Sergeant Riker pushed through the door and into the shock of cold air. A pool of bright light surrounded the metal table, the carts, and instruments which included the incongruous carpentry tools of drill and saw. He looked down at the partially sheeted body.

A young doctor stood by the table, masked below the eyes and wearing green scrubs and rubber gloves. They had met previously over other bodies. The pathologist nodded to Riker, recognizing him as less than a friend but more than an acquaintance. The younger man turned his face back to the microphone suspended above the body as he continued to intone the list of statistics.

‘… well-developed female, approximately twenty-five years old…’

As Riker bent over the corpse, the overhead lamp highlighted every silver hair and deepened the lines of his slept-in face and suit.

‘… wound and bruising to lateral forearm…’

A defensive wound? So there had been a struggle.

Blonde curls framed a porcelain face. He squinted past the dried blood of the head wound and the damage done by a feasting of maggots and beetles.

It was the wrong face.

‘… wound to the side of the skull…’

He pulled back the lid of one eye which had lost its roundness and gone all cloudy. Still, this eye was not and never had been green. His own eyes went to the roots beneath the curls. Not blonde roots.

Not Kathy.

‘… body 66 inches in length…’

This young woman was not as tall by five inches, but she was slender, like Kathy, and the same age.

‘… bones of the cervical vertebrae are broken…’

Riker was slow to regain control over all the muscles in the face and throat that could prevent a burnt out, I-seen-everything, rummy cop from crying like a man who still had feelings after thirty-five years on the force. He closed his eyes.

‘Detective Palanski is a damn idiot,’ said a familiar voice behind his back. Riker turned to face the chief medical examiner. Dr Edward Slope was pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. A green surgical mask hung free beneath his cragged and deadpan face. All the anger was in the man’s words. Slope had also known Kathy in her puppy days.

‘The resemblance isn’t close enough to make them sisters.’

‘Palanski’s a kid,’ said Riker, who said this of everyone under forty. ‘And it’s not like he worked with her every day.’

‘… the hands are crushed, no blood loss. Injury sustained after death…’

Riker opened his notebook and pulled out his pen. He kept his eyes away from the woman on the table, bereft of her sheet, exposed to the lights, the eyes of men, the cold air. ‘The body was found in the park, four or five blocks from Mallory’s neighborhood on the Upper West Side. The victim was wearing a blazer and blue jeans, just like Mallory. And Mallory’s name was on the tailor’s label.’

Dr Slope was staring down at the corpse. ‘Kathy Mallory’s eyes are so green they shouldn’t be legal. How could Palanski confuse the color of her eyes with these pale blues?’

‘He wouldn’t have touched her eyes,’ said Riker. ‘He was scared of Mallory. Even when he thought she was dead, he was scared of her.’

‘… Rigor mortis is still present in the neck and jaw…’

Dr Slope moved closer to the table, nodded to the younger pathologist, and picked up a clipboard which dangled by a chain. Now he turned back to Riker. ‘What have you got so far?’

‘Coffey’s got a preliminary report from the West Side squad. The ME investigator on the crime scene estimates the time of death at yesterday morning between 6:00 and 9:00. An entomologist is working on the bug larvae. Maybe they can narrow it some. Your man figures the body was moved within an hour of death.’

All that was written on the page of his notebook was the word bugs.

Riker didn’t have to look directly at the woman to know what was being done to her. The young man with the mask and the knife was making the first incision crossing from shoulder to breastbone, and then on to the other shoulder, his blade describing a V. In peripheral vision, Riker saw the next slice, the downward motion of the knife hand cutting the body open from the breast to the mount of Venus. The smell of blood mingled with urine and feces. He could hear her liquids running into the holes at the sides of the table.

‘Palanski was the first detective on the scene. He figures the park for a dump site.’

‘And what do you think, Riker?’

‘Could be. I don’t know. We’ve only got grass stains on the clothes. Maybe he did her in the park, and then dragged her deeper into the woods so he could have some privacy while he was working on her hands.’

And that sound, just now, was the first of her organs dropping on to the scale – a lung, or maybe it was her heart.

‘That fits,’ said Slope. ‘No blood loss with those wounds. The hands were smashed up after death. I can’t see you pulling prints on this one.’

The medical examiner slid an X-ray out of a large manila envelope and held it up to the light. ‘The blow to the head wouldn’t have killed her. Her neck was snapped after he stunned her. Fractures indicate a heavy blunt object.’

‘Like a rock?’

‘Could be. By the direction of the bone fragments, I’d say he hit her from the front with the object in his right hand. No bruising on the throat. He probably used both hands to break her neck by twisting the head. Are you staying around for the report?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Riker. ‘Since it’s not one of our officers, this one goes back to the detectives on the West Side. It’s nothing Special Crimes would have an interest in.’

‘… evidence of a recent abortion…’

More of her organs were dropping on to the scales. Three times he counted the cold slap of soft tissue on metal.

Riker kept his eyes nailed to his notebook. ‘I think Dr Oberon said there were defensive wounds on the arm.’

Slope picked up the arm and bent closer to it. ‘No. More like a restraint bruise. The bastard had a strong grip on her arm. Large hand, too. Oh, and be sure to tell Palanski, I’m going to sick Mallory on him. He’s ruined my morning. I don’t see why I shouldn’t have him destroyed.’

Without looking up from his notebook, Riker knew that the organs of her torso were all accounted for. The younger pathologist was moving to the head of the table to make the long incision which would begin at one ear and stretch along the top of her crown to the other ear. Then the man would pull the flap of skin down over the face of the girl who was not Kathy. It was done quickly with the sure strokes of a butcher. Now Riker listened to the saw slicing into her skull. A minute more and her brains would hit the scale. His pen hovered over the notebook as that minute dragged by. And then it was over.

She was gutted and ruined.

Because the woman might have been Kathy, the killer had touched him in his soft places. Kathy Mallory had crept into those soft places as a child and grown up in them.

Later in the day, he would soak his despair in scotch, but not drown it. It would be waiting for him in the morning with his hangover. Tomorrow, the two of them, despair and headache, would be married to one another and sitting at the foot of his bed when he awoke to a new morning, or maybe it would be afternoon, and then they would get him.

For all the days of her suspension from the force, the beautifully tailored lines of her blazers had been uninterrupted by the bulge of a.357 Smith & Wesson revolver. She might have passed for a civilian, but for the uncivilized green eyes. She was settled deep into the well-padded brocade of an eighteenth-century couch in a warm patch of afternoon sun. One slim blue-jeaned leg curled under her, but the running shoe never touched the material. Helen Markowitz had raised her to respect furniture, whether it be the antiques which filled this office with the colors of Persian rugs and stained-glass lamp shades, or the cruder appointments of NYPD.