Another big mistake.

‘You couldn’t face me like a man,’ said Zappata. ‘You back-stabbing piece of crap.’

The two detectives closed their distance with the fireman.

Any second now.

The phones stopped ringing. The only noise came from a civilian clerk, fingers typing, lightly skimming the keys.

– tap, tap, tap, tap -

The fireman was playing to his audience of uniforms, and he was so cocky, rocking on his heels, smiling too wide for a man so off balance. The dead silence from the uniforms gave him no clue that Riker was about to pound him into the ground.

It was not a sucker punch, though Zappata never saw it coming, not from the Ladies’ Auxiliary. One moment he was standing up – Mallory’s fist shot out fast and sure as a hammerfall, and then he was lying on the floor, having a quiet nosebleed.

She stood over Zappata’s prone body, braced like a prizefighter awaiting the payback that would surely follow when this man found his feet again. With one quick glance at Riker, she warned him away. Sergeant Bell smiled, and there were nods of approval all around the room. Markowitz’s daughter would not look to her partner or anyone else to finish off Zappata. By Mallory’s stance, he could even guess which knee she planned to smash into the fireman’s testicles.

The man at her feet was conscious, but he would not or could not move. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with an idiot gape of wide eyes and slack mouth.

The clerk stopped typing. The uniforms were stealing glances at Mallory, the bomb at the center of the room. A telephone rang to jangle nerve endings, and then another phone went off. Papers shuffled, typing and conversation resumed. Officers walked to and fro, some stepping over Zappata’s body on the way to the door -life went on.

Once the squad room door was closed and Jack Coffey was facing Mallory, she missed her opportunity to say, I told you so, but the sentiment was clear when she turned her back on him and walked down the hall toward the incident room.

Sergeant Bell opened the stairwell door and leaned in, asking, ‘Hey, Lieutenant? You still wanna question Zappata?’

‘No, just roll him out on the sidewalk.’ Coffey planned to follow the lead of ten uniforms and the desk sergeant, to say that he had been looking elsewhere when the fireman tripped. A blue wall of cops was securely closed around Mallory. Not that Coffey worried about consequences. What were the odds that Zappata would file a police brutality suit against a girl? Mallory was going to get away with this. The lieutenant watched her disappear through the door at the end of the hall.

‘Maybe you noticed.’ Riker slumped down in a chair. ‘Your favorite suspect has a glass jaw.’ He pulled out a cigarette. ‘Now Sparrow was a big girl, and real good in a street fight – better than Mallory. There’s no way that twerp could’ve taken her down.’

‘Even with a razor in his hand?’

‘You think he’d know what to do with it? I don’t. We’re looking for somebody a lot scarier than Zappata.’

Riker stood before the back wall of the incident room and cleared a space for a photograph from Natalie Homer’s actress portfolio. The hangings had finally been merged into one case. He pinned the woman’s smiling face to the cork alongside the effigy made of clothes. Now they hung together, Natalie and the scarecrow, mother and child.

Detective Janos pinned a note near the newspaper account of a stabbed actress. ‘I talked to Stella Small’s agent and the doctor who treated her razor cut. They both say the assault happened on a crowded street. Now that works with what you got from Lieutenant Loman. All the hassling went on in crowded places.’

‘That pattern won’t hold up for Sparrow, not the week before the hanging.’ Riker walked over to the next wall and pulled a statement down, then handed it to Janos. ‘That’s the interview with the director of the play. Sparrow told him she was between day jobs, and she spent four days learning the lines of the play before she auditioned. Well, that just impressed the shit out of him. That’s why he gave her the part. And there were no open auditions the week before she died, so she wasn’t commuting on the subway at rush hour.’

‘Okay,’ said Janos, ‘but you know this whole town is one wall-to-wall crowd.’

When the big man had left the room, Riker turned back to the wall and the job of merging the paperwork of all the cases. Janos was right. New York City was one big swarming -

‘Crowds of hookers,’ said Mallory.

He jumped in his skin. She was standing right behind him.

‘If you see one hooker,’ she said, ‘you see eight or nine.’

Riker shook his head. ‘No, Daisy said Sparrow was out of the life. Maybe the scarecrow marked her while she was – ’

‘Sparrow was still working the streets.’

‘And how do you know that, Mallory? Were you stalking her again?’ Only someone who knew her well would see the sign of damage in her face, her frozen stance. And now Riker added his words to the list of things he wished he had never said.

Years ago, Sparrow had told him about being covertly followed and catching the young cop in the act from time to time. Mallory had the bizarre idea that she could shadow people unnoticed, that she could walk down any street, enter any room, without attracting stares. At Riker’s last meeting with Sparrow, the prostitute had turned to her own gaunt reflection in a store window, then covered her eyes with a bone-thin hand and said, ‘I know why Kathy’s following me. The kid thinks I’m dying – and she wants to watch.’ Two years had passed since then, and he should have known that Mallory had not stalked Sparrow recently, for she had not recognized the crime-scene address or the surgically altered face. He had wounded her for no good reason.

Her voice was mechanical when she said, ‘I found the plastic surgeon. He does a lot of work on battered women. Sparrow’s new face wasn’t free, but he gave her an installment plan. That’s where all her money went. She was still turning tricks to pay for the operations and chemical peels. So Daisy lied to you. What a surprise, huh?’

‘But you don’t know – ’

‘Yes, I do. Those payments weren’t cheap, and hooking was the only trade Sparrow ever had. That and one pathetic acting gig. She never had a pimp, so she always hung with other whores, lots of them. Safety in numbers – in the crowd. Then you’ve got the summer conventions, the boat shows, car shows. Lots of men – hooker heaven – crowds.’

‘All right,’ said Riker. ‘I’ll find her hangout whores.’ Even in a coma, Sparrow still had the magic to string him along, and the price of being blindsided was very high. ‘I’ll chase down Tall Sally and talk to Daisy again.’ If one of them could point him to a likely street corner, he would do a raid. He would wait until it was too late for arraignments and bail. Most prostitutes were junkies who would shop their own mothers before they would spend eighteen hours in lockup.

Deluthe pulled the new reports from the wall on Riker’s instructions to copy updated material for Charles Butler. He was careful to keep his distance from Mallory, and she had almost forgotten he was in the incident room, until she found another mistake – his.

She stared at the front page of a newspaper pinned to the wall. The actress in the photo was a blond stabbing victim. Deluthe’s initials appeared on a brief companion note in longhand, a few lines for the actress’s name, her address and the words publicity stunt. But that would not square with the dripping blood reported in the article. ‘Where’s the follow-up interview for Stella Small?’

Deluthe looked up from the Xerox machine. ‘I never got to talk to her. But I left a message on her answering machine.’

Mallory searched the wall for other paperwork. ‘Where’s the statement from the midtown precinct?’