I got it. “Be there when they’re opening the door.”

“Right. Leave a message that will scare the hell out of them. A woman in her apartment alone? You get a message like that on your phone, especially on an unlisted number? That’s got to spook her. She’s not going to feel too good just sitting there. So you leave the message and be there waiting when she comes running out the door.”

“Right into your arms.”

Gallo nodded. “Or merge the two stories, if you want. It’s someone she knew who made the call, disguising his voice, and he stood there waiting. Either way, he flushed her out. He got her to open the door.”

“If it’ll make you feel any better, I can sort out the cheese mystery for you.”

“Sure, Fritz. Sort away.”

“The person she was expecting was me.”

Gallo blinked. “You. What are you telling me? You had a date with Robin Burrell the night she was killed?”

“Don’t go smearing me with that brush, Joe. I didn’t have a date. She wanted to talk some more about all the nutsy stuff that had been going on lately. I was testifying on that pirating case, and we’d arranged that I’d swing by when I got out.”

Gallo rested his chin on his fingertips and studied me. “Margo know about this date?”

“I just told you, it wasn’t a date.”

“This little cheese party, then?”

“Is that question relevant to your investigation?”

“So the answer is, she didn’t. What’s going on here, Fritz?”

“Nothing’s going on. I make a living out of other people’s problems. Robin Burrell had some problems.”

“Was she your client?”

“Now you’re sounding like Margo.”

“Oh. So you’ve had this conversation with Ms. Burke?”

“A similar one.”

“And she’s okay with your breaking cheese with the pretty lady across the street?”

“Joe, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re prying.”

“You don’t know any better.”

“Okay. Margo’s nose is out of joint. I’m doing what I can to put it back in place.”

“We’ve established that Robin Burrell was a pretty woman.”

“From where I sit, Margo’s no side of burnt toast. Robin Burrell was upset. If I was able to calm her down some, that’s not a crime. Check your codes. Have you got one for ‘unlawful assisting of damsel in distress’?”

“Okay. None of my business. But I wish you’d told me about this last night.”

“Cops scare me,” I said.

Gallo picked up one of the crime-scene photos and shook his head sadly at it. He dropped the photograph back on his desk, leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers carefully against the back of his head.

“The guy did a real chop job on your cheese friend. We’re looking at one sick, angry bastard here. And when word gets out that Ms. Burrell was found with her hand mutilated against her chest like those other two…” Gallo let the sentence hang.

“Any more thoughts on whether it’s a copycat or if this guy actually did the Central Parkers?”

“The answer to both those questions is maybe. But I sure as hell hope it’s the first one.” He indicated the tote bag. “I wish you could tell me he’s in there.”

“Sorry, Joe.”

Gallo came forward in his chair and plucked one of the e-mails from the bag. As he read it, I took a few of the other photographs and flipped through them. It was a reckless thing to do. I knew there was likely to be at least one of them that could get under my skin. There was. The wiseass crime-scene photographer had fashioned what he’d probably thought was an art shot. The photograph was taken looking down from the crown of Robin’s head as she lay on the floor. Her hairline, her eyebrows and her nose were in the foreground, slightly blurred. The focus of the shot was on the mirror fragment protruding from Robin’s neck, just above her collarbone. The photographer had angled the shot to capture the reflection of a portion of Robin’s face. This wasn’t exactly the last memory of the woman’s deep hazel eyes that I’d have preferred to hold.

Joe Gallo finished reading the e-mail. He set it faceup on his desk, squaring it perfectly. “Suspect number one.” He made a rueful face. “So begins the glamorous side of law enforcement.”

6

I’VE NEVER BEEN SITTING on top of the world myself, so I don’t honestly know what that’s like. For that matter, who can say that having the number-one-rated late-night show in the midnight slot and getting mountains of money thrown at you truly qualifies as “sitting on top of the world,” but that was the tag that Time magazine had given Marshall Fox when they’d put his grinning mug on their cover just three months before the murdered bodies of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman surfaced in Central Park a little over a week apart. Fox’s emergence on the entertainment scene three years earlier, almost literally from nowhere (“South Dakota isn’t nowhere,” Fox joked during the first week of his show, “we prefer to think of ourselves as just south of nowhere”), and his blurringly fast trajectory to stardom had made the high school dropout and former ranch hand a household name almost overnight. Fox’s particular combination of easy charm, faint naughtiness and at times downright reproachful wit struck an immediate chord with viewers. The Time story called it “a near-fluke-ish alchemy.”

One has to conjure the incongruous image of a cowboy Lenny Bruce wandering in from the heartland. Like Bruce, Mr. Fox is not one to mince his words, a trait that also lands him in the grand American populist tradition of Will Rogers or Mark Twain. But ask any female fan of Marshall Fox if she thinks either of those two venerable sagebrush sages had even a fraction of the edge or especially the sex appeal of this new kid on the block, and you’re likely as not to hear a resounding “As if!”

Within months of its debut, Midnight with Marshall Fox was a ratings gold mine for the network. The diamond-blue eyes and the slightly damaged nose peered out from newsstands all over the country. The guy was hot goods. Even Margo, who is not one to be easily starstruck, contracted a case of Fox fever and stayed up past pumpkin time to get her dose of the man. When Fox took up with socialite beauty and celebrity heartbreaker Rosemary Boggs within a year of landing in New York and the two tied the knot a mere three months later, they were given the sort of ink once reserved for royal couples. The media could not get enough of them. Vanity Fair reportedly paid the Foxes over a million dollars to pose as scantily clad modern-day Antony and Cleopatra (Cowboy & Cleopatra) for the cover of their magazine, snakes and all. Rosemary was rumored to have balked at the idea and made the photo shoot a living hell. Regardless, the results pumped sales to the top of the publication’s all-time figures, and when Fox convinced his wife to come on the show the week after the magazine hit the stands-complete with snakes and the peekaboo gold toga-the show’s already boffo ratings likewise flew right off the charts. The Foxes were a force, the new bionic couple. About as “it” as “it” gets.

Not quite two years into the marriage, the cracks began to appear. Rumors of fights. Whispers of drugs. Suggestions of a serious wandering-eye problem on the part of Fox. During an extended European vacation for the lady of the house, speculation grew that Fox was ready to pull up stakes and make his way back to the heartland. Finally, the trial separation, accompanied by the almost immediate parade of women looping their arm through that of the late-night entertainer. High-profile carousing. High jinks. The unexplained police presence at three A.M. outside Fox’s rented bungalow at Chateau Marmont. An unlicensed handgun setting off alarms at JFK. The incident with the shattered glass table and the bleeding Peruvian supermodel-reportedly seven stitches across the nineteen-year-old’s shoulder blade.