“Whoever speaks to the next of kin, we’ll have to let them know what’s here. Pictures will be useful.”

“You can come back any time. Rent’s paid up through April, so Peterson doesn’t want any of this touched until we know who her heirs are. And know whether she was an intended victim or an accidental one.”

The early darkness of a March day had descended over the city while Mercer and I had intruded on the personal effects of Gemma Dogen. It was after six o’clock and I needed to be at the small supper reception the Lenox Hill Debs Board was holding in the principal’s office at the high school hosting my lecture.

Mercer’s flash went off several times as he aimed at a few areas of Dogen’s living room. The light reflected the shining surface of a small golden object and I approached to see what had glimmered so brightly in the otherwise drab room.

“Take it easy, Cooper. It’s not jewelry.”

Mercer lifted a foot-long black stand from the third shelf of the case and read the bronze plate that was affixed to its edge. In italic script was printed the inscription:To Gemma Dogen, in honor of her induction into the Order of the Golden Scalpel. June 1, 1985. Fellows of the Royal Infirmary. London, England.

A solid gold surgeon’s scalpel with a steel blade rested on the ebony box. I lifted it to admire its beauty. “Can you imagine what a superb physician she must have been to get this kind of award when she was only in her forties?” I was conjuring up a clubhouse full of older English doctors, bespectacled and bewigged, presenting the talented young woman with this solid gold token of their respect. “It looks pretty lethal but it’s a magnificent thing, isn’t it?”

“Would have been a hell of a lot nicer for her if she’d kept it in her office. Maybe she’d have had a fighting chance.”

It wasn’t a weapon, as we both knew. It was the tool of a woman who had saved lives and done it thousands of times.

I laid it back on the shelf and told Mercer that I was ready to leave. We put on our coats, turned off the lights, and I locked the door behind me while Mercer rang for the elevator.

It was six-thirty when I said goodnight to Mercer. He dropped me in front of Julia Richman High School and I hurried up the steps to find the chairwoman of the evening’s event.

Sexual assault had been a taboo subject in the sixties and seventies when I was growing up. Rape was a crime that didn’t happen, so the myths went, to “nice girls”-to our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our friends. Victims “asked for it,” and once they got it none of them were supposed to talk about it. If they didn’t deal with it openly, maybe it would go away.

All of the legislative reform that had been accomplished in this field had come in the last two decades. But the laws had been easier to change than the public’s attitudes.

So most of my colleagues and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to educate about the issues to which our working days were devoted. The people we tried to reach-in religious organizations, high schools, colleges and universities, professional clubs, civic groups-all of them might one day wind up as jurors in these cases. That’s when they bring with them to the jury box every preconceived notion and misconception about this category of crime.

There were very few invitations I turned down if audiences were willing to let themselves be informed about the facts-the differences and similarities between stranger and acquaintance rape, which sexual predators are incapable of being rehabilitated, legitimate offender treatment programs and which assailants they can help, the phenomenon of false reporting, and the ability of the criminal justice system to do better for survivors of sexual assault by dedicating more resources to the issue. Sarah Brenner and I knocked ourselves out at early morning breakfast meetings and evening sessions like this one. The more we helped ourselves, the more we helped those women, children, and men who would someday be victimized and need to count on the response of twelve of their peers to render a fair verdict.

Handwritten yellow posters announcing my appearance were stuck on the bulletin board inside the school entrance, with a large black arrow pointing the way to the auditorium. I followed the designated path, stopping at the open door a few feet before the large hall and stepping inside.

A heavyset woman with a tangle of blond hair pushed into a bun atop her head strode toward me with an outstretched hand. “Hello, you must be Alexandra Cooper. I’m Liddy McSwain. I’m in charge of the speaker’s program for this year. We’re really delighted you could be here, especially with all this murder business going on. We saw your name in the paper this morning and I was certain we’d have to call this off.”

She guided me into the room where a dozen or so of her committee members were munching on finger sandwiches. I introduced myself to some of them and decided to feed myself before I got too lightheaded to go on stage. The crustless slivers of seven-grain bread were divided onto three trays: watercress, egg salad, and tomato. I cursed at myself for having passed up Chapman’s overstuffed turkey sandwich so many hours ago in favor of these debutante miniatures and put a handful of the little morsels on a paper plate.

I moved around the room politely answering questions about the District Attorney’s Office and assuring handshakers that I would convey their warmest regards to Paul Battaglia. More and more middle-aged women kept drifting into the reception. There were obvious distinctions between the older half of the crowd and the younger. The over-fifties carried Vuittons on their arms and wore flat Ferragamos on their feet. The natural blond hairstyles, more up than down, were enhanced by Clairol, clearly a two-step process. The newer inductees favored Dooney and Burke-on the shoulder, not the arm-and the Ferragamo with a slightly higher one-inch heel. The blond seemed mostly natural, with a few streaks thrown in for variety. There was not a lot of diversity evident in the crowd and I was mentally censoring my notes to substitute the words “private parts” for my usual references to “penis and vagina.”

Ten minutes before I was scheduled to go on stage, I freshened up in the ladies’ room and we moved into the large auditorium. More than two hundred women had taken seats around the room and I shuffled my note cards to make certain that I had outlined all of the points I wanted to cover during the hour I had been asked to speak.

Mrs. McSwain had crafted a pleasant opening for her group and a generous recitation of the credentials from my curriculum vitae. I climbed the four steps to the stage, crossed to the lectern, and began my remarks.

I talked about the history of Battaglia’s Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit, which was the first of its kind in the United States. I wanted to impact them with the enormity of the problem of sexual assault in our country, so I was armed with some shocking statistics. Not even twenty-five years ago-that is, in our lifetimes-in this very city the laws were so archaic that in a single year although more than a thousand men were arrested and charged with rape, only eighteen of them were convicted of the crime. A few gasps from the girls down in front. I shook off my thoughts of Gemma Dogen and concentrated on my purpose.

I explained how the laws had changed: eliminating the corroboration requirement that demanded witnesses beyond the victim herself, adding rape shield statutes to prevent defense attorneys from inquiring about a woman’s sexual history, ridding us of the dreadful insistence that victims must resist their attackers even when the latter are armed and threatening deadly physical force. All these accomplishments had come about in just the last two decades.

The hour went quickly for me as I illustrated legal issues with anecdotal material from actual cases. It became clear as the question and answer period began that these women were well aware, unlike the generations before them, that rape was a crime that affected their lives. No one in that room, I was willing to bet, had not been touched-directly or indirectly-by some aspect of sexual assault. Almost everyone I met these days would disclose the experience of a friend or relative, child or adult, who had survived some kind of abuse that was connected to my painful specialty.