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o’clock, and Corinne was smothered with a black cloak; if the police wouldn’t put those two facts together, then I would. No more harebrained notions about tattooed party crashers, and no speculation about motives. Just solid reasoning that Lieutenant Graham couldn’t dismiss out of hand.

Zack wasn’t my first choice of a partner to tackle this puzzle—for all his good resolutions of the night before, I wondered if I’d been too accepting of his unpredictable temper. But I needed help, and he’d been at the party and knew a lot of the guests. And besides, I was still angry at Aaron. I’d be damned if I’d let him dictate who I spent time with.

So Zack and I combined our memories of the party to come up with the names of guests who wore black-caped costumes. Then I made a couple of dozen phone calls to those people and others, claiming to be checking on the return of their costumes and the level of satisfaction with my work as a party planner. Most people were happy to gossip about the behavior and attire of their fellow guests, and as they reported on who left early and who stayed late, our list began to shrink. I also called Elizabeth, and heard just what I hoped for: everyone was delighted with the rehearsal dinner, and her mother, Monica, would definitely be at the EMP sans Lars.

While I worked the phone, Zack kept busy over at Eddie’s desk, scoping out the wonderful world of weddings on the Internet and making notes about his Made in Heaven project. He took his work seriously, I was glad to see. At one point he discovered Dorothy Fenner’s elaborate web site, and raved about it until I asked him to stop. Dorothy, gracious and wealthy, was the premier bridal consultant in the Northwest, and I’d lost more than one potential client to her. We were on reasonably friendly terms, but I didn’t need to hear about yet another thing she did better than me.

“OK,” I announced. “Here’s our tally so far. Twelve people wore black capes or cloaks. If you subtract me and Aaron, that leaves ten. The magician was Harry from Classifieds, and he went home with his wife around nine-forty-five. So Harry is out. Ditto Batman, the product manager from Microsoft, who had another party to go to that night. That leaves eight people.

The Three Musketeers were delivery drivers for the Sentinel, and they left early to go drinking together in Pioneer Square. That leaves five. The DJ was a monk, but he was sitting out in public all night. Four.”

“What about breaks?” asked Zack. He shut down Eddie’s computer. “DJs take breaks.”

“True. Do you think he could have killed Mercedes and then gone back to playing music?” I shivered. It was too easy to make this into an intellectual puzzle and shy away from the thought of what one of these people actually did, there in the darkened corridor. “All right, Rick the Rocket stays on the list, at least until I get him on the phone and ask him some questions. Where was I?”

Zack pulled his chair closer to mine. He smelled like soap. Nice soap. “Five.”

“Right. The other four are Darth Vader, Dracula, the pregnant nun, and the Grim Reaper. What a crew.”

“Darth Vader was Doug Rawls,” Zack pointed out. “No way did he do it.”

“No, I don’t suppose he did.” Rawls, the paper’s copy editor, had cerebral palsy. He’d spent most of the night sitting quietly aside, his black helmet on his knee, enjoying the spectacle of his coworkers cavorting.

“OK, I’ll cross him off. We still don’t know who Dracula was, but one of the bartenders saw him just before midnight, so he stays on the list. The nun was Angela, and she was definitely at the party right till the end, because I saw her leaving. But I just can’t see her as a murderer. Can you?”

“She seems really nice,” said Zack doubtfully. “But—”

“Yeah, but.” But someone had killed Mercedes, and tumbled Corinne into the harbor. “All right, we’ll keep Angela. That just leaves—”

“Death,” said Zack.

“Death.” I drew a black box around the last name on my list. “We don’t know for sure that Soper was at the party after eleven, but we don’t know that he wasn’t, and he hasn’t returned my calls. Aaron thinks he did it because Mercedes knew about… knew something incriminating about him.” I remembered just in time that Aaron wanted the bribery issue kept secret. Not