“Meet me tonight.”

The woman’s voice sounds pleading.

“No,” the man repeats.

“Meet me and fuck me.”

A few seconds of silence. Paris holds his breath, hoping The Lead is about fall into his lap. He doubted that such synthesized versions of these voices would ever stand up in court as proof of anything, but you never knew.

Just say the words.

Say them.

“If I say yes, what will you do for me?” the man asks.

“I . . . I’ll pay you,” the woman says. “I have cash.”

Paris thinks: Fayette Martin didn’t work for a sex line.

Fayette Martin is the caller.

“I don’t want your money,” the man says.

“Then what do you want?”

Pause. “Obedience.”

“Obedience?”

“If we meet, you will do as I say?”

“Yes.”

“You will do exactly as I say?”

“I . . . yes . . . please.”

“Are you alone now?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen to me carefully, because I will tell you this once. There is an abandoned building on the southeast corner of East Fortieth and Central . . .”

Paris’s heart leaps, spins, settles. His stomach follows suit. Fayette Martin is talking to her killer. Fayette Martin is talking to the man who cut her in two.

“There is a doorway on the East Fortieth side,” the man continues. “I want you to stand there, facing the door. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you truly have the courage to go there? To do this?”

The slightest hesitation, then: “Yes.”

Paris realizes, amid his revulsion, that it was indeed courageous for Fayette Martin to go there that night, to be so committed to her fantasy that she would risk it all. And all is exactly what she lost.

“Do you understand that I am going to fuck you in that doorway? Do you understand that I am going to walk up behind you and fuck you in that filthy doorway?”

Paris closes his eyes. The scene begins to draw itself in his mind. Watercolors, this time. Blue and purple and gray. Weeza’s Corner Café. Neon in the distance. A woman in the doorway. Petite. Pretty.

“I . . . God. Yes.”

“You will wear a short white skirt.”

Paris sees the dead woman’s accordion-pleated skirt against the filth of the frigid concrete floor; the brown gouache of her blood.

“Yes.”

“You will wear nothing underneath it.”

“Nothing.”

Now, the curve of her buttocks. Pink, dimpled with the cold.

“You will wear nothing on top either, just a short jacket of some sort. Leather. Do you have one?”

They had found no leather jacket. Paris dresses her in one.

“Yes.”

“And your highest heels.”

“I’m wearing them now.”

He sees the bottom of her shoes. Blood-flecked, stiletto-heeled; the Payless price tag barely worn. Special-occasion shoes.

“You will not turn around. You will not look at me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I will not look at you.”

“You will not speak.”

“I will not.”

“You will submit to me totally.”

“Yes.”

“Can you be there in one hour?”

“Yes.”

“If you are one minute late, I will leave.”

“I won’t be late.”

“Then go.”

The conversation ends, the speakers fall silent, the hard drive of the computer turns twice, then stops. Paris finds himself staring at the speakers, waiting for more. An address, a name, a nickname, a background sound.

Nothing. He moves the mouse again. Still nothing.

Just the electric-clock silence of a dead woman’s kitchen.

Paris stands, looks into the living room. His gaze finds Fayette’s high-school picture propped on an end table. It is a soft-focus shot, head slightly back, eyes looking heavenward. Her lips are parted slightly, her sweater is burgundy, perhaps angora, and the color deepens the blush in her cheeks. Around her neck is a thin gold chain bearing a heart-shaped locket.

Paris wonders: What was the path that took her from that moment—sitting in an Olan Mills Studio, eighteen years old, her whole life an uncluttered horizon before her—to that doorway on East Fortieth Street? Through which of life’s portals did she need to pass to make that journey make sense?

And yet Paris believes that whoever she was in life, whatever she did, she had the right to be alive, and that a killer had butchered this woman and left her lying at his feet.

And thus, as she lay cold and blood-shorn and disassembled on a stainless-steel table at the morgue, he begins to feel that strange and special relationship with Fayette Marie Martin, as he had, at least to some degree, with every victim since his first homicide call.

Paris closes his eyes, conjures Fayette’s devastated body in the crime-scene photo, and asks of her murderer: Which way did you like her better, you son of a bitch? Dead or alive?

Which way did you prefer her?

He glances one last time at her portrait, her eyes.

“You will not look at me,” Paris says, aloud, the sound of his voice a dagger through the stillness. Fayette Martin’s stillness.

He looks at her lips.

You will not speak.

21

Paris’s cell phone rings at Carnegie and East Ninety-third Street.

“Paris.”

“Jack, it’s Reuben.”

“What’s up, amigo?”

“I just got the full report on Fayette Martin,” Reuben says. “There’s something I think you should see.”

Paris is glad they are not meeting in the autopsy theater. The labs, although possessed of a full range of their own macabre sights and grotesque smells, at least had the occasional spider plant, the half-eaten peanut butter cup, the air of the living.

Reuben looks wiped out. He leans against a marble-topped table bearing a bank of three microscopes, listlessly drawing on a straw stuck into a beaker of flat Pepsi. On the table, to the left of the microscopes, are a pair of covered lab dishes.

“Hey, Reuben. You look like shit.”

“Just pulled a thirty-six,” Reuben says. “And, with all due respect, detective, you ain’t no centavo nuevo either.”

Paris has no idea what Reuben said, but figures he has it coming. “What do we have?”

Reuben considers Paris for a moment, blank-eyed, taking his time finishing his drink. He then puts the beaker of cola down, flips on the task light over the table, and says:

“We found something strange inside one of Fayette Martin’s shoes.”

“It was under the inside label in her left shoe,” Reuben says. “There was no reason to look under there so no one did. We almost missed it. Looked like an ordinary brand label you find in half the women’s shoes sold.”

“Who found it?”

“The lab was finishing up taking blood samples from the heel of the shoe and someone noticed the corner of the label turned up slightly. They peeled it up a little more and saw the edge of this sticking out. Then they called SIU.” Reuben takes a pair of evidence photos of Fayette Martin’s left shoe out of an envelope.

“Could it have gotten there at the factory by accident?”

“No,” Reuben says. “The label on the inside of that shoe was peeled back and reglued very recently.”

Paris looks at the evidence bag on the table, at the small item found in the murder victim’s shoe: a strip of purple cardboard, about two inches long by a quarter inch wide. On it are what appear to be the bottoms of red letters, as if someone had cut off the bottom quarter inch of some kind of packaging label. It looks like two, or possibly three, words. It looks like the first letter might be a T. Or an I. Or a P. Paris counts two letters that look like an S. Beyond that, to Paris, it might as well be Sanskrit. “Any fluids?” he asks.