He held out his hand for the twenty.

"I'll buy dinner. Put it towards that."

"No can do, Miss Lonelyhearts. Valerie leaves for California tomorrow. Family ski trip for her parents' fortieth anniversary. Going to her place for a home-cooked meal. You know what that is, home cooking?"

"I have a vague childhood recollection." I had grown up in a close-knit family. My grandmother, who emigrated from Finland as an adolescent, lived with us for many years. Both she and my mother were superb cooks who prepared complicated meals every day of the week and made it seem effortless. We'd spend less than an hour at the dinner table when my father returned home from his surgical rounds, and then the women had to deal with the mounds of plates and pots that had been used in the process. Somehow I never inherited the love for standing over a hot stove that had run through my maternal line.

"Andy's making great progress," Mike said. "Scotty and I got up here at five. He's already running with it."

"With what?" I asked, glancing around the shelves that were lined with fragments of bone and assorted animal skeletons- snakes, an armadillo, and an elegantly horned antelope head among them.

"Basic 'scrip. Enough for Scotty to start looking at old police records and calling other agencies. Explain it to her."

Andy kept rubbing the surface of the leg bones with his toothbrush. "We've got a woman-and I'd say a young one, in her early twenties."

"How can you tell that?"

"Get used to it, Andy. Coop's gonna keep interrupting. All she knows how to do is cross-examine."

"First thing is getting the bones clean, laying her out in a proper anatomical position. That was easy here. Usually when we find them so many years later, the skeletal pieces are scattered around the scene, or they've been moved by animals. This one had nowhere to go in that brick coffin."

"But age, how can you tell that?"

"Bones stop growing basically by the time we're twenty-five years old. Up until then they keep changing and fusing together. After that, you begin to see deterioration, which helps us make estimates. They sort of break down, with everything from signs of arthritis to osteoporosis."

"And here?"

"She's in her early twenties, most probably. It's the pelvis again, and the ribs. She's got good height. How tall are you, Alex?"

"Five-ten."

"I'd say she was somewhere between five-six and five-eight."

"I was this big by the time I was sixteen. Could she have been a teenager?"

Andy's attention shifted to the skull, and he pointed the tooth-brush at the woman's mouth. "The teeth are interesting. Can you see?"

I stepped closer to the table.

"Some pretty expensive dental work went into this girl. Quality dentistry, including a pricey porcelain crown in one of the back molars."

I could see the neat and well-crafted denture in the lower part of the jaw.

"Now look up here," Andy said. "These teeth evidence some pretty severe rotting."

"That's an odd combination, isn't it?"

"What it suggests is a kid from a family of means, parents who would pay for first-class dental work throughout her youth and at some stage of young adulthood. The multiple sites of decay are consistent with some other kind of dysfunction going on in her life. Most often it's a slip into addiction or alcoholism. Her mouth exhibits classic signs of someone who has stopped taking care of herself, someone who didn't get medical or dental attention because the substance abuse would be discovered once she was in the hands of a health care professional."

It was astounding to me how this empty shell of a being was revealing herself to Andy Dorfman. "Can you tell anything else about her?"

"Give me the calipers, Mike," he said, reaching across the table. "We try to figure out race from the facial characteristics, using tools like this. The distinctions are pretty subtle for the most part- the set of the cheekbones, how far apart the eyes are, the shape and width of the nose. You need the skull to do it, so we're fortunate she was intact-without that, I couldn't even make an educated guess."

"And here?"

"Caucasian. I'm sure of it. I've put my calculations into FORDISC-"

"What's that?" I asked.

"University of Tennessee keeps a database of cranial measurements, a few thousand of them going back a century. Forensic Discriminant Functions, it's called. Sometimes the facial mask is more obtuse than this one. No question in my mind about this one."

"So we got a white female in her early twenties," Mike said. "Possibly a drug addict or alcoholic. If the ring is hers, her initials are A.T."

"Anything that tells you how she died?"

Andy ran his eyes up and down the length of the silent specimen on the table. "Nope. I thought for sure once we turned her over today I'd find a fracture on the back of her skull. I really wanted to."

"Why?"

He looked up at me. "Because the alternative is pretty frightening."

"Nothing worse that I can think of," I said, recalling the undersides of the broken fingernails, caked with a layer of cement.

"It's one thing to find that she died-say of an overdose-or was killed, even, and then bricked up inside this wall. But if she was alive, and gagged, and then watched herself being entombed-well, can you think of a more miserable death?"

"Twenty-five years ago, huh?" Mike said. "I just hope the guy who did this to her is still breathing so I can be there when Scotty slaps the cuffs on."

"Are you still looking for something else?" I asked.

"The pathologists reviewed it with me-both the X-rays and the bones. They agree there's no other gross cause of trauma. There won't be any kind of death certificate for months down the road, Alex. Whatever fancy medical term they come up with, we're talking buried alive here."

"Why months?" Mike asked.

"I'm going over the works once more to clean her up. I've got to check more thoroughly for any individualizing characteristics to compare to old records."

"Like what?"

"Pathologies, like fractures that had healed. I think we've got a hairline fracture of the tibia here. We've x-rayed it and I'll document it with detail and measurements."

"Will you attempt any kind of facial reconstruction?"

"Sure, Alex, and that slows down the process, too." First the computer would attempt several forms, based on the shape of the skull and Andy's measurements. Then a forensic sculptor would come in to add texture, to try to humanize the portrait. "You'll be lucky to have that by April or May. It's a skill very few artists have. The ball's in Mike's court."

"The NYPD's computer system only has missing persons' reports online back through 1995. Everything earlier has to be a hand-search," Mike said. "From there, Scotty's got to notify every jurisdiction in the Northeast. No saying where this chick got here from."

"And the feds, of course." New York was a mecca to hundreds of thousands of young men and women, coming to the big city from every corner of the country-to find jobs or go to school, if their heads were on right-or to get caught up in the alternative street life of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and crime if they were unstable or unwise.

"So you go home and get some beauty rest, Coop. Andy's given us a jump-start on the basics. By the time we go public with the story, we'll have a pretty fair idea of who we're looking for."

I walked along the green-tiled hallway to the elevator that carried me upstairs to the lobby and out the front door onto First Avenue, where I hailed a cab to go home.

Despite the low temperature, the sidewalks in the Fifties and Sixties were full of pedestrians, making their way to and from the bistros and bars. Friday-night burgers and shooters were staples of the end of the long workweek for many young people looking to socialize before heading to the bridges and tunnels.