Nowadays she didn't cry so easily.

That was when the Big Apple began to rot for Kara. It never was the same after that. She found herself constantly looking over her shoulder. She became afraid to go out alone. And she never went near Central Park again.

Six months after the necklace-snatching she was on the train, outbound from Manhattan, never to return.

Until now.

She looked east along Thirty-Fourth. Bellevue Hospital Center was that way, on First Avenue and Thirtieth. The morgue was in its cellar.

She shut her eyes.

Why am I here? I don't want to be here. I don't have to be here.

Which was true. Her presence here today would not speed Kelly's body back to Pennsylvania by a single minute. But she had to do this, had to make this trip. For Kelly. Kara had left her sister here, and now the least she could do was see her home.

She ignored the schools of cabs cruising the area and decided to walk. It would put off having to see Kelly.

She jumped as a hand squeezed her left buttock through her coat. She whirled and glared into the press of people around her but couldn't tell who'd done it.

God, she hated New York.

▼

Detective Third Grade Rob Harris leaned against the wall in Bellevue's lobby, smoking a cigarette and listening to the couple over by the phones. Amazing. Somebody was in the middle of pulling a variation on the old Spanish handkerchief scam in the middle of a hospital. He'd become suspicious when he saw the pencil case, so he'd sidled over to listen.

"You got da money? Da fi' thousan'? Lemme see. Good! Here. Put it in this pencil case."

"Why?" the woman said. Sheathed in a shapeless old coat, she was chunky, fiftyish, with mocha skin.

"For safekeeping. No one wants a pencil case. An' you hoi' onto it. I don' wan' even touch it."