just a matter of habit, or unless it was in safe place.

'Will, let me have a look at her keys again,' Spencer said, and Baker dutifully took them out of the plastic bag. Ed Landers had nearly finished dusting the purse. Spencer smirked. Ironically, his fingerprints would be all over that purse. Maybe I'm a suspect, too, he thought, looking through the key set. There was nothing unusual about the key ring: big keys, car keys, and a small key that looked like a mailbox key, but he found another key, also small, but thicker, heavier, and coded. There was a number on it.

'Bingo,' he said quietly. 'There was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o ...'

'Detective O'Malley? Pardon?' It was Landers. He seemed confused. Will smiled without comment.

'It's all right. You people finish up here. I've got to get to the bank before it closes.'

'It's well after three,' Will pointed out.

'Yes, but the employees are there till five, proving.'

Prove it all night, prove it all night, Spencer hummed as he drove back to Main and parked next to Molly's Balloon, which in turn was next to the New Hampshire Savings Bank. Spencer knocked on the bank's glass doors.

'We're closed,' a grouchy-looking man mouthed to him through the glass.

Spencer took out his badge and the door opened.

'Who is your manager? I need to speak with him, please.'

Spencer was introduced to Mr Carmichael.

He told Mr Carmichael about Kristina. For the first two minutes, Spencer couldn't get much out of Mr Carmichael, who put his head in his hands and cried. 'She was a nice girl,' he kept repeating. 'A very nice girl.'

Spencer finally said, 'I'm here because I noticed a key of hers that looks like a safety deposit box key. I used to have one myself.'

'Yes, she had one, if that's what you mean,' Mr Carmichael answered.

'May I see it, please?'

'Let me ask you, don't you need a search warrant to look inside it?'

He didn't need one if he didn't expect to find anything. He could just look through it and leave. But if he found something that might implicate someone and that someone would stand trial, he certainly would need one. If he didn't have one, he might as well put his own badge in Kristina's safety deposit box and go on border patrol in the north of Vermont. If they'd have him, that is. If they thought he was still fit for anything after searching through a safety deposit box without a warrant.

'I guess I do need one, yes.' He glanced at his watch. Four forty-five. He had just a few minutes. 'I'll be right back.'

Mr Carmichael walked him to the glass front doors. 'It's incredible that she is dead, you know,' he said quietly to Spencer.

'Yes, I agree.'

'Do you think it was an accident?' Mr Carmichael asked, and Spencer heard him suck in his breath as if to prepare for a response that was out of sync with a quiet small New England town on a cold December afternoon. People got five-dollar parking tickets here, and rooted for the Dartmouth Big Green, and once a month ate Sunday brunch at the Hanover Inn whether they could afford to or not. People did not get murdered.

As he passed the curmudgeon who had not wanted to let Spencer in, Spencer leaned closer to Mr Carmichael and answered, 'No, I don't think it was an accident.'

He saw Mr Carmichael's pained expression. 'What is it? What?' Spencer asked.

Mr Carmichael avoided Spencer's gaze when he said, 'Come back with the warrant, go through her things, and I'll talk to you then. Get permission to sequester the funds in her accounts.'

Spencer remembered Krishna's three singles in her wallet. 'She has funds in her accounts?'

Mr Carmichael looked at Spencer meaningfully. 'Come back and I'll talk to you then, Detective O'Malley.'

Spencer got his search warrant in what was record time even for him twelve minutes. Kristina's bank accounts were immediately frozen, pending disposition of her estate. Spencer rushed back to the bank, thinking, what is it that Mr Carmichael has to tell me? What does he know?

The bank employees had gone. Mr Carmichael let Spencer in. They walked to the back and through the vault. Mr Carmichael found the right key on his formidable key chain, and together they opened Kristina's safety deposit box.

'I'd like to examine it in private, please,' Spencer said, and knew how it sounded. It was good that he wasn't trying to suppress information. Imagine the power of the police officer who had the right to look through a dead woman's safety deposit box in private. Still ... the trappings of the Pandora's box that Spencer held in his hands were too strong and too important to ignore.

Mr Carmichael took him to a small empty room and closed the door.

He lifted the metal cover of the big box. His heart beat faster.

To Spencer's surprise, it was not filled with the stuff that Kristina cleared out of her room with the intensity and completeness of a forest fire. Spencer expected to find the receipt for the black boots stacked neatly on top of canceled checks and monthly statements. He expected to find tear-stained love letters, stacked neatly beneath the receipt for the black boots.

At first glance it was nearly disappointing. He found a photo finally! of a young girl, neat, short-haired, smiling, holding a kite in her hands. The picture had been taken near a body of water that looked like Long Island Sound. There was an older photo of a very beautiful young woman holding a toddler girl in her arms. Polaroid shots of teenage girls with babies. Spencer assumed they were girls from Red Leaves House. There were about a dozen photos. He would go through them again when he had time.

Now he was looking for something more specific. He found a pen from a place called Fahrenbrae Hilltop Retreat and a matchbook with the same inscription.

He'd read about Fahrenbrae in the Chamber of Commerce 'Guide to Hanover' brochure. Three houses, beautifully furnished, twelve miles away from Dartmouth in the Vermont hills, renting for $125 a night. He'd remembered them because the place had intrigued him. He had wanted to drive up there one day.

Spencer found souvenirs from Scotland. Matchbooks, lighters, napkins, dirty napkins, beer-stained napkins, torn napkins with Gaelic words written all over them, words Spencer did not understand. There was a bar of soap from a bed-and-breakfast at the Mull of Kintyre. There were foil rings and red and white ribbons and nail polish with more Gaelic inscriptions on it. None of it individually meant anything. But all together, it made up a time of Kristina's life that must have meant a great deal to her.

Judging from other objects in Kristina's box, the Scottish things must have meant more to her than anything else in her life. There were no matchbooks from Brooklyn, nor torn napkins from Dartmouth College. But Scotland was in her box.

Scotland, and Fahrenbrae.

There were a dozen letters from her grandmother, dated a few years earlier, an old antique parchment stationery with Old English initials in the upper left corner: Spencer read one.

Dear Krissy, my baby, I miss you honey, I wish you would come and see me more often. I know you're busy with school and work, your work is important, I know you can't come down in the summer, but I wish I could see you a little more. If ever you have more time, come see me, I'll always be glad, despite everything, and I mean that honey, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You're still my family, and I believe with my soul it wasn't your fault. So don't be scared of me who loves you. You come and see me when you can, darling, and I'll do anything to help you.

And one other letter, on pastel pink stationery, this one with a flowery R.M.S.

Kristina, Why are you returning my letters? Why aren't you letting me speak with you? What have I done that you should be so angry with me? I should be angry with you, furious, yet, I've been trying, and you've been turning your back to me. Please, honey, please. Your father, he didn't mean anything by going to the lawyers, he was just mad, it'll blow over, you'll see. Forgive the letter he wrote you. I know he didn't mean the things he wrote. He misses you so much. And me too, Kristina, we both miss you.

It was signed Mother.

KMS? Spencer wondered. S?

He looked quickly for the father's letter, but he couldn't find it.

What else?

A manila envelope that contained a folded letter and a seven-page document. The letter scared him him, a veteran of the Long Island Expressway on a Saturday night. A veteran of an ax murder. A grisly premeditated murder. A veteran of growing up in a family of eleven, veteran of six boisterous brothers.

They all found their brides, some more often than others. He found his only once, and he was a veteran of that, too. Yet, sitting here in an empty room, he was afraid to open a thrice-folded letter in that manila envelope. Spencer looked at the thick document instead.

A petition before the judge in the Borough of Brooklyn in the City of New York on this day of November 10th, 1993, being brought by a Kristina Kim of P.O. Box 2500, Hinman, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., against a Howard Kim There it was. Howard Kim. She was married.

Married.

Married. Buried. Well, not buried yet. But Spencer should have known. Kim was not her real name. He had thought it sounded strangely ... nonoccidental. Malaysian? Vietnamese? Korean? Something. He quickly flipped to the end of the document to see her maiden name.

Sinclair. Kristina Sinclair.

Katherine Morgan Sinclair. John Henry Sinclair. Now that made sense. Kristina Morgan Sinclair, the divorce petition said.

Howard Kim. At least now he had a name. In fact, he had more than a name, he had an address. The address was different from the one on Kristina's college application. Howard must've moved in the years since. Spencer quickly scanned through the document. Abandonment ... three years of separation not made legal by the courts ... there was no alimony, there were no children.

The divorce petition had been drawn in September 1993, two months before Kristina's death.

Maybe Howard Kim had killed her. Maybe he hadn't wanted to be divorced from her.

Imagine that married. A college girl married. Spencer checked the dates. Howard and Kristina Kim had been married on the twenty-eighth day of November 1988. That would have made her sixteen years old! Still in high school. Wouldn't she have needed parental permission to be married so young? Even if she hadn't, why would a sixteen-year-old marry anyone? God, the questions. No answers, though.

Not yet, thought Spencer.

Howard was the man to talk to.

Spencer wondered if her dear friends knew she was married. He wondered if Jim Shaw, as he was making plans to make Kristina his political trophy bride, had known that his girl had already been married to someone else, and at sixteen.

Spencer got up to go, and then sat back down. There was still the matter of the letter, thrice folded.

He held it in his hands, looking at it the way he had looked at the black boots poking out of the snow. Spencer suspected that as soon as he opened the letter and read it, all pretenses that Kristina's death had just been an accident would have to stop. And despite himself, Spencer still entertained an idiotic hope that her death had been as unlucky as being hit by lightning.

He unfolded the piece of paper. He saw the date, he saw Kristina's signature, he saw the notary public stamp and the signature of Mr Carmichael above it. He read the six lines of text over and over.

I, Kristina Morgan Kim, hereby leave the funds in my checking and savings accounts at New Hampshire Savings Bank to be divided equally among my three friends, James Allbright Shaw, Constance Tobias, and Albert Maplethorpe. Aristotle goes with Jim. Safety-deposit box contents go to Albert. My grandmother's house on Lake Winnipesaukee goes to Howard Kim.

All Spencer could think of, as he slowly put Kristina's documents back into her box, was the three singles in her wallet he had found in a crushed Mustang near the reservoir the night she almost died.

Outside Mr Carmichael was waiting. There was only one question to ask him. They stared mutely at each other. There was nothing to say.

'How much?' asked Spencer, not wanting to know.

'Nine million three hundred and forty thousand dollars,' replied Mr Carmichael.

Spencer nodded, his mouth numbing. Nine million three hundred and forty thousand dollars. That's a motive, or close enough for government work. But ...

'Mr Carmichael, you just notarized the letter for her, didn't you?'

'Yes, last Tuesday.'

The day she died. The day after her brush with car death.