LAS VEGAS — "This is about Las Vegas, isn't it?"

After nearly three years as a fugitive from Nevada murder charges, Margaret Rudin was hardly surprised when police officers burst into the small apartment in suburban Boston where she was living under an assumed name, a Massachusetts trooper testified Monday at her trial.

Sgt. Mark Lynch said the 57-year-old former socialite made the outburst Nov. 5, 1999, moments after he discovered her cowering in a darkened bathroom, her striking ash blond hair covered with a long black wig.

His quick, dramatic account, which included the story of a police officer impersonating a pizza delivery man, came on the 22nd day of testimony in a case whose snail's pace and repetitiveness has frustrated witnesses, lawyers and especially the judge.

"I've gotta keep this thing moving!" District Judge Joseph Bonaventure has shouted on several occasions as testimony dragged. An end appeared near on Monday, however, as prosecutors said they hoped to finish their case Tuesday afternoon. Rudin's lawyers will open their case, which they estimate will last a week, April 16.

When the jury finally begins deliberations, they will be mulling charges that could send Rudin to prison for life. Dubbed the Black Widow during her years on the lam, Rudin is accused of killing her fifth husband, Ron, a real estate developer, in 1994 to get at his $11 million fortune.

Her defense contends that her husband's shady business associates are behind his murder and say Rudin fled because she felt threatened, not because she was trying to escape justice.

Fear was the reason Rudin cited to confidante and prosecution witness Roma Scott Jones in 1997 when she announced she was fleeing the city, Jones testified Monday.

"She told me she was leaving Las Vegas. She indicated she was fearful," Jones said. While "trying to help a friend," Jones said, she agreed to retrieve and forward Rudin's mail. But later Jones learned of the murder indictment against Rudin and contacted a lawyer and later the FBI.

She cooperated with the agency — letting agents read Rudin's correspondence and Jones' letters to Rudin — and in exchange received immunity and a $5,000 reward from Ron Rudin's estate.

In fall 1999, Rudin mailed her seven boxes of personal belongings, Jones testified. Among handkerchiefs belonging to her slain husband, snapshots and gifts for her grandchildren was an address in Massachusetts, Jones said. She passed it on to FBI agents, and the search for Rudin focused on Revere, a town of 35,000 north of Boston.

At the behest of Las Vegas homicide detectives, Sgt. Lynch and a half dozen other officers went to Revere and staked out Rudin's apartment. As they waited for the right time to pounce, a Domino's Pizza truck pulled up and a delivery man walked toward her apartment. When he returned, police requisitioned his uniform and approached Rudin's apartment. A man staying with her quickly opened the door and a team of officers in raid gear ran into the apartment, guns drawn, Lynch said. They found Rudin hiding in the bathroom, and fake IDs and wigs in the apartment, he said.

A few days later he drove Rudin from jail to a court appearance, Lynch said. During the ride, she said that she had no money because she had given $50,000 inherited from her husband to a lawyer in case she was indicted. The money was a loss, she said, because she found out on her own that the grand jury had indicted her and fled town.

The jury also heard more testimony Monday from Sharon Cooper, a trustee of Rudin's estate and a beneficiary of his will. The real estate developer's will directed that his wife receive 60 percent of his assets with the rest distributed to three business associates he named as trustees. But Rudin, described by several witnesses as a paranoid man who carried a gun and was afraid of the dark, added a directive that if he died by violent means, "extraordinary" steps be taken to determine the perpetrator.

The police investigation focused on Margaret Rudin and, after a civil trial with the trustees, she agreed to a deal in which she received half a million dollars, just enough to cover her lawyers' fees. The trustees split the rest.

Rudin's lawyer, Michael Amador, attacked Cooper and the rest of the trustees for cutting off his client's living expenses just days after her husband went missing. Cooper said she was acting at the direction of the trust's lawyers, prompting Amador to snap, "The lawyers told you to starve her?"

"You're putting words in my mouth," Cooper shot back indignantly.

Amador maintains that the trustees framed Rudin for the murder so they would get his money. Cooper acknowledged that the $700,000 she received was a substantial increase to her $125,000 net worth in 1994, but she brushed off suggestions that the money was a motive to lie, saying she and her husband lived comfortable lives before the inheritance.

Near the end of his cross-examination, Amador, whose ill-preparation has frustrated the judge since before the trial began, infuriated Bonaventure once again. He asked Cooper if she was Ron Rudin's "alibi" for his third wife's suicide. Peggy Rudin shot herself in the head in the couple's bedroom in 1978. Cooper quickly answered no, and prosecutor Gary Guymon stood up and demanded the question be stricken.

"There's no good faith basis" for the question, he said.

An irate Bonaventure agreed, and after he sent the jury to lunch berated Amador and called his question a "cheap shot" and "trash."

"I'm not going to issue sanctions now, but certainly at the end of this trial, I'm going to look into sanctions," he said. "I'm building a record on this."