Bagabond nodded dubiously. "Nine."

"Just don't worry. Maybe we can all have lunch. Depends on how much of a zoo downtown turns into. Maybe we can pick up take-out at a Korean deli and have a picnic on the Staten Island ferry." He leaned toward the woman and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. Before she could even halfway raise her hands to grasp his arms and reciprocate, he was gone. Out the door. Out of her perception.

"Damn it," she said. The cats looked up at her, confused but sympathetic. The raccoon hugged her ankle.

Jennifer Maloy slipped through the lower two floors of the apartment building like a ghost, disturbing nothing and no one, neither seen nor heard. She knew that the building had gone condo some time ago and what she wanted was on the uppermost of the three floors that were owned by a rich businessman with the unfortunate name of Kien Phuc. He was Vietnamese. He owned a string of restaurants and dry-cleaning establishments. At least that's what they'd said on the segment of New York Style she'd seen on PBS two weeks ago. Jennifer really enjoyed that show, which took its viewers on tours of the artsy and stylish homes of the city's upper class. It presented her with endless possibilities and tons of usefiil information.

She floated through the third floor, where Kien's servants lived. She had no idea what was on the fourth floor, since it had been ignored by the television cameras, so she bypassed it and head for Kien's living quarters on the top floor. He lived there alone in eight rooms of unrelieved luxury and opulence-decadence, almost. Jennifer had never realized there was that much money in laundrommas and Chinese restaurants.

It was dark on the fifth floor, and quiet. She avoided the bedroom with the circular, mirror-ceilinged bed (a little tacky, she'd thought when she'd seen it on TV), and the fabulous hand-painted silk screens. She bypassed the Western-style sitting room with its two-thousand-year-old bronze Buddha gazing benignly from a place of honor next to a fabulous electronic entertainment center complete with a wide-screen television,