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excitement racing through him. At this hour, a phone call almost always meant trouble.
    â€œInspector Green?” It was a woman’s voice, curt and authoritative. “This is Sergeant McGrath of the Halifax Regional Police. Sorry to disturb you at home, but the detective down at your headquarters insisted you’d want to be informed.”
    Green bolted upright, wide awake and rooting on the side table for a pen. Years of hounding the duty desk had paid off. “Yes, Sergeant?”
    â€œGood news. I believe we’ve identified your Jane Doe.”

SEVEN
    The next morning Green waylaid Barbara Devine the moment she arrived at her office.
    â€œGood timing,” she said as she swept past him through her door, her plaid cloak trailing. She headed for her closet. “You were the first item on my agenda.”
    â€œI need to go to Halifax.”
    She whirled around, her cloak in hand. “Why?”
    â€œBecause Halifax has a tentative ID on our aqueduct murder, and it may be connected to a cold case of their own.”
    â€œSo get them to fax the file.”
    â€œIt’s several boxes. And I want to re-interview the witnesses myself, in light of our case.”
    She finally hung up her cloak, then paused to look at herself in the mirror. She patted her helmet of hair, denting it slightly, then moved behind her desk with exaggerated calm. Only then did she meet his gaze. “Well, you can’t. You’re needed here. Send Detective Gibbs, he’s the lead investigator.”
    â€œGibbs has to stay here to coordinate things at this end. Besides, he hasn’t the experience to handle this on his own, and I can’t spare two officers.”
    â€œThen get the Halifax detective to do the interviews for you.”
    â€œIt’s our case, Barbara.” He restrained his irritation with an effort. Like it or not, he needed her cooperation. He held outthe travel requisition. “I’ll be there and back in forty-eight hours, guaranteed, and I’ll keep in constant touch by phone and email.”
    He’d already packed and tentatively booked himself on the eleven a.m. flight to Halifax, but by the time he emerged from her office with her signature on the requisition, he had little more than an hour to make the plane. Barely time to brief Gibbs on the newest development in the case and to tell Frank Corelli that if his mystery woman phoned, he was to work through Bob Gibbs on the meeting.
    Only once he was up in the air, heading east over the farmland of Quebec, did he have a chance to reflect. The truth was, he should have given the trip to Gibbs. It was his case, his chance for glory, but the lure of an unsolved homicide had proved too strong for Green. He could hear the excitement in Sergeant McGrath’s voice when she talked about it. For her too, this new development, despite its tragic outcome for Patricia Ross, breathed new life into her case and gave her a chance to catch the bad guy who had foiled her for so long. She sounded like Green’s kind of detective. Driven, determined and exhilarated by the hunt.
    Her gruff tone on the phone had prepared him for a square-shouldered matron in a dour suit and sensible shoes. He was surprised when he emerged from the arrivals gate at Halifax airport to see a tall, slender woman wearing a tailored navy pant suit and holding a sign saying “Inspector Michael Green”. She had fine silver hair and deep-set blue eyes that widened with equal surprise as he approached. He knew his deceptively youthful air and bargain basement polyester confounded a lot of people, but he wondered what she’d expected an inspector from the nation’s capital to look like. A balding, fiftyish pencil pusher with a poker up his ass?
    He smiled broadly as he extended his hand, thinking this forty-eight hours was going to be even more interesting than he’d anticipated.
    She gave his hand a brief, formal shake. “I’ve