"But you're sure it was her."

"Yeah. Yeah, we unwrapped enough to, uh, to be sure."

"I have to ask all this."

"I understand."

"The point is there's no corpse left, is that correct?"

He nodded. "Just ashes. Ashes and bone chips, is what it amounts to. You think cremation and you think you'll wind up with nothing but powdery ash, like what comes out of a furnace, but that's not how it works. There's an auxiliary unit he's got for pulverizing the bone segments so it's less obvious what you've got." He raised his eyes to meet mine. "When I was in high school I worked afternoons at Lou's place. I wasn't going to mention his name. Fuck it, what difference does it make? My father wanted me to become a doctor, he thought this would be good training. I don't know if it was or not, but I was familiar with the place, the equipment."

"Does your cousin know why you wanted to use his place?"

"People know what they want to know. He couldn't have figured I wanted to slip in there at night and give myself a rabies shot. We were there all night. The unit he has is pet size, we had to do several loads and let the unit cool down in between. Jesus, it's killing me to talk about it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Did Lou know I used the cooker? I figure he had to know. He has to have a pretty good idea what kind of business I'm in. He probably figures I killed a competitor and wanted to get rid of the evidence. People see all this shit on television and they think that's how the world works."

"And he didn't object?"

"He's family. He knew it was urgent and he knew it wasn't something we should talk about. And I gave him some money. He didn't want to take it, but the guy's got two kids in college so how can he not take it? It wasn't that much."

"How much?"

"Two grand. That's pretty low-budget for a funeral, isn't it? I mean you can spend more than that on a casket." He shook his head. "I got the ashes in a tin can in the safe downstairs. I don't know what to do with them. No idea what she would have wanted. We never discussed it. Jesus, she was twenty-four years old. Nine years younger than me, nine years less a month. We were married two years."

"No children."

"No. We were gonna wait one more year and then- oh, Jesus, this is terrible. It bother you if I have a drink?"

"No."

"Petey says the same. Fuck it, I'm not having one. I had one pop Thursday afternoon after I talked on the phone with them and I haven't had anything since. I get the urge and I just push it away. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because I want to feel this. You think I did the wrong thing? Taking her to Lou's place, cremating her. You think that was wrong?"

"I think it was unlawful."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't too worried about that aspect of it."

"I know you weren't. You were just trying to do what was decent. But in the process you destroyed evidence. Dead bodies hold a great deal of information for someone who knows what to look for. When you reduce a body to ashes and bone chips, all that information is lost."

"Does it matter?"

"It might be helpful to know how she died."

"I don't care how. All I want to know is who."

"One might lead to the other."

"So you think I did the wrong thing. Jesus, I couldn't call the cops, hand them a sack full of cuts of meat, say, 'This is my wife, take good care of her.' I never call the cops, I'm in a business where you don't, but if I had opened the trunk of the Tempo and she was there in one piece, dead but intact, maybe, maybe, I'd have reported it. But this way-"

"I understand."

"But you think I did the wrong thing."

"You did what you had to do," Peter said.

Isn't that what everybody always does? I said, "I don't know a lot about right and wrong. I probably would have done the same thing, if I'd had a cousin with a crematorium in his back room. But what I would have done is beside the point. You did what you did. The question is, where do you go from here?"

"Where?"

"That's the question."

IT wasn't the only question. I asked a great many questions, and I asked most of them more than once. I took them both back and forth over their story, and I wrote down a lot of notes in my notebook. It began to look as though the segmented remains of Francine Khoury constituted the only piece of tangible evidence in the entire affair, and they had gone up in smoke.

When I finally closed my notebook the two Khoury brothers sat waiting for a word from me. "On the face of it," I said, "they look pretty safe. They made their play and carried it off without giving you a clue who they are. If they left tracks anywhere, they haven't shown up yet. It's possible someone at the supermarket or the place on Atlantic Avenue recognized one of them or caught a license number, and it's worth an intensive investigation to try to turn up such a witness, but he's no more than hypothetical at this point. The odds are that there won't be a witness, or that what he saw won't lead anywhere."

"You're saying we got no chance."

"No," I said. "That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying an investigation has to do something besides work with the clues they left behind. One starting point lies in the fact that they got away with almost half a million dollars. There's two things they could do, and either one could spotlight them."

Kenan thought about it. "Spend it's one of them," he said. "What's the other?"

"Talk about it. Crooks talk all the time, especially when they've got something to brag about, and sometimes they talk to people who'll happily sell them out. The trick is to get the word out so those people know who the buyer is."

"You've got an idea how to do that?"

"I've got a lot of ideas," I admitted. "Earlier you wanted to know to what extent I was still a cop. I don't know, but I still approach this kind of problem the way I did when I carried a badge, turning it this way and that until I can get some kind of grip on it. In a case like this one I can immediately see several different lines of investigation to pursue. There's every chance in the world that none of them will lead anywhere, but they're still the approaches that ought to be tried."

"So you want to give it a shot?"

I looked down at my notebook. I said, "Well, I have two problems. The first one I think I mentioned to Pete on the phone. I'm supposed to go to Ireland the end of the week."

"On business?"

"Pleasure. I just made the arrangements this morning."

"You could cancel."

"I could."

"You lose any money canceling, your fee from me'd make that up to you. What's the other problem?"

"The other problem's what use you'll make of whatever I might turn up."

"Well, you know the answer to that."

I nodded. "That's the problem."

"Because you can't make a case against them, prosecute them for kidnapping and homicide. There's no evidence of any crime committed, there's just a woman who disappeared."

"That's right."

"So you must know what I want, what the point of all this is. You want me to say it?"

"You might as well."

"I want those fuckers dead. I want to be there, I want to do it, I want to see them die." He said this calmly, levelly, in a voice with no emotion in it. "That's what I want," he said. "Right now I want it so bad I don't want anything else. I can't imagine ever wanting anything else. That about what you figured?"

"Just about."

"People who'd do something like this, take an innocent woman and turn her into cutlets, does it bother you what happens to them?"

I thought about it, but not for very long. "No," I said.

"We'll do what has to be done, me and my brother. You won't have a part of that."

"In other words I'd just be sentencing them to death."

He shook his head. "They sentenced themselves," he said. "By what they did. You're just helping play out the hand. What do you say?"

I hesitated.

He said, "You've got another problem, don't you? My profession."

"It's a factor," I said.

"That line about selling crack to schoolchildren. I don't, uh, set up shop in the schoolyard."

"I didn't figure you did."

"Properly speaking, I'm not a dealer. I'm what they call a trafficker. You understand the distinction?"

"Sure," I said. "You're the big fish that manages to stay out of the nets."

He laughed. "I don't know that I'm big particularly. In certain respects the middle-level distributors are the biggest, do the most volume. I deal in weight, meaning I either bring product in in quantity or I buy it from the person who brings it in and turn it over to someone who sells smaller amounts. My customer probably does more business than I do because he's buying and selling all the time, where I may only do two or three deals a year."

"But you make out all right."

"I make out. It's hazardous, you've got the law to worry about and you've got people looking to rip you off. Where the risks are high the rewards are generally high also. And the business is there. People want the product."

"By product you mean cocaine."

"Actually I don't do much with coke. Most of my business is heroin. Some hash, but mostly heroin the past couple of years. Look, I'll tell you right out, I'm not gonna apologize for it. People take it, they get hooked, they rob their mother's purse, they break into houses, they OD and die with needles in their arms, they share needles and get AIDS. I know the whole story. There's people who make guns, people who distill liquor, people who grow tobacco. How many people a year die of liquor and tobacco compared to the number die from drugs?"

"Alcohol and tobacco are legal."

"What difference does that make?"

"It makes some kind of difference. I'm not sure how much."

"Maybe. I don't see it myself. Either case, the product is dirty. It kills people, or it's the substance they use to kill themselves or each other. One thing in my favor, I don't advertise what I sell, I don't have lobbyists in Congress, I don't hire PR people to tell the public the shit I sell is good for them. The day people stop wanting drugs is the day I find something else to buy and sell, and I won't whine about it and look for the government to give me a federal subsidy, either."

Peter said, "It's still not lollipops you're selling, babe."

"No, it's not. The product's dirty. I never said it wasn't. But what I do I do clean. I don't screw people, I don't kill people, I deal fair and I'm careful who I deal with. That's why I'm alive and that's why I'm not in jail."

"Have you ever been?"

"No. I've never been arrested. So if that's a consideration, how it would look, you working for a known dope dealer-"

"That's not a consideration."

"Well, from an official standpoint, I'm not a known dealer. I won't say there's nobody in the Narcotics Squad or the DEA who knows who I am, but I don't have a record. I've never to my knowledge been the official subject of an investigation. My house isn't bugged and my phone's not tapped. I'd know if it was, I told you about that."