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it down to the foot of the bed. She knows it will appear odd that he is in bed with his clothes on, knows a safer pretense would be to disrobe him before pulling the blanket up over his chest. But she has never seen her father naked in her lifetime, and the prospect of undressing him, the horrible thought of seeing his naked body cold and blue and shriveled and dead is so chilling that she takes an involuntary step backward, shaking her head, as if refusing even to consider such an act. The horror, she thinks. The horror. And pulls the blanket up over him, to just beneath his chin, hiding all but his face from view.
    She goes to the phone then, and dials 911, and calmly tells the operator that she’s just found her father dead in bed and asks her to please send someone.
    â€œThe girl was in shock,” Alexander said. “She didn’t know what she was doing.”
    â€œShe just told us she was planning insurance fraud,” Carella said.
    â€œNo, she didn’t say that at all. She doesn’t even know what the policy says. Is there really a suicide exclusion clause in that policy? Who knows? All she knows is that there’s a policy in her father’s safe deposit box. What kind of policy, in what amount, she doesn’t know. So how can you say she was planning insurance fraud?”
    â€œWell, gee, Counselor,” Carella said, “when someone tries to make a suicide look like a natural death …”
    â€œShe didn’t want the world to believe her father killed himself,” Alexander said.
    â€œBullshit,” Lieutenant Byrnes said.
    One of the female officers had taken Cynthia Keating down the hall to the ladies’ room. The three detectives were still sitting at the long table in the interrogation room. Alexander was standing now, facing them, pleading his case as if he were facing a jury. The detectives looked as if they might be playing poker, which perhaps they were. Carella had taken the lead here, questioning the Keating woman, eliciting from her what amounted to a confession to at least two crimes, and perhaps a third: Attempted Insurance Fraud. He looked a bit weary after almost twelve hours on the job. Meyer sat beside him like a man holding a royal flush in spades, wearing on his face a look of supreme confidence. The lady had told them all they needed to know. Alexander could do his little dance from here to Honduras, but he couldn’t tap his way out of this one. Sitting with cards like these, Meyer knew the lieutenant would tell them to book her on all three counts.
    â€œYou really want to send that girl to jail?” Alexander asked.
    Which was a good question.
    Did they?
    She may have been
contemplating
insurance fraud while committing certain criminal acts in order to establish a later claim, butuntil she actually submitted the claim, she hadn’t actually committed the fraud, had she? So was what she’d done really too terribly harmful to society? Did they really want to send her to prison with ladies who had cut up their babies and dropped them down the sewer? Did they really want to send a nice Calm’s Point housewife to a place where she’d be forced to perform sexual acts upon hardened female criminals who’d murdered liquor store owners or garage attendants? Was that what they
really
wanted?
    It was a good question.
    Until Carl Blaney called at eight-thirty that night to say he was just heading home after having completed the full autopsy on Andrew Henry Hale. He thought Carella might like to hear the results.
    â€œI was running a routine toxicological analysis on his hair,” Blaney said. “Washed, desiccated, and extracted hair samples with organic solvents. Injected the extracts into the spectrometer, and compared the results against known library samples.”
    â€œWhat’d you find?”
    â€œTetrahydrocannabinol.”
    â€œEnglish, Doc.”
    â€œMarijuana. Did you find any in the