"What's wrong?" asked Marlene, five minutes after she arrived at the loft. Karp had come back to town, hopped a cab to the day care, picked up Lucy early, for a change, and was now draped across the red couch watching the news on TV. Karp looked up at her.

"Nothing," he lied.

"How was Philadelphia?"

"Okay. I got a nice lunch."

"What was the guy like?"

"Crane? A good guy. Reminded me a little of Garrahy, if Garrahy had been a WASP. A straight shooter. Joe Lerner was there too. He sends his regards. How was your day?"

Marlene sat in her rocker and threw off her shoes. "Hell on earth," she began, and launched into a familiar litany: witnesses not showing, witnesses fishtailing; the idiocy of social workers and psychologists; the cynical malfeasance of the police. People who prosecute sex crimes rarely have a nice day.

Karp had, of course, heard it all before, and was as a rule no more than passively sympathetic, when he did not offer irritating advice about what Marlene should do or should have done to solve various problems.

Now he was almost therapeutic-considerate, patient, interested. When she started to run down, he asked casually, "It might be nice to take a break, wouldn't it?"

"Oh, like a long weekend? Try me! Like where? Vermont?"

"Um, no, I meant a real break. Doing something else. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life with scumbags? I mean, you come home like this every day, bitching and complaining about the witnesses, the shrinks. Trying to put together child abuse cases, rapes… yeah, occasionally, very occasionally, there's a real bad guy, and maybe you can put him away for seven years and he gets out in three and a half, and meanwhile you got all the others. He-said, she-said; who the hell knows what happened in the back of the goddamn Buick?" He looked at her searchingly. "Don't you get tired of it? Wouldn't you like to do something else. I mean you paid your dues. I've paid my dues…"