"I showed them whatever they wanted to see. I answered their questions. I was there on Saturday and left early that evening, but I can't say I saw everything they did or what they took, nor were they finished when I left. Frankly, I don't even know how long they were in my house or how many times." I am touched by anger as I explain all this, and Berger senses it. "Christ, I didn't have a chipping hammer when Bray was murdered. I've been confused because I bought it the day her body was found, not the day she died. She was murdered the night before, her body found the next day." I am rambling now.

"What exactly is a chipping hammer used for?" Berger next asks. "And by the way, hate to tell you, but no matter when you say you bought the chipping hammer, Kay, there remains the minor problem that the one_the only one_found at your house happened to have Bray's blood on it."

"They're used for masonry. There's a lot of slatework in this area. And stonework."

"So probably used by roofers? And the theory is that Chandonne found a chipping hammer at the house he had broken into. The place under construction where he was staying?" Berger is relentless.

"I believe that's the theory," I reply.

"Your house is made of stone and has a slate roof," she says. "Did you closely supervise when it was being built? Because you seem the sort who would. A perfectionist."

"You're foolish not to supervise if you're building."

"I'm just wondering if you might have ever seen a chipping hammer while your house was being buiit. Maybe at the construction site or in a workman's tool belt?"

"Not that I recall. But I can't be sure.''

''And you never owned one prior to your shopping expedition at Pleasants Hardware on the night of December seventeenth_exactly one week ago and almost twenty-four hours after Bray was murdered?"

"Not before that night. No. I never owned one before then, not that I am aware of," I tell her.

"What time was it when you bought the chipping hammer?" Berger asks as I hear the deep thunder of Marino's truck parking in front of my house.

"Sometime around seven. I don't know exactly. Maybe between six-thirty and seven, that Friday night, the night of December seventeenth," I reply. I am not thinking clearly now. Berger is wearing me down and I can't imagine how any lie could stand up to her long. The problem is knowing what is a lie, and what isn't, and I am not convinced she believes me.

"And you went home right after the hardware store?" she goes on. "Tell me what you did the rest of the night."

The doorbell rings. I glance at the Aiphone on the wall in the great room and see Marino's face looming on the video screen. Berger has just asked the question. She has just tested the alchemy that I am sure Righter will use to turn my life to shit. She wants to know my alibi. She wants to know where I was at the exact time Bray was murdered on Thursday night. December sixteenth. "I'd just come in from Paris that morning," I reply. "Ran errands, got home around six P.M. Later that night, around ten, I drove to MCV to check on Jo_Lucy's former girlfriend, the one who got in the shooting with her in Miami. I wanted to see if I could help out in that situation because the parents were interfering." My doorbell rings again. "And I wanted to know where Lucy was, and Jo told me Lucy was at a baf in Greenwich Village." 1 start walking toward the door. Berger is staring at me. "In New York. Lucy was in New York. I carne home and called her. She was drunk." Marmo rings the bell again and pounds on the door. "So to answer your question, Ms. Berger, I have no alibi for where I was between six and maybe ten-thirty Thursday night because I was either in my home or in my car_alone, absolutely alone. No one saw me. No one talked to me. I have no witnesses to the fact that where I wasn 't between seven-thitty and ten-thirty was at Diane Bray's house beating her to death with a goddamn chipping hammer."

I open the door. I can feel Berger's eyes burning into my back. Marino looks as if he is about to fly apart. I can't tell if he is furious or scared to death. Maybe both. ''What the hell?" he asks, his eyes going from me to her. '"What the shit's going on?"

"I'm sorry for making you stand out in the cold," I tell Marino. "Please come in."

MARINO TOOK SO LONG GETTING HERE BECAUSE he had stopped by the property room at headquarters. I had asked him to pick up the stainless-steel key I found in the pocket of Mitch Barbosa's running shorts. Marino tells Berger and me that he rooted around for quite some time inside that small room behind wire mesh where Spacesaver shelves are crowded with bar-coded bags, some of which hold items the police took from my house last Saturday.

I have been in the property room before. I can picture it. Portable phones ring from inside those bags. Pagers go off as unwitting people keep trying to call associates who are either locked up or dead. There are also locked refrigerators for the storage of Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and any other evidence that might be perishable_such as the raw chicken I pounded with the chipping hammer.

"Now, why did you pound raw chicken with a chipping hammer?" Berger wants further clarification on this part of my rather odd story.

"To see if the injuries correlated to the ones on Bray's body," I reply.

"Well, the chicken's still inside the evidence refrigerator," Marino says. "Gotta say, you sure beat the hell out of it."

"Describe in detail exactly what you did to the chicken," Berger prods me, as if I am on the witness stand.

I face her and Marino inside my entrance hallway and explain that I placed raw chicken breasts on a cutting board and beat them with every side and edge of the chipping hammer to note the pattern of injuries. The wounds from both the blunt-bladed tip and the pointed tip were identical in configuration and measurement to those on Bray's body, particularly to the punched-out areas in her cartilage and skull, which are excellent for retaining the shape_or tool mark_of whatever penetrated them. Then I spread out a white pillowcase, I explain, i rolled the coiled handle of the chipping hammer in barbecue sauce. What kind of barbecue sauce? Berger wants to know, of course.

I recall it was Smokey Pig barbecue sauce that I had thinned to the consistency of blood, and then I pressed the sauce-coated handle against the cloth to see what that transfer pattern looked like. I got the same striations that were left in blood on Bray's mattress. The pillowcase with its barbecue sauce imprints, Marino says, were turned in to the DNA lab. I remark that this is a waste of time. We don't test for tomatoes. I am not trying to be funny but am sufficiently frustrated to emit a spark of sarcasm. The only result the DNA lab will get from the pillowcase, I promise, is not human. Marino is pacing the floor.

I am screwed, he says, because the chipping hammer I bought and did all these tests with is gone. He couldn't find it. He looked everywhere for it. It isn't listed in the evidence computer. It clearly was never turned in to the evidence room, nor was it picked up by forensic technicians and receipted to the labs. It is gone. Gone. And I have no receipt. By now I am sure of this.

"I told you from my car phone that I had bought it," I remind him.

"Yeah," he says. He remembers my calling him from my car after I left Pleasants Hardware store, sometime between six-thirty and seven. I told him I believed a chipping hammer was what had been used on Bray. I said I had bought one. But, he points out, that doesn't mean I didn't buy such a tool after Bray's murder to fabricate an alibi. "You know, to make it look like you didn't own one or even know what she was killed with until after the fact."