"Please can you help me? Please? I ve just been murdered."

Detective Daniel Parks missed a step, sloshing coffee over

his hand. Fortunately, the coffee maker had turned itself off

an hour before. He wiped the lukewarm liquid onto his pants

and turned toward the front desk.

"I mean, I m not dead, but I might have I mean,

someone just tried to kill me."

The woman clutching the front counter, stammering her

story to Nancy Dennis, the department receptionist, did not

look like a crank. Except for her mahogany-colored hair,

which frizzed around her head like the mane of a Shih Tzu

having a bad-hair day, she reminded Daniel of a young

Audrey Hepburn--finely sculpted features, porcelain-

smooth skin, and dark, earnest eyes that hinted at mischief.

She was beautiful.

Daniel grimaced. He d have preferred a crank. Twenty

more minutes of paperwork and he d be through with this

long, miserable day, sitting at home watching the Oakland-

Chicago game while he reheated last night s spaghetti. He al-

ready knew the As had won, four to two. Everyone in the de-

partment knew he taped the As games, and they delighted in

spoiling the suspense for him. But he watched the games

anyway. The complex geometry of baseball untangled his

mind from the stress of his job.

This day had been even more stressful than most. Before

he d finished his first cup of coffee, he d been called to a do-

mestic dispute that had escalated to attempted homicide,

with the wife-beater being transported to the hospital with a