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isn't my job, Bishop. If you guys didn't call here every hour on the hour, I'd have more time to get your answers."
    "I've called twice." It was three times, but then he hadn't been on hold for fifteen minutes, either. "Do you have anything on the Tanner girl yet?"
    "I was just about to call you."
    "What were you going to tell me?"
    "Nothing you didn't already know. Strangulation. She fought. Plenty of skin under the nails, I sent it over to the lab. No recent intercourse. Toxicology report will be a couple of days, but from the look of the tissue I'd say she was clean."
    "She wasn't raped?"
    "No. The report—your report, in fact—indicates she was fully clothed when found."
    "She was found by her roommate. I thought she might have covered up the body."
    Someone rapped on Ray's desk, and he looked up to see his daughter Harriet in front of him. She smiled and set a bulging duffel bag on the floor. Then she wandered off to read the notices on the office bulletin board.
    "I'll have this faxed over," Cutler said. "Any suspects?"
    "Not yet. No witnesses, and the roommate who found her was the only close friend that hadn't left town for the summer. She was shook up, I'm going to try to get a statement from her in the morning."
    "Taking the night off? Another date?"
    "Dinner and laundry with my daughter. You got anything else for me, Bill?"
    "No. I'll call you when those lab reports come through."
    "Sure you will."
    Ray hung up and gathered his case papers into a manila folder before sliding the whole mess into a drawer.
    Harriet read the bulletin board with a look of concentration. She looked very like her mother—thin and long legged, with a high, broad forehead. They even had the same smile, an unexpected brightening of a normally stern face.
    "I hope you lock your doors when you're at home," he said, stepping up beside her.
    She sighed. "Dad, don't give me the speech. I work at a newspaper, remember? I heard all about it."
    "Everyone hears about it, all the time. They just think it can't happen to them. I want to make sure you're being careful."
    "You taught me that, Dad. Have a little faith in your parenting skills."
    "Did you know her?"
    "Now I do. Marsha Tanner, twenty-one years old, brown hair and eyes, lived at 414 West Johnson—"
    "Two blocks from your house."
    "I know. But it happened in the middle of the day, and from the report we got, there was no forced entry."
    "So?"
    "So it was someone she knew, and someone who doesn't care about getting caught." She kissed him on the cheek. "Let's forget about it for a while. I thought I'd make lasagna, but we'll need to pick up some stuff on the way home."
    "Lasagna's not going to make me stop worrying about you," Ray said.
    "No, but you won't be able to nag me while you're eating it."
    An hour and a half later—after Harriet had made him spend almost two hundred dollars on groceries he needed but never would have bought on his own, and after spending a half hour at the video place looking for a drama before settling on the Jackie Chan movie they both wanted to see anyway—Ray watched helplessly while his daughter took over his kitchen. The ideal man in his mind's eye was an accomplished cook, but apart from channel-surfing through a cooking show on cable now and then, Ray had never learned to do much more than grill steak. Harriet was putting away groceries, pulling out a pan and utensils, and assembling ingredients simultaneously.
    Ray had bought his house on the East Side of Madison about four years before. He rented out the upper floor to a trio of grad students and kept a laundry room in the basement. The apartment was meticulously clean, because he was hardly ever home.
    After a few minutes Harriet noticed him standing there. "Go ahead and sit down, Daddy."
    "I could put some of these clothes in the wash," he said, reaching for the bulging duffel she'd left inside the door.
    "No." She watched him warily until he set the bag down. "Just relax. I don't mind cooking, and