"Yeah." Robin Duffy smiled and then his mouth wobbled as he tried to take the expression back before it tipped his hand, which was somewhat improved by the card dealt him. "Kathy just couldn't understand why Helen was crying. She figured anybody'd be thrilled to have an extra twenty thou in the checking account three weeks before Christmas."

"Then", said Rabbi Kaplan, "Kathy figured, well Helen is Jewish. Maybe different customs."

In the next four hours, Charles discovered that the game of poker could not be learned from a book, and that Helen had worked miracles with Kathy's behavior. Within six months of foster-care, the Markowitzs had been able to take the child into a store with them, and even turn their backs on her for whole minutes at a time – all because theft, petty or grand, made Helen cry. Helen had done so good a job that Kathy could now pass for a young lady in any company but this one. These men knew what she was: a born thief, a hardcase with no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. Yet, of all the five billion on the planet, Louis Markowitz had loved her best.

After the fiasco with Helen's present, Louis had taken Kathy out of the computer course. The NYU instructor had been sorry to lose such a dazzling student. The bank transfer had been fixed, said the pale little man with the thick glasses. The bank didn't even know the money was ever missing. So why pull the child out? he had asked, genuinely puzzled. It seemed to be upsetting the little girl, he said. Look, she's going to cry.

How could Louis have explained to that kind, soft-spoken, endlessly patient little man that this was not a real kid he had by the hand. You could stick pins in Kathy all damn day long and she'd never, never cry. She had no soft spots.

Later, she would cry for Helen and not stop crying for days, but that was still years and years away. These were the early days of life with the baby felon.

Determined never to stick Kathy on civilians again, Louis brought her into work with him in the after-school hours and pointed at a row of computer terminals in the Special Crimes office. This is crap, he explained to the skinny kid who didn't even come up to his lapel pin in those days. We don't have genius programmers, he told her then, no decent equipment. What we got won't work half the time. And now I've got a PC that won't work at all. You're so smart? Fix it, he told her, and you can play with that one.

One night, when she was only an inch taller, she crept into his office with a strange little smile. She dumped a load of printouts on his desk and crept silently away. Long after Helen had come to take the little angel home, Louis was still at his desk reading all the department dirt he ever imagined possible. The thief had cracked every high-echelon code in existence and raided Internal Affairs.

A present.

This had been Kathy's longest lesson.

The poker game had changed to a bastard version of five-card draw, with deuces wild if you held a queen, and jacks wild if you held a ten. And Charles discovered that Slope was not only a gifted medical examiner, but he could also blow smoke rings.

Slope put up one finger and received one card in an effort to convince the others he held four of a kind. He didn't. "It drove the kid nuts for months trying to figure out why Louis didn't use the goods to blackmail his way to chief of detectives and a slew of pay-offs."

Duffy chimed in, "And I'm sure Kathy was expecting a nice little cut of the action. Two cards."

"And we still have no idea what the kid made of that," said Slope. "Louis thought maybe he lost face with the little brat for a while, that she had him pegged for a sucker, turning down all that great dirt."

"I'll stick with these," said Duffy. "Lousy hand that it is."

"I'm out." The rabbi put down his cards. "When she was twenty years old, Louis almost had a heart attack when she told him she was quitting college to enter the police academy."

"A license to steal and a gun." Duffy clinked a dime into the kitty, and as he looked up, he made his eyebrows dance. "When you see these cards, you're gonna cry, you bastards."

Slope tossed in two dimes, and after the others had followed suit, he splayed out a wild-card jack and three tens, glancing at Duffy with a sly smile. "Louis called in a lot of favors to keep her in Special Crimes so he could protect the city of New York from Kathy."

Rabbi Kaplan put up his hands. "Enough, Edward. You'll make Charles think he's inherited a monster."

"He has," said Duffy, splaying out his wild card and three queens on the table. His short arms barely made the reach to gather in the kitty of nickels and dimes.

"Louis and Helen took Kathy off the street while she still had core emotions left," said Slope. "But she'll never be quite socialized, never altogether civilized. It was just too late, you see."

"She loved Helen at first sight," said Rabbi Kaplan, dealing out the new hand. "But it was a long road for Louis, teaching her to trust him. It was more than a year before she stopped calling Louis "Hey, Cop". Then she got comfortable with "Hey, Markowitz"."

"But she did love Louis," said Slope. "Some kids are a lot worse off for their time on the street. You look into their eyes and there's no one home anymore. They're numb. They're the stuff that serial killers are made of. Kathy's emotions are still very much alive, but it would be a mistake to forget she's damaged."

Charles rearranged his cards, and three men knew he had two pairs. He looked up to smiles all around. "You think the Invisible Man might have been a damaged child?"

Slope held up two fingers for cards. "Louis said some people were just born mean. I have to go along with that. This killer is probably just a garden-variety sociopath, nothing fancy. There are simply too many of them to categorize them as insane."

"Louis favored money incentives for murder." Duffy waved one hand to say he was sticking with the cards dealt him. "Special Crimes was set up to deal with the really brutal, bizarre stuff and a fair share of loonies. But quite a few of the perps turned out to be people with money to gain and a need for stimulation."

"Pardon?"

"Sociopaths need more stimulation. I imagine murder can be rather stimulating," said Slope. "I'm in for a nickle. And the sociopath has all the ethics of an insect."

Three hands later, Charles was down to his last roll of dimes when the rabbi explained that Kathy was predictable in her own peculiar set of ethics. "Kathy's code of behavior was shaped by Helen's character."

Rabbi Kaplan looked at Charles over the tops of some of the worst cards he'd ever held, and he smiled like a winner.

Charles was looking down on a better hand – in fact, a great hand – and as quickly as his face showed all of this to the other players, they laid down their own cards.

"You do realize", said Rabbi Kaplan, "she's going after Louis's killer."

"Louis knew who it was, didn't he?"

"It's hard to say," said Slope. "Louis knew a lot about the murderer, but it was very general stuff. He's a clever bastard, I know that much. He uses a different knife every time. Not even a similarity of serration."

Charles laid down his winning hand to the surprise of no one. "What about the second murder, the car where the Gaynor woman was found? Did the killer have to pick the lock? Wouldn't that suggest an expertise?"

"Good try, Charles," said Duffy, sadly watching the money drift by him and toward Charles's end of the table. "You take any block in New York City, and you'll find at least one unlocked car. The old man who owned that car only drove it when he went to the hospital to visit his wife. He can't remember if he locked it. It's easy to get careless in a neighborhood like that one. There's never been a car theft in Gramercy during daylight hours."