"I'm not even sure that Henry knew where the groceries came from," Margot Siddon explained to Jack Coffey. "I suppose he wondered why the refrigerator wasn't full anymore, but he didn't know what to do about it."

Riker scanned the word groceries. Right, the groceries had been delivered to the apartment ten minutes into the interview. Henry Cathery had given her a wad of cash to pay the delivery boy, and then she had left them for a few minutes to put the perishables in the refrigerator. Acts of charity, Riker had supposed at the time, though he didn't take the girl for the good-mother type. But they were two lonely kids, both outside the mainstream in their quirks.

He looked at the last note he had made on the day of the Cathery interview. It was written in the car after the interview was over and they were heading back. Markowitz had mentioned that the girl never gave Henry Cathery the change for the groceries. Riker had written 'Parasite' and underscored it.

The lighting in the Cathery apartment had been subdued. Under these brighter fluorescent lights of NYPD, Riker noted that Margot Siddon's clothes were not fashionable grunge dressing, but merely old. The elderly and wealthy cousin had not been generous with the girl.

Done with her coffee, she set the cup on the desk and folded her hands in her lap. There was a pressure on the fingers to keep them there, behaving themselves. Her less disciplined legs crossed and recrossed at the ankles.

Coffey was extending his condolences on the death of Margot Siddon's cousin. The interview went on for another twenty minutes, and Coffey glanced Riker's way several times to let him know he hadn't missed the detail that half an hour passed before Riker thought anything had been said that was worth writing down. There were those impatient looks of 'Don't needle me' in Coffey's eyes. But Riker's pen only hovered over the page.

"No, she didn't have any enemies," said Margot, accepting the photograph from Coffey's hand and nodding. "Yes, that's Samantha. Was it a serrated knife?"

"What?" Lieutenant Coffey leaned forward as though he hadn't heard her right.

"The knife that killed her. Was it serrated?"

She set the photograph down on the desk. It was a head shot for identification purposes. A white towel had covered the wound to the throat. The face was unmarred and seemed at peace, only sleeping.

"Ah, we're not sure," said Coffey. "The autopsy is in progress right now."

"I can probably tell if I see the photographs of the wounds."

"We don't expect that of you, Miss Siddon. The identification is sufficient."

"Is there some reason why I shouldn't see them?"

"We'd like to keep some of the details out of the press for now."

Big mistake, thought Riker. The kid's eyes were gleaming.

"I insist on seeing the wounds," said Siddon.

And then it was the kid's mistake to try and smile with half her face. The result was a smirk that was obviously irritating Coffey as he pulled out the envelope with the glossy prints and handed her the shot that showed only the wound to the throat.

"A long knife," she said, holding the photo close to her eyes in the way of a near-sighted person. "And not a serrated edge."

Coffey stood up and straightened his tie. He'd had enough of this, that much was in his face and the stiffness of his stance.

"Sergeant Riker will have a few questions for you, and then he'll see that you're taken home."

The lieutenant left the room.

Riker made a few notes and then looked up. Her face was all accommodation.

"Miss Siddon, do you remember where you were between eleven this morning and two o'clock this afternoon?"

TriBeCa, in a rehearsal loft." Anticipating his next question from a childhood based on television, she said, "There were a hundred other people there for try-outs. The director will remember me. He said I was very good."

But she and Riker both knew she'd be remembered for the left side of her face.

"They told me they'd call," she said, smiling on one side, as the opposite cheek crinkled the scar into a hideous waning moon.

Sure they would.

"I'll drive you home, Miss Siddon."

The East Village was filled with kids from good families who affected the look of starving-artist poverty. But this young dancer with the cheap shoes was the genuine article, legitimately hungry. He had remained in the background of their first and second meetings. Now in the closeness of the car, he detected the smell of the thrift shop, a distinct odor of secondhand clothes. And the girl also exuded a palpable energy, waves of it.

He turned off of Houston and rode north for three blocks before he pulled up in front of her apartment building. A small clutch of teenagers were gathered on the near corner, taking an interest in the unmarked car. Rats scrabbled in and out of the garbage cans. The shattered bits of a syringe sparkled amid the trash on the sidewalk.

"I'll see you upstairs," he said, removing his key from the ignition.

"No, don't," she said, too quickly. "I don't want to be any trouble."

A drunk was relieving himself on the wall across the street.

"No trouble at all."

"No, I insist," she said, half-smiling and no sincerity in even half of her face. She was out of the car and leaning in the window before he could open his door.

"Good-night, Sergeant Riker."

He nodded and started up the car, pulling slowly away into traffic. She stayed a while on the sidewalk to see him off and gone. In his rear-view mirror, he watched her growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared in the dangerous landscape of Avenue C.

He tried Mallory's home number on the car phone. He let it ring, knowing that she took her own sweet time about answering.

Before the interview with Margot Siddon, he had pointed out to Coffey that the girl would probably inherit everything the old woman had in the bank, and Markowitz had always leaned towards money motives. Coffey had pointed out, for the second time in one night, that Markowitz was dead, as if the old rummy cop could not get that one simple thing through his head. And, said Coffey, this was not a woman's crime – for the tenth time, for Christ's sake.

At the next stop light, he made his last note of the evening: Why not a woman?

Margot Siddon turned on the light in her apartment, and a roach scurried across the floor underfoot. She walked through the galley kitchen and passed a rack of knives, more knives than a professional cook could find uses for. And in the alcove which passed for a bedroom, there were other kinds of knives, Swiss Army knives, common penknives, switchblade knives.

Sometimes she forgot that the rest of the world was not so preoccupied with cutlery. She had gone too far tonight. The cops had both been looking at her as though she had just dropped in from the dark side of the moon.

She thought the younger cop, Coffey, was going to drop his teeth when she asked what kind of knife had killed Cousin Samantha.

Dear, dead Samantha. All that lovely money.

She would inherit more than enough money to buy back her old smile, the smile she used to go around in. Her eyes gleamed and glassed as she grinned with half her face. And she began to dance. Her arms and legs were a celebration of leaps and rippling movements as she danced through the room of her dingy walk-up, kissing every wall goodbye.

Mallory passed a walking woman on the dark Soho street. The woman gasped, not with fear but with surprise. There had been no footfalls, no noise at all. Mallory had suddenly materialized at her side and then walked beyond her.