"Chief," Coffey nodded. "Riker filled you in?"

"Much as he could. It's the same freak? You're positive?"

"It's the same pattern with the wounds."

"Oh, God," said Blakely, as if God could find him in this section of lower Manhattan. Not likely, yet he wiped his face with a handkerchief and squinted up to where heaven would be if not for the crumbling brick of the tenement building. "You got a preliminary yet?"

"Yeah, but it's half-assed. Slope hasn't shown up yet. The techs figure they died maybe forty to fifty hours ago. There's plastic in the woman's wounds."

"You got an ID on her?"

"Miss Pearl Whitman, age seventy-five. She's from Gramercy Park, same as the first two."

"No shit. You know who that is? Pearl Whitman of Whitman Chemicals. You got any idea how much she's worth?"

It was like the Chief to give a credit line to a corpse. He was a good political animal.

"Look who's here." Blakely was nodding in the direction of a van with a TV-news logo on the side. He gestured thumb down to a uniformed officer who moved quickly to direct the van and its cargo of reporters and cameramen onto the cross street and away from the crime scene. "Speaking of freaks. Those bastards can smell blood before jackals can."

Jack Coffey closed his eyes, but it did him no good. He could see the Post's headlines on the inside of his eyelids: "Invisible Man's Third Kill". A rival newspaper had favored the name Graylady Killer, but the public had taken more of a fancy to the supernatural aspect of the first murder.

That first old woman had been a daylight kill in the park at the center of Gramercy Square. Anne Cathery had died in full view of every window that looked out onto that square, and every bench-sitter, every passer-by. Yet no one had witnessed it. Her corpse had lain in anonymity among the shrubs, ignored by blase, incurious New Yorkers. In the early morning hours of the following day, flies had attracted the curiosity of a resident.

The second victim, Estelle Gaynor, had also been found in the square. But now Pearl Whitman had broken the pattern by dying at an unfashionable Manhattan address, twenty blocks south by geographic standards and miles farther down by economics. Another deviation from the pattern was the death of a cop, the head of Special Crimes Section no less.

Harry Blakely lit up a cheap cigar, and Coffey bit down on his lower lip to offset a new wave of nausea and stop the onset of dry heaves. He was only hoping to keep some of his dignity, for he had nothing left of his lunch to give to the sidewalk.

"How do you suppose the perp got the old lady down here, Coffey? Any ideas?"

"Had to have a car," said Coffey, his mind working on automatic pilot now, only really concentrating on his innards. "Probably snatched her off the street in Gramercy. No rich old broad is gonna be out for a stroll in this neighborhood."

"Well, now." Blakely smiled. "He has a private car. That's more than we had yesterday. So Markowitz wasn't a total loss."

What would they do to him, Coffey wondered, for punching out the chief of detectives? Well, he would have free beers for the rest of his natural life, but no pension.

"You're the senior man in the section, Coffey. You do right, you'll make captain before the year is out. It's your baby now."

Yeah, right. And who was going to explain that to Mallory?

Coffey was facing the long black limousine slowly pulling to the curb, but he was not really seeing it, not registering that this must be Police Commissioner Beak's limo.

"Aw, Markowitz," Blakely was saying, as much to himself as to Coffey. "This was a real bonehead mistake. He should've pulled the pin years ago."

Coffey's hand clenched wrinkles into the wilted material of his suit jacket. So all the times Lou Markowitz made the department shine had counted for nothing. He would be remembered for this last mistake. Maybe the perp was just smarter than Markowitz. Coffey had never met anyone that smart. And if and when he did? Would Blakely be sitting with someone else and remembering Lieut. Jack Coffey for his last mistake?

"Has anyone told Mallory?" asked Blakely.

"She's in there now with forensic."

"Oh Jesus – "

"She was the first officer on the scene. You were figuring to keep her out of it?"

"She's in there with Markowitz's body?"

"Yeah, and she's pissed off."

He was only vaguely aware of another man standing close by his shoulder and putting one bloodless, bony hand on the fender of the car. Coffey winced as the man leaned close to his ear and yelled, "Are you telling me Sergeant Mallory is in there!"

Where had Beale come from on his little ferret's feet?

Still a bit slow and slightly stupid with shock, Jack Coffey turned to look down at the little man's watery gray eyes. He thought the commissioner had a very big voice for a little jerk.

Dr Edward Slope had come straight from a pool-side barbecue at his suburban Westchester home. Actually, he had escaped from his in-laws and neighbors, running from their screaming children, ducking the flying frisbees, keeping a blind eye to the smoking hamburgers and franks on the grill, not stopping to change his clothes but only grabbing up his bag. His apologies, on the fly, had been profuse, but when he last saw his wife, she had been holding a long, sharp skewer and miming the words, "I'll get you for this," as he backed his car down the driveway and left her to the whirlwind.

In his practice as medical examiner for the county of Manhattan, Dr Slope usually came to his patients in a more somber suit of clothes and not the garish splashes of Hawaiian color which competed with the blood of the crime scene. In a further, unintended rudeness, the exotic flowers of his shirt muted the dead woman's more fashionable blue dress, and drabbed the dead man's brown suit.

And he usually tended to strangers and not to a man he had known for half his life. He had walked quickly from the car to the door marked by a guard of uniformed officers. No one had caught up with him to tell him it was Louis in there. He had walked into this room and met his old friend as a corpse. Now, as he sagged against the bare brick wall, the bright floodlights deepened his wrinkles and made him seventy instead of sixty.

He had to ask himself, what was wrong with this picture? Oh, just everything. Louis should be issuing orders to forensic and the photographer, and pumping him for early details and best guesses. In no scenario could Louis be one of the bodies.

And why was Kathy Mallory here? She should be sitting at a computer console back at the station, and not on her knees in the dirt and the dried blood, flies lighting on the curls of her hair and crawling over her hands and face.

The photographer and the forensic crew were standing by the door, waiting on a go-ahead from Mallory. She was kneeling on the floor, pushing a gold wedding band up the pudgy third finger on the left hand of the corpse which had been her father.

Dr Slope turned his attention to the boy in the handcuffs. It seemed unnecessary to have such a large policeman restraining the kid. In that weakened condition he could not have outrun one of the dead bodies. The boy's head was bleeding, and half his face was swollen. Slope thought of practising on a living patient for distraction, but then he figured he would see this one in his regular practice soon enough. The skeletal junkie was a day away from dying. Were the wounds Mallory's work? It was obvious the boy was Mallory's creature. He was tied to her by his eyes.

Mallory looked up at the boy. "You moved the body, didn't you?"

Apparently, she had trained the boy rather well in the short time they had known one another, perhaps a half-hour by the recent blooding. The boy responded quick as a starving lab rat.