was wildly creating a visual image, a life and a family, and of course a brutal death.
“And you arrive at nine-six by? . . .”
“Eyeballing her, kid. Much shorter than you. Maybe five-five. Brunette, from the rest of the hair on her body. And she wasn’t from the streets.”
“How so?”
“Pedicured toes. No track marks. No tats. About your age, I’d say. Breasts were firm. Skin was unwrinkled and smooth. My money’s on midthirties.”
I had turned away from the broken body of the victim on the church portico, while Mike studied it to learn as much about her as he could in just the few minutes spent with her in the dark and cold.
“I’ll drop you at home, Alex,” Mercer said. “Let’s see what the day brings.”
“Expect the usual,” Mike said, gnawing the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “A handful of domestics, child pervs scouring the playgrounds and cyberspace, identity theft up the wazoo. Let’s meet up at the end of the day, guys, okay? See where we stand, what we find out. ’Cause this friggin’ beast will be back before you know it.”
“Why do you—?” I started to ask.
“There’s a bloodlust here you don’t see very often, Coop. He’s not done. That bastard tossed the head so his next vic won’t connect the dots. Whoever she is, unless we find her first, she’ll never see him coming.”
SIX
MERCER dropped me at the entrance to my high-rise apartment on the Upper East Side, and one of the doormen escorted me to the elevator. I rode alone to the twentieth floor, unlocked the door and bolted it behind me, comforted by the familiarity of my well-appointed home. It wasn’t the way most young prosecutors lived, but at moments like this, the security it offered provided a safety net for which I was enormously grateful.
I didn’t disturb the sheets. I pulled back the duvet and slipped in beneath it, knowing that I needed to calm down but aware that I was far too restless to sleep. Daylight would soon flood the large windows, so for an hour, I closed my eyes and tried to transport myself to a more tranquil surround.
Photographs on my night table allowed me a brief escape from the night’s dreadful scene and Mike’s unpleasant prophecy. My parents smiled at me from the porch of the beach home on the Caribbean island to which they had retired, and my brothers’ kids were oblivious to the camera lens as they body-surfed in the Atlantic during a visit to my summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. My lover, Luc Rouget, waved from his red convertible in the tiny village of Mougins, near the Côte d’Azur in the south of France, and thankfully didn’t seem to be an ocean away when I rested the silver picture frame next to me on the pillow.
I must have dozed despite my apprehension of revisiting visions of the body in my nightmares. My alarm sounded at seven, and I allowed myself another hour after listening to the headlines—still vague and devoid of essential facts—on the local all-news station.
At eight, the time I was usually at my desk in the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan, I got up and showered. I dressed for the trial, in a gray, chalk-striped suit with a pleated skirt and a mantailored ivory silk blouse. Lyle Keets, the trial judge, was an old-fashioned gentleman who liked all the niceties of the practice of law as it was done forty years ago—professional attire was almost as important to him as professional conduct. He had once forbidden a colleague of mine to reenter his trial part in slacks after a juror remarked that he had been distracted throughout the proceedings by the tight panty line he could see as she stood behind the lectern.
I had missed rush hour, so I grabbed a yellow cab for the fifteen-minute ride down the FDR to the courthouse.
“Morning, Ms. Cooper,” one of the uniformed cops on security said as I passed through the metal detector at the One Hogan Place entrance to the building. “Half a day, huh?”
It was easier to smile and nod at him than expect him to have linked my night’s activity to the morning news.
My office was on the eighth floor of the massive courthouse structure, just across the hallway from the district attorney’s executive wing. I had enormous respect for Battaglia, whose long tenure and innovative policies as Manhattan’s chief prosecutor had made him a legend in law enforcement. The pioneering