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she said those words aloud, she felt a worm of doubt wiggling within. Why would a Christian teenager possess so many books on Islam? Did Travis have some political agenda he wasn’t revealing to her or to his mother?
    “Don’t jump to conclusions, Ms. Manfreda. I never said that’s all we had. Mr. Heaton has been linked to the crime with a piece of solid forensic evidence. A bite mark in an apple.”
    “A bite mark in an apple proves my client is a terrorist? Was it a McIntosh or a Red Delicious? Am I missing something here?”
    “We have an eyewitness, Mr. Park Sung Ho, counterman at the Happy Garden all-night market on Washington Street. Mr. Heaton and his friends went in and bought sodas and snacks. They gave Mr. Park a hard time, tossing money back and forth, trying to confuse him with the change. He watched them carefully as they left and saw Mr. Heaton take an apple from a display by the door. By the time Mr. Park got out from behind the counter to chase them, the boys were down at the corner by the mailbox. He saw the one with the apple take a bite out of it and toss it in the gutter. Then the kid crouched down, placed something under the mailbox, and they all ran. A few seconds later, the mailbox blew up.”
    Manny kept her face impassive, but inside she was seething. Travis had conveniently forgotten to mention this forbidden fruit. “And you recovered the apple.”
    “We did. And we intend to prove it has Mr. Heaton’s bite mark in it.”
    Manny was puzzled. Why would they be focusing on the bite pattern? Anything that a person had bitten into would retain traces of his saliva, which could be tested for DNA. A DNA match was infallible, while the forensics of bite comparisons was wildly speculative. She began to feel a flicker of hope.
    “You’re testing the apple for my client’s DNA, of course?”
    Lisnek looked down at his scuffed penny loafers. “Uh … it’s been sent out.”
    Manny detected something squirrelly in his response. They’d probably mishandled the evidence. She didn’t let the smile she felt inside touch her lips. This chump had nothing, and he knew it.
    Manny forced Lisnek to meet her gaze and held it for a long moment. Lisnek was the first to look away.
    As she left the U.S. attorney’s office, Manny turned to ask one more question. “So where is the other kid you brought in? Who’s representing him?”
    “Paco Sandoval has been released.”
    “Released? How come he gets out and my client’s still here?”
    “Because Paco Sandoval is the son of Enrique Sandoval, ambassador to the UN for Argentina. He has diplomatic immunity.”

“Shall we begin?”
    Jake Rosen; Todd Galvin; their diener , a Croatian émigré named Dragon; and Detective Pasquarelli stood around the autopsy table at 8:01 a.m. Before them lay the fully clothed body of Amanda Hogaarth.
    Todd and Jake performed the first routine tasks: Using an alternate light source, they searched for traces of microscopic evidence on Amanda Hogaarth’s clothing. Finding nothing, they photographed her in her clothing, front and back. Jake then carefully removed each of the garments and photographed them completely, even inside out.
    Even without her tweed skirt and sensible undergarments, Ms. Hogaarth managed to project an air of quiet dignity. Jake was sure this woman would have been very surprised to know she had ended up here. The other seven autopsy tables held drunks and drug addicts and street punks. They had led hard, violent lives, so it was no surprise that they had met hard, violent ends. Amanda Hogaarth seemed to have led a blameless, soft, rather dull life. Yet she, too, had wound up under the probing tools of the medical examiner.
    Then Jake stepped up to examine the victim’s skin closely. Her body was covered with the fine wrinkles, freckles, and age spots that plagued the fair-skinned, but there were no wounds. On her left wrist, Jake noted four evenly spaced bruises. He pointed them out to Todd and