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okay?”
    “You’re self-indulgent,” she said. “Too self-indulgent. It ought to bother your conscience.”
    “It does,” he said.
    She looked at him. “It probably does,” she said, shaking her head. She stood and ran her fingers through her hair as she leaned back in a twisting stretch, then relaxed and straightened her sweater, her loose, thick hair falling back around her face. With the wan winter light of late afternoon turning the rich hues of the library into muted colors, it seemed to Haydon that he was looking at an Italian baroque canvas in which Nina’s modern face and form had been set in anachronistic, but perfect, consonance with the seventeenth-century painting.
    “Be back in a little bit,” she said.
    Haydon watched her walk out of the library and listened to her footsteps as she crossed the marble hall to the dining room and into the kitchen. Within moments he heard her talking and then heard the liquid, Colombian lilt of Ramona’s voice. It had been a little over two years now since she had come to live with them as a favor to her uncle, a homicide detective Haydon knew in Bogota. A long-legged girl with an easy smile and the eyes of a woman twice her age, Ramona had been a freshman at Rice University then, and though the arrangement was supposed to have been only for one year while she got used to her new surroundings, Nina and Gabriela, and even Haydon, had grown so fond of her that they invited her to stay on. Listening to snatches of their conversation, a polyglot of English and Spanish in which they interchanged the words of the two languages with a careless freedom that Haydon never had achieved, he heard them discussing psychology and grade-point averages and prerequisites. Ramona was in the midst of midterm exams, and Nina, who was especially fond of the girl and treated her like a younger sister, was wanting to know how she was doing.
    Suddenly aware of a chill on his feet, Haydon wiggled his toes in his well-worn suede oxfords. He hated having cold feet, and in the old house with its limestone and marble floors it was something he constantly fought during the brief few months that constituted winter. The old shoes were favorites because they were just sloppy enough to allow him two pairs of socks. He got up from the refectory table and walked over to the fireplace, took several logs from the copper-lined bin beside the bookcases and stacked them on the grate. Taking a match off the limestone mantel, he lighted the gas jet under the grate and watched the blue flames from the jet lick up the rough sides of the logs from the bottom, watched the logs begin to burn until he smelled the first sweet wafts of the oak fire.

CHAPTER 3
    T he telephone in the library had been altered so that its ring was little more than a soft mutter. Haydon, stirred from his thoughts in front of the fireplace, walked over to his desk and picked up the receiver.
    “Hello.”
    “Stuart?”
    “Yes.”
    “This is Jim Fossler.”
    Haydon could have bet money on Fossler and not been afraid of losing a dime. He was dependable and methodical. Common sense was high on his personal list of virtues, a list he took seriously. Fossler was a lanky man of fifty-four with a quiet disposition, thinning black hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and slightly bulging eyes that didn’t miss anything they weren’t supposed to miss. Low key, but often impatient with the frequent wrongheaded thinking of a municipal bureaucracy, he took an early retirement when the second of his two sons graduated from college, and started his own investigation agency. His wife, Mari, a talkative and bright Filipino whom Fossler had married after the death of his first wife, while the boys were still in high school, quit her position with an accounting firm and used her keen eye for business to help Fossler build his agency. After five years, Fossler’s work was distinguished by his high success rate and his preference for keeping a low