Riker pulled out his notebook and pen. ‘What’ve you got in the way of case numbers?’

‘For the boy? There’s nothing attached to the court documents. Sorry.’ He held up a sheaf of papers. ‘This is a brief filed by the Qualens’ attorney. They tried to adopt the boy, but they weren’t even successful in getting visitation rights.’

‘That’s why I can’t find him,’ said Mallory. ‘Social Services saw the Qualens as a threat. So they changed Junior’s name again and gave him a new case number. We don’t even know what age they settled on.’

‘With what we got so far,’ said Riker, ‘we’ll never get a court order to open sealed juvenile records. And he’s probably out there right now stringing up another woman.’

‘Then we’ll know soon enough,’ said Mallory. ‘He escalated with Sparrow. This time, he’ll put on a bigger show.’

Riker’s kitchen was wrecked, drawers pulled out, cupboards rifled, and a slice of pizza was glued upside down to the linoleum where he had dropped it the previous night – or perhaps the night before. And he had not yet found the playground tape. Years ago, he had put it away for fear of breaking it after running it so many times.

He glanced back at the living room. Charles Butler sat down on the sofa, and a dusty cloud rose up around him. At the man’s feet, cardboard take-out containers and months of newspapers were loosely piled, as if set apart for recycling, a practice Riker had only heard about, and all the ashtrays were overflowing with stale butts. However, Charles was so polite, so well bred that no one would have guessed he was not accustomed to squalor.

At last the detective found the videotape and fed it into the VCR in the living room. He handed his guest the last clean glass (Riker’s own version of good breeding) filled with bourbon and a splash of water, then made his own drink a bit stronger and settled into a leather armchair.

‘A friend of mine confiscated the tape from a pedophile. The freak was cruising Central Park for victims.’ He turned to Charles and noted the sudden rigid set to the man’s jaw. ‘Relax. He never got near the kid. He could only catch her on film.’ Riker hit the play button on his remote control. ‘This is what really got Lou’s attention. The film was a few years old when we saw it for the first time.’ In the absence of children of his own, the pedophile’s video was Riker’s substitute for home movies.

The screen brightened to a clear summer day, and the show began with the close-up shot of a small blond girl in a dirty T-shirt that fitted her like a tent. Riker pressed the pause button. ‘Kathy’s probably eight years old on this tape, but you can see she’s been out on the street too long.’

He pressed the play button, but the little girl remained frozen on the grass at the edge of a playground. She tilted her head to one side, not yet committed to going or staying. The homeless child must have known that she belonged here with kids her own age. Perhaps she recognized a normalcy that had been ripped away from her. So here she was – looking to fill a need.

Doing the best you can.

Kathy came to play.

Charles Butler leaned toward the screen, spellbound by the beautiful little girl, a miniature Mallory. All around her the world was aswirl with action and sound, small feet running in packs and tiny screams of outrage and joy.

The solitary child hesitated another moment. Then, light stepping, cautious as a cat, she padded toward a row of swings, gray boards dangling from long metal chains. She took her seat among the rest, looking right and left with grave suspicion, and she began to swing in a small tentative arc. Now Kathy leaned far back to steepen the pitch and made a soft giggling sound at the wonder of flight. On the upswing, she soared above a line of cruel spikes atop an iron fence. An illusion of the camera made these spears seem close enough to impale her.

Fearing nothing from the hard ground below, she leaned farther back to make the swing fly higher. Reckless and grinning, she soared up and over the heads of wild-eyed women, mothers and nannies, their waving hands and their screams of Come down!

Riker turned to Charles. The man’s mouth was working in a silent prayer, Don’t fall.

Toes pointed toward the sun, she rushed up to the sky, laughing – laughing.

All the joy died when Kathy looked into the camera lens. Her eyes were suddenly adult and cold. Her hands let go of the chains, and she took flight; literally airborne, she flew out of the camera frame, and the screen went black.

Though Riker had watched this film a hundred times, his hand tensed around the bourbon glass. For him, the child was still flying and always would be – a tossed coin that could never land.

Charles slept soundly on his office couch, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Only Mallory was awake to watch the sun come up. She had returned to the offices of Butler and Company with a stack of morning newspapers, and now she sat in an armchair, sipping coffee and hunting for a police press release. It had not made any of the front pages. The scarecrow’s crimes were old and stale, last week’s news.

The dog days of August marked the close of tourist-hunting season in Central Park, the scene of another daylight stabbing, but today’s headline victim was a man decapitated by a flying manhole cover described as the blown cork of a broken water main. The next runner-up was a woman killed by a stone gargoyle that had fallen from a crumbling building facade on Broadway. All the signs of a town out of control were here in black and white, decay and corruption from the sewers to the skyline.

And then there was Riker.

Yesterday, his sallow skin had been stippled with the small wounds of a shaving razor. His hands always trembled the morning after a binge. Booze poisoning was running its course and killing him slowly. With most cops on the decline, integrity was the first thing to go. Riker had clung to his long after everything else had been lost. He had always commanded great respect, even while crawling out of a bar on his hands and knees.

Why would he risk his job to rob Sparrow’s crime scene?

It was a common form of larceny for cops and firemen, stealing cash and baubles from the dead. But she had believed that all the manhole covers would blow up and the town would fall down before Riker would steal anything. And she still believed that, for now she suspected him of a worse crime – holding out on his partner, secreting evidence and working it on the side.

Mallory turned another page in search of the official press release, a warning to every blond actress in New York City. She found the story at the bottom of page three. Lieutenant Coffey had come through on his promise to give the next victim a sporting chance, but the scarecrow had also warned his prey; he had all but pushed the women into the arms of the police. Why?

She blamed her lack of sleep for seeking logic in a madman’s plan.

The young actress had grown up wearing the discards of the Abandoned Stellas, twice- and thrice-handed-down clothes bought from secondhand stores. Only the fabulous blue suit had never been worn by anyone else, and now it was ruined New York style, with blood, and she had lost her armor. Every passerby could see the genes of a third-generation bastard, the highway debris of traveling men.

This morning, Stella Small stood in front of an uptown cash machine and stared at her bank card. She never balanced her checkbook, for that sucked the last bit of charm out of life, and it also frightened her. She could roughly guess her account balance, enough for underwear, but she was hoping for more. A brochure was clutched in her other hand, and she paused to pray over it, God bless junk mail. Designer suits were featured on the second page of sale items. The fashion outlet store was only one block away, and she had an hour to spare before the next open audition. Stella had gambled a subway token on her belief in synchronicity, and now she fed her bank card into the magic slot.