and Joe had locked the door when he left.

Because I was the only one in the entire universe who couldn't open my door without a key, I got the spare from my neighbor Mrs. Karwatt.

"Isn't this a nice day?" she asked. "It feels just like spring."

"I guess everything's been pretty quiet here this morning," I said. "No loud noises or strange men out here in the hall?"

"Not that I've noticed." She looked down at my gun. "What a nice Glock. My sister carries a Glock, and she just loves it. I was thinking about trading in my forty-five, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. My dead husband gave it to me for our first anniversary. Rest his soul."

"What a romantic."

"Of course, I could always use a second gun."

I nodded my head in agreement. "You can never have too many guns."

I said good-bye to Mrs. Karwatt and let myself into my apartment. I went room by room, checking closets, looking under the bed and behind the shower curtain to make sure I was alone. Morelli had been right—the apartment was a wreck, but not too many things looked destroyed. My visitors hadn't taken the time to slash upholstery or put their foot into the television screen.

I took a shower and got dressed in clean jeans and a T-shirt. I put some gel in my hair and worked with the big roller brush so I had a lot of loose curls and looked like a cross between Jersey Girl and Baywatch Bimbo. I felt dwarfed by the volume of hair, so I added extra mascara to my lashes to balance things out.

I spent some time straightening the apartment, but then I started to get nervous that I was a sitting duck. Not just for Habib and Mitchell, but for Ranger as well. It was past my nine o'clock deadline.

I called Morelli at the office.

"Did your grandmother ever come home?" he asked.

"Yes. And it wasn't pretty. I need to talk to you. How about meeting me for early lunch at Pino's?"

After I hung up with Morelli I called into the office to see if Lula knew anything about Morgan.

"He's fine," Lula said. "But I don't think those guys Habib and Mitchell are gonna get their Christmas bonus."

I called Dougie and told him I was going to keep the Cherokee for a little longer.

"Keep it forever," he said.

By the time I got to Pino's, Morelli was already at a table, working on breadsticks.

"I'll make a deal with you," I said, shrugging out of my denim jacket. "If you tell me what's going on between you and Ranger, I'll let you keep Bob."

"Oh boy," Morelli said. "How can I pass that up?"

"I have an idea about this Ramos business," I said. "But it's pretty far out. I've been thinking about it for three or four days now."

Morelli grinned. "Woman's intuition?"

I smiled, too, because as it's turned out, intuition is the big gun in my arsenal. I can't shoot, I can't run all that fast, and the only karate I know is from Bruce Lee movies. But I have good intuition. Truth is, most of the time I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but if I follow my instincts things usually work out okay. "How was Homer Ramos identified?" I asked Morelli. "Dental records?"

"He was identified by jewelry and circumstance. There were no dental records. They mysteriously disappeared."

"I've been thinking—maybe it wasn't Homer Ramos who got shot. No one in his family seems upset that he's dead. Even if a father thinks his son is rotten to the core, I find it hard to believe there's no emotion at his death. And then I went snooping and discovered someone was living in Hannibal's guest room. Someone the exact size of Homer Ramos. I think Homer was hiding out in Hannibal's town house, and then Macaroni got clipped and Homer ran."

Morelli paused while the waitress brought us our pizza. "This is what we know. Or at least, what we think we know. Homer was the bagman for Stolle's new drug operation. This whole thing sat real bad with the boys in north Jersey and New York, and people started choosing sides."

"Drug war."

"More than that. If a member of the Ramos family was going to deal drugs, then north Jersey was going to deal guns. And nobody was happy about any of this because it meant boundaries would have to be redrawn. Everyone was feeling nervous. So nervous that it became known a contract