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He found out soon enough that cons like to brag about crimes they'd never been charged for.

The speedboat he's using overturns—he's probably had a little too much vino to manipulate such a craft in the stormy waters, a downpour having started an hour earlier—and damned if he doesn't wash up like a castaway in an old silent movie.

Two blocks from my motel, I saw the caddy again. Cruising slow. Keeping me in sight.

But why? She'd hired me to do a job. Didn't she trust me?

When I got to my motel room, I went immediately to the window and peered through a slit in the dark and dusty drapes.

They were just pulling into a parking place. I watched as they got out and walked down the street to a restaurant. They were both dressed in jeans and sweaters. She wore high heels with her jeans, this year's fashion. She had a slightly wide but very friendly sort of ass. They come in all temperaments, asses do, tight little dour ones, big friendly happy ones, perfectly shaped ones that are nice only after you click your heels and salute, and weary suburban ones that just want to be rubbed a little with a mixture of fondness and Eros.

I went over and laid on the bed and looked at the patterns the water stains had made on ceiling and wall. What were they doing in town, anyway?

The person in the next room decided to take a shower. The wall behind me roared and thrummed with water.

I turned on the news. Dan Rather looked as psychotic as ever, just about ready, at last it seemed, to pick up a gun and shoot everybody on the set of Nightly News. All the time smiling that Norman Bates grin of his.

When I woke up, it was dark.
M.A.S.H.
was on. I'd clickered the volume down to 0 so it was a silent movie.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do, given the fact that Nora and Vic were following me around.

I got up, washed my face with a washcloth that smelled musty, went over to the phone and dialed Des Moines information.

I was surprised that Richard Tolliver had a listed number.

I called it. A maid answered. "I'm sorry, Mr. Tolliver has gone out for dinner."

"I see. Would you ask him to call me later tonight?"

A suspicious hesitation. "May I ask what this is about?"

"Family matter. His family."

"I see." Pause again. "Do you know Mr. Tolliver?"

"No, I don't, ma'am."

"I see. All right, give me your telephone number, then."

I gave her the number. "Room 115."

"Room?"

"It's a motel."

"I see." Prim disapproval. I'm sure she had a picture of me naked and rolling around on the bed with five or six equally naked ladies, all of us wearing tattoos and lamp shades.

"It's important," I said.

"I'll see that he gets the message, sir. That's all I can do."

"Thank you."

"Yes, sir."

Click.

I went in and washed up and changed into a blue button-down shirt that the cleaners had starched to razor-sharpness, dark slacks, dark ribbed cotton socks, the ones with the gold toes just as in my college days, and a red windbreaker in honor of James Dean. Sometime this year he'd be having a birthday. It seemed the least I could do.

I went over and peeked out the window. The Caddy was gone. It probably wasn't much fun, killing time while the guy you were following caught a nap in his shabby little motel room.

I checked my watch.

Still had an hour to go before dinner.

I decided to make myself useful.

I drove to within a block of the McNally house, took my little black bag from the backseat and then worked my way down an alley so that I could watch the place from a relatively safe position.

Lights shone. I figured I would have to come back later, or even possibly tomorrow.

But then the downstairs lights clicked off.

Eve McNally came out the back door, moving quickly down the narrow walk next to clotheslines still hung with white sheets that smelled clean in the starry dusk.

I crouched behind the garbage cans and peeked through a dusty garage window.

She got into a new Ford sedan, worked the garage door gizmo, and then drove away.

I heard her tires crunch gravel as they headed west toward the mouth of the alley.

A few minutes later, I stood in her small but well-organized kitchen that smelled pleasantly of spices.

And stared into the sweet earnest face of her dog Sara. A little growl rattled in her throat and twice she let out a bark but when I got down on my haunches and put my hand out, she trotted over and I started petting her head. I almost hated to take advantage of her good nature this way. For the rest of the time, Sara followed me around, tail wagging.

The first floor was a living room, large bath, sewing room and the kitchen. Upstairs were three good-sized bedrooms, a room with a worn couch and an old Philco black-and-white portable 17" TV and a bookcase that leaned dangerously leftward. It was filled with battered paperbacks running to romance novels, which I've always considered to be science fiction for women. My otherwise-educated, beautiful and most-sophisticated wife had read them. I found her taste just as baffling as she found mine for private-detective novels. "They're just as much make-believe as my romance novels are," she'd always said. And she was probably right.

Nothing is what I found. Nothing at all useful, not in any way, nothing that told me why Eve McNally looked so depressed and anxious this afternoon, or burst into tears as soon as she'd closed the door behind me.

The woman had real problems but what were they?

I decided to try the basement, a large, dark, dusty room that would have made Bela Lugosi feel right at home.

The washer and drier were almost comically white and comically new against the backdrop of cobwebs and cracked plaster and rat droppings and empty battered coal bin of this basement.

There were several cardboard boxes filled with cobwebby mason jars of homemade preserves. I lifted each jar and looked under it. Nothing.

Thanks to all the dust in the air, my allergies kicked in. I spent a few minutes sneezing, blowing my nose and coughing hard enough to give myself a vague headache. I groped in my pocket for the antihistamine tablets I always carry, my allergies being what they are and all, and after taking two, and giving my flashlight a little nudge so that its waning batteries temporarily fed more juice to the bulb, I went back to my search.

There were drawers to be looked into, boxes to be opened and inspected, and an old metal desk that probably dated back to the forties to be gone through.

It was in the desk—bottom-right drawer if you really care—that I found the small white box, and in the small white box that I found the finger.

At first I thought it was fake. I have a nephew who is at that age when whoopee cushions and joy buzzers bedazzle the young mind. He once showed me a finger like this. As now, I started when I saw it. The difference was, it took me only a half-second to realize that Jamie's was a fraud. This one, however, was real. Fake ones don't come with cuts and bruises and the long red nail fiercely broken. Before this finger had been chopped off just below the lower joint, the woman to whom it belonged had put up a violent struggle.

The finger felt obscene in my hand, cold and inhuman.

I shone my light into the box and found the note. I used the edge of my handkerchief to extract the note—there might well be fingerprints on it—and set it down on the desk.

Neatly typed in the center was:

This is what happens to your daughter if I don't get those tapes back. And if you go to the police, I'll kill her.

There was no signature.

I replaced note and finger in box, put box back in desk, and was just turning toward the stairs when I heard a wooden step creak.

I shone my light up there.

Her eyes glowed like a cat's.

Eve McNally, she was. And she held a carbine. And it was pointed directly at me.

"What do you think you're doing?" she said.

"Trying to help you."

"Right," she said. "Trying to help me."

"I found the finger."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about, and I don't care. I just want you out of my house."

She told me much more in that last sentence than she meant to.

Most homeowners finding a burglar in their place would immediately phone for the police.

But it was obvious that Eve McNally wanted no police in on this at all.

I felt sorry for her. She looked alone and scared even with that carbine in her hand. She needed a friend. She really did.

Then there was the matter of the finger.

"You just come up the steps very slowly."

She waved the carbine at me.

I didn't move. "Mrs. McNally, you really don't know about the finger?"

Her fear was now replaced by confusion. "Finger? What're you talking about?"

"Have you been down in the basement lately?"

"No."

"Let me just walk over and get something from the desk. Then I'll bring it back to you."

She sighed a ragged sigh. "This is some kind of trick. I know it is."

"No trick. There's just something I want you to see."

I turned and started walking to the desk. She didn't shoot me in the back. That was definitely a good sign.

Lower drawer, right hand, small white box. You couldn't miss it. The one with the human finger inside.

I retrieved it and carried it back to her like a well-trained family dog.

When I got three feet from the barrel of her carbine, she said, "Hand it over, slow."

She wasn't expecting it, so it really wasn't too difficult: grabbing the barrel of her gun two inches or so down from the muzzle and giving it a jerk that snatched the carbine from her hands and brought her tumbling down the stairs.

I put the gun down, went over and helped her up.

She was crying, hard, bitter crying, and I felt sorry for her again, so I brought her close to me and held her and just let her cry for a time, and then when her tears seemed to subside I helped her upstairs and put on a fresh pot of Mr. Coffee in the kitchen and then we sat down at the Formica-covered table and I pushed the small white box over to her.

While she was looking at it, I went into the bathroom and got her three Bayer aspirin, and then in the kitchen again I got her a cool glass of water.

The finger lay on the table, out of its box, ugly and terrifying.

"I knew he was involved in something like this."

"Who?" I said.

She looked up. "You know who."

"Your husband?"

"Yes."

She'd been wearing blue eyeliner, smudged now from her crying, and her cheeks were puffy and pink.

"The finger doesn't look familiar?"

"No," she said. "Thank God. I was afraid—" Then she stopped herself.

"Where's your daughter?" I said. "I know your husband's missing but where's your daughter?"

She changed the subject deftly, nodding her smooth, attractive face to the counter. "Coffee's ready."

I brought us two cups of coffee and sat down across the table from her.

"Your husband's in some kind of trouble with somebody, and now somebody has your daughter. Isn't that right?"

She stared at the finger some more. "You read the note. You know what it says."

"You didn't see the finger until I showed it to you?"

"No."

"And you don't know who your husband might be in trouble with?"

"No."

"Did he tell you he was in trouble?"

"No."

"That note makes it sound as if he might be blackmailing somebody. Is that something your husband might do?"

She hesitated. "I— He has a dark side, I guess you could say. He only ever really wanted one thing in life and that was to own his own business. He just had a thing about that. Being his own boss and all, I guess. But we lost it two years ago—it was just like losing one of his children for him—and he's never been quite right since."

"Do you think he could blackmail somebody?"

"I'd have to say yes."

"How many days has he been gone?"

"Why was the finger in the basement?"

"He was hiding it from you. He didn't want you to know he was in trouble. Now, how many days has he been gone?"

"Two."

"How many days has your daughter been gone?"

The pause again. "Who are you? You haven't told me yet."

"A friend."

She smiled sadly. "That's what the Lone Ranger used to say when people asked him who he was."

I smiled back. "Well, unfortunately, I'm not the Lone Ranger."

"If you go to the police—"

"I won't go to the police."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

And her speaking of the police made me look up at the wall clock and when I looked at the wall clock, I saw that I was twenty minutes late for my dinner appointment with Jane Avery.

"She didn't come home from school the other day."

"And you haven't heard from anybody about her?"

"No."

I looked down at the finger.

"We'll have to assume that he's got her," I said quietly.

"He?"

"The man your husband's been blackmailing."

She lost it again, put her head down, started sobbing so hard I was afraid she was going to vomit.

I went over and got down on one knee and stroked her dark hair and rubbed her back gently and told her over and over that these things usually turned out fine and that if we just had a little patience and a little time . . . But that wasn't true, of course. At the very least we were dealing with a person who could chop off another person's finger. I had no doubt that we were also dealing with the same man Nora Conners had hired me to find, the same man that Mike Peary had profiled in his letter to Nora. The same man who had murdered all those girls.

She sat up, dried her eyes with the backs of her small white hands, and sniffled. "I really appreciate you being here."

I stood up. "I've got to go, but I'll check back with you tonight."

She nodded.

I went over to the back door, opened it and said, "If the man should call you, write down everything he says. Every single word—all right?"

"Yes."

"And if you should hear any noises in the background, anything at all, write down what those were, too."

"I will." She sniffled. "I really appreciate this."

I nodded and left.