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it?”
    “Her quarters. Nine years, I’d say.”
    Before McGarr’s marriage, over a dozen years earlier, Mary-Jo Stanton had thrown a large prenuptial party for Noreen, and McGarr had stayed on that very floor. It had been devoted to guest rooms, exclusively.
    “Why did she move up here?”
    “The simple explanation is that, as Mary-Jo got older, she became rather reclusive. She wished to be alone and closer to God—hence, the move to the top of the house.”
    Asking the priest to remain there, McGarr pulled theWalther from under his belt and mounted the steps on the wall side of the stairs.
    The wide paneled door had been left enough ajar that he could squeeze through, and he paused there in the doorway to listen for any noise within the dead woman’s living quarters.
    Or rather, her aerie, he decided, as he advanced into the apartment. Even at night, like this, natural light from the half-moon and stars overhead spilled into the hall because of skylights that had been placed regularly along the ridgeline of the gabled roof.
    A central hallway ran the length of the large building with—how many?—at least a dozen doors leading off into the rooms of the apartment. More` than a few had been opened, but only one, near the west end of the building, was lighted.
    Waiting at least a full minute to accustom his eyes to the darkness, McGarr slowly made his way toward the wedge of brilliance, pausing to listen before crossing in front of an open door. Oil paintings of religious scenes lined both walls.
    From the clutter on the floors of the open rooms, he could see that somebody had already conducted a hurried search of the premises, which appeared to be continuing in the lighted room, where something now hit the floor with a thud.
    With the Walther raised, McGarr was only a few feet away when he heard the muffled sound of quick feet on the carpet behind him. Swinging round, he caught a glimpse of somebody—a woman—rushing at him with something raised over her head that she now chopped down.
    The blow sent the Walther skidding into the baseboard, and McGarr’s wrist felt like it was broken. A second blow to the side of the head starred McGarr’s vision, and he crashed into a painting that fell from its perch.
    But before she could swing again—what was it? some sort of long heavy baton—McGarr’s left hand darted out toward the center of her face and he felt her nose snap under his knuckles.
    As she staggered back, McGarr took a quick step toward the woman and loaded his weight into a punch that he buried deep in her upper stomach. When she doubled up, he grabbed the back of her head and jerked her face down onto his rising knee. Her body snapped back, and she fell hard on the carpet with her arms splayed to either side.
    Spinning around, McGarr searched the shadows for the Walther. Not finding the gun immediately, he teased the Advantage Arms special-purpose pistol from the slit pocket inside his jacket before moving directly to the open door.
    He saw a study or a small library that had been tossed. The drawers of a desk had been pulled out and dumped on the carpet, and books from the shelves lay nearby, as did the contents of a row of filing cabinets.
    The central processing unit of the computer near the desk seemed to be missing; wires from keyboard, mouse, and monitor were dangling from the edge of a table in back of the desk. And it appeared that somebody had used a knife to cut a painting from a large, ornate frame with a gold nameplate that said, “F. José Maria Escrivá de Balaguer.”
    McGarr checked a small toilet off the room, andthen moved to another door that led to a deep closet filled with other rifled file cabinets. But whoever had been in the room when the woman attacked him from behind had fled.
    How? He glanced around. The large windows were closed, and it was a long fall to the ground. The person must have gone by him when he was reeling from the blow to the head, the one that had spangled his