I glanced in. Sitting alone on a bench was a black man I guessed to be about sixty years old. He was slumped against the far wall, his legs outstretched in front of him. Also in the pen with him were two large shopping carts whose contents remained a mystery to me from this distance. I could see that he was wearing a plaid flannel jacket with long sleeves over a T-shirt. When my focus dropped to his lower torso, I noticed the pale green surgical pants with the drawstring waist. My eyes were riveted on the dark red stains that blotched the calves on both legs of his trousers. Gemma Dogen’s blood.

Lieutenant Peterson was standing at the desk, phone to his ear, finishing a conversation as I entered his room. He winked at me as he spoke. “No, Chief. I won’t let that ballbreaker tell me what to do. Nope. Just thought it was smart to have her here for legal advice-search warrant, lineup, Q and A. Nope, we’re running the show, I’ll make it clear. I hear you.

“Welcome back, Alex. Looks like we got a break. C’mon into the locker room and we’ll bring you up to speed on the day’s events.” Mercer and Mike had gone directly into the briefing area, where some new faces had been added to last night’s crew.

Peterson made all the introductions and I took one of the seats at the table.

“Okay, here’s what we got. The B team spent the day at Mid-Manhattan. McGraw let me bring in the A team as well and use the 17th Squad for canvassing below the buildings in the bomb shelter tunnels. My guys had the administration and medical staff interviews set up in some of the conference rooms at the medical college. Must have had thirty or forty people from neurology and the Minuit faculty lined up for their initial questioning, just comin‘ and goin’ all afternoon. Background on them, what their relationship was with Dogen, anything they saw or heard the night before her body was found-the usual.

“Nobody’s expectin‘ any solutions on the first round. Nice and easy, getting the lay of the land.

“About six-thirty, Detective Losenti here gets a call from two of the doctors we’d already spoken with earlier in the day-they’re both right inside, Alex. I thought you might want to talk to them yourself. The two of them left the neurological floor together to go down to the radiology department on the second floor. Had to look at some X rays in a case they’re both consulting on. Walk into the supply closet opposite the X-ray room and this guy-the one you see in the pen-is curled up on the floor taking a nap. They roust him to get him out when they notice his pants legs are covered with blood. One of ‘em stayed in the room while the other one called Losenti, whose beeper number was on the flyer we handed out asking people to call if they saw or heard anything. He was still in the hospital complex so he went right over to radiology.”

I looked around the room at the faces of the detectives. It was 9:30 at night and everyone had been going since dawn, but the optimism of breaking the case so quickly boosted everyone’s spirits and brought them back together as a team.

“What does he say?”

“He’s either playing dumb now or we got a real psycho on our hands. A few of the guys have tried to talk to him and got nowhere. I want Chapman and Wallace to take him into one of the interview rooms and see if they can make any progress with him. It’s gonna take hours. He mumbles, says the only name he has is Pops, and the stuff on his pants is red paint. Stepped in a bucket of red paint. Then out of the blue he apologizes for ‘what happened to the lady.’ ”

“Is it possible?”

“It’s blood, Alex. Human blood. I ain’t tested it yet but I’ve seen enough of it to last me six lifetimes. That’s why I wanted you here. Figure out what we can take with or without a warrant, how you want this handled so we don’t jeopardize any evidence we seize. I’m not interested in McGraw’s suggestions. He can spend his time doing all the media spin he wants, we’ll finish off this investigation my way.

“Used to be an expression, forty years ago, back when he and I were in the Academy together and things were different in New York. Used to say about a boss who’d never worked his cases like a real detective that he couldn’t find a Jew on the Grand Concourse. No offense, Alex.”

“Forget it, Loo,” Chapman said, “Sherlock Holmes couldn’t find a Jew on the Grand Concourse anymore.” An area of the Bronx that once had been home to thousands of upwardly mobile Eastern European immigrants was entirely Hispanic today.

“What’s the lineup for? I mean, who can ID this guy doing what?”

“Almost everyone we’ve talked to saw someone on a hallway or in an elevator or a stairwell Tuesday evening or night. I don’t know if we’re talking about one person in the medical center or a dozen different prowlers or a lot of wishful thinking. But we’re gonna let some of these hotshots take a gander at Pops and see if he looks familiar.”

“I don’t think a lineup makes any sense at this point, guys. We don’t have any witnesses who claim to have heard anything in Dogen’s office or seen someone leaving it, do we? Let’s not waste our time with it.”

“Alex, we got a lot of people-housekeeping, nurse’s aides, medical students-who were on and off those hallways all night. I’d like to see if anybody can put this guy in the general vicinity. You can keep working on whatever you want. This can’t hurt.”

“Sure it can, Loo. Suppose he’s our guy, and nobody’s ever seen him before. It’s premature at this point.

“The most critical thing is to get those pants off him and get them to the labimmediately. Let’s get that blood tested and make sure it matches Dogen’s. Have you got Crime Scene here to photo him?”

“Yeah, Sherman ’s waiting.”

“Fine. Get a few shots of him as he is. Make sure they shoot his legs, too, to show he isn’t injured anywhere. Go over his hands and arms to see if she was able to scratch him-”

“Done that. Negative.”

“Well, Chet didn’t think he gave her the chance. You got something to put on him when we take his pants?”

“We’ve got more surgical outfits here than Scrubs has. Yeah, we’ll give him a clean pair.”

Chapman asked the lieutenant what had been found in the shopping carts that were inside the pen.

“One of them happens to be Pops’shome, Mr. Chapman. Now, I certainly don’t want to search his home without a warrant, do I? So we’ve just parked it right there in my driveway for the time being. It’s a two-car garage, you might have noticed. The other one belongs to Pops’s good friend, who’s being questioned now by Ramirez.”

“And your eight ‘guests’ from last night, they’re gone?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, young lady. Ralph,” Peterson looked at Losenti, “who are my friends visiting today?”

“We’ve moved them over to the Anti-Crime Office, Loo. Watching the basketball game tonight. Just fed them a tasty assortment of ribs from Wylie’s. Why would they want to leave?”

Peterson laid out his plan. Chapman and Wallace were to take Pops into the room used for lineups to begin their interrogation. That way if he and I wanted to observe any of it, we could view them through the two-way mirror that allowed us to see into the room, although the men on the other side couldn’t see out.

“We won’t have fillers to run the lineup for at least an hour, but there’s a lot of other things to be done. Alex, what would you like to get to work on?”

“First, I want to call Battaglia, just to give him a heads-up before he hears it on the late news. I think I’d like to speak with Sarah Brenner and get her up here with me to work on this. I’ll need a second hand to get busy on warrants once this gets moving, and she’s the one I’d most like to have on board. Then I might as well get started reinterviewing the doctors who found Pops and the guys who are going to view the lineup.

“Oh, Mike, do me a favor and call Maureen. Tell her no matter what she hears on the news, she’s still going in tomorrow for us. It’s all set up, we might as well see what intelligence we get out of it, and know exactly what’s happening in there.”