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that, Kathy began waving vigorously from the couch.
    “Kathy says hi,” Lee said.
    “Yeah, thanks—uh, listen, have you got a minute?”
    His friend sounded disturbed, preoccupied—from the tightness in his voice, Lee could tell this call was all business.
    “Sure, go ahead,” he said.
    “Okay. We got a really strange situation here, and if you’re free, I’d like to have your input on it.” “Go ahead—shoot.”
    Chuck Morton proceeded to tell him about exactly the same case Butts had laid out before him over dinner, and Lee pretended to listen. Or rather, he pretended he had never heard any of this before, which was hard, since Butts had covered it quite thoroughly. Still, he managed to ask some leading questions, and thought he pulled it off pretty well. The last thing he wanted was to get Butts in trouble for spilling the beans about a case—even if it was to Lee, Butts could still catch hell for it, and even more since Kathy was there, too.
    Strictly speaking, case details were to be spoken of only with the officers directly involved, lest something should leak out that would compromise the investigation. Of course, things were leaked all the time, and Lee suspected there was a fair amount of pillow talk that went unreported. He couldn’t imagine a marriage of any substance without a few slips here and there. He thought of Chuck and Susan Morton in bed together. He had once shared a bed with her, and now … he forced the image out of his head.
    “Okay,” he said when Chuck had finished. “You’re right—it does sound intriguing.”
    “It’s damn perplexing, that’s what it is,” Chuck grumbled. “And that’s why we need you on board. If you have time, that is.”
    “Sure,” said Lee. “You clear it with brass, and I’ll be in your office Monday morning.”
    “Great,” said Chuck, sounding relieved. Lee could hear a woman’s voice in the background, and Chuck called to her, “Just a second, all right? Okay, I will.” Then, into the receiver, he said, “Susan sends her love.”
    “Thanks,” Lee said, feeling his throat tighten. Whatever
    Susan Morton was sending, it wasn’t her love. Her lust, perhaps—maybe her desire, her need, which was bottomless—but hardly her love.
    When it came to men, Susan Morton was a piranha—she ate them up. Junior year at Princeton she set her sights on Lee, after having chewed her way through most of the underclassmen on the rugby, soccer, and rowing teams (she favored those with brains and brawn, though not too much of either—she wouldn’t touch football players or physics majors). Blessed with a body that needed little improvement on what nature had given her (or so she claimed), straight blond hair (Lee always suspected it was bleached), and bewitching green eyes, she only had to wiggle her pert little hips or flutter her expensive false eyelashes to have men drooling like doddering idiots.
    Lee fell for her act for a while—then, after a particularly nasty fight over which restaurant they were going to (for her, the more expensive the better), he decided he’d had enough. Without even pausing to wipe the smudged lipstick off her pretty little mouth, she turned around and seduced his roommate and best friend, Chuck Morton. If she felt awkward about the situation, she didn’t show it. In fact, Lee thought it was the ultimate power play for her:
he
might reject her, but look!—she could have the very next man she set her sights on.
    And she had him, all right. She tugged on every heartstring poor Chuck had, and since Susan gave him the false impression that she had left Lee—and not the other way around—he could hardly point out her flaws to his friend, who might think it was just sour grapes.
    They dated all throughout junior year, and when Chuck left Princeton early to support his mother after his father’s sudden death, they were married within a few months. And now there they were, with two children and a house in the tony suburbs of