"In other words if I don't, I'd be hindering it?"

"I didn't say that." He shook his head.

She started towards the door.

"Yet." He smiled.

"Remember why I got out of this field?"

"That happened five years ago," he said after a pause.

"I've quit this kind of work, I do corporate investigation," she said. "Why can't you ever look at my hand? If you don't answer me I won't consider working with you." She gripped the edge of his desk, her knuckles white.

His voice sounded tired. "Because if I look at that burn mark, everything comes back. I see your bloody…" He covered his eyes, shaking his head.

"You see Papa burning on the cobblestones, thrown by the blast against the pillar in Place Vendôme. Our surveillance van, a smoking rubble from the bomb. And me screaming, running in circles, waving my hand, still gripping the molten door handle."

She stopped. Several plainclothes types hurriedly put their heads back behind their computers. She recognized some of their faces.

"I'm sorry, Morbier." She nudged the base of his chair with her foot. "This doesn't usually happen. Nightmares generally take care of it."

"There's one remedy for shell shock," he said after a while. "Climb into the trenches again."

But he didn't know Soli Hecht had already thrown her back in.

AIMÉE WALKED along the Seine, speculating about the photo fragments. The sunlight glittered feebly off the water and a fisherman's nearby bait bucket stank ripely of sardines.

She trudged over the grooves worn in the stone staircase to her dark, cold apartment, unable to get Lili Stein's corpse out of her mind.

She'd inherited the apartment on the Ile St. Louis from her grandfather. This seven-block island in the middle of the Seine rarely, if ever, had seen real estate change hands during the last century. Drafty, damp, and unheated, her seventeenth century hôtel particulier had been the mansion of the Duc de Guise. He'd been assassinated by Henri III at the royal chateau in Blois, but she'd forgotten why.