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on a rainy night. The man had seemed so interested in the stained-glass doorways of the little out-of-the-way shops that lined the alley that Joe had wondered if he was planning to break in.
    Yet his body language had seemed wrong for a break-in, relaxed but not stealthy. Not watchful enough of the street behind him, not attentive enough to the two open ends of the alley.
    The stranger was such a small guy. His boneslooked as thin as bird bones. His skin was very white, his hair as sooty black as the crows that bedeviled Joe from their clumsy perches among the oak trees. The guy’s cheeks were thin and narrow, his pointed chin darkened by black stubble. His pale, child-size hands looked frail and weak. Moving suddenly, he had entered the alley.
    Wandering along the narrow brick walk, he glanced without interest at the empty paper plate in its wooden shelter; he looked into the jasmine vine but didn’t seem to see Joe, who was still rolled up like a frightened caterpillar. Joe thought the guy was maybe fifty or sixty, he could never be sure about human age. To interpret a person’s age from a set of facial features was for Joe a far more difficult science than reading their body language.
    The guy’s high forehead was feathered by wispy black hairs that lay thinly across his pearly scalp. Thicker hair grew on his thin arms and the backs of his small hands, as if the maker of all living creatures had somehow gotten his wires crossed and put most of the hair in the wrong places. Joe imagined that if this man were to shake hands with a normal-size person, one would hear his bones cracking. The man seemed unfinished. Moving on through the alley, he paused beside a wrought-iron bench. What did he find of such interest in Jolly’s alley that he remained standing there, looking? What was he looking at ? But then when a car came down the street, its tires swishing on the wet pavement, he headed out of the alley fast, as if he didn’t want to be seen there.
    Joe looked up at Lucinda, feeling cold. This had to be the same man the kit had been watching. Howmany child-size men were there? The population of Molena Point wasn’t all that big. If Kit had seen him tonight, what had she seen? Joe imagined too clearly the kit’s yellow eyes, round and huge with curiosity, with shock at Patty’s death—and perhaps with secret knowledge. If Kit had seen the killer, there was no telling where her rage and determination would lead her.
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    Earlier that night as the detectives and coroner worked over Patty’s body, photographing and videotaping, collecting fingerprints and lab samples, and then as Joe and Dulcie and their human friends searched for the kit, Kit moved alone through the windy night tracking Patty’s killer. Or, she started out to track him.
    Frightened and cold, filled with hatred of the man, she had followed the geranium scent as far as she could, hurrying along the icy concrete, her small body shivering with chill and grief, hurting so for Patty that all her senses seemed numbed. Besides geranium, she had picked up the stink of dirty socks and dog doo, all three mingling in the same gusts of air. As nasty as that was, it made her tracking faster; she galloped along following that wafting sourness, scanning the airy drafts like a small bird dog. His trail led her straight to Molena Point Little Theater.
    The movie crowd that had enjoyed Patty’s films was just dispersing. Had there been no announcement, then, of Patty’s terrible murder? Maybe not. The cops had had enough trouble keeping people out of the inn’s patio and away from the crime scene.Maybe they’d encouraged the theater personnel to say nothing, to simply continue with the filmed interviews that followed the movie. The programs were sometimes quite long. That was why Lucinda and Pedric had skipped this one after four nights’ running. Drawing back among the bushes at the edge of the sidewalk, Kit