Cold Hit
by
|Linda Fairstein


A Warner Book First published in the United States in 1999 by
Scribner First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Little, Brown and
Company This edition published by Warner Books in 2000 Reprinted 2000

Copyright 1999 by Linda Fairstein The moral right of the author has
been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in
any form of binding or caver other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.

ISBN 07515 2320 8

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc

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Warner Books A Division of

Little, Brown and Company (UK) Brettenham House

Lancaster Place London we2E 7EN

For

ALEXANDRA DENMAN Best friend forever

I am spellbound by the mystery of murder.

Weegee (Arthur Fellig)

One.

It was after eight o'clock, and all I could see of the sun was its
gleaming crown as it slipped behind the row of steep cliffs, giving off
an iridescent pink haze that signaled the end of a long August day.

Brackish gray water swirled and broke against the large rocks that edged
the mound of dirt on which I stood, spitting up at my ankles as I stared
out to the west at the Palisades. The pleats of my white linen skirt,
which had seemed so cool and weightless as I moved about the
air-conditioned courtroom all afternoon, were plastered against my
thighs by the humidity, and I swatted off the mosquitoes as they
searched for a place to land on my forearms.

I turned away from the striking vista across the Hudson River and
glanced down at the body of the woman that had snagged on the boulders
less than an hour earlier.

The detective from the Crime Scene Unit reloaded his camera and took
another dozen shots. "Want a couple of Polaroids to work from till I get
you a full set of blowups?" I nodded to him as he changed equipment,
leaned in above the head of his partially clothed subject, and set off
the flash attachment.

The old guy with the fishing rod who had made the grim discovery was
twitching nervously while he answered questions hurled at him in Spanish
by a young uniformed cop from the Thirty-fourth Precinct. The officer
pointed at something bulging in the man's pocket, and the fisherman's
free hand shook uncontrollably as he pulled out a small flask of red
wine.

"Tell him to relax, Carrera," Detective Mike Chapman called over to the
rookie. "Tell him this one's a keeper. Catch of the day. Haven't seen
anything this clean pulled out of these waters since Rip Van Winkle used
it as a bathtub."

Chapman and his good friend Mercer Wallace had been talking with each
other from the time Mercer and I reached the site ten minutes earlier.

They had walked away from me so that Lieutenant Peterson could fill
Mercer in on what he and Mike had learned since being called to the
scene, while I stood at the woman's feet, staring down at her from time
to time, half hoping she would open her eyes and speak to us. We were
all waiting for one of the medical examiners to arrive and take a look
at the body so it could be bagged and removed from this desolate strip
of earth on Manhattan's northernmost tip before onlookers began to
gather.

Hal Sherman rested his camera on top of the evidence collection bag and
wiped the rivulets of sweat off his neck. "How'd you get here so fast?"
he asked me.

"Mike was reaching out for Mercer to help him on this one and got me in
the deal. Mercer was down in court with me for pretrial hearings in an
old case when Mike beeped him. Said he had a floater with a possible
sexual assault, and he wanted Mercer to look at her."

"Tell the truth, kid. You couldn't resist a night on the town with the
big guys, could you, blondie?" Chapman asked, after coming over to check
whether Sherman had finished the photography. "Hey, Hal, who's the guy
seems like he's about to lose his lunch over there?"

We all turned to look at the man, not more than twenty-five years old,
who was leaning against a large boulder, taking in deep breaths of air
and cupping one hand over his mouth. "Reporter for the Times, fresh out
of journalism school. This is his third assignment, tailing me around to
see how we process a crime scene. Two burglaries in the diamond
district, one arson in a high school, and now Ophelia."

Chapman went into a squat next to the right side of the woman's head,
impatient with the presence of amateurs as he set to work on what was
clearly the start of a homicide investigation. "Tell him he ought to
look into getting the gig for restaurant reviews, Hal. Much easier on
the gut."

I stepped closer to watch Chapman go over the corpse again, this time as
he concentrated on details that he had observed before our arrival and
explained them to Mercer Wallace. The two had been partners for several
years in Manhattan North's Homicide Squad, where Chapman still worked,
until Mercer had transferred over to Special Victims to handle rape
cases. Despite the differences in their backgrounds and manner, they
came together seamlessly to work at a crime scene or on a murder
investigation.

Mercer, at forty, was five years older than Mike and I. He was one of a
handful of African American detectives who had made first grade in the
department, a detail man whom every senior prosecutor liked to count on,
in the field and on the witness stand, to build a meticulous case.

He was as solid as a linebacker but had passed up a football scholarship
at Michigan to join the NYPD. Slower to smile than Mike Chapman, Mercer
was intense and steady, with a sweetness of disposition that was, for
those shattered victims who encountered him, their first lifeline back
to a world of normalcy.

Mike Chapman was just over six feet tall, a bit shorter than Mercer.

His jet black hair framed his lean face, momentarily somber as he
reviewed the dead woman in front of him. A graduate of Fordham College,
where he worked his way through school as a waiter and bartender, Mike
had never wavered in his determination to follow the career path of his
adored father, who had been a cop for more than a quarter of a century.
He had a grin that could coax me out of almost any mood, and an
encyclopedic knowledge of American history and military affairs, which
had been his major concentration while in school.

"Four-point restraint," Chapman began, focusing his pen like a pointer
in a college classroom. The slender body was resting on a wooden ladder
about eight feet long. The victim's ankles and wrists were bound to
narrow rungs above her head and below her feet. The cord used to hold
the woman in place was firmly knotted and secured. Longer pieces of a
thicker rope dangled from parts of the frame, and two of them still had
rocks attached to their tips.

Mercer was bending over now, looking at the extremities from every
angle. "Somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to make sure this body
didn't come to the surface anytime before Christmas, wouldn't you say?"

He tugged at one of the loose lengths of rope, holding up the ragged
end, from which it appeared a weight perhaps another rock had torn free.

Over the top of his head I could see Craig Fleisher, the on-call medical
examiner, walking toward us. He waved a greeting and added, "Better move
quickly, the vultures are gathering." Next to his parked car the
satellite dish sitting above a Fox 5 television truck was suddenly
visible. The first field reporter had already picked up word of the
unusual find from a police scanner, and it would take only minutes
before other camera crews joined him to try to get the most salacious
shot of the corpse.

"What have you got, Mike? A drowning?" Fleisher asked.

"No way, Doc. Throwing her overboard was just a means of disposing of
the body." We all leaned in closer as Chapman placed his hand on the
crown of the woman's head and moved it slightly to the side. He slipped
his pen beneath her matted black hair, which was still wet and splayed
against the wooden crosspieces of the ladder, then lifted it gently to
expose the scalp. "Skull was bashed in back here, maybe with a gun butt
or hammer. I'd bet you'll find a fracture or two when you get in there
tomorrow."

Fleisher studied the gaping wound. He was stone-faced and calm, running
his fingers over the rest of the rear of the head. "Well, she wasn't in
the water very long. Only a day or two at best."

He repeated what Chapman had told us when Mercer and I arrived. There
was no putrefaction or decomposition, and the bruises he noted on her
body were probably antemortem. "Fish and crabs usually get to work on
the soft tissue pretty quickly," he explained, "but the face is
completely intact here. Seems like they didn't have much of a chance."

Fleisher had trained in San Diego, so although he was a recent hire in
New York, he was quite familiar with marine deaths.

"Could be our lucky break, Doc," Chapman said. "The killer or killers
couldn't have picked a worse place to dump a body if they expected to
keep it from surfacing."

The doctor straightened up and scanned the area a barren headland, just
thirty feet long, that sat at the end of a city street, nestled between
Columbia University's Baker Field and below the toll bridge leading
north out of Manhattan, to the Bronx. "That water sure looks angry,
doesn't it?" "Spuyten Duyvil," said Chapman. "Welcome to the
neighborhood. It's an old Dutch name for this tidal strait that connects
the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, separates us from the mainland."

Mike knew the background as well as I did. Settlers in New Amsterdam had
called it that in the early 1600s. In spite of the devil, they said,
because the waters were so very rough, rocked by the tides in both
directions. Passage through it had been impossible for centuries, until
the government cut a canal almost one hundred years ago.

"Not that you'll see any Dutchmen around here now, Doc. Rice and beans
replaced Heinekens a few years back, if you know what I mean. But they
named it well."

The kid reporter had gotten to his feet and come up behind me, out of
direct view of the body but close enough to listen to the conversation
and jot down what we were saying.

"You mind not putting anything on paper for the time being?" Chapman
asked, in a voice that was more of an order than a question. "You'd be
required to give your scribbled musings to Miss. Cooper here. It would
become discovery material for the trial and she'd have to turn your
notes over to the defense, once we catch the prick who did this."

"But, but I'm uh there's a privil "

"You want to wait in the car while we do this, or you want to stand here
quietly like a good scout and count on your memory to get this right?
The local history you can find in a book, the current events are off the
record. Start with the fact that she's got a crater the size of a teacup
in the back of her head and that nobody planned on her doing any laps
once she hit the water. Now keep out of my way.

Understood?"

Chapman turned back to our small group, which was huddled around the
body. Only the police divers, dressed in their scuba gear and holding
for directions, stood off to the side as the rest of us waited for
Fleisher to finish his inspection. Wallace had sent Officer Carrera up
to his radio car to get a blanket, and he and another cop were holding
it open as a shield between the dead woman and the curious busybodies
who were gathering on ioyth Street. He opened his cell phone and called
the local precinct for crowd control backup as the news crew moved up
within feet of our operation.

"Who's the blonde?" I heard the Fox 5 news reporter ask his cameraman.

"Alexandra Cooper. District Attorney's Office. Runs the Sex Crimes Unit
for the D. A." Paul Battaglia. Probably means the cops think the
deceased was raped. They always bring her in on those cases."

I wanted to hear what else the cameraman was going to say about our
work, but Fleisher was talking again and I focused back on his remarks.

"You've got a female Caucasian who I'd guess to be in her late
thirties." I had recently turned thirty-five, and I peered down at the
frozen gaze of the woman, wondering what had brought her to this violent
end, so prematurely. "I'm not going to turn her over or do any more work
here, gentlemen. Too many eyes. But I'm certain the cause will be blunt
force trauma that blow to the head which Chapman located for us. I don't
think we'll find any signs at autopsy that she was alive when she was
submerged."

Fleisher went on. "Possible sexual assault. We'll be checking the
vaginal vault for abrasions. I would doubt there'll be seminal fluid of
value, once the seawater invaded. Hard to tell whether the missing
clothes suggest rape or the rough current ripping them out of place."

The well-toned body of the young woman still had a beige silk shell
covering her bra, and a skirt of the same material. Both had tears and
rips in the fine fabric. But there were no underpants, and I noticed
what appeared to be finger marks embedded in the skin of her inner
thighs.

"Doesn't look like a local girl, does she, Mercer?" Chapman remarked.

The Thirty-fourth Precinct still housed some elegant old apartment
buildings, but it was not one of the tonier neighborhoods of the city.

"Check out the fingernails and pedicure. From the shape she's in, I'd
bet she spent a lot of time on the Stair Master

The vermilion polish on her toes and nails had been slightly chipped by
her struggle with her assailant or by the tides. It was clear that she
had taken good care of herself, until this week.

The Eyewitness News truck had joined the posse. "Hey, Mike," I heard a
voice call out from the far side of the blanket Carrera was holding,
"got anything for us?"

"Gimme a break, Pablo. Have a little respect for the dead. C'mon, Doc.
Can we get her out of here now?" Fleisher told him to cover the body,
move the waiting ambulance in, and load up the ladder as it was, its
cargo still lashed to the wood. "Need anything else from me?" Chapman
shook his head and said he'd be at the morgue for the autopsy proceeding
the next day. He bent over and noted the name of the manufacturer on the
underside of the ladder before an attendant loaded it onto the van.

"Summer backlog," Fleisher said. "I won't get to this one until two
P.M." and that's with jumping her over a few unclaimed souls I've got in
the cooler."

Four new arrivals from the precinct formed a human chain to separate the
growing crowd from the diminishing group of us who were standing where
the lady on the ladder had been.

Chapman walked over to talk with the lieutenant, who was watching the
scuba team members tether themselves to huge pieces of equipment that
Emergency Services had ferried to the scene. They were going to attempt
to crawl around the border of the whirling passage in the unlikely
possibility that they could feel for any evidence or weapon.

It was obvious that there would be nothing to see along the silt-lined
sides and bottom of the treacherous waterway gap.

"Don't waste their time or energy, Loo," Chapman urged Peterson, using
the informal nickname that rank evoked from all detectives. "She didn't
go into the drink anywhere near here. Could have been Yonkers, could
have been the Bronx. It's just my good fortune that she stubbed her toe
and washed up on a little piece of Manhattan North. I haven't picked up
anything except drug shoot-outs in weeks."

Only Mike Chapman would consider this discovery to be his good fortune.

I looked around the neglected plot that had become this woman's
temporary graveyard, its surface littered with broken beer bottles,
empty crack vials, scores of spots of pigeon droppings, and a few dozen
used condoms.

Mercer Wallace came up beside me, grasping my elbow in his enormous
black hand and guiding me out to the street, running interference for me
through the rows of news teams and the neighborhood cronies who were
looking for excitement now that darkness had fallen. He unlocked the
passenger door of his car and I ducked into the seat.

People moved back to the sidewalk as Mercer made a U-turn on the narrow
road, and we drove off. He turned in and out of a maze of one-way
streets, accelerating when he reached Broadway, taking me downtown and
across Central Park to my apartment, on the Upper East Side. I was
silent for blocks.

"Where are you, Alex? Talk to me. I can't let you go upstairs alone just
thinking about that body. She'll be with you all night. You'll never
close your eyes." I knew that without being told. But I was deeply
distressed and much too wired to sleep after what we had just seen,
despite my exhaustion from a couple of weeks of hard-fought courtroom
battle in front of a demanding judge. "Thanks, Mercer. Just wondering
about the obvious, knowing that there aren't any logical answers. I'll
be fine."

"We'll get him, Alex. It doesn't seem very likely tonight. But Chapman
and me, we'll get him. In spite of the devil, Miss. Cooper. In spite of
the devil."

Two.

A cold blast hit me as I opened my apartment door. Thank God I had
forgotten to turn down the air conditioner. The coolness felt good as I
moved into the bedroom to take off my wilted suit.

The green light flashed on my answering machine. I smiled at the thought
of hearing a friendly voice or two, someone who would ease my transition
from a scene of violence to the peace of my home, secure and comforting,
on the twentieth floor of a high-rise apartment. I pressed the playback
button as I began to undress.

I was on my way to the shower when I heard the voice that I had been
waiting for, so I walked back and sat on the side of my bed. "Alex?..

. Alex?... It's Jake ... " The telephone connection sizzled and faded.
Before I could move, it started again. "Don't know if you can hear me
... still in China ... and ... must be about nine o'clock your time.
Sorry I missed you ... I'll see you ... and just wanted to tell you that
... " I pushed the replay button. The machine hadn't captured any more
words than I had heard, but it was Jacob Tyler's voice that I wanted to
listen to over and over. We had been dating for only a couple of months
and the newness of the relationship still got me tingling when I heard
him speak. I pushed the save button and went in to shower.

I lifted my face up to the steaming water that poured out at me and
drizzled down the length of my legs. I reached for the bar of soap and
stared at my fingernail, noticing the chip of polish at its tip. My eyes
closed and all I could see was the bright red on the nails of the dead
woman's hand. I opened my eyes and shook my head, willing myself not to
call up other memories of that body on the ladder. There would be all
night for such visions, as I knew too well from past experience.

I scrubbed the day's grime off my face and body, then dried and wrapped
myself tightly in a warm, thick terry robe.

I toweled my hair as I played Jake's message once more. I was smiling
again, imagining what he might have said in between the snatches of
words that were actually recorded and not gobbled up by the satellites.

I'd have to phone my best friend, Nina, and tell her about Jake's call.

I could guess what her response would be: "What good is it to have a guy
half a world away when you need him to put his arms around you right
now?"

Maybe I'd wait and call her tomorrow. She wasn't wrong about my needing
Jake, but I had been dealing with images of victims for more than ten
years. Most of the time, my work was with women who survived their
assailants and who would triumph in the courtroom. But very little could
soften the shock of seeing firsthand the destruction of a human life a
life as young as my own, as full of promise and hope as I dreamed mine
would be.

I shook the dampness off my hair and looked at my watch. It would be
morning in China. I had no idea where Jake was at the moment and no
office number abroad at which to call him back. I wished he were here
with me now. This was not a night to be alone.

My head ached and my stomach was making noises, demanding to be fed. I
pressed the telephone button to speed-dial the deli on the next corner
and order a turkey sandwich. I could nourish the body if not the soul.

"Sorry, Alex. It's almost ten o'clock," said Clare at P.J.
Bernstein's delicatessen. "We're just closing up."

I never cooked at home, so I knew there would be nothing in the
refrigerator. I had cans of soup in the cabinet, but it was too warm out
to entertain the thought of hot soup. I put some ice cubes in a glass,
moving on to the den to fix myself a stiff Dewar's. A mystery novel
waited for me next to my bed, but there was nothing like the sight of a
real corpse to alienate me from the genre for a couple of weeks. Jake
had left a dog-eared Henry James on my dresser. Perhaps I'd start that
instead of trying to go to sleep.

I hadn't bothered to turn on the lights before I sat on the sofa, drink
in hand, and gazed out over the city. Soft music from my CD system
distracted me until Linda Ronstadt began to sing about the hungry women
down on Rue Morgue Avenue. I flashed again to the body on the ladder and
visualized the setting where it rested tonight.

The sharp buzz of the phone startled me. I caught it on the third ring.

"You almost sound happy to hear from me for a change." "Mike?" I asked,
having hoped it would be Jake.

"Wrong voice, huh? Don't go getting dejected ' it's me.

It's not like I'm the Unabomber or Ted Bundy calling you for a quick
squeeze. The lieutenant asked me to get hold of you. Says he'd really
like you to be at Compstat in the morning."

Compstat comparative computer statistics the NYPD's hot new
demonstration for leadership accountability. Meetings held at
headquarters several times a month, in the War Room, to show off the
commissioner's ability to identify and solve the city's crime problems.

"What time do I have to be there?"

"Seven o'clock sharp. Seems the brass went berserk over this one tonight
it screws up all the mayor's statistics for the month. The commish may
even call on you if he gets frisky and wants answers for all his
questions, or wants to blame your boss for refusing to prosecute some of
the quality-of-life cases."

"Thanks for the warning."

"You sound really flat, kid. You okay?"

"My head's still back at Spuyten Duyvil, if you know what I mean. Want
to grab a pizza and come on up here for supper?"

"Sorry, Coop. It's almost eleven o'clock. We'll be working most of the
night, trying to figure out who this broad is and when she got popped in
the river. See you at reveille. Better sleep with the night-light on."

It wasn't the dark that frightened me. It was the fact that moving
around out there, below my window, were creatures capable of splitting
open the head of a young woman and throwing her body into the water. I
stared out at the lights of Manhattan for the next hour, watching them
gradually go off as people went to sleep. And all the time, as I sat
awake, I thought about the monsters who walk among us.

Three.

There were still a few cars parked on Hogan Place near my office, most
of which belonged to the lawyers working the midnight shift in night
court, when I pulled my Jeep into a reserved slot behind the district
attorney's space at six forty-five on Friday morning. I took the
shortcut over to One Police Plaza, cutting behind the Metropolitan
Correctional Center and alongside the staggeringly expensive new federal
courthouse, which made our digs, complete with oversized rodents and
roaches that obviously thrived on Combat, look like judicial facilities
in some third-world country. I stopped at a cart being wheeled into
place by one of the regular street vendors and bought two cups of black
coffee, remembering that the brew served in the hallway outside the
meeting room was too weak to start me up for the day.

One by one, black Crown Vies with red flashers mounted on each dashboard
pulled into the tightly secured parking garage beneath Police
Headquarters, marking the arrival of bosses from all the commands in
Manhattan North, the upper half of the island. I continued past that
underground entrance and jogged up the two tiers of granite steps,
walking around in front of the building to display my identification to
the cop at the door and run my shoulder bag through the metal detector.

"Eighth floor," the guard said. "Elevator's behind the wall to the
back."

I knew the way well. In over ten years as a prosecutor, I had come to
this building more times than I cared to count. Some days I was sent to
sit in at meetings called by the commissioner in which the district
attorney himself had no interest; on other occasions I came to
brainstorm on investigative strategies in cases the department was
struggling to solve; frequently I was there to plead for manpower in a
matter that was not getting appropriate police attention; and every now
and then under this administration's budget-driven oversight I walked
over to attend the promotion of a friend to a higher-ranking post.

Compstat had revolutionized the accountability of precinct commanders
when it was introduced to the department in the early nineties. Several
times a month, at seven o'clock in the morning, bosses from one of the
city's geographic divisions were summoned to appear at One Police Plaza,
to spend the next three hours being grilled by the chief of operations
and two of his trusted henchmen. There was only one direction in which
this mayor wanted the crime rate to move, and each man was called upon
to answer for the evil that crossed his borderlines and played havoc
with the numbers regularly released to the press by the Public
Information deputy.

When the elevator doors opened on eight, I was facing a wall of
blue-uniformed backs of the commanding officers, pressing ahead against
each other as the invited guests who were not members of the department
turned the corner to enter the Operations Room and take their seats in
anticipation of the arrival of Chief Lunetta.

Chapman called out to me before I noticed him, wedged between two full
inspectors who were laughing at whatever tale he was spinning. "Hey,
Coop! Meet Lenny Mcnab. Just been transferred over to clean up the
Three-three. Take a good look at him now, because after this meeting I
doubt he'll be able to sit down for a week."

Mcnab shook his head and my hand at the same time. The newspapers had
been full of stories about the string of bodega burglaries in Mcnab's
territory. If he couldn't account for progress in the investigation by
this morning, he'd be made to look like a fool by the three grand
inquisitors.

Lunetta's voice boomed out at us from the stairwell door. "Let's get it
going, guys. We've got a lot to cover this morning." His entourage
brushed past us and we dutifully followed.

Room 802 was a cavernous space, with double-height ceilings and
state-of-the-art electronic equipment, that had been designed to become
Command Central in case of any terrorist takeover or natural disaster in
New York City. Three gigantic media screens filled the front wall of the
room, which was lined on one length with concealed booths to hold the
crisis solvers at more critical points in time, and observers on more
benign occasions while the other wall was decorated with police shields
and murals featuring flags of various law enforcement agencies.

Two tables ran through the center of the room from forward to rear,
around which the commanders seated themselves with the personnel who ran
their investigative and uniformed forces, as well as a few detectives
who might be called upon to explain the status of a particular case that
had attracted media attention.

Directly beneath the huge screens was the podium, to which speakers
would be called at the whim of the chief of operations. Lunetta would
tell the computer programmer who sat beside him which graphics to
display over their heads on the three screens usually starting with a
map of the precinct, a chart of the previous month's crime statistics,
and a graph plotting the most recent week's violent crime activity, with
robberies flagged in red, rapes in blue, and burglaries in green.

Lunetta and his super chiefs sat in the rear at a table perpendicular to
the array of well-decorated men spread down the center of the room.

He was tall and lean, with angled features and black hair that was drawn
sleekly back and trimmed at the neck in military fashion. He looked
great in the dark navy blue uniform, and knew it.

My seat was in one of the three rows of folding chairs behind the
chief's position, which were reserved for non-NYPD spectators. Each
chair was labeled with a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad. Excusing
myself, I tried to slither into place, passing over two lawyers from the
United States Attorney's Office and four guys from upstate police
departments, before sitting down next to a woman who introduced herself
as a trend researcher from the Department of Justice. I opened the lid
of my coffee cup and took a slug as Lunetta called the first group of
officers to the podium.

Frank Guffey moved forward to the mike, flanked by his supervising
staff. He was smart and well liked by police and prosecutors, a tough
boss who had been moved from the East Harlem area a year earlier down to
the cushy confines of Wall Street, and now back to the high-crime
neighborhood of the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

"G'morning, Chief. I'm reporting on the period that closed July
thirty-first." Guffey smiled and paused briefly, weighing whether to add
a personal pleasantry. "Nice to be here again in the North, after a
brief visit to Manhattan South, sir."

Lunetta shot back, "I hope you can say as much after the meeting."

"First of all, the decrease in overall crime continues." Clearly, Guffey
knew the drill. That's what these guys wanted to hear, right out of the
box. "Now, we do show an increase in robberies, but "

Forget the "buts," buddy. I watched as Lunetta turned his head ninety
degrees and gave a command to the computer programmer sitting at his
right shoulder. Seconds later, the three overhead graphics changed. A
map of the Twenty-eighth Precinct's territory dominated the middle
screen.

Lunetta barked, "Break them down for me, Inspector. I want them by day
of the week, and then by the time of day of the tour."

Before Guffey could lift his papers and find the correct answers, we
could all see the numbers in the projections that the chief's team had
prepared for this attack.

"I want to get right into these spikes, Guffey. Take us through them.

Give me reasons."

I could see the color rise in Frank's cheeks, as most of the bosses
around the tables seemed to squirm in sympathy.

Guffey started to respond. "Several of them seem to be the work of the
same team, Chief. The numbers started to spike when a pair of male
Hispanics began to hit a couple of apartments on Broadway, just north of
Mcdonald's. Same M.O. Gain entry with a ruse female knocking on the door
for the perps and asking for her sister. Then she disappears while the
guys tie up everyone inside with speaker wire "

"Drug related?"

"Probably. Only, the one last week, on the twenty-ninth "

"You mean the restaurant manager they burned with an iron?" Lunetta
thrived on displaying to the crowd how well he could learn the detail of
hundreds of these cases, outlined for him in his briefing books, and
talk about them as familiarly as if he were working on them himself.

"Yeah. We figure that was a mistake. They went to the wrong apartment. I
got Louis Robertson here. They're his cases, if you'd like to hear from
him."

"Not unless he's got answers for me, Guffey. Excuses I got plenty of.

It's answers I want. You guys doing the obvious? Running fingerprints
through Safis?" The new, automated fingerprint-matching system was
solving scores of cases that used to require tedious hand searches.

"Checking with surrounding precincts to see if they got anything like
this going? Parole probation informants? I assume you'll study these
charts and decide how to redeploy your manpower to address the situation
more aggressively." Guffey said his men had been doing all of the above
and that he would certainly make use of the time charts. He got through
the other crime categories fairly gracefully and back to his seat
without a great deal of damage.

Inspector Jaffer was next up. A real breath of fresh air for the
department. As I ran my eyes around the table, Joanne Jaffer and Jane
Pearl were the only two women inspectors I noted in the room. They were
both young, bright, and attractive, and were changing a lot of opinions
about female bosses in the department, held by too many of the hair bags
those dyed-in-the-wool old-timers who were petrified in their
traditions.

Jaffer's numbers in the Twentieth Precinct were excellent. The Upper
West Side had always been one of the safest residential areas in
Manhattan. Robberies, burglaries, and car thefts continued to be lower
than ever. No homicides in over six months. Her only problem was a
serial rapist who had been operating for more than two years hitting
sporadically, and not even linked to a pattern until DNA tests on the
rape kits had confirmed that the most recent attack was committed by the
same assailant as the first one, which had occurred more than twenty
months ago. Battaglia had been asked to address a community meeting
about the case in a few days and would be pleased if I could come back
to him after this morning with a sense about the chief's role in the
investigation.

Jaffer gave her report and began to answer Lunetta's questions about the
rapist.

"How many cases you up to now, Inspector?"

Jaffer answered sharply. "Eight, sir. That we know of. Eight with an
identical M. O." and two of those have been linked to each other by DNA.
Serology is working on two others this week."

"What took you so long to put this pattern together? Somebody asleep in
the station house?"

She started to answer, as a hand went up on the right side of the room.

Sergeant Pridgen, who was assigned to Special Victims, was responsible
for the task force handling the investigation. He had been running the
cases long before Jaffer became involved and was trying to jump in to
take some of the heat.

Lunetta ignored Pridgen's waving arm. I knew he'd like to see Jaffer
sweat, and I kept my fingers crossed that he would fail to make it
happen.

"Serology finally came up with a cold hit, Chief. That's what broke it
for us."

Her answers were clipped, to the point, and good. The investigation had
floundered until the Medical Examiner's Office made a computer match
known in the still-evolving language of genetic fingerprinting as a
"cold hit" between DNA samples left by the rapist in his victims' bodies
more than two years ago and those found in the most recent case.

Cops who had argued about whether or not the older attacks bore any
connection to the current crimes were silenced by the stunning ability
of the database to definitively link an assailant's targets to one
another.

"Why can't serology match it to a perp in their data bank?" Lunetta
asked.

"Because the bank is just up and running in New York. It's only been in
operation since last year, and they've got fewer than a hundred samples
from convicted rapists and murderers."

Legislation created genetic data banks in most states across the country
during the late nineties, but few of their labs were equipped to process
the information collected from inmates and create the pools from which
to search for repeat offenders, until quite recently. It would be
unlikely to get a hit on this serial rapist, who had been operating on
the streets of Manhattan since the days before the law enabled the
collection of blood samples from incarcerated prisoners.

Jaffer continued to describe the team's approach. Last week the
department sketch artist, working with several of the victims, had
completed a composite that was being distributed to stores and
residences throughout the precinct the "generic male black," as Mercer
liked to describe the suspect. Medium complexion, average height,
average build, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, possible
mustache, close-cropped hair, no distinguishing features, scars, or
marks. Before too long, every African American adult male who set foot
north of Sixtieth Street and south of Eighty-sixth Street, between
Central Park West and Riverside Drive, would be stopped and questioned.

Neighbors would be turning in their de liverymen or elevator operators,
and good citizens would be frisked by anxious and weary cops, each one
hoping to get a lucky break and catch the compulsive rapist.

"Stop dancing around, Pridgen. I'm getting to you. What else is your
crew doing about this one?"

The sergeant stood to answer. "We've got Traffic giving out summonses on
the midnight tour, tagging all the unregistered and uninsured plates.
Mounted's working the area on weekends, which is mostly when he hits."

I could see Lunetta rolling his eyes even as I stared at the rear of his
head. Mounted cops riding up and down West End Avenue at midnight on a
Saturday. Not the most subtle way to patrol the neighborhood.

Even the rapist might catch on and change his movements.

Pridgen continued. "We've called in the Profiling Unit at Quantico and "

Say the magic word and the duck comes down, hitting Lunetta square on
the head. "Feds? Feds? Whose stupid idea is that? Aren't you guys up to
handling this one yourself? Answer me, Pridgen. Whose idea was it?"

Lunetta saw Pridgen flash a glance in my direction. "District attorney
calling the shots on this one, Sarge? You just sit back and let them
take right over and run the show, huh? Maybe you're moonlighting on the
side, too busy to do major investigations? We got an opening over at the
auto pound, looking after towed vehicles, if you think this is too tough
for you. What does Cooper use on you guys anyway, a nose ring? Just
leads you around on a leash all day? Let me know if you start rolling
over on your back or baying at the moon."

The woman researcher from Justice bit into her lip and looked at me for
a reaction. I didn't know whether I was blushing for Pridgen or for
myself. I ripped some paper from my legal pad and dashed off a note to
Lunetta, passing it forward, in which I asked his permission to explain
where we were going with the investigation. By the time it reached him,
was opened and read, he had continued to pepper the sergeant with
questions and then kept on going at Pridgen even harder, choosing to
ignore my offer. If he had intended to call on me before I asked to
speak, I had just sealed my fate by assuring him that I wanted to give
him answers to these questions.

"Last week's attack was this girl coming from one of those Columbus
Avenue bars, too?"

"No sir," Pridgen answered.

"Where from, then?"

"Actually, her boyfriend drove her home, just before two in the morning.
Let her out of the car about half a block from her apartment, up at the
corner. She walked to the front of the building alone. The rapist pushed
in behind her, after she unlocked the vestibule door."

"So much for the boyfriend. I guess chivalry's dead, wouldn't you say,
Sergeant? I want some progress on this one before the next time you come
back here. Take your seats. I want the Three-four up now. Let's hear
about last night's homicide."

Chairs pushed back and the podium assembly changed over, with Lieutenant
Peterson and Chapman accompanying the CO up to the stand.

The general precinct figures were good. Lunetta was pleased that the
deputy inspector in charge had taken the story of one of his burglary
patterns to a local cable TV program, ique Pasa NY?" which resulted in
an informant breaking the case. He liked that kind of creative policing,
as he would call it. What he never had liked was wisecracking, not even
back when he had been Chapman's boss in the Street Crime Unit, almost a
decade earlier.

"Who's going to bring me up to speed on the new case?"

Peterson pointed at Chapman and stepped aside. Mike rested his notes on
the podium and ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. He dug one
hand into the pocket of his blazer, then started his description of how
he was summoned to the scene. He was thorough, detailed, and
professional the best homicide cop in the business but I fidgeted and
recrossed my legs when he got to the end of the narrative and closed his
description with Dr. Fleisher's directive to load "Gert" into the EMS
van.

""Gert'? I didn't know she'd been identified." Lunetta was annoyed.

His head whipped from side to side as he checked with each of his aides
to see if they had failed to give him the morning update on the city's
most visible crime of the moment. The case was on the cover of both
daily tabloids, and he should have had the newest information about the
unfortunate victim before the public did.

"She hasn't been identified yet, Chief."

"Well, is her name Gert, or isn't it?"

Don't go there, Chief, I urged quietly from the peanut gallery. All of
us who worked with Mike knew that he named his victims in every case.

Always did it, and often stuck with his nickname, no matter what the
eventual I.D. his own perverse way of personalizing his cases.

"I call her that, Chief, so she's not just some number, some cold
statistic for the mayor to get off on. I named this one in honor of
Gertrude Ederle three Olympic medals and the English Channel. I figure,
given the way somebody tried to send her to sleep with the fishes for
keeps, she must have had the soul of a great swimmer to stay afloat."

There were a few snickers around the room, but most of the group knew it
wasn't the safest direction to follow.

Lunetta wouldn't bite twice. He moved away to the next questions.

"What are you looking at here?"

Chapman went on. "After the autopsy results today, we'll work on a press
release and sketch."

"Can't you give the papers a photo from the scene a close-up? Get an
I.D. more quickly?"

"I don't think the way she looked coming out of the water is the way any
of her loved ones would want to see her featured. We're working with
Missing Persons and each of the precincts."

"You checking every area that borders the creek? May turn out to be a
Bronx homicide after all, Chapman. The numbers get tallied in the
precinct where the crime occurred, you know."

"I don't care where she dove in, Chief. We got her now."

Fat chance, Lunetta. Count it as an outer-borough murder so we keep the
Manhattan numbers down? Nope, I'm with Chapman. She landed here, and no
matter where she was killed, that gives us jurisdiction.

"I see from the newspapers that you had Miss. Cooper up at the scene
last night. You throwing in the towel, too, Detective? Ready to call in
the Feds? I can't help but wonder what it is you need a pet D.A.
for at all these crime scenes and station houses. D'you carry her
lipstick case for her, or her hairbrush?" The chief smirked at his
put-down, jabbing the detective and me in the same thrust.

But trying to embarrass Chapman that way wouldn't quite work. He'd
simply use the opportunity to get more laughs, even if they would be at
my expense. "No, no, sir. She never lets me near the makeup. You know
me, Chief I'm strictly a leg man. I'm in charge of her spare panty hose.
Each time there's a run in one of those suckers, I pull out a
replacement pair. Best I can do at the moment."

A couple of my friends around the room raised their eyes cautiously to
meet mine, to make sure I was rolling with the flow. Not a problem.

Battaglia had trained me well. I could control my short fuse with the
knowledge I'd get some shots back at the chief eventually. The district
attorney might even take them on my behalf.

Lunetta's number-two man leaned over and whispered something to him,
flipping through the briefing book to an earlier page. He scanned it and
looked up. "Is that case of the body that came out of the East River
last month related to this one, you think? That's still open, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but no connection. That one, a homeless man was fishing, hooked
up and pulled an arm out of the water. Right out of its socket,
actually. Scuba went in and found the rest of the body, weighted down
with concrete blocks. She'd been in the water more than half a year.

Feet bound, ligature round the neck. That's a mob case got a good snitch
who's working with us. We know who we're looking for, just haven't been
able to find him yet."

Great restraint, Mikey. He had resisted the temptation to tell Lunetta
that he had christened that victim

"Venus." A one-armed Italian woman in a cement overcoat didn't lend
herself to any appellation except Venus de Milo.

The aide whispered to Lunetta again. "We had Bronx South here on
Wednesday of last week. They've got a rape pattern as well in a couple
of the housing projects. You might check over there to see if there are
any similarities."

Chapman looked less than interested. The likelihood that the
well-groomed, silk-clad woman he had dubbed Gert had anything to do with
ghetto dwellings in a run-down neighborhood that wasn't his official
territory didn't engage him very seriously.

Lunetta listed off a punch list of places to go and things to do that
would have been elementary for a rookie homicide detective. Mike
listened patiently and assured the chief that as soon as they figured
out who the deceased was, he'd be off and running. "I assume we'll know
who she is by the end of the day."

"That's great, Chapman. Then I'll expect an arrest within the week.

Maybe next time you'll do a better job keeping the shutterbugs away from
the scene you're working. No reason for a case like this to be
front-page news, except for the photo opportunity you gave them. Now
it'll take a couple of days to make these headlines go away."

Lunetta finished snapping at Chapman, looked around the room, and
announced to the bosses, "I think you gentlemen realize how much the
commissioner hates it when this kind of thing happens. Tourists aren't
scared away by drug dealers killing each other off on their own turf or
gang members shooting other gang members to death. But if this woman
turns out to be an innocent victim of violence, I don't think I have to
tell you what it means to the city. Last night, at a fundraiser, the
mayor was just telling his supporters that murders in New York had
dropped to their lowest numbers in more than a quarter of a century when
he got word of this mess." Lunetta scanned the brass arrayed in front of
him. "That's the point of all these exercises in case it's slipped your
minds. Letting everyone know how safe this city has become. Our homicide
rate hasn't been this good since nineteen sixty-one." Chapman made sure
he muttered into the microphone as he picked up his notes and pocketed
them. "I hate to burst Hizzoner's bubble, but I gotta tell you his
numbers are small comfort to the broad who's laid out in a refrigerator
up at the morgue, waiting for her last physical."

Four.

Mike spent most of the short walk over to my office, three blocks north
of One Police Plaza, trying to worm his way back into my good graces. I
was used to being the butt of Chapman's humor and had long ago stopped
letting it get to me. It was not even ten thirty and I was already more
bothered by the oppressive heat that had blanketed the ugly stretch of
asphalt that ran in front of the city and state buildings along Centre
Street.

"Aren't you going to be late for court?" he asked me as we rounded the
corner and I stopped at the cart to buy us each another round of coffee.
Mike called up to the vendor to throw in a cruller for him, too.
"Couldn't eat a thing last night. Kept looking into that hole in the
back of Gert's head every time I closed my eyes."

"No court on Friday. The defendant's a Muslim. Today's his holy day," I
answered, hanging my identification tag on a chain around my neck as we
approached the entrance to the District Attorney's Office.

"Reggie Bramwell's a Muslim? I collared him on a gun case five years
ago, and he was a full-press Baptist then. I'm sure of it." "Jailhouse
conversion, Mike," I said, pushing through the revolving doors and
holding the security gate open for one of my colleagues who was on her
way out of the building, headed toward the other courthouse, pushing a
shopping cart loaded with evidence. "A week ago Thursday, in fact. Must
have been a deeply religious experience. Someone at Rikers Island
convinced him of the joys of the three-day workweek. The judge uses
Wednesday as a calendar day, and the prisoner Reggie Bramwell, now also
known to the court as Reggie X gets to worship on Friday. Just prolongs
my agony for a few days. In fact, I think he's just doing this because
he knows I wanted some vacation time this month and if he can't go to
the beach, why should I?"

We waited for one of the three elevators to return to the lobby floor,
while a small commotion started behind us. "Alex, tell this jerk who I
am, will you please?" a familiar voice called out.

My colleague Pat Mckinney was standing in front of the security counter
dressed in his running clothes, which were drenched with sweat, arguing
with the officer on duty. Pat's already reddened complexion was
deepening and appeared to be spreading to the tips of his ears and down
his neck.

"I'm telling you I left my I.D. on top of that pad next to the telephone
before I went out at nine thirty. Now, if somebody moved it or walked
off with it, that's your problem and not The cop, obviously a summer
replacement who was stuck with this security detail, didn't recognize
the deputy chief of the Trial Division. Most of us who jogged from time
to time during our lunch hours had taken to leaving our photo
identification tags at the entrance desk and picking them up on our way
back in. The officers from the Fifth Precinct who regularly worked the
desk knew most of us by sight and held the tags in a pile on the corner
of the counter, behind the bank of telephones. I had no time for running
these days, because of my hearings, and no inclination either, because
of the intense heat. Mckinney, who liked to take his daily jog earlier
than the lunch hour break during the hot summer months, was probably
more aggravated by the fact that this police officer didn't recognize
him than that the officer had misplaced his only means of official
access to the building.

I held the bucking elevator door open with my left arm and started to
explain to the officer that I would vouch for Mckinney, despite the fact
that he hated my guts.

Chapman nudged me out of the way by bumping his hip up against mine and
clamping his hand on the button that said Close. He was also calling out
to the cop as the doors came together in front of my face. "Hey,
Officer. Don't let that guy in. He's a whack job comes around here all
the time, looking to get in. The real Mckinney has a huge wart on the
tip of his nose and foams at the mouth a lot."

"That'll do wonders to break the ice between me and my supervisor, don't
you think?" I asked as I pressed the button for the eighth floor and
replaced my sunglasses in their case.

"What's the difference? Mckinney hasn't had a decent word to say about
you in the entire time you've been here. Screw him. Who's going to miss
him for the next half hour, his girlfriend?"

"What girlfriend? You mean Ellen? She just works for him, she's not his
girlfriend."

We got off the elevator and headed for my office.

"Don't tell me you're as gullible as his wife, Coop. All that platonic
crap? "Beep me, darling, I'm working on a gun bust tonight with the
cops. Field assignment. Midnight grand jury." You know anybody else in
the Trial Division who gets the kind of close supervision Ellen does?
One on one, behind closed doors? Trust me. Next time he gives you any
trouble, I'll run interference for you."

My secretary, Laura, had a smile on her face by the time we came into
view, no doubt hearing Mike's voice as we made our way down the hall
together. He broke into his best Smokey Robinson imitation as she began
to go through the morning's messages with me. She sailed through the
first six, all of which could be returned later, accompanied by Mike's
humming and finger snapping. When he broke out in his modified lyrics
"And in case you go to court, then a lawyer is the one you want to see
... but in case you want love, Laura ... call on me" I gave up the
battle and went in to my desk to see what else awaited me.

I opened the desk drawer and took three extra-strength Tylenols. The
fatigue of the trial schedule on top of my usual duties supervising the
Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit had been wearing me down. Sarah Brenner, my
close friend and second in command, had been ordered by her obstetrician
to stay at home, since she was already three days overdue with her
second child. I had all weekend to complete the legal memorandum the
judge in the Reggie X case expected from me on Monday, so I decided to
focus first on the queries from the other lawyers in the unit.

"Who sounded more critical?" I called out to Laura.

"If I were you, I'd get Patti down here first. Want me to call her?"

"Yeah. Then back her up with Ryan, please."

Mike took off his navy blazer and hung it on the back of one of the
chairs before picking up the pile of morning newspapers that had been
delivered to my desk. He was looking to see whether any clever reporter
had scooped him on some aspect of the Gert murder that he might have
missed.

Patti Rinaldi was one of my favorite young assistants a solid lawyer
with sound judgment and dogged courtroom style. Her enthusiasm for her
work, and for resolving the plight of her victims, seemed to emanate
from her when she entered my small office carrying the case file of her
latest problem.

"A vision in lavender, Ms. Rinaldi," Chapman said, eyeing the tall, thin
brunette carefully over the top of his New York Post. "You look
ravishing today. You're not cheating on me, are you?"

"Cooper doesn't leave me any time to even think about it, Mike. I worked
the four-to-twelve shift on intake last night. Thought you'd want to
know about this one, Alex. Have you had any cases at a sleep disorder
clinic yet?"

"Not so far."

"I think we got our first."

Mike's interest was piqued. "What's a sleep disorder clinic?"

"Latest psychobabble moneymaker. Almost every medical center has one at
this point. Patients who have trouble with sleep insomniacs,
sleepwalkers, snorers, you name it come in to be '' while they sleep.
Idea is to find a cure for the problem."

Patti added to my description. "And they pay dearly a thousand, fifteen
hundred dollars per visit just to spend the night on a cot and let
somebody '' them sleep, measure their dream time and the intervals
between dream segments."

"Are there job openings?" Mike asked. "I suppose by now someone's come
up with my time-tested solution. Two cocktails, get laid, roll over, and
smoke a cigarette guaranteed to put you out for hours. Maybe I could be
a consultant."

"Is this one of the legitimate operations, Patti?"

"Yes, Alex. It's affiliated with Saint Peter's Hospital. It's located in
a large office building which houses all their clinics up on Amsterdam
Avenue. This is actually run by the head of their Department of
Psychiatry, so they treat the whole thing very seriously."

"Your victim?"

"Her name is Flora. Very fragile twenty-two-year-old who lives with her
mother in Flatbush. Met the defendant a couple of years ago when he was
her psychology professor at Brooklyn College. She began to see him for
therapy after the school year, but was smart enough to stop the sessions
when he started coming on to her sexually.

"Now, almost two years have gone by and she was suffering from
depression. Found his number in the book, called him, and he made an
appointment for her to come in to the clinic, where he told her he's
currently working. Said he still did therapy on the side." I was taking
notes as Patti continued the narrative.

"Flora got to the office at eight o'clock on Tuesday night. Paid the
therapist his name is Ronald for the session, and at the end he advised
her that she needed to get a job, to engage herself in something
serious. He offered her a position as a computer analyst at the clinic.
Took out a contract for one year's employment from his desk, signed it,
and had her do the same."

I had dozens of questions to ask, but rather than punctuate Patti's
story, I would let her tell it and assume she would cover most of what I
needed to know.

"Finally, Ronald took the contract back and told Flora that he wouldn't
make his boss, the chief physician, enforce it unless she thanked him
right now by performing oral sex."

"I am definitely in the wrong line of work," Chapman mumbled.

Patti went on. "Ronald waved the contract back and forth in front of her
and kept repeating, "No blow job, no job." He reduced Flora to tears in
about five minutes, and she complied with the condition.

Meanwhile, in a few of the cubicles attached to Ronald's module, people
were sleeping naked, of course, with monitors attached to measure their
breathing, their blood pressure, their REMs, and so on. So when Ronald
handed her back her half of the contract, he told her this was better
than usual. He said that most of the time he stood there and masturbated
while he watched the struggling sleepers try to find the Land of Nod."

Chapman was on his feet. "You mean these idiots are paying big bucks to
have this frigging pervert get his rocks off watching them toss and
turn? That'd cure my insomnia instantly. I'd like to tie him to a chair
by his testicles and make him listen to lullabies for twenty-four hours.
See how he sleeps. I don't get it, Coop. This stuff you people work on
makes murder look comprehensible."

"How'd she come forward, Patti?"

"When Flora called Ronald yesterday to ask when she could start to work,
he told her that there was no job because he really didn't have any
power to hire or fire employees. She stormed right into the clinic and
showed the contract to the physician in charge, who said it was bogus.
So she went directly to a pay phone on the corner and called the cops. I
thought you ought to know about it before I did anything on the case."

"Good thinking." Brownnosing worked with me almost every time. Patti
knew that if we, as prosecutors, could direct the course of an
investigation pre arrest we could usually build a stronger case for
trial.

"What's to think about?" Chapman asked. "Cuff him and put him in the
can, now."

"What's the crime, Mikey? What does Patti charge him with?" I stood with
my back to the air conditioner, trying to cool down as we talked.

"Sodomy in the first," Mike suggested.

"I didn't hear you describe any force, did I?" Patti shook her head in
the negative in response to my question.

"Public lewdness," Mike spat out at me.

"It's not a public place. Ronald's sitting right in his own office when
he's playing with himself. Expectation of privacy and all that," I
countered.

"I told you murder is easy. You got a dead body, an unnatural cause of
death, and it's one kind of homicide or another. You girls gotta sit
here and play Find the Crime." "Here's what you do," I suggested to
Patti. "Bring Flora in and get all the facts. See if you can make out a
coercion charge. Try section 135.60 of the Penal Law, sub 9 compelling
her to perform an act which might be harmful to health, safety,
reputation, et cetera.

"Also, there's a good chance he's been holding himself out as a doctor
or some other licensed position at the clinic. Figure on next Wednesday
that's my calendar day, so I'm free to go with you. You can have a
search warrant prepared and ready by then. We'll have a couple of guys
from the squad take us up to the clinic, and we'll go in that morning
with the warrant. That way we can seize all his personnel records,
Flora's files, his appointment book, any documents he has on his walls
with credentials that can be checked out and any other information you
can develop during your interview with Flora. No one will be on notice
that we're coming, so none of the records will be destroyed. Let's keep
this one quiet. No need to embarrass the legitimate part of this
operation at Saint Peter's, okay?"

Patti picked up her folder and was gone. I found my list of topics I
needed to update Battaglia about and added this one to it. I had to
remember to ask his executive assistant, Rose Malone, whether he had
accepted the invitation I heard he had received to be Saint Peter's
Hospital Humanitarian of the Year, for his charitable work on behalf of
underprivileged kids.

"Don't you have anything to do?" I asked Chapman after I reminded Laura
to get Ryan Blackmer over to see me. Mike was lifting things up from the
piles on top of my desk and reading them. Some were complaint reports
and investigation updates, others were personal notes and messages.

"Nothing till the autopsy this afternoon. I was hoping you'd come with
me to Forlini's and grab a bite to eat. I'm always more content in the
morgue when I've got a full stomach."

"I don't have time to go out for lunch today. Call Kindler or Holmes
just get out of my hair for a while so I can catch up on everything
here."

"Have you returned yesterday's call to Jacob Tyler yet?" Chapman asked,
fanning out a handful of messages from Laura's telephone pad.

"And does that one have anything to do with the fact that the white lace
camisole you ordered is out of stock but will be shipped by Fedex as
soon as "

I lurched across the desk and ripped the papers from Mike's hand as Ryan
entered the office.

"Well, I can't imagine that the underwear delivery would upset you, so
there must be something about the call from the newscaster that has you
jumping, Ms. Cooper. Go easy on her, Ryan, it's been a long morning."

Mike always liked to tease me about my social life, but I hadn't yet
told him that I had been dating Jake and knew this wasn't the right
moment to explain the relationship to him.

Ryan was as good-natured as he was competent, and for every serious case
that he indicted, five or six more bizarre situations wound up on his
desk. "You got any time next week to help me with an interview?" he
asked me. "I'd really like your opinion."

"Sure, which one?"

"Remember the Cruise to Nowhere you assigned to me? Four girls from
Jersey celebrated their high school graduation by taking a weekend
cruise," Ryan reminded me. "Boarded the ship in New York harbor, then it
sails out past Long Island for three days. I didn't know there was
anything that could float capable of holding the amount of liquor on
board this thing. Or that any land-roving mammal could imbibe as much as
these kids did and still be alive."

"I don't remember any of the facts. Sorry, but I've been preoccupied
with my hearings."

"The girls started drinking mimosas at breakfast Saturday morning.

Stacey, the victim and I am using that word loosely, Alex got seasick
and went down to their cabin to throw up for a couple of hours. Bounced
back in the afternoon for some Bloody Marys and beer. Wine and champagne
with dinner. Doesn't remember anything after ten P.M. She was a bit
surprised to find the ship's magician in her bunk with her starkers when
the ship pulled into the dock on Sunday morning. She's screaming rape.
And by the way, suing the cruise ship." "The Love Boat," said Mike.

"Well, that's what her bunk mates say, but she's insisting she would
never have done anything like that if she were sober. Personally, I
don't even think we have jurisdiction if this happened more than three
miles out of the harbor, but I know you believe in seeing everybody who
makes a complaint."

For far too long, when rape laws prevented prosecutions and the system
was not open to its survivors, women had no place to turn for justice or
advocacy. One of our goals in setting up a special unit was to see all
those women who wanted to report cases, and give them the appropriate
guidance whether their matter belonged in the criminal court or
elsewhere.

"Make an appointment with her for the Friday after next and have Laura
put it on my calendar. Just give me all your witness interview notes
before then, so I know where the inconsistencies are when we start
talking to Stacey. Be sure you check with Laura on Thursday, ' if I'm
still tied up with this new homicide, I'll have to move you back a
couple of days. And Ryan, what are you doing for lunch?"

He brightened and looked back at me, waiting for the offer. "Take
Chapman across the street and feed him. Stick it on my tab. I've got
work to do."

"I'll give you a call when we've taken care of Gertie, Ms. Cooper.

Personally, I'm a little bit worried about you, though. I think your
father's right listening to stories about all this sex and violence day
in and day out can't be very good for you. C'mon, Ryan." Mike was almost
out the door when he turned back and threw me the last question.

"Whatever happened to romance? Doesn't anybody believe in dinner and a
movie any more.

Five.

Alex Trebek told the noisy crowd of prosecutors and cops packing "Part
OF the name affectionately given to the bar at Forlini's, since at many
points on a Friday afternoon it was likely to have more office personnel
in it than most of the dozens of court parts across the street that the
Final Jeopardy category would be New York State History.

I could see Chapman's dark head positioned beneath the television that
was hung in the far corner of the room, surrounded by six of the guys
from Trial Bureau 50, celebrating the end of another workweek.

"Get it up, blondie!" Mike shouted down the bar at me as I squeezed
through friendly packs of coworkers who were reliving their
cross-examinations and telling" one another about their latest triumphs
and travails. "How are you on the Empire State?"

"I'll go the usual ten," I said, sliding into the space cleared for me
by Ed Broderick and Kevin Guadagno. Dempsey had seen me arrive, too, and
my Dewar's on the rocks was already on the countertop.

"All right, then," Trebek continued, fighting for our attention over the
noise of the jukebox and the banter of more than a hundred of law
enforcement's thirstiest troops. "The answer is: City that was the site
of the largest Confederate prison camp during the Civil War."

I shook my head and rested it in my right hand, ready to acknowledge
defeat, while I sipped my scotch with the left. Chapman was writing
furiously on the back of a cocktail napkin. "I've been had. This isn't a
New York question it's military history," I moaned.

Mike Chapman had majored in history at Fordham College and amassed a
limitless knowledge of battles, gunboats, warriors, and even the names
of the stallions on which they rode. Our long-standing habit of betting
on the Final Jeopardy questions whether in the middle of a crime scene,
a good meal, or a round of cocktails had taught each of us to stay away
from the categories that were the other's strong points, and I was about
to be taken down in front of my colleagues on Chapman's principal
strength much to his delight.

As the timer ticked and the theme music jingled on, my mind sped through
lists of upstate names, but all I could think of were prisons to which
my convicted rapists had been sent over the last decade Green Haven,
Ossining, Clinton, Auburn, and so on. Nothing conjured up the Civil War.
Mike was singing an Irish ballad in my ear, confusing me further, and
substituting the name of one of the grimmest institutions for the town
in the classic song. "How are things in Dannemora he crooned as I tried
to brush him away from me.

Trebek picked up the card lying on the podium in front of the
septuagenarian wallpaper hanger from Minnesota, saw that it was empty,
and commented that it was too bad he hadn't ventured a guess.

"Take your best shot, Cooper?" Mike said.

"What is Attica?" I asked, stirring the ice cubes with my finger.

"Bzzzzzzzz." Mike imitated the penalty buzzer as the show's second
contestant bombed with her answer, too. "What is Elmira?" he said, loud
enough for everyone at our end to hear.

The Stanford professor who had won on the show four days this week also
had the correct answer, and was beaming no less proudly than Chapman as
Trebek congratulated him and announced that his five-day total was
$38,000.

"Cooper's got the next round, Dempsey. For me and everybody in Trial
Bureau 50. Elmira, the flower of Chemung County. Treaty of Painted Post
proposed there in seventeen ninety-one, to end the settlers' war with
the Iroquois. Wouldn't expect you to know that, kid. But three thousand
Confederate soldiers are buried there. Actually, called it "Hellmira'
during the war, ' the conditions were so bad. What'd you think they were
going to ask, Coop where's Niagara Falls? Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?
Too much time wasted at Wellesley with those Elizabethan poets and that
Chaucerian crap you're so full of."

"I'm going back to the office, Mike. You want to talk autopsy before I
go?"

"You gotta be kidding. We got a table in the back room we're all having
dinner together. Aren't you going to stay for that?"

"I'm taking a salad back with me. Honestly, I'll be in the library all
weekend. Just tell me what happened this afternoon."

Chapman and I walked out of the bar toward the rear of the restaurant
and sat at an empty table for two. "Still no I.D. Dr. Fleisher makes her
out to be about forty years old, and in very good health except for that
crater in the back of her head. No kids never given birth. He was also
right about the cause. Blunt force injury dead long before she hit the
water."

"Does he know what's responsible for the laceration?" I asked.

"You can start with the fact that this wasn't a ' and fall."

Whatever she was hit with was hard enough to cause a skull fracture.

Could have been a gun butt, a brick, a rock. Doubtful that it was a
bottle or anything like that no residue or fragments in the wound," Mike
went on. "The impact was probably a glancing blow, but it was so deep
that the subcutaneous tissue separated from the underlying muscle
fascia." "And the internal exam?" I asked.

"Fleisher didn't find anything remarkable. Sexually active adult female.
Only thing that will interest you is that there were abrasions on her
upper thighs, close to the vaginal area."

"Nobody mentioned them last night at the scene," I commented.

"Doc said it's typical with a body that's been immersed in water. That
kind of injury scraping of the skin and removal of superficial layers
only becomes noticeable after the body has dried out," Mike said.

"Were those actually finger marks I saw?" I asked, wondering if the
abrasions had been caused during an attempt at a sexual assault.

"Looks consistent with that. They took lots of close-ups, so you can
study them."

"How about rope burns from the ligature marks?"

Chapman described the autopsy proceeding, in which Fleisher cut the skin
directly under the wrist and ankle restraints, looking for that answer.
"Not enough hemorrhaging to suggest she was alive when they tied her
up," he answered. "It was probably just the means of securing her body
to the ladder, for the purpose of disposing of her. That's it, except
for the toxicological workups, which won't be ready for another week."

"Any reason to think there'll be findings of significance?" I wondered.

"Yeah, Fleisher thinks she's had some problems with cocaine. He didn't
like the looks of her nasal septum. Could be just one more of those
uptown drug deals gone sour," Mike said. "She looked classy, but she
undoubtedly liked to stick that sugar up her nose."

"What's next?"

"Gert just stays tucked in her fridge until somebody figures out who she
is. Tomorrow morning, she's out of the newspapers, and I start looking
for who-done-it."

"Give me a call over the weekend if anything develops, will you?" I
asked. "I'll be down here most of the time, either in the library or at
my desk."

"Don't you want a ride home later?"

"Thanks, no. I've got the Jeep right in front of the office. Ciao." I
said my
"Good nights" around the bar, picked up my take-out salad, and walked
the quiet block back to the office.

It was after midnight when I locked up my files, rode the elevator down
to the lobby, and drove home to park in the garage and drag myself
upstairs to go to sleep. I played the messages left by friends on my
answering machine throughout the day and evening, and made a list of
calls to return at some point on Saturday. Most of my pals got out of
the city on the steaming summer weekends to beach houses they owned or
rented, borrowed or shared and I was just as anxious to get this court
proceeding behind me so I could disappear to my home on Martha's
Vineyard for some rest.

I bathed, ignored the usually appealing pile of magazines next to the
bed, and read a chapter of The Ambassadors before falling off into a
sound sleep. On Saturday morning I went over to the west sixties, where
I took a two-hour ballet class with my instructor, William, who tried to
remove all the knots that several weeks of courtroom tension had worked
into my shoulders, back, and thighs. When I left the dance studio I
headed directly downtown to the office, to continue researching and
Grafting my arguments for the complicated presentation I had to make on
Monday.

It was close to eight o'clock when I realized that my eyes were bleary
and my thought process was getting fuzzy. As I neared home on the FDR
Drive, I was trying to decide whether there was anyone in town I could
call on such short notice to meet me for a light supper. The beeper went
off while I was still a few blocks away from my apartment, and when I
glanced down and noted that the number on the lighted display was
unfamiliar, I decided to wait until I got upstairs to return the call.

"Hello?" I said tentatively.

The accented voice of an older woman spoke into the telephone. "One
moment," she said, and I heard her say something inaudible while passing
the receiver to someone.

"Yeah?" It was Mike Chapman's voice.

"Hi. Got your beep on my way home."

"Hey, Coop. We got an I. D." just an hour ago. Housekeeper came back
from vacation. Says the lady of the house was supposed to be here all
week but nobody's seen her. Noticed the sketch in yesterday's news, then
she put it together with the fact that "Madam' is not around.

Called the precinct, and they notified us. I grabbed one of the guys and
we ran down here with a couple of the head shots from the M. E."s
Office, and the housekeeper breaks up on us as soon as she sees the
photos."

"Who is "

"Lady's name is Denise Caxton. Lives well, lived at 890 Fifth Avenue.

Ever hear of her?" Chapman wanted to know.

"No. Why?"

"She and the husband own an art gallery, same place where you get your
roots done." "The Fuller Building?" I asked. Madison Avenue at
Fifty-seventh Street the crossroads of the art world, as the owner of my
salon liked to call it.

"Yeah, the Caxton Gallery occupies the entire top floor."

I could hear the background conversation between Mike's partner and the
tearful woman as Mike whispered into the phone. "You wouldn't believe
this apartment five-bedroom duplex, with a modern art collection that
most museums would kill for."

"So, did they? And where's Mr. Caxton?"

"The housekeeper doesn't know. Denise split with him Lowell Caxton a few
months back. They both still share the apartment separate entrances and
living quarters but there's no sign that he's in town.

And she says there's nothing to suggest any foul play in the apartment,
either."

"Want me to come over and "

"Forget about it. Valerie's giving us the boot. Won't let us look around
or touch anything. Not till she gets her orders from Monsieur Caxton."

"Any date book, calendar to trace back the deceased's movements?"

"All on computer, Coop, and she's not letting us anywhere near that room
or any of the equipment."

"Can you secure the apartment until I can get a warrant to search it?" I
asked.

"You bet your ass we'll have to. Any of this stuff disappears, we'll all
be nailed to the wall. I've sent for some uniformed guys to watch each
of the entrances, just to keep the place buttoned up tight.

"And get your beauty sleep, blondie. I have the distinct feeling that
you and I will be dancing together on this one. If there's one motive
for every million hanging on these walls, we're gonna be busy."

Six.

"Think about it for a minute," Chapman urged me. "Rebecca? Domestic
violence. Notorious? Domestic violence. Gaslight? Domestic violence.
Dial M for Murder? Domestic violence. Niagara? Domestic violence. Every
one of your favorite movies has some kind of spousal abuse in it, you
know? What does that say about you, blondie?"

I was staring at a Monet hanging in the Caxton living room. I had never
seen any painting from the water lily series in private hands, and here
was a glorious canvas, practically as large as the triptych that hangs
in the Museum of Modern Art, stretching the length of the wall.

"The Postman Always Rings Twice? Domestic violence. Double Indemnity?

Domes "

"Yeah, now you're getting to the good ones. The ladies strike back,
Mikey. Those are the ones I really enjoy." I walked over to Mercer, who
was studying the signature in the corner of the painting.

"Is this for real?" he asked me.

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. "I assume so. I played around on the
Internet for a couple of hours last night after Mike called me with the
I. D." and it seems the Caxton collection is world famous. A lot of it
has been in the family for generations."

Mercer and I were moving around the forty-foot-long room like it was a
gallery in the Louvre. Each painting and object was museum quality, and
I was fascinated by their beauty and number.

Chapman was sitting on a sofa facing the stunning view of Central Park,
watching as the housekeeper delivered coffee and English muffins to the
table in front of him, pouring from a Georgian server that was worth our
collective salaries for at least the next couple of years.

"Thanks, Valerie. I was starving." Chapman gave the red-eyed woman his
best grin and began slathering butter on the toasted morsel he had
picked up from the plate. "Valerie makes these from scratch, Coop. Got
her own nooks and crannies better than Thomas'. You oughta take a lesson
from her."

Mercer shook his head and walked over, spreading a napkin across the
knee of Chapman's jeans. The dripping butter would have been an
unwelcome accent to the delicate design of golden Napoleonic bees on the
peach silk fabric of the sofa. "How'd you get Valerie to let us in?"

"We bonded last night over a bit of Mr. Caxton's Irish whiskey. I've
frequently found it helpful in periods of bereavement. Basically I told
her I wasn't going anywhere until she located him for me."

Chapman had called me again at midnight to tell me that Valerie had
reached Lowell Caxton at his home in Paris and that he would be taking
the Concorde back to New York. It was Mike's idea that the three of us
await him in his home, to deny him the opportunity to alter or destroy
any evidence before we could interview him.

Air France flight 002 from Paris had been due in at 8:44 A.M. on Sunday.
Chapman had returned to the building at six, and Mercer had picked me up
at home two hours later. "Why'd she let you back in today?" I asked.
"The boss won't be too happy about this, I'm sure."

"Let's just say she was encouraged by the doormen. One thing they frown
on in these snooty buildings, Miss. Cooper, is scenes. The sight of me
alone in the lobby wasn't all that upsetting to them at first, but it
was probably when I asked Frick and Frack if they thought it was gonna
be necessary for me to get the Emergency Services Unit over here with
battering rams that they called and suggested to Valerie that I might be
more comfortable waiting in Caxton's salon. I'm telling you doormen
despise scenes."

So much for any evidence that we might be lucky enough to come up with
in the apartment. The kind of pressure that Mike liked to apply to get
his way more often resulted in a consent under threat than the freely
given consent necessary for a lawful entry or search.

Valerie returned to the room with another ornate tray and porcelain cups
for Mercer and me. Her hand trembled slightly as she poured the coffee,
and I wondered whether it was because of grief over her mistress's
death, the effects of a hangover, or fear of Caxton's reaction when he
found us settled in and enjoying his hospitality. She replaced the
silver pot on a small table beside a large ormolu clock that bore an
engraved seal depicting a royal crest I couldn't identify.

"Hitchcock had it right, Coop. Think of how many movies it's the husband
or wife who offs the other spouse. Just because this guy was in Paris
all week doesn't mean he isn't a prime suspect. Shit, we don't even know
exactly how many days she's been dead. Besides that, someone with this
kind of dough could hire a killer with his pocket change."

"Well, what did you get out of Valerie during your fireside chat last
night?"

"Precious little. Seemed to genuinely like the late Mrs. C." who hired
her personally and relied on her for all kinds of intimate service. But
the husband pays the bills, and she's not about to throw that out the
window so fast." Mike was almost finished with his second muffin, the
buttered topping covered over with some kind of strawberry preserve.
"Hey, Mercer, might as well lift the lids on those little Coop, what
does your mother call useless little dust catchers like that stuff over
there? Tchotchkes? Maybe Denise stored her coke in one of those."

Chapman pointed at a gilt-trimmed bureau plat, only half in jest. It was
completely covered by miniature porcelain snuffboxes. Half a dozen of
them would have fit at once in the palm of Mercer's hand, but he lifted
the lids of several of them individually. I sipped on my coffee as I
walked beside him, noticing that each box was hand painted with
portraits of cavalier King Charles spaniels in a variety of regal
backgrounds.

Above the table was a Degas, familiar to me from my Wellesley
introductory art course and close enough in detail to the famous Foyer
of the Dance that it had to be the study for the great painting that
hangs in Paris.

Chapman was on his feet, wiping his hands with the heavy damask napkin.

He was standing in front of a Picasso about four feet by six, his head
cocked as he tried to make some sense of the Cubist representations. "I
just don't get it. Why would somebody pay millions of dollars for
something like this, which isn't supposed to look like anything anyway?

I must have spent too much time in church. I haven't liked any artists
since Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Just give me a Madonna I mean,
the old Madonna and I'm happy."

I had circled the room and was back in front of the lilies. "You'd like
Monet. Impressionism got its name from one of his paintings Impression
of a Sunrise." Chapman joined me to look at the vast canvas, one of the
endless images of the same subject portrayed at different hours of the
day in different variations of light.

"That one you're looking at was painted at Giverny, just before his
death. He was nearly blind." Caxton's voice startled us as we turned to
look toward the entryway of the long room.

"Looks to me like most of the stuff painted in this century could have
been done by a blind man. Mike Chapman, Homicide," Mike said, advancing
to shake Lowell Caxton's hand and show his identification.

"These are my colleagues Detective Mercer Wallace, and Alexandra Cooper
from the District Attorney's Office."

Caxton extended a hand to each of us. "I hope Valerie has made you
comfortable. Perhaps you'll allow me to step inside and freshen up for a
moment before we get on with what you need to do."

It was a reasonable request after a trans-Atlantic trip, and although
Chapman would have liked to tail him into the private quarters of the
apartment, we had no choice but to let Caxton disappear to his suite of
rooms.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later he returned to the living room, opened a
set of sliding pocket doors, and gestured the three of us into the
library. The walls were lacquered in a rich shade of Chinese red,
strikingly showcasing another Picasso, this time from the artist's Rose
Period. Bookcases were lined with sets of leather-bound volumes,
valuable and rare, and assuredly untouched and unread. Some decorator's
idea of a complement to the art.

Lowell Caxton seated himself in the largest chair in the room as we took
our places around him. "It's a bit more intimate in here," he said to no
one in particular.

As he looked each of us over to size us up, waiting for Valerie to bring
him the tea he had requested, we examined him as well. The articles I
had seen in Lexis-Nexis gave his age as seventy-four. But he was trim
and vigorous, with a full head of thick gray hair, and I would have
guessed him to be no older than sixty-five. He remained in the clothes
in which he had traveled gray slacks, loafers without socks, a tennis
shirt, and a pink cashmere sweater looped around his shoulders. The
solid gold Cartier Pasha on his wrist was the only jewelry he wore.

Valerie delivered the tea on yet another small silver tray. "Close the
doors after you, will you, Valerie?" Caxton asked. Her hands were still
shaking as she backed out of the room, sliding the doors together by
pulling the brass knob on each of the sections.

"Am I supposed to open this session by telling you how distraught I am
by Deni's demise?" he went on. "Or have you already found ample fodder
in the tabloids to know that it wouldn't be a very sincere way for me to
begin? The flight home even with the abbreviated flying time of a
supersonic transport was more than enough for me to shed whatever tears
I had left. I didn't kill her, although there'll be plenty of her
friends to suggest as much to you. But I certainly didn't love her any
longer, so you might as well know that from the outset."

"You want to ask us anything, before I get started?" Chapman queried.

"I know everything about how and where she was found, Detective. After
Valerie reached me with the news last night, I had my assistant make all
the inquiries he could. I'm sure you'll tell me whatever else you think
it's necessary for me to know."

I had worked with Mike often enough to get inside his head. You couldn't
look at a situation like this without thinking you could easily find a
motive for the husband to want the wife dead money, business,
infidelity, and in this instance, even more money. A contract hit in
this kind of marriage would be cheaper than any alimony decision made by
a judge or jury. But it was also so obvious that we were each thinking
that it was too easy. Now the guy plays right into the theory by not
even expressing interest in how his estranged wife was killed. He
probably had more channels of access to whatever information he wanted
than I had pairs of shoes.

Mike had two short-term goals. He needed to get as much information
about both Caxtons, personal and professional, as he could, and he
wanted to shove open the pocket doors so he could see whether anyone was
coming or going into the private rooms of the apartment.

"It's warm in here, Mr. Caxton," Mike said, taking out his notepad and
loosening his tie as he rose and walked toward the doors. "Mind if I
open these for a little air?"

Caxton lifted a remote control panel from the table beside him. "Not
necessary, Detective. I'll simply adjust the room temperature. It stays
much cooler in here without the summer sun beating through those glass
windows off the park. Carry on. Tell me what you need to know."

Whether we needed it all or not, the Caxton family history and the
building of the art fortune had to be explored, in case they proved to
be links to the murder.

Lowell Caxton III was the grandson of the Pittsburgh steel baron whose
name he bore. The grandfather had been born in
1840 and was one of those great American success stories a poor kid from
a large family who rose from menial mill jobs to running a production
plant before he was thirty. When he recognized the growing demand for
steel, needed to build the railroads across the country, he borrowed all
of his working-class relatives' money and purchased a factory. In 1873,
when another young fellow, named Andrew Carnegie, came along and began
his acquisition of businesses which he later consolidated into the
Carnegie Steel Company, Lowell Caxton never had to work again. He became
an investor and speculator, and thereafter a philanthropist responsible
for helping Carnegie build libraries and art museums all over the
Northeast.

In the mid-1880s, Caxton became enamored of the bohemian lifestyle of
many of the young artists living and working in Paris. He bought several
apartments in Montmartre and let some of the struggling upstarts live
there rent-free, in exchange for paintings that he took to America.

On one of his trips, drinking in the nightclubs with Toulouse-Lautrec,
Caxton took up with a dancer, whom he married and brought back to the
States. Their son, Lowell II, inherited the entire fortune the money and
the art when both of his parents died in the sinking of the Lusitania,
in 1915. He was thirty years old at the time.

As though the passion for art had been genetically transmitted, the
junior Caxton carried on his father's interests, patronizing the
creators and expanding the family collection. He was a popular figure at
Mabel Dodge's "evenings" in her home at 2.3 Fifth Avenue, where he
championed the Post-impressionists to Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger,
John Reed, and the other intellectuals who gathered to exchange ideas
while Dodge puffed on her gold-tipped cigarettes. It was at one of those
soirees that he met his wife, a guest of Gertrude Stein's named
Marie-Helene de Neuilly, who was a well-known patron of avant-garde art
before the First World War. Our host, Lowell III or Three, as his father
liked to call him as a boy also had the love of art in his blood.

"The first artist I ever met was Picasso," Caxton continued, "at our
home in Paris, before he went off to Spain to fight. He was having an
affair with my mother at the time, although I was much too young to pick
up on that. And in case you're wondering, it was perfectly all right
with my father. Got him some stunning paintings for his collection. You
might like to see them someday. They're in my bedroom never been shown
publicly."

"Do you mind if we talk about your wife, Mr. Caxton?" Chapman asked.

"I've had three, Detective. I assume you mean Deni?"

"Well, actually, why don't you tell me about the other two first? Then,
yes, I'd like to know as much about Denise as possible."

"Not much to say about them. Rest in peace." Caxton looked over at me,
daring a smile. "I married Lisette in France at the beginning of the
war. She died in childbirth. Tragic, really. I adored her. My second
wife was from Italy. She raised Lisette's child and then two more
daughters of our own. Killed in a boating accident in Venice."

"Aha!" Chapman said under his breath, shifting in his chair and leaning
across to me. "Rebecca. I told you so."

I ignored the crack and went on. "Where are your daughters now?"

"All grown, married, living in Europe. And if you want to know whether
or not they liked Deni, they didn't. She was younger than all of them,
and they never got along very well. But they've had absolutely nothing
to do with her for years."

"I understand," Chapman said. "We will, of course, need to get in touch
with them at some point."

"I'll have someone from my office get you all their information."

"Back to Denise, if we may."

"Certainly, Detective. I met Deni nearly twenty years ago, in Firenze.

She was "

"You were widowed at the time, Mr. Caxton?" Mercer asked.

"Widowed once, Mr. Wallace. My second wife was alive and quite well.

Her mishap occurred several years thereafter. In any event, I had flown
over to look at a Bernini sculpture that I wanted to bid on. It was at
the gallery that I first saw Denise, and I was more infatuated with her
than with the statue. That hadn't happened to me in years."

"And she was there to bid on the same piece for the Tate?" I ventured,
having found that item of her biography on-line the previous night in an
old magazine clipping about a museum opening.

Caxton smiled. "I should think you'd know better than to believe
everything you read in the newspapers, young lady. Deni was just off her
year as Miss. Oklahoma, and a very-distant-second runner-up in the Miss.
America Pageant. You were probably too busy with your nose in your
schoolbooks," Caxton said, with a nod in my direction, "to be watching
that year, but she was the kid from Idabel with great looks and no
talent to speak of traded in baton twirling in favor of reading a
soliloquy from As You Like It. Not exactly a crowd pleaser. She took her
ten-thousand-dollar scholarship prize and escaped. Worked her way over
to Florence to study art, which she didn't know the first thing about at
the time. Figured if Andy Warhol could fool the world with what he was
selling, she could catch on and find a niche.

"I decided to follow my grandfather's route, Miss. Cooper. What Denise
lacked in breeding, she made up for in shall we say? elan. She was a
marvelously quick study and I enjoyed teaching. All she needed from me
was to create a provenance for her, no different than a clever forger
would do for a fine painting.

"I gave Deni a vague and somewhat mysterious background orphaned as a
young child, with a trust fund. Raised abroad in a series of boarding
schools. Moved her from the pensione she was living in to the Excelsior,
where I was staying when I came to town. Had her tutored in French and
Italian she was adequate in the former and tolerable in the latter. Most
of the men who met her were intrigued and forgave her the minor
incongruities. She didn't care much about what the women thought of her.
Denise was never a contender for Miss. Congeniality."

"What did your second wife think of her, Mr. Caxton?" Mike clearly was
fascinated by the circumstance of the thrice-widowed husband.

"I'm not sure she ever knew about Deni, to tell the truth. She was
riding in a cigarette speedboat when it flipped, killing her instantly.

I had only known Deni a few years at that point. The whole arrangement
was working perfectly for me. And yes, Mr. Chapman, there was an inquest
when my wife died. Accidental death, I'm sure Maurizio, my assistant,
can get you all the records that you need."

"How long have you had the gallery in the Fuller Building?" Mercer
wanted to bring this story up to the present.

"Deni and I moved back to New York twelve years ago. We bought this
apartment so that she could open our gallery. For me, the satisfaction
has always been in finding and collecting the great pieces more than a
century of Caxton taste that I can surround myself with in the privacy
of my own homes. Not entirely selfish, mind you. We frequently exhibit
portions of the holdings, whenever asked, and many of my mistakes have
wound up permanently on the walls of museums all over America and most
of Europe.

"But Denise also liked the game itself. It wasn't enough to gift her
with unique art or jewels, which worked very well at the beginning. She
had come from nothing her father was a soybean farmer and she really
needed to prove she was as smart as any of the rest of us out there.

She liked the hustle of the art world. She adored being a taste maker if
you will. But I suppose your research has revealed all of that."

Now I was doubly sorry that I had suggested I knew anything about either
of the Caxtons. "Not at all, Mr. Caxton. Forgive me, but I only tried to
acquaint myself with information about Mrs. Caxton's business when I
learned that it was she who had been killed. It's always helpful to me
if I can get as close to the victim as possible to try and understand
why she might be a target for someone. That is, if her loved ones allow
me that kind of access."

"Anything you'd like, Miss. Cooper. Perhaps it would help if we took a
walk into Deni's quarters, to give you an idea of how she lived. Would
you like that?"

Chapman was on his feet before I could answer. Caxton moved to the
double doors as Mike leaned in behind me and whispered, "Very smoothly
done, blondie. Keep batting those eyelashes and you could be the fourth
late Mrs. Lowell Caxton. A very temporary position, from the looks of
it."

As the doors slid apart I could see the back of a man carrying a black
leather suitcase as he walked out of the entry way that led from the
living room to the elevator. Mercer nudged Chapman. "There goes
Kardashian with Simpson's bloody clothes."

"Mr. Caxton," Chapman said, "I'd appreciate it if you could hold that
gentleman before he leaves here with any property that we might need to
look at."

"Is it safe for me to assume, Detective, that you don't have a warrant
to search my luggage?"

Mike and Mercer were silent. Caxton continued. "That was Maurizio. He
simply unpacked the bag I returned with this morning and is taking it
down to the storage area in the basement of the building. Sorry to
disappoint you." We heard the heavy door swing closed.

He led us past the Picasso and pointed at three doors across the room.

"That far exit goes to the kitchen and the servants' quarters. Unless
you think the butler did it, Mr. Chapman, that portion of the household
needn't take up your time. These other two are rather, were our separate
apartments. Nothing new about that. Even when we were getting along very
well, we always had distinct living spaces.

Different lifestyles, different tastes in art.

"I didn't approve of the drugs, and I didn't much care for Deni's
current passion for modern painting some of the very abstract, jarring
works she'd developed an interest in recently." We followed Caxton as he
opened the door to Denise's wing.

"You know, gentlemen, this may sound a bit peevish in light of the fact
that I'm standing here with you while my wife is being fitted for a
coffin, but if your department had taken my shooting a bit more
seriously, perhaps this wouldn't have happened to Deni."

Mercer, Mike, and I couldn't conceal our puzzlement as we exchanged
looks.

"Are any of you with the Nineteenth Precinct? That's the unit that's
handling the investigation," Caxton explained.

"No, we're not. Could you tell us what happened?" Chapman was plainly
annoyed that we had come here without such an important piece of
information.

"Just crossing Madison Avenue, six weeks ago, on my way home from the
Whitney. Holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in my hand. A car driving past
slowed down, and the man in the passenger seat pointed at me it was
happening so quickly that all I saw was his hand then I heard the sound
of a gun shot and felt a stinging on my scalp. I found myself sitting on
the curb, people running over to help me. Never even dropped the
coffee."

Caxton bowed his head and parted his silver hair with his hands. "I'm
sure you can still see the scar, like a seam across my scalp. At that
moment I was quite sure I was dead. This must be what it's like to die,
I thought to myself. No pain at all. It took me a few seconds to
realize, as the blood dripped onto my face, that I had been grazed by
the bullet and not seriously injured at all. If someone had actually
tried to kill me, they'd hired the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

"I trust you'll be able to figure out whether Deni's death had anything
to do with that, won't you?"

He pivoted away and walked on ahead of us to turn on the lights in the
dim hallway. "The only thing I trust," said Chapman, "is that some
ass-kissing lieutenant in the Nineteenth was trying to make his numbers
look better for the commissioner. When I call over for the case report
on the assault on Lowell Caxton, I'll probably find out that they're
carrying the investigation as disorderly conduct instead of attempted
murder. Heaven forbid you alarm the good citizens of the Upper East Side
by suggesting a violent crime could happen here they might confuse the
place with Harlem."

Seven.

"Here's another Degas," Caxton said to me, stopping in front of a
painting. "Perhaps you remember from your college days that after the
Napoleonic wars, it was presumed of firstborn sons of a certain class
that they would become lawyers. Edgar dutifully followed his father's
wishes and enrolled at the Fac-ulte de Droit. Fortunately for the rest
of the world if not his parents he dropped out in favor of doing
something more creative than litigation after only a month."

He walked on. "Cezanne spent almost three years at law school in Aix,
replete with boredom. And Matisse actually clerked for a lawyer for
quite a while, drafting briefs and keeping files. It was only when he
was forced to stay at home with appendicitis that he was given his first
paint set by his mother. A decade later, he changed the history of the
art world with the birth of Fauvism exuberant colors and wildly
distorted shapes. Imagine our loss if any of these giants had become
mired in the law. You don't paint by any chance, do you, Miss. Cooper?"

Lowell Caxton managed to summarize a bit of art history while making
clear his disdain for the legal profession. I got the point.

So far, the hallway lined with Impressionist paintings was as
breathtaking as any gallery in the finest museums. Caxton opened the
last door, which had been Denise's bedroom. The contrast was stunning.

"A bit self-involved, would you say?" he asked rather facetiously.

The room was like a shrine to its former occupant, with almost every
painting in it a portrait of Denise. "Gifts from the artists, of course.
Thankful for her ability to turn their talents into gold, in some
instances. Quite like alchemy. The Warhol is the great irony, in that he
started this whole odyssey for her, without his ever knowing it."

Displayed above the headboard of the king-size bed, covered in an
exquisite set of antique linens with countless throw pillows layered on
top, were the four-colored Warhol images of a younger Denise Caxton.

The youthful bride with a swan-like neck and beauty queen smile was
deserving of a few portraits, I conceded, but this accumulation was a
bit frightening.

The three of us circled the space, looking at signatures and taking in
the variety of styles. I recognized some of the names Richard Sussman,
Emilio Gomes, and Aneas Mckiever among them but Caxton pointed out the
rest of those I had never encountered. There were Deni Caxtons fully
clothed and bejeweled, and there were Deni Caxtons completely nude and
erotically posed. There were torsos without heads and limbs, and there
were heads without body parts.

"How'd she let this one slip in?" Chapman asked. He pointed at a yellow
canvas, three feet square, with a small pink rectangle in the upper
right corner.

Caxton laughed. "That is Denise, Detective. According to Alain Levinsky.
Even she had a sense of humor about it. She managed to sell about a
dozen Levinsky '," Mr. Chapman. One each to Bardot, Trump, and Ted
Turner can't remember who sat for the others. A few rectangles, a few
oblongs, a few squares. Et voila, a portrait."

"This is all like "The Emperor's New Clothes," if you ask me," Chapman
said.

"Precisely," Caxton responded. "I couldn't agree with you more. Denise
mocked me for my traditional views too representational, she used to
argue, too old-fashioned. I wish P.T. Barnum had lived long enough to
encounter this trend. Nowadays there are two or three suckers born every
minute, if you ask me. He might have gone into partnership with Deni."

Mercer was scouring the surfaces of the furniture bedside tables,
dresser top, lingerie chest for any signs of notes or papers, names or
phone numbers. But there was nothing loose and nothing casually laid
about. Either Mrs. Caxton lived that neatly or Valerie had removed every
jotting or message pad before we arrived.

"Would you or the housekeeper know whether any belongings are missing?"
Mercer asked. "Jewelry, clothing, anything like "

"I couldn't begin to guess," said Caxton. He stepped to the only other
door in the room and pulled the handles back to reveal a walk-in closet,
which was probably larger than half of the studio apartments in
Manhattan. Clothes were assembled by category dresses, slacks, suits,
evening gowns and then again by colors within those groupings. "The
lesser jewels are kept in that safe at the rear. The more important
things, from my mother and grand mere are all safeguarded in a vault.

We'll certainly check for you during the week.

"If you've seen enough here, we'll go inside to Deni's office."

I wasn't sure that I was ready to leave the boudoir, but we were given
no choice, and the three of us dutifully followed Caxton, retracing our
steps back up the corridor and into the next room.

Denise had constructed a thronelike encampment for herself at one end of
this huge home office, centered around a fifteenth-century table that
Lowell told us he had found in an Umbrian monastery. The table had
become her desk and was ornamented only by a Faberge clock. There were
two chairs placed opposite Denise's high-backed leather seat, and four
more scattered around the room that matched that pair. Here the walls
were decorated with paintings that were completely unfamiliar to me all
contemporary and none bearing signatures that I recognized.

Caxton walked behind the table and lowered himself into Denise's chair,
looking around the room as if for the first time from that perspective,
and invited us to sit down and ask him whatever questions we wanted to
pose about her.

"When do we reach the point at which you ask me who her enemies were,
gentlemen?"

"We're ready anytime you are. How long's the list?" Chapman said.

"Depends on where you are in the art community, I would think. A
disgruntled '' who thinks his dealer has taken too great a commission
for his work. Just glance at the walls and see how many of those there
might be. Then you've got the clients, who've found they've paid too
much for a painting, on the dealer's advice, that they neither like nor
will be able to resell for anything remotely near the price they put
out.

"There isn't anyone in the business," he went on, "who hasn't been
accused of selling a forged piece, by accident or design, over the
years. And then there's the current brouhaha in the auction houses, with
the government charging sellers with rigging the bids to knock up the
prices. On the surface, gentlemen, it's a -world of exquisite beauty and
refinement. But it's every bit as filthy and cutthroat as any other
commercial enterprise, as soon as you get beneath the top layer of
gouache."

Mercer was leaning forward, balancing his pad on his knee while he
reviewed subjects he wanted to ask Caxton about. "We'll need a client
list, then, as well as contact information for the painters she
represented."

"You'll have to talk to her partner about that tomorrow at his office."
"I thought you were her partner," Mike said.

"As I mentioned, I set her up in the gallery in the Fuller Building
originally. Without the Caxton name, I doubt she would have been able to
sell the Mona Lisa, had it come on the market. I was the entree to the
uptown world in Manhattan old money, large walls, deep pockets. But once
she got involved in the New York scene, she had her own separate
business a thriving one at that with a silent partner who mirrored her
taste much more directly. Perhaps you've heard of him Bryan Daughtry?

They called their business Galleria Caxton Due."

Mercer and I certainly knew Daughtry's name. He had been a suspect in a
very bizarre murder case in a neighboring county beyond our jurisdiction
but right up our alley. Chapman went for the bait. "Dead girl in the
leather mask? That Daughtry?"

"Indeed, Mr. Chapman. That's why I was so grateful that he was a silent
partner. The scandal didn't alarm Deni at all. Might even have helped,
with her type of clientele. But none of the stigma ever stuck on Bryan.
I haven't spoken with him yet today, but he knows all the players in
their professional life."

"Does he have any part of your Fifty-seventh Street business?" I asked.

"Not a dime. Not a speck of paint."

"Where was their operation? Soho?"

"You're not keeping up with the trends, Detective Wallace. Soho is dead.
It's a commercial mall these days, not a creative zone any longer."

The area south of Houston Street and north of Canal had been claimed by
the avant-garde art community in the sixties and seventies. Abandoned
lofts and warehouses, uninhabitable and overrun with rodents, had been
renovated, populated, and gentrified by the struggling artists who were
unable to afford midtown rents and needed the cavernous space to house
their oversized canvases. The old meat district known as Washington
Market became chic with its new infusion of hip locals and its re
designation as

"Tribeca," the triangle below Canal. By the late eighties, galleries
there were being displaced by designer boutiques, chain store branches,
and bed-and-bath shops with their ubiquitous supply of votive candles.

Caxton described the exodus. "In the mid-nineties, Paula Cooper moved
her business up to Chelsea, the west twenties between Tenth and Eleventh
Avenues. Have you been over there lately?"

"You won't be asking Alex questions like that after you get to know her
a little better, Mr. Caxton," Chapman said. "She doesn't eat, shop, or
sleep outside of her zip code. Makes her skin crawl soon as you say the
words

"West Side," doesn't it, Coop?"

"We have a lot in common," Caxton replied, smiling back at me. "Paula
Cooper no relation, I take it?"

"No, I know her only by reputation." And because my father had bought
some paintings from her, I thought to myself, remembering a Jennifer
Bartlett I particularly loved.

"Well," he continued, "she's the real class of this business. And its
bellwether. I don't actually know the reason she moved, but it's a safe
guess to say that it's because of what happened in Soho. This district
in Chelsea was full of enormous warehouses. Fifty years ago, when the
ocean liners docked on the piers all along the Hudson and connected to
the railways there, it was a commercial hub. Lately, the warehouses have
been used for auto repair shops and taxi dispatch centers vast and
utilitarian, but not terribly attractive.

"Paula found a fabulous space on Twenty-first Street. Cleaned it up, put
in some skylights, whitewashed the interior, and everyone who thought
she'd been out of her mind realized what a genius she was. Deni and
Bryan started buying up land on those blocks a couple of years ago,
planning to open a new venture together. Real estate's gone through the
roof over there. Kind of sorry I ignored them in the beginning. I could
have made a killing on the property alone." Caxton paused. "Bad choice
of words today, isn't it?"

Remorse wasn't his strong suit.

"And the cocaine? What were her sources for that?"

"The problem only started four or five years ago. About the time that
her taste in art changed so radically. Deni knew how strongly I
disapproved of her drug use. I could only joke that one had to be stoned
to appreciate the work she was trying to hawk to the great unwashed."

"Do you know who her dealer was?" Mercer asked.

"I think she used to get it from the kids who hung around the galleries.
Then, as she got hooked, she'd just beep whoever wasn't in jail at the
moment, and a delivery would arrive, brought up to our home by the
white-gloved doormen. Usually camouflaged in potpourri or packaged in a
bag with assorted foodstuffs from Dean & Deluca."

"Did she owe money to anybody? Any suppliers?"

"No reason to. More than enough money to support all her habits."

Mercer was working the drug angle with good reason. Deni's body had been
found at the tip of the Thirty-fourth Precinct, which was the heart of
Manhattan's illegal drug operations. Colombians, Dominicans, and African
American street gangs Santiago's Sinners, Latin Kings, and Wild
High-tops mixed it up with one another night and day as they pumped the
streets of the city full of heroin, cocaine, and all their derivative
forms. Even if Deni had been thrown in the water from the Bronx side of
the creek, the odds were overwhelming that the site of the dumping was
heavily infested with users and sellers of every kind of controlled
substance.

"Had either of you started divorce proceedings, Mr. Caxton?" I wanted to
know.

"Yes, yes, I had. More than a year ago. No rush about it, and not that I
had any plans to go to the altar again, but the marriage was over and I
wanted to be sure that I got out of it with most of the treasures I came
in with, you see. The money was irrelevant to me, but I needed to
protect the collection and keep it intact, as well as I could."

"What was the status of the legal action?"

"Our lawyers were negotiating, Miss. Cooper. I'm sure you know what that
means. Trying to run up their bills at hourly rates with endless phone
calls and meetings and suggestions and general nonsense."

"I assume there was a prenup "

"Certainly there was. But most of its contingencies were useless after
the marriage survived ten years. You must realize how much older I was
than Deni. I thought a decade with her would be bliss. It's like the
salesmen who try to sell a man my age a watch with a lifetime
guarantee," the septuagenarian went on. "I always tell them that I'd be
interested in a similar piece, but for a lower price and with simply a
ten-year guarantee."

"So what was she fighting about?"

"It wasn't money, Detective Chapman. I've offered plenty of that, and
she made quite a lot of it on her own projects. But she wanted more of
the art, some of my pieces. Claiming an entitlement for many of the
things I'd bought since we'd been together. As though I needed her
judgment to lead me to a Titian or Tintoretto. Perhaps next time you're
here," Caxton said, making it obvious that we were coming to the end of
his hospitality, "you might like to see what it is I want to hold on to.

"Unlike that mishmash of styles my wife favored, I've hung my favorites
each in its own salon. My bedroom is devoted to van Gogh Deni thought
they were minor, but they're quite wonderful, really. My office is the
Poussin room, and my "

Chapman had just about had it with the self-importance of Caxton and the
arrogant cataloguing of his wealth. "How about your inamorata's bedroom,
sir? How'd you decorate that one?"

"Not a stupid guess at all, Detective. Yes, I've been seeing someone.

She's in Paris, and quite content to be there. And if you think it
bothered Denise at all, you'd be wrong. We've been leading separate
lives for a long time." "Do you know who she's been seeing?" I asked.

"Perhaps the help would know that, Miss. Cooper. They change the linens
here I don't."

That last exchange brought him to his feet, as he ushered us out of his
wife's office and back to the living room.

Chapman wasn't quite done. "When was it, exactly, that you left for
Paris?"

"Maurizio will give you all that in for " "I'm sure Maurizio would give
me oral sex if you told him to, Mr. Caxton. I'm not talking ancient
history, here. This is Sunday what day did you leave New York to go to
Paris on your last trip? I'd like to hear it from you."

Caxton's veneer had worn thin, and Mike's patience even finer. "It was
Tuesday, Tuesday evening at seven o'clock."

"Any other homes that you and Denise owned? Any place that she might
have gone if she left this apartment for a few days and you were holed
up in Paris?"

"Well, we've got a house in Saint Bart's, but it's not the season there,
of course. I doubt it's even opened up this time of year."

Chapman couldn't resist the cheap shot. "Yeah, I know you two wouldn't
be caught you-know-what there off-season, would you?"

Caxton ignored him.

I knew the small Caribbean paradise well. My parents had bought a home
and begun spending winters there after my father retired from the
practice of medicine. The Cooper-Hoffman valve, which he and his partner
had invented as young physicians, had revolutionized the then-new field
of open heart surgery and made possible a lifestyle that allowed him to
live in that French-owned resort while continuing to travel for his
lectures and conferences all over the world. It would be easy for me to
get information about the Caxtons from my connections on the island.

"I'd suggest that when you speak with Bryan Daughtry you ask him about
the truckload of paintings mostly Delia Spi-gas, I think, and quite
ghastly that was hijacked at the end of June. I don't know if the art
was ever recovered, but the hijacking had Deni completely crazed when it
happened."

Mercer added the truck incident to his list.

"May we spend a few minutes with Valerie?" I asked, hoping to get a
closer handle on personal life in Denise's wing of the house.

"I'm so sorry I didn't think of it before I excused her for the day. I
told Maurizio to let her go after she prepared my tea. She'll grieve
enough for all of us, Miss. Cooper. I'll let her know you'll be
contacting her, of course.

"Now I've got to ask you to leave so I can get ready for tomorrow. I
must arrange for the services at Frank Campbell. Find a minister.

Suggest an appropriate psalm. That sort of thing. I'm afraid the closest
Deni ever got to a church was her frantic scrambling to buy that
incredible Velazquez of Innocent the Tenth."

Caxton opened the door to the landing that put us at the elevator. "You
know, Miss. Cooper, there's a poignant fact about values in the world in
which Deni and I lived that very few people realize. More than ninety
percent of the art sold in America will never again fetch anywhere near
the same price when the buyers attempt to resell it." He paused, not
quite ready to turn his back on us. "It was like that with Deni, too,
and I think that fact was even beginning to dawn on her. She had
invented herself once brilliantly and sold the stunning result at the
very top of the market. I'm not sure she could have done as well
repeated her success, if you will the second time around. Very sad,
that, don't you think?"

This time he closed the door behind him without waiting for us to be
gone.

Eight.

It wasn't even noon when we emerged from the lobby of Caxton's building
onto the pavement in front of the Fifth Avenue co-op. The temperature
was already over ninety degrees and the humidity was best measured by
the tiny ringlets that formed instantly at the nape of my neck.

"Hate to say it," Mike remarked, "but even this feels like fresh air
after an hour with that pompous jerk. Where to?"

"I've got to spend the day at my office. I'm supposed to finish up the
hearing tomorrow, and I need to put the finishing touches on the brief
I'm submitting after the argument."

"Is P.J. Bernstein's air-conditioned?"

"Yeah." The delicatessen near my apartment was my morning hangout on
weekends.

"Let's grab some breakfast while we break up my to-do list. Then one of
us can shoot you down to your office, okay?"

I rode the short distance to Third Avenue with Mercer, who parked at a
meter in front of the deli, a feat that could be accomplished only in
August. Midtown Manhattan was a ghost town on summer weekends, between
vacationing New Yorkers, others who commuted to beach houses and shared
rentals in the Hamptons or on the Jersey shore, and day-trippers who
made their way to Jones Beach or the suburban pool of a friend or
relative.

The three of us sat at a table in the rear, near the kitchen, each of us
taking out a pad to make lists and notes for the next week's work.

"Any point in my gracing the funeral?" Mike asked, after we ordered.

"The best reason to go," Mercer offered, "is to try and get a look at
maybe even a copy of the list of attendees. See if you can scope the
sign-in book. They've always got one of those at Campbell's. Might give
us a jump start on some of the people in her business, beside what we
hope we'll get from her friend Bryan Daughtry." "Already thought of
that. There's always some sweet old mick used to drink at my father's
bar who runs the show at that funeral home. If I spread a little cash
around, I'm sure they'll make a copy of the guest list."

The beeper attached to my waistband went off just as the waitress
returned with my iced coffee. Mercer saw me slip it off the belt of my
slacks and lift it to check the callback number. "Trouble for us?" he
asked.

I laughed when I read the dial. "It's Joan Stafford, and she even added
a nine-one-one after Jim's number." Joan, one of my closest friends, was
vacationing with her fiance on the Outer Banfcs off the coast of North
Carolina. "Either of you want to guess what she thinks is so urgent
she's got to talk to me immediately?"

Mike grabbed the cell phone from my hand after I dialed and heard it
ringing. "Get your skinny ass out of bed with that foreign policy wonk
and c'mon home to me. It's lonely here without you just the Cooperwoman
to give me orders all the time. What's with the emergency beep, kid
half-price sale at Schlumberger you gotta tell her about?"

Chapman looked up at Mercer and me as he repeated Joan's answer. "You
wanna dish about a dead woman? Well, now that it's been on CNN this
morning, I guess all you art mavens will be calling in with useless
information." He paused to listen to something Joan was telling him,
then glanced back at us as he said good-bye and turned off the phone.

"It's not enough we gotta deal with you. Nancy Drew's on board, too.

Joan just gave me the names of three of Deni's clients and a couple of
her lovers," he said, writing in his notepad as he talked, "and also has
the story about why Caxton was no longer welcome at Sotheby's.

She'll be up this week dinner on Tuesday. Y'think this is some of her
fiction, or should we run with it?"

Joan was a playwright, just back from London, where her latest satire
had opened to brilliant reviews and full houses. "Go to the bank with
her on this one. It's the world she was raised in. It wouldn't surprise
me at all if she knew most of the players in the gallery scene she's got
a marvelous collection herself, plus she's been shopping the auctions to
redecorate Jim's place in Washington."

I looked at the list on my pad. "I need to do a search warrant for some
of Deni's things and have it ready in case you connect with her partner
by tomorrow. The appointment book and calendar, records of sales and
purchases " Mercer interrupted me. "We've got to assume a lot of this
stuff is on computers. Be sure you draft the warrant so we can walk out
of there with the hard drives, disks, and anything else in the office.
The guys can download the data and get information that way, too. We'll
search the gallery first to let you know what's there."

"I can always amend the warrant if you see more than we've thought of by
the time you go in," I said.

"I'll reach out for Daughtry," he continued, "and call the funeral home
for details on the memorial service."

I finished my Raisin Bran while Mike worked his way through an omelette,
home fries, a side order of bacon, and toast and Mercer picked at a
bagel with cream cheese. "Who's going to check out Lowell Caxton's
shooting incident in the Nineteenth?"

"I'll swing by there later tonight," Chapman said, barely coming up for
air between bites of his breakfast. "I'll also take care of the ladder
manufacturer see how common the brand is and who sells it." He aimed his
fork at Mercer. "You see if you can run raps on all the employees at
both galleries, and work on the art hijacking in June. What was it Delia
Spigas? Who's Delia Spiga, Coop?"

"I've got to go back to the books for that one. Ask me again at the end
of the day."

"What's your schedule like this week?"

"Once I knock off the brief on Reggie X this afternoon and argue it
tomorrow, I'm free. It'll take the judge a couple of weeks to make a
decision and write his opinion. The sooner I get downtown, the faster I
get it out of the way."

Mercer pushed off from the table and took the check from the waitress,
while Mike dredged the last few fries through the ketchup.

"No point in you taking me," I said. "My car is right up the street.

Just keep me posted." I waved good-bye and walked to my garage. I pulled
the Jeep out and made my way over to the FDR Drive, while the all-news
radio station wedged the story of Denise Caxton's identification as the
murder victim between the Yankees' doubleheader victory last night and
reviews of the Spice Girls' concert in Central Park. Maybe Chapman
wasn't entirely crazy live fast, die young, and be a good-looking
corpse. Deni's fortune hadn't seemed to offer her very much more.

I escaped the rest of the hot afternoon and evening by immersing myself
in completing the court papers I had to submit on Monday morning. The
case was an old arrest of Mercer's, and my adversary had used his skills
to challenge every aspect of the police procedures used in the
investigation. The hearings we had just ended included the propriety of
the arrest tactics, the legality of the search and seizure of evidence
linking the perp Reggie Bramwell to the beating and rape of his
estranged lover, and the admissibility of statements that Bramwell made
to Mercer in the hours after he was taken into custody.

The case was pending in front of Harry Marklis, a jurist from the old
school who didn't get domestic abuse at all. My last pretrial motion was
an effort to convince the judge to allow my victim, Mariana Catano, to
testify to two earlier episodes that involved the same defendant.

One was an attempted assault that he had pleaded guilty to a year
before, and the other was a confrontation in which he had threatened to
set fire to her so that she'd look ugly enough that no other man would
want her.

I had argued myself blue in the face, but Marklis was clueless. "So, why
didn't she just leave him, Miss. Cooper? What the hell'd she take him
back for?" If I hadn't been able to explain the complex dynamic of a
relationship of battering to a justice of the Supreme Court of the State
of New York, I could only imagine how the average juror would respond to
the same issue. Yet over and over again, my colleagues and I would see
the cycle of violence escalate in these cases, and attempt to understand
the complicated panoply of emotional, familial, and economic binds that
kept the partners in place.

Mercer Wallace joined me in my office at nine o'clock on Monday morning.
He was keenly interested in the outcome of Mariana's matter and wanted
to hear my argument on this final pretrial issue. Marklis had directed
our appearances for 10 A. M." although he was known for taking the bench
late in the morning and quitting early in the afternoon.

"Anything develop last night?"

"Nope. Wasn't able to reach Daughtry anywhere. Gallery's closed on
Sunday and Monday all through the summer, and his answering service just
kept telling me they'd given him my message several times. Trying to get
his home address so we can pay him a visit, but I'll wait till you're
done upstairs. Allnighter "Not too bad. I was home before midnight.
Polished this off and started a rough draft of a warrant on the word
processor, ready to go when you guys come up with something."

"All work and no play ... "

"Don't go there, Mercer. You're as bad as Mike." I gathered up my file
folders and motioned to him to move so we could head upstairs to
Marklis's court part. "I'm fine. Got stood up for the weekend ' this guy
I've been seeing was sent out of town on assignment. But thanks for
asking."

The only people in Part 59 were the three court officers and Rich
Velosi, the court clerk. I placed my files on the counsel table and
asked if there was any word from the judge.

"Yeah, Ms. Konigsberg just called," Rich answered, referring to the
judge's law secretary. "He's working in chambers, she says, so he won't
get up here for another half hour."

The court officers all laughed, knowing that "working in chambers" was
just a euphemism for

"The judge hasn't arrived yet." But neither had my adversary. "Prisoner
produced?"

"He's in the pens."

Mercer began to schmooze with the officers while I reviewed my notes.

From baseball they went to golf, from golf to the first pro football
exhibition games, and from the games to the Bramwelj case. "Y'rhink
Cooper's got a chance to get a decision on this motion before Labor
Day?"

"Marklis make a decision? Listen, he's got two toilets in the robing
room and it usually takes him twenty minutes to figure out which one he
wants to use. All depends on the troll factor." Mercer and I both
smiled. The officers referred to the petite law secretary, Use
Konigsberg, as "the Troll." Whatever she whispered in Marklis's ear was
bound to be the law of the case.

It was exactly eleven twenty-eight on my watch when Marklis, short and
stout, waddled through the door and took his seat at the bench as the
clerk called us to order and asked everyone in the courtroom to rise.

The defendant had been brought out from the pens minutes earlier, when
his lawyer had entered the well.

"Good morning, gentlemen. Miss. Cooper. Why don't you all state your
appearances for the record, and then we'll get started."

"Alexandra Cooper, for the People." I spoke aloud and remained standing
while the defense attorney, Danny Wisten-son, spelled his name for the
stenographer.

"It's now nine thirty-five, and we're going to resume argument in the
Bramwell case."

I glanced over my shoulder at Mercer and rolled my eyes in disgust.

Marklis had long protected himself by making a phony record of the time
of the proceedings. My colleagues and I had challenged him on any number
of occasions, but I knew that if I tried it today, it would seal my fate
in the argument I was about to make. His arrogant grin confirmed that he
knew he had me.

"I have the papers you submitted in support of your Molineux
application, Ms. Cooper. Do you have anything to add this morning?"

It was clear that he was hoping I did not.

"I do, Your Honor." I rose to my feet, but before I started to lay out
the law that supported my position, Marklis went on.

"You know, evidence of a defendant's prior crime can't be admitted at a
trial for the sole purpose of showing that he has the propensity to
commit the crimes he's now charged with."

"I do know that, Judge Marklis." He'd obviously done the minimum amount
of homework necessary to get through this process. "But Molineux makes
it quite clear that it's admissible when it's probative of his motive,
his intent, and a common scheme or plan.

"In the instant case, Bramwell's prior threats and assaults on Ms.
Catano are ' interwoven," using the language in the Vails opinion, and "

"You got that cite, Counselor?" Marklis swung his chair around and
pointed at Wistenson.

"It's in Ms. Cooper's brief, but I'd like to be heard on this, Your
Honor."

"I'm not finished, Judge."

"Yeah, well, I've got about all I need on this point, dear."

I turned away from the bench, steaming at Marklis's laziness and choice
of appellation. At some point during the argument, Chapman had slipped
into the courtroom and joined Mercer in the front row on the far side of
the rail. I read his lips as he mouthed to me, "I love it when you're
angry."

As I walked toward the detectives, I asked over my shoulder, "Judge, may
I have a few minutes?" and kept moving without waiting for a response.

"When you put your hands on your hips, blondie, it's a dead giveaway.

Temper, temper."

The diminutive judge stepped down from his seat and walked over to
whisper to Ms. Konigsberg. Chapman couldn't resist another crack,
looking at the huddle of two small figures, like conspiring Munchkins.

"What's going on, Coop? Looks like a wrap party for The Wizard of Oz."

"Don't get me in any more trouble with Marklis. How come you're down
here so early?"

"Caxton played cute with the memorial service. Ten o'clock this morning.
Invitation only just a handful of friends, and Daughtry wasn't among
them. My guy inside says the husband wants to wait until the fall, when
everyone is back from summer vacation, before he holds a real memorial.
Wouldn't want to slight all the artists and clients who couldn't get
here on short notice. But you better cut this exercise in futility
short, ' we need some help."

"With what?"

"Looks like we found the car Deni's body was transported in. Need you to
do a warrant."

"Great. How'd you get it?"

"Uniform cop in the Bronx noticed an abandoned station wagon this
morning. Not far from the water. K-p Unit took a dog up there a little
while ago and got a positive hit. Looks like there's blood on a canvas
tarp in the back, too."

"Any plates? Whose is it?"

"Stripped clean. VIN number's been scratched out a bit, but the computer
still came up with a list of possibilities."

"And?"

"One of them comes back to an employee who works in Deni's Chelsea
gallery. Bingo."

I stepped back and smiled at the judge. "That's it, Your Honor. No
further argument. We'll rest on our papers." I grabbed my files off the
table and followed Mercer and Mike out of the courtroom.

Nine.

Laura tried to pass the telephone to me as I swept through her alcove.

"It's Rose. She just wants to warn you that Battaglia said he'd like an
update on the Caxton investigation."

"Tell her that he'll have it by the end of the day."

Mike was at my desk, using the private line. "It's a girl!" This time I
grabbed the receiver out of his hand. Sarah's baby had been born during
the night, and she was calling to tell us about it, urging us to come
visit Janine as soon as possible.

"You okay?"

"Much easier this time. When are you coming up to the hospital? I'll
only be here until Wednesday."

"Don't worry. We'll come see her tonight or tomorrow.

Give her a kiss and tell her we'll all be up the first break we get." I
placed the phone back in its cradle.

"See, Alex, that's what you should be doing with your life instead1 of
chasing around" after scumbags (ike we do all day."

"You're beginning to sound like my grandmother." I turned to Mike as I
sat down at my desk. "Have you ever done one of these before? I mean, a
search warrant based on a dog as the informant?"

"No, but I got the officer right outside who knows how." He walked to
the door of my office and signaled to a plain-clothes cop who was
reading the Daily News on a chair in the hallway. "This is Detective
Loquesto," he said, introducing me to a sandy-haired man with a crooked
smile that seemed to align with his long, hooked nose. "Armando, meet
Alex Cooper."

"Good to meet you. Thanks for the break."

"Don't thank me," he said. "Tego did it. Latin word for "I protect."

I'm just the handler; the dog does the heavy lifting."

"Can you walk me through the affidavit?"

"No problem do it all the time."

I pulled up my standard search warrant application form on the computer,
quickly punching in the information Chapman fed me about the target
automobile, a '91 light blue Chevy wagon, partial vehicle identification
number 6683493, registered to Omar Sheffield.

"How'd you connect Sheffield to one of the Caxton galleries?" I asked.

Mercer spoke up. "Caxton's aide, Maurizio, faxed me a list of all the
employees. It was on my desk when I walked in today. Also had the names
of some of Denise's clients said we'd have to get the rest of them from
Daughtry."

I fleshed out the paragraph delineating that there is reasonable cause
to believe that we might find blood, hair, fibers, fingerprints, and
other evidence of the presence of the body of Denise Caxton. Then I
added in the "moreover" clause, asking the judge to believe that this
property was used to commit or conceal the commission of a crime.

It was essential to explain to the court how, when, and where the body
of the deceased had been found, and that her death was the result of a
homicide. When I finished that paragraph, I looked up at Armando for
help. "Now what?"

"You gotta throw in some background about me and Tego."

I typed in his name and shield. "Your command?" "NYPD Emergency
Services, K-9 Unit." He told me how many years he'd been on the force
and what his training had been to qualify him for this special duty.
"Tego's got four years on the job specializing in cadaver duty."

"What?" I knew German shepherds were used to great advantage in police
work, trained to identify the scents of bomb materials and controlled
substances. This one was new to me.

"True. He's like Chapman death is his specialty. Sniffs it out and loves
it."

"How do you train them for that?"

"There are a couple of chemicals that simulate cadaver odors "

"Yeah, Coop, and Chanel doesn't make '," Mike cut in. "So don't try and
seduce me by dousing yourself in '." Armando continued. "They're called
Cadaverine and Pseudocorpse both are artificial commercial scents. The
dogs practice by smelling body parts, corpses, crime scene areas. Then
we sprinkle some of the fake stuff on items like you'd find at a scene
and let them go to work."

"Tell her what you give them when they come up with a body."

"Three treats and a rawhide pull toy, just like if he'd brought home
your missing slipper."

I improvised a few paragraphs about Tego's training and the fact that he
had completed more than sixty tests in the company of Detective
Loquesto.

"What else do I need?"

"You gotta say what the dog did when he got to the target. The Chevy was
parked in a row of nine cars. In training we call it a ' reaction,"
which "

"What'd he do, exactly?"

Chapman was impatient and anxious for me to complete the warrant. "He
went ape, like you do when you see Alex Trebek. Drooling, panting "

"Pretty close," Loquesto said. "He sniffed next to the right rear
passenger door, then ran around to the back of the wagon. He jumped up
against it and began pawing at it, whining and scratching like it'd get
him inside. I looked in window was slightly tinted and there's a dark
stain on a canvas-colored matting. Then I pulled Tego away and took him
one at a time to the doors of each other car. No reaction at all."

I finished the application with the routine language, respectfully
asking the court for a warrant and order of seizure. "As soon as the
lunch break is over, we'll go down and get the judge who's sitting in
the arraignment part to sign it, okay? Anybody want me to call in
something to eat?"

"Nah, we'll grab a bite on our way to the Bronx."

"Okay. I'll open a grand jury investigation this afternoon so I can
start some phone company subpoenas for muds and luds on the Caxton
telephones home and galleries." Contrary to what most people thought,
prosecutors have no power to subpoena people or evidence to their
offices. It was only the authority of the grand jury in New York, not
the district attorneys, that enabled the request for a witness to
produce documentary evidence. "Who's looking for Omar?" "My job," Mercer
said. "Since the gallery's closed today, there's no activity at all. The
address on the Motor Vehicles Bureau records for Omar's residence is in
Brooklyn."

"Before I came up to the courtroom," Mike went on, "I called the boss at
the Eighty-fourth Precinct and asked them to do a drive-by of that
address. Desk sergeant beeped me back and said it's a burned-out
building. Mercer'll be working on it this afternoon."

My paralegal, Maxine, came into the room and greeted the trio of cops.

"This looks like the wrong time to ask, but what do I do with a walk-in
who just arrived now for her ten-thirty appointment?"

"Who is she?" I looked at my watch, noting that the woman was more than
three hours late.

"Her name's Unique Matthews. Says she's here to see Jan-ice O'Riley, but
Janice has to do a preliminary hearing all afternoon."

"This one's the prostitute who was raped at gunpoint by the trucker on
Houston Street, right?" "Yep." Maxine smiled and motioned discreetly
with her thumb for me to look out the doorway to Laura's desk. A young
woman was towering over my secretary, balancing on four-inch platform
sandals with straps that wrapped up to her knees. The cheeks of her
buttocks were hanging well below the bottom of her shorts, and her
cleavage strained against the skimpy cut of her fuchsia cotton tank
T-shirt, exposing a tattoo of Mickey Mouse on her inner left breast,
outlined against her dark skin.

Unique was chewing a wad of gum and sipping from a large bottle of
Yoo-Hoo.

I called out to the witness, knowing that there would be no particularly
good reason for her tardiness. "Unique, how come you're so late today?
You were supposed to testify this morning."

She took the straw out of her mouth and sneered at me, certain that I
could not understand how hard it had been to rouse herself for something
as relatively unimportant as her court appearance. "I overslept."

"Why don't you take her across the street to Catherine's office?" I said
to Max. This was going to take more experience and a firmer hand than
Janice had with these cases. "Let her work with Unique for a couple of
hours."

Chapman patted Max on the back. "Remind O'Riley of Cooper's basic
commands. Never make a morning appointment for a hooker. Like vampires,
they don't thrive in daylight. C'mon, blondie. Let Mercer get on his
way. Me and Aman-do'll come down to court with you to get the warrant
signed."

"Armando and I."

"What else do you do in your spare time besides give grammar lessons?

Wellesley meets the NYPD. Now that's an exercise in futility."

I stopped at Laura's desk and asked her to check the docket assignment
sheet. "Who's sitting in arraignments this week?"

"You've got Roger Hayes in ARi and John Reick in ARz."

Mercer chided me. "Judge shopping, Alex? My money's on ARi. I'll check
in with both of you as soon as I get back from Brooklyn."

Mike, Armando, and I took the circuitous route to the first-floor
arraignment parts, down the interior stairway one flight and over to the
elevator bank that serviced the courtrooms and stopped on only a single
floor of the District Attorney's Office, as a security measure.

As usual the wait for a functioning elevator going in the right
direction seemed interminable. And walking the hallways with Chapman was
more of a social occasion than a business trip. He had worked with and
partied with every senior assistant in the office at one time or
another. He was a legendary storyteller, a great foil for people's
jokes, and the best investigator that most of us would ever encounter in
the NYPD.

The double swinging doors of ARi pushed open as I entered behind Mike.
Families and friends of prisoners arrested within the last twenty-four
hours and awaiting their first appearances before the judge filled rows
of benches on both sides of the room. Some mothers looked tearful and
anxious, waiting for word from the Legal Aid attorneys that their sons
would be coming home today, while other relatives slept soundly despite
the noise and activity, clearly accustomed to the routine of this
process.

We made our way down to the front row, saved for attorneys and police
officers, and I scooted into the only available seat, between two
uniformed cops who were dozing until their cases were called. Mike and
Armando sat behind me, scrunched between an elderly Hasidic Jew dressed
in his traditional black overcoat and an obese Latina woman who was
whining some kind of prayer over and over again under her breath.

The air-conditioning wasn't working and the windows were so tall in the
two-story room that there was no way for the crew to open them for fresh
air. Everyone in the well of the courtroom lawyers, stenographer,
officers, and clerks was fanning with different files or sheaves of
papers. The stench was unbearable.

As soon as Judge Hayes made eye contact with me, he waved me up to the
bench. As I rose, Chapman grabbed my shoulder. "I'm coming with you.

This place smells like a broad I used to date." "May we approach, Your
Honor?" I asked as I closed the swinging gate that separated the benches
from the counsel tables.

"Absolutely, Ms. Cooper. We'll take a ten-minute recess, folks," Hayes
announced, eliciting groans from almost everyone in the gallery.

"Why don't we all go into the robing room? Will we need a reporter?"

"Yes sir."

Hayes had been one of my first supervisors in the District Attorney's
Office when I started there, more than ten years ago. I respected his
judgment and valued his guidance and friendship enormously.

Mike, Armando, and I followed Hayes out of the courtroom and into the
small chambers behind it that served the arraignment part. He normally
sat as a trial jurist in Supreme Court but was serving a week's rotation
in this duty since so many of the judges took vacation time during July
and August. Hayes greeted Mike and me warmly, and we introduced him to
Armando.

"I'd tell you to make yourselves comfortable, but that's obviously not
possible."

The small room was bare except for an old wooden desk, three chairs, and
a black rotary telephone that hung on the wall. It was painted the
institutional green that must have been bought in vat loads by the city
of New York fifty years ago and was now chipped and peeling from every
corner and molding. Next to the phone, written on the wall in ink, were
the numbers of most of the delis and pizza joints within a mile's
radius, jotted there by lazy court officers who called out for
deliveries during the meal break of night court.

I explained our visit to the judge, and we went on the record with the
stenographer so that he could make the appropriate inquiries before
signing the warrant.

"Everything seems to be in order, Alex." He initialed the papers and
chatted with Mike while I went back to the clerk to have the official
seal put on the documents. As the court officer gaveled the crowd back
into order and Hayes resumed his position on the bench, we left the
courtroom with exactly what we needed to move the investigation forward.

The rear entrance of the immense Criminal Courts Building was adjacent
to ARi. Mike took his copy of the paperwork from me, and he and Armando
headed for the door while I started to retrace my steps back up to my
office.

"I'll call you as soon as we're done checking out the wagon. Wanna meet
Mercer and me for dinner?"

"Sure. Cocktails and Jeopardy! at my place, then we'll go somewhere in
the neighborhood."

Upstairs on the eighth floor, Laura greeted me with word that Patrick
Mckinney, deputy chief of the Trial Division, wanted to see me. The
chief, Rod Squires, was on summer vacation and Mckinney would use all
the muscle he could to make me answer to him and try to micromanage my
case. I thanked Laura for the message, then did my best to ignore that
she had given it to me. I knew I could deal directly with Battaglia on
something as major as the Caxton murder.

I called my friend Rose Malone, in the D. A."s suite, and told her that
I was ready to update the boss whenever it was convenient for him.

Things looked good, I assured her, since the cops had already found a
critical link to the deceased's disappearance. I was optimistic enough
to think this early break would signal a speedy conclusion to the
investigation. Battaglia was on his way to Albany for a meeting with the
governor on the legislative agenda, so I knew I was off the hook for the
rest of the day.

The intercom buzzed. Laura reported there was a woman on the line who
refused to give her name and would speak only to me. She said she had
some things to tell me about Denise Caxton.

"Put the call through on my private line and close the door so no one
interrupts me." I pressed the flashing light on my dial pad. "This is
Alexandra Cooper."

"Thank you for taking the call. I thought you might be interested in
some personal information I have about Deni Caxton."

"Yes, but it would also help me if you would tell me with whom I'm
speaking."

My request was met by silence.

"Hello?" I asked, getting no response. At least she hadn't hung up, so I
didn't want to push her too hard. "I hope you can understand that we get
an awful lot of crank calls whenever our names appear in the paper on a
sensational case. It just helps me to know that I'm dealing with someone
who really has something useful to say." And who isn't wasting my time.

Still a pause. Then, "I'll give you my name, but I'd like a few
assurances first."

"That's not unreasonable. May I ask what they are?"

"I can't have my name connected with this case in the papers. Not in any
way. Can you promise me that?"

Impossible. "All I can promise is that no one will get your name from
us. You have my word that it is not the kind of thing we would ever give
to the press. But obviously, since I have no idea what your connection
is either to Denise or to the investigation I simply have no idea how
you figure in the matter at all. Perhaps reporters already know who you
are."

I was clearly fishing now, and she was just as clearly getting agitated.
"I have nothing to do with the case. I'm a friend of Deni's, that's all.
One of her oldest friends. I know things about her that I doubt anyone
else knows. Very intimate things. Perhaps they'll be useful to you,
perhaps they won't. But I thought I'd be more comfortable talking with
you than with a bunch of detectives."

"And your other requests?"

"Just one other, really. Lowell Caxton must never know I've spoken with
you."

"That's easy. He's a witness in this matter. We'd have no business
telling him where or from whom we get our information."

"He's terribly well connected, Ms. Cooper. I'm afraid it's more
difficult to keep secrets from him than you might think. That was one of
Deni's biggest problems."

"Would you be willing to meet with me this afternoon?" I glanced at the
clock on the wall, and it was already after three. "Or this evening?"

"I'm coming into New York late tonight. I can meet with you tomorrow."

"Let me give you the address of my office "

"No, I won't come there. I don't want some tabloid photographer camped
out on your doorstep snapping witnesses as they go in and out of the
building."

Kivera Live, Burden of Proof, and Court TV had been real wake-up calls
to the public about the way high-profile cases frequently spin out of
control.

"We're closer to a solution than you might think," I said to ease her
concerns, sure in my own mind that Omar Sheffield would be the key to
Deni's disappearance. "But I'll be happy to meet you at your home, if
you prefer."

"My hotel, if you don't mind. I'll call you during the day, and perhaps
you can meet with me by late afternoon. The name is Seven.

Marilyn Seven."

"Thank you for that, Ms. Seven. I appreciate it. Where will you be
staying?"

The click on the other end of the phone reminded me that she didn't
trust me or the system all that much. I went back into our office E-mail
and sent one of my regular messages to my colleague who ran the computer
section's Investigative Support Services, Jim Winright.

Co opera to Winrightj: Can you please run me a background check on a
woman named Marilyn Seven? Sorry, I've got no date of birth, no social
security, no residential address. Nothing but a name. It's a long shot,
but could you see if you can come up with anything before I meet with
her tomorrow? Thanks, as always.

With Jim's skills and a bit of luck, the not-so-common-name search might
call up something on his database, whether out-of-state driver's
registration records, licensed professional information (if her
occupation required some kind of government control), property ownership
records, or even a Dun & Bradstreet report. It would help me not to go
to the meeting blind, so that I could better evaluate whatever it was
that Marilyn Seven had to barter.

When I finished drafting the subpoenas, which Laura could format and
print, I ran upstairs to the ninth-floor grand jury room, to open an
investigation into the death of Denise Caxton. Several of the jurors
whispered to one another as I spoke, recognizing the deceased's name
from the newspaper accounts. I was out of the chamber as quickly as I
had entered it, and on my way back to my desk.

"Call Catherine or Marisa," Laura told me. "They want to make
arrangements to go to the hospital tomorrow to see Sarah and the baby.

And Kim Mcfadden, from the U.S. Attorney's Office, called. Here's her
extension."

I took the slip of paper from Laura and dialed the number immediately.

I hadn't seen Kim, who was a federal prosecutor, in months. Our offices
often tangled when investigations crossed jurisdictional lines and our
bosses became territorial, but she and I had been friends since she
started to date one of my colleagues, several years ago.

"Sorry I've been so out of touch," I began our conversation. "Can we
make a lunch date for later in the month, when things slow down here?"

"That'd be good, Alex, but it's not the reason I'm calling. Got the
clearance from the top to give you a heads-up on this, once I saw you
were handling the Caxton case."

"Just when I was beginning to think this was a ground ball, don't tell
me it's going to get muddier. My guys think it's a disgruntled employee
raped and dumped her in the water.

Probably just hired the wrong guy. I'm waiting for the results on his
rap sheet now, with a team of detectives out looking for the subject."

"That's probably what you've got, then. Just thought that you should
know and I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone other than
Battaglia that we've had a major investigation under way with Justice.

Price-fixing by auction houses and art dealers. We've had subpoenas out
for months you may have seen the story in the Times."

"Well, if I did, I didn't pay any attention to it. I don't remember a
thing about it."

"We're looking at it as an antitrust matter. Know what bid rigging is?"

"Not in the art world. Bring me up to speed, Kim, and the next time you
get a sexual assault on federal property, I'll walk you through it." I
said it only half in jest, since once every few years their office
actually claimed jurisdiction for a rape in a Veterans Administration
hospital or on a military base.

"The claim has been that gome of the biggest art dealers in the city
have formed a ring agreeing not to bid against each other on paintings
in which they all have an interest. That collusion keeps the price down
at auctions an illegal restraint, really. Then the participating dealers
hold what's called a '.""

"Which is ... ?"

"That's a second auction but a secret one. The dealer who got the piece
at the public auction sells it off for a much higher price, and then the
members of the ring all split the profits. The agents who've been
investigating this for years can lay out the whole thing for your team."

"Any direct connection to Denise Caxton?"

"Nothing certain yet. But records have been subpoenaed from both Lowell
and Denise Caxton, Bryan Daughtry, and quite honestly, a cast of
thousands. All the big dealers are being called down here Leo Castelli,
Knoedler, Pace Wildenstein. They're all in the contemporary field. David
Findlay and Acquavella in modern and Impressionist works.

Even Sotheby's and Christie's have gotten those unfriendly little slips
of paper. I'm not saying any of these places are targets there's no
allegation they did anything wrong or participated in the knockouts but
we're trying to get a handle on the nature and extent of the scam."

"Any results yet?"

"We're getting buried in an avalanche. Travel logs, phone records,
invoices from business transactions, correspondence between the auction
houses and some of the dealers."

"Can I bring my detectives over later in the week if we don't settle
everything in the next twenty-four hours?"

"That's why I called. No reason for you to reinvent the wheel. If you're
going to have the legal authority to request the same kind of
documentation, maybe we can shortcut some of this for you."

"Thanks a million, Kim. I'll call you in a day or two."

There was enough to keep me busy at my desk until after six, so I
successfully avoided contact with Mckinney through the end of the day.

I drove home, went upstairs, turned on all my air conditioners, and
filled the ice bucket in anticipation of the arrival of Mercer and Mike.
I called Lumi, who owned the wonderful Italian restaurant over on
Lexington Avenue, and made a reservation for the three of us at eight
o'clock, after confirming that she had Mercer's favorite pasta on the
menu tonight cavatelli with peas and prosciutto. I settled in to watch
the end of the evening news, knowing that very little would keep Mike
from missing the Final Jeopardy question at seven twenty-five.

I had told the doormen that they didn't need to announce either of the
detectives, who were well known to the staff in the building. Mercer was
the first to come through my front door, and we decided there was no
reason at all to wait for Mike before we poured our first drink. I fixed
him a Ketel One with two olives and lots of ice before filling my own
glass with Dewar's.

"What'd you find out in Brooklyn?"

"I found out that the last time anyone lived at the address given on
Omar Sheffield's automobile registration, he wasn't even a glimmer in
his momma's eye. The whole block is a wreck. The Eight-four squad had
some informants in the ' that they rousted for me, but nobody ever heard
of Omar. I spent three hours pounding that hot pavement and every minute
of it was wasted time. Hope Chapman did better than I did. Zip, zero,
nada."

He sipped on his vodka while I started to tell him about my phone calls
from Marilyn Seven and Kim Mcfadden.

Mike came in minutes later and walked straight to the den, checking the
screen and pouring himself a drink before he took over the conversation
with the results of their search.

"I think I'm asking for a new partner. Gimme one of those four-legged
sniffers any day. Man, I've worked with detectives so bad they couldn't
find dog shit at the pound." Mercer smiled over at me. "I guess this
means Tego was on the money."

"Emergency Services broke into the car. No question about it there was
definitely a body in there. Backseat is down, and there's a big piece of
sailcloth laid out full length, with a bloodstain on top. It was folded
over, so we opened it up you know what I mean? It was like the body had
been sandwiched in between. Huge bloodstain, kinda matching the hole in
Denise's head. Even some hair. And a pair of lace panties beige, size
four."

"What did you do with them?"

"Everything's vouchered. Going directly over to the lab. They'll run the
DNA tests at the M. E."s Office. We could have preliminary results
within forty-eight hours."

In the mid-1980s, when the lawyers in my office had first been
introduced to DNA technology and the science of genetic fingerprinting,
it took three or four months to obtain results from the private labs to
which materials were sent for testing. Now the city had established its
own laboratory, and the methodology had changed so dramatically that we
could include or eliminate suspects and match samples to victims or
defendants in a matter of several days.

"Tonight's Final Jeopardy category is Bob Dylan's Music," announced Alex
Trebek as he led into a commercial break and Mike sssshushed us into
silence.

"I'm out. I do not know anything about this one," Mercer said, standing
to freshen his drink.

"I'll go twenty," I offered, comfortable with the category.

"Let's keep it at ten," Mike said. That was a sure sign that he didn't
have a clue.

"Nope, it's twenty or I'm not betting."

He reluctantly put his money on the table.

"Let's show our contestants the answer, ladies and gentlemen." Trebek
read along with the words that were revealed on the screen: "Famous rock
musician who plays the organ on Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."

Ooh, that's a tough one, folks."

The theme music played as Chapman cursed, noticing the smile on my face.
"Double or nothing?" I asked.

"Talk about obscure, how could you possibly know this? No way."

The bioethics professor from Oregon shook his head and didn't even
attempt an answer. The mother of eleven from Nevada and the crab farmer
from Delaware both guessed wrong, as Trebek was sorry to tell them.

Mike's beeper gave off with a loud series of noises as I put my response
in the appropriate question form. "Who is Al Kooper?" I asked.
"Impossible for me to forget, right?"

"A Jewish organist, no doubt," he said, squinting at the number after he
took the device off his waistband. "Turn to Comedy Central. Let's watch
Win Ben Stein's Money before we go eat."

We had a new quiz show favorite in the seven thirty time slot, so I
switched channels and passed Mike the portable phone. "Who's the beep
from?"

"It's the lieutenant's line," he said, dialing the number at the squad.

"Hey, Loo, what's up?"

"What; How certain are they?"

I muted the television sound while Mercer and I waited to hear what
seemed so surprising to Mike.

"Mercer Wallace is with me. We'll get over there right away. No, no
we're just ten minutes away." He hung up the phone and handed it back to
me.

"I'll start with the good news. They found Omar Sheffield."

"Where?" Mercer and I spoke at once.

"In the culvert next to the railroad tracks, between Tenth and Eleventh
near Thirty-sixth Street. Dead. Very, very dead. Run over by a freight
train."

Ten.

"Death Avenue," Chapman said flatly.

"Seems like an appropriate name after last night." Mike and I were
standing on Eleventh Avenue at the edge of the Thirtieth Street rail
yards at eight thirty in the morning. He had called to suggest that I
meet him there on my way into the office so he could show me where
Sheffield's body had been found.

"Forget last night. That's what this stretch was called a hundred years
ago." His sweeping arm gesture took in all the property north and south
of the tracks that had once been owned by the New York Central Railroad.
"My old man grew up here Hell's Kitchen. Used to tell us stories about
this neighborhood all the time."

After the Civil War, when a large area of Manhattan's West Side was
thick with slaughterhouses, factories, lumberyards, and tenements, it
housed one of the worst slums in the city. Cops who covered its beat
called it Hell's Kitchen, from Thirtieth Street north to Fifty-ninth
Street, and from Eighth Avenue west to the Hudson River.

"Freight trains rolled through here every day and night. The place was
notorious for its filth and for the dangerous gangs that controlled its
everyday life. The kids who weren't killed by disease or driven out by
dust and noise were just as likely to be flattened by one of the trains.
Big Mike was around long before they elevated the tracks, after nineteen
thirty, to get them off the street." Mike grinned as he thought of his
father's stories. "Used to fascinate me, ' he said that every time a
train came through, there was a '' a guy who actually rode on a horse
ahead of the engine, waving a flag to get people out of the way. Can you
imagine that in the middle of Manhattan, in the twentieth century? When
he was four or five, my dad dreamed about being that cowboy when he grew
up. By that time the trains were raised above street level. But Death
Avenue is what they called it, even then." "Here's Mercer," I said,
pointing to the corner of the next block, where I saw him parking his
car. "What's the plan?"

"We're meeting Daughtry at the gallery in a few minutes. Thought you'd
want to be along for the interview."

Mercer greeted us with, "What's the word from the morgue?"

"I was just telling Coop. Train messed up Sheffield's body pretty well.
But there's no way he just happened to be crossing these tracks.

Fleisher says it'll take a few days for the toxicology reports to come
in. My guess is somebody probably filled him up with dope or
tranquilizers and left him here in the dark to make it look accidental.

And by the way, it didn't happen last night. Omar was lying here a
couple of days out of sight, out of mind."

Mercer held up a roll of papers he was clutching in his left hand. "Let
me tell you about Mr. Sheffield. Forty-six years old, three felony
convictions worked his way up from burglary to gun possession to armed
robbery. Released on parole about eight months ago. Needless to say, he
reported faithfully to his parole officer, who didn't have a clue that
Omar's residential address simply didn't exist."

"You think Deni Caxton knew that when she hired him?" I asked.

"Let's hope we're about to find out. Daughtry returned my call late last
night. He's waiting for us at the downtown gallery. Ready for this?"

Mike and I left our cars parked near the rail yards and rode down to
Twenty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in Mercer's
department car. I had never met Bryan Daughtry but knew well the story
of his involvement in a murder in Westchester County almost ten years
earlier, even though he had never been charged or prosecuted.

In the late eighties Daughtry had a gallery in the Fuller Building,
where Lowell Caxton still maintained an upscale presence. Daughtry was
forty years old at the time and had worked his way up quite rapidly from
apprenticing with another successful dealer to owning his own business,
once he became the personal business associate of the wealthy Japanese
collector Yoshio Tsukamoto.

Daughtry was buying and selling major works Jackson Pollocks and Franz
Klines and living a lifestyle that matched his newfound ability to
afford it. A town house in the east sixties and a grand Victorian
country place south of the highway in East Hampton. He was intensely
private about his personal relationships, but rumor had it that he
preferred teenaged girls young, lean, fond of drugs, and dressed in
leather.

By 1992 his professional life seemed to be unraveling just as quickly as
it had taken off. Creditors had trouble collecting money from him even
small amounts and auction houses as well as other prominent dealers
began to sue because of misrepresentations Daughtry had made about
ownership of some of the works he sold. Then the IRS piled in after a
disgruntled accountant whom Daughtry had fired reported that Daughtry
had withheld tax payments on more than $5 million of income.

Informants told the Feds that he was buying almost fifty grams of
cocaine a week, at $100 a gram. His lawyers were working on a deal to
get him out of his legal problems.

And then, the body of a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, a would-be model,
was found in a wooded area surrounded by enormous private estates in a
suburban town north of Manhattan. The bird-watchers who stumbled on the
carcass were stunned to find that the only part of the remains that had
not been consumed by rodents was the stunning head of the child, her
faded blue eyes staring out from a black leather mask that tightly
covered her skull.

I reminded Mike and Mercer of the rest of the story. Posters of Use
Lunen had been plastered all over the Village, where she had last been
seen at a leather bar, one frequented by Daughtry and his crowd.

Although no one had placed the dealer there the evening of the girl's
disappearance, his closest personal assistant, Bertrand Gloster, had
been at the bar for hours and was known to pimp for his boss when
Daughtry was too wrecked to appear on his own.

In fact, it was rare for Bryan to come on to his subjects face-to-face.

His preferred mode of pickup was to sit in a private room on the third
floor of the building in which Cuir de Russie ("Russian leather"), as
the bar was called, was situated. He'd stare out the window for hours,
doing an occasional line of coke. When he saw a girl who was young and
nubile enough standing on the sidewalk for a chat with a friend or a
smoke, he would call the number of the pay phone outside the bar, talk
to his target, and invite her up to the owner's lair.

Long after the death of the Lunen girl, people in the art world told
stories of visiting Daughtry in his office, where he often had sex toys
casually displayed on his desk and cabinet tops handcuffs, collars,
studded bands, and even leather masks like the one found on the corpse.

In those same encounters he would refer to the ever-subservient Bertrand
as "my executioner," the enforcer who had been brought in to serve as a
bodyguard against the rough characters Daughtry encountered in this
underside of his life. No one took his words seriously at the time.

Also later, acquaintances admitted hearing stories of the
sadomasochistic games that Bryan and his pals had favored, wild evenings
of drugs and sex, complete with whips and chains, during which Daughtry
increasingly lost his self-control.

Bertrand Gloster was picked up within days of the discovery of Use
Lunen's body. He had once been employed as a caretaker on one of the
neighboring estates, and his borderline intelligence level made him an
easy subject for police interrogators. He admitted killing the young
girl, who had gingerly agreed to participate in the S&M activities in
return for Daughtry's promise of an airline ticket home to Sweden.

In Gloster's chilling confession, he described Use Lunen putting on the
leather mask and zipping its mouthpiece shut before Daughtry handcuffed
her behind her back and directed her to kneel behind a large boulder in
the woods. Then, Gloster said, the already floating art dealer snorted a
few more lines and leaned over to whisper to Use, "You'll be going home,
all right in a wooden box," before he ordered Gloster to shoot her in
the back of the head.

"End of story?" Chapman asked.

"Not exactly. Gloster's doing twenty-five to life for murder, and the
Westchester D.A. has never been able to nail Daughtry." The testimony
of an accomplice has to be corroborated by some other evidence it's not
sufficient in and of itself to charge the coconspirator with the crime
of murder. "There has never been a single other thing to link Daughtry
to the child's death."

"So this friggin' lunatic did eighteen months for tax evasion and now
he's back in business like he's a normal guy, right? Man, I'd like just
five minutes alone with him while you wait in the car. Whaddaya think,
Coop? No loss to society, I promise."

Mercer parked in front of Galleria Caxton Due, the newest Chelsea
outpost, which Deni and Bryan had just been setting up for a fall
premiere at the time of her death. It was too early in the day for the
galleries to be open, so there were few other cars and little pedestrian
activity on the street.

Mike paused briefly to read the sign that was posted below the bell:
"Service entrance in rear on Twenty-third Street. Hope that doesn't mean
us."

The front door was unlocked, so Mike pushed it open and we followed him
in. The cavernous first-floor space of the former auto repair shop had
been completely whitewashed and gutted of all signs of its earlier life.
New Age music played on speakers tucked up high in corners of the room.

"Guess they're not set up for the exhibition yet."

"You're about to step on a masterpiece, Mikey. Read the sign." I pointed
to a piece of gray string, about twelve feet long, that extended out
from the wall to form a triangle and was tacked to a point on the floor
near my left shoe. He ignored me, looking around, instead, at similar
strands of colorless yarn spread across sections of the gallery like
giant cat's-cradle forms. I called out the words written on the placard
describing the display: "In these string sculptures, the space takes on
an incorporeal palpability, concentrating on the planar or volumetric
components. Illusion and fact are interwoven, with overlapping linear
trajectories."

"This is arty Mike responded. "You think some horse's ass is going to
pay money for these things? I never saw anything so useless in my entire
life."

Bryan Daughtry's voice called down to us from a high balcony area off to
the side of the airy room. "Don't be so quick to declare this one the
most absurd, Detective. There are several more floors above you might
like to see. Why don't you take the lift up here to my office?"

"Can I make it up there without hanging myself on any of this string
crap you call art?" Mike said to Daughtry, rolling his eyes at the
bizarre exhibit of yarn sculptures that stretched across the mostly bare
space on the ground floor. Then he turned to me. "Let's head up,
blondie. Maybe if I dangle my handcuffs in front of him he'll get a
hard-on. You're certainly much too old for his taste."

There was a small lift in the far corner of the wide room. When the
doors of the elevator opened on the sixth floor, I was struck in the eye
by a blaze of light. The southern exposure of the building was a wall of
glass, which let the bright midday sun flood into this most unexpected
setting.

From this point, with no tall buildings in the immediate area, I could
see over the rooftops of nearby galleries and garages and out to the
Hudson River, which curved in toward the east just a few blocks below
us.

The most striking surprise was that about three floors beneath where we
stood, running from the north end to the south side of the airy atrium,
was an actual stretch of railroad track. It was heavy, thick, covered
with rust, and overgrown with weeds.

I stared down at it. "Is that real?"

Chapman was rapt. "I wish my old man could see this. Sure it's real.

Look," he said, pointing to an opening where the track ran out of the
glass-sided building and across the street, directly into a warehouse
facing the Galleria Caxton Due.

I leaned against the railing to see that in similar fashion, the
grass-filled ties also ran back out of the converted garage, crossing
over the double width of Twenty-third Street and rolling on between two
buildings on its north corner.

"What is it?" Mercer asked.

"The old Hi-Line Railroad. Another Hell's Kitchen special. When they
raised the tracks off Death Avenue north of the rail yards, they still
needed trains to get down to the meat markets in the Fourteenth Street
area. So, south of Thirtieth Street, this became the elevated line.

Haven't you ever noticed the old tracks?"

Mercer and I looked at Mike blankly and shook our heads.

"Just drive uptown on Tenth Avenue and look to your left. The air rights
over the railroad tracks were sold off, so all these warehouses were
allowed to build above and surrounding the actual path of the Hi-Line.
Between every block in the twenties and even below that, till you hit
the old Gansevoort Market, you can see the great tracks right from the
street."

Daughtry stepped out of his office, on the southwest corner of the
floor, and looked across at us. "Amazing space, isn't it? We're the only
gallery in the city smart enough to incorporate this bit of history into
our design. Glad you appreciate that much."

He invited us into his chilled office, and despite the temperature in
the climate-controlled gallery, I was surprised to see that beads of
sweat were pooled on Daughtry's forehead. He repeatedly dabbed at the
streaks running down the side of his neck.

Mike, Mercer, and I introduced ourselves, and he invited us to sit
opposite his desk. There were no signs of his former indiscretions here,
and although he resembled the photos I had seen in the press during the
Gloster trial, Daughtry was paunchier now, and jowls had replaced the
even line of his pointed chin.

"I'm sure you know all about my background, Detective," he began
tentatively, as his eyes darted back and forth between us, trying to
measure our level of hostility or the extent of our familiarity with his
past. His fingers trembled when they were at rest on the desktop, so he
kept wiping at his head and neck, even before it was necessary.

"But you need to know that I adored Deni Caxton, and I'll be glad to
help you in any way that I can."

Chapman was unmoved by Daughtry's effort to set a cooperative tone, so I
sat back quietly, like a guest privileged to be at the interrogation but
not encouraged to participate. Mike was aware of his witness's
vulnerability, so, in contrast to his meeting with Lowell Caxton, he
knew he could control the conversation.

Mike let Daughtry think that if he bared his soul about the tax fraud
matter, we'd get off the old case and move on to the mystery of Deni's
death. It seemed to calm him to tell us what we already knew about the
tax matter, as though we would think better of him for admitting his
wrongdoing aloud.

Then Mike moved his chair directly across from his target. "Now, Bryan,"
he said, knowing the use of his first name would bring Daughtry down one
more notch, "tell us about her."

Daughtry seemed relieved to be off the subject of himself and onto his
friend. "Oh, Deni. She's the only reason I'm still in business today,
after getting out of "

"No, no, no, Bryan. Not Deni. I want to know about the girl about Use
Lunen."

The moisture gathered again on his pasty skin, and now he looked from me
to Mercer and back again, hoping one of us would intercede with Chapman
and call him off.

"I had nothing, nothing to do with that girl, Detective. I've never been
charged with any crime. That sick little bastard should have been strung
up and "

"And stringing you up would probably have given you more pleasure than
any pervert like you deserves, Bryan. Just keep in mind that there's no
statute of limitations on murder. You play with us on this case, you
tell me even one little white lie about you or Denise Caxton or Omar
Sheffield, and "

"Omar? What does he have to do with any of this?"

The collar of his hunter green sport shirt was soaked through, and the
underarms matched it. His surprise about Sheffield seemed genuine to me.

Chapman continued. "The slightest misstep with us, and I'll go to the
ends of the earth to find the nails for your coffin, the evidence
that'll stick you in a jail cell right next door to Bertrand Gloster.

So, now you tell me, Bryan. What's this operation all about? And sit on
your hands while you're at it you're making me crazy with all your
mopping and dabbing. Take a shower after I leave you need it anyway."

Bryan responded like a three-year-old child and literally put his hands
under his thighs. He explained how he and Deni had met in 1990, when
both of them had galleries in the Fuller Building. They discovered their
similarities early on both from poor families and with invented
histories, each with an untrained eye but great instincts. Deni and
Bryan delighted in the big sale to a famous client, and both would do
almost anything testing the boundaries in a fairly sedate business to
stumble upon a sleeper, a lost masterpiece that had suddenly come back
on the market, and then find a Streisand or a Nicholson to buy it.

"Don't forget the candy. You still sniffing, Bryan?"

"Not really."

"No such thing as ' really' when it comes to cocaine addiction. You and
Deni had that in common, too, didn't you?"

"May I wipe my mouth, Detective?" Chapman nodded and Daughtry lifted one
of his hands and wiped his face and neck with the sleeve of his shirt.
"We got high together occasionally."

"Who's your source?"

"Actually, Deni was. With my felony conviction I couldn't take chances
buying off the street. I relied on my well friends to give me coke.

Artists, dealers, even the guys who work in the warehouse. There's no
shortage of the white stuff on the streets. You know that."

Chapman stood and looked out through the glass wall of Daughtry's
office, down over the tracks to the string-lined display that we had
seen on entering. "Did Denise really go for this garbage? I mean, you've
seen the paintings in her home, and in Lowell's gallery, haven't you?
They've got an amazing collection."

"Detective, van Gogh only sold five of his paintings in his lifetime.

Relatively speaking, merely a handful of artists have ever been
recognized by their contemporaries. Deni wanted to get in on the next
wave, pick the giants of the future, take some chances. What Lowell does
with his collection of masters takes no brains at all, no imagination.
Just money."

"Let's talk about your business."

"It's Deni's business, not mine. I've put some money into it, but she
couldn't risk attaching my name to a venture like this. Too many people
seem to remember too much."

"D'you know she was having problems? Legal ones?"

"Of course I did." Daughtry looked down at his desk. "I mentioned van
Gogh a moment ago. I'm sure you knew about the controversy over Vase
with Eight Sunflowers.""

"Let's say we know our version of it," Mike bluffed. "Why don't you tell
us yours?"

"There's a bit of a storm in the market these days. Vincent van Gogh
only painted during the last ten years of his life. He's been credited
with completing 879 oils, 1,2.45 drawings, and a single etching."

Daughtry was talking to me now, as though Mercer and Mike wouldn't be
able to understand the story.

I glared back at him. "Talk to the detectives, Mr. Daughtry. They're
much better at this work than I am. They're really quite intelligent."

"The brouhaha is that a great many experts now believe that some of the
most famous paintings, and even the one etching, are fakes. In fact,
they suspect that many of van Gogh's contemporaries created them and
others passed them off as the real thing. Since his work is fetching
higher prices than almost anyone else's, it's a rather hot debate these
days."

"And Deni?"

"Well, Deni recently sold Eight Sunflowers to a client in Japan. I don't
know his name offhand, but it's a matter of public record. He's now made
a claim with the United States government "

I broke in. "I don't get it. There are supposedly fake van Goghs
everywhere from the Musee d'Orsay to the Metropolitan."

"Yes, Ms. Cooper, but the gentleman's claim is that Deni sold it after
she had sent it to Amsterdam to be authenticated by the curators there,
and after they'd told her its value was questionable." "So, after she'd
been told it was a copy?"

"An opinion she fought vigorously with the Dutch Ministry of the Arts."

"But rather than waiting for the outcome," Chapman said, "she stiffed
the client anyway. How much?"

"Four-point-six million."

Chapman let out a whistle. "Not a bad day's work, Bryan.

What's your cut of that? And what do you know about the bid-rigging
investigation the Feds are doing?"

Daughtry was shaking his head. "I didn't have a piece of the van Gogh.

I'm only involved in buying the contemporary works."

Chapman was pacing the small room, looking through the glass panel at
the space below. "Phew. You musta had that leather mask wrapped too
tight around your brain. This junk'll never bring you a nickel."

"Deni wasn't the least bit worried about the auction investigation. She
was above all that it never occurred to me to even mention it. And about
your eye, Mr. Chapman," Daughtry said, "if what you're referring to as
junk is that single oblique line of string you saw downstairs, I just
sold the artist's last piece Red Yarn as an Octagon Half- for a quarter
of a million dollars."

"To some yupster Cooper went to school with, no doubt. When's the last
time you saw Denise Caxton?"

"I think it was Wednesday of last week, before I went to the Hamptons.

Things were very slow here there's really nothing that goes on in August
in our business. I invited Deni to come out to the house with me, but
she said she had errands to get done in town. I left her here late in
the afternoon, and we never talked again."

Daughtry was more emotional about Deni's death than her husband had
been, but this reaction could just as easily have been a function of his
nervousness and discomfort.

"Alex, you got a couple of subpoenas for Bryan? Why don't you give ' to
him now?" Mike turned back to Daughtry. "We'll give you a few days to
get this stuff together. Two other things. I assume you were printed
when you went in the can, right? We'll be pulling those out for
comparisons with some of the evidence we've found. And you'll also
notice that there'll be two cops parked in front of the gallery in a
patrol car for the next few days. Nothing and I mean nothing goes in or
out of here until we've been through the place with a fine-tooth comb.
Ms. Cooper here will draft one hell of a warrant that'll cover my ass in
court, and I'll expect your complete cooperation while we execute it."

Daughtry stood up. "But, Detective, there'll be art shipments coming in
and out all the "

"I don't think so, Mr. Daughtry. From what I read in the newspapers, I
take it you liked to be the top in your little S&M games. Well, I'd like
nothing better than to make you the bottom for me and for some
eight-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound convicted rapist waiting for you in
a very crowded cell upstate, if I can get you there. So don't misbehave
too badly, ' you may go back into prison a tight end, but I know you'll
come out a wide receiver."

I turned to face Mercer, biting my lip to suppress a laugh. "Get me out
of here, will you?" "Mr. Daughtry," Mercer said, standing up and
towering over the rest of us, "when's the last time you saw Omar
Sheffield?"

He looked up at the ceiling. "I'd guess sometime that same afternoon,
last Wednesday, almost a week ago."

"Who hired him to work here, and what'd he do for you?"

"Deni did all the hiring and firing. Omar's a sort of handyman moves
exhibits, hangs the artwork. Painted the gallery with a couple of his
friends. Ask him yourself. He'll be here within the hour."

"Don't count on it, Bryan. Omar's feeling a little sluggish this
morning." Mercer said, "Did you know that Omar had a record? That he was
on parole?"

Daughtry hesitated, and I sensed that he was starting to filter his
responses to us.

"I'm not sure. I may have heard something about that, but didn't pay any
attention." "Didn't pay attention?" asked Chapman incredulously. "What
was this place, one-stop shopping for the parole board? You know that
there are restrictions about who you do business with, don't you? What
if I tell you that you gotta hire a new whipping boy oops, damn it,
there I go again with that dominatrix crap. Omar Sheffield is the latest
casualty in the Caxton-Daughtry partnership. He's as dead as Deni. What
do you think of that?"

Daughtry drew in a deep breath, and his hands started trembling again,
uncontrollably. "I think, actually, that it's not such a bad thing, Mr.
Chapman. Would you like to know why Deni hired Omar to work for her?"

"Let me guess. A direct pipeline to a cocaine source, right?"

"Well, that was just a lucky coincidence. Denise actually had a special
job for Omar," Daughtry went on, clearly banking on his betrayal of his
dear friend and partner to get Mike Chapman off his own back. "She put
him on the payroll for a single purpose. And now that she's gone, I
don't suppose there's any harm in telling you.

"The sole reason she employed Omar Sheffield was to kill Lowell Caxton."

Eleven.

The three of us settled into a booth at the Empire Diner, the
sleek-looking chrome-fitted slice of a Deco eatery on the northeast
corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, to regroup over a
late-morning cup of Coffee.

"I'll take a mushroom-and-cheese omelette, too," Chapman told the
waitress.

"How many breakfasts have you had today?" I asked.

"I try to fortify myself in advance whenever I know I'll be hanging out
with you. And throw in an order of crisp bacon and some sausage, okay?"

Mercer was doodling on his napkin, connecting stick figures with arrows
and seemingly going around in circles.

"Someone killed Denise Caxton. I assumed it was Omar Sheffield.

Someone probably kills Sheffield I don't think he just walked under a
boxcar after forty-six years of careful living, but we'll know for
certain in a day or two. Denise had hired Sheffield to kill her husband
so maybe Omar's the guy who screwed up the job and caused Lowell's scalp
wound. Deni seems to have all the money in the world, but keeps
scam-ming for more. Plus, she's got a class A dirt ball pervert for a
business partner. Where are we going here?"

"Nowhere, fast. I'll feel better after some more caffeine," I said.

I called Laura on my cellular phone. "I hope you picked up the voice
mail I left at seven this morning, telling you I wouldn't be in till we
finished uptown. Any messages for me?"

"Jim Winright found nothing on the Internet about the woman you asked
about in your E-mail. He doubts it's her real name," Laura said. "And
someone called Marilyn Seven phoned to say she could meet with you at
noon in the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, on Fifty-seventh
Street. Then the M. E."s Office wanted you to know that there was indeed
seminal fluid on the canvas piece taken from the Chevy, and they'd
probably have DNA results by the end of the day tomorrow. Last one is
from Jacob Tyler. He expects to be back from China by the weekend, and
hopes you can get away to the Vineyard."

I repeated the first three messages to my companions, omitting Jake's
call and my hope that we might find Deni's killer so I could be with him
by Friday.

"Good," Chapman said. "I already told the M.E. we'd need a comparison
DNA print for Omar, so he should have that one under way, too. One of us
oughta take that meeting with Marilyn Seven and you."

"It doesn't sound like she wants to have this conversation with police
around. I think the Four Seasons is still a pretty safe place to be."

"Let Mike get on with what he's got to do, Alex. I'll take my car up
there and sit in front of the hotel, in case you need me for anything."

Mike took us back to where we had parked earlier in the morning, and I
drove uptown, throwing my parking permit in the windshield and leaving
the Jeep near the entrance to the building.

The only woman in the lounge was a slight, serious-looking brunette
whose long hair was wound into a French braid. Her tortoiseshell
eyeglass frames held tinted lenses, and as I stood in the entrance to
the room she dipped an ivory cigarette holder in my direction.

A bit dramatic for my taste, but I approached her and introduced myself.
She stood and shook my hand, smiling openly and inviting me to join her.
"Sorry for the dark glasses. I've had some vision problems lately, and
even the softest light bothers my eyes. And I also apologize for being
so mysterious. With all of Deni's problems, I just don't know where to
turn and whom to trust. I called the lawyer who handles all my business
affairs here in New York yesterday Justin Feld-man and he assured me
that I could rely on your judgment and your discretion."

"If he's your lawyer, then you're in very secure hands. Justin's the
best in the business." Although I had been put off by her phone call, I
liked this woman immediately. "Are you also an art dealer?"

"No, but my late husband was a collector. I live in Santa Fe now, but we
bought a lot of our paintings from Lowell in the old days."

She was wearing a dark blue sweater, probably silk, with a dark blue
skirt that extended to midcalf, showing a bit of her thin ankle above
the tops of her delicate blue sandals.

"Like Deni, I was married to a much older man, and a very rich one.

Unlike her, I had inherited a lot of money, too an automobile fortune
well, automobile parts, actually." She smiled at me. "And Lowell had
sort of put Deni in my hands, to help polish her up a bit. I was ten
years older than she I'm forty-nine now but we became friends, best
friends. I'm sure you know how important that is to a woman."

"I can't imagine going through life without one," I said. Nina Baum, my
Wellesley roommate, had taught me everything there was to know about
friendship and loyalty. And even though she lived in Los Angeles and
Joan Stafford was spending more and more time in Washington, I counted
on the intimacy of our relationships to bolster me through the sometimes
dark days and nights of my chosen work. "May I ask you to tell me about
Deni what you know, as well as what you think was going on recently?"

"Certainly. Would you care for something to drink?"

"No, thanks." I watched as she sipped at a glass of white wine.

"At the very beginning, it was as though Deni had walked into the pages
of a fairy tale. Lowell was amazingly seductive, and Denise was like a
magnificent jewel that he wanted to place in the center of his crown.

His dinner parties were legendary has anyone told you about them?"

I shook my head in the negative.

"Not that it was his idea, really, but he copied a page out of Gertrude
Stein's ingenious recipe for entertaining. The living room perhaps
you've seen it was hung with old masters and works from many of the
greatest artists who ever lived. Then, with a handful of the richest
collectors at the ready, he'd sprinkle the guest list with whoever was
hottest in the art world and seat the artist opposite his own paintings.
Brilliant, wasn't it? Those often surly and sullen personalities
couldn't help but smile as they were reflected in their own canvases and
assured of almost immediate sales.

"Imagine at one table having Ellsworth Kelly, Keith Haring, David
Hockney all sitting amidst their creations while they debated with each
other about style and talent as well. Those were the days that Deni
loved."

"How long did life at the Caxtons' go on like that?"

"Quite a good while, actually. Beyond Deni's youth and exuberance,
Lowell seemed to love everything about her, not least of all how eager
she was to learn everything there was to know about his life's passion.

She was a tireless student, and though she had an untrained eye, her
hunches could be brilliant. Lowell called her ' budding alchemist."

First, he tempted her with really fine paintings that he'd search out in
the chateaux of Bordeaux and the palaces of the once-rich in Venice.

She'd a gift for knowing there was something lurking beneath the crusted
dust and oil, and she would coax Lowell to take the gamble.

"More often than not she was right. They came home with a Canaletto and
two amazing Delacroix that way. Stole them, in a sense. Paid practically
nothing for the works, then turned around and sold them for a fortune to
several of the Caxton stable Lowell's devoted followers.

He was less amused when she turned the same talent on the current art
scene. He thought she was wasting her time."

"Chicken or egg, Ms. Seven, which came first? Do you know how the
marriage began to unravel or come apart?"

"That's a bit too quaint a description. I'd say it came to a screeching
halt.

"It was when Lowell had gone to Bath, a year ago this past June. There
was to be an auction for the estate of Gwendolyn, Lady Wenbotham. She
was the ninety-four-year-old dowager who'd owned a fabulous collection
of portraits lots of minor royalty and major military figures. Lowell
and Deni were feuding, rather mildly, because she was too busy to go
with him on the trip. Not only did he value her eye, but he wanted her
there to show off at all the social events Ascot, if they could get away
early enough, staying on for Wimbledon, dinners, and balls. Kind of
thing she usually loved to do."

"What kept her away?"

"I'm not sure, really." Ms. Seven stopped, as though considering whether
or not to tell me what she guessed had been the reason. "She was vague
even with me at the time."

"Another man?"

"No, up to then she'd been quite faithful to Lowell. So he left for
England did the tennis and the horse races and Deni was quite aloof for
those weeks. Finally, she called and said that if I would go along with
her, she'd surprise Lowell in Bath. We packed our trunks and off we
went. I had a driver pick us up at Heathrow the morning of the auction
and take us directly to the Royal Crescent. Do you know it?"

"Yes, I do." I had stayed at the charming old hotel when one of Joan
Stafford's first plays was staged there before opening at the Lyric
Theatre in London.

"Denise went to the desk and announced that she was Mrs. Caxton and
would like the key to the room. I had one of those suites facing the
crescent, but to get to Lowelps room she had to pass through that quiet
little garden, where half of the guests were having high tea.

"Five minutes later I heard Deni yelling as though she were standing in
my very room. Language I doubt many of the hotel guests had heard
before. Lowell, as I later learned in exquisite detail from Deni, was in
the middle of some kind of acrobatic sexual maneuver with Gwendolyn's
great-granddaughter, a twenty-five-year-old local beauty who was no
doubt trying to up the ante on the family fortune. She had captured
Lowell's attention and was hoping to keep his bids high that evening."

"Any point in asking what happened next?"

"Deni used more four-letter words than I thought I'd ever find in
Webster's. The young lady came downstairs wearing a hotel bathrobe, and
Deni tossed her underwear out the window, probably landing it on
someone's scones and crumpets. Gwendolyn's eighty-nine-year-old sister,
Althea, watched the whole episode unfold from her wheelchair in the
middle of the courtyard.

"When Lowell stormed through there, fully dressed, about fifteen minutes
later, Althea lifted herself up with her cane, reached it out to stop
him in his path, and announced for all the family friends to hear, "I
applaud your courage, Mr. Caxton. Must have been something like trying
to fit an oyster into a parking meter, having your way with my
great-grand niece Lovely to have met you. Sorry you can't stay for the
evening."

"

"He didn't go to the sale, after all that?"

"No. In fact, he had our driver take him directly to the airport for a
flight back to New York."

"And Deni?"

"She and I went to the auction. She was furious, and determined to do
something to show what he had taught her professionally. Everyone in the
room, of course, was impressed that she showed up at all. To them it was
pure American moxie. She dressed elegantly, beamed at everyone flirting
with the men and being unusually courteous to the women and focused her
attention on every item in the sale." "How'd she do?" I asked.

"Like a dream. She bought a portrait of the Marchesa Cec-chi for
sixty-seven thousand dollars. It had been unattributed in the catalogue.
But Deni brought it back to her restorer, Marco Varelli have you
encountered him yet? He's a genius. And after he cleaned it up, they
actually found Sir Joshua Reynolds' signature under a couple of
centuries of grime. She sold that piece for more than a million and a
half. And just for fun, she bought a small piece of garden statuary,
some kind of wood nymph if I remember correctly. I don't think it cost
her two thousand dollars."

Marilyn Seven took a breath, put out one cigarette and lit another, and
reminded the waiter to bring her another glass of Saint-Veran.

"I'll tell you, Miss. Cooper, I was sitting in the same room, looking at
the same objects. I thought the sculpture was too kitschy to put in my
own backyard. Turned out to be an original by Giambologna, the great
Florentine artist. Worth close to ten million. Deni refused to sell it.
Just shipped it home and installed it in Lowelps bathroom. She wanted to
remind him of the entire experience. Make it indelible."

"I take it that was the beginning of the end?"

"Basta. Finito. Terminato. Neither one of them was willing to forgive
the other, and for Lowell it was a confirmation that they had been
moving in separate directions for a couple of years. Deni had no idea if
that was his first indiscretion although I really doubt it.

He'd finished the Pygmalion thing with Deni. He was ready to take on
someone new."

"Why didn't she just walk away from him? Certainly she'd made enough
money to go out on her own."

"I suppose when you come from a background like Deni's, there's never
quite enough to erase the fears that you're going to find yourself back
on the farm sowing soybeans in the dirt for the rest of your life."

"With what she was sitting on? I can't believe that."

"It wasn't a very attractive side of my friend, but she also wanted to
take Lowell to the cleaners. Deni wanted some of the Caxton treasures as
well, and she had no plans to walk away without them."

"But she had no right to them, Ms. Seven. They're clearly Lowelps,
aren't they, except for some of the works acquired during the marriage?"

She looked at me as though I were an absolute idiot. "I'm not talking
about the art in their home or in the gallery. Don't you know anything
about the Caxton operation? Because if not, you've got a lot of catching
up to do.

"The Caxtons have been at this now for three generations. Lowell has
such a tight grip on the collection that not even his employees know the
extent of what he owns, or more importantly, where all the art is.

Deni knew there were paintings stashed in Swiss vaults and even in an
old Cold War bunker on a hillside in Pennsylvania. He moves his pieces
in armored cars and by private jet."

Deni's friend was certainly devoted to her. I could see she was going to
go on bashing Lowell as long as I'd listen.

"Are you aware that Three you probably know it was his childhood name,
and it made him crazy when Deni called him that was never invited to
join the Art Dealers Association of America?"

Again, I shook my head to tell her that I was not.

"In seventy-five, I think it was, and certainly before Deni, he was
caught bugging the telephones of the most prestigious galleries in New
York, long before hi-tech spying became a tool of the business world.

He was checking on their inventory, as well as trying to get an idea of
what their customers were searching for on the market. Lowell's father
had used a lot of his money to pay scholars to write catalogues
raisonnes."

"Sorry, you've lost me. I don't know what they are."

"They're the key to individual artists and their works. Good ones are
well researched and documented, and by controlling the catalogues of a
particular artist, you control the price and value of his work. Many
experts think there's an aura of questionability about the Caxton
catalogues, that histories and pedigrees have been altered for the
family's private gain. Several art historians have denounced the works
publicly, which made Lowell furious. It threw into question his
Ver-meers, his Legers, his Davids." "But Deni thought she could get her
hands on those paintings?"

"Well, yes in part. She was also terribly frightened that she knew too
much about them for Lowell to let her go. His first two wives had never
really participated in his professional world. But once Deni learned it
and loved it, he let her in. She knew things about Caxton and his
father, and their manner of doing business, that Lowell regretted having
told her once the bottom fell out. Her greatest fear and she spoke of it
to me often was that he'd never let her walk away from him, knowing what
she did about his dealings. She couldn't stay with him, Ms. Cooper, but
he wouldn't let her go."

I wondered if Marilyn Seven knew anything about Deni's partnership with
the late Omar Sheffield. "Do you have any idea how desperate your friend
was to get rid of her husband?"

"About as anxious as you or I would be, if your life had been threatened
like hers had."

"How and when was she threatened?" "Well, that answers that. I didn't
suppose Lowell told you about the letters Deni got last year, which
practically drove her insane."

"No, so far he hasn't mentioned any letters to us at all."

"I've brought you a copy of one of them, if you'd like to see it."

Marilyn Seven withdrew a xeroxed paper from her slim purse and passed it
across to me. The copy was a page of lined white paper, covered with
neatly printed handwriting and addressed to Denise Caxton. I scanned it
quickly.

My name is Jennsen, and I live in Brooklyn. I know you don't know me,
but I have been watching you since you got home from England. I know how
you look like, and I know how to find you. Listen, if you go to the
police about this, I will hurt you bad, or go back to Oklahoma and kill
someone you really love. I know when you leave your house and go to W.
zznd St." so I could follow you. I know you get your hair cut at La
Coupe and you eat dinner twice a week at Fresco on $znd St. Your husband
pays you $125,000 a month for your expenses. Are you getting this yet? I
know where you buy your underpants and how much you pay for your wine.
Now here's what I want. Listen close. I want you to send $1,000 to my
friend, who is in jail, and who's address is on this letter. This is to
show you that I am not kidding, by two ways. One is that I know every
move you make, and the other is to show you that my best friends are
locked up doing time, so you know I am not playing games. We know how to
hurt people very bad. Lowell also told me who the five men are who are
your lovers. Now you think I'm jiving? Send a check or money order to my
friend Omar Sheffield, 968-1911, Box 968, Coxsackie Correctional
Facility, Coxsackie, New York 12051.

REMEMBER NO POLICE. If you don't send my friend the money, I will take
charge by getting you in the near future. Include your phone number so
we can talk.

I looked up at Marilyn Seven. "What did she do about this?"

"Certainly not call the police."

"Did she do what this guy wanted?"

"What would you have done?" "Look," I said, my impatience growing. "It's
not a contest about us trying to match wits. I didn't get this letter."

"These letters, Ms. Cooper. A shoe box full of them. It was obvious to
her that this man could only have gotten the detail about her from
Lowell, and that Lowell had hired him to kill her. She knew she was
being scammed, but of course she did as he told her."

"She sent money up to the state prison?"

"You bet she did. Early and often. The faster she sent it, the faster
the ante was raised. By the time the guy finally called her, she must
have already sent him twenty thousand dollars. She was terrified, and
asked him point-blank whether her husband had hired him to kill her. He
confirmed it for Deni. Told her that Lowell was trying to torture her
first, mentally, and that's why he'd given this guy Jennsen so much
information about her movements and whereabouts. They were planning a
way for the hit to happen sometime when Lowell was abroad and Deni
wasn't in her apartment almost exactly the way it did happen so it
couldn't be traced back to Lowell."

"But she kept the correspondence going, of course," I said.

"To stay alive, and to turn the tables on her beloved husband. It was
her idea to outbid Lowell on this deal, too and to get the Jennsen
fellow to kill Lowell before he murdered her." Marilyn Seven leaned in
and put her hand on top of mine. "I told her over and over again that
she was insane, and that it would be a deadly mistake for her to play
with fire. She wouldn't listen to me, of course, and my insistence that
she abandon her plan took her further and further away from me. I don't
think, in the end, that she really had anyone left that she could
trust."

"Bryan Daughtry?" I ventured.

"You'll forgive me if I don't dignify that question with a response."

"Do you have any of the other letters that she received?"

"No, I never saw them. And I have no idea where she would have kept
them. The first one was the only one she sent to me, when she wanted my
advice. I don't know if they're at her home, or office, or in a safe
deposit box. I felt you should know about them."

She removed a fifty-dollar bill from her pocket and summoned the waiter
to bring a check. "I'll be at the hotel for a few days before going back
home, if you need me for anything."

"Under the name "Seven'?" I asked.

"Yes, of course." She smiled. "Why, I suppose you tried to check up on
me before we met, Ms. Cooper. It's close enough to my real name the
Italian word for '." I used it briefly, almost thirty years ago, when I
attempted a career on the stage. Did I stump you?" she asked, seemingly
pleased by the idea.

"In fact, you did. We came up blank. Much too blank for someone of your
means."

"That 15 my name, in a fashion. I was actually born Marina Sette, in
Venezia. My mother abandoned me when I was eighteen months old. Left my
father and ran off with a very dashing American Lowell Caxton."

I suppose that I was unable to stifle a slight gasp.

"My father left Italy and came to the States, where his parents raised
me while my mother raised her stepchild and had two more of her own with
Lowell. She never glanced over her shoulder, not even to stop from being
run over in that boating accident."

I had grown up with the most loving mother on the face of the earth and
could not comprehend how any woman could leave a child to take off with
another man.

Marina Sette went on. "My father turned his automotive parts factory in
Michigan into an integral part of the Ford Motor Company Sette Moto by
the time I was six. If you can measure wealth in material ways and
believe me, I can't money has never been an issue."

"But Lowell Caxton surely he knew who you were."

"Perhaps he'd have recognized me if I were as breathtaking as my mother
must have been. But he never caught on. Not for a moment. Then, after
the fireworks in England, when Deni was looking for every conceivable
way to hurt him, she couldn't resist telling him exactly who I was."

"And his reaction?"

"I wanted it to be rage, of course. I wanted it to cause him to agonize
over me or at least, if he didn't care about my feelings, he should
regret the loss of my husband as a rather substantial client. As I
should have expected, all I got was indifference.

"Surely you can understand why I thought Deni was on such a treacherous
course with her pen pal. After all, there was no need to go outside the
family." Marina Sette removed her cigarette from the holder and crushed
it in the ashtray on the table. "I could have killed Lowell Caxton
myself."

Twelve.

Laura stopped me on my way back to my desk, half an hour after I had
left Mercer in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. It was almost three and
I was making my first appearance of the day at the office.

"Mckinney was looking for you. He's assigned someone to the
investigation of the dead guy they found in the rail yards last night."

"Tell him to listen to his voice mail. I called him this morning to tell
him it's part of my case. As nicely as you can say it, Laura, tell him
to keep his hands off my corpses, okay? Boss back from Albany yet?"
"Rose said not to worry. He's in a meeting all afternoon with some of
the lawyers on that foreign bank scandal.

They're offering millions of dollars of forfeitures Battaglia hasn't
even asked about your case since he returned. But you've got an
unexpected visitor, Alex. Mrs. Braverman is back. I've had her in the
waiting area since lunchtime, but she won't leave and she won't talk to
anyone else. You're the only one who can help her."

"Tell Max to bring her in. I don't think I've seen her in six months,
have I?"

"Got that search warrant ready for me yet?" Chapman asked. I knew he'd
come down to meet me when he had finished at the M. E."s Office, but I
hadn't expected him to walk through my door quite so soon.

I lowered myself into my chair and groaned. "Slow down. I just walked in
and I've got some social work to do. Just stand by for a few minutes.
You're about to meet my favorite witness."

"Do not ever go to an autopsy of someone run over by a freight train.

I've seen some pretty gruesome sights, but this was like chopped "

"Spare me the details. The photographs will be more than I need to
know." It was mandatory for one of the assigned detectives to be present
during the medical examiner's autopsy proceedings on a possible homicide
victim.

Max walked in, leading a very obese elderly woman on her arm. Mrs.
Braverman was wearing a garishly colored sundress and a chartreuse straw
hat with an enormous brim.

"Alexandra, darling, I'm so glad you got down here in time to see me."

The octogenarian dropped Max's hand and waddled across the room to
embrace me as I came out from behind the desk. "And who's this handsome
young man?"

"Michael Patrick Chapman, ma'am, Miss. Cooper's favorite detective," he
replied, giving her his best and brightest grin.

"Is he on my investigation now?" she asked me.

"He's the man. I brought him in specially for you. He's solved hundreds
of these cases. What's been going on since the last time you were here?"

She plopped into one of the leather armchairs opposite me, while Mike
leaned against a file cabinet and listened to her story. "You were right
about Christmas and New Year's, Alexandra. They must have gone away for
the holidays because I didn't have any problems after I saw you. Then,
of course, I went to Boca to be with my son and grandchildren for a few
months. Now, ever since I'm back, they're making life miserable for me."

"Tell Detective Chapman who they are, Mrs. Braverman."

"Extraterrestrials, son. In my day we used to call them Martians. But
I've done a lot of reading up on this, and now I know they could be from
anywhere out there."

Mike kneeled by her side and looked her directly in the eye. "What are
they up to this time?"

"They've moved into the apartment upstairs, where old Mr. Rubenstein
used to live before his daughter shipped him off to a home," she said,
now slipping into a whisper as she talked to Chapman. "They've been
flashing signals at me, beaming them through the ceilings and the walls.
They're trying to control my brain waves."

"Are they doing it through the toaster and the television set, too?" he
asked, with the same degree of intensity that I had seen him question
murder suspects.

"Exactly!" she replied emphatically.

"I told you he was good, didn't I?"

"Nobody in my family believed me, Mike I could call you Mike, couldn't
I, sweetheart? The precinct wouldn't do nothing about it. They sent me
down here to see Alexandra after I told them about the time one of them
fondled my breasts while I was napping. She's been wonderful to me,
really. I feel better every time I see her." She cocked her head and
looked over at me. "I try not to be a nuisance to her. Then, as soon as
I saw her picture in the paper with this lady in the water, the rays
became even stronger. I got worried that maybe the same people are after
you, sweetheart."

"We're gonna solve this for you, Mrs. B.," Mike said, rising up and
pointing to my top desk drawer. "Coop, gimme a couple of boxes of clips,
right away."

"Clips, of course," I repeated, sliding it open and removing two boxes
of paper clips.

"Not those, the giant-size ones. Those ordinary ones don't work with E.
T."s."

I took two boxes of large clips out and Mike ordered me to make it four.

"Now, here's what you do. When you get home, take a couple of dozen out
of the box, make yourself comfortable, and start to string them
together, know what I mean?"

Mrs. Braverman's eyes were gleaming with delight at the attention she
was getting. "Sure, sure. This I can do." She nodded as Mike looped the
metal pieces together to demonstrate to her.

"Then, you take the top one and you attach it to the belt on your dress.
You gotta have enough clips to make the chain reach to the floor. Then
you're grounded. You're completely safe because the signals run right
through the chain and onto the carpet, missing you completely. Who lives
beneath you?"

"Mrs. Villanueva. Dominican, but very nice."

"No problem. Sometimes the waves go through to the apartment below, but
Dominicans are immune to extraterrestrial interference. She'll be fine."

Mrs. Braverman got up from her chair while I put the four boxes of clips
in a plastic bag and handed them to her. "Costs the city a dollar
forty-five, but it's worth every penny for your peace of mind.

Just call Coop if you need a refill."

"I'm gonna kiss you for this, Mike." She puckered her lips and reached
out for his face, planting herself firmly on his mouth. "Could I make a
shiddach with you and Alexandra here?" I recognized the Yiddish
expression for a brokered marriage.

"Hey, Mrs. B." you'll excuse me, but I don't have the balls to take on a
broad as tough as this one. Don't you have a daughter for me?"

"Three sons. An oral surgeon, an accountant, and one we don't talk
about. Plays the horses, best I can tell. I'll leave you two to your
business now. And you, don't use that kind of language in front of my
girl here," she said laughingly. "Someday she's gonna meet a nice man
who'll take her away from all this, right, Alexandra?"

"Right, Mrs. Braverman." I walked with her and Max to the door so that I
could accept another hug and sent her off to the elevator.

"Wouldn't it be great if we could solve two percent of our cases that
simply?" Chapman asked. I came back to my desk and waved him out of the
way so I could get to the word processor to work on the search warrant
for the Galleria Caxton Due. I told him about Marina Sette and showed
him the letter she had given me.

"Looks like we need another visit with Lowell Caxton. And you'd better
do a subpoena for Omar Sheffield's prison records. Be sure and include
the visitors' log. Let's check to see when Deni made her appearance
there." "Make yourself useful," I said, as I filled in the facts to
establish probable cause for a search of Daughtry's gallery, from all of
Deni's property through the contents of Omar Sheffield's locker. "Go
tell Laura what you want and she can type up the subpoenas for me to
sign.

And ask her to hold all my calls for an hour so I can knock this thing
out. That way you can execute it tomorrow."

I had almost finished the application when Chapman came back in the room
and reached across the desk to pick up the blinking phone line of a call
that Laura had put on hold.

"She assured me you'd want to be interrupted for this one. Jake Tyler,
with an overseas operator patching him through."

I took the receiver from Mike's hand and spoke into it. "Hello?...
Hello?" I waited for a response but there was none.

"I thought this technology worked all over the world."

"So did I. My luck, he's in the one little village in the middle of
nowhere that can't pick up the signals." I held on for several more
seconds and then hung up the phone.

"So, what's all the secrecy about this romance with Jacob Tyler,
blondie?"

"For one thing, I only met him last month Fourth of July weekend, at a
clambake on the Vineyard. It's still very new. And for another, you know
what a gossip mill this place is."

"Jeez, you'd think Mercer or me was gonna slit our wrists if you were
getting laid."

The next look I flashed at him wasn't so pleasant.

"Mercer or I?" he asked.

"It's not the grammar I'm so worried about this time, it's the
sentiment."

Mike's feet were up on my desktop now. "What do you hear from your
friend Drew? I felt kinda sorry for that guy."

"He just wasn't ready for anything that intense yet. As much as we liked
to be together, he was still getting over the death of his wife.

When Milbank offered him a transfer to their new law office in Moscow,
he took it." "Like my pal Scanlon says, "The camel shits. The caravan
moves on." I agree with little old Mrs. B. You need to get a life before
this job sucks everything out of you, kid."

"Don't start with me, Mike. It's everyone else I know outside these
doors who can't understand why I love what I do and who just doesn't get
it. From my pals, I at least expect that you agree that this is the most
fascinating job in the world. How many people get up in the morning and
look forward to going to work? You and I have never had two days that
have been at all predictable in our entire careers, and no two that have
been even remotely alike. And on top of it, you do a little bit of good
for somebody else in the mix." I knew I was preaching to the choir, but
Mike was just in one of those moods that swept over each of us from time
to time.

"Jacob Tyler. Isn't he the guy who's like a baby Brian Williams?"

"I don't think that's quite the description he'd favor."

"But he's the one who sits in for Brian Williams when Williams sits in
for Tom Brokaw, right? Anchorman-to-be. Deep voice, lots of hair,
best-looking striped shirts on the airwaves."

"When you're ready to tell all about your love life, I'll buy the drinks
and we'll compare notes for an entire night, if you'd like."

"All I need is half a minute. The story of my love life'd fit on a
matchbook cover. C'mon, let's get this thing signed so I can rattle
Bryan's cage tomorrow morning."

As we returned to the office from the courtroom, Catherine Dashfer and
Marisa Bourges, the two senior members of the Sex Crime Unit, were
waiting for me. "Did you forget that Rich was on trial?" Marisa asked,
referring to one of our colleagues, who was in court with his first
date-rape prosecution.

"Damn it, I forgot completely. I'm so wound up in this that I'm not
paying attention to the daily routine."

"That's okay. When he heard you weren't in, he called and we went over
to help him. The medical testimony was on today, and his witness handled
it extremely well."

In more than 70 percent of reported sexual assaults, the victim suffers
no gross physical injury. And even though physical injury is not an
element of the crime of rape, most jurors expect that they'll hear
evidence of bruises and lacerations. Frequently we need an expert
physician to explain the absence of visible trauma, as well as the
elasticity of the vaginal vault.

"Thanks for covering for me. Michael Warner is such a prick, I thought
he'd make mincemeat of Rich's doctor." The defendant's attorney was a
mean-spirited character as well as a screamer, and though the physician
who had examined the victim was an experienced practitioner in an
emergency room setting, he had never testified in a courtroom before.

"I think Rich has a lock. Dr. Hayakawa held up beautifully. Every time
Warner went back at him, he held his ground, described his findings, and
concluded that they were consistent with the victim's version of the
events. Finally, Warner was halfway across the room and yelled out at
the doctor at the top of his lungs, mocking him for dramatic effect. "I
want you to tell the jury why it is, Doctor, that you did not expect to
find any lesions or tears, even though this woman had described to you
an absolutely brutal and life-threatening encounter."

"Dr. Hayakawa never lost his cool. He just looked straight at the jury
and said, "Because actually, penis not so awesome weapon, ladies and
gentlemen."

"

Catherine broke in. "The foreman cracked up and the rest of the jurors
followed. I never saw anyone run for his seat as fast as Warner. Rich is
going to sum up tomorrow. We took him through it when we got out of
court tonight and he's going to do fine. You still have time to go to
the hospital to visit Sarah and the baby?"

It was after six. "Sure. I told Nan Toth to be downstairs at my Jeep at
six fifteen."

"You two ride with me," Chapman said to Catherine and Marisa. "They can
meet us up there."

I finished returning phone calls before going out to meet Nan. We headed
up First Avenue to New York University Medical Center and parked the car
on Thirty-fourth Street, stopping to buy flowers before going in. Keith
Raskin was getting off the elevator as we waited for it on the ground
floor. A brilliant orthopedic surgeon, he had painstakingly
reconstructed the bones in my right hand after they were shattered in a
horseback riding accident several years earlier. I flexed my fingers and
made a fist to demonstrate how successful the operation had been.

"After that Dogen murder case you worked on this spring, I never thought
I'd see you inside a hospital again," Keith remarked, referring to the
tragic slaughter of a neurosurgeon inside one of the city's largest
medical centers.

"Just a visit to the obstetrical floor, Doctor. In and out as fast as I
can make it." We caught up with each other briefly, and Nan and I
continued on our way to Sarah's room.

We arrived in time to join Catherine, Marisa, and Mike in admiring the
baby as she squinted up at us through teeny brown eyes. The room was
well stocked with bouquets, Beanie Babies, and oversized stuffed
animals, and the phone rang constantly while we each took turns holding
Janine in our arms.

When the aide came to take her back to the nursery, Sarah put on her
slippers and padded down the hall for a few laps of exercise around the
maternity floor. Mike grabbed the clicker and turned the television on
to Jeopardy!" having timed his visit to be sure to get in for the final
question. The screen lit up just as Trebek displayed the category for
the night, which was Famous Quotations.

We looked at each other and I shrugged my shoulders, knowing this could
go any which way, depending on the subject of the quotation. "You guys
in for ten?" Chapman asked all four of us.

Marisa, Catherine, Nan, and I each dug in our pocket-books to match the
ten-dollar bill that Mike had thrown on Sarah's bed.

"And tonight's answer is: John Hay referred to it as ' splendid little
war.""

"So much for all your fancy degrees and the twelve years of law school
among you. This is the quickest fifty bucks I ever made," Chapman said,
scooping up the money and fanning it in our faces.

There was not much about American history and nothing about military
history that Mike Chapman didn't know. I looked at the other women and
told them I conceded defeat. Not one of us had a serious guess.

Before any of the contestants revealed their answers, Mike announced,
"The Final Jeopardy question is: What was the Spanish-American War?"

"That's exactly right," Alex Trebek said, remarking on the answer given
by the poultry inspector from Lumberton, North Carolina, which earned
him $8,700 and the evening's championship.

"Eighteen ninety-eight was the year. And John Hay, ladies," Chapman
continued, "was our ambassador to Great Britain during that conflict.

Later he was secretary of state. His comment may have seemed appropriate
at the time, since it was a very short and one-sided war.

Now, more' than a hundred years later, we're still dealing with the
fallout Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

"A little less time shopping at the Escada sample sales and a bit more
with your noses in the books and I don't mean Dorothy L. Sayers or
Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Toth and you'll be able to hold on to your
husbands' well-earned money. C'mon, blondie, we got work to do."

"We're meeting my friend Joan Stafford for dinner. She claims to have
some inside poop about the deceased. See you in the morning." We said
good night to Sarah and the others near the nursery. It was a quick ride
up to Forty-sixth Street and the quiet elegance of the best steak house
in Manhattan, Patroon.

Mercer and Joan were already seated at the front corner table when we
entered. I kissed the top of her head before sliding into the banquette
and told her how much I missed having her in town, now that she was
spending all her time in Washington with her fiance. Ken Aretsky, the
owner, sent a round of drinks over to the table.

Mike was already buried in the menu and banking on Joan's inimitable
generosity. "I'm starting with a dozen oysters. Then the veal chop with
the garlic mashed potatoes. Let's order so we can talk business."

He raised his glass in Joan's direction. "Cheers. So whaddaya know that
we don't?"

"Here's the thing. I never knew Deni personally, but a lot of my friends
did. And I've met Lowell more times than I can remember at his gallery,
at auctions, and even dinner parties. But there have been stories
floating around town for years, for whatever they're worth."

"You gave Mike the names of two of her lovers when you called. Any
significance to that?" I asked.

"I ran rap sheets on both of '," Mike broke in. "Came up clean. Look
like legit businessmen."

"There's Preston Mattox, who's an architect," said Joan. "Not much talk
about him. The other one nobody really gets. He's Frank Wrenley, an
antiques expert and dealer. Scratch a bit below the surface on him and
I'm not quite sure the kind of guy you'll find. Maybe it's just that
he's such new money. Sprang up on the art scene out of nowhere, and
suddenly he's in the big leagues, running side by side with Deni
Caxton."

"I'm telling you, Coop. This case has everything for an art caper except
Nazis," Mike said, eschewing the dainty shellfish fork in favor of
slurping up an oyster.

Joan Stafford picked at her warm foie gras. "So it's Nazis you vant,
Herr Chapman? Then it's Nazis I shall give you."

Thirteen.

"Have you ever heard of the Amber Room?"

The three of us shook our heads in the negative. "I'm sure I don't have
to remind you about all of the art that was seized and stolen by the
Nazis during the Second World War," Joan said.

My father had insisted that my brothers and I learn about the Holocaust
from our childhood on, both to understand the magnitude of its
atrocities and to know its historical and cultural importance. As a Jew,
and also as an art collector, he had followed the stories of families
fleeing Europe before the war, and those sent to the death camps, whose
personal treasures became the property of their conquerors. Recent years
had seen a series of legal wrangles to reclaim such confiscated artworks
and restore them to the survivors or the rightful heirs of their owners.
I knew of many of the cases that had been brought in the courts as
paintings surfaced at auctions or institutions after half a century of
being secretly held, but I had never heard of something described as a
room.

"In seventeen seventeen, King Wilhelm I of Prussia gave the tsar Peter
the Great a unique gift. It was a set of gilded oak panels that were
decorated with more than six tons of amber, elaborately carved and inset
with Florentine mosaics and Venetian glass mirrors. The walls were
installed in the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, and had actually
been dubbed the ' wonder of the world' by the British ambassador. So far
as I'm aware, only a single photograph of this breathtaking creation was
ever known to have been taken in its two-hundred-year history.

"When Nazi troops invaded Russia in nineteen forty-one, they brought
their own art experts along to aid in the plundering of the Soviet
bounty. The priceless Amber Room was taken apart and shipped off to a
town called Konigsberg, which is on the Baltic coast. But by the end of
the war, as some of the treasures began to appear, there was not a sign
of this enormous chamber." "Any theories about it?" I asked.

"Dozens. I researched it carefully because I intended to write a play
about it." She glanced across at me, knowing that I always chided her
about her abandoned efforts. "Had to stick it in a drawer once your DNA
buddies matched the Romanovs' bodies. I had it all set to be
reconstructed for Anastasia who was found alive and well in never mind.

"I take it you want the leading theories and not the obscure ones. Some
professional treasure hunter showed up a few years ago with Xeroxes of
documents signed by Himmler, claiming he could prove that the room had
been redirected to Quedlin burg but that the general transporting it had
made an independent decision to change the route in the face of the
Allied advance." "Quedlinburg," Mike said. "That was a major Nazi stash,
wasn't it?"

He reminded us that in 1996 the Feds tried to prosecute two Texans for
the return of several hundred million dollars' worth of medieval
reliquaries, stolen by their brother an American soldier at the end of
World War II. German troops had looted the religious treasure everything
from ninth-century prayer books and lavishly painted manuscripts to
gem-encrusted vases and figures. And in the process of the American
liberation of Europe, lowlifes in our own army had made off with the
already stolen cache of goods.

"So, one school has the amber buried in the quarry beside a
seventh-century castle, while the latest claim is that the son of a
German military intelligence officer who helped with the actual
logistics of the move has used his father's papers to establish that the
stuff never even got to Germany, but is still buried in the Russian
system of underground tunnels and mine shafts."

Mercer had been unusually quiet throughout the meal. "Connect this to
Denise Caxton for me, will you?"

"This all goes back to the Second World War. Lowell Caxton's father
lived in France, as you may already know by now." "Yes," I said. "He
made some reference about how his parents met, and his being raised in
an apartment in Paris."

"Although the senior Caxton spent the war years in the States, he never
severed his ties with a guy called Roger Dequoy, who was later
identified as one of the worst collaborators in the art world. Dequoy
was selling paintings to all the Nazi leaders, and they in turn were
trying to dump the Impressionist works they had stolen. Thought it was
all too degenerate, if you can imagine that.

"The French government considered bringing charges against Caxton's
father for selling to the Nazis, but they were never able to build a
case. What is quite clear is that the Caxtons were positioned both
financially and politically to have had access to an unbelievable number
of the pillaged works. What they also had was the ability to move them
around Europe pretty well, too." "It seems to me," Mike said, "that with
all the wealth they had already accumulated, the old man could afford to
sit on the stuff until the millennium. No need to try to sell it and
show his hand, like most of the others who got caught."

"The Caxton thing has never been about selling or making any more of a
profit. That's just sport for them, father and son. It's all in the
possession sheer, unadulterated greed. You've been to the apartment,
right?"

"Yeah. We were there over the weekend."

"Lowell has suites, as you may know, each done in a favorite painter or
period. Of course, I've never seen it myself, but rumor has it that
somewhere, in one of his properties, he has rebuilt the Amber Room.

It's not complete some of the wood was warped when the mine shaft was
flooded. But he got most of the jeweled pieces out of Europe somehow,
and found craftsmen to regild the mirrors and panels in separate units,
so none of them had reason to suppose that he had actually found a whole
room. It must be as close as anyone in the world is going to come to
feeling like a tsar." "And Deni?" I asked.

"She certainly knew about it. Each of his wives did. That's what Liz
Smith was alluding to in her column this morning."

"You'll forgive me if I tell you I didn't have a moment, between
autopsies, to read the friggin' society pages, won't you?" asked
Chapman.

"Sorry. Liz wrote something about how getting to Caxton's inner sanctum
was certainly the kiss of death for each of his three lovely wives. You
know, like Bluebeard's castle. Once he got them in his secret lair and
made love to them there, he had to kill them."

"Don't lose me here, Joanie. Are you suggesting that Low-ell was trying
to shut her up about the Amber Room, or that someone else was trying to
use Deni to get to it? And please don't tell me that your personal
trainer is the source for this." I knew that half of Joan's best gossip
came from the guy who worked her out at home every morning when she was
in Manhattan, where she still kept an apartment. He had a fantastic
client list, and something about lifting weights and doing inversions
seemed to cause these well-toned, tight-lipped women to reveal their
deepest secrets to him.

"The way I heard it, the Russian mob was pushing its way into the
Chelsea art scene, hoping to put pressure on Deni to lead them to the
amber so they could return it to the palace, which has been under
restoration for twenty years. They've got a patron, a Soviet businessman
who hit it big in the telecommunications industry, willing to pay the
tab for what they assumed she could lead them to."

"Ever been to Brighton?" Chapman asked Joan.

"Sure, my play had tryouts there and in Bath before it opened in
London."

"Not Brighton, England. Brighton Beach. Home of the Russian mafia."

"You think I don't do the West Side, Mikey? Well, Joan doesn't do the
outer boroughs. Forget Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. They're just places
she has to drive through to get where she wants to go."

"So she's not coming with us when we go poking around for double agents
looking for Nazis looking for stolen art, huh?" Mike asked me.

Mercer picked up the thread. "What do you know about Bryan Daughtry?"

Joan laughed. "More than anyone needs to know, that's for certain.

Denise Caxton didn't create that monster, but she was certainly feeding
him."

"Why was she so attached to him, do you think?"

"She was the classic underdog, Alex, and there was something in her that
must have made her reach out to characters with the same background. I'm
sure you remember that I used to buy from Daughtry, in the old days,
before any of us knew about the dark side with the leather and young
girls. Like Deni, he's basically a dreamer, trying to create a fantastic
life out of whole cloth. His business was riskier than anything that
Lowell did, and she apparently liked that. I mean, it doesn't take much
skill to sell a Picasso, right?"

"Got any suggestions for who we talk to about their commercial
enterprise?" Mike asked.

Joan thought for a moment. "Marco Varelli, perhaps."

"I just heard that name today, but where?" I was tired, and confused as
well.

"Sweetest little old guy you'd ever want to meet. He's a restorer,
perhaps the most respected in the field."

Now it came to me. Marina Sette had mentioned him to me during our
conversation at the Four Seasons this afternoon.

"I mean, if I tripped over something like the Amber Room, Varelli's the
person I'd go see to make sure whatever the treasure might be is not a
fake. He looks like a gnome must be well over eighty by now. Varelli
might have known some of Deni's secrets. You'll find him in a small
atelier he keeps in the Village."

"We expect to be getting as many of the gallery records as we can. With
a little luck, maybe she kept notes about her love life, too," Mercer
said.

Joan shook her head. "

"Good girls keep diaries; bad girls don't have the time." Tallulah
Bankhead, by the way. I don't think that's very likely." "You said you
were going to tell us why Lowell Caxton wasn't welcome at the legitimate
houses any longer," I reminded Joan.

"The Gardner Museum heist, almost ten years ago. Has that come up in any
of your interviews yet?"

"You should stick to your fiction, Joan," Mike said. "Wanna pour me
another glass of that red wine?"

I knew that around the turn of the century Boston socialite Isabella
Stewart Gardner had built a Venetian-style palazzo to house one of the
country's most spectacular art collections, which she had put together
with the aid of her close friend Bernard Berenson. I had been to the
museum many times when I was in college, and even once last year on my
way through the Fenway section of the city.

"I remember the break-in, but it was years ago. Hasn't that ever been
solved?" I asked.

"Never. Listen, guys," said Joan, telling the story of what remains to
this day the costliest art theft in United States history, "this is
where Lowell may have gotten his hands even deeper in the dirt.

"In March of nineteen ninety, two men disguised as Boston cops presented
themselves to the museum's security officers at the side door of the
building, and were let in. The robbers locked up the guards, disabled
the unsophisticated alarm system, and made off with about ten paintings.
Estimated value? Almost three hundred million dollars."

"Are you serious? What was in the place?" Mercer asked.

"A few Impressionists I think a Manet and a Degas an ancient Chinese
bronze work, a finial from a Napoleonic flagstaff, a Vermeer, and most
importantly, the masterpiece that all the fuss has been about. It's a
three-hundred-and-sixty-year-old Rembrandt that hung in the Gardner's
famous Dutch Room. The title of it is The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,
and it was the only seascape that he ever painted.

"Nothing from the heist has ever been found. Not a trace. The Gardner
had so little insurance at the time of the theft that the reward they
offered was only a million dollars. Just a year or two ago, the FBI
upped it to five -million. There have been rumors in the art world for
years, but not a clue to follow up on. Except the chips."

"What chips?"

"I'm just being dramatic, Alex. Paint chips, of course. Most of the
works were small enough to be taken frame and all. But maybe because of
the way the Rembrandt was fastened to its mountings the robbers actually
cut it out of the frame. Isn't that awful? Anyway, the varnish on it and
its great age must have made it so stiff that literally dozens of paint
chips fell onto the floor, and that's all that was left behind."

"Get me from there to Caxton," Mike said, licking the chocolate sauce
from the profiteroles off the side of his mouth.

"Everyone knows the painting is too hot to handle. Over the years,
several mobsters who've turned up dead in the Boston area have been
linked to the robbery. And each time there's been a buzz in the
galleries and auction houses that the Rembrandt's at the heart of it.

If anyone could hide this kind of booty, or better still, transport it
anywhere in the world, it could only be an individual with the means of
a Lowell Caxton, or someone who flirted with danger as freely as Deni.

"There was an opening at Lowell's gallery in the Fuller Building a few
months ago. Deni had left before I arrived. Everyone said she was high
and kind of mouthing off about this astounding coup she was about to
make that would turn the art world on its ear. Be sure and ask Lowell
about it when you see him again."

This time it was Mercer's beeper that went off before the end of the
meal. He rejected my offer of a cell phone and stepped away to return
the call from a booth at the top of the staircase.

When he came back down the flight of stairs, he approached the table and
tapped on it with his knuckles. "Off to Chelsea, m'man."

Mike threw back his head and chugged down the La Tache '86 as though it
were a Budweiser. "More string sculptures at this hour of the night?"

"Nope. Denise Caxton's car."

"Where?"

"Right under our noses the whole time. In a chop shop one block away
from her gallery. About to be dissected and shipped overseas, from
Chelsea Road Repairs, Ltd."

"Anything in it?"

"Crime Scene's going over it now for fingerprints. And it looks like
there's blood. Could be she was abducted from her car and then finished
off in Omar's wagon."

Mike stood up from the table and thanked Joan for the meal. "How about
we pick you up in the morning and drop in on Lowell at the Fuller
Building?" he asked me. "Be downstairs at nine."

"Don't rush off before I finish with the news from the Medical
Examiner's Office," Mercer said, putting a hand on Mike's shoulder.

"DNA isn't in yet, but they did a basic ABO typing from the sperm sample
found on the canvas where the body had been. We got a new ball game,
ladies and gentleman. Omar Sheffield did not rape Denise Caxton."

Fourteen.

"

"Lovers," Mr. Chapman? It's not the term of art I would have chosen,"
Lowell Caxton said, standing behind the desk in his office in the Fuller
Building and seemingly looking out at the view northward on Madison
Avenue. "Personally, I referred to them as Deni's 'shareholders." Each
had a piece of her at some point in time. But it was a very volatile
market."

"You're not suggesting they were interested in Deni because of her
money, are you?" Mike reeled off the names of the men Joan had told us
about Mattox, the architect, and Wrenley, the antiques dealer.

"Come, come, Mr. Chapman. You're brighter than that. Not her money,
certainly. My money. The Caxton fortune has attracted all kinds of
maggots to Deni as well as to me." He turned back to face us.

"Something I've had to deal with all my life. And no, as I've told you,
I was spared a proper introduction to either of those gentlemen you've
mentioned."

Morning sunlight was beaming in and hitting Caxton directly in the eye,
so he came out from behind his desk and gestured for us to sit in the
overstuffed leather chairs grouped beneath a pair of Boudin beach
scenes.

"How come you didn't tell us anything about the letters Deni had gotten?
The threatening ones, the blackmail?" Mike asked.

"Ah, do I sense the presence of a little guttersnipe?" Caxton groaned.

"What?"

"La povera Signorina Sette, am I right? Poor little Miss. Sette, still
peddling the same nonsense at the drop of a hat. Let me guess, gentlemen
when you sell the movie rights to your ridiculous fantasy here, you'll
be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger," Caxton said, grinning at Mike.
"You'll be Denzel Washington, Marina Sette will be some two-bit Shirley
Temple look-alike, and as for me if only they could bring Bela Lugosi or
Vincent Price back to life. I'm always to be cast as the villain, am I
not? At least, it's usually such a richly textured role."

There was a knock on the door and an assistant entered with a tray
holding a Baroque silver coffee service and a mound of croissants and
Danish. Caxton was silent as she put the heavy load on the table in
front of us and walked out of the room.

"Why don't you help yourselves, Detectives?"

"Nah, I'll just let Sharon Stone over here pour for me. That's why I
bring her along. Not very useful, but sometimes decorative." Mike jerked
his thumb in my direction as I was leaning forward to pour the coffee.

"What made you connect Marina Sette to the letters Deni received?" I
asked.

"This isn't the first time she's tried to bring me down, Ms. Cooper.

Did she take the trouble to come all the way here just to stir the same
old pot again? You know why she hates me, don't you?"

There wasn't much of a way to protect Sette in all this. "I know what
she told me."

"Her story is nonsense, of course. There's no way for her to prove it,
but sadly, there's no way for me to disprove it, either." I remembered
that the woman Marina claimed was her mother, Lowell's second wife, was
killed in a boating accident. "Buried at sea, as it were."

Caxton flashed one of his more loathsome smiles at me as he said that,
and went on. "Even these latest scientific techniques of yours genetic
fingerprinting are useless in this instance. I can't convince anyone
that this waif was not the child of my wife."

"So, why does she hate you so much?" I didn't bother to tell him that
the DNA of Marina's half sister could indeed prove the claim that she
was his stepchild.

"I think it has more to do with her husband. He was a substantial client
of mine until we had a falling-out over a serious acquisition I made.
Richard tried to claim a piece of the profits, but he wasn't successful.
Soon they were coming at me from all directions."

"But the letters were real, weren't they? I've seen one of them."

"Quite real. I can give you copies of all of them, if you like."

Caxton removed a micro recorder smaller than a match-book from his shirt
pocket and spoke into it, reminding himself to ask his lawyer for a set
of the correspondence.

"They played quite a dramatic role in the matrimonial sparring. Deni's
lawyer tried to use them to show that I had hired someone to take a hit
on her life." With good reason, I thought to myself. "In the letter I
saw, the information was strictly private in nature, Mr. Caxton. It had
to come from someone who knew Deni intimately. If not you, then can you
suggest who it might have been?"

He looked through me as though I were a complete idiot. "I guess when my
attorney charges me four hundred fifty dollars an hour, it's worth the
results. He got to the bottom of it rather quickly. Once you check this
fellow out, this what was his name?"

"Omar Sheffield," Mercer offered.

"Yes, Omar. You'll find, as my lawyer did, that Omar had developed quite
a scheme for himself in state prison. He's got a file six inches thick,
just up at the jail, blackmailing women the same way. Every single one
of them in the middle of a divorce."

"I know I'm only a dumb cop, but where'd he get his information?"

"The library, gentlemen. The law library. Would you believe, our pen pal
Omar is a regular little scholar, though you'd not know it from his
crude language."

We still didn't get it.

"When the divorce proceedings began, Deni applied for temporary alimony.
I don't know if you're familiar with these civil actions, but they tend
to involve a lot of mudslinging. I was prepared to be more than generous
with Deni. After all, she'd given me a great deal of happiness for ten
years.

"Either she or her lawyer got greedy. Suddenly her bills for
hairdressing and entertaining escalated to ridiculous numbers. She
claimed more for facials and massages during the last year than most
people in this city spend to eat."

"So, what book did Omar find in the prison library?" Mercer asked.

"It wasn't a book at all. It wasn't even the tabloids. Surely you can
guess by now, Miss. Cooper, can't you?"

I was dumbfounded.

"What's it called?" Caxton went on. "The Law Journal? Have I got it
straight?"

All three men looked at me, and finally the lightbulb went on in my
head. "Of course, the judge's opinion in the matrimonial case. It would
have everything details and facts in it."

"Thank you. Vindicated at last."

The New York Law Journal was printed every weekday and subscribed to by
most law firms and libraries in the state. It was my daily tool for
keeping up with case law in the criminal field; I clipped and filed
articles about court decisions and issues related to my work. It rarely
interested me to read write-ups of divorce matters, but I had seen
enough of them to know that every detail mentioned in Omar Sheffield's
letter was likely to have been referenced by the judge in reaching
conclusions about the case at hand.

Caxton continued. "My lawyer was furious even took it up with the
editor. After all, there's no reason not to have red acted some of the
confidential information, because of precisely this kind of escapade."

Mercer had never read any of the decisions. "So, how did Sheffield get
your address?"

Caxton seemed almost exasperated by our collective density at this
point. "My dear fellow, the judge practically spoon-fed the whole scam
to him. You'll read it for yourself, but I can pretty much paraphrase it
for you. "The couple live in separate apartments in the matrimonial
residence, which is located at 890 Fifth Avenue." And so on down the
line, chapter and verse, hairdresser, masseuse, pedicurist, and psychic
all included.

"Go visit the warden, as my lawyer did. Omar Sheffield is a more
prolific letter writer than Winston Churchill. The bastard had done this
operation a dozen times. Check with him he was quite candid with my
lawyer."

"Omar ran out of ink not too long ago," Mike said.

Our intentions of putting Caxton on edge by confronting him with the
threats against Deni that we had assumed would be linked back to him had
failed dismally.

Mike was noshing on a cheese Danish and took a swallow as he looked over
at Caxton. "So, is there really an Amber Room?"

"You don't look the gullible type, Detective. Have they suckered you in
with all this nonsense, too? Is this another Marina Sette story?"

He was looking back and forth at each of us, to see if one of us would
make a telltale slip. "Willing to sacrifice one nubile young prosecutor?
Legend has it, I think, that once I let a seductress in that secret
chamber with me and make love to her, I have to kill her."

It did sound a lot sillier than it had when Joan told us about it last
evening, and I absorbed it on one Dewar's and two glasses of superb red
wine.

"Keep them coming, gentlemen. Your questions get easier to answer all
the time."

"Why didn't Deni go to England with you in June of last year? What was
so important to her that she needed to stay behind, until you went on to
Bath?" I asked.

Caxton stiffened noticeably, perhaps because the reminder of the scene
in Bath rankled him. "Well, you're the ones they pay to do the
investigation, aren't you? Suppose you get on about your business and
get an answer to that for me. It's puzzled me for quite some time now."

He tried to bring the meeting to a close now, but Mike and Mercer
weren't entirely ready.

"Got any Rembrandts in stock, Mr. Caxton?" Mike was on his feet, walking
to the far side of the room to study the portrait hanging on the
opposite wall. "A little something with water in it, for a change?"

"No, Detective, not on hand. But I'd love to buy one from you, should
you come across it. The Caxtons, going back a couple of generations,
have been known to squeeze every penny worth of value out of a fine
painting, but we simply don't do armed robberies. Not my style.

"The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, painted in sixteen thirty-three.

Probably the most famous missing artwork in the world, Mr. Chapman.

And I would be delighted to get my hands on it."

"Did Mrs. Caxton ever talk to you about it, or about the theft at the
Gardner?"

"Everyone in my business talked about it at some time or other. Quite
frankly, it fascinated all of us. Such a bold undertaking, and then to
be stuck with a treasure that no museum would dare touch, despite the
fact that eighty percent of the things you see in European collections
have been stolen or looted over the centuries.

"Once a year thieves pull off a caper at some institution or other even
the Louvre has had its share of embarrassments. Deni was a free spirit.
Not exactly, shall we say, to the manner born. Would it intrigue her to
be the one to find the lost Rembrandt and make her mark on the world? No
question in my mind. Would she sleep with the enemy to do that? Two
years ago I would have been confident in saying no.

Now I'm really not sure."

"Tell us about the opening you gave here a few months back. The party
that Deni came to she might have been high that night."

"There haven't been any shows this summer not enough of my clients stay
in town to make it worthwhile. Perhaps you're referring to the
eighteenth-century Italian landscape collection that was installed here
in May? Yes, Deni showed up. No problem with that." "People have told us
she was talking openly about some great thing she was onto, some kind of
coup that she was going to have."

"Nothing I heard. But after all, I was hosting the party and there was a
rather large crowd around."

Mike was expressing his skepticism that Caxton hadn't observed or heard
what Deni was up to. "So busy that you didn't notice what your estranged
wife was saying to your clients?"

Again a snide look. "Well, Detective, I wasn't out in the kitchen with
the Ritz cracker box open, making the appetizers by myself. I simply had
no interest in anything she had to say at that point."

"We located Mrs. Caxton's car last night," Mercer said. "She might have
been attacked while she was in it. We still haven't found a witness who
knows where she was or what she did from last Thursday on.

I realize you were away, but have you heard from anyone who saw Deni?"

"Not a soul."

"She have any trouble with the car, that you know of? Any reason to
bring it in the shop?"

"The car was a dream. Never a moment's worry. I gave it to her several
years back. Mercedes 500 E Class. A collector's item. Only about a
thousand of them in total. Benz body with a Porsche engine.

Deni could fly in that car.

"It only had one dangerous feature. Got her in trouble once before."

"What's that?"

"The lid on the gas tank was controlled by the door locks. To fill it
with gas, you had to unlock the car doors. In case you haven't noticed,
most gas stations in Manhattan are in fairly unsavory parts of town. One
time, over on Eleventh Avenue late at night, Deni had to unlock the
doors. After the attendant stepped away from the tank, a man with a
pistol opened the rear door and got into the car. Held the gun to her
head and took her a few blocks away, where he robbed her.

Took her cash, her jewelry, the Chopard watch I'd just given her for our
tenth anniversary none of it insured. Cost me a bloody fortune.

Tried to make her get rid of the car after that, but she refused.

"Anything further?" Caxton asked. "I'm sure you'll excuse me. I've got a
condolence call to pay this morning. One of the most respected figures
in our business, and a dear friend both to me and to Deni, passed away
yesterday." He stood up, walked to his desk to retrieve a pair of
sunglasses. "I've really got to be going."

"They're dropping like flies around you, Mr. Caxton. Hope it isn't
contagious," Mike cracked. "Anyone I knew?"

"I sincerely doubt it, Mr. Chapman." Caxton lifted the Times off his
desk and passed it to Mike. "A lovely gentleman. A very distinguished
art restorer called Marco Varelli. Read the obituary page if you think
I'm deceiving you yet again."

"Marco Varelli?" My lips moved as Mercer said the name aloud with
disbelief.

"How'd he die?"

"A heart attack, in his studio. Eighty-four years old. I'm off to
console his widow."

Fifteen.

Battaglia was drinking apple cider and puffing on a cigar as he waved me
into his office an hour after I left Lowell Caxton on Wednesday morning.
I could tell there was no urgency to the district attorney's questioning
of me by the fact that he removed neither the cigar from the corner of
his mouth nor his feet from the edge of the desk.

"Any progress in this art dealer's murder?"

"Developments, yes. Progress, no."

"I've got to give a speech at the Department of Justice next week on the
significance of the drop in the crime rate in New York. Rose is typing
it up today. Any figures you can give me to throw in on sex crimes?"

"Nothing that will help you. Rape is the only crime in which the rate of
reporting has increased in the last three years. Stay away from those
numbers, unless you think Justice will give us more money if we can show
how the volume has gone up."

"Suppose they ask me why it hasn't dropped like the other violent crime
categories?"

"Not complicated at all. A lot of the credit for the reduction goes to
aggressive community-policing policies, right? Most people don't realize
that almost eighty percent of reported rapes occur between people who
know each other. The stranger rapist the guy who jumps out from behind
trees in the park or breaks into homes he's only responsible for about
twenty percent of the cases. But he's the guy most women fear.

"So, while violent street crime is way down, the acquaintance-rape
victims aren't at all affected by the presence of the cop on the beat.

They trust their assailant so they walk right past the officer into the
apartment or dorm or hotel room of the man they're with and then the
attack occurs."

Battaglia went back to the report he was reading. "Get me a memo on that
before the end of the day, will you? Flush it out a bit so I can use it
in Washington."

I was almost out the door. "Hey," he called after me, "what's with you
and this news guy, Jacob Tyler? I'd like to meet him. Maybe we could get
him to do a story on the new Welfare Fraud Unit we're setting up."

It was impossible to keep a secret from Paul Battaglia. He never even
had to leave his spacious office on the eighth floor of the building to
get the most complete intelligence professional and personal from a
cadre of loyal and talented men and women who served him in his
distinguished career in public service.

"I'll be sure to let him know, Paul. May I ask how "

The cigar was parked squarely in the middle of his gritted teeth now.

"Tell him I said I never divulge my sources. He'll appreciate that, as a
good reporter."

I stopped at Rose's desk, knowing that I could learn from her what
Battaglia had been told about the status of my new romance, but she had
stepped away, so I went back to my office.

"Mike's on hold. I tried to transfer him over to Battaglia's wing but
they said you were on your way back," Laura said.

I went into my room and picked up the phone.

"Just checked with the morgue," he said. "No autopsy done on Marco
Varelli. Didn't have to. He was eighty-four, with a serious heart
condition, and under a doctor's care. Once his own physician signed off
on the death certificate, that's it. By the end of the day he'll be
resting at a funeral parlor down on Sullivan Street. We'll go over for
tonight's visiting hours and see if we can turn up some employees or
friends.

"Also," he continued, "spoke to the Feds on the auction-bid-rigging
investigation. Can you meet us at Kim Mcfadden's office at five?

They'll fill us in on that, and update us on the Gardner Museum heist,
too."

The United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District was a
four-block walk from my office, set back behind the old federal
courthouse, near Police Headquarters, and the New York City offices of
the F. B.I. "Fine, that gives me the rest of the day to catch up on the
things I need to do. See you at five." "Is this a bad time?" Carol Rizer
asked as she stood in the doorway.

She was new to the unit, and although her skills were good, it was
important that she be supervised on complicated matters.

"If I told you to wait for a good time, your witness is likely to die of
old age. What do you need?"

"I'm having a lot of trouble with a victim in a case I picked up last
night. The defendant's got a really bad record three felony convictions
but there's something wrong with the victim's story and I just can't
break her on it. Can I bring her in for you to talk to?"

"Yes. Give me the background."

"Her name is Ruth Harwind, and she's nineteen years old. Lives in Queens
with her mother. Has a boyfriend named Wakim Wakefield he's waiting up
in my office. The defendant is Wakim's roommate, and his name is Bruce
Johnson. Ruth claims that she stayed in their apartment one day after
Wakim left for work. She says Bruce forced her bedroom door open with a
knife and dragged her into his room. That's where she says he raped
her."

Carol knew how I handled these interviews. She had written out a list
for me identifying all the inconsistencies in the story Ruth had told,
first to the police and then to her. She had also highlighted for me the
facts that didn't make much sense.

"What do you find troubling?"

"Start with the point that in the middle of the rape, the boyfriend came
back to the apartment, knocked on Bruce's bedroom door, and asked where
Ruth was. Bruce said he didn't know, and Wakim left. My first problem is
why she just didn't scream out for help when Wakim was right there in
the next room.

"Now, if she'd told me it was because he'd threatened her again with the
knife, it might have been credible. But all she says is that it didn't
occur to her."

"What else?"

"The cop examined the door that she claims was pried open with a knife.

There's no sign of any disturbance on the paint or to the wood. Also,
there's no immediate outcry. When she left the apartment and went
outside on the street, she ran into Wakim. She went back upstairs with
him, showered, and made love. Nobody mentioned the word '' until Bruce's
girlfriend came home and told Wakim that Ruth had been cheating on him.
He's the one who challenged her to go to the police if the story was
true."

Frequently the motive in a false report can be gleaned from the
circumstances of how and why a sexual assault gets related to the
police. In many cases like this, an angry boyfriend dares the victim to
prosecute if the crime really happened.

"Did Bruce make any statements?"

One of my favorite bureau chiefs, Warren Murtagh, had a list of training
rules, and Murtagh's Rule #3 was a good one. "No defendant ever says
absolutely nothing." Everyone arrested makes some comments to the cops,
spontaneously or in response to questioning, which is usually useful in
sorting out the facts.

Often the perp's remarks can be discarded as self-serving and of no
value, but just as often there are kernels of truth that can be used to
shed light on the victim's version of events. Every now and then, the
real story lies somewhere right in between.

Carol answered, "Johnson says it was consensual. Says he gave her ten
dollars to come in his bedroom and have sex with him. Even told us they
watched a porno movie together. And that he used a condom, ' she asked
him to.

"Also, Alex, she's lied about some of the basic stuff. Said she worked
at the Victoria's Secret store in the World Trade Center for six months.
I called over there and got the woman who's been the manager for two
years. She's never heard of Ruth."

"Bring her in." Once a witness has lied about facts that are not
essential to the case and that can be easily verified or disproved,
there is reason to be suspicious about the underlying allegations in the
criminal complaint. Until caught in a direct lie, every witness who
walked in the door was presumed to be telling us the truth.

Ruth Harwind was not happy to be ushered into my office. At five foot
eleven she was a couple of inches taller than I, dressed in jeans and a
T-shirt and directing her defiant pout toward the floor.

I began with a series of pedigree questions to get as much background
knowledge about the young woman as I could. "Why you need to know all
this business about me?" she asked, balking at the personal information
for which I was probing.

"Because I need to know as much about you as Bruce Johnson knows, as
much about you as he's going to tell his lawyer to use against you. It
may be the only way that Carol and I can protect you when you go to
court.

"Who do you live with in Queens?"

"My mother."

"What's her name?"

Ruth's annoyance level was growing. "What's that got to do with me being
raped?"

"Like everyone else who's been the victim of a crime, you walk through
my door and tell a story that could keep Bruce Johnson in jail for the
next twenty-five years of his life. That's longer than you've been
alive. And that's what he deserves, if everything you told the police
about him is true.

"But Carol doesn't know you and I don't know you, so I'm going to ask
you a series of questions that are really simple to answer and that are
a very easy way for us to be able to prove that things you tell us are
true. So, let's start over. Would you please tell me your mother's
name?"

"No, I won't." Ruth had dug her heels in. Slouched down in the chair,
she stared at a small vase of flowers on my desk, refusing to make eye
contact with me.

"Why won't you tell me?" I asked. "Look at me when I'm speaking to you,
please."

"

"Cause I don't want my mother to know I'm here, that's why."

"That's fair. I can accept that." Since Ruth was nineteen, there was no
legal requirement that her parents be notified. "Why don't you tell me
what you do? Do you go to school? Do you have a job?" "Like I told her,"
Ruth said, jerking her head in Carol's direction, "that's nobody's
business but mines. This is about me and Bruce. Why don't y'all ask me
questions about that, huh?"

"You're not going to be able to give the answers you're giving me to the
judge, when he asks the same things in the courtroom. He's going to
insist on a little respect and make you respond to whatever he needs to
know."

"Well, let's just drop the whole thing and lemme outta here." Ruth
slammed her hand on my desk and stood up. "Wakim can take care of
Bruce."

"Sit down, Ruth. You're not going anywhere. There's a man who's been
held in jail since last night, and based on what you tell me today, the
judge is going to decide whether to keep him in on high bail any
longer."

We glared at each other for a couple of seconds before she took her seat
again. The questioning continued at the same pace and with similar
results. When we got to the part at which Bruce forced Ruth into his
bedroom, I asked whether he had turned on the television or a movie.

"Yeah, he put on the VCR, but I wasn't watching."

"That's not what he says."

"Well, who you gonna believe, him or me? Whose side are you on, anyway?"

"What kind of movie was it?" I asked, ignoring her questions to me.

"I seen it before, at Wakim's. Some kind of dirty movie with two girls
sucking on each other. I only looked at it from time to time."

Great. Already Bruce's version was making more sense than Ruth's.

My intercom buzzer went off and Laura asked me to step out to her desk.

"If there's anything else about your story that you remember now that's
different than what you told the police, this is the time to tell Carol.
Once we put you under oath and you swear to the judge about something,
if it turns out not to be true, then it will be too late for Carol and
me to help you." I excused myself and said I'd be right back.

"Alex, this is Mrs. Harwind, Ruth's mother. One of Ruth's friends told
Mrs. Harwind that her daughter was coming down here today, and she's
asked to talk to you."

The middle-aged woman in the hallway outside Laura's cubicle was
agitated and tearful. I introduced myself and took her into the
conference room to explain what was going on. Since Ruth had asked me
not to tell her mother about the case, I was avoiding the fact that her
daughter was fifteen feet away, inside my office.

"Miss. Cooper, you've got to help me find my child. I've got a warrant
for her in Queens Family Court, ' she ran away from the group home they
put her in."

"How long ago was that?" I was confused, since Ruth was too old to be a
candidate for court placement in a group home.

"Just back two weeks. This guy Wakim, he's got her hid in his apartment.
My girl looks big, but she's only fifteen."

"Fifteen?" I sat Mrs. Harwind down and explained that Ruth was with me.
Since there was a warrant issued in her case, I was legally obliged to
return her to court.

"Laura, call the D. A."s Squad. Ask for Sergeant Maron, and tell him I
need a detective down here immediately. Get two, and tell him to make
sure that one is a female."

This would not go down easily, and I expected that the girl would get
confrontational. With Ruth and Carol in my office, and Mrs. Harwind in
the conference room, I waited at the foot of the staircase for the
detectives from the squad to come downstairs. Before they appeared, a
man who seemed to be forty years old got off the elevator holding two
cans of soda and headed straight for Laura's door. I heard him ask for
Ruth.

"Excuse me, are you Wakim? I'm Alex Cooper, one of the D. A."s working
on Ruth's case. We're almost done, but I'm going to need you to go back
to Carol's office until we finish the interview, okay?" Without protest,
he handed me a soda and asked me to give it to Ruth, and walked back to
the elevators. I didn't want him anywhere around when I explained to
Ruth that she wasn't going home with her boyfriend.

Sergeant Maron and Detective Kerry Schrager arrived within minutes.

"This could get ugly. I've got a very unhappy teenager here who needs to
make a court appearance in Queens. Just stand by while we break it to
her, okay? And then you can help me get transportation for her."

I opened my office door to walk in. Maron and Schrager stayed in the
doorway, and Ruth immediately sensed this was trouble.

"Why don't we go back to a couple of basic questions, Ruth. What's your
date of birth?" "I told you, I'm nineteen," she said, glancing back over
her shoulder at the cops. "Why are these people here?"

"I didn't ask how old you were, Ruth. Tell me the year you were born."

She was smart, but like many of us, lousy at math. The subtraction was
off, and the year she gave would have made her sixteen.

"Your mother tells me that you're only fifteen. Is that true?"

Ruth picked up a copy of the Penal Law from the top of my desk and threw
it toward the window, missing my right ear by a couple of inches.

"I hate my mother. All right, y'all, is this what you want to hear?

Bruce Johnson didn't rape me, okay. Bruce Johnson gave me ten bucks to
get him off, and you know what? I did it. And you know what else? It
wasn't the first time."

The tears began to flow. "Wakim woulda killed me if he caught me in that
room with Bruce. And Wakim don't ever give me nothing. No money, no
clothes, no presents. You woulda made up a story, too, if it was your
ass that woulda got broke."

I spoke softly to Ruth as I tried to give her some tissues. "You just
can't go into a court of law, swear to tell the truth, and then lie
about something. I realize Bruce is a bad guy, but you can't put him in
jail to save yourself. How old does Wakim think you are?"

She was sniffling. "He know the truth. He know I'm fifteen."

"You understand that he can be arrested for having sex with you, because
you're underage? When you try to act like a big girl, Ruth, you're gonna
get stuck with the consequences." I paused. "Your mother's down the
hall."

She got up from her chair, shouting curses at the top of her lungs and
trying to push past the detectives. I told Kerry to stop her. I made her
sit down and explained that she had to go before the judge in Family
Court, since she had absconded from the program and was wanted, A. W.O.L..

"You can do this the easy way, like a young lady. I'll let you leave
here with your mother, and put you in a taxi to go to Queens. Or you can
do this the hard way. That means the detectives would have to handcuff
you and take you there like a prisoner."

"Well, you can all go screw yourselves, ' I'm not going anywhere with
her or with any of you." She was screaming again and kicking the side of
my desk. "I don't care what you do with me, ' I'll just run away again
and Wakim'll take me home."

Sergeant Maron raised a pair of handcuffs and looked at me
questioningly. "I guess that's the way our customer wants to go."

Ruth looked me straight in the eye and spat across the desk, hitting an
old indictment on top of a pile of papers. "And you, you bitch, I hope
you get what's coming to you. I hope you " "Attitude," I said. "Attitude
from a fifteen-year-old. Save your breath, Ruth. You know how lucky you
are to have a mother who cares about you and who "

"Where's Wakim?" She was screaming now, at full pitch. "I wanna go home
with Wakim."

While Kerry Schrager cuffed Ruth behind her back, I called Witness Aid
to make sure that Margaret Feerick, one of our social workers, could go
with the detectives and Mrs. Harwind to Family Court. Pat Mckinney came
to my doorway and started yelling over Ruth's wail. "What the hell is
going on in here? This is an office, Cooper, and the rest of us are
trying to get some work done." I asked Sergeant Maron to go to Carol's
waiting area, find Wakim, read him the riot act about hanging out with a
minor, and send him on his way.

Eventually, the miserable troupe of characters was ready to leave the
office, with Ruth Harwind in tow. By the time I got them off to court,
contacted Bruce Johnson's parole officer to find out if we could have
his parole revoked for statutory rape the sexual acts with an underage
teen wolfed down a light yogurt, and dealt with the stack of messages on
Laura's desk, it was a quarter of five and time to go to the U.S.
Attorney's Office.

With summer vacations in full swing, the elevators were practically
empty as I rode down to the lobby. I chatted with some of the
secretaries who were walking out onto Hogan Place with me, then made the
left turn onto Centre Street for the short walk to Mcfadden's office.

The area in front of the Supreme Court, Civil Division, had been under
renovation for almost a year in an effort to convert a cement triangle
into a small green park.

I crossed with the light and had just passed in front of the plywood
frame of the construction area when a dilapidated livery cab with tinted
windows veered across the sparse line of cars moving north on Centre
Street. Brakes squealed and horns blasted, so I picked up my head to see
what was happening.

The gypsy cab was coming directly at the sidewalk, where I was trapped
between a parked police car and the wooden fencing behind me. The driver
slammed into the patrol car, which jumped the curb and was catapulted
toward me, as I flattened myself against the plywood boards.

The marked police vehicle caught its right fender on the fire hydrant in
its path, but as the left fender made contact with the lumber, the
fencing gave way and I fell backward into a small ditch.

My embarrassment was greater than my discomfort as I lay on the ground
in the dirt, my heart racing and my lip quivering. Three court officers
had seen the accident from the steps of the courthouse and came running
down to check if I was all right.

"Are you a juror, ma'am? You're gonna have some great lawsuit against
the city," the first one to my side remarked.

"I'll be fine," I said as they helped me to my feet. I wiped pebbles out
of my hair and brushed the soot off the rear of my pale aqua suit.

There were long scratches on my calves and one of my elbows was
bleeding.

"Did you get a license off that car?" one of the men asked me, as
onlookers gathered to see what the disturbance was about. "We'll help
you make out the police report."

"No, thanks. I couldn't see the plate at all." But I had no trouble
making out the face of the driver.

"Must've been a madman," the second guy said. "Did you hear him?"

I shook my head to indicate I had not. But as I thanked the officers and
continued on my way to Kim's building, the driver's words

"You're dead meat, bitch" were still reverberating in my ears.

Sixteen.

I walked into the conference room after clearing security on the ground
floor. Mike and Mercer were exchanging war stories with four very
buttoned-down federal agents while they waited for me to arrive. I
didn't need a mirror to tell me what was obvious from the expression on
Mike's face as he looked up to see me.

"Mother of jeez, what the hell happened to you? That picture's got 'line
of duty' written all over it. Someone messes me up like that and I could
go out on three-quarters disability pay tomorrow."

Mercer came over to examine the scrapes on my arm and ask whether I was
all right.

"Yeah, I tripped into a hole on my way over from the courthouse."

"All those years of ballet lessons and you're a regular twinkle toes You
got four city blocks to walk here, what kinda hole we talking about?"

"I'll explain later. Let's get going here."

"You'll explain now, blondie."

"Ran into somebody who doesn't like me. Wakim Wake-field, a
forty-something ex-con. Took his fifteen-year-old plaything away from
him this afternoon and he didn't appreciate it." I told them a short
version of the story.

"Just another friggin' Ponce de Leon looking for his fountain of youth,"
Mike said. "Let's call in a police report on your hit-and-run attempt."
"No," I said firmly "Just leave it alone. I'm not hurt. And this'll blow
over by the time he goes out tonight and finds himself another teen
angel. It couldn't have been anything more than chance that he saw me on
the street as I was leaving and took out his frustration on me. I hate
to tell you, but some cop's going to walk out of Central Booking later
tonight and find a radio car that got bashed up worse than my pride.
Point me to the ladies' room and give me a little time to make myself
presentable."

Special Agent Rainieri chose not to delay the discussion until my
return, since I had already kept the group waiting an extra twenty
minutes. He seemed to be speaking in answer to a question one of the
detectives had asked. "Yeah, we had a turncoat. That's what started the
whole investigation. Seems he got cheated out of a very big sale and
decided to rat out some of the other dealers in the pack.

"The point of these rings, you know, is to keep the prices of the
artworks at auctions way down. One of them buys the painting at the
public sale, then resells it at a vastly greater price usually to a
private client and splits the big profit with his or her small clan of
coconspirators."

"Denise Caxton?"

"She was a player all right. Don't forget, not only do we have ordinary
business receipts and phone records, but we've got tapes of all the
telephone bidding that goes on during an auction house sale.

And the expense statements and each gallery's credit agreements."

I had to remind Mike that beyond the social cachet and great expense
connected with the grand auctions, art was one of the only objects in
the world that could be purchased in any currency and from any location.

"Do you know who her cohorts were in these deals?"

The only female agent present, Estelle Grayson, answered. "She moved in
and out of a few partnerships. Lowell Caxton didn't mess much with
auctions, and didn't run with the pack. He has always had his own
sources and paid dearly for them. Doesn't leave much of a paper trail,
and didn't mix well in the sandbox with the other kids."

"Bryan Daughtry?" I asked.

"He's everywhere in this. Not up front, not sitting there with a paddle
in the air. But he was pumping cash into her operation and trying to
guide her into play with some of this very contemporary art inventory."

"Any names you can give us connected with the auction investigation?"

"Denise Caxton spent a lot of time at events this year. Sometimes she
was with a personal client, a big collector." Rainieri referred to his
file and gave us a list of names, none of which sounded at all familiar.
"Often she brought a friend or escort, and it's hard to tell if there's
any business purpose instead of a social one. Chapman says you've been
talking to Mrs. Caxton's friend Marina Sette. She's a figure at these
things. Could be she's just a big spender.

"Two of the men Denise had been socializing with also show up Frank
Wrenley and Preston Mattox. Again, one's an antiques dealer and one's an
architect, so we've got subpoenas out for their records, too.

Nothing in on them yet. We just don't know if they're around for the fun
or the profit."

"Well, do they buy anything?"

"Wrenley does. But that's a new twist, new buzzword in the auction
world. It's called '-marketing." So, when Sotheby's has a sale of
Impressionists, for example, they don't start the program off with a
Monet. Last spring at their big show, the first piece sold was a pair of
silver soup tureens made by a French silversmith in the eighteenth
century. Used to belong to J.P. Morgan. Went for more than seven million
bucks. The houses are trying to lure art collectors into new passions."

"Wrenley bought those tureens?"

"No, no. But he's shown up often and bought a lot of silver pieces old
French royalty. And Denise Caxton had Preston Mattox bidding on a set of
murals out of an old Scottish estate. So we haven't reached a point of
figuring whether this was business or romance.

"Anyway, Kim asked us to start making connections between Mrs. Caxton
and anyone who'd have a reason to do her in. We're looking, and a few
months down the road, when we have all the paper we need, something
might leap out at us. In the meantime, if you guys have subpoenaed some
of the same phone and business records that we did, we can cut through a
lot of this and give you our copies. Maybe you'll find things that
wouldn't mean anything to us."

I fished through my overstuffed pocketbook to pull out copies of the
file folders with the subpoenas inside. The bag had turned upside down
in my fall and was even more disastrously messed up than usual.

"I don't know how she finds anything in there," Chapman said as I
clasped lipstick, a compact, a handkerchief, Tic Tacs, four pens, and a
wallet in my left hand, trying to free up the folder with my right.

"What do you know about the Gardner Museum heist?"

"Not our turf. We've talked to the team who've worked it for practically
ten years, just ' they're figuring the stolen items have got to surface
somewhere before too long. So they're watching the auction houses pretty
closely, too. D'y'all know about Youngworth and Connor?"

More than anything, Mike hated telling a Fed that there was something
about which he was ignorant. He wouldn't say no to them, so I did.

"There are two guys in Boston, William Youngworth and Myles Connor.

Youngworth's an antiques dealer been in and out of the can on minor
things and Connor's a master art thief. Both of these men were in jail
when the Gardner job was pulled, but word is, if they weren't the brains
behind the theft, they certainly knew about it.

"Last year Youngworth claimed that he could broker the return of the
missing Rembrandt for the five-million-dollar reward the FBI put up,
along with immunity for him and his pal. You know about the chips?"

Another thumbs-up for Joan Stafford. "Sure," said Chapman, puffing.

"Know all about the chips. Those assholes cut the painting right out of
the frame."

"Yeah, well, Youngworth gave some Boston news reporter a few chips to
support his claim that he could produce the goods. Our experts looked
them over. Not authentic, not from the missing painting. That's the
latest on the Gardner case."

"Who was your expert? Got a name for us?"

"No idea who it is. We'll get it for you tomorrow."

We spent the next half hour sorting through documents to see which ones
I was legally entitled to examine at this point. At six fifteen, Mercer
suggested we close up. "Let's get over to the funeral parlor before the
seven o'clock visiting hours. Maybe we can chat up some of Marco
Varelli's friends and family."

Varelli's wake was in a small, dark funeral home on Sullivan Street, in
the narrow block just north of Houston. I had been in the neighborhood
before, which had been home to Vincent "the Chin" Gigante, whom I had
often seen there walking up and down the street in his bathrobe,
feigning insanity, before his recent conviction and trip to federal
prison.

I stepped out of Mercer's air-conditioned car and onto the steamy
pavement in front of Zuppelo's funeral parlor. "You think they got a TV
in there?" Mike asked.

"You are not watching Jeopardy! in front of the mourners," I said.

"Call your mother when we leave here and ask her what the question was,
okay? Live without it for one night."

The three of us presented ourselves to the manager of the mortuary.

"The only one here at the moment is Mrs. Varelli. You're a little early.
Are you friends?"

"Distant relatives," Chapman answered.

Mr. Zuppelo looked skeptically from Chapman to me, then frowned at
Mercer Wallace's dark skin.

"Northern Italian," Mike said. "With a trace of Sicilian."

He flashed his badge at Zuppelo, who led us into a dingy sitting area.

The odor of more than thirty flower arrangements mostly orange
gladioluses and yellow carnations was especially stifling in the intense
late-summer heat. The open casket was in an alcove at the far end of the
room, and Mrs. Varelli sat beside it, clutching a set of rosary beads.
The jacket of her gray suit seemed to overwhelm her delicate shoulders,
and she looked as if she had cried all the tears she was capable of
shedding in the past twenty-four hours.

Mike nudged me and told me to introduce myself. "See if you can get her
outta this hothouse and away from her husband's body. Bond with her,
Coop. Be sensitive if you still remember how to do that."

I left Mike and Mercer at the doorway and approached the widow. "Mrs.
Varelli, I'm Alexandra Cooper. I'm "

"So nice to meet you, Miss. Cooper. You were, perhaps, a friend of
Marco's?"

"Actually, no, Mrs. Varelli. Would you like to come inside with me, to
another room, and I'll explain why I'm here?"

"Sixty-two years, Miss. Cooper. Never apart for one night in sixty-two
years. What am I going to do without him?" She grabbed the side of the
coffin and started to talk to her husband. "I'm just going to be a few
minutes, Marco. I go with this young lady to see what she's going to try
to sell me."

She extended her hand, and I grasped the white cotton glove and braced
her elbow, helping her to her feet. "Everyone thinks I just got off the
boat from Napoli. Do I want a mausoleum, do I want a condominium, do I
want a ticket back to the old country? I was born in Newark, New Jersey.
Lived here all my life. These people think I'm stupid. Think I'm going
to give away Marco's paintings or turn his studio into the YMCA.

"All I want is for Marco to get up and walk around the corner with me to
have our dinner at Da Silvano, sitting on the sidewalk, like we did
almost every evening in the warm weather. Artists would look at Marco
with respect, Marco would look at the young ladies with longing, I'd
have a couple of glasses of wine, and together we'd go home very happy.

It's awfully lonely after sixty-two years, Miss. Cooper. You want to
sell me something, or you want to buy?"

As she talked, I walked her past Mike and Mercer and into an empty room
decorated in somber, waiting-for-the-next-body tones of neutral
palettes. There was an elegance to the old woman, with her perfectly
erect carriage, fragile body, and very keen mind.

"I'm an assistant district attorney, Mrs. Varelli. A prosecutor."

"Somebody make a crime here?"

"I'm working on another case, a murder case. A woman who was killed last
week. I understand that Mr. Varelli had done work with her. We the
detectives and I had planned to come see him later this week. Then we
learned about his death. I'm so sorry for your great loss. I don't mean
to burden you now, but maybe you could give me the name of your
husband's assistant, who could tell "

Her back was straight as a rod as she poked herself in the chest. "I am
the only one he trusted with his work, Miss. Cooper. He had several
workmen who helped him with the physical labor, the movement of large
pieces, the arrangement of supplies, and from time to time he had an
apprentice. But there is nothing I didn't know about his business. Who
is this lady who was killed?"

"Caxton. Denise Caxton."

Mrs. Varelli turned her face ninety degrees, away from me. She was
silent.

"You knew her, then?"

"It's not good to speak ill of the dead, is it?"

"What kind of business did she have with your husband?"

"The same as everyone, Miss. Cooper. You know about Marco?"

"I have to admit that I had never heard his name until this week. But
all the people I've talked to say what a wonderful man he was."

"A genius. Did they say that, too? Mostly, he was a genius."

I nodded to her.

"As a boy, in Firenze, he studied art at the Accademia. Paint is what he
loved not the canvas, but the substance that made color and he had even
more passion for that than for beautiful women. But he never did it so
well himself the drawing or the creation. What he did brilliantly was to
find the beauty in the paintings of others who had gone before him.

"Marco could stand in his atelier for hours, some eager dealer at his
heels watching, working on what appeared to be a dirty old piece of
burlap. He'd fasten his binocular headset on that was the only thing
that even looked like it connected him to this century. Gently, ever so
gently, he would swab at the tired colors with a little touch of cotton.

"Behind him, some greedy collector or dealer would be urging him on.

"What do you see, Marco? Who do you think it is, Marco?" You have no
idea what treasures he has found over the years. Even so recently, his
eyes saw things through the filth of centuries that no one else could
dream possible."

"And his illness he was still working until recently, even with his
heart condition?"

Mrs. Varelli snapped at me. "Illness what?"

"I, uh, I knew that a doctor had come when he collapsed."

"A touch of arthritis, that's what the doctor was for. Marco's skill
depended on two things, his eye and his hand. Neither one of us no
pills, no machines, no medicines. He only had a doctor to help him when
his hand ached from the arthritis and it hurt him to hold a scalpel for
so long. Un po' divino, Marco believed in. The medicine from the
grapes." "It was his heart that gave out," I said, hoping it was gentle
enough a reminder of what the doctor had told the M. E."s pathologist.

"There was nothing wrong with Marco's heart. His heart was so good, so
very strong." Mrs. Varelli became tearful.

"Were you always in the studio with your husband?"

"No, I was rarely there. We have an apartment in the same building. We
had our coffee together in the morning, then he would go upstairs to
work. Back home for lunch and a nap. Then more work, always.

Sometimes into the evening, if he found himself in the middle of a
surprise or a painting he had come to adore. Then he would come home to
bathe himself, to get rid of the oil and varnish and streaks.

Together we would go off for dinner, alone or with friends. A simple
life, Miss. Cooper, but a very rich one."

"Had you ever met Denise Caxton?"

"It was her husband I met first. I can hardly remember when, it was so
long ago. He was not a warm man, but he was very good to Marco. Lowell
Caxton bought a portrait at an auction house in London, maybe thirty
years ago. It had been mis catalogued in England and sold as an
unidentified portrait of a young girl. Lowell bought it only because he
said it reminded him of his wife, whichever one that happened to be at
the time. He didn't believe it had any value, and he brought it to Marco
simply to clean it up to be hung.

"But Marco thought she was a beauty, too. "Overpainted," he complained
to me every time he came downstairs. He didn't use many words, Marco.

He didn't need to with me. Days and nights he worked on it, until there
was life in the child's face and her petite blue dress had texture and
the warm glow of silk. One afternoon, Marco came down for lunch. I give
him his soup and he looks across the table.

"Gainsborough," he said to me, ''s a Gainsborough." Every museum in
England wanted to buy it back.

"Many people would just have paid Marco the price he asked for the
restoration, and still my husband would have been happy. Lowell Caxton
did that. But then he came back the next week, when Marco had come home
for his lunch. I let him in the house that's when I met him. He had
under his arm a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was a Titian
very small, very beautiful. We have it still. You come to my home,
you'll see it."

"In your apartment? A Titian?"

"But so very little. It's a study, just a piece of one of his great
works. You know The Rape of Europa?"

Of course I knew it. Everyone who had ever taken an art course in
college had studied it. Rubens had called it the greatest painting in
the world. And I had seen it many times because it was part of the
collection at the Gardner Museum. Was this just another coincidence?

"When did you say Mr. Caxton gave you the Titian?" Mrs. Varelli thought
for a moment. "Thirty, thirty-five years ago."

Before Denise, before the Gardner Museum theft. "And Denise Caxton, was
she a client of Mr. Varelli's?"

"First she came many times with her husband. Then alone. Then with other
people maybe dealers, maybe buyers. I never met them in the studio.
Sometimes Marco would tell stories about them."

"Did he feel the same way you did about Mrs. Caxton?"

Mrs. Varelli tossed back her head and laughed. "Of course not. She was
young, she was quite beautiful, and she knew how to make an old man feel
wonderful. She'd practice her Italian on Marco. She'd flatter him and
tease him and bring him fascinating paintings to examine. Always looking
for gold where there was none. Wasting Marco's time, if you ask me."

"Do you know who the men were that she brought recently?"

"No, no. For this, I give you the names of my husband's workmen. Maybe
they were introduced or can tell you what these men looked like. You
give me your card, and next week I call you with their telephone
numbers."

"Is that the only reason you didn't like Denise?"

"I don't need many reasons. She was trouble. Even Marco thought she was
trouble."

"How, Mrs. Varelli? What did he tell you about her?" "Like I said, Miss.
Cooper, Marco didn't use a lot of words. But these past few months, on
the days that Mrs. Caxton came to see him, he didn't come home smiling
like he used to. She was trying to get him to work on something that
upset him, gave him agita. That he did say. "At this age, I don't need
any agita.""

"But didn't he get any more specific than that?"

"Not with me. I was just glad he didn't want to work with her any
longer. He didn't seem to like the people she was bringing around."

"Did Mr. Varelli talk about Rembrandt ever?"

"How could one make his life in this world and not talk about
Rembrandt?"

I was grateful that she had not responded by saying what a stupid
question I had asked. "I mean recently, and in connection with Denise
Caxton."

"You don't know, then, that Marco is" her chest heaved visibly as she
breathed deeply and changed the wording. "Marco was the world's leading
expert on Rembrandt, no? Perhaps you're too young to know the story."

Mrs. Varelli went on. "Rembrandt's most famous group portrait is called
The Night Watch. Have you ever seen it?"

"Yes, I have. It's in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum."

"Exactly. Then maybe you know that originally, more than three hundred
years ago, it had a different name."

"No, I've only heard it called by this one."

"When he painted it, it was entitled The Shooting Company of Captain
Frans Banning Cocq. Over the decades, it became so covered with grime
that people assumed that the setting was at nighttime the name you know
it by. Well, after World War Two was ended in about nineteen forty-seven
when Marco was just getting a reputation as a restorer, he was part of
the team of experts put together to restore the enormous painting.
During the cleaning, it lightened brilliantly. That's the first time
anyone in the twentieth century realized that it wasn't a night scene at
all.

"Marco was the only member of that restoration group still alive fifty
years later. When anyone and I mean anyone, Miss. Cooper has a question
about the attribution of a Rembrandt today, it was only my Marco who
knew the truth.

Monarchs, presidents, millionaires they all came to see Marco Varelli
about their paintings."

"Denise Caxton, did she ever bring him a Rembrandt?"

"This I don't know."

"Did your husband ever say that she or anyone else asked him to look at
paint chips recently?"

Again Mrs. Varelli looked at me as though I had no brain at all.

"That's what my husband did every day of his life. Paint, paint chips,
paint streaks, paint fragments. From this, Miss. Cooper, come
masterpieces."

"Excuse me, Alex. Could I see you a minute?" Mercer was speaking to me
from the hallway.

"May I go back to Marco now?"

"If you'd give us another few minutes, Mrs. Varelli, we'll be out of
your way," he said to her.

I thanked her for her graciousness at such a terrible time and walked
back to the room in which the coffin rested. Mike was standing next to
the dead man's head.

"I hope by paying your respects to the deceased you got more than I did
from the widow," I said to them as I reentered the room. "A bit of art
history and a hunch that Denise Caxton was nothing but trouble."

"Then I'd say Mrs. Varelli's got great instincts. Remember that case I
had a few years back in Spanish Harlem? The Argentinian dancer, Augusto
Mango, who died prematurely during a sexual encounter with a rabid fan?"

"Very well."

"You know how we found out it was murder and not a bad heart?"

"No."

"Some doctor declared him dead at the scene. I think he must have been a
podiatrist. Then, at the funeral parlor, while they were combing his
hair into place, the mortician found a bullet hole in the back of his
head. Small caliber, barely the trace of an entry. The fan's husband was
the killer. Post headline was Don't Tango with Mango.

"Well, Mr. Zuppelo wouldn't make such a good barber." Mike carefully
turned Marco Varelli's head away from us and smoothed the thick white
hair back from his left ear, much as he had done at Spuyten Duyvil when
we first saw the body of Denise Caxton. There was the unmistakable mark
that a bullet had pierced the skull of the gentle old man.

Seventeen.

"Criminal court press room where every crime's a story and every story's
a crime. Mickey Diamond here." The veteran New York Post reporter had
covered the courthouse for longer than anyone could remember, and
answered the phone with his usual elan on Thursday morning.

"What did you think you were doing by running that story this morning?"
I asked when I called, trying to control my temper.

Pat Mckinney had left a copy of the page-three clipping on my desk,
quoting me in an article about the Caxton murder investigation.

Battaglia had an inviolable policy about assistants talking to the
press. He enforced it rigidly, and he was right to do so. With more than
six hundred lawyers in the office and three hundred thousand matters a
year coming through our complaint room, it would have been insane to let
prosecutors comment on cases they handled. First I had called Rose
Malone, urging her to let Battaglia know that Mickey's feature was pure
fiction, and then I had dialed the newsroom.

"Slow news day, Alex. My editor was begging me for a story."

I looked at the lead paragraph in the piece, in which Diamond attributed
to me a statement about a major break in the case.

"If we're close to a solution, as you say I say, then it truly is news
to me," I told him. The story reported that, working closely with
detectives from the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, I had discovered the
motive in the Caxton killing and an arrest was imminent. "Battaglia will
be furious when he reads this. It's bullshit, but now he'll get pressure
from the mayor to make an arrest, and we don't even have a suspect yet."

"The truth is so rare, Alex. I like to use it sparingly." He laughed at
his own joke, knowing that I wouldn't. "Straighten me out. Give me some
real scoop to go with. Maybe this'll make the killer show his hand he'll
think you know more about him than you do."

"Thanks for the help, Mickey. When he turns himself in because of your
story, I'll make sure you get the reward money." If nothing else, I
confirmed that word of Marco Varelli's murder had not yet leaked to the
press. Diamond would have been all over me if he'd heard what we had
discovered last night.

We had broken the news to Varelli's widow just as mourners had gathered
for the evening visit to the funeral home. Her initial shock at the fact
that her husband had been assassinated was replaced with her proud
resolve that she had known he had not died of natural causes. Bravely,
she composed herself and greeted their friends and associates for more
than two hours, while we mingled with the small crowd in the room.

She had finally thanked Chapman warmly and then turned to tell me good
night. "You see, Miss. Cooper, I was sure that Marco Varelli would never
have chosen to leave me. Such was his love, such was his life."

The funeral was to be on Friday, after the second night of the wake, and
she invited us to come to her nearby apartment the next week.

Mike had gotten her permission to seal Marco's atelier last night and
secure it with patrolmen. He would go back later today to process it
with the detectives from the Crime Scene Unit. We needed her, or one of
Varelli's workmen, to help discover whether any artworks or valuables
were missing. That might have to wait until after the burial.

Finally, when everyone left the dingy funeral home, Mike and Mercer had
arranged for the Medical Examiner's Office to pick up the body of Marco
Varelli for an autopsy.

I had come downtown to work, busying myself in the review of new cases
till I could meet Mike or Mercer in Chelsea. We were going back to
Galleria Caxton Due to talk to Bryan Daughtry again, as well as to
oversee the execution of the search warrant.

It was Mercer who phoned at eleven thirty to tell me he was leaving his
office to go to West Twenty-second Street. Mike had witnessed the
proceeding on Varelli at the morgue, which had validated his discovery
at the funeral parlor, and would join up with us in Chelsea.

I drove my Jeep up to the gallery thinking about Denise Caxton, Omar
Sheffield, and Marco Varelli. What common factor in their lives so
closely linked them in death?

I parked right in front and walked to the Empire Diner, where I sipped
another cup of coffee until the guys arrived a few minutes later.

"You got the warrants?" Mike asked, slipping into the booth along with
Mercer, who had met him at the front door.

"Everything we need."

We walked across the street and down the block, where the entrance to
the gallery's garage was blocked by a radio car. One of the uniformed
officers saw us coming, recognized Mike, and got out to say hello.

"Hey, Chapman, how's it going? Been a long time. I thought you did
steady midnights?"

"Used to be, Jack. Now I'm afraid of the dark doing day tours. Any
action here?"

"He ain't givin' us any trouble. A little pedestrian traffic around, but
no packages going without getting' searched, and no trucks in or out.
Same report from yesterday."

A receptionist met us inside the front door. "Mr. Daughtry thought you
might be coming in sometime this afternoon. He's upstairs with a client.
I can make you comfortable down here, if you'd "

"No thanks," Mike said, ignoring the young woman and leading us to the
elevator in the far corner. When we reached the top floor and stepped
out onto the landing, there was no sign of Daughtry on the walkway.

Mercer headed over to see whether he was in his corner office, while
Mike and I looked out at the old railroad tracks again.

"My father used to tell me the stories about the gangs from Hell's
Kitchen who terrorized the train lines the Hudson Dusters, the Gophers.

When he was a kid, he hung out in a saloon right up the street here,
running errands for a guy named Mallet Murphy. Called him that ' he'd
crack disorderly customers over the head with a meat hammer."

Mike leaned back against the waist-high iron rail as he looked out at
this view of Chelsea. He couldn't have been any happier if you'd sat him
at the top of the Eiffel Tower. This was his father's home turf, and the
neighborhood held his family roots.

"This view could change my whole opinion of both Denise Caxton and Bryan
Daughtry. It's really cool that they left the old tracks in place." He
turned and noted the Plexiglas doorway that led out of the gallery onto
the tracks.

"Hey, Coop, someday after me and Daughtry have put our differences
aside, I'll walk you and Mercer out that very door, onto the tracks, and
take you as far downtown as it goes. Tell you stories about real
gangsters and show you where the bones are buried."

"We're down here, Mr. Chapman. As long as you've made yourselves at
home, why don't you come tell me what you need?" Daughtry called up to
us from somewhere a level or two below. I couldn't see him from where I
was standing, but he had obviously been alerted to our arrival.

The catwalk around the edge of the upper floor was about four feet wide.
The three of us walked around its perimeter until we came to a metal
staircase that led down a level.

Here the space extended out over the track below, and there were couches
and sitting areas that faced various exhibits on the vast walls that
ringed the gallery.

Bryan Daughtry and another man were seated facing each other in brown
leather armchairs. Daughtry stood to reach for Chapman's hand.

"Let me guess," Mike said, looking at two yellow columns positioned next
to each other and representing some sort of sculpture. "The Cat in the
Hat?"

"Shall I read to you from our brochure, Detective? "A minimal
freestanding work, this kinetic fiberglass piece conveys a charming,
vertiginous uncertainty." Like it? Or do you prefer the one behind me? A
very creative new fellow uses beeswax, hazelnut pollen, marble, and rice
to make sculptures, as we say, ' mute yet implacable force.""

"Come to think of it, my apartment looks fine with a couple of NFL
posters, a slightly used baseball signed by Bernie Williams, and an
eight-by-ten glossy of Tina Turner that Miss. Cooper gave me. Your stuff
makes me wanna puke."

"Shall we go back up to my office?" Daughtry asked.

Mercer and I started to follow him. Mike stretched out his arm to
Daughtry's companion, who remained seated as I started to walk away.

"Hi. Sorry to break this up. I'm Mike Chapman. Homicide. You are ..

. ?"

The attractive dark-haired man, who I guessed to be about forty years
old, stood up and smiled, returning the handshake. "I'm Frank Wrenley.

How do you do?"

"Well, well, well Mr. Wrenley. And how do you do? Tell you what c'mon
upstairs with us. I got a few questions for you when we're done with Mr.
Daughtry."

"Of course. I assumed you'd want to talk to me about Deni. I'm happy to
try to help." Mercer whispered to me as we walked to the narrow
staircase, "You and Mike go at Daughtry. I'll baby-sit Wrenley till
you're done, so he doesn't make any calls while he's waiting. This is a
rare opportunity to get him when he wasn't expecting us."

Mike and I settled into the dealer's office with him. "Like I told you,
we got a warrant to go through your gallery and warehouse. A team of
detectives will be here shortly to do that. You can make this real easy
on yourself if you wanna give us most of what we ask for, which are
Deni's business records and belongings, access to the contents of Omar's
locker, and things like well, look at the papers for yourself.

"We'd also like to look through some of the paintings you've got stored
here."

"Anything in particular you're looking for? Your taste in art, Mr.
Chapman, is so hard for me to define."

"Got any Rembrandts on hand?"

"So you're joining the search for the mythical Holy Grail, too?

Everybody's looking for the big score. You've got a better chance of
winning the lottery than finding that missing painting."

"Then you won't mind if we look, will you?"

"Certainly not."

"Had you and Deni talked about it? I mean, about The Storm on the Sea of
Galilee}"

"Many, many times. But so did everyone else in our business." "Seems to
me," Mike said, "that if I were an ex-con sitting on a hot item, my best
bet would be to contact somebody else in the same shoes.

I wouldn't be likely to walk into a classy operation where they might
give me up to the Feds just for talkin' to them, but I'd sure be likely
to sniff out some creep who'd done time and was completely amoral."

"What do you want me to say, Detective? "Sticks and stones'?"

"Look, we know someone offered Deni the Rembrandt. And we even know
about her meetings with Marco Varelli, to authenticate the chips."

Daughtry met Mike's stare head-on. "That's the oldest trick in the book,
Mr. Chapman. Varelli is dead. Don't expect me to believe he summoned you
to his bedside just before he had the big one. I doubt you ever spoke to
him. Not much of a talker, that man. Try me again, harder this time."
"Lowell Caxton told us about the hijacking of the Delia Spiga paintings
last June. Said to ask you why it made Deni so crazy."

"Well, I assume the disappearance of a truckload of any artist's work
would make his dealer berserk. Caxton Due

represented Delia Spiga. The whole thing was rather odd. Nobody ever saw
who stole the truck, so we don't even know whether or not the thieves
were armed. Deni had actually rented an eighteen-wheeler from a soda
delivery company so the truck would be inconspicuous on the highway.
After the drivers made a stop for coffee on the thruway, they came out
of Mcdonald's and the truck had disappeared."

"Never found it?"

"To the contrary. It was found the next day, abandoned behind an old
factory upstate. Not a thing missing. Either the thieves didn't like
Delia Spiga or they were looking for cola and not art."

"What did Deni think?"

"That first night? She was wild. Figured it had to be an inside job,
someone who knew she was shipping fine art but disguising the delivery
truck. When every painting was found intact, she calmed down and assumed
the hijacking was just a coincidence. Amateur soda swipers foiled
again."

"So maybe somebody did think she had the Rembrandt and was slipping the
stolen painting in with the transport of the Delia Spigas?" "One might
have thought that to see how upset she got. But of course, Detective
Chapman, the police who found the truck went through it and listed every
item on it. No Rembrandt recovered. And Deni was far, far too relieved
the next day to have been missing one great masterpiece."

Mike jumped back a year in his next question.

"That trip to England that Lowell made alone the June before the one
that broke the marriage apart. What were you and Deni up to that kept
her away, that kept her so busy here?"

"Try as you might, Chapman, you won't mix me in this soup. Whatever it
was, Deni never let me in on it. But you're right, it was serious.

Whoever called her, whoever contacted zo8

her someone made an offer she couldn't refuse. She withdrew from me
completely and was very secretive. It bothered me at the time, but after
a few days she changed her mind and went off to join Lowell. You
obviously know the rest. I didn't think any more of it. Figured she'd
been onto a deal and that it must have fallen through. Happens all the
time in this business."

The receptionist buzzed on Daughtry's intercom to tell him that more
detectives had arrived.

Chapman stood up. "Why don't you show my guys around?" Then he bent over
the desk, the top of his fists pressed against the leather blotter.
"Remember, it ain't just me you gotta worry about, Mr. Daughtry. Mess
with the cops and you've still got the boys on Eleventh Avenue to deal
with Knuckles Knox, Stumpy Malarkey, One-Lung Curran.

They got ways I couldn't get past the Supreme Court in six lifetimes."

When Daughtry left the room, I turned to Mike. I was steaming. "Who the
hell are you talking about? Bad enough I don't know what you do when I'm
not standing next to you. You can't threaten people like that, and I
can't stand by and let you do it."

"Not even once? I've waited a lifetime to say that to somebody.

"Battle Row," this block used to be called. Those guys, Knuckles and
Stumpy? Real hoodlums used to scare my old man to death when he was a
schoolboy. Relax, blondie. That gang broke up around nineteen
thirty-two. Six feet under, all of '. Did I sound like Cagney? Did I
scare you?"

Mike stepped to the doorway and motioned to Wrenley to come into the
office and sit down. I introduced myself.

He was dressed in black from head to foot collared polo shirt, linen
slacks, tasseled loafers and his jet-colored hair was slicked back,
every strand in perfect placement. I guessed it was his style, not an
expression of mourning.

"Hope you don't mind some questions about Denise
Caxton," Mike began. "We understand you and she were quite close." The
edge in his voice with which he had addressed Daughtry was gone. It was
clear to me that he was hoping to get Wrenley's help with more personal
information about the past year.

"Not a secret, Detective. I'd met Deni two or three years ago. After she
and Lowell had their blowup last year, our relationship became more
intimate."

"You didn't mind the competition?"

"Her husband, or do you mean Preston Mattox? I understood what it was
about. Deni was just a kid when she hooked up with Lowell Caxton.

She'd been faithful to him throughout the marriage, and don't think
there weren't lots of opportunities for her to have a fling. After he
embarrassed her with that episode in Bath, she was more than ready to
spread her wings.

"And besides, she was still married to Lowell. She wasn't very anxious
to tie herself down permanently so quickly. We both seemed to get all
the pleasure we needed out of each other's company, professionally and
personally."

"I take it you're single?"

"Always have been," Wrenley answered.

"How'd you and Mrs. Caxton meet?"

"When I moved most of my business interests to New York "

"What's the business?"

"Antiques. High end. Furniture, silver, nineteenth-century for the most
part."

"Where'd you move here from?"

"Palm Beach, Detective. Grew up in Florida, in the Keys. Set up shop
there, but I was always on the road. Auctions in England, France, Italy,
and of course, New York. I still keep a place on the water down there,
but I live here now.

"I saw Deni long before I met her. She was hard to miss not just her
looks but her spirit and energy. Always in the chase for a great find,
and in those days, something to show Lowell how much she had learned
from him."

Mike tried the man-to-man thing. "Never came on to her before she split
with him? Never asked her out, called her, till after the Bath scandal?"

"I never called her then, Mike. It was Deni who called me. We'd been to
auctions together and gotten to know each other a bit. I'd asked her for
advice about paintings when I was making acquisitions for particular
clients. Nothing social. After she flew home from England that time, she
was determined to make a statement to her friends back here. Called me
and invited me to go to a couple of dinner parties with her. It almost
began as a game, for both of us. I never imagined I'd fall in love with
her, nor she with me."

"What was the story with the other guys?"

"There were lots of men pursuing Deni. I'd have been an idiot not to
think that would happen.

I suppose my most serious rival was Preston Mattox. Had an airtight way
of getting under my skin."

"Why Mattox more than anyone else?"

"Ever hear of something called the Amber Room?"

"Yeah," Mike answered. "Know all about it."

"Mattox was convinced that Lowell Caxton had smuggled some of the panels
out of Europe and had them hidden somewhere. He's an architect,
world-class.

Deni said he had this dream you ought to talk to him about it of
creating his chef d'oeuvre with remnants of the room. I don't know
whether he was interested in her or in what she could lead him to. But
that possibility made her furious whenever I suggested it.

"Look, I'm on the road a lot of the time. I never expected her to sit
home doing her needlepoint, waiting for me to come back to town. She
knows sorry, she knew that I dated other women when I was in Europe, and
that was fine with her. She'd been tied down too long to care about that
kind of thing right now." "So, what brings you here?" I asked. There was
nothing in Daughtry's world that seemed remotely connected to the
nineteenth century.

"I wasn't invited to Deni's funeral, as you probably already know.

Bryan and I are old friends, and he knows how devastated I was by her
death. I just wanted to talk, reminisce, try to make some sense of it.

May I call you Alex? When you catch the bastard who did this, Alex "

Wrenley paused, then dropped his head and shook his hand back and forth,
as though asking us to wait a few moments before he spoke. "No point in
my going on. There's nothing you can do to him in a court of law that
would resemble any kind of justice.

"The newspapers said the police thought she was sexually assaulted. Is
that true?"

"Probably," Chapman answered.

He lowered his head again. "She was so loving, so God, I can't bear to
think of any animal touching her, hurting her." Again he paused.

"There must be something I can do to be useful."

"Let me have your numbers," Mike said, taking his notepad out of his
pocket. "There's a lot more I'm gonna need to talk to you about as this
thing unravels. As soon as we sort through some of the business records
and evidence that's developing, I'll give you a call and set up an
appointment, okay?"

Wrenley removed a business card from his wallet, added his home
telephone to the number on it, and passed it to Chapman.

"Want me out of the way here? Sounds like you've got things to do with
Bryan."

"D'you know that Mrs. Caxton was being blackmailed? Threatened by a man
in prison?"

"Sure I did. It terrified her. She was convinced Lowell was behind it."

"Got any idea why she hired that guy Omar and had him working here with
her?"

"It made me furious, actually. Bryan can tell you. I had dozens of
arguments with Deni about Omar. And I wasn't sorry to see him turn up in
a ditch, Mike. But she thought it was her best protection against
Lowell, sort of an insurance policy."

"She'd have been a very rich widow if Lowell had died first, wouldn't
she, Mr. Wrenley?"

"Take a trip with me to Palm Beach, Mike. You want rich widows? I didn't
have to come to New York to catch myself one of those, if that's your
implication. They're as thick as palmetto bugs down there."

"Sorry about Denise, Mr. Wrenley." I offered my hand as he stood up to
leave.

For the rest of the afternoon, Bryan Daughtry led the detectives through
the beginnings of a painstaking search of the art inventory in the
gallery and adjacent warehouse. I sat in his office as he produced much
of the documentation requested in the subpoena, reading and xeroxing
stacks of bills and papers, the endless figures blurring my vision by
the close of the day.

"You guys need me for anything?" I asked Mercer at six fifteen. "I'm
supposed to go to dinner and the ballet tonight, if you can carry on
without me."

"Scat. We'll grab some chow when we leave here, and see if we can catch
up with the Crime Scene guys at Varelli's studio. I'll leave a message
on your machine if we find anything interesting. You around tomorrow?"

I was tired, dismayed by the dead ends we kept meeting in this case, and
glad the following day was Friday. "I'll be in all day. I've got a
ticket on the seven-thirty evening flight for the weekend, but I feel
guilty leaving you with all this hanging."

"Nothing you can do, Coop, till we give you a perp. Be on that plane.

We'll be talking to you before that."

I went out to my car, squared the block, and fought the tunnel traffic
of Jersey commuters going north on Tenth Avenue to begin their ride
home. After I passed the entrance, I continued up to Sixty-fourth
Street, turning to park in the cavernous garage below the Lincoln Center
complex. Although the Metropolitan Opera House was usually dark during
the month of August, there was a gala performance this evening, with
pieces that the ballet company was staging for an international tour
that was about to begin.

There were tiered sections in the underground lot, each identifiable by
an enormous band of colored paint that wound around the walls of that
area. In my fatigued state, I kept trying to think of a memory device to
help me recall that I was directed up the ramp to the red-striped
portion of the garage, and parked in the fifth row away from the door,
behind a column boldly labeled 5.

I joined the line of patrons to prepay the parking ticket and took the
escalator upstairs. Natalie Moody and her party of friends had already
been seated in the Grand Tier Restaurant, below the immense Chagall
mural looking out over the plaza. The group was ordering their dinners
as I arrived, so I chose the grilled salmon and we chatted and ate
before moving downstairs to take our seats in the orchestra.

Few things are as capable of transporting me from the images of violence
that permeate my working days as is ballet. I have studied dance for
almost as long as I have walked, and have continued to take lessons as
both a form of regular exercise and a medium of escape from some of the
seamy underside of life that I encounter on the street. Had I had the
talent, I would rather have been a prima ballerina with American Ballet
Theatre than almost anything else in the world.

So I sat back in my seat, ready to take refuge in this fantasy world, as
the crystal chandeliers rose into the ceiling of the opera house and the
curtain went up on the first piece. Victor Barbee made a rare appearance
to partner the exquisite Julie Kent in a pas de deux from Swan Lake. The
audience responded wildly with more than six curtain calls, and for half
an hour I forgot about Denise Caxton. The second act featured Alessandra
Ferri with the dazzling Julio Bocca in the balcony scene from Romeo and
Juliet, and I lost myself completely in the perfection of their pairing.

There was a sparkling Rodeo with Kathleen Moore and Gil Boggs, and a
final intermission before the corps was going to perform the

"Kingdom of the Shades" from La Bayadere. It was after ten thirty, and I
told Natalie I needed to get a jump on the crowd and head for home. I
was afraid the Minkus music and the endless line of white-tutu'd Shadows
would lull me to sleep in my seat.

I dug into my seemingly bottomless pocketbook for the Jeep keys,
reminding myself that I had to relocate the red-striped parking area,
behind column 5. The walk back to the car seemed farther than it had on
the way in, but it was four hours later and I was really dragging.

There were plenty of gaping spaces between the automobiles, I noted to
myself, and it usually displeased me that so many suburban ticket
holders walked out of the theater before the end of the event. Tonight I
was one of the guilty leave-takers.

I started the engine, flipped on the headlights, and backed out of the
space, heading over to the end of the row toward the ramp down to the
exit. As I made the wide turn, a sport utility vehicle larger than my
own careened around the adjacent line of cars and came racing at me,
head-on.

My foot jammed the gas pedal to the floor and I swerved to the left,
speeding down lane Red 4 as the chase car followed closely on my tail.

I saw an opening mid row where two spaces had been created side by side
as well as back-to-back, and I

barely braked as I nosed the Jeep into a curve and an immediate second
left turn.

The dark car in pursuit took the long way around, and I could see that
it was skipping two rows to try to cut me off at the top of the ramp.

I was pressing on the horn with my left hand as I steered with my right,
hoping that someone would be annoyed by the blaring honk. A Jaguar with
two couples in it pulled out in front of whoever was trying to cut me
off, and I lurched ahead, hoping to see a security guard at the foot of
the incline, where the giant red arrow merged with the equally wide
yellow and blue stripes.

Instinctively, my foot hit the brake as a caution, and I immediately
recognized that even a second's delay could be a costly mistake. But I
had hesitated as I always did when leaving that garage, choosing between
the exits on the north and south sides of the building, depending on
which one was open at a given hour.

Just as I decided to make the right turn and go out onto Sixty-fourth
Street, where there was a bus stop and, always, a post theater crowd,
the dark chase car came roaring down the steep rise of the garage behind
me. Its driver passed me on the left side and cut me off. His engine
still running, a male figure with a stocking cap over his head opened
the door and got out, running toward me with the gleam of something
metallic in his hand.

The empty sport utility vehicle was between me and the mechanical arm of
the barrier that would have been my escape. As he slammed his left hand
on the hood of the Jeep, I juiced the gas again and jumped the curb of
the divider that separates the entrance from the exit gate. My Jeep kept
going, smashing against the retractable arm of the entry blockade and
cruising up the hill to the wide flat pavement of Sixty-fourth Street.

My repeated pounding on the horn cleared the crossing of pedestrians who
were out for a summer stroll on Broadway. I paused to make sure the
traffic light was with me, then goosed the car across the busy
intersection, never stopping for a moment as I raced through the Central
Park transverse and reached the East Side.

Eighteen.

"You're not going home alone tonight, Coop. End of story."

It was midnight, and I was sitting at the corner table in the front of
Primola with Mike and Mercer. The third Dewar's had failed to calm me.

After I had driven through Central Park, I headed directly across
Sixty-fifth Street to my second home, the Italian restaurant where I
frequently entertained my companions for dinner. I knew that even at
eleven o'clock, Primola would be full of people, so I parked at a fire
hydrant in front and ran inside to find Giuliano, the owner. He was my
friend, and just as important, he was a soccer player who had competed
on a World Cup team several years earlier. If he was between me and the
door, I'd be perfectly safe until reinforcements arrived.

I told him that someone crazy was following me, so he sat down at my
table, asked Adolfo to get me a drink and Peter to bring over the phone.
I dialed Mercer's beeper number and inhaled the scotch as I waited for a
callback. He and Mike had just left Varelli's studio and were sitting in
a bar in Soho, eating dinner and enjoying their first cocktail. It took
them half an hour to get uptown to meet me. Once they arrived, Gillliano
left us alone to talk, and Fenton, the bartender, kept sending rounds
over to the table.

"Obviously, I didn't want to go home alone. That's why I called to tell
you what happened. But if you two deposit me there and lock me inside,
I'll be fine." I live on the twentieth floor of a high-rise building
with two doormen, and pay dearly for a great sense of security once
inside.

"Why didn't you just go right to the station house, instead of coming
here?"

"Because then there'd be a police report, and then somebody would call
the tabloids, and then Battaglia would have me under lock and key for
the next month."

"You don't even know who you're looking for, blondie. I've had blind
victims who've given me a better scrip than you have."

"It's awfully hard to give you a description when the guy's wearing a
mask and gloves."

"I think it's time for a slumber party. One of us is gonna hang with you
overnight."

Mercer took it a step further. "And besides that, you are on the very
first plane to the Vineyard in the morning. That is, if you're not going
to be by yourself up there this weekend."

"Clark Kent's booked in for a visit, Mercer. Ace reporter for the Daily
Planet. She's dumping us for some news jock, m'man. What time of day do
they start flying those tin cans?"

Either the liquor or the scare I had just experienced made the idea of a
weekend in the country even more attractive than it had seemed earlier
in the day. I had completely neglected matters like the sleep clinic
investigation for the more pressing problems of the Caxton murder, but
I'd push that one back another week as well. "There's an eight A.M. out
of La Guardia Probably over booked this time of year.

I'm not sure I'll get on."

"Know how much pleasure it would give me to officially bump some
investment banker off that flight?" Mike asked. "I'll take you out there
myself."

I looked at my watch. "Make you a deal. Let me call David Mitchell.

If he and Renee are home," I said, referring to my next-door neighbors,
"I can sleep on their sofa, and they can drop me at the airport on their
way to the Hamptons in the morning. You two have better things to do,
okay? Try solving this mess before anyone else is killed."

My call awakened David, as we knew it would, but he was more than
gracious. Renee made up the sofa bed while Mike parked my Jeep in my
garage and Mercer escorted me up to my own apartment so I could grab my
robe as well as a shirt and pair of leggings to wear in the morning.

"Want me to wait while you pack things to take with you to the country?"

"I've got everything I need up there," I said, as I gave him a hug and
opened the door to David's apartment with his spare key, which I kept in
my dresser drawer. "Thanks. Call me if anything happens before I see you
on Monday."

I undressed, took a steaming hot shower, and wrapped the terry robe
around me. I was too jumpy to sleep, but I turned out the light and
rested, with their dog, Prozac, curled up by my side.

We left the apartment at seven, and David walked me in to the gate to
make sure I got on the flight. There were the usual number of no-shows,
and ten minutes before takeoff I boarded the thirty-seat Dash 8 and fell
asleep for the short flight to the Vineyard.

I had a monthly parking spot at the airport. It was a brilliantly clear
day and a good ten degrees cooler than it had been in the city all week.
I put the top down on my little red Miata and drove up-island to
Chilmark, to the house.

Once I passed the crest of the drive, where my friend Isabella Lascar
had been killed, the gray-shingled farmhouse came into sight and, beyond
it, the stunning view of Vineyard Sound, which never failed to take my
breath away. This is the one place on earth where every tension I have
dissolves, and where I have spent the happiest hours of my life.

My caretaker had unlocked and prepared the house for me, and I went
inside to open the windows, settle in, and see what messages were on the
answering machine.

The first was from Nina Baum, calling late last night from California.

Chapman had phoned to tell her about the incident in the garage, and she
was checking on me as well as urging me to get on a plane and come out
to Malibu until the investigation was over. Nina, by luck of the draw,
had been my college roommate during freshman year at Wellesley.

She remained my closest friend, and she and her husband were often my
refuge when I wanted to hang out away from the problems that my job
presented.

The message I'd been waiting for was next, the voice of Jacob Tyler
calling from an airport phone booth. "It's Jake here. Can't find you
anywhere all I get are machines. It's Friday morning and I'm on my way
to the Vineyard, if that's still the plan. I've gone from China to
California, then an overnight in Chicago. I'm due into Boston before
noon. And if there's no fog, should be on a Cape Air hop that gets me
there at one thirty. I'll try your office in a bit. If you're not at the
airport, I'll just take a cab up to the house. Miss. you."

I took the portable out onto the deck and dialed Laura's number.

"Alex? Are you okay? Mercer left a message on my voice mail telling me
not to expect you today. Is everything all right?"

"It's fine. I'm just whipped. We worked late last night, so I'm taking a
long weekend. If people are looking for me, you can reach me on the
Vineyard. Anything interesting yet?"

"Jacob Tyler called first thing. He didn't leave a message, ' I couldn't
tell him what your plans were. And Robert Scott, from University of
Virginia Law School. Wants to know if you can do a lecture about public
service this fall."

"I'll take care of Tyler. Would you call Bob Scott back and tell him I'd
be glad to, if he can suggest some dates?" Maybe I would tell the
students about last night's encounter. What the D. A."s Office lacks in
financial rewards, it makes up for in drama and intrigue.

I changed into shorts and a T-shirt, set the dining room table for two,
went out to the barn to get birdseed to fill the feeders, and sat back
down on the deck to read the New York Times and the Vineyard Gazette.

The osprey nest at the foot of my hilltop, on the side of Nashaquitsa
Pond, had a nestful of babies, being hovered over by their mother.

Goldfinches and cardinals fought for the seed I had just put out, and my
wild-flower field teemed with the pink, lavender, and white heads of
cosmos and the cobalt blue of Oriental poppies.

This was the place that I considered my home. Professionally, I thrived
and flourished in the fast-paced life I led in New York City.

Most of my friends were there, and I had been born and raised in a
suburban village in nearby Westchester County, so my parents and
brothers were frequently in and out of town. But this island, especially
the quiet rural end on which my house was sited, was where I came to
relax and to restore the tranquillity that eluded me in the midst of an
intense investigation.

Most of my life had been a charmed one. I was one of three children the
only daughter of loving parents whose marriage was still not only a
sound one, but a great romance as well. The trust fund endowed by my
father's invention, the Cooper-Hoffman valve, had been used to give me a
first-class education, first at Wellesley and then at the University of
Virginia School of Law. It permitted me to indulge my dream of working
in the public sector without the enormous burden of student loans that
forced so many of my colleagues to leave the prosecutor's office for
more lucrative careers. And for frivolous interests like travel and my
collections of first-edition books and antique jewelry, it was a route
to some indulgences that I would never otherwise have been able to
afford at this stage in life.

While the Vineyard had offered me some of the most spectacular days of
my life, it also held for me my most difficult memories. Adam Nyman, the
physician I had fallen madly in love with while I was at law school, had
summered here all of his life. When we became engaged the year that I
graduated, we bought this house together. It had belonged to the widow
of a fisherman whose family was one of the original group of settlers in
the seventeenth century. I had delighted in having it redecorated in
celebration of our wedding. A local artist had stenciled the walls in
pastel designs she had copied from a set of antique hand-painted Limoges
plates my mother had given us as an engagement gift. The evocative
landscapes by island artists that Adam had collected over the years had
been reframed and hung throughout the cheerful rooms.

Our families and friends had been assembled in the homes of friends and
country inns around the island for the wedding weekend. The house and
its gardens had never looked more beautiful than during that lush summer
after an unusually rainy spring.

And then came the morning phone call that ripped my spirit and heart to
pieces. Adam had completed his last rounds in Charlottesville and had
set off late in the day to drive all night for the trip to the island.
It was my mother who took the call from the state police, and it was she
and Nina who sat me down on my bed to tell me that Adam's car had been
knocked off a bridge in Connecticut by another driver and demolished on
the rocks in the river below.

Everything sealed up inside me for years, or so it seemed at the time.

I had been afraid to let myself get close to anyone else for fear that
something I loved would be seized from me when I was happiest. I went
aimlessly from room to room in the house on those rare weekends I could
bring myself to come up here, imagining how Adam would have adored what
I had turned it into for us.

The ten years that had passed did nothing to lessen the pain of his loss
or to make less vivid the depth of our passion for each other. But I had
learned to love again, without ever forgetting that I would have
sacrificed all the other pleasures and triumphs of my life to have had
this time with him.

I had made changes in the house, too. Something had nagged at me to
create a different feel, a sense of another phase of my relationships.

So the previous winter I added an addition with a larger living room, a
huge slate-trimmed hearth, and tall windows open to the handsome sweep
of sea and sky. And with Nina's urging, for her upcoming Labor Day
weekend visit, I had the architect build a new bathroom, decadently
luxurious, with a steam shower and whirlpool tub. Slowly it had become
possible for me to be here without any longer feeling that I was
betraying Adam's love for me.

Now I found myself looking at my watch every ten minutes, filled with
anticipation about the arrival of Jacob Tyler, with whom I had
serendipitously become entangled in early July. Less than two months
later, I sat here daydreaming about seeing him again this afternoon,
excited by the pleasure he gave me, emotionally and physically, and
still palpitating from the newness of the romance.

I read the papers, knocked off the Friday crossword puzzle, and called
the office to make sure everything was still quiet. I wasn't a cook, but
there was an easy trick to serve an elegant Vineyard dinner with no
effort at all, and I set about making it happen before Jake arrived. A
phone call to the fish market to order a late-afternoon pickup, a stop
at the Chilmark store for island corn and tomatoes at the peak of
perfection at this point in the summer and I was off for the
twenty-minute ride to the airport to meet Jake's plane.

Cape Air's one o'clock from Boston was the only flight due in when I
arrived. As usual, not many people were leaving the island on a Friday
in summer, and several locals waited with me for the nine-seater to come
into range. The tiny plane first appeared as a small dot in the
cloudless blue sky, and circled out over the south shore before coming
in for a landing. I could see the crown of Jake's thick brown hair
emerge from the door first as he bent down to get out onto the steps
that the pilot had lowered. He picked up his head to look for me behind
the arrival gate and broke into a wide smile when he saw me standing on
a bench against the chain-link fence, waving at him with both arms. His
suit jacket was slung over his shoulder and hooked by the finger of his
left hand, and he blew a kiss to me with his right hand when he touched
ground.

When he reached where I stood in the waiting area, next to the luggage
rack, he dropped his briefcase, took me by my shoulders as he said,
"Hello, angel," and kissed me for what seemed like three minutes. My
head nestled in the crook of his elbow, and I closed my eyes and stood
still to savor the feeling of his embrace.

"Got room in that little car for a duffel full of dirty clothes? It's
hard to travel light for ten days in China." Jake had covered the
presidential summit in Beijing for NEC and had been traveling for almost
two weeks on his way there and back. We had spent a weekend on the
Vineyard before he took off, and our communications had been
frustratingly erratic since then, between time differences and our
unpredictable schedules.

"I'm thinking of giving up prosecution and taking in laundry. I'd be
delighted to start with yours, Mr. Tyler."

"Bad week? I couldn't seem to catch you anywhere, no matter when I
called."

The suitcases were off-loaded to the luggage rack, and Jake lifted his
bag out so we could walk to the car. I carried his jacket and briefcase
under one arm, taking hold of his left hand with my right.

"You'll get a full report this evening. I've been ordered to take today
off, so if you don't talk to me about the gross national product or
global warming or the Japanese commodities market, I won't bore you with
the twists and turns in my murder case."

"There's nothing boring about it. What's been happening?" he asked, as I
opened the trunk to put the bag inside.

I put my index finger up to my lips, whispered "Ssssss-ssssssshhh," and
slipped behind the wheel of the Miata. "I'm taking you for a ride.

Just relax and enjoy the scenery."

We left the airport and started up-island. After about a ten-minute ride
on the South Road, I turned the car off onto a wide-mouthed dirt drive,
unmarked and unpaved and full of rutted holes that threatened to devour
the small car.

"Am I being kidnapped?" Jake asked, tousling my hair. "Nobody at the
network will ransom me, you know. Take me away now and you'll be stuck
with me forever."

The brush was thick on both sides of the way, and we bounced along the
winding path for more than a mile until we came to a fence attached to
two wooden posts, which seemed to be standing on guard in the middle of
nowhere. I took a key from the glove compartment, got out of the car to
unlock the gate, drove through, and locked it again behind us.

"Where the hell are you taking me?" he asked with a laugh. "I'm
exhausted. Quite frankly, I was hoping for a long, hot shower in your
fancy new digs, and then well, something in the way of a warm welcome
stateside."

"I promise you'll feel like a new man after this. You've got to trust
me."

After a few more seconds I went around a bend, and ahead of us we saw
the flat stretch of the dusty long green grass of the wetlands, and a
pond populated only by a handful of swans. Beyond that were the rolling
dunes of South Beach, merging into the wide-open expanse of the Atlantic
Ocean.

There were a couple of other cars parked at the entrance to Black Point
Beach, on one of the most exquisite summer days. "What's with the gate
and key? Where is everybody?"

There are only two states in the country, Maine and Massachusetts, in
which you can own beachfront property to the mean low-water mark. As a
result, the Vineyard was dotted by vast lengths of ocean beaches that
were privately held and not accessible to the general public. This was
one of them more than a mile in length and I had bought a piece of it
when I purchased the house, more than a decade ago.

"Better than a shower. Let's go for a swim."

I parked the car, grabbed two towels from my tote, and ran to the
footpath that led over the dunes, kicking off my moccasins and telling
Jake to do the same with his loafers. We reached the peak together and
stood looking out at the wide belt of white sand and the white-capped
blue water that seemed to go on forever.

"Great, Alex. You think I didn't see enough of the Pacific, that I
needed this today?"

"Don't be such a grouch. Get those rags off you c'mon, hurry up."

"There are people "

I lifted my sunglasses and peered down the beach. "It looks like there
are maybe four stick figures between here and Edgar-town," I said,
turning to Jake and unbuttoning the business shirt that he had worn on
the plane, while he stood with his hands on his hips. I reached for his
waistband, drew off his belt, and unzipped his pants.

"Well, I guess if they won't recognize that you're the sex crimes
prosecutor from the big city, they won't have a clue that the tired,
naked guy you're molesting is a newscaster." Jake finished taking off
his clothes while I lifted my T-shirt over my head and dropped my shorts
on the sand. I ran down to the water's edge, hesitated for a moment as
the cold surf dashed against my feet, then dove into the
sixty-eight-degree water and started swimming straight out, away from
shore.

By the time I picked my head up and turned back to look for Jake, he had
overtaken me with a strong crawl stroke.

"Isn't this glorious?" I asked. I swam to him, wrapped my arms around
his neck, and we played our mouths against each other as we bobbed in
the endless roll of waves.

"I feel like I'm about fifteen years old and I like it."

There was nothing quite like the sensation of the brisk salty water
against bare skin. Swimming naked in the ocean ranks among the world's
best pastimes. I set myself a course parallel to the beach and swam back
and forth until I had done almost fifty laps. The undertow was getting
more fierce as the tide started going out, so I reluctantly dove under a
big breaker and went up on the sand to join Jake, who thought the water
was too cold for a long swim.

"I'm exhausted just watching you."

"Harrison High School swim team. Hundred-meter crawl and anchor of the
relay. Don't ever try to get away from me by taking a water route." I
stood behind him, steadying myself on his shoulder as I put my shorts
back on.


"I'm not going anywhere anytime soon," he said, grabbing my knee and
kissing the still-damp back of my calf. He pulled on his trousers and we
walked slowly over to the car, arms entangled, drying in the breeze as
the early afternoon wind shifted and kicked up a bit.

Once on the main road again, I was conscious of driving too fast and
tried to slow myself down. The outdoor shower was behind the house, its
oversized head curtained only by a couple of old lilac bushes. I soaped
up and washed off all the sand before going into my bedroom through the
sliding door off the rear deck.

Jake did the same, following me in and pulling me toward him, onto the
pale blue cotton sheets that covered the bed. "If dreaming counts, then
I've made love to you over and over again all these last two weeks in
hotel rooms, on airplanes, every time I closed my eyes."

"It doesn't count at all," I said teasingly. "I didn't feel a thing."

I reached an arm across his chest and he raised my face to his, his
tongue reaching in to taste mine. He ran his hands up and down the
length of my thighs as I wrapped my leg inside his. We kissed and rolled
and laughed and touched for as long as we could both stand to, and then
Jake entered me and told me that he loved me.

For the next hour we rested on the cool sheets while I explored the
surfaces of his body, which seemed so pale next to my own.

"Aren't you going to answer your phone?" he asked me when it rang.

"Let the machine get it."

"Coop? It's me. Are you okay? Nothing urgent, but I wanted to make sure
you got up there without any trouble. I started beeping you an hour ago
but "

It was Chapman's voice speaking into the recorder, so I
grabbed the receiver from beside the bed. "Hi, Mike. Sorry. Yeah, I'm
fine." For some reason that I didn't understand, it made me feel uneasy
to be lying in bed with Jake while I was talking to Mike, with whom I
had had such a close and complicated relationship for so long.

"For chrissakes, why didn't you call us back? Me and Mercer have been
worried about you after last night. Whaddaya trying to scare us for?"

I glanced over at Jake. I hadn't yet told him the story about the week's
events. "I apologize. Actually, I never even heard the beep. I stopped
off at the beach for a swim and left the beeper in the car. My fault I
won't do it again."

"Don't tell me, Coop. Your new man's into that From Here to Eternity
crap. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach, waves washing up
over them as they make love on the shore. That it? Too much sand in the
crotch for me, kid. I'd rather "

"Grow up," I snapped into the phone as I slammed it down on the table.

"Friend of yours?" Jake asked jokingly.

"A very good one, actually. One of the detectives on the Denise Caxton
case."

"Remind me not to cross you. Why did you hang up on him?" "Some other
time," I said, leaning back and caressing Jake as I did.

"Have you made a reservation for dinner? I'd love to grab a nap before
we go out."

"Even better. I thought you might enjoy a good home-cooked meal."

Jake looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. "Now I'm really confused.
What time zone am I in? Who are you?"

"While you're resting I'm going to sneak out for half an hour, and by
about eight thirty tonight we'll have a candlelit dinner for two." I
wasn't proud of the fact that I couldn't cook, but it was the truth.

"A little more exercise, and then you might lose me for a few hours,"
Jake said, pulling me over on top of him and starting to arouse me
again. "Put every one of those bad guys out of your mind, Alexandra
Cooper. This weekend you're all mine."

When I finally rested in his arms, half an hour later, we both fell
sound asleep. Shortly before six o'clock I showered and dressed and
headed down the road. In the little village of Menemsha, less than ten
minutes away, I could forage for an entire gourmet meal with no more
effort than a few phone calls and a quick ride.

My first stop was the Bite, where I picked up a steaming quart of clam
chowder and a side order of the world's best fried clams. True to form,
the Flynn sisters, had the most-up-to-the-moment island gossip.

"Heard you got a real looker with you for the weekend. Is it really that
guy on the evening news?" Karen asked.

"He hasn't even been out of my house yet. Who's spreading this one?"

She pointed at her sister. "Jackie's best friend works at the Cape Air
counter. She called as soon as you picked him up. Bringing him for lunch
tomorrow?"

"What, and lose him to one of you two? See you."

A quarter of a mile farther, I pulled into the narrow space beside
Larsen's Fish Market. One of the best services on the island was
provided by Betsy and Chris. You could call in the morning, place an
order for lobsters, and pick them up at the appointed hour all cooked,
split, and cracked ready to serve and eat. I could place them in the
oven to keep warm, and then serve up the two-pounders anytime I wanted.

I went next door, to Poole's, for a few fresh oysters from Tisbury 1JZ
Great Pond. Last stop was the Homeport Restaurant, right on the edge of
the harbor, where I stopped at the back door and bought a Key lime pie
from Will for dessert.

When I returned home, I shucked the corn and put the water up to boil,
poured the chowder into a pot to reheat it later on, and tucked the pie
into the refrigerator to keep it chilled.

It was almost eight o'clock when Jake woke up, shaved and showered, and
dressed for dinner. The red ball of the sun was setting off to the west
as we sat on the deck and sipped our drinks. I listened to the details
of the China trip and Jake's descriptions of the meetings he'd had, the
personalities he had met, and the opinions he had formed during his
travels. For me it was fascinating to get inside a world so foreign to
my own, and to contrast the problems of the witnesses' lives in a single
criminal case to the global problems he studied every day.

I disappeared into the kitchen to stir the pot, lit the candles in the
dining room, and opened a bottle of '91 Puligny-Montrachet. "Why don't
you come in and sit down?" I asked, dishing up the thick chowder and
carrying it to the table.

With Smokey Robinson singing in the background, we feasted on the
delicacies of a Chilmark summer, talking and laughing as we devoured the
food. As best as I could I tried to explain the events of the week since
Deni Caxton's death, walking Jake through the steps of the investigation
to date. "No more of this tonight or you'll have bad dreams," I said,
pouring decaf with a serving of the pie.

"Have you made any plans? Outing us to any of your pals this weekend?"

"Everyone, Jake. It's August on the Vineyard I don't have much choice,
do I?" The usually tranquil island more than quadrupled in population
with summer people, and it was an opportunity for me to be with friends
from all over the country some of whom I rarely saw all winter when I
came for a weekend or vacation.

"What's the drill?"

"We're teeing off with Janice and Richard at Farm Neck, eight A.M.
Louise Liberman and Maureen White are giving a cocktail party in the
evening, and we're invited to stay on for dinner." It had amazed me,
when Jake and I first met, to discover how many people we knew in
common. Those with whom I had social relationships of long standing, he
had gotten to know through his position in the media. Somehow it made us
seem even more connected than the short months we had known each other
would indicate. I looked forward to letting everyone see how happy I was
to be with him.

"Will the president and Mrs. Clinton be there tomorrow night?"

"Not sure, but I know they're invited. I hope so."

"Let's clean up this mess and go to sleep."

I held his face and kissed him on the forehead. "Go inside. This is the
part I do really efficiently. I'll join you in ten minutes."

By the time I cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, and straightened
up the kitchen, Jake was spreadeagled face down on the bed. I folded my
clothes and placed them in my armoire, slipping in beside him and
raising the comforter over us against the soft night wind that always
makes my hilltop such an easy place for sleeping. I don't remember any
tossing and turning after my head came to rest on the pillow.

I was startled by the sharp ring of the telephone. Light was just
appearing on the horizon as I picked it up and spoke softly into it. It
could not have been much later than 6 A.M. "Hello?" I asked somewhat
disoriented, perhaps by the hour, perhaps because of too much wine with
my dinner.

"Alex, it's Mercer. The lieutenant insisted on me calling you. Said you
raised a stink last time you read it in the newspaper without a heads-up
from us."

"Don't worry, he's right. What is it?" I sat up as Jake raised
his head and rested it on his elbow, massaging his eyelids with his
thumb and middle finger.

"West Side Eighty-sixth Street. Our man just hit again early this
morning, about an hour after midnight. Got a twenty-year-old kid going
into her building. Raped her, beat her up pretty bad when she tried to
resist. I hate to do this, but can you come on back into town?"

Nineteen.

I got out of bed, made the coffee, dressed in jeans and a blazer, and
sat on the deck while Jake unpacked his golf clothes from his duffel and
got ready to leave the house.

"You sure you don't want me to go back with you?"

"Of course not. It's a sin to leave anything as beautiful as all this
unless you have to.

You've got a lot of friends on the Vineyard," I said, "and tonight, when
I finally crawl into my bed at home, it will give me enormous pleasure
to close my eyes and think of you being right here, wrapped in my sheets
and looking out at this view.

"I'm the one who feels guilty, promising you a weekend together and then
flying off-island to go to work." I was worried that the
unpredictability of my job and its all-consuming nature when I was
working a big case or a complex trial would put Jacob Tyler off, as it
had done other men.

"Hey, if a guy with my schedule and lifestyle can't relate to this, then
you'd have something to worry about."

The airport was on the way to the golf course, so he dropped me at the
terminal, kissed me good-bye, and I promised to be careful and stay in
touch. There was no direct service to New York on Saturday morning, so I
took the next Cape Air flight to Boston and called the Special Victims
office to tell Mercer that I'd be on the ten-thirty shuttle.

With runway delays and air traffic, it was after eleven thirty when I
got through the gate at the Marine Air Terminal.

"Sorry, Alex. Sounds like you were planning a nice couple of days.

Hate like hell to pull you away from it."

"You know that's never a problem. How's she doing?"

"She'll be okay. She's got a lot of guts. Tried her damndest to fight
him off. She saw the gun but didn't think it was real, so " "That's some
chance to take," I said.

"You're not kidding. She grew up in Florida, around handguns. So she
felt pretty comfortable with her guess. Maybe she was right. The guy
stuck it back in his waistband and started to pummel her with his
fists."

"Completed rape?"

"Legally, yes. He penetrated but he didn't ejaculate. So there'll be no
DNA on this one."

The elements of the crime required penetration of the victim's vagina,
however slight, for the charge to be rape. Most victims had no reason to
be aware of this technicality, so many would tell us that the assailant
"tried" to rape them but hadn't completed the assault. In fact, the
insertion of the defendant's penis, whether or not he completed an act
of intercourse, was all that was needed, by law, to accomplish the act.

"Where are we going?"

"She's down at headquarters now, working on a sketch. The lieutenant
figured you'd want to get as detailed an interview as soon as possible,
so that's where we'll do it."

"What time did she leave the hospital?"

"I got called at home and went over to Roosevelt Hospital at three.

Treated and released. Had a head-to-toe exam, and one of the advocates
stayed with her the whole time." The Rape Crisis Intervention Program
run by the hospital was one of the best in the city. Like most others,
it was underfunded and staffed by volunteers, but the quality of the
care and service was superb.

"I took her home so she could clean up and rest for a while, then picked
her up at nine this morning to take her to One Police Plaza."

The NYPD had a unit of detectives whose specialty was the artistic
re-creation of likenesses of defendants, the police sketches that were
made into Wanted posters and distributed throughout the neighborhood at
risk or the city at large. Some preferred to work freehand, and others
used computer-generated programs that assigned a particular feature from
a description provided by a witness or victim. Every nuance, each subtle
distinction, led to a thickening of facial hair or a change in shape of
an eyelid. The results in many cases eventually proved to be almost
photographic reproductions of the attacker's face.

In this instance, with a serial rapist, the artists had already produced
several composites. And although each one resembled the others, there
were variations that were reflective of the circumstances under which
each woman saw the man who committed the crime. This witness would add
her own detail to the pictures that had already been circulated.

"You think it's too much for her if I go back over everything with her
today? Can she handle it now?" I asked Mercer,

trusting his judgment and knowing the sensitivity that he brought to
this work.

"I didn't push her. Thought if you and I did the questioning together at
once, we'd get whatever we need, and she'd have to explain it all one
less time. She's game, Alex. Determined to get this guy and put him
behind bars forever." He had pulled away from the curb and we were
headed for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the bridge to Manhattan.

"I promised her I'd find him and that you'd make sure he never sees
daylight again. She's really eager to talk to you."

So much had changed in this business, just in my professional lifetime.

Women, who had traditionally been reluctant to report cases of sexual
violence, were now far more likely to come forward, as society lifted
the age-old stigma on victims who cried rape, and began placing the
blame where it belonged: on the offender. Still, those who were attacked
by strangers and not acquaintances were believed more readily and were
far more likely to be victorious in the courtroom. Paul Battaglia, who
was passionate about this issue, had devoted resources to prosecuting
these cases that no other office in the country could match. Whether the
assailant was a date, a relative, a spouse, or a professional colleague
of the victim, we had a mandate to vigorously investigate and take to
trial the case of any credible witness who deserved her day in court.

"Guess you didn't get much rest last night," I said. Mercer looked
exhausted. He had worked all week on the Caxton case, which relieved him
of other duties at the Special Victims Squad. So he had not caught new
cases, but he was still the one they beeped when the West Side rapist
struck. He had been assigned to that task force from the outset, and the
lieutenant counted on his skill in relating to victims, as well as his
ability to remember the similarity in modus operandi language, actions,
order of the sexual acts that would help coordinate all the cases in the
pattern.

He laughed. "First night in weeks I had some companionship in the form
of a warm body, other than Chapman. I don't think I'd been home an hour
when I got the call." He took his eye off the road for a moment to look
over at me. "This job can't do much for your love life either, can it?"

"I'm in no position to complain after you gave me the day off
yesterday." I spent the rest of the ride telling Mercer about my evening
with Jake and how relaxing a single day away from the city had been.

"Did anything important develop on Caxton?" I asked, as we parked behind
headquarters and walked up the long sets of steps from Park Row to the
front of the building.

"Bits and pieces. The manufacturer of the ladder found the lot number of
the one that was attached to the deceased. Sold last spring to a
hardware store on lower Broadway. We got them checking receipts now.

Not going to be any kind of surprise if it came from her own gallery.

Wouldn't have been unusual for Omar to have one accessible to him.

You'd need to use them to install all the art and exhibits.

"And we located Preston Mattox, the architect boyfriend of Deni's. He
was abroad on business all week. Gets back here today. Said he'd give me
a call so we could speak to him about her this weekend."

"What did Crime Scene come up with on Varelli?"

"The studio was clean as a whistle. Someone got in and out without
leaving a print, or else they polished the place up before they left.

Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Only thing that looked out of place
was a pair of sunglasses." "Prescription?" I asked optimistically.

"Not so lucky. Could belong to anybody, but they're just a bit too mod
for the old man. And there is a young apprentice


who worked for Varelli. He's been home in California all month, visiting
his family. He wasn't due back here until after Labor Day.

But he's apparently distraught, so he's coming in tonight to see the
widow. We can interview him on Monday.

"Also, Caxton's lawyer came up with more of the letters that Denise had
received from her blackmailer. Mike didn't see any point in taking them
to the lab for fingerprints. They'd already been handled by too many
people for us to get anything off them. He copied them for the case
folder. Said he'd take a set home to read this weekend."

We had gone through the security checkpoint and were in the elevator
heading upstairs to the artists' unit.

Josie Malendez was sitting with two plainclothes detectives, eating a
roast beef sandwich and drinking a can of soda. She smiled as she saw
Mercer enter the room, and I struggled to show no reaction as I looked
at the large purple bruise that had swelled and caused the closing of
her left eye. She squinted at me from the good one and held out a hand.
"You must be Alex Cooper."

Mercer and I let her finish her lunch. We examined the sketch that
resulted from her session with the detectives. "She gives him a rounder
face than the last two. Thinner mustache, same eyes, same nose. And
she's adamant about the lisp. Slight, but it's there. She's the first
one to mention anything significant about his speech."

"She's the first one to engage him in as much conversation, trying to
talk him down, talk him out of it, isn't she?" I asked, relying on
Mercer's knowledge of the details. "And she was stone sober unlike the
last two which makes me want to trust her observations even more. They
giving this one to the press?"

"Yeah. The commissioner and the mayor want it for the six o'clock news.
Any objections?"

"Nope. Ask them to use the same quote from Battaglia's comment, the one
he gave last time the guy struck. It got lost in the coverage of the
bomb scare story that broke the same night."

We knew that for a rapist to be operating in the same geographic area
for more than two years, it had to be, for him, a comfort zone. Clearly
he was someone who lived or worked in the neighborhood and could move
about it easily without seeming to be suspicious. If the police and
scientific techniques did not break the case, our best hope was that a
neighbor or coworker would notice a resemblance to the sketch and call
the hot line with a tip. The most difficult thing to overcome was the
stereotypical reaction of most of the public that the guy who lives next
door couldn't possibly be a rapist.

When it apoeared that Josie had finished eating and had a few minutes to
rest quietly, I went over to sit with her and began to talk, to explain
the process. The detectives who had worked with her on the drawing
excused themselves, and Mercer replaced them at the table, ready to take
notes of our conversation.

Our questions had to be more specific than those that had yet been
asked. While the physician who had conducted the physical needed answers
to what kind of contact had occurred and what Josie had experienced at
her attacker's hands, and the uniformed cop who responded to her home
had asked for the broad outlines of the criminal event, Mercer and I
began our probe in microscopic detail. Things that frequently seemed
insignificant to the victim were crucial to our ability to put the
puzzle together, and often to link one case to another. I always started
the process by explaining to the witness why such seemingly irrelevant
minutiae could be useful to us.

And so we went on, asking Josie to explain her whereabouts all
throughout the previous afternoon and early evening. While her actions
may have had nothing to do with what happened on her front doorstep, we
could not eliminate

the possibility that she and her assailant had crossed paths earlier
that night, or that he had followed her from one location to another.

The original police report, as in most cases, had summed up Josie's
assault in a single sentence: "At the time and place of occurrence, the
defendant displayed a pistol, beat the complaining witness about the
face with his fists, causing physical injury, and thereby forcibly
engaged her in an act of sexual intercourse."

Almost four hours after we began to talk with our victim, Mercer and I
were ready to wrap up the interview. We knew exactly how the rapist's
approach had been made, where Josie was in regard to him when she was
first aware of his presence, the precise language he had used when he
accosted her in the vestibule of the building, and how she had responded
to him. We knew in which hand he had held the weapon, and what about its
design and appearance had allowed her to assume that it was an
imitation.

The process was inordinately draining on the witness, and we were keenly
aware of that.

"Can you think of anything else that we haven't asked you that you think
we should know?"

"Not a thing." Josie's fatigue was obvious.

"Are you going home tonight?" I asked. It was almost six o'clock.

"No, no. I'm not ready to go back there alone. My sister lives in
Brooklyn Heights. I'm going to spend some time with her till I figure
out what I want to do."

"That's smart. I'm sure the counselor at the hospital told you, but
these first few nights are going to be hard."

"I know. The doctor gave me something to help me sleep."

"Yeah, but even sleeping doesn't always provide an escape. You may have
dreams nightmares, actually and flashbacks.

You'll see people on the streets who will remind you physically of your
attacker, and you may have a visceral reaction tremble, recoil, cry.

All of these things are normal in light of your experience. And believe
it or not, time will truly make it better."

"And finding this son of a bitch will be the best of all," Mercer
assured her.

One of the detectives who had done the sketch was driving home to Bay
Ridge and said he would deliver Josie to her sister's apartment. I
walked with her to the restrooms down the quiet hallway, and waited
while she went inside. In a few minutes, from where I stood, I could
hear her sobs coming from within. I opened the door and found the young
woman leaning against the sink, running a finger over the discolored
portion of her thin face as she stared at her almost unrecognizable
image in the mirror.

I walked to her side and placed my arm around her shoulder. She turned
and pressed the unharmed side of her face against me, her chest heaving
as she tried to speak but couldn't catch her breath to do so.

"Don't try to talk. Let it go, Josie."

Her body became deadweight in my arms as she cried for several minutes.

She pulled away from me and washed her face again in the sink. "Whew.

I hadn't shed a tear until now. I was so intent on following everyone's
directions and being cooperative, but there's nothing left in me to
give. It's like he took everything away from me."

"You're alive, Josie, and that's the most important thing. Whatever you
did last night was the right thing, because you walked away from him in
one piece. You'll triumph in the end. The hard part is catching him
that's Mercer's job. Convicting him, with a witness like you, won't be
difficult at all. We won't let you down I can promise you that."

I led her back to the detectives' office. Mercer told Josie that he'd be
in touch with her on Monday to set up an appointment to look through mug
shots of sex offenders, and we said good-bye to her.

"We've got to figure out what to do about you for the rest of the
weekend. Battaglia thinks you're safely tucked away in the country."

"Drive me home and I swear to you I'll stay at the apartment all day
tomorrow. Sleep in, read books, watch old movies. Nobody knows I'm in
town. It'll be heaven."

Mercer called his office to see if there were any messages, but there
were none. Then he checked the Homicide Squad to see if any of the
witnesses expected in town had phoned to leave word for Mike Chapman.

The civilian worker who answered the phones at Manhattan North said
there were two calls during the afternoon. Mercer listened to her relay
the messages and asked her to let the lieutenant know he was on top of
both situations. Then he repeated the news to me. "Preston Mattox is
available to come into the office on Monday afternoon to meet with Mike
and me.

"And Marina Sette called. Didn't leave a number, because she said she'd
had to check out of her hotel after receiving some threatening phone
calls. She didn't know how to get in touch with ADA. Cooper, so she
asked if Mike or I could meet her tomorrow morning."

"Where? In your office?"

He looked down at the notes he had scribbled in his pad. "Said she's
staying with an artist she knows in Chelsea. There's an exhibit being
set up for an opening later this week in a brand-new gallery called
Focus. It's in a renovated warehouse on Twenty-first Street, a block
away from Deni's place. She'll be waiting in the office at the back of
the exhibit, Sunday morning at nine. And she wants me or Mike whoever
keeps the meet to bring you along."


"Why me?" I didn't mean it seriously. But my visions of languishing in
bed with the Sunday Times crossword puzzle were dissipating quickly.

Mercer looked up from his pad. "Ms. Sette says you're the only one she's
comfortable talking to, the only one she trusts. Says she's come up with
information about Denise Caxton's murder that she thinks you'd really
like to hear."

Twenty.

I called the Four Seasons Hotel and the front desk confirmed that
Marilyn Seven had checked out first thing this morning.

"You want me to invite Chapman to go with us tomorrow?" Mercer asked.

"Let him take his mother to Mass. I think we got on each other's nerves
yesterday. If you don't mind doing this without him, I'm game."

"Why the mystery from Ms. Sette, do you think?"

"I don't know. She was very secretive about Lowell Caxton not knowing
she was in town. He had no trouble guessing correctly that she was the
source of some of our information. Anyway, she seemed to like creating a
little suspense. Told me she used to be an actress, and I think she
still has a flair for the dramatic. Hey, a little culture on a Sunday
morning can't be too bad for either of us."

, "On one condition. You let me sleep on the couch in your den tonight
consider it that you're saving me a long ride home, not that I'm
baby-sitting. It'll make Battaglia and the lieutenant happy, and give us
a jump start in the morning."

"You're in charge, Detective Wallace. Do I get dinner before you lock me
in for the night?"

"Seems to me I haven't had Chinese food in weeks. I could go for some
Peking duck at Shun Lee Palace. How about you?"

"My mouth is watering. Give me a few minutes, I've got to make a call."
I dialed my house on the Vineyard and Jake answered on the first ring.
"How's the sunset tonight?"

"I'm sitting on the deck with my drink, ready to drive to Louise's for
cocktails and dinner. How's your day been?"

"Long. We're just about to leave headquarters now. Mercer and I are
going to have dinner together, and he's going to spend the night at the
apartment. We've got a date in the morning with a skittish witness on
the homicide."

"I'm glad he's going to stay with you. It's smart, till somebody knows
what's going on. Tell him I'm insanely jealous, will you? I'll call you
when I get home tonight."

"Give my love to everyone."

Mercer and I drove uptown and spent a quiet evening enjoying a good meal
and the ambiance of the handsome dining room. We parked in the driveway
in front of my building and Mercer left his police plate in the
windshield so the car would not be disturbed overnight. We went upstairs
and settled in, flipping channels on the television looking for
something to watch and settling on CNN, until Jake called to give me a
rundown on the party. I watched a bit more TV until I got drowsy enough
to say good night and go inside.

When I awakened, shortly after seven, Mercer had already
brought the newspaper inside and brewed a pot of coffee. "Slim
pickings," he said to me as he surveyed the near-empty shelves of the
refrigerator.

"Check the freezer. I've always got a package of English muffins in
there."

While I showered, he nuked the muffins and put them in the toaster. We
sat at the dining room table like a married couple, each coming out of
the night's slumber at our own speed, buried in our favorite piece of
the Sunday news. Mercer had his head completely immersed in the Sports
section. I skimmed the book review, reading the "Crime" column to scout
for new mystery writers, and checked the best-seller lists.

"You're not drinking your coffee," I said.

"I hate this flavored stuff. It's really a girl thing."

"It's Colombian cinnamon. I think it's delicious." I picked up the Arts
and Leisure section and riffled through to find the write-ups on
galleries and exhibits. "Here's a piece about Focus the place we're
going to this morning."

"What does it say?" Mercer was dumping the dregs of his cup into the
sink and looking in my kitchen cabinets for a different coffee blend.

"Mind if I make another pot of dark French roast?"

"Go ahead. Focus is described as a ' new exhibition space dedicated to
long-term installations of works of art that are unlikely to be
accommodated by existing museums because of their scale and substance."
Apparently, like everything else in that neighborhood, the place used to
be a warehouse building. It's massive forty-four thousand square feet."

"Is it open yet?"

"Doesn't seem to be. There's a scheduled premiere the first week of
September."

"Who owns it?" I continued to scan the article. "Doesn't mention. This
is mostly a description of what it's going to have, why it was built,
how unusual it is." I paused to read on. "Hey, we're in luck. Ever hear
of Richard Serra?"

Mercer shook his head in the negative.

"He's probably the greatest sculptor alive. Had a superb show at the
Museum of Modern Art not too long ago. His work is set up now for the
opening. Sounds extraordinary. Want me to read it to you?"

"Sure." Mercer was seated again, waiting for the new pot of coffee to be
ready. He picked up the Sports section once more as I tried to describe
the show at the gallery.

"It's called Torqued Ellipses VI. The concept grew out of Serra's
fascination with ships and with steel. Are you imitating Mike Chapman,
or are you going to listen to this?"

Mercer put down the paper and I showed him the photograph of the massive
steel plates, more than a dozen feet high and several inches thick.

He was impressed. The pieces looked formidably strong, resembling curved
hulls of three ocean liners split into a handful of pieces and laid out
on the floor of the renovated space like a giant maze, covering more
than eight thousand square feet.

"I thought you were talking about tiny little sculptures. These things
look like the base of the Titanic. How does he do it?" "The article says
Serra contacted every mill in the world, until he found a machine that
had been used in World War Two, at a shipyard near Baltimore called Beth
Ship, that could roll and bend these huge pieces of steel plate. Each
one of them weighs twenty tons."

"So I guess Ms. Sette picked a good spot to hold this conversation.

She can tell us about the people running the place. Must be a friend
who's letting her use it."

I went inside, ran a brush through my hair, and put on some lipstick. I
had on a linen pants suit with ballet flats, casual but professional.

The morning was overcast and the air-conditioning in the car and in the
gallery was likely to be cool.

It was shortly before nine when Mercer drove into the quiet street.

There were no residential buildings, a scattering of still-used
warehouses, and four galleries that probably wouldn't open on a summer
Sunday until after one o'clock, if at all. As Mercer parked, I pointed
out the Hi-Line tracks that sliced through the middle of Twenty-second
Street, north to south, rife with weeds, just as they had looked when
they passed through the Caxton Due gallery and ran on downtown. It still
surprised me that neither one of us had ever been aware of the tracks
till we saw them when we were here with Mike the week before.

The entrance to the new gallery was quite discreet, a rectangular white
sign with very small letters printed in jet black ink: Focus.

Mercer put his hand on the doorknob to test it, expecting to find it
locked. It gave at once and opened into the dimly lit space. A young
woman came forward and invited us in. "Good morning," she said. "I've
been expecting you."

I recognized her immediately as the receptionist who had been at Bryan
Daughtry's office on Thursday, when the three of us had gone there with
the subpoenas. The face was less distinctive than the four silver studs
in her right ear, the three in her left, and the small ring piercing one
of her eyebrows.

I followed Mercer inside. "Is Ms. Sette here yet?" he asked.

"I'm not sure who's coming, exactly, but you're the first ones to
arrive. I was told to be here to open the gallery and let the police
officers in. You're welcome to look around. I'll be up front at the door
if you need anything. Hope you don't get seasick," she said to me,
smiling. "It's a really weird feeling inside those things."

Mercer and I stood at the prow of the first sculpture, which loomed over
us like the hull of a great oil tanker. I rounded the corner and stood
in the space between two ends of the first ellipse. When I looked back
at Mercer, I couldn't help but laugh. It was so unusual to see any
physical thing that dwarfed him so completely.

"What's it like inside?"

I stepped between the enormous curved surfaces and started to walk to
the far end. It was immediately confusing and disorienting to the
senses. I knew I was standing still on a flat surface, but the
arrangement of the pieces made the entire thing feel out of proportion
and dizzying. To my left, the structure bowed outward and was wider at
the top, more than ten feet above my head. The one to my right sloped
inward, and when I raised my eyes to see its top, I had a claustrophobic
reaction, as though the entire steel frame might fall on me if I so much
as brushed against it.

"Whoa, c'mon in, Mercer. It's almost like a brilliantly artistic fun
house. I see what she was talking about it's a very bizarre spatial
illusion." Mercer paused in the entry while I kept walking, about to
exit the first ellipse and trail around its outer side to get to the
second one, in which the side shapes were set up in reverse. Each of the
five forms was angled in a dramatic fashion, different from the others.
He caught up to me inside the third figure, bracing himself against a
wall the reverse in shape from the last one, which surprised him so
radically.

"Don't lean on it," I said, half jokingly. "Doesn't it seem like it
would fall over and crush us instantly?"

Mercer was fascinated with the composition of the colossal steel plates,
and stopped to bend and rub his hands up and down against the skin of
the sculpture. "This mother isn't going anywhere, Alex. It must have
been like moving a bunch of battleships to get it in here.

Man's a genius."

He straightened up at a sound coming from the front of the warehouse
space. "D'you hear that?"

"Sounded like the door closing. Let's go meet her." I moved to find my
way out of the ellipse and toward the front of the gallery.

"Hold it. That noise after the door closed, that's what I'm talking
about."

"I didn't hear it. I must have been speaking to you."

"Wait here, Alex. Let me see who came in."

Mercer passed by me, motioning me to stay put as he walked out of my
line of sight.

I could distinguish the sound of the hard-soled bottoms of his loafers
clicking on the concrete floor, moving away from me. I heard him call
out "Hello," then pause and call it out again, but the words only echoed
in the cavernous expanse of the room without eliciting a response.

"Oh, shit!" he exploded. "Hold still, Alex, stay there. I'm coming to
get you."

I heard his first exclamation and started to run, screaming, "What?" as
I did, until I heard his command for me to stop.

I was turned around inside this torqued ellipse, not certain where the
front or back of the gallery would be when I emerged. I could make out
the sound of what I thought was Mercer's shoes pounding toward me, and
then something softer, perhaps rubber-bottomed, coming at me from
another direction. There was nothing to hide behind or duck under within
the shell of the sculpture, and I didn't have the least idea about
whether there actually was an office in the rear of the exhibition
space, and if so, whether it would be locked or open.

I was frozen in the same spot, accustomed now to the obscure lighting
and the lack of contrast between the gray steel mammoths and the
interior walls and ceiling. My yellow linen suit stood out against the
dark colors like the bull's-eye on a target, and my head whipped back
and forth, not knowing from which direction my friend would appear.


At the same moment as I saw Mercer's hand grab the end of the ellipse, I
heard him yell, "Alex, DOWN! Now!" The discharge of his gun resounded
like a cannon in the open space between the sculptures as he fired at
someone I could not see.

I squatted on my haunches as though I were on the starting blocks of a
relay, fingertips poised to lift me up and out the moment Mercer gave
the next order. His single shot was met by a return salvo of two or
three bullets, which pinged off the side of the steel almost even with
the level of my head as I crouched and cowered.

Mercer's left hand reached around for me, and I moved to meet it.

Without more than a glance, he grabbed me by the wrist and we started to
jog in the direction of one of the other structures, Mercer's large
frame running interference for me as we searched in vain for something
that would provide a shield.

"It's your stocking-mask guy from the garage," he whispered, trying to
catch his breath and check the gun that he usually kept holstered on his
ankle.

"The girl?" I knew the answer before I asked the question.

"Dead." He stopped to listen for noise and heard none. "At some point
I'm gonna signal you to run, and you're gonna move like a gazelle to get
to that front door and call in a ten-thirteen."

Word on a police radio that an officer needed assistance was the
universal beacon to summon cops to any emergency situation in which
another cop's life was at risk.

"Not without "

"That's movie bullshit, Coop. When I send you, you fly."

There was no point arguing. It was a decision I would have to make if an
opportunity even presented itself to us.

Mercer stepped in front of me, practically flattening me against the
side of one of the exteriors. He must have heard a sound that I had not
picked up. He cocked his ear in the direction of its source and moved in
a 180-degree arc as he turned to fire off another round. He swung back
in front of me and waited for the return fire, as my sweaty palms
pressed an imprint on top of the dark steel.

Now the padded footsteps had drawn closer, and I could actually hear
them running across the floor on the far side of this ellipse, toward
our position.

"We're moving," Mercer mouthed to me as he briefly turned his head to
face mine. Again he took me by the wrist, and we dashed around into the
sculpture we had stood behind, and through its far end, bullets chasing
us and bouncing off the cylindrical walls as we zigged and zagged
together.

I trusted that Mercer was trying to find his way to the front door.

Despite the variety in shape and curve, every one of the steel walls
looked identical to me. Their height and their solidity had become
oppressive, and I tried to steady myself as I ran behind him, praying
that he had maintained some idea of the relationship between these
gigantic barriers to our freedom.

Pure silence again. Mercer bent his head to peer around the edge, then
looked back at me and winked. His lips formed the word "now," and he
tugged on my jacket sleeve to try to propel me out in front of him.

With blind faith in his instincts, I broke into a trot and sped through
the length of one more sculpture. At its far end, I thought I made out
the doorway that led to the street and an escape. I looked over my
shoulder to make sure that Mercer was coming along with me, and as I did
I could see the expression of horror cross his face.

"Down!" he screamed at me again as he saw the gunman run into place
behind my back, aiming at me from a site between me and the gallery
exit.

Shots were fired from both guns, and someone shrieked in pain. I
couldn't tell whose voice had cried out, but in the split second after
hearing the noise, I bolted in Mercer's direction.

"Stay right here, Alex. I got him." Mercer's gun was in his
hand as he overtook me and raced toward the masked figure, who was bent
over from the waist and trying to run to the door. He seemed to be
dragging his left leg.

I ignored Mercer's order and chased after him as he let himself out the
door. When I was within ten feet of the front wall, I could see the body
of the receptionist slumped over in a leather armchair, blood oozing
from her forehead a fraction of an inch away from her pierced eyebrow. I
stopped in my tracks, turning to kneel and check her for a pulse.

As I dropped to my knees, Mercer was edging himself to the long metal
bar that pushed out onto the street. Suddenly daylight flooded into the
huge space of the gallery as the door was pulled by someone on the
outside. A burst of light exploded close to where I saw Mercer standing,
at about the same time as I heard the noise of the discharge.

The gunman had swung the heavy entrance open from the sidewalk and let
off three more shots into the gallery.

Mercer Wallace collapsed to the floor without uttering a sound.

Twenty-One.

I picked up Mercer's hand and spoke his name with an urgency I had never
known before. His eyes opened, and he tried to talk but could not.

"Thank God," I said. "Stay with me, Mercer. I'm getting help."

The doorway gave against my push and I was on the street. Three teenage
boys were Rollerblading, heading westward to the piers. I had no idea
where in the gallery I had dropped my tote and the cell phone I kept
inside it. "Call nine-one-one," I shouted at them. "Please call
nine-one-one tell them a cop is shot. Please!"

One of the kids held his index finger and thumb together in an okay'
sign and skated off, I assumed, to a telephone on the corner. The other
two came to the sidewalk and were only seconds behind me as I scrambled
back to Mercer's side.

I sat on the floor next to his motionless body and tried to find where
he was hit. His eyes flickered open and he attempted to follow the
movements of my hands.

"Oh, shit," I said, both to myself and to the boys, who stood
dumbfounded at my back, not knowing what to make of the dead girl and
the dying cop. "Are you sure your friend's going to call nine-one-one?

One of you should stand in front of this place so you can point it out
when the police car comes." I was barking commands like a general.

"Get out to Tenth Avenue. Flag down anyone you can find to get in here
to help."

One kid took off but the other watched with fascination as I folded back
the lapels of Mercer's jacket and saw the bullet hole that had torn
through his clothes and perforated the left side of his chest, terribly
close to his heart.

"Bad," Mercer mumbled as I held my ear over his mouth to better hear
him. He opened his lips to say more. No sound came out as he turned his
head away from me and his eyelids shut.

"Don't close your eyes, Mercer. Don't close your eyes, please." I could
hear sirens in the distance and I kept on praying that he wouldn't lose
consciousness, that I wouldn't see his eyes roll back into his head. I
held one of his strong hands in my own, stroking his face and head,
trying to keep him with me by talking at him ceaselessly.

"Listen to me, Mercer," I begged him. "I can hear a siren. They're on
the way. We'll get you to Vinny's in three minutes. Stay with me,
Mercer. You got that son of a bitch, now stay with me, please." Saint
Vincent's Hospital was less than ten blocks away, with an emergency room
well equipped to handle trauma like gunshot wounds.

I watched his chest move up and down, his labored breathing giving off a
low, rumbling noise from his throat. "Keep looking at me, Mercer.

I'm gonna be with you through everything, just give me a chance.

Breathe for me." I was wiping sweat off his forehead with my fingers as
it dripped down both sides of his neck and into his eyes.

The smallest blader skated back in the door. "We got a fire truck,
okay?"

"That's great, that's excellent. Hear that, Mercer? We got a truck
coming in." I turned back to the kid. "Tell them we need an ambulance."
He was gone again.

Mercer's mouth curled up on one side, as though he was trying to smile.

I pressed the palm of his hand to my lips. Again I started babbling
anything I could think of to keep him alert. I talked about Mike and
about food and about the department and about how he could go to my
house on the Vineyard for his recovery, and as I was rambling on to the
next topic, four firemen in all their gear tore into the room and
surrounded us.

I got up and stepped back, telling them that Mercer was a detective and
that he had been shot at close range in the chest. Before I could finish
the explanation, an ambulance had pulled up next to the hook and ladder
parked in front of the gallery. I got lost in the commotion as the EMS
team started an IV drip in Mercer's arm and loaded him onto a stretcher.
As I stood on the sidewalk, five radio cars pulled into the block from
both directions, responding to the call for assistance that each cop
dreads most of all, for himself and for everyone else in blue.

Now I was just a hanger-on at the fringe of the growing crowd. None of
the officers who arrived knew me, and my identification and badge were
somewhere in my bag on the floor of the gallery. I pushed the kids who
had helped me out of the way, trying to explain to the cops who Mercer
was and what had happened.

The EMS workers lifted the stretcher onto the rear of the ambulance, and
as it tilted, I could see that Mercer's eyes were closed shut. "I'm
going with you," I shouted over the heads of the firemen who were
clustered around the wagon.

"Sorry, lady. You'll have to meet us at the hospital Seventh Avenue and
Eleventh Street." One of the men was getting into the driver's seat and
the other was closing the first side of the double rear doors.

I squeezed ahead and climbed up onto the back running board. There was
no point telling them I was an assistant district attorney. That fact,
without any supporting identification, didn't buy me a ride on the
ambulance. "I'm his wife!" I screamed at them. "I'm going with him."

I ducked into the van, and the medical technician came in behind me and
slammed the door.

I held Mercer's hand for the short ride, ambulance sirens blaring, as we
were escorted to Saint Vincent's by three police cars leading the charge
downtown.

I couldn't tell if the moisture on the crease near Mercer's left eye was
perspiration or a tear, but a big drop formed and hung there until the
shifting of the stretcher dislodged it as his body was removed and
carried toward the entrance of the emergency room. He didn't open his
eyes, not even for a moment.

Twenty-Two.

"Stop beating yourself up over it, kid. He's a cop and you're not.

Aren't we supposed to take bullets for the rest of you ungrateful
assholes who delight in calling us pigs? You didn't shoot him. Some
friggin' mutt who I should have alone in my office for maybe fifteen
minutes ... "

I had beeped Chapman even before I called the lieutenant and the
district attorney. "It's my fault we kept the meet without telling you
about it."

"Great, blondie. You wanted me pumped full of lead too, huh?" Mike had
raced to the hospital, arriving within an hour of my call, and was
waiting with me for word from Mercer's surgeon. He was white with fear
about his friend's medical condition, and his fingers combed through his
hair constantly a sure sign of his agitation.

"What did you tell Spencer?" Mercer's father was a widower, retired from
his job as a mechanic at Delta Air Lines. Mike had stopped by his home
in Queens on his way to the hospital, to tell Spencer Wallace about the
shooting.

"Man, that sucked. Better me than seeing some chaplain on your doorstep,
like it was normal for him to drop in every week to pray for Mercer's
well-being. I just didn't want his pop to hear it on the news later
without some personal contact first. Might be the toughest thing I've
ever done." Mike stopped pacing long enough to sit down on one of the
institutional beige vinyl chairs in the waiting lounge and rest his head
back against the neck cushion.

"Did he want to come here with you?" I knew Spencer had already suffered
a mild stroke earlier in the year and had not yet fully recovered. But
Mercer was the light of his life, and it tore me apart to think of how
the impact of this event would pain him.

"Yeah, but I told him absolutely not. He just looks so weak to begin
with, Alex, and I knocked whatever remained right out of his guts. His
sister lives down the block, so I called her to come in to sit with him
for the afternoon." Mercer had two ex-wives and no current steady.

"Spencer was worried about you, too. He just looked at me and said that
you and I are Mercer's family now. We're the ones to be with him today."

Mike was on his feet again, first circling the room, then walking out
the doorway.

"Where are you going?"

"I got some calls to make. Sit tight."

"There's a phone right here. We can use my credit card number to get an
outside line."

Mike ignored me and walked off. I understood the dynamic and knew that,
as close as the three of us were, I was an out sider in these
circumstances. The fraternity of police officers who put their lives on
the line every day for the rest of us circles the wagons pretty tightly
when one of their own is harmed. I had been there today with Mercer, but
I had escaped injury. Most cops swear they would rather have given their
own life than to have failed to protect a partner. I didn't carry a gun
and would not have been expected to play the role that a police officer
would play in this situation. But my heart was heavy with guilt knowing
that I had drawn Mercer into a situation that had, perhaps, cost him his
life.

"Are you Miss. Cooper?"

The halls were swarming with cops some of whom had responded to the news
of a downed colleague, others of whom Mercer had worked with and had
heard of the shooting through the department grapevine. The commissioner
was coming back by helicopter from a weekend upstate, and the mayor was
expected to arrive at the hospital within the next hour to visit
Mercer's bedside.

"Yes, I am." "Lieutenant Gibbons asked me to bring these to you. Thought
you might need '." The young patrolman handed me a brown paper bag.
Inside were my identification badge, wallet, keys, and cell phone. "Said
to tell you that he had to keep the pocketbook and the rest of the
contents to send over to Latent to be processed for prints."

I couldn't remember when I had dropped the bag from my shoulder, and
even though I doubted the gunman had stopped to touch my belongings, I
knew the routine investigation of a police officer's shooting would
include the most painstaking details. This gunman would be found.

"Tell him thanks."

Chapman reentered the room. "Man, you don't want to set foot out in the
lobby of this place. The hospital is crawling with reporters. Last thing
they need to see is a bloodstained prosecutor, and Battaglia'll have you
begging for a job with the Legal Aid Society's Baghdad branch office." I
glanced down at the pale yellow suit now covered with blood from
Mercer's wound.

"Maybe Mickey Diamond was right. Maybe his fictitious story saying we
were close to a solution and an arrest made the killer nervous and drove
him to the surface."

"Did you call the other emergency rooms?" I asked, pretty certain that
the shooter had fled only because Mercer had nailed him in the thigh
with at least one shot, and that the wound was serious enough to need
treatment.

"That's a waste of time. He ain't walking into that kind of trap, if
he's been this smart."

"Just do it. Remember the Trenta story?" I had handled a case a year
before in which a burglar had surprised a woman in her apartment and,
after stealing her money, demanded that she perform oral sex on him. As
she kneeled on the cold linoleum floor in her kitchen and placed her
mouth on the defendant's penis, she noticed that he put his knife down
on the counter. So instead of acceding to his request, she bit him as
hard as she could and kept biting as the defendant howled in pain.

An hour later, Harry Trenta walked into Roosevelt Hospital and asked to
be treated for an injury to his private parts that occurred, he told the
nurse, when he fell out of bed. She examined what she described in her
notes as a "shredded penis" a condition completely inconsistent with a
fall and contacted the local precinct to ask whether anyone had reported
a recent attempt at a sexual assault.

As is often the case, we count on the stupidity of the perpetrators to
make our jobs easier. In this instance, that kind of slip had not yet
occurred. Mike didn't expect us to get lucky now.

"Someone else can take care of that end of it. I did check out Santa Fe.
Marina Sette got back there yesterday afternoon. The airline can
probably confirm that for us. In any event, my guess is that she was
airborne when that call was made to the squad asking us to come to the
gallery. So either she's a part of this phoned from the plane or had
someone else place the call for her or whoever set it up knew she was
unreachable all afternoon and that's why her name was used."

In the hours since Mike had arrived at the hospital, I had also brought
him up to date on the contacts Mercer had told me about yesterday. Mike
had made appointments to see Preston Mattox and Varelli's apprentice,
Don Cannon, on Monday, but I also knew that he would not step outside
the doors of Saint Vincent's no matter how long it took until he could
see Mercer.

Again Mike was pacing. "Your faithful pal Mickey Diamond has a new one
for his Wall of Shame." The Post reporter papered the small pressroom in
the courthouse with his frontpage stories. "News radio's already calling
this one

"Slaughter off Tenth Avenue." No doubt they're gonna run that poor
girl's puss all over the tabloids. What a waste of a life she was just
in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. This guy is a monster."

Mercer had been in surgery for more than four hours at this point. Mike
and I were running out of things to distract us. Every half hour brought
a new wave of detectives who came by to console, to pray, to offer blood
or whatever aid was needed. The mayor and police commissioner had given
their sound bites from the hospital lobby, urged all the citizens of New
York to keep Mercer in their prayers, and moved on.

When two men in green scrubs that were stained like my suit entered the
room smiling, Mike embraced me before they could speak. "Your partner's
going to make it," one surgeon said. "We've just "

"Well, what the hell took you so damn long to let us know?" Chapman
asked. "We'd like to be with him." He was walking to the door while the
surgeon was still talking, and I knew he was fighting back tears that he
didn't want me to see.

"Mr. Wallace is still in the recovery room. Give him another couple of
hours there, and when he gets to intensive care, one or two of you can
be with him briefly."

Mike did not turn his face to me but said that he was going down the
hall to call Mercer's father and give him the good news.

"I'm Alex Cooper. I was with the detective when he was shot. What was "

"The bullet missed his heart by less than half an inch. Lodged in a bone
just above it. But there was a huge amount of internal bleeding that
posed an even greater danger. I think we've got it all taken care of,
but the next few hours will be rough." He looked at his watch.

"It's almost four o'clock. Why don't you go out and grab some lunch?

Give the nurses a little time to get your friend settled in."

"We'll be here for a while, Doctor. I think we'd like to see Mercer
before we do anything else." Mike and I weren't moving until we could be
with him.

I thanked them for their work and they left me alone in the small room.

I lowered myself onto a chair, put my head in my hands, and thought of
all the promises I had made to God in these past few hours of things I
would do differently and better if only Mercer came out of this okay.

Every part of me ached, and I tried to relive the day, thinking of what
might have happened had the two of us not gone to the gallery. The
throbbing in my head was now a constant, and when it intensified, it
reminded me of the sound of the morning's gunshots. I could not even
imagine the physical pain that Mercer experienced when the shot ripped
through his chest.

I reached into the paper bag and removed the cell phone, dialing
Battaglia's home number. I was relieved to get the machine and not the
person. I didn't need another rap on the knuckles, and I just left him
the good news about Mercer and told him I'd be staying with a friend
overnight.

Jake was booked on a seven-fifteen evening flight back to La Guardia the
same reservation that I originally had. I couldn't find him on the
Vineyard, so I left a message on my machine there and one at his
apartment, telling him about the shooting and asking if I could stay
with him for a couple of days.

Mike came back about fifteen minutes later with coffee for both of us
and a deli sandwich. "Wanna split this?"

"No, thanks." My stomach was still roiling. "I need to apologize for
snapping at you on the phone on Friday."

Mike's appetite was directly related to his spirit. He opened his mouth
wide to get around the hero, which was stuffed with ham and provolone,
lettuce, tomato, and onions. He garbled a "Never mind"

through the food. "I know you're full of crap, blondie," he said when
the first three mouthfuls had been thoroughly chewed. "Hey, you think I
haven't been through this before? You just spent half a day praying over
Mercer's soul, probably had to swear you were even gonna be tolerant of
me in the bargain." He winked at me and shoved the sandwich back in his
mouth.

"So, I spent yesterday reading Omar Sheffield's file." He was able to
concentrate again. "He was really a pro at that scam. Whole bunch of
complaints against him to the prison warden. Lowell Caxton may have been
right. Looks like Omar hung with the jailhouse lawyers. Pulled a lot of
the divorce cases directly out of the Law Journal. One opinion, the
judge even wrote which private school the two kids attended. Omar lifts
the name of the school from the judge's decision, threatening that he
could have the kids picked off on the sidewalk as
they came down the steps after class. Wife went nuts, blaming the
husband. All along it was Omar, with the aid of the honorable jurist."

"Didn't anybody arrest him for aggravated harassment?"

"Nope. Worst I can see is that he got box time." Put in solitary
confinement for twenty-three hours a day, denied use of the library and
any mail service. "Added a few months against an early parole.

"But the warden told me there's an even bigger problem now, with the
Freedom of Information Act. Prisoners write to agencies like the Board
of Elections, and because of the law they can ask for and get the home
addresses of anyone they want. One guy just used it to get the new
address of the ex-girlfriend he's been stalking for six years. I'm
telling you, the lunatics are really running the asylum when it comes to
the criminal courts." The last sentence was muffled by the remains of
the sandwich and by Mike licking the mustard off his fingers before
wiping them with a napkin.

"Any record of Denise Caxton in the visitor log?"

"Not that they've found yet. But I gotta go through it myself. Maybe she
didn't even use her own name. Meanwhile, you given any thought to where
you're gonna be spending the next few weeks, when you're not at work?"

I nodded my head. "I'll stay at Jake Tyler's apartment. Maybe you can
swing me by my place so I can pick up some clothes."

"I'll get somebody to do it. I'm not leaving here tonight." There was no
point in suggesting that Mike do otherwise. He would be at Mercer's side
throughout the critical hours, no matter how long they turned out to be.

It was almost six o'clock when a nurse came to tell us that she would
take us to the intensive care unit. "He's sleeping now," she said.

"Doctor said you wanted to see him. Then I'll take you to a place where
you can be more comfortable."

Mercer had been placed in a cubicle directly opposite the nurses'
station. I could hear a gaggle of monitors beeping before we reached the
entrance to his room, which was guarded by two plainclothes detectives.
I stood in the doorway and looked at his long frame, which filled the
hospital bed completely. There were tubes coming out of his nose and
intravenous lines attached to his forearm. He didn't move or respond at
all to the sound of Mike's voice saying, "Hey, buddy," as he lifted the
sheet that covered Mercer's chest to expose the bandaging there and
stroked him gently on the blade of his shoulder.

"That's a lot of anesthesia he's got to sleep off," the nurse said.

"I'll come get you in a bit. There's a room right over here."

She led us down the hallway and we resumed our vigil with the families
of several other critically ill patients. Mike couldn't stand the
company and the prattle of the anxious people. "I'll be in with Mercer."

"But there's no room "

"I'll make room. I wanna talk to him." He shot me a look that had the
same effect as adding the word "alone" to his statement and walked away.

It was impossible to drag my thoughts away from the day's events. I was
trying to ignore my pounding headache, and as I covered my eyes with my
hands, I didn't notice the approach of the two men who planted
themselves in front of me.

"Alexandra Cooper?"

I looked up as they palmed their gold shields and identified themselves.
"Scan Iverson and Tom Bellman, Major Case Squad," one of them said,
pointing first to himself and then to his companion. "We'd like you to
come downstairs with us. Hospital director's given us a room to do
interviews in. Just need to go over everything with you."

I stood up, gesturing toward the hallway. "But I'd like to be here with
Mercer. We're waiting for him to "

"We're not going very far, Alex. We'll get you right back up here when
he comes around."

"Why isn't Homicide working on this?" I hadn't moved at all, and both
men appeared to be annoyed. I knew I was getting paranoid, but I wanted
detectives who knew me and loved Mercer to be working on this shooting.

"C'mon," Iverson said, turning his back on me. "They're not gonna give
something like this to one of your pals. Chief of detectives brought us
in on it." He looked over his shoulder and smiled at me. "He even
mentioned that you might be difficult."

"I'd like to have Detective Chapman with me, if that's all "

"And we'd rather not have him, if it's all right with you. He wasn't
there, it's not his case, and we'd like to handle this our way, okay,
Miss. D. A.?"

Clutching my paper bag, I obediently followed the pair down the quiet
hallway to the elevator bank and downstairs to a small office with a
plaque on the door that read Security.

For almost three hours, Iverson and Bellman grilled me about everything
that had gone on since my return to Manhattan from the Vineyard the
previous morning. I had done this myself to thousands of witnesses in my
ten years as a prosecutor, and I was as impressed as I was exacerbated
by their demand for precision and detail. Over and over again they
pushed me to recall every physical twist, movement, footstep, direction,
and sound that had been made or taken in the gallery that morning with
Mercer. I strained every one of my senses to re-create the scene
exactly, certain from their implacable expressions that I was failing
some kind of test that they were giving me.

When Iverson closed his notepad and stood up, I looked at each of them
the way witnesses had looked at me so many times, wanting to know if the
answers supplied had been good or correct. And I kept my mouth shut,
knowing that neither man could give me that assurance.

"Tommy'll take you back up to intensive care, Alex. That's it for now,
but later in the week we'll have to get you over to Twenty-first Street
with us. Walk us through the place, okay?"

"Sure. Anything you need."

Detective Bellman and I had nothing to say to each other on the way
upstairs. He escorted me around to Mercer's cubicle and shook my hand as
he said good-bye. Mike had pulled a desk chair from the nurses' station
into the niche next to the bed, with his back to the door. He was
leaning forward, his hand on one of Mercer's, and he was speaking in a
low voice. I could hear him naming friends they had worked with and knew
that Mike was telling war stories and reminiscing, just chatting at his
silent partner. The position of Mercer's body had not changed at all
since I had first seen him several hours ago.

"Hey, Mercer," Mike said, "Coop's back." Now addressing me, "Where you
been, blondie?" I told him about the interrogation. "These dicks must've
worked her over pretty good, Mercer. She looks like shit. I just wish
you could open your eyes right now and take a look at her. I oughta
borrow one of your intravenous tubes, man run a little Dewar's through
it and give her some juice. Who's the team?"

"Iverson and Bellman."

"Dammit, Mercer. Get your ass outta that bed. I wouldn't let those two
lightweights handle a bad check. They treat you okay, Coop?"

I shook my head up and down.

At about midnight, a policewoman from the Sixth Precinct came up to the
nurses' station with a few containers of hot soup for Mike and me.

I walked it back over to Mercer's room. Mike was standing now, and I
could hear him saying something about an administration.

"What are you talking about now?" I asked. "Can I spell you for a
while?"

"Know how they say people in a coma can hear you? Well, if that's true
and he's only sleeping off some gas, I'll be getting through to him
before too long. I just want mine to be the first voice he hears.

Remember my dictionary? I'm going through it with him now. Used to make
Mercer so mad especially if all the other guys were laughing when I did
it he'd be ready to punch me in the face."

Chapman always joked that he was going to sell a reference book to
compete with the O. E.D. the Oxford English Dictionary. He called it the
C. P.D. Chapman's Perpetrators' Dictionary and he thought it should be
printed and issued to every rookie in the department.

He took his seat by Mercer's side. "I'm only halfway through the A's.

"Administration' that's when a woman gets her period." Then he launched
into an imitation of the high-pitched voice of a female witness. ""But
Detective Wallace, I couldn't let him do the nasty to me. I was on my
administration last week."

"

"Athaletic." Used interchangeably with the word '."

"Officer Chapman, you can't go arresting my brother. He be having an
athaletic fit right now."

"

"Ax." What you do uptown with a question. "Officer, let me ax you this
... " You ever know anybody Irish or Jewish or Italian who axes
questions, do you?"

"Alex, are you in here?"

Mercer's frail voice came at us from the other side of the bed, his eyes
still closed, his head still facing toward the wall, and his words
barely audible. Mike bounced up from his chair, grabbed Mercer's left
ankle which seemed to be the only

part of him not hooked to any kind of medical device and started kissing
the sole of his foot. I answered

"Yes," and we both bent over to get close enough to hear Mercer speak.

His lips pulled together to form a smile. "Will you get that racist son
of a bitch out of this room?"

Twenty-Three.

"Cold hit, Coop." I had just stepped out of the shower a few minutes
after seven o'clock on Monday morning, and Jake handed me the telephone
to take Mike Chapman's call.

"On what?"

"Bob Thaler just called. He said they got a match on the semen found on
the canvas tarp that was in the back of Omar Sheffield's station wagon
the one that Denise Caxton's body had been wrapped in. Did it through
the data bank."

"Cold hit" was the slang term that scientists used to describe what
occurred when a computer made a successful comparison between DNA
samples, linking a piece of forensic evidence to an actual human being.

The detectives did not have to submit names, latent prints, mug shots,
or vouchers for hours of overtime legwork in order for this technology
to work. The computer's ability to make a cold hit took only an instant.

Thaler was the chief serologist at the Medical Examiner's Office and had
helped to pioneer this technology. The data bank had been established by
the New York State legislature, and there were data banks in almost
every state by the late 19905. New York's was slowly being filled with
the genetic fingerprints DNA developed from a single vial of blood taken
from every prisoner in the state convicted of sexual assault or
homicide. Like their latent print counterparts, these unique codes were
becoming an invaluable tool in the solution of cases of rape and murder.

"Who's the match?" I asked.

"Anton Bailey. Convicted of larceny three years ago up in Buffalo. Did
half of a four-year sentence and was released to parole eight months
back."

"Then why was he in the data bank?" His blood would not have been taken
for a crime like larceny, a nonviolent theft.

"That's just it. He wasn't in the New York base. Thaler had the Feds run
it interstate and, sure enough, got a hit in the Florida data bank." The
Sunshine State had passed the legislation before most other parts of the
country. "Seems like Mr. Bailey had gone by a different name down South
Anthony Bailor. And Mr. Bailor did some hard time back in Gainesville.
Put away at eighteen, for almost twenty years.

Rape in the first degree.

"So it looks like Anton Bailey is the man who sexually assaulted Denise
Caxton."

"And killed her." "Talk about cold hits," Mike said. "If this isn't a
straight-out sexual assault gone bad, then someone must have hired old
Anton to do Deni in. That could be the coldest hit of all."

"Now all we need to do is figure how and where he came into this
picture."

"Thaler's the only government guy whose office opens up at seven A.M.
I'll get on the horn to State Correction after nine. Just thought you'd
like to know first thing."

"How's your patient?"

"Restless night. He was in a lot of pain. But they're taking some of the
tubes out today and hope to get him moved into a private room."

"Battaglia arranged a full security crew for me until this thing is
over. I told him I already feel like I have a human strait-jacket
wrapped around me. They're driving me down to the office. Are you doing
any interviews today?"

"If they have Mercer set up by the early afternoon, I'll call you so you
can come up to the office with me. I'm beginning to think it's safer to
let our interviewees drop by our place."

"What did you do about sleeping?"

"Not as cozy as you. Nurses let me curl up on a gurney in the hallway."
"Anybody I.D. the girl yet?" I asked, assuming the receptionist who
opened the door for Mercer and me yesterday, whom I had first seen at
Deni's gallery, could be a link to the killer.

"Yeah. Name was Cynthia Greeley. Twenty-three years old, from Saint
Louis. Bryan Daughtry claims that most of the time she freelanced. He
insists that it was Deni who hired the kid, not him. And that Deni met
her when she was working for Lowell, on Fifty-seventh Street. Lowell
thought Cynthia had too many pierced body parts to be working the uptown
scene, so he was glad to let her go."

One more twisted path to unravel. "I'll get down to work and wait to
hear from you. Give Mercer's hand a squeeze for me. Tell him I'll come
over with you tonight. Need a place to clean up this morning?"

"Nah. I can shower at the squad. Change of clothes in my locker. See you
later."

Battaglia had assigned two detectives from the D.A.'s Squad to
accompany me from place to place for the duration of the investigation.

I didn't like the restrictions it imposed or the waste of taxpayers'
money. But he had given me no choice and had sent them to the hospital
last evening. They had driven me to my apartment so I could pack a
suitcase of belongings that would get me through the week, and then on
to Jake's home, not too far from my own. Front-door-to-front-door
service.

I had reached there in time to find Jake watching the news on CNN. It
was after one o'clock in the morning. "Turn it off and I promise not to
tell anyone at NEC that you were checking out the competition," I said
to him when he embraced me at the door. "I don't want to hear anyone
else's spin on the day, okay?"

I stripped my blood-soaked clothes off right there in the hallway and
stood naked, offering them to him with both hands. "Take these to the
incinerator and just throw them down the chute, would you please? I'm
going to take a bath. I don't suppose you have anything that passes for
bubbles here, do you?"

"No, but the bar's still open," he said, kissing the tip of my nose.

"If I can see through the steam, I'll bring you in a drink as soon as
I've dumped these."

I soaked in the tub while Jake sat on the floor beside me, sipping his
drink while I tasted mine. I told him how Mercer and I had walked into
the trap that had been so carefully laid for us at the exhibit, and how
terrified I had been at the thought of losing Mercer. Jake didn't
interrupt at all as I went on and on, stepping from the tub into the
bath sheet that he wrapped around me; then I shivered for the first time
in days as I tied the belt of his white terry robe on my waist and sat
on the edge of the bed to call my mother and let her know that I was
okay.

I stared into the masked face of our gunman seeing nothing for what
seemed like hours, until I finally fell asleep on my side, with Jake's
arm resting on my shoulder.

At seven forty-five I was ready to leave for the office. "What's your
day like today?" I asked Jake, watching him knot his tie and ready
himself for the cross town ride to the NEC offices at Rockefeller
Center.

"Kind of like yours, in the sense that I won't really know until I get
there. I'm supposed to be covering the secretary of state's speech at
the U.N. Do I have to worry about you as well, or just nuclear warheads,
civil wars, and an erupting volcano in the Antilles?" he said jokingly.

"Battaglia has me under lock and key. So, your beeper will call my
beeper?"

"Count on it. See you tonight."

I was out the door and down the FDR Drive with my armed escorts. The
early arrival gave me time to catch up on the matters that had come in
on Friday, when I had stolen the day to get away to the Vineyard. I
checked my appointment book. One of the assistants had asked me to
pencil in a re-interview at ten with her witness in a domestic violence
case.

That gave me a couple of hours to return phone messages and speak with
friends. As my colleagues began to arrive, many dropped by my office to
see how I was, express their concern, and ask about Mercer, having heard
accounts of the shooting on last evening's news. I finally shut my door
to avoid a visit from Pat Mckinney. There was enough salt in my
emotional wounds without his venom added.

At ten fifteen I called Maggie to check whether her witness had arrived.

"She just called to cancel. Her husband offered to take her on a cruise
over Labor Day weekend. She'd like to come see you when she gets back in
two weeks. Guess she isn't quite as frightened of him as I thought."

That freed up another hour of the morning, or so I thought until Laura
buzzed to say that one of the young lawyers from Trial Bureau 60 had
been sent to discuss a new case with me. I opened my door and found
Craig Tompkins waiting outside.

"Something different, at least for me. The intake supervisor thought you
might have some ideas about how to charge this."

"What have you got?"

"The security guards over at the Javits Center are holding a guy, but
I'm not sure they've got a crime to arrest him for."

"What did he do?" The Javits building was the city's convention hall and
regularly the scene of large group meetings, trade association
gatherings, and exhibitions.

"He signed up to attend this week's Trekkies reunion. Seems to have
spent all day yesterday riding up and down the escalators, from floor to
floor. Kind of got the guards' attention ' he was sort of goofy looking,
carrying around a big gym bag the whole time, but never actually went
into any of the lectures or conference rooms. When he came back in this
morning, the head of security took a few rides up the escalator, right
behind the guy.

"This jerk's got a video camera hidden in the bag. What he does is wait
for a girl in a short dress to get on in front of him, then he rides up
behind her, holding the camera so it shoots the view up her skirt. A
thrill a minute, I guess."

"So what did they do with him?"

"Arrested him for harassment. Confiscated the gym bag and the video
camera."

"Sounds right to me. What's the problem?"

"Well, they don't have any victims."

"What about the women he was filming?" In order to make out the charge
of harassment, there would have to be people who would claim that the
amateur moviemaker's conduct had annoyed or alarmed them.

"None of them ever realized what he was doing. They each just stepped
off the escalator at the end of the ride, unaware that they had been
immortalized on film. Then the security guys played back the videotape.
Thighs, knees, lots of underwear but nobody is recognizable from the
angle of the shots. No way to figure out who they are."

I thought for a minute. "How about trespass? That he was unauthorized to
be in the center."

"Won't work either. He paid full price for admission and that entitles
him to be in the facility."

"Did he make any statements? Admissions?"

"Yeah, he gave it all right up. Married businessman from Connecticut,
works for a public utility company there. Started doing this a year ago,
just ' it turns him on."

"Talk about arrested development. Guess he never got past the sixth
grade." "Now he says he can sell them to a Web site. It's called U.S.
Videos only, the initials stand for "Up-Skirt." Lots of video-cam
voyeurs, he claims. Cops checked it out. Each tape sells for forty
bucks."

"And that's exactly what's on '?" I asked incredulously. "I'm not sure
there's anything criminal to charge him with. Let me call Mark."

The usual response for any of us in the Trial Division when we were
stuck on legal issues a lot thornier than this was to reach out for the
head of the Appeals Bureau, our in-house lawman. We waited for his
callback, which confirmed that there was no recourse in the criminal
justice system for the Trekkie's actions. Craig used my phone to tell
the Javits security force to let the guy go. The Internet was creating
more opportunities for perverts than most of us had imagined, and law
enforcement agencies were less aggressive than the cyber-gee ks in
coming up with solutions.

Mike called from Mercer's room at eleven thirty. "Forget those surgeons
you saw yesterday. There's a lady doc here today, and a posse of very
attentive nurses, and I think Mercer Wallace is really on the mend.

"I'm gonna scoot up to the squad at one. The pain medication makes
Mercer pretty sleepy. His father wants to sit with him this afternoon.

Varelli's assistant is going to come in for an interview. Wanna be
there?"

"Absolutely."

"I'll swing by and pick you up, since I'm so close to your office," Mike
said. "Then I can bring you back here to the hospital tonight.

The D.A.'s Squad can take over your chauffeuring duties from that point
on."

I called the Special Victims Unit to see who would inherit the
day-to-day work on the West Side rapist matter and was relieved to hear
it was in the capable hands of two veteran detectives who had worked
with Mercer for years.

Then I stopped at Rose Malone's desk so that she could see that I was
physically unharmed and tell Battaglia that Mercer's shooting had not
unhinged me completely. Now that I was an eyewitness to the attempted
murder of a police officer, I knew that the district attorney would
assign another prosecutor to take over at least that part of the
inquiry, just in case the crime was unrelated to our probe of Denise
Caxton's killing.

"Would you ask Paul to let me have a say in who Mckinney assigns to
Mercer's shooting?" I asked Rose when she told me that Battaglia had
just gone to lunch.

"Sure. I know he won't get to it today. He's got to polish up a speech
he's giving tonight, and I don't think he'll have time to speak to Pat
Mckinney," she said, looking through the crammed schedule sheet that she
kept on top of her desk.

"Great. If he wants me for anything, I'll be up at Manhattan North."

When I reached Laura's office to pick up my case folder and wait for
Chapman, she told me to call Marjie Fishman, my counterpart in the
Queens District Attorney's Office.

"Are you okay?" Marjie began the conversation.

I assured her that I was and gave her the update on Mercer's condition.

"You don't have any racetracks in Manhattan, do you?"

"No." I waved Mike in when I saw him standing with Laura outside my
room.

"Well, we've finally got a situation that you haven't seen yet." '

"Try me." There were days when my colleagues and I were sure there was
nothing left that one human being could do to another that could shock
us. And then, without fail, something else came along to prove us wrong.

"Last Monday, out at Aqueduct, a cop patrolling the stables in the
middle of the night came upon, shall we say, an intimate encounter
between one of the grooms and a horse. The defendant's name is Angel
Garcia. The officer heard a loud thud, which was the sound made by the
naked Garcia falling off the plastic bucket he'd been standing on."

"How's the horse?"

"The vet says she's fine. If you pass an OTB office on your way uptown,
tell Mike to put some money on Saratoga Capers. Last Friday, after a
thorough examination and clean bill of health, our horse came in third.
That's her best start in weeks."

I hung up shaking my head in amusement, although I couldn't help feeling
sorry for the poor creature. Fortunately, there were laws against
inhumane treatment of animals, and Marjie's Special Victims Unit was
prosecuting Garcia for abusing Saratoga Capers. Mike laughed out loud
when he heard the story.

"Just feature sharing a jail cell with Angel Garcia," Mike said. "Every
other prisoner has pictures of Cindy Crawford or Julia Roberts or
Penthouse centerfolds on the wall. Meanwhile, Angel's got giant-size
pinups of Trigger and Mr. Ed. Go figure. C'mon, blondie. Let's blow this
joint."

"Wait a minute. Has anybody explored that part of Omar Sheffield's
background?"

"Whaddaya mean? Horseplay?" Mike asked.

"Cell mates just what you were joking about. When Omar was in the can
doing time upstate, who did he share a cell with? Do we have any names?"

Mike stopped and double-backed to my desk to use the phone. "I don't
think I asked that question. I'm not sure anybody did." He dialed the
squad and reached Jimmy Halloran, a baby-faced cop who'd been on the
Homicide Squad for more than a decade but looked like he was still in
high school. Jimmy had been added to the Caxton team last night, after
Mercer was injured. He bristled every time Mike called him by the
nickname he'd been given by his team Kid Detective.

"Hey, K. D.," Chapman said. "Squirrel around on the lieutenant's desk.

See if you can find the paperwork on Omar Sheffield. You know, the bad
boy who forgot his mother told him not to play on the tracks. See if
anyone checked the names of his roommates in state prison. Coop and I
are on our way uptown. If you don't find anything in the file, call up
to the warden at Coxsackie and get some answers. And if they need a
subpoena, call Cooper's secretary and she'll crank one out for us and
fax it up for her signature. Make yourself useful." He hung up the
phone.

"Where are you parked?" I asked.

"Behind the courthouse, on Baxter Street."

"Good. Let's slide out the back door. The fewer people I have to talk to
about yesterday's events, the better off I'll be." We went downstairs
and took the elevator from the seventh floor to the lobby, walking past
the arraignment parts and the roach coach, as the building's snack bar
was affectionately dubbed. It was half an hour before the courts
recessed for the afternoon lunch break, so we navigated the hallways and
went out onto the street without much delay.

As we walked into the squad office, Jimmy Halloran took his feet off the
desk and stood to greet us, pointing out a young man who was reading a
newspaper at a desk across the room. "That's your one o'clock. The guy
from Varelli's studio.

"And those names you wanted from the warden? He said Omar Sheffield
spent some of his time in solitary." Halloran looked down at his notes.
"Had three cell mates while he was upstate. Kevin Mcguire, who's done
mostly burglaries, and Jeremy Fuller, who sold heroin to an undercover
cop. They're both still in jail."

Again, he glanced at his notepad. "Third one is named Anton Bailey.

Does this stuff mean anything to you?"

Twenty-Four.

The Manhattan North Homicide Squad office was virtually empty. Every man
and woman, whether on duty or off, had come in to try to crack the
attempt on Mercer's life. Those who were not officially in the field
were pounding the pavement, leaning on informants to try to get a lead
on which to follow up. The rest were filling the lobby at Saint
Vincent's, even though it was far too soon for all but the closest
friends and family to visit with him.

"Cooper and I are gonna use the lieutenant's office for this interview.

Call Albany, call whoever you've got to, but get every single sheet of
paper that exists in this state on Anton Bailey," Chapman told Jimmy
Halloran. "And when you're done with that, call the Gainesville,
Florida, P.D. and start all over again. Use both names, Bailey and
Anthony Bailor."

"Hey, Alex, how'd he get into the system up here without them picking up
the Florida case?" Halloran asked me. "How come nobody figured out that
Anton Bailey and Anthony Bailor were one and the same before today,
huh?"

"Just lucky, I guess." No one could be arraigned for a felony in New
York State without a fingerprint check. But every now and then, all of
the automated techniques failed. In some cases, if the interstate
computer system was down and the perp used an alias, the fingerprint
comparison was never actually made. The fine type at the bottom of the
rap sheet, if the prosecutor or judge stopped to read it, said that the
results were based on a name check and not a verified latent exam.

If the prior rape conviction had been reflected on Bailey's record, then
the larceny case would have drawn a mandatory prison sentence longer
than the time he served. He would not have been free to have sexually
assaulted Denise Caxton and to have set in motion the chain of deaths
that followed.

"You must be Don Cannon," Mike said, shaking hands with the man sitting
in the squad room. "I'm Detective Chapman, Mike Chapman. And this is
Alexandra Cooper, from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. Thanks
for coming in."

I guessed Cannon to be younger than I am, in his late twenties, perhaps.
He was a bit shorter than I, with a serious when and horn-rimmed
glasses. He seemed no more at ease than do most civilians who find
themselves in the middle of a homicide case but express a willingness to
cooperate, which few mean as sincerely as he seemed to.

"Why don't you have a seat and tell us a bit about yourself?" Chapman
asked. "I'd like to know what you did for Mr. Varelli in his business.
That kind of thing."

"You probably know by now that Marco was the master, the most meticulous
workman in his field. Just about every important restoration project in
the last fifty years has been offered to him.

Those that excited him most, he worked on himself.

"I'm from Sacramento originally. Went to UCLA, have a graduate degree in
fine arts. That the kind of thing you want to know?" He looked from
Mike's face to mine, tentatively, to see whether he was proceeding in
the right direction. We both nodded.

"One of my professors had worked with Varelli on Guernica, back in the
eighties. Do you remember, that was the Picasso that was defaced at the
Museum of Modern Art by some deranged fanatic?"

"Yes, of course. Our office handled the case."

"The professor knew that I wanted to work in restoration, that I hoped
to develop a career, go back to the West Coast, and set up shop at the
Getty or one of the other museums. To apprentice to Marco Varelli, well,
there's simply nothing better to prepare to learn this business, and no
finer credential on a resume." "When did you start to work for him?" I
asked.

Cannon hesitated. "Nobody worked for Varelli. I mean, technical people
did laborers who picked up and delivered the paintings or arranged the
studio. But he was quite a loner. Once he had established himself as the
virtuoso, more than forty years ago, he was insistent on working alone.
If you were fortunate enough to get his attention, and he agreed to work
on your project, then he wanted the result to be only his handiwork."

"What do you mean, ' agreed'? Didn't people just pay him?" Chapman
wanted to know.

The serious Mr. Cannon smiled wryly. "No, no, no. Mr. Varelli had more
than enough to live on. He was paid handsomely for his craft. So, at a
certain point in his life, it was easy for him to turn down whomever he
pleased. If the painting or the artist was not one he deemed worthy of
his effort, no matter what the price offered, he wouldn't touch it."

"How about if the ownership was cloudy?"

"Well then, Miss. Cooper, there was simply no way to engage him. I can
recall an instance when a collector showed up in the atelier with a
Leger. The particular painting had been classified in the Pompidou
Center as an Rip, which means that it had been seized by the Nazis
during the war and later returned to France. To date, no one had been
able to connect it to the original owner or his descendants. Signor
Varelli refused to become involved until an effort was made to trace the
lineage and try to find the owners. The more money that was offered to
retain him, the more offended he became. I'm sure it's a lot like that
in the legal profession, don't you think? I mean, with all the ethical
dilemmas defense attorneys have?"

He looked over at me for an answer, which came instead from Chapman.

"You're watching too much Geraldo. I never met a defense attorney with
an ethical dilemma if the check clears, his client's not guilty." "You
said that no one worked for Varelli. Didn't you'?"

"I had the privilege of being apprenticed to him, Detective. An
expensive privilege."

"You had to pay to help him?"

"I had a grant, actually, from a private family foundation. That's what
made the experience possible for me. I certainly wouldn't have had the
means to do it otherwise. Consider it like going to the best school in
the world. For close to three years I was tutored by a genius. The
skills he has given me are qualities I could never have learned anywhere
else." Cannon bowed his head. "I still can't believe he's gone. And
worst of all, murdered." He looked up at us. "He was such a quiet,
benign man. There's not a reason I can think of for someone to hurt
him."

"Let me run some names by you. Tell us if you know any of these people,
okay?"

Cannon cleared his throat and said it would be fine.

"Start with Lowell Caxton. Ever meet him?"

"Many, many times. I'd guess Marco had known him for as long as I've
been alive. I think he was one of the few collectors whose taste Mr.
Varelli admired. I've never been to any of Caxton's homes, but I
understand there were several generations of a great genetic eye for
art. Mr. Caxton used to come by for an opinion every now and then. Do
you know about the Titian the one he gave to Marco?"

"Yes. We spent a few minutes with Mrs. Varelli at the funeral home.

We expect to see her in the apartment later this week."

"Marco adored that gift, a real jewel of a little drawing. I think his
acceptance of Lowell Caxton had a lot to do with that gesture. It would
be hard to dislike someone who had done such a generous thing."

"Any conflict between them, ever?"

Cannon shrugged his shoulders. "Not that I ever witnessed. Keep in mind,
I wasn't there all the time. Mostly I was with Marco when he was
actually doing the work on his projects, not when he was talking with
his clients or when they dropped in for a glass of grappa and some
advice about what to bid on a particular piece.

"He was very good at dismissing me. "Thank you so much, Mr. Cannon.

And now, per piacere, I think we are finished for the moment." He'd kind
of flutter his hand in my direction, and I'd know it was time to take
off."


"The grant covered the expenses of my study, but not an apartment in
Manhattan. My girlfriend and I sublet a room in a loft in Soho. She's
here in graduate school at NYU. When I
was free to leave I'd head for the library, an art show, or a movie.

But I'd get out of his hair, that much was clear."

Chapman checked off Caxton's name on the list he had started and went
down to the next line. "Bryan Daughtry. Ever run into him?"

"Yes, he was another visitor. Not so much anymore, with the contemporary
work he was trying to sell. But Marco had done ventures with him before
I arrived here, which was before Daughtry went to jail.

On that tax fraud, not that other thing." Cannon looked at me to see
whether I registered any reaction to his reference to the girl in the
leather mask.

"What do you know about his background?"

"I don't mean to make light of the story about Bryan Daughtry's
involvement in that old case, but it kind of fascinated Mr. Varelli.

He never saw the cruel side of Bryan. Met him as a young man who had a
rather good eye for art, albeit untrained. I was a bit shocked to meet
him myself when Bryan first came to the studio. Marco told me all about
him that first day."

Cannon moved in his chair, put the fingertips of his right hand
together, and shook them easily in front of his face, imitating the old
man's accent. "

"But can you tell me why, Mr. Cannon, why a young man wants to tie up a
beautiful young girl and cause her pain? This I don't understand at all.
From a body like this you should get only pleasure, only sweetness, only
come si dice in ingle se rapture. But maybe I am too old to understand."

"Quite frankly, I used to think when Daughtry was here to visit and Mr.
Varelli kicked me out, it was to ask him questions about his sexual
proclivities. Marco was much more curious about that than he was about
contemporary art."

Cannon talked for a while about Bryan Daughtry's more recent business
focus, but again could think of no incident that unnerved him in regard
to Varelli.

"How about Marina Sette?"

Cannon seemed to draw a blank.

"Marilyn Seven?" I asked, adding a physical description as well as
telling him where she lived.

"It's quite possible she had been to see Marco, of course. It's just not
a name I recognize."

"Frank Wrenley?"

Again, not familiar. Neither was Preston Mattox. Cannon knew the names
of some of the workmen, but Omar Sheffield and Anton Bailey were not
among them.

Chapman put down his pen and clasped his hands on the desktop.

"Talk to me about Denise Caxton. Everything you know. When you met her,
what she was like, what Marco thought about her. Things that don't seem
important to you may be exactly what we're looking for, so give it all
to me, okay?"

"This one's a bit complicated, Detective. There was Denise Caxton the
woman, and there was Denise Caxton the collector. Marco Varelli's eye
was unerring. He admired great beauty, on a canvas or in human form.

Nothing inappropriate, nothing unusual. But he would look at a handsome
woman's face as though it had been sculpted by Michelangelo.

Didn't matter if she were a waitress in a diner or a client with
millions. Mrs. Caxton had a real head start with Marco, from the old
days. He had met her when she was a kid, just married to Lowell.

"If I'm not mistaken you might have to check her apartment for this I
think Mr. Varelli once painted her portrait, a full-length nude. He was
very proud of it. Told me it was hung in her room at home. I believe she
had a collection of self-portraits, right?" He chuckled at the vanity of
that idea, it seemed to me.

Cannon continued, "She was a real flirt Mrs. Caxton, I mean. Knew
exactly how to play the old guy, with words. When I first met her,
almost three years ago, she could light him up like a flare when he knew
she was coming. She would always bring his favorite chocolates, if she
had been to Paris, or a chilled bottle of wine to sip with him in the
afternoon. She loved to listen to his stories, wanted to know every
painting he'd ever worked on who owned them, what he did to them, what
became of them. Marco used to complain that his wife didn't want to hear
the old tales over again. Denise Caxton hung on his every word, or at
least she let him think that she did."

"Did you ever work on any of the paintings she brought into the
gallery?"

"Yes. She had a knack for picking up sleepers, bidding on some
incredibly lifeless old canvas that she'd either had a good tip on or
had followed with her gut instincts. "Who is it, Marco? Tell me who's
hiding underneath there, mi amore." She'd tease him into playing with
almost anything she brought in. And what was funny about it was that
most of the time, he wanted me there to watch this game she played with
him. As if he wanted me to see that a magnificent young woman doted on
him, that it wasn't just happening in his imagination."

"When did his feelings for Deni change?" Cannon paused. "Is that what
Mrs. Varelli said?"

"Yeah. Said she didn't make him quite so happy anymore."

"I can't recall exactly when the change occurred, but she's right. Mrs.
Caxton's visits were fewer and farther apart. She rarely came alone
anymore, and the games were over."

"Who'd she bring with her, if she wasn't alone?"

"Friends, clients I don't know. Varelli would shoo me out of the studio.
There was no longer any verbal foreplay, so he didn't need me around."

Chapman was annoyed. "You must know who some of them were, don't you?

Start somewhere women? men? young or old?"

"Occasionally she came with people I knew, like Bryan Daughtry. Once or
twice she might have been with a woman maybe even that lady you
described earlier, with the French braid. Seven or Sette, whatever you
called her. But most of the time it was men, two or three different ones
in the past few months, since she split up with her husband."

"Can you describe any of them for us? Would you recognize them if you
saw them today?"

Again Cannon shrugged, not attaching any importance to these visitors.

"There wasn't anything remarkable about any of them. Sure, maybe I'd
know them if I ran into them again, maybe not. You have to understand,
Detective, that if Marco Varelli wasn't working on a canvas, I was just
as happy to be out of there. It was as much an education for me to spend
a free afternoon at a museum as to be a fly on the wall when he was
chatting up rich collectors. I didn't need the small talk."

Chapman stood now, walking behind Cannon's back. "In the last three
years, is there anybody else who spent as much time with Marco Varelli
as you did?"

Cannon thought and then told us, "No. Except for his wife."

"Anybody who knew what he thought about everything and everybody?"

"No, probably not."

"They have any kids?"

"No."

"I bet you were sort of like a son to him, weren't you?"

"Not exactly. But he was very good to me."

"What was the most important thing in the world to him, Don? Leave his
wife out of it for the moment. Tell us."

"You know the answer. He lived for great art for looking at it, touching
it, smelling it, dreaming about it."

"And he trusted you with his legacy."

"Well, I'm not the only one who ever apprenticed with him. There are
dozens of experts in museums around the world who "

"But now, Mr. Cannon. You've spent these last three years joined to him
at the hip. I find it really kinda hard to believe that he had many
secrets from you." Mike's fist pounded down on the top of the
lieutenant's desk. "I'd like you to tell me why he and Denise Caxton had
a falling-out."

Cannon started at Chapman's change in mood. "I wasn't his confidant, Mr.
Chapman. I was merely his student."

"And you're too damn smart, too good a student, not to have been aware
of what was happening in that little garret every day, that's what I
think. If you've got a special talent, Mr. Cannon, it's your powers of
observation, isn't it? Tell me what you saw up there, what you heard."

Mike's voice bellowed in the small room as Cannon looked at me to call
off the angry detective. "She's on my side in this, buddy. If I let
Cooper cross-examine you for fifteen minutes, you'll forget you ever
walked into this room with a set of balls." Chapman was shouting now,
and red in the face. "Three people are dead and my partner's lying in a
hospital bed with a hole in his chest. Stop wasting my time!"

"Do I need a lawyer?" Cannon spoke quietly and again directed the
question to me.

I began to answer but was interrupted by Chapman. "If you're gonna tell
me you killed someone, we'll call you a lawyer. Somehow, I doubt that's
the problem. Just tell me what's on your mind and worry about that
later."

"Well, what if I have information about a crime?"

Mike's open palm slammed the desktop another time. "Whaddaya think I've
been asking you to tell me about for the last hour?"

Twenty-Five.

Cannon had stalled for about as long as Mike was going to let him, and
he knew that. "I suppose there are two things that changed the
relationship between Mrs. Caxton and Marco. The first problem began
about a year ago."

"When, exactly? "About' doesn't help me all that much."

"I can't give you a specific date. I'm pretty sure it was before she and
her husband began to have problems in their marriage. I remember that
because I thought it was strange she had come to see Marco about a
matter so important but that it was something she wanted to be sure he
wouldn't tell Lowell."

"That's a start. Coop, make a list for me. First thing, try to put a
date on that visit, okay? What happened that day?"

"Denise was exuberant. It must have been spring or summer, ' she wasn't
wearing a coat. She was dressed to the nines when she came in, and she
looked spectacular. They began the usual flirtation, and Marco made sure
that I took it all in. She handed me a bottle of wine a very special
one, she made sure to tell me and asked me to open it. I did, and Marco
invited me to pour for all three of us."

"Had you known she was coming?"

"Yes, she'd called the day before and told Marco she'd found a surprise.
A painting, that is. Asked if he would look at it for her.

Of course he agreed."

Cannon took a breath before going on. He rubbed his hands together and
talked slowly, as though uncertain he should talk at all. "After half an
hour of cajoling Marco, she got up from the chaise and picked up the bag
she'd come in with one of those large canvas sail bags. She removed
something from it, and all I could see was a small mound of plastic
bubble wrapping. She unwound several layers of it and lifted out a
painting. Then she walked to one of the easels and rested it on the
stand. "Come, Marcolino come play with me." Mrs. Caxton took him by the
hand and stood him before the canvas."

"Did you know what it was?"

"I certainly didn't. It was dark, really covered with dirt, and hard to
make out."

"Did Varelli say anything?"

"Then? No. It would have been unusual for him to speak until after he'd
gotten to work and made up his mind that he knew what he was looking
at."

"What'd he do?"

"What he did best, Detective. He put the glass of wine down next to him,
strapped his headset on sort of like small binoculars and steadied
himself in place to look at every inch of the canvas with the aid of the
light from the glasses. You want to know the details?"

"All of them."

"It was obvious that not only was there soot on this one, and varnish,
but something had been painted over the original work. That happens
frequently with oils, you know, sometimes just because the artist
changed his mind about what he wanted to portray. But in this case it
looked like it had been put on top to disguise an earlier version of
whatever was depicted.

"So Marco got out his acetone, soaked a cotton swab in it, and went
about dabbing at a corner of the canvas, sort of the top right
quadrant."

"And you, what were you doing?"

"I stood behind him to watch, to be there to assist him should he have
needed me to."

"And Deni?"

"Practically breathing down his neck. Not that he minded that, from
her."

"How long does this take, what he was doing?"

"Depends. On what's there, how many layers, how easily or not it picks
up. I would say Marco worked for close to an hour before he said very
much. He stopped to tell us that he thought he had gotten through the
primary layer. He stood up to stretch, and to have me take a look, which
I did."

"What did you see?" Cannon smiled for the first time in ten minutes.
"You sound just as anxious as Denise. "What do you see, Marco? What can
you tell me?" He poured himself another glass and asked me a few
questions, ignoring Deni completely.

"

"What century, boy, do you see now? What school, what artist?" He did
that with me all the time, delighting in those rare occasions when I
could pinpoint a good answer as rapidly as he was able to do."

"Did you recognize anything?"

"Only that Marco had gone back several centuries, between removing the
new paint and the grime that had so discolored the original canvas.

Wherever this piece had come from, it had been terribly, terribly
neglected."

"What then?"

"He went back to work, this time adding some ammonia to the acetone and
patiently dabbing away. It's a very slow business. After a while,
Marco's touch exposed some bright blue paint trimmed with a very pearly
sort of highlight. He almost gasped when he saw the contrast of the two
colors next to each other."

"Excuse my ignorance," Mike said, "but why?"

"I didn't know myself, but now I assume that was the point at which he
thought he had recognized the artist, perhaps even the painting."

"And Deni?"

"She had seen him do this enough times to know he was reacting to
something serious." Again, Cannon slipped into one of his imitations.

"

"Go in deeper, Marco," she urged him. I remember that he hesitated for a
bit, then picked up one of his pointed tools, almost like a scalpel, and
began to dig at the thick varnish in another part of the painting. More
of the picture came into view, near its center, revealing a clear yellow
tint that had been almost brown in color in the layer above.

"That's when I was banished."

"By Denise Caxton?"

"By Marco Varelli. That familiar little gesture I told you about
earlier, sweeping me away with his hand like you might do to a pet dog
you wanted to get out from underfoot? That's exactly what I got from
him. "That's all I'm going to do for today," he told me. "You may go
home now.""

"And did you?"

"I left the studio, certainly. But my curiosity had been aroused. I went
straight to the library at NYU to do a bit of art research. At that
point I was fairly confident that we had been looking at something from
the seventeenth century, probably Dutch." "A Rembrandt?" Mike asked.

"Not bad, Detective. It was an interior scene by a great colorist I was
guessing Vermeer, who was known for his pearl-colored reflections and
the fantastically luminous shades of blue and yellow. I pored over
textbooks until I found what I was looking for. Have you ever heard of a
painting called The Concert?"

Neither one of us had.

"You know about the break-in at the Gardner Museum?"

Mike was following the story intently. "Yeah, we do. Why?"

"Along with the great Rembrandt that was taken," Cannon said,
acknowledging Chapman as he went on, "which you clearly seem to be aware
of, there was one Vermeer stolen that has never been found either. It's
called The Concert, and it depicts a young woman playing a pianoforte
for two others. I believe I'm one of the very few people in the world
who has seen that painting at least, any portion of it in the last ten
years. The other two who saw it with me that day Mrs. Caxton and Mr.
Varelli are dead. Maybe now you can understand why I'm reluctant to
speak about it."

Mike had no sympathy for Cannon's fear. "What's its value?"

"Not as great as the Rembrandt, but still in the multi millions.

Vermeer is known to have painted only thirty-five works in his
lifetime."

"Was it still at Varelli's studio when you got there the next day?"

"No. I never saw it again. Nor did he mention it to me. We went right
back to work on the portrait we had been commissioned to restore for the
Tate, the one we were immersed in before Denise Caxton asked to drop by.
I came in that next morning eager to hear what he and Mrs. Caxton had
found

after he had dismissed me. Not a word. But then, the texts I had
consulted were written before the Gardner theft, so I had no idea the
Vermeer had been stolen. I thought that perhaps the museum was
deaccessioning the painting, and it made sense to me that the Caxtons
were among the few collectors with the means to acquire it legitimately.

"It wasn't unusual for Marco to work in silence. Finally, when we broke
for lunch, I thought I'd impress him with my knowledge. I'd be the
perfect pupil and answer the questions he had asked me when he had
started to uncover the picture in my presence."

"Did it work?"

"It backfired colossally. Marco almost took my head off. I told him that
not only did I think I knew the century and the school to which the
painting could be attributed, but that I also knew the artist and the
work itself. He looked surprised and challenged me." Cannon looked up at
us rather sheepishly. "When I said the words aloud, he became furious at
me.

"

"But why?" I asked him. "Why are you so angry?"

"You have never, never seen that Vermeer, do you understand, my boy? It
has never been in the studio of Marco Varelli." He went on to rant and
rave about the fact that Denise had brought him a fraud, some lousy
copyist's effort to re-create a Dutch domestic scene, that Denise was a
rank amateur who had occasionally been lucky but had made a bad guess.
He practically made me swear that the event I witnessed had never taken
place." "Have you ever told anyone about it?"

"My girlfriend, sure. No one else. I had gone right back to the library
and searched the periodicals. That's when I realized that it must have
been the stolen Vermeer, and that Varelli wanted no part of it. I
respected him for that, and thought that would be the end of it."

"You mean it wasn't? Did Deni come back?"

"Of course she did. Several times, not too long after, just trying to
regain favor, I guess. Lots of good wine, charming coquettish ness
gifts. Marco wasn't at all materialistic, but she'd find wonderfully
whimsical things small sculptures, paintings, objets dart that he
couldn't resist and bring them by to appease him."

"Any talk of the Vermeer?"

"None. And again Marco wanted me around when she showed up and made a
fuss over him. So they weren't alone very much those next few visits.

Then," Cannon said, rubbing his eyes with his hand, "there was another
tempest. Perhaps, if I hadn't been such a coward, I'd have done
something about it at the time. Deni came in one day very excited, very
flustered."

"When was this, do you remember?"

"Not off the top of my head."

"Months later, Don?"

"No, no. Three or four weeks at most. But I'm pretty sure she had been
away, out of the country, in the meantime. I think it was shortly after
she and her husband had some kind of huge fight and split up.

Anyway, I knew immediately that something different was going on."

"How?"

"As soon as she arrived, it was Denise who asked me to leave. Even Marco
looked puzzled, because she dispensed with the usual flirtation.

"You don't mind, do you? I've got some personal matters to discuss with
Signer Varelli. It's the middle of the afternoon, Marco let him have the
rest of the day off, okay?"

"For once he seemed reluctant to let me walk out. I think, at that
point, he didn't quite trust her anymore. But she was insistent, and he
gave me the back of his hand."

"Do you have any idea what she wanted? Was she carrying the same bag?"


"She wasn't carrying any sail bag this time. Just her pocket-book. I
took off my work shirt, said good-bye, and closed the door behind me."

"Didn't Varelli ever tell you what it was about?"

"He didn't have to, Detective." Cannon pursed his lips and looked away
from us before speaking again. "I'm not proud of this, but I really
couldn't help myself. Instead of leaving, I ran down the steps from the
atelier door, then I slipped off my sandals and walked back up, sitting
on the top of the stoop, so that I could listen against the door.

"It was Denise Caxton at her best, pulling out all the stops. She was
pleading with Marco to look at what she had brought with her coaxing and
cajoling him with her limited vocabulary of Italian platitudes. "My
little gems," she kept repeating. Then I heard her tell him that he was
the only person in the world who could know the truth. That this
adventure would crown his illustrious career and be his great heritage
to restore a priceless painting to the world."

"Little gems?" Chapman asked. "Could you see what they were talking
about?"

"I never saw them, but it became quite obvious. She had a small pouch,
which she opened, and placed the contents on Marco's workbench. Chips, a
dozen tiny pieces of paint chips."

"From the stolen Rembrandt?"

"That's precisely what she wanted to know." "I realize Varelli's
expertise," I said, "but is that the kind of thing that a restorer would
be able to determine with any certainty?"

"I guess you both know that when The Storm on the Sea of Galilee was
taken in that theft, the burglars were unusually sloppy, just slicing it
out of the frame with a knife and leaving behind a dustpan full of
chips. That probably means that slivers continued to flake off the edges
of the actual painting itself, so whoever possessed the painting would
have more pieces like the ones collected by the police. A science lab
would have to make the ultimate determination of the authenticity of the
age of the chips. They can do it with electron and polarized-light
microscopes, like the F. B.I, uses. Specialists have uncovered frauds,
for example, by proving that minuscule amounts of chalk in a paint
primer were made twenty years ago, not three hundred.

That's technology.

"But Marco wasn't a bad place to start, to get a first opinion. What lab
technicians do with their tools or their scopes, he did with his nose
and his fingers and his infallible eye. It was the trait that made him a
genius at restoration. Besides that, Ms. Cooper, Denise Caxton could
hardly walk into an F. B.I, office and ask whether the fragments she was
holding actually matched the ones that had fallen behind at the Gardner
during an unsolved theft, could she?"

"Did Varelli look at the chips?"

"I never found out. When I left, he was still being obstinate and
refusing to entertain Mrs. Caxton's request."

"Why didn't you wait?"

"Believe me, I wanted to stay there. But a couple of the workmen were
coming back with some large frames that Marco had sent out to be
regilded. We had been expecting them earlier in the afternoon. When I
heard the buzzer ring from downstairs, I was afraid Mr. Varelli would
open the door and find me hiding there. So I left.

"The next day, he carried on as usual. And after what had occurred with
the Vermeer, I didn't dare ask him about these paint chips. I don't
think I ever mentioned Rembrandt's name to him for a couple of months."

"Didn't he talk about Deni anymore? Didn't she still come to visit?"

"Less frequently, so far as I know. But whenever she showed up, he
insisted I stay to help him or have a glass of wine with them. And he
was much too discreet to talk about her. After she'd leave, he'd shake
his head and say she was crazy. "Bella pazza," my beautiful crazy one.

That's what he called her more recently."

"And when she was killed, what did he have to say about her then?"

Don Cannon shook his head at us. "Don't know. I was on vacation with my
girlfriend, camping out in Yosemite. My family couldn't even find me to
tell me that Marco had died. But those scenes with the Vermeer and then
the paint chips were the cause of the breach that developed between him
and Deni, I'm sure of it. The other thing," he said, stretching a bit
and arching his back, "the other thing was also a bit odd, at least to
me."

"What other? I thought you said there were two things that estranged
them meaning the Vermeer and the chips."

"To me," the young man replied, "those two were part of the same
headache the Gardner Museum heist. The other one was something else
again."

Mike was jotting notes on his pad, while I added points to my list of
questions. "A bit later on, Denise came back to the studio. It was well
after she and her husband had separated, I know that. She had another
man with her and "

"Who?"

"Sorry, I can't help you with that. I never got much of a look. He was
standing quietly off to the side, and like Varelli, all my attention was
on Mrs. Caxton. It wasn't unusual for her to have men with her who were
clients. They rarely entered into her conversation with Mr. Varelli and
I never paid them much mind. Anyway, she was telling Marco about the
breakup, and she said she had brought a gift, this time for Gina for
Mrs. Varelli. It was a necklace of beads very large amber beads and a
carved figurine that matched them. "Come look, Dan," she said to me.
She'd met me a few dozen
times, but she was a bit too self-centered to bother to learn my name.

Always called me Dan instead of Don. "Come look, you'll never see
anything like these. They're quite rare. Lowell gave them to me, and I
really don't want to wear them anymore. Might give him too much
satisfaction. Gina will adore them, don't you think, Marco? You don't
have to tell her they're from me."

"Mrs. Caxton reached over with both hands to pass them to Varelli, but
he recoiled instantly and the strand fell onto the floor. "Not in my
house, signora, not under my roof. Too many people have been killed for
these trifles with which you amuse yourself.""

"And she left?"

"She got down on her knees to pick up the beads. One end of the strand
had broken and they were rolling across the floor like golf balls. I
helped her gather them up and put them back in her purse. Then she and
her friend left.

"But they left behind the little amber statue. By accident, I would
think. Mr. Varelli didn't even notice it. But when Gina came upstairs
the next morning to bring us some tea, she saw it there. She spotted it
immediately and admired it. Just picked it up with her and took it down
to the apartment."

"Didn't he say anything then?"

"Only to himself, under his breath. He rarely said no to Gina about
anything. But when she carried off her little treasure, Marco muttered
something about Nazis. It meant nothing to me then, but a few more hours
at the library, and the computer research came up with stories about the
Amber Room. I even found a few articles that connected the lost room to
Lowell Caxton."

Chapman was holding his notepad in his right hand, tapping it against
his other fist. "There must be some way to reconstruct the dates that
these things happened, no? You keep any kind of appointment book or
calendars?"

"No reason to, Detective. I went to work at the same place every day at
the same time. I keep journals about exhibits I've gone to see and I
keep loads of sketchbooks, but they don't have any engagements in them."

"How about Varelli?" I asked. "People made appointments with him, there
were deliveries, someone paid the bills "

"Gina Varelli, of course. She was the only one who Marco let control his
business."

"The widow, right?"

"Yes. She made most of the arrangements. Marco didn't like to be
bothered by telephone calls and mundane things." Cannon laughed. "Like
money. Didn't she give you that book when you spoke with her? It's got
everything in it every visitor, client, bill, receipt. I'm sure it would
be a great help to you in your investigation."

"No. We'll get it from her when we see her this week," I said, adding to
my list and nodding at Mike. "Perhaps we can get her to talk about the
amber piece, too. Maybe Marco and she spoke about it at home,
privately."

"Yeah. I'll call her tonight and see if I can go over in the morning and
pick up the journal and the statue, okay, Coop?"

I didn't have to answer.

Don Cannon spoke. "Not tomorrow, Detective. About two hours before the
funeral that had been scheduled for last Friday, Gina got a call from
the mayor of Florence. It's where Marco was born. The Italian government
offered to fly the body home for burial in the family's church,
somewhere up north, in the mountains, alongside all his ancestors. Kind
of like a national hero which shows the respect they have for artists
over there.

"Gina Varelli left for Italy last evening. Some little town in Tuscany.
I don't even know how to reach her."

Twenty-Six.

"Your to-do list is getting to be a mile long," Chapman said after Don
Cannon left the office and we were eating our sandwiches at the
lieutenant's desk.

"I'll call down to my paralegal now and see whether she can get a number
for the mayor of Florence. You double-check with the guys from Crime
Scene to see whether they took any kind of book when they processed
Varelli's studio."

"I'm telling you, Mercer and I were there with them. No such thing
anywhere we looked. The only evidence they vouchered was the pair of
sunglasses. Whatever this appointment journal or calendar is, it's
probably in his apartment, not the studio."

"Well, if we can find the niece who took Gina Varelli home the other
night, maybe we can convince her to let us do a consent search. If not,
I'll draft another warrant in the morning." I looked at my watch.

"It's already almost four o'clock."

The shifts had changed, and detectives working the day tour were signing
out while those doing four-to-twelves were coming on. Even the teams
that had finished their official tours were working overtime, without
pay, because of Mercer.

Jimmy Halloran opened the door. "Your secretary's on line two. Wanna
pick up?"

"Sure. Laura? Everything okay?"

"Just a couple of things you need to know about. Pat Mckinney is having
a meeting at ten tomorrow with a few of the senior trial counsel.
Catherine said to tell you that he hasn't given them any specific agenda
yet, but she assumes he's planning to pick someone from the group to
assign to prosecute Mercer's case."

"Thank her for letting me know. I'll be there."

"You're not invited, Alex. That's the point. That's what Catherine
wanted me to get across to you."

Damn it. Mckinney would do everything in his power, as deputy chief of
the Trial Division, to make me uncomfortable as a witness to Mercer's
shooting. I wanted to have a say in who would prosecute the gunman when
he was caught. "Can you find a number for Rod Squires? Scout around for
me, will you?" The chief of the division, my friend and ally, was also
on summer vacation. If I could enlist his aid before morning, I'd have
some control over the selection process.

"Let me call Rose Malone. I'm sure she'll know how to find him. And you
also need to know that the man who tried to run you down last week,
Wakim Wakefield? Well, he was back here at the building today, trying to
get upstairs to file a complaint with Battaglia about you."

"Did security let him through?" That's a bit too close for comfort.

"No. His name was on their daily chart." The security crew in the lobby
at 1 Hogan Place kept a roster of names of people not welcome in our
office an ever-expanding list of psychos, malcontents, and cranks who
were expert at creating disturbances once they got inside.

"Was he arrested?" I asked with some hesitancy.

"No. The guard called up to the squad to get some detectives to come
talk to him, but there's only one elevator working today, and by the
time somebody got downstairs, Wakefield was already gone. Mr. Battaglia
himself called about it. Made me promise to ask you if you were using
your bodyguards." "Don't mention to him that I groaned when I told you
yes," I answered.

"I'm smack in the middle of a police station right now, and unless
Chapman goes ballistic ' I tell him to wipe the mustard off the side of
his mouth, I'll be perfectly safe. I'll stay with him a few more hours,
and then he'll pass me back off to the D. A.'s Squad. Tell the boss I'm
being a very good soldier, okay? And please see if you can get a number
for any government officials in Florence. We need to find Marco
Varelli's widow."

"Alex, it's after ten at night over there. I'll see what I can do, but I
doubt I'll have anything for you until tomorrow. And one last thing."

"Some good news, right?"

"Not exactly. Pat Mckinney dropped by. He told me to remind you that you
are to stay away from the hospital. No visits to Mercer, no talking
about the case. He doesn't want you comparing notes and conforming your
stories to fit each other's recollections. Sorry, Alex."

"Don't worry, Laura. I know you're just the messenger." I hung up and
Chapman asked what the news was, so I told him about Wakefield.

"Jeez, blondie, if it wasn't for me you'd have no friends at all. Let's
take off. Preston Mattox will see us at his office whenever we get
there."

"I thought you said everyone else would have to be interviewed here."

"What happened to your sense of humor, kid? D'you lose it yesterday?

This guy's got his architectural offices in a penthouse suite on Fifth
Avenue, overlooking Saint Patrick's Cathedral, with about fifty
employees in the surrounding rooms. I'll get you home in one piece
tonight."

Mike called the hospital and spoke with Mercer's dad, who told him that
Mercer had been sitting up for a few hours in the early afternoon and
now was sleeping again. We gathered our things to leave the squad.

Jimmy Halloran had been kept over to do back-to-back tours, to man the
phone and hot line, since City Hall had announced a reward for
information leading to the arrest of the shooter.

"Hey, K. D." give me a beep if anything comes in on Bailey before your
shift is done. We've got an interview to do before we stop off at the
hospital."

With that we were on our way to the offices of Mattox Partners, and our
first introduction to another one of Deni's suitors, Preston Mattox.

His secretary announced us and we were led into the stark glass-enclosed
headquarters of the prominent architect, which looked south toward the
spires of the great church below.

My first reaction was surprise. He appeared to be about fifty years old.
He was in good shape and dressed in a navy suit, exuding a much more
businesslike air than the art-world denizens we had encountered
throughout the last week. But what struck me most about Mattox was that
he looked truly distraught, and as though he had been crying for days on
end.

There was a hollow contour around his eyes and a lifelessness emanating
from within, which hit a chord in the core of me that wanted someone to
be mourning for Denise Caxton.

Once more Chapman and I made our introductions.

"Why don't you have a seat?" he said, coming out from behind his desk
and pulling three chairs around in a circle. "Sorry I didn't get back to
you sooner. I really had to get away from here after Deni was killed.
Lowell made it clear that I wasn't welcome at the service, and I just
needed to be somewhere else."

Mattox was cordial, but he seemed distracted and unable even to muster a
smile.

"Have you made any progress in solving Deni's case?"

"Not as much as we'd like," I answered.

"I've stopped reading newspaper accounts, so I don't know what you're up
to. The stories about her all made her sound so vacuous and unpleasant.
She was a most unusual creature clever, funny, warm. She craved
affection, and I loved giving it to her."

Mike showed unusual restraint in not mentioning Deni's other liaisons.

He let Mattox do it for us. "You've probably talked with some of Deni's
other friends. Obviously, I wasn't the only man in her life, but I was
fighting hard for that slot." He stood up and walked to the window,
looking out and not speaking for several seconds. "I had asked Denise to
marry me."

"But she wasn't even divorced yet," Mike said.

Mattox rested against the ledge of the windowsill. "No, but I was urging
her to speed up the process. Stop fighting with Lowell and walk away
from him. Frankly, it made me sick just to think of them living under
the same roof. I don't quite have the art collection that her husband
does, but short of that, there wasn't anything she wanted that I would
not have given her."

"Do you know why she didn't leave?"

"Really why? Probably I don't know. None of the reasons she ever gave me
made much sense. "Just wait," she used to say. "Don't rush me."

She was obstinate about it and I was madly in love, so I didn't push
her. It was the only thing we ever fought over. And she could fight,"
Mattox said, almost amused at the memory of it.

"What do you mean?"

"Deni was a battler. She looked so soft, so fragile. But she had an iron
will, and if something got under her skin, she'd go to the mats for it.
It was one of her best traits as a friend a tenacious loyalty that
endeared her to anyone who got close enough." He took a handkerchief
from his pants pocket and held it over his mouth as he cleared his
throat, and then tamped the cloth against his eyes. "I keep thinking of
how she must have died. I know it wouldn't have been without a
struggle."

So many victims of sexual assault had described to me their reactions to
the assailant. The greatest number submitted to life-threatening words
or display of a weapon. Others chose to attempt to fight back.

Some were successful and became survivors. For many, the resistance
served only to aggravate the attacker and caused him to use more force,
which resulted sometimes in serious injury to the woman, and often in
her death. No one could second-guess the decisions each victim had to
make in the seconds when she was confronted by a rapist.

Mike tried to direct the conversation back to the areas that interested
him.

"Did you have any kind of relationship with Lowell Caxton?"

"A casual one. I'd known him for years never did any work for him, but
we traveled in the same social circles here in town. Always been a
perfect gentleman to me."

"How about to Deni?"

"I think I understood him a lot better than she did, to tell you the
truth. I don't think she had any business trying to make him let go of
some of the artwork that had been in his family for decades. It wasn't
the prettiest side of Deni, as you probably know by now."

"What about her concerns that he was trying to have her killed?"

Mattox frowned at that suggestion. "I ridiculed the idea at the time.

Sort of makes me crazy to think about that now. It could just as easily
be Lowell behind all this as it could be anyone, I guess." He looked up
at Mike. "I don't envy your job, Detective. Saw an article in the paper
not long ago. Said there are more murderers in the United States than
there are medical doctors. More murderers than college professors. It's
mind-boggling, really." He talked on about the Caxtons' marriage for
more than fifteen minutes, until Mike changed the questions to ask about
Bryan Daughtry.

"Never had any use for him, Mr. Chapman. It was a major point of
contention between Deni and me. Whenever we talked seriously about the
future, I made it clear that there was no room in it for Daughtry. He's
a despicable piece of well, human garbage." Mattox walked along the
window on the far side of the room, dragging his finger along the sill.

"Why you people never nailed him for the murder of that Scandinavian
girl upstate escapes me completely. Whatever he does, he somehow lands
on his feet each time. Makes me sick just to think about it."

"Did you spend any time at Caxton Due, their new gallery?" I asked.

"Not when Bryan was around. I'd gone there on several occasions with
Deni, when she went to check on shipments that were being unloaded. She
found all that very exciting loved to watch the men break down the
packing boxes and lift some painting or sculpture out of them. She was
like a little kid on Christmas morning, poring over every inch of the
canvas, examining the artist's signature, checking out the condition of
the frame.

"I'd go just to see her reaction. Frankly, the art she and Daughtry were
interested in did nothing for me. I'm rather a classicist, as you can
see from my work." He pointed at the office walls, which displayed the
plans and finished results of some of his buildings. There was an
elegance of line and style that didn't mesh with the contemporary works
we had seen in Chelsea.

"Do you know Varelli? Marco Varelli?"

"Certainly. I'd actually met Marco many times."

"With Deni?"

"I'd met him through clients long before I started to date Deni. But I'd
never been to his atelier until she took me there. He was a genius a
lovely man."

"When were you there at his studio, I mean?"

"A couple of times this spring. I don't remember exactly, but once or
twice, probably in June or July."

"Why did Deni take you there?"

"She usually went when she had a painting that she wanted Varelli to
look at." "Like a Vermeer?" Mike asked.

I wanted to slow him down. I could see Preston Mattox stiffen when Mike
mentioned the artist's name. If he jumped into the territory of stolen
artworks too quickly, I was afraid he'd lose his cooperative subject.

"So, you two have bought into all the gossip on the circuit. Denise
Caxton and the masterpieces from the Gardner heist. When you find the
goods, be sure and let me know," he said, scowling at Chapman as though
he had made a terrible mistake.

"Deni ever talk to you about the Vermeer? Or the Rembrandt?"

Mattox was angry now. "She wasn't a thief, Detective. Deni made more
than her share of enemies, but she was an awfully decent woman when you
gave her a chance to be. There was no way she was involved with the scum
who've been peddling stolen property. She didn't need that kind of
trouble. Between the life that Lowell had built for her and what I was
willing to provide when she married me, there wasn't any reason to
debase herself with something that would land her in jail." While Mattox
was hot, Mike decided it was a good moment to offer him up the name of
his rival. "And Frank Wrenley? Where did he fit in Deni's life?"

"As far out of the picture as I could move him, Detective."

"Why? What did you know about him?"

"Not enough, clearly. But that's because whatever I saw I didn't like."

"More than just jealousy?"

"Yes, Mr. Chapman. Far more than that. Frank moved in on Deni like a
vulture right after she and Lowell split. I mean, they had known each
other before around the auction houses, but he pounced on her like a
panther when her wounds were still quite raw."

"But she loved him, too, didn't she?"

"She certainly liked what he offered her as an immediate alternative
when Lowell Caxton brought their marriage to a crashing halt. Wrenley
was a vehicle to get back at her husband. First of all, he was young,
and youth was something Lowell couldn't buy for himself with all his
millions. Wrenley was slick too slick for my taste."

"Was he a real player in the antiques business?"

Mattox was slow to answer. "He's been making quite a name for himself.

Not necessarily someone I'd bring in on a project, but he seems to know
what he's doing."

"Would you say that you were closer to Deni in recent months than
Wrenley was?" I asked.

Preston Mattox crossed his arms and leaned against the sill. Something
he thought of brought a smile to his face. "I almost gave up on Deni
before I got started. For a while it wasn't Lowell's shadow that got in
the way, it was Wrenley's. Everywhere we went, he'd been there with Deni
first. Just your mention of Marco Varelli reminded me how unreasonable
I'd been about it. I'd been introduced to the man any number of times,
but that last afternoon we were up in his studio, Deni and I walked in
with a bottle of wine and some biscotti and he embraced me in a bear
hug, calling me "Franco." Instead of correcting him, I took it out on
Deni as soon as we left, asking her what the hell she'd been doing there
with Frank."

"What'd she tell you?"

"I'm not sure she ever gave me an answer, Mr. Chapman. As with most of
our arguments, she got me over them by taking me home to make love.

I knew she and Wrenley had been doing the auction scene together, so it
made sense that they had taken some work to Varelli to be cleaned up or
restored. I just didn't like following in his footsteps wherever we
went. But I didn't answer the question you asked, did I, Miss. Cooper?

"Yes," he went on, "I was confident that I'd be spending the rest of my
life with Deni. I can't tell you how extraordinarily happy that made
me."

"Why had you gone to see Varelli that day?"

"Because Deni asked me to. Simple as that. He'd been mad at her about
something, she wouldn't tell me what. So she wanted to take him a gift
for his wife, smoke the peace pipe together that sort of thing. I
suppose I was an intermediary. She knew he liked to talk to me about my
work and that I could hold my own, whether it was about the
architectural principles of Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Jefferson or
about drawings and art."

Chapman didn't care about the dome on the Rotunda. "What was the gift
that Deni took for Mrs. Varelli?"

Again Mattox hesitated before lifting his head to meet Chapman's stare.

"It was a necklace, Detective. An amber necklace. But I suppose you knew
that already. I imagine you found the small figurine that Deni left
behind, and that Mrs. Varelli told you the story."

Neither of us responded to his statement.

"I take it the peace offering didn't go very well, did it?"

"Varelli was furious." Mattox seemed to be open with us, having
convinced himself that Varelli had told the story of the encounter to
his wife. I guessed that he did not even recall that the soft-spoken
young apprentice, Don Cannon, had been in the room when the beads were
presented. "He assumed that the amber was part of Lowell's secret cache
of looted Nazi riches. The old guy didn't even want to hold the necklace
in his hands."

"Isn't that the truth, though? Isn't that the source of the amber?"

"Hardly, Mr. Chapman. All of us who've been looking for the Amber Room
have combed the Baltic coast for years. In Lowell's case, for half a
century, if you can imagine that. We've each come back with bits and
pieces the area is rich with amber. There are places along the coast
where you can pick up chunks of it right on the beach. But no one really
knows whether the great room was destroyed in some wartime bombing or is
buried in one of the quarries that treasure seekers are constantly
drilling."

"How about the rumors that Lowell Caxton has smuggled half the remains
out of Europe and re-created the palace room in some hideaway in the
Pennsylvania countryside?"

"And that's why I had latched on to Mrs. Caxton, Mr. Chapman? I've heard
that one, too. If you could have seen

Deni throw back her head and roar at those stories and the nonsense that
she and Lowell had used this mini Amber Room for their trysts well, then
you would have seen the woman I adored. She liked to fuel those absurd
tales when she heard they were circulating. The more bold and bizarre,
the more it pleased her. She loved outrage, Detective, and if she was at
the center of it she loved it even more."

"Were those the only jewels from Lowell that Deni wanted to give away?"
I asked, referring to the amber beads.

"Lowell?" Mattox said with some surprise. "I don't think she was parting
with anything he gave her. His gifts to her were pretty substantial."

"Then why the amber?"

"Those pieces weren't from Lowell."

I was sure Don Cannon had repeated that as part of Deni's explanation
when she tried to hand Varelli the necklace.

Mattox thought for a moment. "You know, you're right, though. She told
Marco they had been given to her by Lowell." Now he looked up at me.
"But you see, that was part of the game she liked to play. By
implication she'd let people assume they were part of Lowell's
collection. Knowing Deni, she thought it would titillate old Marco to
think there really was an Amber Room and that she and Lowell had
cavorted in it. She and Varelli may have talked about it on other
occasions I simply don't know that."

"But she wouldn't take anything fake to give Varelli," I said. "I
realize that his specialty was paint and artworks, but he had such a
great eye. People tell us he had a unique sense of touch, and could
identify the age of artworks so precisely. She wouldn't pass off
something to him as an antique or a valuable if she was trying to
appease him, would she?"

"The necklace and figurine were genuine, Miss. Cooper. Very old and very
fine amber. The Baltic region is full of great pieces. It's just that
these things had absolutely nothing to do with the mysterious Russian
palace and its amber. Deni may have tried to create that impression, but
she knew damn well where the pieces came from." "And where was that?"
Chapman asked.

"The necklace had been commissioned by King Wilhelm of Prussia for his
queen. And the figurine as well. Sold at auction in Geneva several years
ago. Can't remember the price they brought, but it was quite high."

"And Lowell bought them for Deni?"

"No, no." Mattox seemed bothered that we hadn't followed his point.

"Deni only said she had gotten them from Lowell. Actually, they were a
gift to her from a friend."

"You know who he was?"

"She, Detective. From a woman called Marina Sette."

"Pretty nice stocking stuffer," Mike said.

It seemed even more curious that Deni would relinquish something that
her closest friend had given to her. I still had every note card and
silly souvenir that Nina or Joan had ever sent me, not to mention the
more serious gifts. "But why would she get rid of something so precious,
from someone she liked so much?"

Preston Mattox looked at me with a curious glance. "Liked so much?

They hadn't talked to each other in a long time."

Chapman spoke before I did. "I thought they were best pals."

"I don't know what gave you that idea. They used to be quite close, but
they had a terrible falling-out this spring. I don't think Deni had
returned Marina's calls in months."

"What was that about, do you know?" "The only person who thought she had
a greater entitlement to Lowell Caxton's fortune than Denise did was
Marina Sette. Deni came to believe that the primary reason Marina had
befriended her in the first place was to work herself back into the
inheritance the fortune that would have been Marina's had her mother not
abandoned her when she married Lowell.

There was nothing logical about Marina's position. I doubt she has a leg
to stand on in a court of law. But I think it was more of an emotional
attempt to regain some connection to the mother she never knew, by
claiming that she had a right to some of the masterpieces acquired
during the period her mother was married to Lowell Caxton."

"Seems to me there was more than enough money to go around," Chapman
murmured.

"But they'd never argued about that before?" I asked.

"It never was an issue with Deni before this spring. But then, once she
suspected that Marina Sette had been sleeping with Frank Wrenley, it
became more than an issue. It was the end of the friendship. The worm
turned."

Twenty-Seven.

Mercer Wallace lifted his head off the pile of pillows as we entered the
room and gave us a weak but warm greeting. The nurse who helped feed him
his dinner still a liquid diet was moving the tray off the bedside table
as we settled in around the patient.

Chapman grabbed the television remote control panel dangling from a cord
on Mercer's bed railing and pointed it at the small set that was hanging
from a support in the corner.

"Too early," Mercer said, laughing. It was only six thirty-five, and he
thought that Mike was looking for the Jeopardy! channel. "Let me hear
what's going on."

Mike kept clicking until the screen was set on NEC and the national news
report. "Don't you want to see Cooper's guy? Has he got a live shoot
tonight, kid? Whoops, looks like Brian Williams has the anchor spot." He
muted the sound and asked Mercer how he felt.

"I don't remember much about yesterday. Pain's under control, and they
even had me out of bed for an hour this afternoon. One lap around the
hallway." "There he is!" Mike said, rising from his armchair and walking
to stand directly under the television set. "Gimme volume, Mercer."

Jake was standing on First Avenue, in front of the United Nations
building, and he was mid-sentence when I heard his voice: "... after the
secretary of state and the delegate from ... "

Mike's pen was in his right hand, held up against the screen and tapping
at Jake's chest. "Here's the thing, Mercer. The reason you and I will
never get to first base with Ms. Cooper is that we don't have these ties
that all her beaux wear, know what I mean? Every one of ' has these
itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny little friggin' animals all over '. Grown men,
and they got little squirrels runnin' around with nuts in their cheeks,
sheep jumping over fences, monkeys swingin' on vines, giraffes standing
on tippy-toe. I would be mortified to be here on national television,
talkin' about sending troops to the Middle East, decked out in some
French necktie what do you call them, Coop?

Hermies or Hermans or Ermies something like that. Anyway, the thing is,
Mercer, that it works. "Cause whatever it is about those ties, every one
of the goofballs who shows up wearing one of ' gets laid.

"Am I right, blondie? Ever do a simple guy with a striped tie? I doubt
it. I'm telling you, if Alex Trebek walked in with one of these on,
she'd go down on him like a pelican, wouldn't you, kid? You wanna
predict who Cooper's gonna get up close and personal with, you check out
the tie. That, my good friend, is my Dick Tracy crime stopper clue of
the day."

Mercer was holding his hand over his chest. "Don't make me laugh, Mike.
Somebody want to tell me what's going on with the case?"

"First of all, forget that you ever saw Alex tonight. Pat Mckinney's
riding her pretty hard. Doesn't want her to visit with you, so you don't
talk about the facts of the case together."

Mercer looked across at me to see if Mike was still kidding. "It's true.
He's afraid we're going to conspire and rearrange the events if we talk
to each other. I spent three hours last night giving my statement. I'm
sure they got one from you today, as soon as you opened your eyes. I
don't know what he's so worried about."

"They were here. Two guys from Major Case, first thing this morning.

They said they're taking you back over to the scene later in the week."
"Yes," I said, hoping that my involuntary shudder at the thought of
revisiting the gallery hadn't been visible to Mike or Mercer.

"That is one spooky exhibit," Mike said. "I stopped there this morning
on my way to the hospital the first time. Kind of reminds me of that
great Orson Welles scene in Lady From Shanghai the shoot-out in the fun
house? Only thing missing was the mirrors. Listen to this."

Mike pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pants pocket. "They're
already moving a new show into Caxton Due. Somebody probably needed all
that friggin' yarn to make a sweater. I'm reading right from the
description Bryan Daughtry wrote. It's in New York magazine. "The artist
affixes hardened blobs of paint and scraps of paper, hair, and other
scavenged materials to her monochromatic canvases." I'm looking forward
to wrapping this case up so I can go back to working something real,
like a pickpocket detail."

Mercer winced as he tried to push himself up in bed. I moved to his side
to adjust the pillows behind his back and beneath his head. I grabbed
one of his enormous arms and pulled on it as gently as I could, but was
unable to move him. Mike got on the other side, and together we raised
Mercer so that his head rested in a more comfortable position.

"Watch out for the tubes," I said to Mike, lifting the IV drip from
where it was caught under a roll of bedsheet.

"Else you'll get strangulated on all those concoctions, Mr. Wallace.

That's a word for the S section of my dictionary. I got to jot that one
down. "Fixiated' that goes with the F's, not the A's and 'strangulated'
are two very popular causes of death among perps."

"Have mercy, will you please, Mr. Chapman? I'm supposed to be lying here
very still. Don't make me get up and have to hurt you."

We spent the next half hour telling Mercer what we had learned from Don
Cannon and Preston Mattox. "Who do you like in all this?" he asked.

Mike shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing and nobody is like what you'd
think they'd be. Me, I always thought the international art world was
for the elegant and elite. Classy, calm, sedate, cultured. I'm tellin'
you, there are more lowlifes in this business than all the Hannibal
Lecter wannabes in the world."

"Between the fakes and the frauds, and centuries of thefts and
misrepresentations, I can't imagine now how anyone sets a value that can
be trusted on any painting," I added. It was odd that for so many of the
people we had encountered, their passions had become obsessions, and
their lives as illusory as their art.

Mike reached for the clicker and raised the volume again. "Okay, the
Final Jeopardy topic is Sports. Way to go. I'm in for fifty dollars.

Partners, Mercer?" Mike gave him a thumbs-up and got a wink in response.
"Get your money up, Coop."


I opened my pocketbook and reached in to dig around. Even though I had
just taken another handbag from the apartment late last night to replace
the one that I had lost in the shooting, I had already filled it with
more than any reasonable person would cart around. The heavy wallet,
laden with a checkbook, credit cards, business cards, and assorted
notes, had sunk to the bottom of the deep tote. On Mercer's tray table I
unloaded house keys, car keys, office keys, and Jake's apartment keys. A
lipstick case and blusher came out next.

Handkerchief, pens, hairbrush, Post-it pads, and my official badge piled
on top.

"How the hell do you ever find anything in there? It's really one of
life's great mysteries.

"Okay, the answer is: First major league athlete to play all nine
positions in the same baseball season. You got sixty seconds, blondie.

Mercer and I got this one locked up ... What the hell is that?"

As I pulled out my wallet, with it came a small plastic bag that had
snagged on its clasp, holding an old-fashioned razor and set of
double-edge platinum blades, along with a toothbrush and tube of paste.

"I brought a little supply kit for Mercer. Jake has dozens of those
travel cases so he can just pack them and go when he gets sent on
assignment. Thought maybe you'd be able to use some of this stuff while
you're here," I said, holding it up so Mercer could see.

He pointed to his drawer and told me that his dad had brought him
everything he needed, so I replaced all my belongings in the bag.

"Enough with the Clara Barton imitation. You either give us a name or
just drop the money in my pocket."

I had no idea that anyone had ever accomplished that feat. I took out a
fifty-dollar bill and handed it to Mike, at the same time as I said,
"Who was Whitey Ford?" As far as I was concerned, if it hadn't been done
by a Yankee, then it hadn't ever happened.

Trebek was just consoling the three contestants, none of whom had
delivered the correct answer. Before he revealed it on the game board,
Mike announced, "Oakland. Who is Bert Campaneris?"

The television echoed the same question: "Who is Bert Campaneris?"

"I can't believe you knew that."

He'd pocketed the cash before I finished the sentence. "You don't mind
if I don't spend it on flowers or candy, do you, m'man? I got some
informants who need a little monkey grease to make ' sing to me."

The phone rang and I picked it up. "Could I speak with Detective
Chapman?"

I stepped back and Mike squeezed around the side of the bed and took the
receiver. "K. D.? Whaddaya got?" Mike raised his left shoulder to hold
the phone in place against his ear while he reached into his pocket for
a pen and paper. He listened to Jimmy Halloran for several minutes,
occasionally punctuating the conversation with a "When?" or a "Who?"
while I held a straw to Mercer's lips and helped him drink some of the
water that the nurse had directed him to finish. "No, it's not
everything," Mike said before hanging up, "but it's not a bad start.

Thanks."

Mike began his narrative for us. "Anthony Bailor. Gainesville, Florida.
He's forty-two years old now, but back when he was eighteen, he
burglarized an apartment. Raped a college student who was living there.
Knifepoint. Also I. D."d in three other cases in town within six
months." "And did less than twenty years?" I asked.

"Three of the victims were too scared to press charges. Hey, it was
almost twenty-five years ago. Nothing unusual about that back then."

It was only within the last ten to fifteen years that victims of sexual
assault were treated with any dignity in the courtroom. The bad laws
that had prevented women from having access to the system had begun to
be revised throughout the seventies, but public attitudes about this
category of crime had been even slower to change. For centuries, rape
was the only crime for which the victim was blamed, and the stigma that
attached itself to women who had been forced to experience such an
intimate violation kept many of them from seeking justice.

"What didn't show on his sheet was his youth record. Again, Florida.

Did time in a juvenile facility, also for rape. Carjacked a woman in a
supermarket parking lot."

"So we got a sexual predator on our hands."

"Served his felony sentence in Raiford. They got a prison there, Coop,
makes Attica look like a beauty school. Bailor did hard time. Real hard
time. I'm talking chain gangs and leg irons. Must've been one of the
first guys to get himself into the DNA data bank. Even though they
didn't exist when he was convicted, by the time he was eligible for
parole, no one was let out until his genetic fingerprint was on file."

Mike looked back at his pad and flipped the page. "When he got out of
jail, he moved right out of Florida. Can't say as I blame him. If you're
gonna foul up again, might as well come north to one of our country club
prisons. Be my guest, Mr. Bailor. I love New York.

"Ready for the larceny arrest?" Mike asked. "The original charge was
grand larceny, but he pleaded out to possession of stolen property.

That's how come he did so little time. Prosecutor had to drop the top
count and take the lesser plea ' the theft actually occurred in
Massachusetts. Anton Bailey was stopped on the New York State Thruway
for speeding. When they searched his car, the troopers found a couple of
oil paintings. Valuable ones. Seems Anton hadn't saved his sales
receipts."

"Massachusetts? From the Gardner?"

"Nope. Right state, wrong museum. Something called the Mead Art Museum,
in Amherst. Couldn't pin the actual burglary on Anton. His alibi back in
Buffalo held up pretty well. So all they had him for was possession of
the goods. They even offered him a deal of no jail time if he gave up
his accomplice. But he hung tough. Shit, after the stretch he did in
Florida, he must have done this sentence standing on his head."

It was an interesting development. Somewhere along the way, Bailor had
connected with art criminals and had perhaps lent his break-in talent to
their undertakings. A simple calculation confirmed that he was still in
a Florida prison when the Gardner theft had occurred, but he must have
more recently marketed his skills to this murky underground world of
thieves.

"Do you think he knew Omar Sheffield before they wound up in the same
cell?"

"No sign of that yet. We'll have to talk to some of the other prisoners.
So far, what K.D. got is only from the paperwork in the warden's files.
Could be just dumb luck. Omar's doing his usual scam.

Tells Anton about Denise Caxton, maybe even shows him the clippings from
the Law Journal about the Caxton divorce, which lists every one of their
assets and describes all of their dealings in the art business.

Anton has bigger plans. Passes off the information to ... "

"Whom?" I asked. "That's all we've got to figure. He must have been in
this with someone else, someone who had his own scam in mind for
Denise."

"Or for Lowell," Mike reminded me. "I'm not sure who was out to get
which one first."

"You don't really think Lowell was intended to be a victim in all this,
do you?"

Mercer had been listening to us without joining the conversation, as he
struggled against dozing off. "You said you spoke to that Sette woman
out in Santa Fe yesterday, Mike? That she really was back there?" Mike
paused before answering. "It was actually her housekeeper who answered
the phone and told me she expected Sette back in an hour or so. She was
Mexican, with a thick accent, and hard to understand. No, I didn't speak
to Sette directly. And I forgot to check the airline manifest afterward
to see if she really flew out there. Sorry, Mercer.

I'll get on that tonight."

It was Marina Sette's message or one that had been left for us using her
name that had resulted in my trip to the Focus gallery with Mercer
yesterday and that had set us up to be shot. For good reason, Mike was
concentrating more on that intrigue at the moment than on piecing
together the puzzle of Deni Caxton's death.

The phone rang again and I answered it. "Alexandra? It's Rose Malone.

I thought you might be there with Mercer. I wanted you to know that Mr.
Battaglia is on his way home. He's going to stop in at the hospital."

Thank goodness for Rose. She was better than a radar detector. I'd say
good night to Mercer before Battaglia arrived, and let the squad
detectives take me back to Jake's apartment for the night.

"And one other thing. The police have arrested that Wake-field man who
was here at the office looking for you earlier."

"Did he come back?" I asked, alarmed at his persistence.

"No. But that young girl who was in your office was it Ruth?"

"Yes."

"She showed up at his apartment this afternoon, to try to get together
with him again. He beat her up pretty seriously. For admitting to you
that she'd been sleeping with his roommate."

"Oh, no." I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth at the thought of the
anger that Wakefield must have unleashed at that child. I thanked Rose
for the call and hung up the phone.

"You're running on fumes, Coop," Mike said. "I'll sit with Mercer
tonight. Let me take you downstairs and send you off. Get a good night's
sleep and we'll talk in the morning. Put a double rush on those prison
phone records when you get to the office. We gotta figure out who
Bailey's connected with, okay? And I think we need to find Marina Sette
as soon as possible."

I sat in the back of the unmarked car, looking out at the dark streets
as we drove uptown and making small talk with the detectives about the
usual office gossip. They discharged me in front of Jake's building,
watching as the doorman let me in and then parking at the curb, where
they would sit out their shift before they were replaced by the midnight
team in a couple of hours.

I turned the key in the lock and entered the apartment. A small lamp was
lighted on the vestibule table, where I saw a handwritten note addressed
to me.

"Dearest A My turn to disappear. Running for the last shuttle to
Washington. Have a 7 A.M. interview with the secretary of defense.

Sweet dreams, see you tomorrow. Love, J."

I groped the walls in the semidarkness of the unfamiliar layout to turn
on a light switch in the hallway leading to the bedroom. Once I found my
way, I reached for the suitcase I had packed the evening before and laid
out some of the clothes for the next day.

The silence and the emptiness made me uncomfortable. I wanted the
comfort of my own home, and the warmth of Jake's caress.

Twenty-Eight.

I couldn't find the coffee beans in Jake's kitchen when I got out of
bed, shortly before seven o'clock. I showered and dressed, joining the
team in the department car for the ride down to 1 Hogan Place. They let
me out right in front of the building, and I bought us each some
breakfast at the cart on the corner before going up to my office. Now
that Wakim had been arrested I felt at least somewhat more secure.

The pile of unanswered correspondence on my desk was growing out of
control. There was a stack of indictments on sex crimes cases that
needed to be proofread and approved before the end of the August term,
which was a week away. Phone messages from friends were taped to the
computer screen; a request from Elaine to set a time to come into the
Escada store to have the clothes I ordered from the fall collection
shortened had been ignored; and solicitations for charitable
fund-raisers collected dust on the far corner of the desk. It was still
too early to find most people at their offices, so I busied myself in
the review of grand jury proceedings to make sure the lawyers in the
unit met their filing deadlines.

The first call was from Bob Thaler, the chief serologist at the Medical
Examiner's Office. It was not even eight thirty, and I was answering my
own phones because Laura would not arrive for another hour.

"Sorry it took me so long for the tox on Omar Sheffield." While autopsy
results were available to us quickly, it frequently took weeks to run
all the toxicological tests looking for foreign substances in the
deceased's brain, liver, tissue, or lungs.

"Find anything?"

"Just about everything. Omar might have been breathing when that train
ran over him, but he wouldn't have been aware of very much. He was
loaded up with speed balls more than enough to kill himself with if he'd
been attempting to O. D."

"And if someone else was trying to kill him?" Speedballs were a deadly
combination of heroin and cocaine, usually mainlined right into the
system.

"It'd work like a charm. Just keep pumping it into his arm."

"But the cause of death, what have you put down for that?"

"Gross internal trauma. I mean, he died at the moment the train ran over
his body, Alex. But in all likelihood the drugs could have done the
trick by themselves. Somebody finds you in a hotel room in a coma, they
can still get you to a hospital and try to pump the stuff out of you.
Slim chance, with this amount of poison in his veins, but it might have
been possible for him to survive. Run a few railroad cars over this
perfectly inert body, it's a sure thing he's gone to meet his maker."

"Thanks, Bob. Would you fax over a copy of the report to me?"

Lawyers were beginning to dribble into the office. I had my door open,
listening for Pat Mckinney's arrival. The click of high heels on the
tiles of the deserted hallway caught my attention. Pat's office, like
Rod Squires', was at the far end of my corridor. But there were no other
women assigned to this executive wing of the Trial Division, so I
stepped out to Laura's desk to see who was walking by.

I recognized Ellen Gunsher from the back. She was junior to me, having
been in the office for almost eight years. Bright enough and quite
aggressive, she had taken to all of the duties of a prosecutor fairly
well except for the one that counted most. She had never grown
comfortable in the courtroom and backed away from trying cases. Her
surname lent itself to the unfortunate alias

"Gun-shy," and her colleagues teased her mercilessly about her retreat
from the kind of professional battle that most of us relished.

Ellen had found a protector in Pat Mckinney. As deputy chief of the
division, he had taken her out of her trial bureau and created a special
unit for her to supervise. Most of us recognized that it was a make-work
kind of assignment to serve as a contact with the NYPD's Warrant Squad,
to initiate and oversee active searches for the most dangerous of the
thousands of defendants who failed to appear on their cases after bail
had been granted. Many of the prisoners for whom Wanted cards had been
issued were petty offenders who would turn up in the system before too
long on charges of shoplifting or jumping a turnstile. Ellen's job
consisted of sifting through court papers and targeting the more violent
offenders, then assigning Warrant Squad officers to make an active
search for their return.

I believed that Mckinney had manufactured that niche because Ellen was a
decent lawyer and a nice person who was not otherwise a fit in our
division. For two years I had ignored office gossip that they had been
having an affair, but now the amount of time they spent together behind
closed doors seemed inordinate for the nonessential nature of Ellen's
work.

I went back to my desk to gather the notes I planned to take in to
Mckinney to discuss the latest interviews Mike and I had done on the
Caxton investigation. Mckinney waved at me as he passed by my doorway.

"We gotta talk."

The case papers had outgrown a single folder. I pulled out the sheaf of
reports we had worked from yesterday, took my thick legal pad including
my to-do list, and headed down to the deputy's office. I knocked on the
heavy metal door.

"Come in," Ellen called out to me. Not exactly the welcome I wanted.

She was standing by a hot plate at the far end of the room, boiling
water for tea. She had opened a jar of honey and was holding two mugs.

Mckinney had his back to me and was talking on the phone. It was all a
bit too domestic for my taste.

"How's Mercer?" Ellen asked.

"He's in rough shape. It was a very close call."

"You must feel awful. I can't imagine how you handled watching him get
shot."

I slowly moved my head back and forth, biting my lip. I had no intention
of telling her anything about how I felt, and was boring my eyes through
the back of Mckinney's sweaty T-shirt as though it would somehow get him
off the phone faster.

"Want some tea?" she asked, holding up a third mug with a photo of
Mckinney's kids under a Christmas tree emblazoned on its ceramic side.

"No thanks," I said, raising my cardboard coffee cup at her.

"Any new leads?"

"I'll wait until Pat gets off the phone."

"Been up to the Vineyard at all?"

"Uh huh." When you're ready for full disclosure on your personal life,
I'll be happy to give you an update on my own.

"You really look whipped. Ought to try a little concealer for those
circles under your eyes. Maybe you should take the next couple of weeks
off. Stay up there until after Labor Day."

Women in the workplace, I sighed to myself. Why is it that' Mike Chapman
could tell me how bad I looked and I could acknowledge it, but when
Ellen eyeballed me and said the same thing, it sounded bitchy?

Maybe I could take two weeks in the country if I was as expendable
around here as you are, I thought. "I'm fine. I'll take it easy next
weekend."

Mckinney finished his conversation and sat down opposite me at his small
conference table. "I want to talk to you about the case, Alex I mean,
the whole matter. I've been thinking that maybe the best thing "

"Pat, would you mind if we just do this one-on-one?"

Ellen had poured the water and was squeezing the tea bags now.

"You mean Ellen? She's a unit chief in the division. What's the
problem?"

"This discussion is between you and me. I know you've called a meeting
for ten o'clock this morning to which I wasn't invited. I'm planning to
be there."

"That's a stupid idea, Alex. In fact, I'm not even sure it makes any
sense for you to stay on the Caxton investigation."

"Ellen, would you mind leaving the room, please?"

She placed the mugs on the table, and instead of answering me, she
looked at Pat, who was looking directly in my eyes.

"I'm not having this conversation in Ellen's presence. Last I knew," I
said, trying not to let my temper take over my response, "no one in this
case had jumped bail, failed to appear, warranted out on a misdemeanor,
or otherwise done anything to invoke the awesome power of Ellen
Gunsher's irrelevant little unit. This is between the two of us, Pat.
You have no business talking about it with Ellen. And don't you dare
even think about taking me off the Caxton murder. I'll go right to
Battaglia and "

"I've already done that, Alex."

Ellen's head was snapping back and forth between us like it was on a
spring. I was infuriated that Pat had spoken to the district attorney
about removing me from the investigation.

"I'll bet he told you to stick it. He has absolutely no problem with the
work I've been doing."

It was a bluff, but a successful one. Mckinney's moment of hesitation
revealed to me that although he had raised the issue with Battaglia, he
had not been given a green light to take the case away from me.

I pushed my chair back and walked to the door. "I'll be in Battaglia's
office. When you and the Lipton Tea lady finish your morning
tete-a-tete, feel free to come in, by yourself, to get a bulletin on the
case. Meanwhile, I'll leave you to the important matter of how many of
yesterday's token suckers failed to show up in APiy."

I doubled back past my office, across the main corridor, and used my
magnetized identification badge to buzz myself into the executive wing.

Secretaries to the administrative assistant, the first assistant, and
the chief assistant were setting up their desks for the day and greeted
me with interest and concern.

Rose Malone was already at her word processor when I approached her
desk. She was the last to leave the building most nights sometimes with
Paul Battaglia, but never before him. And she was always the first one
in place the next day.

She didn't even turn her head to speak to me. "He's not here yet, Alex.
There's a community board breakfast meeting in East Harlem."

"Do you expect him before ten?"

"No. He's going from that one directly to the Midtown Court. There's
going to be a press release about the new computer system that will
track bench warrants in all the borough courthouses and police
precincts."

Great. A new technology that will make Ellen Gunsher completely
obsolete. "Will he call in from the car?"

"I expect so. Shall I transfer him over to you?"

"Please. Especially if you get him within the hour, okay?"

"Anything wrong?"

"Was Pat Mckinney alone with him for any period of time yesterday?"

Rose stopped typing and looked back at Battaglia's date book, as though
trying to find a way to remind herself of the day's meetings.

"I know he called and asked if the boss would see him. They may have
spoken for a minute or two, but Paul was tied up most of the afternoon
with the accountants who've been working on that welfare fraud case. It
couldn't have been much of a conversation."

I thanked her and walked back to my office. As much as Mckinney may have
wanted me off the Caxton case, I was still alive. I needed to sit down
and go over what the rest of the week might produce for us, knowing that
any kind of evidentiary break would help cement my position on the team.

I could hear Chapman serenading Laura as I went back to my office. What
had probably started as a cross-examination of what she knew about my
relationship with Jacob Tyler had segued into an impromptu version of
Paul Simon's

"Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover." As I turned the corner he grinned at
me and continued singing. "Don't make a mistake, Jake.

Just let yourself go."

"To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?" I growled.

"People to talk to, places to go, subpoenas to get. Let's start with the
latter. What happened to your manners? What about

"Good morning, Mr. Chapman. How are you today? Thank you for bringing me
another cup of coffee," huh? I'm even going out on a limb for a

"Don't you look lovely today, Miss. Cooper. Could be you had a good
night's rest at long last.""

"Thanks. But I've already been told by Ellen Gunsher that even makeup
can't help me in my current condition. Pat's trying to knock me off your
investigation."

"What kind of suicide mission is he on?"

"There's a meeting at ten to assign one of the senior trial counsel to
Mercer's shooting. And since I'm a witness to that, he wants to take me
off the whole thing and set one of his pets up to handle it, before Rod
Squires returns from vacation." My back was to the door as I reached
across my desk to replace the case papers on top of the folder.

"I'm trying to get a call into Battaglia before this morning's caucus on
the subject."

"Speaking of carcass, what's up, Mckinney?"

Mike warned me that Pat had appeared in the doorway, and I spun around.

"Now I'd like to talk to you alone, Alex. Why don't you wait down the
hall, Mike?"

"Battaglia gave me strict orders that she's to have police protection
around the clock, Pat. No can do." Mike sat behind the desk in my chair
and lifted his feet up on my desktop, one at a time, making the
statement that he was not about to move. "We got some breaking
developments on Caxton you might want to know about."

"Take a walk, Chapman. C'mon."

Mike checked with me before he slowly removed his legs, then stood up
and started for the exit. "Be sure to give my best to your wife and
kids, Pat."

The intercom buzzed and I could hear Laura calling my name.

"Yes?"

"There's a gentleman downstairs who wants to talk to you. His name is
Frank Wrenley. Can he come up?" I exchanged glances with Chapman, who
had stopped in the doorway, and he nodded at me in response. "Keep him
down there for ten minutes while I make a few calls. Maybe he can clear
up some of this business about his relationship with Marina Sette. I'd
like to find out exactly where she is right now." I told Laura to have
security hold him there until Mike could go to the lobby to escort him
in. "This isn't a very good time to talk, Pat.

Might as well go ahead with your ten o'clock meeting. I can't make it
anyway."

Twenty-Nine.

"I just woke up the housekeeper in Santa Fe. She doesn't expect Ms.
Sette back there for another week. Laid on a heavy Spanish accent, says
I must have misunderstood her when I called on Sunday. I'm telling you,
Alex, I swear that woman told me Sette had just flown back home the
other day. This is Mercer's life, for chrissakes. It's not anything I
would have made a mistake about. Today when I press her about where I
can get in touch with Sette, all I get is that the housekeeper doesn't
know. "La Senora' is traveling." Mike was fuming.

"All right, relax. Let's just make a plan."

"You know why I like it better when I'm working on something where
everybody's poor? "Cause the friggin' perps can't go too far. One guy's
maybe got a mother in Queens, next one chills out at his brother's place
in the Bronx, another sleeps on the rooftop. None of this Airborne
Express crap that the rich can pull. That mope I locked up for the
triple homicide in the Polo Grounds project two weeks ago?

Gave me more trouble than any of '. His sister told me he lived in a
mobile home. In New York City? No way we don't have ' here. Took me days
to figure out she meant the A train. He just moved his plastic bag of
worldly goods into the subway and rode from one end of the system to the
other and then back, night after night. It should happen to these
people. What if it actually was Marina Sette who left the message for
you and Mercer to meet her?"

"Then she either has something to do with the killings or she's on the
run because she's truly terrified of something or someone."

"When are you gonna get results on all the subpoenas for telephone
records?" His impatience was palpable.

"I call every day, and every day they tell me that the volume is
tremendous and I'll have what I need as soon as possible. The only ones
back were in yesterday's mail. Omar Sheffield's phone calls made while
he was in jail. I had Maxine and one of the other paralegals go through
them to check for calls to Denise Caxton. Not a one."

"How can that be?"

"I checked with the warden. You'll love this one. There's a foolproof
way for inmates to place untraceable calls now. They buy those prepaid
telephone cards and then use the cards to make the calls from prison pay
phones. All you're left with is a record of a call to the company that
issued the card, but no link at all to the number actually dialed.

Max says Omar's phone-privilege time slots you know, the half hour each
day he had access to the booth show lots of activity in the period that
would fit with the dates after Deni started to get letters from him, but
all the outgoing ones he made just reflect the number of the calling
card company in Brooklyn."

"Damn. And no word on when you'll have the incoming calls to the Caxton
house or the galleries?"

"That takes longer. I'd guess we're at least a week away from that
stuff."

"Let me go downstairs and get Wrenley. After he tells us why he's here,
I'll move it to talk about Marina Sette, okay?"

I walked to my desk to find my file notes on the antiques dealer and
review them. Laura stuck her head in the doorway and asked if she could
borrow an emery board. I pointed to my handbag, which I had left on the
leather armchair in front of the desk. "Just fish around in there. I
know I've got a few on the bottom."

"Would you mind if I take the day off tomorrow?" she asked tentatively.

I guessed that was the real reason she had come into the room in the
first place. "As long as you can get someone to cover the phones.

They've been wild since this started. And help Mike with the subpoenas
he needs you to type up this morning." We were short staffed because of
the normal summer vacation schedule, but the pace of the investigation
didn't correspond with the seasonal slowdown. "Any luck in finding Rod
Squires?"

"Rose says he's on a sailboat off the coast of Maine. If he contacts
Paul, she'll flip him over to you."

For the moment, Frank Wrenley's unexpected appearance gave me a reprieve
from Mckinney's plan to boot me off the case.

Mike came back into my office with Wrenley and I rose to shake his hand
across the desk. This time he was head-to-toe in slate gray, a slight
contrast to his jet black hair and almost a match for the cloud-filled
sky that hugged the city with its humidity.

"Why don't you have a seat and tell us what brings you down here?"

Wrenley turned to sit and I saw my bag in his way. "Just put it on the
floor. Sorry."

He lifted it and sat it down next to the row of file cabinets. "Must
have your whole arsenal in there, Miss. Cooper."

Chapman laughed. "She would if we'd let her. Temper like hers, Mr.
Wrenley, Cooper couldn't get a permit to carry a pointed pencil."

Wrenley looked directly at me. "I wasn't sure who to talk to about this,
but perhaps you ought to know. And you might be able to help me, too."

It was getting harder and harder to find anyone to talk to us who didn't
want something in return. "What is it?"

"Last evening I found out that Lowell Caxton is going to be closing his
gallery."

He stopped speaking and both Mike and I waited for him to continue.

"I mean, this week. Abruptly. Doesn't that surprise you?"

"Elephants flying? Monkeys tap-dancing? Those things might surprise me.
The people in this case, the pals you've been running with who've been
scamming each other and the public for most of their adult lives?

Very little they do could surprise me at this point."

Wrenley ignored Chapman and talked to me. "Caxton's had one of the most
substantial businesses in this city for longer than I can remember. It
would be one thing for him to announce a closing and wind down his
affairs over the next few months. But to pull a few moving vans up to
the front of the building and start loading them like a gypsy in the
middle of the night, well, it's more than a bit odd." "Last night?" I
asked. "Who told you about it?"

"Bryan Daughtry called me. He still has a lot of contacts who work in
the Fuller Building."

Wrenley's statement reminded me that before Daughtry went to jail on the
tax case, his original gallery had been on Fifty-seventh Street, several
floors below Caxton's suite.

"What else did he say?"

"One of the custodians, a fellow who runs the freight elevator, figured
he could make a few dollars by passing the information to Daughtry. It
worked. Bryan went right up there and gave the guy a hundred bucks.

Saw what was going on himself. Paintings and sculptures being loaded
onto a truck at eleven last night, complete with a cadre of security
guards. But Caxton's employees wouldn't spill the beans. Not a word
about where they were taking the stuff, or why. I'm sure he paid them
well enough to ensure their loyalty."

"I guess I'm missing the reason why either you or Daughtry think any of
this is your business," Chapman said.

"Understandable. That's why, as I said a few minutes ago, I wasn't sure
what to do about it when Daughtry called me in the middle of the night.
Both Bryan and I were involved in a number of art deals with Deni. She
and I recently bought some paintings at auction together," he said,
switching his attention to Mike. "You're the skeptic, Detective. Check
with Christie's. Back in May we were partners on some minor
Impressionist works that sold pretty reasonably."

"Lowell's in on this, too?"

"Oh, no. Not at all. But a lot of the things we bought well, it just
made more sense for Deni to keep them for us, to store them until we
decided whether we were going to hang on to them or sell them to
clients. I mean, Lowell had warehouses and guards and insurance. Even
their apartment was a safer place to keep artworks than any temporary
facility she and I could arrange. We were lovers, after all, Detective.
I didn't have to get a signed pledge from Deni when I agreed to let her
hold on to something we bought as partners. She wasn't trying to screw
me out of anything, if you'll forgive the expression."

"So you think some of the art you own is being spirited away by Lowell?"

"Possibly. And I don't even mean intentionally. Lowell doesn't have any
reason to know the details about Deni's latest acquisitions. I just
think there should be some way for me to have a look at what he's got
before he ships it out of town or abroad. I have papers and sales
receipts for everything. I'm not asking you to get in the middle of
deciding what's mine and what isn't. My lawyer will handle all that.

He wanted me to, well, to exaggerate to you a bit."

"What do you mean?"

Wrenley was fidgeting now. "I called my lawyer to ask him to get
involved this morning. The problem is, of course, that Lowell won't let
me inside to look, neither at the gallery nor the apartment still their
home, certainly. It was my lawyer's idea to come to you, Miss. Cooper.
Look, I don't want to lie to you, but he suggested I swear to you that I
know Lowell Caxton has got property in the gallery that belongs to Deni
and to me. That perhaps then you could intercede and go in with a
warrant to search for things." He tapped his fingers on the arm of the
chair. "Frankly, I have no idea what Deni did with some of the
paintings. I can't '' where they are that would simply be a logical
guess, but not necessarily true. Bryan Daughtry's been very helpful. I'm
going to go through his warehouse, too. Perhaps some of the things I'm
looking for are stored with him."

"Can you give me an inventory, a list of the works you have a claim to?"
I asked.

"I don't have one prepared right now, but I can have it drawn up within
a day or two." Wrenley's hands were on his knees, and he looked down at
the floor before he spoke again. "When you're in love with a woman as
young and healthy as Deni, you just never think that she's going to walk
out the door and ... never, never come back. The business side of our
partnership was the last thing it occurred to me to worry about during
this past week. That afternoon, I just waited and waited for her to meet
me for lunch "

"The day she disappeared? She was on her way to meet you?" Chapman
asked.

"Perhaps I have surprised you after all, Detective. I assumed you'd know
that, from the housekeeper or someone you'd interviewed. Didn't you ask
me that the first time we met? I was sure you had."

Chapman seemed embarrassed that he didn't know one of the fairly basic
facts about Denise Caxton's last day. "The guys who work in her garage
have her going out with the car early in the morning. No one else we
talked to seemed to know much about her plans for the day. What did you
do when she didn't show up for lunch?"

"I waited half an hour. Tried her at home, in the car, at the gallery.

No luck. Check with the maitre d' at Jean-Georges I thought you would
have done that by now. I must have tied up his phone for twenty minutes
calling around to find Deni."

"Were you upset? Call the police to look for her?"

"No, I suppose the maitre d' would also tell you I wasn't very upset, so
there's no point pretending. Nothing from which a couple of martinis
couldn't distract me. I'd half expected she might stand me up that day.
We'd had a bit of a tiff the week before."

"Business?"

"Not business at all. And in retrospect, not exactly pleasure, either."
Wrenley looked me in the eye. "I told you when I met you the first time
that Deni and I dated other people. Well, I ran into someone in Paris, a
woman who'd been recently widowed and was doing the grand tour to
announce that her mourning period was officially over. We spent a
weekend together, which there was no need for Deni to find out about.
Unfortunate coincidence, she turned out to be a friend of Deni's."
"Marina Sette?" Chapman asked.

"Bravo, Detective! Forty-eight hours in a small hotel on the Left Bank,
and tout New York seems to know all about it. I know Marina told Deni,
and that's what had her so mad at me. Deni didn't mind what she didn't
know about, but Marina really pushed her nose into it."

"Was it over between you and Deni?"

"Of course not. But it was cool, to say the least. She made a point of
letting me know that she was spending a lot of time with Preston Mattox.
But that was just to get back at me."

"You don't think she was in love with him?"

"Deni was an intensely physical creature, Ms. Cooper. She'd once made
the mistake of telling me, when she was unusually giddy in the middle of
a rather vigorous round of lovemaking, that there wasn't enough Viagra
in all the laboratories in the country to get Preston through another
month of his relationship with Deni."

Every time I was on the verge of liking her a bit more, I'd hear
something that would cause me to take three mental giant steps in
reverse. No point in exploring with Wrenley whether his rival had other
redeeming features.

"When she didn't show up at the restaurant for lunch and I couldn't find
out where she was, I thought that all she needed was some time to get
over what I had done with Marina. She'd only graced me with the luncheon
meeting because we had some business decisions to make and because she
wouldn't accept an evening date with me. She already had dinner plans
with Mattox." I didn't think I had displayed any expression, but Wrenley
looked from me to Mike. "Surely you knew that, didn't you? Preston would
have had more to worry about than I did when she didn't show up for that
date.

"I guess my trip down here wasn't altogether useless," Wrenley said. "I
do hope you'll give some thought to looking into why Lowell Caxton is in
such a hurry to close his gallery." I had no intention of telling
Wrenley what we would do next. "I'd suggest you let your lawyer go ahead
with whatever action he thinks will protect your business interests as
well." I stood up to see him out. "Thanks for letting us know about it."

"Do you still have any contact with Marina Sette?" Mike asked.

"Nothing directly. But I hear about her from time to time."

"When's the last time you saw her?"

"Couple of months ago."

"She call you when she came to New York?"

"You mean yesterday?"

Chapman didn't hesitate for a moment. "Yeah, yesterday."

"No, but she called Bryan Daughtry. He told me that last night when he
telephoned to let me know about Lowell Caxton. Bryan said that Marina
had stopped by the new gallery on Twenty-second Street to see him.

Probably to find out if he'd heard any rumors about whether Deni had
left a will, or any instructions about who was to get which paintings."
I thought she had told us she detested Daughtry. "Why did she go to
him?"

"She could hardly go to Lowell, considering their relationship, and she
wasn't talking to me."

"What did Bryan tell her?"

"That the only will he knew of was the original one Low-ell's lawyers
had prepared for Deni when they first married. Like so many people her
age, Deni thought she'd have all the time in the world to amend it. But
Marina was still looking for her piece of the rock, what she thought was
her '." She really believed, when their friendship was in full bloom,
that she had convinced Deni to give her some of the Caxton heirlooms."

"So Lowell gets it all?"

"I suppose. I mean except for the handful of things that Deni bought
with either Bryan or me. Her fortune all started with Lowell, didn't it?
In any event, Bryan just wanted me to know that Marina was bad-mouthing
me, blaming me for her falling-out with Deni. And that she seemed
frantic, out of control. Very hyper about something. That I should stay
out of her way if she tried to see me."

"Will you let me know if Marina Sette calls you?" I asked. "Certainly,
Miss. Cooper. Thanks for your time." Chapman waited several seconds
after Wrenley shook our hands and walked out the door. "Saddle up,
blondie. Let's see why Caxton's heading for the hills."

Thirty.

Mike parked the unmarked car illegally and threw his laminated police
identification plate in the windshield. The Fuller Building was on the
northeast corner of the intersection, with entrances on both Madison
Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. An eighteen-wheeler was parked in front
of the side door in a large space protected by a red sign that announced
NO STANDING EXCEPT TRUCKS LOADING AND UNLOADING.

The lettering on the vehicle said Long Island Baking Potatoes,
Bridgehampton, New York. It was definitely loading, and the cargo was
not spuds.

There was a fine mist and I hurried to get inside the lobby. In addition
to the two men standing at the rear of the truck, there was another
person stationed inside the double doors whom I assumed to be part of
Caxton's security team.

"Recognize any of them?" I asked Chapman, hoping to get lucky and
discover that some retired cops were on the payroll.

"Too ugly. Must've been Feds."

The building was familiar to me because I'd been coming to the
hairdresser there for almost ten years. With the exception of the Stella
salon on the second floor and a handful of dental and medical offices,
the structure was almost entirely leased by gallery owners. I knew that
the eastern bank of elevators I used once a month went up only eighteen
stories, so I led Mike to the western bank and pressed 35 to get to the
top floor and the Caxton Gallery.

We stepped off onto an empty hallway. The glass doors of the space were
covered by some kind of makeshift screening, and a note that said the
gallery was closed. There was a telephone number to call for people
making inquiries about exhibits and purchases.

Mike tried the brass handles on the entrance behind the temporary
partitions, but they didn't give. He knocked several times on the panels
and the door was eventually opened by an unsmiling man in a dark suit.

"Lowell Caxton's expecting us," Mike said.

That brought a smile to one half of the man's mouth. "Mr. Caxton is not
here."

"That's strange." Mike looked at me as though surprised and asked,
"Didn't he say today, at eleven o'clock?"

The man didn't wait for me to answer. "He's been called out of town
unexpectedly. You can leave a message for him at this number." He
pointed to the paper that we had just seen.

"I'd like to leave a note for him. May I come in and "

Mike had started to walk inside but was blocked by our somber gate man
"Don't make it difficult for me, will ya?" He took the leather case from
his pants pocket and held up the gold shield, expecting to be let
through the doorway.

"Let's see your warrant, Detective."

"Very good, very good. So, you probably finished at the academy, huh?

Must have worked your way right up to the top, ironing Mr. Hoover's
dresses, to get yourself a plum job like this one when you left the
Bureau. Can you at least call Caxton now and tell him that it's urgent
we talk to him today?" "I just told you how to leave him a message."
"Suppose I told you his life may be in danger. You realize there've been
a series of killings since his wife was murdered, and we're the ones
working on that case. It might behoove him to let us tell him what's
been going on with "

"Mr. Caxton is not in any danger. If he's interested in talking to you,
he'll give you a call. He's a bit bored with being looked at as a
suspect in Mrs. Caxton's death. He'll get back to you when he's ready."

"You know where he is right now?"

The man stared back at Mike without answering.

Mike took my arm and started to lead me away before turning back to his
nemesis. "I'd rather have my balls cut off by a great white shark than
end up doing bullshit security work for some billionaire dirtbag. Have a
nice day."

On the way back down to the lobby, we talked about whether or not it was
worthwhile to hang out there for a while to see who was coming and going
from the thirty-fifth floor.

"Can't you get someone from your squad to sit on the place this
afternoon and evening?" I asked.

"Let me call and find out who's around. Maybe the lieutenant can get the
precinct to send some Anticrime guys over. We haven't got the manpower
to do this stuff."

"Come up to my hairdresser. Elsa'll let us use the kitchen to make
calls."

"Don't you have your cell phone with you?"

"Yes, but let's see what the girls know about what's happening in the
gallery. When Daughtry had his business here, there wasn't much they
hadn't heard about him. They had better sources than the Westchester
District Attorney's Office. Sooner or later someone from the staff in
just about every place in the Fuller Building uses Stella for color or
cuts. Besides, wait till you see how adorable Elsa is."

We switched elevator banks and rode up to the second floor. Pat, the
manager, was surprised to see me walk in without an appointment in the
middle of the week. Her eyes went directly to my hairline, looking at
the state of my roots.

"You're not due till Saturday morning, week after next, right?"

"That's some welcome. Just came by to gossip with Elsa and use the
kitchen to make a few phone calls."

I introduced her to Mike and she led us past the reception desk into the
rear of the busy salon. Elsa, my colorist, was wrapping foil around a
client's hair strands while Mike watched in bewilderment. I signaled to
her that we were going into the back room, and she mouthed to me that
she'd join us as soon as she was finished.

Mike called to explain the situation, and the boss told him that he
would try to arrange for coverage from the local precinct as soon as
possible. Mike also asked that a car be sent to sit on Caxton's
residence, check with the doormen, and monitor the movement of traffic
in and out of that location, too. We helped ourselves to coffee and
tried to figure out how we could find Caxton quickly and learn what had
prompted this sudden move.

Elsa came into the kitchen, removed her rubber gloves, and washed her
hands so that I could introduce her to Mike. I had spent so much time
talking to each of them about the other over the years that it was hard
to believe they had never met. Elsa had long been my friend, and in
addition to restoring the blonde to my naturally light hair, as a
devotee of the opera and ballet she alerted me to theater and art events
that I had neglected to read about. I knew, also, that when there was a
rare lull between clients, she explored the galleries throughout the
building and collected catalogues of the shows.

"This is a nice surprise. Are you here to see Louis or Nana for a
haircut," she said to me, then looking over at Mike, "or do you have a
new customer for some streaks?"

"We were in the building trying to get into the Caxton Gallery, so I
thought I'd come by and see if you had any scoops for us."

"About the move? Nobody knows what's going on. It's all so sudden."

"Didn't you have any connections there?"

"No, one of the other girls here did highlights for the receptionist,
though. Her name was Genevieve. She called yesterday and canceled her
appointment. Said she'd been laid off and wouldn't be working here
anymore."

"Got a full name on her, and a home phone number?" Mike asked.

"Let me check with Pat. She's got a file on every client. I can get it
for you before you leave."

"Have you ever spent time at Caxton's?"

"Browsing, sure. They always had fabulous things, stunning exhibits."

"D'you know either of them?"

"Not more than to say hello to. He knew I worked here I usually walk
around with my smock on during the day so he didn't waste any time on
me. He realized I wasn't a buyer. But Mrs. Caxton had a good sense of
humor and was always very nice to me. She wasn't in the building all
that much the last couple of years, but before that she'd often talk to
me about what she'd picked up at auction or how much she'd sold
something for. I didn't know her well, but I liked her."

Elsa was petite and thin, with short dark hair and creamy porcelain
skin. She worked in a black painter's jacket, black slacks, and thick
black clogs, exuding style and a quiet intensity. She took in everything
that her surroundings and her chatting customers gave out.

And as Joan Stafford always said, you could trust her like a grave to
keep a confidence.

"What else have you heard?" I asked.

"Rumors. Nothing reliable."

"About her death?" I was incredulous, expecting that if she had heard
anything, however unreliable, Elsa might have called me before our
unplanned visit today.

"No, no, no. There was a commotion a couple of weeks ago, maybe a day or
two before Mrs. Caxton disappeared. Genevieve's the one who told us
about it. Sort of a row in the gallery."

"Between Denise and Lowell?"

"No, I don't think he was even in town, from what we were told."

That fit with what we knew of Lowell's movements.

"What was it?"

"Denise showed up in the gallery one afternoon carrying lots of bags, as
though she had just been on a Madison Avenue shopping spree.

Genevieve told me that most of the staff had remained loyal to her, but
the guy who managed the place for Lowell wasn't a fan of hers. She did
whatever business she had come in to do, and then left. The manager
literally ran out of the gallery five minutes later, trying to stop Mrs.
Caxton before she got into a cab. Genevieve says he accused her of
making off with a painting something small but valuable."

"Was there a scene on the street?" I asked.

"Actually, it was in the lobby. He reached the ground floor before she
did. Stopped Mrs. Caxton in front of that clerk at the building's
information booth and forced her to let him look through all her bags."

"Did she make a fuss?"

"Nope. Knowing her sense of humor as I did, I expect she enjoyed the
commotion. He pulled out all her purchases lingerie, a peignoir set, a
teddy intimate items like that were flying out of his hands while
everyone watched."

"And the painting?"

"No painting. Off she went. At least, that's the version we got down
here."

Mike rested his elbow on the counter and looked at Elsa. "So, where did
Mrs. Caxton stop on her way downstairs, so that he got to the lobby
before she did, even though she had a good head start, huh?"

"Maybe she popped into one of the other galleries, to see a friend?"

"I'll follow up on that. See if I can get the date of the squabble from
this Genevieve, when we find her." He paused. "But if Mrs. Caxton didn't
pay a social call, and just supposing for the moment that she was trying
to take a valuable item out of the building, can you think of any likely
place to hide something between the thirty-fifth floor and the lobby?"

Elsa had worked in the salon for more than fifteen years. She had
probably inspected every exhibit and office and nook of the Fuller
Building during that time, shunning the elevators in favor of the back
staircases, as she often told me, for exercise and to relieve the tedium
of standing all day at a stationary place behind her work chair.

"I know where Denise used to go to sneak a cigarette," she said softly.

"Whaddaya mean?"

"Even before the city passed laws about smoking, Lowell never let anyone
light a cigarette in the gallery. He had all kinds of special air
controls for the maintenance of the art, especially because he had so
many old paintings. Most of the staff would go all the way down to the
ground floor and stand out in front on the sidewalk to smoke.

Denise wouldn't bother to go that far. She'd mooch a cigarette I don't
think she did it very often and she found my secret hideout. That's
where we ran into each other from time to time."

"You smoke?" Mike asked, like he was interviewing her as a prospect for
a date.

"No. But I like to clear my head every now and then. The fumes of these
hair dyes can get to you after a few hours. I just go up there for a
breath of air, some peace and quiet, and a great view of the city."

"What is it, like a balcony?"

"Not even close. In fact," she said, giving Mike the once over "I'm not
certain you'll fit. I'll show you if you'd like."

We left the salon and Elsa pressed the button to go to the eighteenth
floor, which was the highest level we could reach from the eastern bank
of elevators. She led us to the large gray fire door and pressed her
weight against the long metal bar that opened it onto the staircase.

Together we walked up to the nineteenth floor, which was basically a
darkened hallway connecting the two sides of the building.

The only illumination came from the glare of the cherry red neon exit
sign above the doorway we had just entered. My eyes tried to adjust to
the gloomy corridor as I followed behind Elsa, with Mike bringing up the
rear.

Two-thirds of the way to the far end, there was a pocket in the wall on
our right. Had Elsa not turned toward it, I doubt I would have noticed
it at all. She moved surely in that direction and cautioned me to watch
the two steps that she climbed, coming face-to-face with another,
smaller fire door. As she turned the knob and pushed outward, the door
gave way and a sliver of the gray midday sky appeared over her head.

Beyond where Elsa stood was a perch, no more than two feet wide and
three feet long. It extended like a small lip, high above the street and
out from the side of the building, completely open except for a small
iron railing that stretched across it at chest height. My delicate
friend stepped onto the ledge, held the bar, and leaned forward to look
over the rooftops below.

Then she stepped back and suggested I do the same. "Vertigo," I said.

"Not for me." I held on to her arm and tried to stand close to the rail
with my eyes open, but I couldn't bear to stay out there. There didn't
seem to be enough barriers between me and the sidewalk, nineteen stories
down. I offered the post to Mike but he declined, crouching on the floor
with his fingers outstretched, trying to measure the size of this
exterior shelf.

"What are you doing?"

He stood up. "Great place to stash a painting, then come back to pick it
up later on. Does the building stay open after the galleries close?"

"Sure. Our salon has much later appointments than the businesses do.

Same for the dental offices. The only other office on this floor is the
Malaysian Travel Bureau. It keeps regular hours but I've never seen much
traffic there."

"Not that many people knocking each other down to get to Malaysia," Mike
said.

Elsa smiled. "I guess not. Of course, lots of the dealers see people by
private arrangements, anytime that's convenient. That's why there's
always someone at the booth in the main lobby. Denise Caxton was well
known to everyone here. She could walk in and out of this building
whenever she wanted, without a problem. I just can't imagine her
stealing a painting, or anything else for that matter. That's why I
didn't think the story was anything serious. The way Genevieve told it,
the manager was either simply trying to embarrass Mrs. Caxton or he was
making a fool of himself."

"Suppose she wasn't '' anything," Mike suggested. "Maybe it was
something that was hers, a painting Lowell didn't know about that she
had warehoused at the gallery. Or that she had hidden up there in one of
his storage areas."

Elsa didn't know anything about the Caxton business dealings, so now
Mike was talking to me. "Maybe it was something that she felt she had
every right to take, but Deni knew that Lowelps people wouldn't let her
leave his place with anything. She goes in with lots of bags, makes her
rounds, gets what she's after, and walks out before his manager can
check what she's got. Then she stops by the little ledge and leaves this
package which I expect is wrapped in something protective. Am I safe in
guessing this spot isn't very well trafficked?"

"I've never seen anyone here except Denise Caxton. I'd be willing to bet
that ninety-nine percent of the people who work in this building don't
even know it exists."

"She makes the drop and continues on to the lobby. Low-ell's guy is
waiting for her there. He either assumes, or she tells him, that she
stopped off to see someone else in another gallery. Gives her a
perfectly valid excuse for a short detour on her way downstairs.

"Then she comes back that same night or the next day to pick up her
painting. Hell, she could even have circled the block in the cab and
gone right back for it ten minutes later. Everyone says she was a risk
taker."

Elsa looked concerned. "I hope this has nothing to do with her death.

It was such a silly story it didn't seem worth repeating when I heard
about it. I never connected the two things." "No reason for you to have
thought anything about it," I assured her.

Mike squinted to look at the number displayed on his beeper, which must
have been vibrating on his waistband, while I went on talking. "At this
point, we're just grasping at anything. It's good to know about this."

"Let's get back to the phone. The lieutenant's looking for me. This'll
go over big when I tell him I'm at your hairdresser's."

We retraced our path back to the kitchen, where I had left my handbag.

Mike called the squad while I asked Elsa to keep her eyes and ears open
for information about the Caxton Gallery's closing and move.

Mike started singing the opening bars of Willie Nelson's "On the Road
Again" as he hung up the phone. "Either make yourself comfortable and
let Elsa lighten up your silken tresses, or I'll get you some escorts
from Midtown North to take you back to work. I'm off to beautiful
downtown Piscat-away."

"What's there?"

"Man checked himself into the local hospital this morning. He's got an
infected wound in his groin that's festering away. Told the E.R. staff
that he had an accident on a construction site, but the X rays show
there's a bullet inside. Right now the Jersey troopers are holding him.
Could be that Mercer hit the bull's-eye after all. Patient matches the
description of Anthony Bailor."

Thirty-One.

It pained me to admit that Pat Mckinney might be right about anything,
but there was no point in my asking Mike to go along with him on the
ride to New Jersey. If Anthony Bailor was the person under guard in a
hospital, then it was likely that he had been the gunman who had aimed
at me, shot Mercer, and killed the young receptionist in Chelsea on
Sunday. I had no business being anywhere near him.

"What's your plan?"

"To get my ass down there to Piscataway before that pair of clowns from
Major Case find out about it."

Physicians were required by law to report gunshot wounds, and some
clever detective in the town where Bailor sought treatment, recognizing
that there were no open cases in his jurisdiction in which anyone had
claimed to have injured an assailant, had the great sense to notify
police in the tri state area about the suspect's appearance.

"It looks good?"

"Yeah, the guy's a transient, a walk-in. Used a common name but has no
I.D. to back it up, and gave a phony address a street that doesn't
exist, in a neighboring town. Fits the physical scrip of Bailor. Elsa,
she's all yours for the next fifteen minutes. Loo got a uniformed detail
from the North to ferry you around and keep you safe till I come back
this evening."

There was no point arguing. Mike wasn't going to undercut Battaglia's
direction that someone escort me from place to place. "Should I keep
working on trying to find Caxton?" I asked.

"Yeah, as long as you do it from behind your desk. If you get a lead on
where he is, we can confront him tonight or tomorrow morning. What you
could do, in the meanwhile, is let these cops take you to Denise's new
gallery on your way downtown. See if you can charm Daughtry into telling
you what he found out last night about Lowell Caxton's exodus from the
city. You may do better with him if I'm over the border, Coop. Maybe you
could coax him into letting you look around the storage area."

"Remind me what I'm looking for, exactly. The Vermeer? The Rembrandt?"

"Maybe I'll have a better idea of that after I talk to Bailor." He
looked at his watch. "Give me an hour to get out to Piscat-away, and
another hour to talk to him, then I'll either beep you or call Caxton
Due looking for you."

"Meet you at Mercer's room when you get back tonight?"

Mike was distracted. "Suppose you were Deni and you had something a
painting, in all likelihood that someone else wanted. Where would you
hide it?"

"Let's begin by recognizing that she had more options than most of us
could even imagine. And who's she hiding it from? I mean, if it's
Lowell, then I doubt she'd have it at home or anyplace they use
together. If it's Daughtry, then she wouldn't hide it at their gallery.
Depends, in part, on who she's avoiding, don't you think? It would help
to know that first."

"Forget who it is. What I'm thinking is, if it's any kind of artwork,
she could have hidden it in plain view, if you know what I mean. She
could have had Marco Varelli undo any restoration. He could re-create
the cover of a restored painting, or obscure a masterpiece. She could
hide something like that in a warehouse, and if she treated it casually,
maybe nobody would pay it any attention. You'd need her eye, her
knowledge, her tutor. Maybe Deni could even carry it around in a
shopping bag and nobody'd think twice of it. Maybe what's at the heart
of this case is one giant optical illusion, Coop." Mike's idea wasn't
altogether crazy.

"So I'll crank up the search for Lowell, stop in to schmooze with Brian
Daughtry and scan the gallery's warehouse at the same time. Will I jinx
things for you if I buy a bottle of champagne to open at Mercer's
bedside when you come back from checking out Anthony Bailor?"

"Dom Perignon. But you gotta promise that I can be the one to break the
news to him. If you get over there before I do, don't even raise his
hopes. I'd hate for this to be a false alarm. If it's the real deal, I
want to tell Mercer myself."

Mike was ready to take off. "Great to meet you, Elsa. Keep an eye on
blondie till the precinct cops get here."

I called Laura to check my messages. There was a note from Mckinney, who
wanted to talk to me as soon as I got back to the office. I had a couple
of hours to kill until I could expect to hear from Chapman about the
identity of the man with the gunshot wound, and I had no intention of
returning to Hogan Place until I knew whether this new development could
turn the investigation around.

The more urgent message was from the sergeant at the Special Victims
Squad, about a new case that had come in several hours ago. I phoned him
immediately.

"What have you got?"

"Victim's at New York Hospital. Twenty-six-year-old businesswoman from
Georgia, staying at a hotel in town. She's being treated for an inner
ear disorder, comes to town to see a specialist. Woke up this morning
but blacked out on her way out of the bathroom. She was able to call her
husband back home, and he phoned the manager. Two hotel security guards
got into the room and radioed for an ambulance. Then the older one told
the second guy to go downstairs and wait for the EMS crew. He assumed
the woman was unconscious, but she was just too weak to respond. In any
event, he ripped her pajama top off and started to molest her. Finally
she came around and was able to tell him to stop.

Reported it to the ambulance driver as soon as she got inside and they
closed the doors."

"What hotel?"

"Would you believe the Sussex House?"

"On Central Park South?"

"You got it. She paid six hundred fifty-three dollars for the privilege
of being abused by a member of the staff."

"What do you need?"

"Her husband's flying up from Georgia this afternoon. Can you get her
interviewed and set up the grand jury, so she can get back home when the
doctor releases her?"

"Absolutely." I checked my watch. "I'll go over and talk to her now I'm
just ten blocks away from the hospital. I'll assign somebody senior to
handle it. Need any help at the hotel? Are they being cooperative?"

"One of her girlfriends met us there to pack up her belongings. She's
the one who found the two buttons on the floor ripped off the shirt of
the pajamas."

"Did you get the guy?"

"Yeah, but he's not talking. Ponied up with a lawyer right away. Just
doing his job."

I called Catherine Dashfer to tell her about the case.

"I'm doing a hearing this afternoon in front of Judge Wet-zel," she told
me. "But I'm free the rest of the week. If she's released in the
morning, just have her be in my office at ten, and I'll put it right in
the jury. We can have her at the airport by this time tomorrow."

"Thanks a million. Would you do me another favor? Call Mckinney for me
and tell him I just got called out on a new case, and that I won't be
back until late in the day, okay?"

Elsa had ordered two salads from the local deli, and we were eating our
lunch when a policewoman in uniform presented herself at the reception
desk. I finished up before saying good-bye and heading off on my rounds.

Police Officers Brigid Brannigan and Harry Lazarro had been told that
their assignment was to take me wherever I needed to go until they were
relieved later this evening by another unit. On the short ride to New
York Hospital I gave them a brief rundown on what had been happening in
the Caxton case. The rest of the story they knew from newspaper
accounts. One of them had been gravely wounded, and there was no more
serious situation than that to a cop.

Brannigan got out of the car at the Sixty-eighth Street entrance to the
large facility. "Want me to take you in?"

"I'm fine, thanks. This stop was just added to the itinerary, so I'm not
expecting any trouble."

From the information booth I called the emergency room, but Gallic
Emerson had already been treated and had been admitted for observation
and tests concerning her inner ear imbalance. She was on 6 North, and
the volunteer worker directed me to that wing.

When I reached her room, Gallic was sitting in an armchair dressed in a
hospital gown and answering questions from a physician and a resident.

I explained who I was and why I was there. My purpose was not to
question her in depth about the assault since Catherine would do that in
the morning but rather to explain the proceedings to her and engage her
cooperation. Witnesses and their families were always surprised to learn
how much gentler the process had become with a specialized unit like
ours, and how comfortable we could make the person who had been
victimized.

I stepped back outside the room and waited for the doctors to finish
their examination. When they were through, I returned and sat with
Gallic, telling her what would happen the next day and answering all her
questions about the system. She and her husband should go to Catherine's
office, where the questioning would take place. The grand jury
presentation would take less than ten minutes and the assailant would
not be present for it, so she did not have to see him again or tell the
story in front of him. After that, Catherine would be responsible for
the motion practice in the case presenting the court with information
responding to defense requests for facts to which they were entitled.
Three or four months thereafter, we would bring Gallic back to New York
for the trial, and with any luck Catherine would be working again in
front of a jurist as sensitive and knowledgeable as Wetzel.

She seemed grateful for the overview and willing to participate.

"Were you examined in the emergency room?"

"Fortunately, I wasn't raped. So they didn't do an internal exam. They
were more worried about my physical condition that my blood pressure had
dropped so dramatically and my vital signs were weak." I knew from my
conversation with the sergeant that the attacker had put his mouth on
Callie's breast and sucked on it.

"Did anyone look at your chest?"

"I'm not sure. There was so much going on when we got here I just don't
know."

"Would you mind going into the bathroom and looking at yourself in the
mirror?"

When she emerged, she was nodding her head. "There's a large
discoloration on my skin, where his mouth was. And there are a few
scratches on my breastbone, which might have happened when he was
ripping at the buttons."

"I'm going to ask one of the nurses to come and look at you again, if
you don't mind. I'd like her to note those marks on your medical chart.
And Laura, who's one of our photographers, will take a few pictures of
them tomorrow morning."

"They seem so minor."

"Even so, Callie, they corroborate exactly what you said this man did to
you. It will be very useful for you at the trial."

We talked for a while longer before I thanked Callie, reassured her
about what a good witness she would be, and left the hospital.

The patrol car was waiting for me in the parking circle off York Avenue.

"What's next, Miss. Cooper?"

I checked my watch. It was almost an hour and a half since Mike had left
for Jersey, and I was trying to control my curiosity about his encounter
with the man who might be Bailor.

"Before we go to Chelsea, why don't you just swing by 890 Fifth Avenue?

It's not too far out of the way. I want to check with the team that's
watching an apartment there."

In ten minutes we were in front of Lowell Caxton's building. There was
an unmarked detective car parked next to the awning. I got out to talk
to the men sitting inside, both of whom were eating hot dogs and
drinking root beer. They worked with Mike at the Homicide Squad and were
annoyed at being stuck on such an uninteresting post.

"Nothin' happening here. Doorman says it's business as usual with
Caxton. This guy only does days, so he don't know what time Lowell came
home last night. But his chauffeur picked him up a little before eight
this morning. I had him call up to the maid, too. She says Caxton's due
home sometime after seven o'clock this evening. You and Chapman planning
to come over then?"

"Yes, unless you see something else we should know about earlier. Have
you got my beeper number?"

"No, but I got Mike's."

"He's not with me today, so why don't you write mine down, too?"

The surly fat one in the driver's seat took another bite from his tube
steak and handed me the paper napkin that had been draped over his knee.
I tore off the corner with the mustard stain on it and wrote down the
number to hand back to him. He was as likely to call a D.A.

with a hot lead as he was to run in the next marathon.

"Any other traffic in or out we should know about?"

"If you know a Mrs. Cadwalader on three, she's either turning tricks on
the side or she's runnin' a halfway house for retired hockey players.
She's got action comin' and going' every twenty minutes, and most of her
company's sportin' half their teeth and bowlegs. And there's a schnauzer
on five with a very weak bladder, so he's out here peeing on my front
tire once an hour, courtesy of his housekeeper, who's carrying a pooper
scooper looks like it's made outta sterling silver. And she's got a
great ass the housekeeper, not the schnauzer.

Now, are you gonna sit here and watch us watching them, or are you gonna
find some way to make yourself useful to Mr. Battaglia?"

Brigid Brannigan was leaning against the patrol car and opened the door
for me to get in the backseat. She looked crisp and cool in the police
uniform, and her neat auburn ponytail set off her fine features
handsomely. "I used to think I had a hard time, breaking in as a
prosecutor with all these tough old dinosaurs in my department who
thought handling homicides was only a man's prerogative. I bump into a
guy like that one, and I bet you could tell me stories about what it was
like for you to come onto this job that would make my experience seem
like a cakewalk."

She got in the car laughing and started to talk about her rookie
adventures with some of the hair bags the stiff old-timers who never
made it out of uniform that she'd encountered in the four years she'd
been on the force.

"Why don't you take the Sixty-sixth Street drive through the park and
head down Ninth Avenue? I'm going to a gallery called Caxton Due, on
Twenty-second Street, between Tenth and Eleventh."

Brigid continued to amuse me with her anecdotes while her partner weaved
in and out of the midafternoon traffic on the approach to the Lincoln
Tunnel. Once that cleared, Lazarro drove down to Twenty-first Street and
came up Tenth Avenue, about to make the turn into the one-way westbound
block on which the gallery entrance was located.

We could all see that it would be impossible to drive into the narrow
street. In addition to the cars parked at meters on each side, there
were three enormous trucks lined up in a row right in the middle of the
pavement. Wooden stanchions were spread from the north corner of the
curb to the south.

There didn't seem to be anyone directing this operation. Officer Lazarro
gave off a few whelps, and two men in T-shirts and jeans poked their
heads out of the cab of one of the trucks. Since they weren't moving,
Brannigan got out of the car and walked over to them.

She came back and leaned in the window. "They've got a permit to block
the street off for the afternoon. There's a place farther down the way
called the Dia Center for the Arts. They're installing a major
exhibition today, so this is legal while they're unloading sculpture for
the new show. Want me to walk you into your gallery?"

"This might work even better. There's a rear door on Twenty-third
Street, through the warehouse of the gallery. We saw the sign for it,
like a service entrance, the first day we came here. Maybe Daughtry'll
let me in that way. As Chapman said then, Daughtry might even prefer we
use it." Again, I checked the time. "Chapman should be calling soon.
C'mon, let's go around the corner."

We drove up to Twenty-third and Lazarro signaled left, then made a
U-turn to pull up to the curb in front of the spot I pointed out as the
garage entrance to Deni's gallery. Brigid got out of the car when I did
and walked with me over to the rusty-colored door frame, which had an
intercom system with two buzzers next to a small enamel plate. One was
marked CAXTON DUE SERVICE, and the other said CAXTON DUE

GALLERY.

I pressed the second bell and waited a couple of minutes.

"Any idea how long we'll be here?" Brigid asked.

"With some luck, if he lets me poke around the warehouse, I might be an
hour or more. If Chapman turns up anything important, be ready to fly
out of here with me, okay?"

The gray haze seemed to be lifting, as the forecasters had promised, and
the sun was beginning to filter through. I was hot and looked forward to
being received in the cool of the air-conditioned art display space.

We both heard the sound of the intercom click.

"Yes?" Judging from the crackling quality of its sound, the system was
as old as the building.

"Alexandra Cooper. From the District Attorney's Office," I identified
myself to Daughtry.

"I'll buzz you in. Come on up is not but I'll top "

The entrance led directly up an old iron staircase, which bypassed the
storage area to lead into the gallery itself. Before the door swung shut
behind us, I heard Lazarro calling Brigid's name.

"Sergeant Danz wants to talk to you. Needs an idea of how long we're
going be tied up here. Wanna take it?"

Brigid looked at me. "Do you mind?"

"Of course not. I do the same thing when my boss calls."

"Can you wait down here a few minutes while I report in? The sergeant's
gonna have to get permission for us to work over the end of the shift at
three thirty."

I pointed up. "You know right where I am. I'll be out as soon as Chapman
calls."

As I climbed the steps, I could see scores of paintings arrayed in bins
beneath, most of them covered in bubble wrap or kraft paper, and all
labeled by the artist's name and some kind of numerical code. They
varied in size from tiny objects, not larger than four by six inches, to
giant canvases that were best suited for museum walls.

I rang at the door at the top of the stairs and the buzzer sounded to
unlock the way into the small lift, which descended to this ground floor
area to take me up to the top of the atrium, where Daughtry awaited my
arrival. When the door slid back, I was again overwhelmed by the beauty
of the open atrium space. Emerging from the elevator on the north side
of the building, I was facing the glass wall of the southern exposure
and its great view of the city sky.

As I stepped off into the room, I felt the relief of the cold surge of
air that I had anticipated. It contrasted with the unexpected brightness
of the afternoon sun at the end of a gloomy day, which lit up the
gallery space and beamed down on the tracks of the deserted Hi-Line
Railroad.

I took my sunglasses out of my jacket pocket for the first time that
day.

"Over here," called a voice that was familiar to me, but it was not
Daughtry's.

I looked around and saw Frank Wrenley sitting on one of the couches in
the exhibition area one flight below me.

"Welcome, Ms. Cooper. I'm baby-sitting the art for Bryan. He should be
back anytime now. May I offer you a cold drink?"

I remembered that this morning, in my office, Wrenley had told us that
Daughtry was going to allow him to look through Denise's belongings to
see whether any of his property was included there. He was holding a
sheaf of papers in one hand and a tall glass in the other.

"Shall I come down?"

"Please."

I followed the catwalk around the bend until I arrived at the metal
staircase that led to the level below. I walked down, shook Wrenley's
hand, and accepted his offer to sit on the couch. I could see the
documents he had laid out on the glass-topped table between us. He had a
red pen and appeared to be going through lists that he was checking
against his own.

"Will you join me in a Bloody Mary?"

"No thanks."

"Ah, the constable doesn't drink on duty, does she?"

"I'm so exhausted, Mr. Wrenley, that I'd probably curl up and take a nap
if I so much as smelled a whiff of the vodka. Your inventory?"

"Bryan's off trying to solve the mystery of Lowell Caxton's hasty
retreat. He's been good enough to let me attempt to reconcile some of my
records with Deni's things before I return to Palm Beach." He waved his
receipts in my direction as though to convince me that he had proof of
title for anything he needed. "Where's your sidekick? I was beginning to
think you and Detective Chapman were joined at the hip."

"He'll be along soon. We were I was hoping to get Mr. Daughtry's
permission to look around a bit at some of Denise's things." "I thought
that first day I met you here you'd gone all through this place with
warrants and everything short of commando troops. Bryan was sure he was
going back to prison."

I smiled at his exaggerated description. "That's one of the problems
when you do a search before you know just what it is you're looking
for."

"But now you do know?"

Not really. But I saw no reason to tell that to Wrenley. We'd try again
with some of the information we had picked up after Varelli's murder and
during our conversation with Don Cannon. "Do you have any idea when Mr.
Daughtry is due to return?" I didn't know whether to try to wait it out
or get down to my office and face the music with Mckinney.

"Pretty soon, I should think. He's got to lock the place up for the
night."

It was now going on three hours since Mike had left the city. I reached
in my bag to get the cell phone to try to beep him. When I turned it on,
the failure of the three green icons to light up reminded me that the
battery must have run down. I kept the charger set up on my desk at home
and plugged the phone into it every evening as a matter of habit, but
since I had spent the last two nights at Jake's apartment, I had
neglected to recharge it.

"Would you mind if I use the telephone for a moment?"

Wrenley pointed to the portable unit on the table next to his papers.

"Help yourself."

I picked it up and dialed Chapman's beeper, punching in the number of
the gallery as I read it off the plate on the receiver. Then I set it
back down, knowing he would return the call to the unfamiliar number
only when he was ready to take a break.

"I can't give you access to the storage area, but I don't imagine Bryan
would mind if you look through the gallery and the office while you're
waiting. After all, you've done that once already, haven't you?"

I was feeling even more foolish as I stood up and glanced around. There
was nothing in the midst of this thoroughly modern exhibit that I could
connect by my wildest stretch to the art treasures that I associated
with Deni Caxton's troubles. I started to work my way about the place,
reading the descriptions and trying to make sense of the works.

Within several minutes the phone rang and I hurried back to the area
where Wrenley was sitting. He had answered it by saying, "Galleria
Caxton Due," and passed it off to me when I approached the table.

Instinctively, I turned my back to him and started to walk a few steps
off. I was aware that it was rude, but I also wanted whatever privacy
might be necessary. "No, that was Wrenley. Frank Wrenley," I said,
responding to Mike's question about whether the man who had spoken was
Bryan Daughtry.

"Can you talk?"

"About what?"

"Never mind. You'll explain where Daughtry is later, I guess."

"Sure. No big deal. Is it our guy?" I whispered into the receiver.

"Order a magnum of the champagne, Coop. Anthony Bailor is about to have
an incurable case of gangrenous balls. He's not talking, but he's the
man."

"What do you mean he's not talking?"

"He still denies everything, including his name. But I've got his mug
shots, and the Jersey police ran his prints this morning."

"Have you arrested him?"

"Why? You gonna give your pal Jake a scoop for the nightly news? No
leaks on this one till we know who's behind it. Bailor took the fall for
someone in that last theft he was involved in. There's got to be a link
to somebody in this investigation."

"Don't be ridiculous. I just want to know what to do next. Should I go
down to the office and draw up a complaint on Deni's homicide?

You're going to have to lodge a warrant so we can start extradition
proceedings from New Jersey."

"Take it easy. I haven't even told the lieutenant yet. Let me see how
the boss wants me to handle it and what the Jersey cops want to hold him
on out here. You find out anything useful about Caxton?"

"Not a thing. Where do you want to meet?"

"I'll call you back as soon as I sort this out. I'll pick you up at
Hogan Place and take you to Saint Vincent's."

I hung up and walked the phone back to Wrenley, who seemed absorbed in
his checklist.

"Good news? You look a lot happier now than you did ten minutes ago."

"Please tell Mr. Daughtry I was here. Perhaps he could give me a call
tomorrow, and I'll set up a time to see him."

"You've decided not to wait?" Wrenley stood up, looking at me and
shielding his eyes with his right hand. He was facing directly into the
sun, which had now saturated the atrium. "Must have some new
developments on the case. Have you found Lowell Caxton?"

"No, it's another matter altogether. Nothing to do with the Caxtons.

You'll probably hear it on the news tonight an assault in a midtown
hotel. I've got to get some things started on that one before morning."
No point giving him any information on Anthony Bailor.

"Well, good luck with this. For Deni's sake I sure hope you get a break
soon. I'll be back up from Florida next week, if you need me for
anything." The late-August sun was like a ball of fire, coming over the
tops of the low buildings across the street and sparkling through the
wall of glass. I lifted my sunglasses off the top of my head and
replaced them on my nose.

My heart was pounding as my mind pieced the clues together at precisely
the wrong place and time. Like Anthony Bailor, Frank Wrenley had been
raised in Florida. I picked up my bag to leave and did an involuntary
double take at Wrenley, who was squinting back at me without benefit of
sunglasses.

Thirty-Two.

"You look as if you've seen an apparition, Ms. Cooper."

"Sorry, I'm just very tired. I don't feel well. I'll see myself out."

I was backing away from the area around the two sofas, thinking of the
sunglasses that had been vouchered at the scene of Marco Varelli's
murder a week earlier. How many coincidences does it take to make a
fact?

Wrenley was walking toward me. I quickened my pace, knowing that
Brannigan and Lazarro were waiting for me right outside the warehouse
door.

"I suppose Detective Chapman has managed to get his hands on Anthony
Bailor. Is that what put you in such a good mood, Ms. Cooper?"

I was holding on to the railing now, two levels above the obsolete train
tracks cutting through the center of the gallery, dizzy from the
combination of vertigo and the question that Wrenley had just asked me.

He broke into a run before I did, and was upon me in a second, grabbing
my free arm and spinning me around to face him. He was holding a
small-caliber revolver in his right hand, the kind that was probably
used to put a hole through the brain behind Marco Varelli's ear.

"Did Anthony's wound get worse? Is that how you found him? I couldn't
come up with a physician anywhere to treat him. He's not exactly John
Wilkes Booth. Just couldn't find a taker. And all I needed was another
day or two to tie up loose ends so I could get myself out of town for
good. I didn't want this to happen." His grip tightened on my wrist.

"So you, Ms. Cooper, will have to be the sacrificial lamb. You might
take a terrible fall, say, from the level above us." He prodded me in
the ribs with the gun.

"You can't get out of this building without me alive and well." My voice
must have been trembling as I tried to construct a reasonable bluff. "If
you kill " I stopped, unable to complete a sentence that held the
implication of my own death. "If you try to hurt me, you won't be able
to walk out the door. There are police officers stationed in the front
and back of the building. They have orders not to let anyone in or out
without my approval."

Wrenley stood still, not knowing whether to believe me or not. With the
gun held against me, he lifted the glasses off my nose and placed them
on himself. Now I blinked as I tried to avoid the direct glare.

"Why should I think that's true? Have you seen the trucks unloading out
front for the Dia exhibit? Not even a police car could get through that
block."

"There are two men in plain clothes standing at the entrance of the
gallery," I lied, "and a patrol car with two others out in back. You
have yourself to thank for that. It all started after your efforts to
kill me the first time, didn't it? There have been bodyguards taking me
everywhere since your attempts on my life."

I remembered the day I had met Chapman and Wallace here to interview
Bryan Daughtry. We had interrupted his meeting with Wrenley. My Jeep had
been parked directly in front of the gallery, with my identification
plate in the windshield. It was he who must have had me followed from
Twenty-second Street to the garage at Lincoln Center.

He'd had plenty of time to alert Bailor to try to run me down that
night, after the ballet. Wrenley must have thought I'd known more than I
did. Maybe he had relied on Mickey Diamond's made-up headline.

He was considering his options. "I can offer you a livelier proposition,
then. You're going to be my passport out of town."

Anything that would get me away from this unlikely mausoleum. "What do
you mean?"

"Take me downstairs with you and have them drive us wherever I decide to
go." My panic heightened at the thought of putting another police
officer within range of a man with a loaded gun, of exposing Brannigan
and Lazarro to this murderous thief. "That might not work," I said. "If
they don't know you, they won't fall for that."

"It can't be your friend Chapman down there, can it? He just called you
from somewhere else. So it must be some uniformed cops who pulled this
duty. I'm sure they don't know you and all your colleagues, do they?"

I couldn't figure where he was going with this, so I gave an honest
answer instead of trying to outguess him. "They're precinct cops. They
don't know me well."

"And tell me how well you know Charlie Rosenberg?"

My head was spinning. I couldn't follow him. The name sounded vaguely
familiar but I couldn't think of who or what he meant. "Who?"

He reached into his left pants pocket and pulled out the gray security
badge issued by my office, which dangled from a silver-colored metal
chain. With one hand, Wrenley slipped it over his head and let it hang
around his neck, like I wear mine at the office. Now it clicked.

Charlie was a young assistant who worked in one of the trial bureaus.

Like Mckinney, he was a morning jogger.

"I picked this up at the front desk today when I came down to your
office to see you. Tsk, tsk, tsk they ought to be much more careful with
those I.D. tags when you people leave them lying around. I actually had
other plans for this, in case we needed to get past the doormen at your
apartment building. But it will do fine for you to introduce me to your
bodyguards. You can say I was here working on the case when you arrived.
Charlie Rosenberg. Shit, some of my best friends are Jewish."

"But the photograph "

"Can't even make it out with all the use the badge has had dark hair,
pleasant smile. I'll pass." I thought of the morning two weeks ago,
right after Deni's body had been found, when Mike and I came back from
Compstat and Mckinney's tag had been mislaid in the pile at the front
desk. I was so pleased at the time that he had trouble getting back into
the building that I hadn't raised a stink about the lax security.

Wrenley poked me again. "Where's your tag? Put it on."

"It's in my bag."

With his free hand he reached inside my oversized tote, never taking his
eyes off me. It was hopeless that he'd find anything in it. He gave out
a quick laugh. "I guess Chapman gave you away. Since he told me there's
no gun in your bag, why don't you get the I.D. badge out yourself? And
leave the sharp pencils inside there."

I set the bag on the floor and knelt down, riffling through it to feel
for the chain and pull it out. It snagged on something and I grabbed at
it. Now I could feel the plastic bag in which I had placed the toilet
articles for Mercer. I pulled up the small plastic razor blade case and
palmed it, bringing the chain and gray tag with my name on it out of the
handbag. Still crouching, I hung the chain around my neck and pocketed
the slim blade holder as I reached my hand to the floor to stand up
again.

Wrenley jabbed at me to move toward the staircase. We were closer to it
than to the lift in the far corner. There was no point making a dash to
the elevator with a gun at my back. "Down the steps, Ms. Cooper. Let's
try the back door, where you say the car is waiting."

I descended the stairs slowly, my hand shaking as I tried to grip the
banister. We had gone from the fifth level to the fourth. I turned on
the landing and went down to the third floor, where the old Hi-Line
tracks ran through the length of the building.

"Hold it right there," he said sharply, drawing up by my side as I
reached the bottom step. He rested a foot on top of the nearest railroad
tie. "You've got to get this quivering under control, Alex.

It's Alex, isn't it? These cops have to think we're partners, too, don't
they?"

Wrenley didn't realize Battaglia was running the Children's Crusade.

Most of my colleagues were kids right out of law school, staying in
public service only as long as they could resist the lure of the
high-paying private sector. Someone Wrenley's age would be an executive
or supervisor, and not likely to be out in the field working cases or
taking orders from me. Even if I could calm myself down, Brannigan was
bright enough to know that something was wrong with this picture. I
would put us all in grave danger.

He lowered his right arm, his gun to his side but still visible. "Never
send a rapist to do a man's job." "What?" I asked.

"Deni wasn't supposed to be murdered. Maybe I can make you more
comfortable if you understand that I'm not a killer. Well, I didn't set
out to be one. You just need to get me safe passage out of here, and
then I'll simply disappear, leaving you unharmed. But we can't go
anywhere until you settle down and stop shaking so badly."

I didn't believe him for a moment, but it was clear that he wasn't
letting me move until he saw my tremors subside. "Tell me what you mean.
If you want me to stop shivering, explain to me why Deni had to die."

"Two words: Anthony Bailor." Wrenley braced his back against the
banister.

"You knew him in Florida?"

"Much to my father's regret. Wrong side of the tracks and all that. I
met Anthony during my brief stay in a juvenile home, back when I was a
delinquent. A quaint term you don't hear much of these days, do you,
Alex?"

I was certain we had run a rap sheet on Wrenley and it had come up
clean.

"You look puzzled. I was fifteen at the time. My father's lawyer was
good. Had the case sealed because of my age. Knew enough to get the
fingerprints and photos back. Most of them are too lazy to follow
through on that, as you probably know. But then, it wasn't all bad.

After I met Anthony I never had to do second-story work again.

"I've had an eye for nice things all my life. Couldn't always afford
them. But I was able to get myself invited into the right homes for
cocktails and dinner. Called Anthony a week or two later, gave him the
layout and a schedule, arranged myself an alibi for the time of the
burglary, and I built myself up a very nice little collection of
antiques. The Keys were a bit confining for me, so we eventually set up
shop further north. By the time Anthony got sent away big-time, I was
flourishing in Palm Beach. The old ladies loved me."

"The Gardner heist. You "

"Don't be stupid. I'd never have dared an operation like that one.

Besides, Anthony was tucked away in prison ten years ago."

"But he did the theft from the museum at Amherst. That's what he went to
jail for in New York."

"Exactly. One of the guys responsible for the Gardner masterminded the
break-in at the Mead. Anthony took the weight for him when he got caught
with some of the art."

"But never gave him up?"

"He's good at that. I'll bet your man Chapman is having a hard time."

"And Denise Caxton?"

"I'm sure you know by now that Anthony and Omar spent some time together
in jail. Omar had that lame brained scam of writing threatening letters
to wealthy divorcees. He began to brag about it to Anthony. Told him
about the Caxtons and their art connections. Bailor got in touch with
me. I knew Deni and Lowell everyone in the business knew them. We used
Omar to stay close to Deni."

"Did she really hire him to kill Lowell?"

"She didn't want her husband dead. She just wanted him frightened a
bit."

I'd say a bullet creasing his skull could do the trick. "Omar shot him?"

"No, he subcontracted that out to Anthony. Far more capable with a gun.
You're doing much better, Alex. You're almost ready to go." He was
watching my hands, which I had clasped together to keep from shaking as
much.

"But the paintings from the Gardner, this all has to do with them,
doesn't it?" Wrenley paused.

"I know you showed one of them to Marco Varelli." He looked me in the
eye to see whether I was just testing him.

"Those paintings have been out of circulation for almost ten years,
since the date of the theft. Everyone knows, Alex well, everyone in my
circle that the thieves have had trouble unloading them. Some of the
minor things have sold, of course "

"But not the Rembrandt or the Vermeer." "So Anthony was asked to get in
touch with me long before he met Omar."

"By the thieves?"

"I prefer to call them the custodians. I have no idea who the
Philistines were who actually broke into the building. Couldn't have
been art lovers I think they left the most valuable painting behind, in
their ignorance."

Titian's Rape of Europa, wall-sized and worth even more than the
Rembrandt and the Vermeer.

"I'd been trying to find a way to sell them, collect a broker's fee. I
had heard about Lowell's fantastic private collection, and I knew Deni
was supposed to be a bit of a wild card. They were still together at the
time, of course. I thought I might interest her in buying one of the
great pieces for their own collection. Discretion advised. It happens
more often than you'd think with stolen art."

"And you called her shortly before she was supposed to travel to England
with Lowell. That's why she didn't go on that trip with him, isn't it?"
Sooner or later our subpoenaed phone records would show the incoming
call to Deni from Frank Wrenley. If only those records had arrived
before now.

"She was wild with excitement when I told her about the paintings.

Funny thing is, she wanted to buy them for Lowell.

It was to be the greatest coup of her life, to give him something he
didn't have and couldn't have found anywhere else in the world. She sent
him on ahead to England with the best intentions."

"And she took the Vermeer to Marco Varelli, to make sure it was the
original?" I asked. I thought of our conversation with Don Cannon, who
had witnessed the meeting.

"I never expected to become personally involved with Mrs. Caxton. That
wasn't part of the grand design. But it was icing on the cake. She
developed a serious case of cold feet once Varelli threw his tantrum, so
she decided to catch up with Lowell in Bath. She'd been planning the
surprise of a lifetime for him, and he's in bed with the young English
girl. Drove Deni right back home, into my waiting arms."

"You convinced her to keep playing with the paintings, even though she
knew they were stolen?"

"Let's say it was the free spirit in her. Once she and Lowell decided to
split, she became more carnivorous, more worried about how she could
maintain the lifestyle to which she'd become accustomed. Every now and
then she'd get a little crazy on me. You know about the reward?"

"Five million dollars tax-free from the Feds, for the return of the
art."

"Deni would occasionally try to convince me to turn in the paintings, in
exchange for immunity from prosecution for possession of stolen
property. Take the five million and run off with her well, I can't tell
you where, exactly. I'm still hoping to be there by tomorrow.

Beyond your jurisdiction, Miss. D.A. And no extradition policy, either."

"But the other man she was dating? Preston Mattox."

"Why is it women like you always enjoy a sad love story? I did have some
competition. Deni wasn't quite ready to make a commitment after what
happened with Lowell. Her self-confidence had skyrocketed after our
first few months together."

The story was becoming clearer all the time. I stretched out the fingers
of both hands, to see whether they trembled. Wren-ley watched me. "Very
good, Alex. Getting better."

I balled them into fists and looked back at Wrenley. "Then why was she
killed? She had the paintings, didn't she? You were afraid you'd lose
everything if she walked away from you?"

"Correction. One painting. We were going to be partners, so I let her
hold on to the Vermeer. Less valuable than the Rembrandt, but she loved
that domestic little scene. I favored the seascape.

"I called to tell her I thought she was right. That we ought to return
the paintings to the museum and collect the reward. Her name wouldn't be
connected to the scandal, and I'd give her half the proceeds. We had
been doing other deals together, so it made perfect business sense.

To prove my bona fides, I offered to take her to lunch so she could give
me the painting wrapped up, of course at Jean-Georges. In public.

Neat and clean. She could carry it to the table in a Bergdorf shopping
bag and just pass it to me with a peck on the cheek. A check would
eventually follow for two and a half million."

"But you must have concocted a way to get all five million?"

"Well, minus a slight commission for Anthony."

"Did you know where she kept the painting?"

"If I knew that I wouldn't have had to offer her a two-hundred-dollar
lunch, would I? Anthony was to follow Deni from home. He had borrowed
Omar's station wagon. He was to abduct Deni, drive her to a fairly
remote spot, and steal her purse and whatever else was in the car. He
knew he was after a painting, but the painting was supposed to look
incidental to the usual money, jewelry, fancy-car theft."

I closed my eyes and my right hand covered my mouth, trying to keep the
words inside. "But you knew he was a rapist. How could you let him near
Deni?"

"I didn't know that Anthony had been convicted of rape. It's not a
popular category of criminal acts among inmates. He always described
himself as an armed robber. True, naturally. And a carjacker. True as
well. He just neglected to tell me that he'd also raped his victims.

"All he was supposed to do was steal the Vermeer. Obviously, Deni
wouldn't be able to report the crime to the police. That was the bottom
line of my plan. She would have undermined her whole divorce settlement
with Lowell if she had gone to the police. No judge would give her a
nickel of Low-ell's fortune, or any of his art, if she was caught with
stolen paintings. A Vermeer that had been missing for a decade? How do
you walk into a police station and tell them that you were just carrying
it around when you went to meet a friend for lunch?

Then, there'd be me to deal with. She'd feel badly about my loss, and
I'd be sure to make her feel guilty, and there she'd be, owing me more
than two and a half million dollars, just because she'd been careless
and lost our painting."

"Plus, you'd still have the painting. Or both paintings?"

"Voila!"

"Where did the plan go wrong?"

"Denise made Anthony angry." Wrenley's indifference was chilling.

"First of all, he tells me that Denise didn't have the painting with her
in the car. Lots of cash, enough jewelry to make a splash at our lunch
he was entitled to keep those things, under our agreement but no
Vermeer. Now, between you and me, Ms. Cooper, this is still a point of
contention between me and my old pal Anthony. He's not beyond pulling a
sting on me, either.

"So he was angry with her. And then well you know this better than I do.
What makes a man decide to rape a woman? Anger? Lust? Control?

Or the Willie Sutton theory of robbing banks just because she's there?"

I had been doing this work for more than ten years and I had never seen
or heard any satisfactory explanation of what motivates a human being to
force another into an act of sexual intercourse, the most intimate
contact two people can experience. The only factors that were the same
in every case were the vulnerability of the victim at a particular
moment in time and the opportunity that this presented to the assailant.

Wrenley stepped forward and moved closer to me, passing behind me and
putting his left arm around my back, ready to lead me to the staircase
going down to the street level.

"Bailor denied assaulting Deni at first. Made up a whole story about
Omar being along for the ride, and blaming the rape on him. That's
actually why he killed poor Omar so that dumb con artist couldn't tell
me otherwise. Worked fine with me until I read the newspaper story about
the DNA eliminating Omar. Not so tense, Alex. C'mon. I'm telling you all
this so that you don't waste the government's money trying to hunt me
down. I don't have the damn paintings after all. I got screwed out of
the Vermeer, and the Rembrandt was never actually in my control."

I pulled away from Wrenley and walked alongside him.

"So Anthony and I had another meeting. That's when he told me about
getting mad at Deni for not having the painting. He knew I'd understand
that, since I wanted it so badly. What he couldn't make me understand is
why he made her get in the back of the station wagon and, well ... He
said he never meant to get rough with her. He just didn't expect her to
resist, especially since he had a gun. Thought just the threat of it
would make her tell him where the Vermeer was. But he couldn't scare it
out of her. Said she fought like a tiger. Claimed he had to hit her in
the back of the head with the gun to shut her up."

I was biting the inside of my cheek so hard that I tore through the thin
membrane and could taste blood in my mouth. I put my right hand in my
jacket pocket and began to play with the case of Jake's razor blades,
sliding one out the open end of the container and squeezing it between
two fingers. I thought of Preston Mattox's description of Deni, so
feminine looking but such a fighter, and his sorrowful certainty that
she would have struggled against her attacker. For some women,
resistance saves them from the completion of the assault, but for others
it causes the attacker to use even more force to accomplish his goal.

"There's an object lesson in all this, Ms. Cooper." Wrenley held his
revolver up for a moment for me to see, as a reminder. "I'm going to
tuck this back in my waistband during my short freedom ride, but I know
you're clever enough to understand that it's not smart to make me
angry."

Frank Wrenley was standing at the top of the stairwell, lowering his arm
from in front of my face as I took my fingers out of my pocket.

With a single stroke, I sliced at his hand with one of the sharp cutting
edges of the razor blade. The gun fell onto the steps beneath him and
clattered to the floor below. Wrenley grabbed his wrist and howled in
pain.

Thirty-Three.

I ran as fast as I could go, in the direction of the double glass doors
that surrounded the Hi-Line Railroad ties and opened out onto the
antiquated structure leading downtown, several stories high above the
streets of Chelsea. Wrenley had been at the top of the stairs, blocking
my way to the patrol car in the rear of the building. I didn't waste
time; he might have reached the gun before I did, which would have been
deadly. I knew I had temporarily disarmed him, but I also guessed the
wound had not disabled him completely.

The bolt affixed to the exit yielded easily to a twist of my hand. I
yanked it back and was met by a blast of the hot August air as I escaped
onto the tracks. For once I prayed silently don't let Chapman's stories
be full of their usual exaggeration. I was trusting his brief oral
history of the neighborhood to make my dash away from this callous
killer, and I needed Chapman's facts to be right.

The rusted iron frame of the deserted railway rose on thick beams over
Twenty-second Street and stretched out ahead, cutting through the center
of the buildings opposite me. The track bed was wider across than most
small tenements in the city. Looking down at the littered ground, I
chose a path directly between the parallel lines that were vestiges of
old track, hoping to avoid tripping over pieces of wood and steel that
were obscured by weeds and garbage of all sorts.

I screamed for help. I was headed south, and Brannigan and Lazarro were
parked on the north side of Caxton Due. I knew they couldn't see or hear
me as I ran, but I was sure I could attract the attention of someone who
would call for assistance. "HELP! POLICE!" I yelled as I crossed to the
far side of Twenty-second Street, looking down for signs of life amidst
the vans that had congested the entire block since before I had arrived
at the gallery. I gasped for breath, holding on to the edge of the
building adjacent to the tracks, but could see no people on the pavement
below. Wrenley was charging at me from the open glass doors of Caxton
Due.

I started jogging again, slowing somewhat as I zigzagged around holes in
the skeleton of the trail, afraid I would catch my foot and wedge myself
in a crevice from which I'd be unable to retreat. There were shards of
broken glass and dirty hypodermic needles, discarded sneakers and dead
pigeons, and I danced around objects on the obstacle course, wanting
none of them to bring me down in flight.

Racing through the valley of warehouses that rose above the tracks on
either side of me, I emerged onto Twenty-first Street, stopping to peer
down and repeat my cries for help. Kids were playing ball at the far end
of the block, near
Eleventh Avenue, and they stopped to look as one of them heard and
pointed up at me. "POLICE!" I shouted to them, not knowing if they could
make out my words. I glanced back to see Wrenley gaining on me, so I ran
again.

There was open iron grillwork on the side of the guardrail at the next
intersection. I gave a fleeting thought to climbing over and trying to
lower myself down from it. I was still too high off the street to jump,
but perhaps I could cling to a ledge until police arrived. Then I saw
the rolls of barbed-wire fencing directly below me, spitting their
jagged edges upward, so I propelled myself on.

Wrenley was getting closer. His route was a more reckless one than mine,
straightforward and relentless in pursuit. Taller buildings rose around
me as I followed the next strip of tracks, the intense glare of the sun
briefly lost to the shade of the brick walls.

I heard a grunt from behind me and ignored my own directive not to look
back. Wrenley had tripped on something and fallen to the ground.

Taking a deep breath, I surged ahead and ran on past the giant
warehouses, onto a long open stretch of track. I must have been below
Nineteenth Street by now. In the distance I could hear the faint wail of
sirens. I had no idea how remote they were, or any hope that they would
reach me in the maze of one-way streets.

Lowering my eyes to the pavement below in search of the blue-and-white
patrol cars that might be on their way, I saw only the tall traffic
signs on the nearest corner, their bright red flashers urging me on.

DON'T WALK.

The length of the run had not been enough to slow me down, but the dense
humidity and August heat were oppressive. I was gasping for air and felt
like my body was running on fumes, trying to find oxygen in the
stillness of the stale afternoon.

Wrenley was closing in again. I didn't have to turn my head to see him,
but I could hear his labored panting over the noise coming from my own
chest. We were somewhere below Seventeenth Street, and the entire
structure of the railroad lay out before me, curving slowly around to
the east, away from the surrounding buildings.

I felt the tug on the tail of my jacket a split second before Wrenley
pushed me down from the rear, landing with me in a tangle of legs and
arms. My knees slammed against the metal tracks as I tried hopelessly to
break the fall. The palms of my hands stung as they landed on pieces of
rusted metal, rocks, and debris I couldn't identify. I pushed up and
kicked one leg out back behind me, smacking it against Wrenley's chin or
chest I couldn't see which drawing a groan as his head snapped back.

As I raised myself up on my feet, I grabbed at one of the empty beer
bottles scattered along the path and carried it in my hand as I resumed
my gallop, heading to the section of the Hi-Line that crossed out over
Tenth Avenue.

I was hugging the left side of the railing as the elevation passed over
the piece of sidewalk edging the wide thoroughfare. I knew the danger
that slowing down would bring Wren-ley closer to me, but I also knew
that this main artery running below me, four lanes wide, would be my
most obvious chance to get help. I had no idea how much farther the
tracks ran before they would corner me at the dead end of a brick wall
on some abandoned tenement.

As I looked down I could see the mesh fencing and barbed wire that
bordered a parking lot directly below me. Beyond that, for the first
time since I began my run from the gallery, I was free of the prickly
metal underpass that would have ripped my skin apart had I landed on it.

I was even with the curb of the sidewalk below me as I looked up the
broad avenue. Moving against the sparse flow of uptown traffic were two
patrol cars coming at us, lights spinning furiously atop them and sirens
screaming their appearance.

I stopped at that point and stuck one foot in the iron grid-work of the
side rail, lifting my other leg over the top, half dangling above the
street, hoping to make it easier for the cops to see me as they
approached, and harder for Wrenley to get to me. My right hand was still
clutching the bottle, and with my left I tried to balance against the
top of a billboard frame that was posted along the rail.

Wrenley was on me now, coming directly at me with his arms outstretched.
His right hand looked like a road map, trickles of blood forming streets
and highways. As he prepared to lunge at my neck, I shattered the bottle
against the steel frame of the Hi-Line and screamed at him to keep back.

His right hand landed on my shoulder. I anchored my foot in the open
grille of the banister and pivoted out of his grip, my pants leg ripping
as it twisted against the steel trim. He grasped again and caught a hunk
of my hair, trying to pull me toward him, back onto the tracks. Gripping
the billboard top to stay in place, I swung my right arm at Wrenley's
head, slashing him with the fractured end of the broken brown bottle.

This time his screams were louder than mine, as I opened up a gaping
hole between his ear and forehead, with blood erupting from the gash and
spilling down into his eye.

He staggered back for a step or two, then vaulted at me like a wild
animal that had been mortally wounded in a hunt. His hands still wanted
my neck, and as he charged toward me I shifted my weight and swung my
leg onto the track, flattening myself against the back of the billboard.

Blinded by the blood, Wrenley hurtled himself over the guardrail
headfirst, onto the street below.

I bent over to see his body crumpled against the blacktop like a deer on
a dark country road, with cars screeching to a halt to try to avoid him.

Within seconds the two police cars pulled up from the north, directly
under the tracks. From above I watched Brigid Brannigan's ponytail
swinging as she yelled to Lazarro to check the body, while she ran in my
direction, looking up to see whether I was the woman slumped over the
railing, staring down at the corpse of Frank Wrenley.

"Are you hurt?"

I shook my head from side to side, not daring to try to speak. More
sirens, and the large square shape of an ambulance lumbered into view.

Too late to be of any use for Wren-ley. What had Chapman called this
street? I thought to myself. Death Avenue.

"Can you stay up there till I get the Fire Department here with a
ladder?"

I nodded to her, then turned my back and sat down on the ground. I
leaned against the railing, rubbing my calves with my scraped hands and
trying to breathe at regular intervals.

Fifteen minutes later, after the body had been removed from the scene, I
heard Brannigan calling my name again. I stood and looked down at the
long red engine that had been summoned, watching as the ladder was
hoisted into place. Two of the firemen climbed up it and over onto the
Hi-Line tracks, introducing themselves and shaking my hand.

"Can you make it down?"

"I hate heights." I gave them as much of a smile as I could muster, not
able to explain to them what it had taken for me to be poised on the
edge of the railing when Wrenley had come at me just a little while ago.

"Nothing to it. I'll be one rung below you, guiding you down. Harry'll
stay on top and load you on. Just close your eyes and trust me."

When I opened them again, I was on the street. The ad on the billboard
plastered above my head was visible for the first time. It was a
six-foot-tall vodka bottle in the shape of the fuselage of a jet
airplane, with words beneath it in bold yellow paint: ABSOLUT ESCAPE.

The cluster of uniforms around me, all meaning to be helpful, was
stifling. Police and firemen were having a cordial turf battle over who
would take me into their care cops as first on the scene, or firemen as
my rescuers.

I pulled Brigid Brannigan aside. "Tell them I'd like to ride with you."

"Will you go to Saint Vincent's so they can check you out?"

"Yes. I think I'd like a tetanus shot." I wasn't sure what my knees and
hands had been raked against. "But I want to make a stop on the way
there." She explained to the others that I was going with her. I got in
the front seat of the RMP. Someone handed me my bag, which I had dropped
in the gallery. The beeper was going off, so I removed it and saw that
it was my office number. Brannigan began driving up Tenth Avenue, about
to turn east to loop around downtown to the hospital. "Would you just go
straight a few blocks, to the corner of Twenty-first Street?"

I called Laura from Brannigan's cell phone. She sounded concerned.

"Mike's been beeping you. He's probably through the tunnel now, back in
Manhattan. Says he hasn't been able to find you. Are you okay?"

"I guess I didn't hear it. Would you call him back and tell him to meet
me in Chelsea, the northwest corner of Twenty-first and Tenth, okay?
I'll wait for him till he gets there." She'd know the rest of the
details soon enough.

The car came to a stop just past the traffic light. "Here?"

"Yes."

Brannigan looked at the small graceful building that I had noticed when
we circled the block earlier today. "Want me to come in with you?"

"No thanks. I just want to wait there for Chapman. Think anyone would
mind?" She smiled back at me and simply said, "No."

I got out and walked up the four steps of the Church of the Guardian
Angel. Its lovely Romanesque facade is bordered by two slim columns and
a round stained-glass window. I pulled on the wooden door and walked
inside, sitting down in the cool silence. I didn't know where the
nearest synagogue was, but I needed to be in a place where I could be
alone and pray. Somehow the name of this lovely church lent itself to
the circumstances of the day.

Twenty minutes later I heard the door open and close, and the noise of a
pair of footsteps walking toward me. I didn't turn my head.

Mike Chapman slipped into the pew beside me and looked at me, grimacing
as he shook his head back and forth. He started to say something.

"Not right now."

He put his arm around my shoulder instead. I closed my eyes and rested
my head against him until I was ready to leave.

Thirty-Four.

Mike was singing background for Willie Nelson and Julio Igle-sias "To
All the Girls I've Loved Before" when Jake and I walked through the door
at Rao's a week later. He got off the bar stool when he saw us come in.
"They're playing my song. Best jukebox in the world."

Joey Palomino came out of the kitchen to greet us. "You got the first
booth, Jake. Good to see you. Nice to have you back, Alex."

The tiny restaurant on the corner of 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue
was like a private club. An unknown caller might hope for a reservation
six months ahead, but the handful of tables were filled by regulars who
came on a steady basis when
Joey gave them their dates. Once in, since there is no second seating,
you could sit for the night and feast on luscious Italian food and wine
for hours, to the accompaniment of great music from the fifties and
sixties. Mike and I had been guests there a couple of times over the
years, but Jake had worked his way up to a weekly berth after he hit the
national news desk. Mike had asked Jake to set up a dinner to get me out
of my dismal mood and to mark Mercer's move from intensive care to a
regular hospital room. It looked like he'd be released in another ten
days.

We settled into the booth as Vie, the bartender, came over with the
first round of drinks. He forgot names from time to time, but never
faces or beverage favorites. "Salute."

"To Mercer's recovery," Jake said, clicking glasses with us.

"So now you know why Caxton was packing up," Mike began.

"Let's not talk about the case tonight, please?" I looked from one to
the other.

"You gotta face the music sooner or later, blondie."

I had avoided most discussions of the whole matter for the last week,
immersing myself in the case folders that had been buried on my desktop
since the evening I had learned of Denise Caxton's death. Jake hadn't
pushed me, letting me ease back into my own apartment and assure family
and friends that everything was fine.

Frankie Palomino, Joey's son, came to sit at the table and take our
order. Mike was distracted for the moment. He'd obviously been thinking
about what he'd eat from the moment I told him we'd be coming here for
dinner.

"I gotta have the roasted peppers, clams oreganate, and the seafood
salad to start. For pasta I want the fusilli with sausage and cabbage.

Then some lemon chicken, veal parmigiana, and whatever else Coop wants.

And a bottle of red wine. Tell Vie to make it a good one."

Mike had picked all the best things from the kitchen. Frankie laughed
and asked if Jake and I wanted to add any choices of our own. The food
was served family style, in portions large enough to feed half the guys
back at the squad.

"Where was I? Oh, so you heard about Caxton?"

Jake looked at me and gave my hand a squeeze. "He's right. You've got to
deal with this."

I played with the ice in my glass, drew in a breath, and answered Mike.

"Kim Mcfadden called me at home this weekend, before the story broke in
the papers on Monday." The U.S. Attorney's Office had brought down the
first indictments in the auction bid rigging case. Although Lowell
Caxton was not among the defendants named, it had already been rumored
that one of the dealers was cooperating and about to testify against
others in the ring. Lowell had been moving his assets out of New York to
some of his other properties, probably trying to get them out of the
country before they could be seized by the government.

"Has Anthony Bailor talked?" Jake asked Mike.

"He's not exactly singing. The first time I saw him at the hospital, he
wouldn't give up Wrenley for anything. Once he heard Frank was dead, he
confirmed that's who he was working for. Still won't admit he did the
hit on Deni, but we don't need his confession. We've got the DNA to make
that case."

"Bailor was the guy in the garage after Alex?"

"Yeah. Seems Wrenley panicked at Mickey Diamond's story in the paper
that we were close to solving the case. He followed Alex to Lincoln
Center, then called Bailor to run her down. Same for the attempt on
Mercer and Alex. Wrenley was the one who hired the receptionist to
freelance for him on Sunday morning. She called to leave the message, at
his direction, pretending to be Marina Sette. He also paid her to let
you into the gallery. Bailor was told to kill her on his way in, and
then shoot both of you." "What does Bailor say about the paintings?" I
asked.

"Back to square one. Holds to his story that he doesn't know anything
about the art. And now, with Wrenley dead, we'll never know if he really
had the Rembrandt, too."

I knew that cops as well as F. B.I, agents had gone through Wrenley's
apartments in New York and Florida in painstaking searches. The
possibility that after a decade these priceless treasures would be
restored to public view again had been dashed with the murder of Denise
Caxton and the death of Frank Wrenley. Both paintings were still
missing. Was I responsible for the fact that Wrenley's secret died with
him in his fall from the railroad track?

"I know what you're thinking, Coop. He was a mutt who didn't deserve to
live."

"But if he had some of the stolen paintings, and we could have found out... "

"Hey, the friggin' Feebies couldn't find the stuff for ten years.

They're probably just sitting on the floor under somebody's bed,
collecting dust. Or in some storage case left in a warehouse that won't
get opened for another fifty years, and then they'll get discovered by
accident. These thieves have been scamming off each other for so long
now, the art could be anywhere. A lot of dead bodies left behind for
this loot." I thought of Marco Varelli and why the old man wasn't
allowed to die a natural death, simply because he might connect Wrenley
and Caxton to the stolen Vermeer.

"The Feds got nothin' better to do than look for counterfeit money and
seize illegal Cuban cigars. This gives ' a mission, Coop. It ain't all
bad."

Mike was tucking his napkin into the collar of his shirt. "Hey, Jake,
better stick that tie in your shirt. You get sauce on that thing it'll
ruin the design completely. What's he got on this one, blondie?

Gerbils? Wait'll I tell Mercer you got little rodents running around on
your necktie."

Frankie came over to make sure everything was okay. "See the group at
that table for six? It's the CEO of one of the big ad agencies, with a
few of his models. One of the girls saw you on TV the other night and
wants to meet you."

I turned to look around, assuming that Frankie was talking about Jake.

"Relax, it's not me for a change. It's Chapman."

The tall redhead was beaming at Mike. She must have seen him on the
news, being interviewed about the close of the Caxton murder
investigation.

"Tell her I'll be over as soon as I finish my dinner, will you,
Frankie?" He wiped the empty pasta bowl with a piece of bread and winked
at his admirer. "So, either of you guys hear the question tonight?"

We had been in the car on our way to the restaurant when Jeopardy
aired. "No."

"Easy one. Would have been a split."

"What was the category?"

"Religion."

"I never bet against you on that."

"Yeah, but since you spent some time in church last week, I thought
you'd give it a shot. The answer was: Seventeenth-century cleric who
created the most famous sparkling white wine."

I laughed. "That religious I am. Dom Perignon, the monk who discovered
champagne."

Mike got up from the booth and called over to the bar. "Hey, Vie, you
got any champagne on ice? I'll be back over when they bring out the
chicken. I'm gonna go introduce myself to my fans. You know how that is,
Mr. Tyler, don't you?" He winked at me and put his napkin on his seat.

Jake turned to ask if I was all right. I smiled and nodded, reaching up
to kiss him on the side of his neck. "Thanks for your patience.

I'll be fine."

He held my face and pressed his mouth gently against mine. Then he sat
back. "There's a follow-up question to the one about Dom Perignon. I
feel just like that lucky old monk. Know what he said when he took his
first sip of champagne?"

"I have no idea."

"I'm tasting stars!"" Jake said, pulling me toward him and kissing me
again.

I heard the sound of the cork popping out of the bottle and flying up
against the ceiling. The Temptations were singing

"My Girl," Mike had come back to the booth to await the next course, and
Vie was pouring champagne for everyone. The events since the night I met
Mike at Spuyten Duyvil would be less raw in a few weeks, we'd catch the
West Side rapist soon, and new cases would draw me back into the work I
loved.

We lifted our glasses to toast our missing partner once more, with Mike
extracting a promise from us to bring Mercer to dinner here as soon as
he was able. We would be a team again, in spite of the devil.

Acknowledgments For almost thirty-five years, Alexandra Denman has
taught me everything there is to know about friendship. Her love, her
loyalty, her humor, and her intelligence have enriched my life beyond
measure. Ben Stein, Alex's husband, is right to call her "the goddess."

My fictional heroine draws her name as well from Alexander Cooper
artist, book lover, and devoted friend to Justin and me. This book owes
much to Alex and Karen Cooper, who introduced me to the galleries of
Chelsea, the brilliance of Richard Serra, and the existence of the
Hi-Line Railroad. They advanced the plot over wonderful meals and lots
of good wine.

Susan and Michael Goldberg give new meaning to the word "generosity."

Along with the crew of the Twilight Captain Cutter, Todd, Wcs, Kelly,
and Stephens they have given us a paradise to which to retreat, calm
seas for sailing, and a safe haven for dreaming. Their book parties make
all the lonely hours at the keyboard worthwhile.

Although my beloved pal Jane Stanton Hitchcock lives a shuttle flight
away from me now, her fictional counterpart is ever present on the pages
of this book. It was more reliable to research the art world capers with
a phone call to Jane than through the texts.

I am deeply grateful to Vineyard friends, who help sustain and encourage
me through long summer days, when writing novels seems to be the least
likely way to pass the time. To Ann and Vernon Jordan, with enormous
respect and boundless affection; and Louise and Henry Grunwald, with
great admiration and eternal gratitude. Their morning phone calls boost
my spirits and dinners together nourish my soul.

My prosecutorial patron saint remains Bob Morgenthau. I have been
fortunate to have had the benefit of his guidance, his integrity, and
his wisdom for a quarter of a century. The women and men of the
Manhattan District Attorney's Office and especially my devoted friends
and colleagues in the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit are the best in the
business. Along with our counterparts in the New York Police Department
and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, they continue to work on
the side of the angels. Survivors of violent crimes who come forward
with courage and fortitude, and trust our ability to do justice for
them, have my profound esteem.

Last year I lost two friends, each of great spirit and heart. Whenever
Alex Cooper goes to the ballet as she does here with Natalie Moody she
will be watching the dancers at American Ballet Theatre and honoring
Howard Gilman, an extraordinary man whose spirit lives on in all of
those man and beast whom he embraced.

And my young protegee, Maxine Pfeffer, who lost her valiant struggle
with cancer, will always be Coop's paralegal, Max. Thinking of her will
forever bring a smile to my face.

Some of my Vassar classmates asked me to create a character in memory of
one of our dear friends, the actress Marilyn
Swartz Seven, who also died too young. She is here as a woman of mystery
a role I hope she would have enjoyed performing.

The crews at Scribner and at Pocket Books have been a delight. I am
especially grateful to Susan Moldow, for her support; John Fontana, for
his stunning design; Giulia Melucci, for her relentless and enthusiastic
efforts on my behalf; and Sunshine Lucas, for her patience and
efficiency.

My thanks to all the booksellers and librarians who continue to put this
series in the hands of readers, and to readers who wait for more.

The collaboration with Susanne Kirk, friend and editor, has been one of
the blessings of this business. She has helped me make this a better
book.

I have seen so many books dedicated to Esther Newberg in the last year
that I have run out of superlatives for her. The best thing my husband
ever did for me, other than ask me to marry him, was to introduce me to
Esther brilliant agent, brilliant friend.

My family remains my most precious gift. My only regret is that my
father the gentlest man I've ever known, who introduced me to this genre
when I was a child did not live long enough to see the joy this career
has given me. But I thank my amazing mother, Alice, and all the
Fairsteins Guy, Marisa, Lisa, and Marc for their support, and the
Feldmans and Zavislans Diane, Jane, Jan, Matthew, and Alexander for
theirs as well.

Most of all, I am constantly inspired by the love of the most wonderful
continuing character in this series and in my life Justin Feldman. He
has made all my dreams come true.

FINAL JEOPARDY Linda Fairstein "An authoritative and scary view from one
who has battled evil and locked it away'

Patricia Cornwell The days of Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper often
start off badly, but she's never faced the morning by reading her own
obituary before.

It doesn't take long to sort out why it was printed: a woman's body with
her face blown away, has been left in a car rented in Coop's name in the
driveway of her weekend home. But it isn't so easy to work out why her
lodger an acclaimed Hollywood star was murdered, or to be sure that the
killer had found the right victim.

As Coop's job is to send rapists to jail there are plenty of suspects
who might be seeking revenge, and whoever it is needs to be found before
her obituary gets reprinted.