"Agent Harbaugh, I presume?" she asked. "Right on time."
He was wearing a dark suit and tie, the FBI uniform. He was tall and older than she would have guessed from his voice on the phone. His neatly cut hair was white. His skin was weathered less from age than from the sun. He was definitely good looking.
"Come in," Stella said.
He did. She closed the door. There was no need for him to look at the paintings on the wall. He had looked at each one carefully the last time he was here.
"Would you like that Coke?" Stella asked.
"No, thanks. May I?" he asked, nodding at a chair.
"Please," said Stella.
He sat. She sat across from him.
He looked at her with a sad smile and sat back. He had come to kill her, but there was no hurry.
The shop was dark except for two low-wattage night-lights inside.
Flack knocked and looked at Aiden, who shifted the weight of her kit. Flack knocked again harder, much harder. The door rattled. If there were a sensitive alarm it would have gone off by now, but they heard nothing.
Flack didn't give up. More than two minutes passed before they could make out the figure of a man coming down the stairs inside the shop.
Arvin Bloom stopped for an instant at the bottom of the stairs, recognizing the police officers, and then, with what looked like a huge sigh that shook his body, he came to the door and opened it.
"We'd like to take another look at some of your furniture," said Aiden.
"Now?" said Bloom. "You are harassing me. Do you have a warrant?"
"No," said Flack, "but we can get one. Same deal as before. One of us gets the warrant. The other stays with you. How do you want it?"
"Come in," said Bloom, stepping aside. "I'd ask you to be fast if I thought it would do any good."
Flack and Aiden entered. Bloom closed the door behind them and made no move to turn on more light.
Flack stayed with Bloom and Aiden went into the darkness at the back of the shop. She was back in five minutes, saying, "The bloodwood cabinet. Where is it?"
"Sold, this afternoon," said Bloom. "I made a good sale. If I'd waited, I could have done better, but I wanted to get money back to the widow of Asher Glick, aleviah sholom."
"Who bought the bloodwood cabinet?" Aiden asked.
"A couple," said Bloom. "Maybe in their late fifties. Dressed like money. Handed me cash, $25,000. They didn't want a receipt and they had a van parked illegally in front of the shop. I helped them put the cabinet in the van."
"So you don't have a name or address for these customers?" asked Flack.
Bloom shook his head "no" and said, "It's not unusual."
"Where's the money?" asked Aiden.
"Got to the bank before it closed," he said. "You can check with the bank in the morning. I didn't kill Asher."
"We will," said Aiden, starting toward the door. Flack wanted to keep Bloom talking, but Aiden was now on the street, so Flack followed her, closing the door behind him.
"What's up?" he asked her.
They both looked through the window at Bloom, who looked back at them. Aiden and Flack moved toward their car.
"I picked up what looked like fresh latent prints on the wall the bloodwood cabinet was against. Two different sets."
"One Bloom's," said Flack. "The other the customer who bought the cabinet."
"Or the person who helped Bloom get it out of his shop," she said. "One more thing."
As they walked Aiden pulled a see-through packet out of her pocket and held it up for him to see.
"What is it?" asked Flack.
"Sawdust," said Aiden, smiling.
FBI Agent Harbaugh sat comfortably, legs crossed in the chair facing Stella.
"I like the paintings," he said, looking around the room. "That's an Andre Danton, isn't it?"
The painting he was looking at on the wall behind Stella was a scene of a narrow cobblestone street with houses seeming to bow toward the lone old woman on the sidewalk with a kerchief over her head and a basket of flowers under her arm.
"Yes," said Stella, without turning to look at the painting.
She examined Harbaugh again. He was lean, sat straight and was in obvious good shape, but she could see now from the age spots on his hands, the hair growing on his ears, that he was at least in his mid-sixties. His teeth were white, even and definitely his own. His face was weathered, the stereotyped image of a cowboy.
"Yes," he said, seeing the question in her eyes. "I'm a temporary retread, brought back as a consultant because this guy was mine until I retired. Nine people over a fifteen-year period. Texas, California, Illinois, Tampa. Stopped three years before my retirement."
Stella nodded, hands folded in her lap.
"Pattern," said Harbaugh. "Kills three. Gets his fix and goes underground till he has to start again."
"The crucifix? The victims? The words in Hebrew?" asked Stella.
Harbaugh shrugged and said, "All of his victims have been religious, not just Jewish. I think the last one in this cycle will be a Christian minister or a Catholic priest."
"Just a hunch?" asked Stella.
"Fits the previous pattern," he said.
"Is any of that true?" she asked.
For a few seconds they both sat silently and then Stella reached into the lacquered red box on the table next to her. She pulled out a small gun and a bottle and held them up for him to see.
The bottle was the antihistamine syrup from Stella's bathroom cabinet. The gun was her.38, and it was aimed at him.
"You were careful," she said, "but you moved a few things, not much, but enough for me to notice. A lot of my job is to notice small things."
"You think I moved your pill bottles?" he said.
"I know you did," she said.
He nodded, now understanding, and said, "Fingerprints."
"And two strands of hair in my bathroom drain where you poured the poison into my antihistamine bottle."
The man remained rigid, eyes on Stella.
"You're not and never were in the FBI," she said. "Your name is George Melvoy. You were born in Des Moines seventy-three years ago. You were a medic, an infantry corporal with MacArthur when he landed in Korea in 1950. After the war you went to Iowa State University, majored in pharmacy. You've had your own successful drugstore in Des Moines for more than forty years. Wife died six years ago. No children. I've got a photograph of you faxed from the Des Moines Register four hours ago."
Melvoy didn't move.
"You're losing hair," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"You know why?" asked Stella.
"Yes," he said.
Stella nodded and said, "Aluminum levels in your hair are high. The DNA we got from your hair shows three tiny abnormalities on some of your chromosomes, abnormalities that may be a sign of Alzheimer's."
" 'Tough old bird,' " he said, almost to himself. "And 'sharp.' That's what my customers say. In a year or so I'll be a grinning, helpless rag doll who doesn't recognize anyone. Well, I don't plan to be around when that starts happening. I'm glad you didn't use that medicine. It was a coward's way of killing."
"A capful wouldn't have killed me," she said. She had couriered the syrup over to the lab earlier, had them run an emergency analysis on the doctored syrup. "It might have made me sick. It would take the whole bottle to kill and even then it wouldn't be a certainty."
Melvoy shook his head and said, "Good thing I'm retired. I could probably kill a customer with a wrong prescription."
Stella put the bottle back in the open box on the table.
"Why didn't you arrest me when you found out?" he asked.
"I want to know why you want to kill me," she said.
"Don't anymore. I did when I walked through that door, but… Remember Matthew Heath?" he asked.
"Tall, thin, red hair, worked in the lab for a few months," she said. "He had a seizure. When he came back from the hospital, he was wearing thick glasses and found he couldn't look at the computer screen for more than a minute or two before he felt a seizure coming on. He just quit one day. I heard he was going to cooking school."