"First thing we're going to do, Mike, is give your pal a new name," Andy said, leaning back on his heels.

"Because?"

"Because I think he's a she."

"Ah-hah! Once some more of the bricks came down I was beginning to wonder. But then I've been told you need a magnifying glass to see my private parts, too."

"The hips on this one give her away."

"Why's that?"

"See where this flares out over here?" Andy said, pointing his finger to the large bones coming out of the lower vertebrae. "Nature's way of accommodating childbirth. The sciatic notch spreads as a young woman matures, and the pelvis gets wider to be able to hold a fetus. Look at the forehead, too."

"What?"

"Vertical. Straight up and down. Men's foreheads tend to slope more, form a brow ridge above the eye sockets, while women's generally are like this." He turned to one of the techs. "Want to pass the big torch?"

"What are you looking for?" Mike asked.

"You want to know who this is, right? We've got a start on gender. We need to figure out her age, race, height-anything that will direct the scope of your investigation."

"How about when she went missing behind the wall?"

"That's what I'm about to dig for." Andy turned on the light and moved it slowly over the surface of the crude wooden floor behind the remaining few inches of bricks.

He lifted out some tiny sepia-colored chips, pieces of bone that seemed to have absorbed color from the brown earth on which they had rested. He turned them over and examined them, placing them next to the digitless hands. "Fingers, probably. Toes are down there, too. Camera, please."

The tech passed the equipment back to Andy, who took the shots himself. When he finished that task, he bent down close to the wall and reached in again, sifting through some of the remains and scooping a small sampling into a glassine envelope, which he studied before passing it on to Mike.

"See those little fragments?" Andy asked. "Like small caramelized bits?"

"Yeah."

"Good chance they're her fingernails, broken off when the bones dropped to the ground years ago. Submit them to the lab along with one of the older bricks. Betcha fifty bucks you'll find some of that sealant stuck to them."

Mike looked up at Andy. "You're telling me this lady was clawing at a brick wall to try to get out from behind it?"

Andy nodded.

"So this isn't just a coffin, right? You're saying she was probably still breathing when she went in here, just from what you think is underneath her nail bed?"

Buried alive. I shuddered at the terrifying thought of such a ghoulish demise, at the hopelessness of her delicate fingernails scraping against the stones that had been cemented in place. Nan and I exchanged glances.

Mike was pumping Andy for his techniques, unfamiliar as we both were with skeletal remains.

"Last year's case in midtown, some hard hats found the bones in a concrete slab when they were digging a storage room for an Eighth Avenue pizza shop," Andy said. "The girl still had the hair on her head and some ligature around her wrists. Hey, can you get a shot of this?"

One of the techs moved closer and focused his camera on an object on the ground.

"What do you see in there?" Mike asked.

"Looks like a sock. Like a man's sock. I was hoping it would be something of hers."

Clothing would be a big help in the identification process, Andy explained. If it had great age or distinctive markings, it might lead the detectives to a specific period in time. Modern pieces with logos, labels, and trademarks could pinpoint a year and guide them directly to the place of purchase.

"Big enough to be a restraint?"

"I'll let you see it in a few minutes. Maybe a gag, stuffed in the mouth, but nothing long enough to tie her up, I don't think," Andy said, as he painstakingly covered every crevice of the small space with his light.

Mike was readying a brown paper bag. "That'd be good. Get some saliva off it for DNA evaluation."

"Don't be too excited about that until we know how long she was in here. There are some holes in the back wall of the building. Professor, you still here?" Andy called over his shoulder.

"Yes."

"What abuts this basement on the outside?"

"A small yard, actually."

"That's why she's picked clean, Mike. May not mean she's been here two hundred years."

"Maggots?"

"More likely mice have gotten in and out. Field mice, squirrels, some kind of vermin could have squeezed through these crevices. Picked the flesh clean, but the ligaments would have been left just like they are. Kind of dried out, almost mummified."

"How'd you date the bones you found uptown?"

"One shiny dime," Andy said. "A 1966 ten-cent piece in the cement coffin. We knew that wasn't necessarily the year she was killed, but it couldn't have been any earlier than that."

He lifted the dark sock with a pair of tweezers and passed it out to be bagged.

"Any pocket change?" Mike asked.

"Nope. But there's something cylindrical standing on its edge." He reached in again and removed what appeared to be a small ring. An assistant sealed and labeled the package before passing it to me.

The gold-toned band was now tarnished and caked on its surface with some sort of debris. At its widest place, I could make out an engraving in cursive black lines. "Could be initials. Maybe an A and a T. "

There was no date, no hallmark. It looked like an inexpensive ring that a young woman would wear.

"Come in close on this, will you?" Andy said, lying prone and making room on the basement floor for Mike as he passed the flashlight to him. "There's some writing."

"Where?"

"It looks like a piece of canvas that got caught in the cement on one of the bricks over to the left. See it?"

Mike focused the beam into the recessed brickwork and read aloud: "'Cappozelli's Rat Poison. Manufactured in'-first three letters are all I can get-probably going to be Detroit. I'm making out the d-e-t. "

"Does it show a date?"

"Patience is a virtue, blondie." Mike had his nose pressed against the bottom edge of the wall. "It's got one of those drawings of a skull and crossbones. 'Keep out of reach of children.' Looks like Poe is exonerated. The poison was packaged in 1978."

6

Dorfman's team continued to work at dismantling the bricks above the scrap of canvas so that it could be inventoried with the other items. "So I'm thinking this lady went behind the wall no earlier than 1978."

"Gagged and naked?"

"Probably. Although that kind of poison is so caustic it could have eaten away clothing or paper, anything that might have been in there with her."

"You're convinced she was alive when she was bricked in?" I asked. I couldn't shake the image of this woman's final torture, a premature burial evoking a very primal fear.

Mike and Andy looked at each other before answering me. "Doesn't seem any point in gagging someone already dead, does there, Mike?"

"Depends what kind of games they were playing. What's next?"

"We close up shop for the night," Andy said. "You get the PD to secure the building. I come back tomorrow and start a head-to-toe workup on the skeleton. I don't even want to turn her over now."

"Looking for what?"

"Signs of blunt force trauma. Broken bones from old injuries. Anything that might help determine cause of death, in the unlikely event it wasn't a shortage of oxygen. The kinds of fractures or dental work that can be compared against existing medical records for identification purposes."

"So sometime about twenty-five, twenty-six years ago, MissA.T. disappeared, and all we have to do is figure out who she is and why somebody put her here," Mike said.