Routine, mostly. A few notes, a few melancholy thoughts about finding a new job. But who else would pay you to have this kind of fun?

LUCAS MADE IT back to the office and found Marcy waiting with Del and Lane; plus Rie from Sex, and Swanson and Tom Black from Homicide. The start of virtually every homicide investigation-other than the ordinary ones, where they knew who the killer was-began with paper, the details lifted from the murder scene, with interviews, with the reports from various laboratories. Swanson and Black had been pushing the routine.

"The problem is, Aronson didn't have a boyfriend or a roommate, and the two ex-boyfriends we can find don't look real good for having done it. One of them is married and has a kid now, working his way through college, and the other one lives in Wyoming and barely seemed to remember her," Swanson said.

"She have a phone book?" Sherrill asked.

Black shook his head. "Just a bunch of scraps of paper with numbers on them. We checked them and came up dry. Woman in the next apartment said she heard a male voice over there a couple of times in the month before she disappeared. Never any kind of disturbance or anything."

"Look at the numbers stored in her cell phone?" Lucas asked. "Anything in her computer? She got a Palm Pilot or anything like that?"

"She had a cell phone, but there weren't any numbers stored at all. The e-mail in her computer was mostly with her parents and her brother. No Palm. We got her local phone records: She had lots of calls out to ad agencies and to friends-we talked to them, they're all women, and we don't see a woman for this-and then some random calls out, pizza, stuff like that. We never tried to reconstruct the pizza-delivery guys, and now… hell, I don't know if we could. It's been too long."

"What you're saying is, you ain't got shit," Del said.

"That's the way it is," Black said. "That's one of the reasons we always thought there was a possibility that she was still alive-we came up so empty. She didn't drag around bars. Wasn't a party girl. No drugs, didn't drink much. No alcohol at all in her apartment. She worked at a restaurant called the Cheese-It down by St. Pat's. I suppose she could have run into somebody there, but it's not a meat rack or anything, it's a soup-and-sandwich place for students. She freelanced ad work, designing advertisements, and did some Web design, but we couldn't get hold of anything."

Swanson was embarrassed. "We're not looking too swift on this thing."

LUCAS PARCELED OUT assignments.

"Swanson and Lane: Take all those ad agencies and the restaurant. Find out who she was talking to. Make lists of every name you run."

He turned to Black, who had once been partnered with Marcy. "Marcy can't do a lot of running around yet, so I want you and her to work out of the office, get these three women in here, the ones who got drawings, and list every person they knew or remember having talked to before they got the drawings. No matter how slight the connection. When they can't remember a name, but remember a guy, get them to call people who would know him. I want a big-mother list."

To Rie: "I want you and Del to get copies of the drawings and start running them around to the sex freaks. This guy has a screw loose, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's shown a few of these things around. He's an artist, so maybe he's been out looking for a little appreciation. We want more names: all the possibilities that your friends can think of." He snapped his fingers. "Do you remember Morris Ware?"

"No."

"I do," Del said. He looked at Rie. "Might've been before your time. He takes pictures of children."

"He may be back in business," Lucas said. To Del: "Why don't you hang with me tomorrow. If we have time, we'll go look him up."

"All right."

"I see a couple of big possibilities for an early break," Lucas said. "The first one is, somebody knows him and turns him in. The second one is, we've got to figure he's had some contact with these women. If we get big enough lists, we should get some cross-references."

"But we need those big-mother lists," Black said.

"That's right. The more names we get, the better the chances of a cross. And the more people we can find who have gotten these drawings, the bigger the lists will be."

"What're you gonna do?" Marcy asked.

"Go talk to the movie people about some publicity," Lucas said. "We're gonna put the pictures on the street."

4

CHANNEL THREE WAS located in a low, rambling stone structure, a fashionable architect's attempt to put a silk purse on a corner that cried out for a pig's ear; Lucas had never liked the place. The building was a brisk crosstown walk from City Hall, and during the walk, Lucas thought for a moment that he'd seen a slice of blue in the sky, then decided that he'd been wrong. There was no blue; there never would be. He grinned at his own mood, and a woman he was passing nodded at him.

Lucas had a full-sized Xerox of the Aronson drawing in his pocket, along with partial copies of the other three drawings; in those three, the faces had been carefully scissored out. He met Jennifer Carey in the Channel Three parking lot, where she was smoking a cigarette. She was tall and blond and the mother of Lucas's only child, his daughter, Sarah. Sarah lived with Carey and her husband.

"Lucas," Carey said, snapping the cigarette into the street. A shower of sparks puffed out of the wet blacktop.

"You know those things cause cancer," Lucas said.

"Really? I'll have to do a TV show on it." She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. "What's happening? Where'd you get the hickey?"

"That's it, I'm buying a turtleneck," Lucas said.

"You'd look like a French thug," Carey said. "I could kind of go for it… So you're back with Weather?"

"Yeah. Looks like," he said.

"Gonna do the deed?"

"Probably."

"Good for you," she said. She looped her arm in his and tugged him along toward the door of the building. "I always liked that woman. I can't imagine how a little thing like a shooting came between you."

"She had the guy's brains on her face," Lucas said. "It made an impression."

"The brains? Or the incident? I mean, like a dent? Or did you mean impression, as a metaphor? Because I don't think brains would really-"

"Shut up."

"God, I love that tone," she said. "Why don't we get your handcuffs and find an empty van?"

"I got a story for you," Lucas said.

"Really?" The bullshit stopped. "A good one? Or am I doing your

PR?"

"It's decent," Lucas said.

"So walk this way," she said. He followed her into the building and through a maze of hallways to her office. A stack of court transcripts occupied her visitor's chair; she moved them to her desk and said, "Sit down."

"This is a purely unofficial visit," Lucas said. He took the Xerox copy of the Aronson drawing out of his pocket.

"The best kind," Carey said. "What's that paper?"

"There are a couple of conditions."

"You know the kind of conditions we can accept… Can we accept them?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Then… gimme."

Lucas pushed the paper across the desk and Carey unfolded it, looked it over, and said, "She could lose a few pounds."

"She has," Lucas said. "Death will do that for you."

"She's dead?" Carey looked at him over the drawing.

"That's Julie Aronson. Her body-"

"Found her down south, I know the story," Carey said. She turned her lips down. "We've sorta hashed that over. Not that we can't use it."

"Hang on, for Christ's sakes. Goddamn movie people," Lucas said. "The thing is, several women have gotten drawings like this-three more that we know of. Two got them in the mail, and a third set was posted on a bulletin board over at the U. We got a freak."