"The hotel security chief made him," Thorsen said. "Known as Nick Pappy and Poppa Nick. Also called The Magician. A smalltime hood. Mostly cons and extortion. We're running him through Records right now."

Delaney looked through the doorway again. The small room was an abattoir. Walls splattered with gobbets of dripping blood. Rug soaked. Furniture upended, clothing scattered. A lamp smashed. The drained corpse was a jigsaw of red and white.

"Naked," Delaney said. "But he did put up a fight."

The three men watched the Crime Scene Unit move about the room, dusting for prints, vacuuming the clear patches of carpet, picking up hairs and shards of glass with tweezers and dropping them into plastic bags.

The two technicians were Lou Gorki and Tommy Callahan, the men Delaney had met in Jerome Ashley's room at the Hotel Coolidge. Now Gorki came to the door. He was carrying a big plastic syringe that looked like the kind used to baste roasts. But this one was half-filled with blood. Gorki was grinning.

"I think we got lucky," he announced. He held up the syringe. "From the bathroom floor. It's tile, and the blood didn't soak in. And we got here before it had a chance to dry. I got enough here for a transfusion. I figure it's the killer's blood. Got to be. The clunk was sliced to hash. No way was he going to make it to the bathroom and bleed on the tile. Also, we got bloody towels and stains in the sink where the perp washed. It looks good."

"Tell the lab I want a report on that blood immediately," Thorsen said. "That means before morning."

"I'll tell them," Gorki said doubtfully.

"Prints?" Boone asked.

"Doesn't look good. The usual partials and smears. The faucet handles in the bathroom were wiped clean."

"So if she was hurt," Delaney said, "it wasn't so bad that she didn't remember to get rid of her prints."

"Right," Gorki said. "That's the way it looks. Give us another fifteen minutes and then the meat's all yours."

But it was almost a half-hour before the CSU men packed up their heavy kits and departed. Deputy Commissioner Thorsen decided to go with them to see what he could do to expedite blood-typing by the Lab Services Section. In truth, Thorsen looked ill.

Then Delaney and Boone had to wait an additional ten minutes while a photographer and cartographer recorded the scene. Finally they stepped into the room, followed by Detectives Aaron Johnson and Daniel Bentley.

The four men leaned over the congealing corpse.

"How the hell did she do that?" Johnson said wonderingly. "The guy had muscles; he's not going to stand there and let a woman cut him up."

"Maybe the first stab was a surprise," Bentley said. "Weakened him enough so she could hack him to chunks."

"That makes sense," Boone said. "But how did she get cut? Gorki says she bled in the bathroom. No signs of a second knife- unless it's under his body. Anyone want to roll him over?"

"I'll pass," Johnson said. "I had barbecued ribs for dinner."

"They may have fought for her knife," Delaney said, "and she got cut in the struggle. Boone, you better alert the hospitals."

"God damn it!" the sergeant said, furious at his lapse, and rushed for the phone.

Delaney hung around until the ambulance men came in and rolled Nicholas Telemachus Pappatizos onto a body sheet. There was no knife under the body. Only blood.

The other detectives went down to the lobby to assist in the questioning. Delaney stayed in the room, wandering about, peeking into the bathroom. He saw nothing of significance. Perhaps, he thought, because he was shaken by the echoes of violence. Tommy Callahan came back and continued the Crime Scene Unit investigation.

He pushed the victim's discarded clothing into plastic bags and labeled them. He collected toothbrush, soap, and toilet articles from the bathroom and labeled those. Then he popped the lock on the single suitcase in the room and began to inventory the contents.

"Look at this, Chief," he said. "I better have a witness that I found this…"

Using a pencil through the trigger guard, he fished a dinky, chrome-plated automatic pistol from the suitcase. He sniffed cautiously at the muzzle.

"Clean," he said. "Looks like a.32."

"Or.22," Delaney said. "Gambler's gun. Good for maybe twenty feet, but you'd have to be Deadeye Dick to hit your target. Find anything else?"

"Two decks of playing cards. Nice clothes. Silk pajamas. He lived well."

"For a while," Delaney said.

He left the death room and took the elevator to the lobby. The crowd had thinned, but police were still quizzing residents and visitors. Out on the sidewalk, the mob of noisy newspapermen had grown. In the street, two TV vans were setting up lights and cameras.

Delaney pushed through the throng and crossed the avenue. He turned to look back at the hotel. If she came out onto Seventh, she could have taken a bus or subway. But if she was wounded, she probably caught a cab. He hoped Sergeant Boone would remember to check cabdrivers who might have been in the vicinity at the time.

He walked over to Sixth Avenue and got a cab going uptown. He was home in ten minutes, double-locked and chained the door behind him. It was then almost 2:00 a.m.

"Is that you, Edward?" Monica called nervously from upstairs.

"It's me," he assured her. "I'll be right up."

He hung his skimmer away, then went through his nightly routine: checking the locks on every door and window in the house, even those in the vacant children's rooms. Not for the first time did he decide this dwelling was too large for just Monica and him.

They could sell the building at a big profit and buy a small cooperative apartment or a small house in the suburbs. It made sense. But he knew they never would, and he supposed he would die in that old brownstone. The thought did not dismay him.

He left a night-light burning in the front hallway, then climbed the stairs slowly to the bedroom. He was not physically weary, but he felt emptied and weak. The sight of that slaughterhouse had drained him, diminished him.

Monica was lying on her side, breathing deeply, and he thought she was asleep. She had left the bathroom light on. He undressed quickly, not bothering to shower. He switched off the light, moved cautiously across the darkened room, climbed into bed.

He lay awake, trying to rid his mind of the images that thronged. But he kept seeing the jigsaw corpse and shook his head angrily.

He heard the rustle of bedclothes. In a moment Monica lifted his blanket and sheet and slipped in next to him. She fitted herself to his back, her knees bending with his. She dug an arm beneath him so she could hold him tightly, encircled.

"Was it bad?" she whispered.

He nodded in the darkness and thought, of what Thorsen had said: "I'm getting too old for this kind of thing." Delaney turned to face his wife, moved closer. She was soft, warm, strong. He held on, and felt alive and safe.

After a while he slept. He roused briefly when Monica went back to her own bed, then drifted again into a deep and dreamless slumber.

When the phone rang, he roused slowly and reached to fumble for the bedside lamp. When he found the switch, he saw it was a little after 6:00 a.m. Monica was sitting up in bed, looking at him wide-eyed.

He cleared his throat.

"Edward X. Delaney here."

"Edward, this is Ivar. I wanted you to know as soon as possible. They've run the first part of the blood analysis. You were right. Caucasian female. Congratulations."

"Thank you," Delaney said.

Zoe Kohler came out of the hairdresser's, poking self-consciously at her new coiffure. Her hair had been shampooed, cut and styled, and treated with a spray guaranteed to give it gloss and weight while leaving it perfectly manageable.

Now it was shorter, hugged her head like a helmet, with feathery wisps at temples and cheeks. It was undeniably shinier, though it seemed to her darker and stiffer. The hairdresser had assured her it took ten years off her life, and then tried to sell her a complete makeup transformation. But she wasn't yet ready for that.