A living doll. These young women were born to be trophies, fully accessorized Oscar-Barbies, to use Eleanor Masters Solanka’s phrase. It was obvious that the young men of their class were reacting to the three deaths exactly as if some coveted medallions, some golden bowls or silver cups, had been stolen from their clubhouse plinths. A secret society of gilded young men calling itself the S&M, which stood, it was suggested, for Single & Male, was reportedly planning a midnight gathering to mourn the loss of its members’ much-loved main squeezes. “Horse” Marsalis, Anders “Stash” Andriessen—the Candell girl’s restaurateur Eurohunk—and Lauren Klein’s good-time guy Keith Medford (“Club”) would lead the mourners. As the S&M was a secret society, all its members flatly denied its existence and refused to verify the rumors that the mourning ceremonies would climax with mixed-sex war-painted naked dancing and skinny-dipping on a private Vineyard beach, at which time candidates for the vacancies in the big guys’ beds would be intimately auditioned.

All three dead girls, and their living sisters, thus conformed to Eleanor’s definition of Desdemonas. They were property. And now there was a murderous Othello on the loose in this case, perhaps, destroying what he could not possess, because that very non-possession insulted his honor. Not for their infidelity but for their uninterest was he killing them in this Y2K revision of the play. Or perhaps he broke them simply to reveal their lack of humanity, their breakability. Their dollness. For these had been—yes!—android women, dolls of the modern age, mechanized, computerized, not the simple effigies of bygone nurseries but fully realized avatars of human beings.

In its origin, the doll was not a thing in itself but a representation. Long before the earliest rag dolls and golliwogs, human beings had made dolls as portraits of particular children and adults, too. It was al ways a mistake to let others possess the doll of yourself; who owned your doll owned a crucial piece of you. The extreme expression of this idea was of course the voodoo doll, the doll you could stick pins in to hurt the one it represented, the doll whose neck you could wring to kill a living being, at a distance, as effectively as a Muslim cook deals with a chicken. Then came mass production, and the link between man and doll was broken; dolls became themselves and clones of themselves. They became reproductions, assembly-line versions, characterless, uniform. In the present day, all that was changing again. Solanka’s own bank balance owed everything to the desire of modern people to own dolls with not just personality but individuality. His dolls had tales to tell.

But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just “dolled up” on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity. Sky, Bindy, and Ren thus represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural history of the doll. Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up as mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire, the Pax Americana, itself… A dead body on a street, thought Malik Solanka, coming down to earth, looks a lot like a broken doll.

… Oh, who even thought like this anymore, other than himself? Was there anyone else left in America with such ugly, misconceived notions in his head? If you’d asked these young women, these tall confident beauties on their way to summa cum laude college degrees and glamorous yachting weekends, these Princesses of the Now, with their limo services and charity work and mile-a-minute lives and tame, adoring superheroes striving to win their favor, they would have told you they were free, freer than any women in any country in any time, and they belonged to no man, whether father or lover or boss. They were nobody’s dolls, but their own women, playing with their own appearance, their own sexuality, their own stories: the first generation of young women to be truly in control, in thrall neither to the old patriarchy nor to the man-hating hard-line feminism that had battered at Bluebeard’s gate. They could be businesswomen and flirts, profound and superficial, serious and light, and they would make those decisions for themselves. They had it all-emancipation, sex appeal, cash—and they loved it. And then somebody came and took it away from them by hitting them hard on the back of their heads, the first blow to knock them out and the rest to finish them off. So, who killed them? If it was dehumanization you were interested in, the murderer was your man. Not they themselves but he, the Concrete Killer, had dehumanized them. Professor Malik Solanka, tears running down his face as he sat hunched over his tequila on a bar stool, buried his head in his hands.

Saskia Schuyler had lived in a many-roomed but low-ceilinged apartment in what she called “the ugliest building on Madison Avenue,” a blue brick monstrosity opposite the Armani store, whose “only good point,” in Sky’s opinion, was that she could call the store and have them hold dresses up to the window so that she could check them out through binoculars. She hated the apartment, her parents’ former Manhattan pied-a-terre. The Schuylers lived mostly out of town, on a gated estate set in rolling landscape near Chappaqua, New York, and spent much time complaining about the Clintons’ purchase of a house in their hometown. Sky, said Bradley Marsalis, liked to reassure her parents that Hillary wouldn’t be there long. “If she wins, she’ll be off to D.C. and the Senate, and if she loses, she’ll leave even faster.” Meanwhile, Sky wanted to sell up on Madison and move to Tribeca, but the co-op board had three times turned down the purchasers she had found. On the subject of the board, Sky was vociferous. “It’s full of lacquered old dames covered in tight shiny fabric, like overstuffed sofas, and I guess if you want to get in, you have to look like furniture too.” The building did have a twenty-four-hour doorman service, however, and the night-duty doorman, old Abe Green, reported that on the date in question Miss Schuyler, “lookin’ like a million dollars” after a big night out at a music-awards gala (“Horse” had industry connections), got home around one-thirty. She parted at the door from a plainly reluctant Mr. Marsalis—“Boy, did he look pissed,” Green noted—and walked unhappily to the elevator. Green rode up with her. “To make her smile, I told her, Too bad you only live on the fifth, miss, otherwise I could enjoy lookin’ at you a little longer.” Fifteen minutes later she buzzed for the elevator again. “Everything okay, miss?” Abe asked her. “Oh, I guess so. Yeah, sure, Abe,” she said. “Sure.” Then she walked out by herself, still in her party finery, and never came back. Her body was found a long way downtown, near the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. A study of the last hours of Lauren Klein and Bindy Candell showed that they, too, had come home late, refused entry to their boyfriends, and gone out again shortly afterward. As if these girls had turned Life away, then set out to keep their assignations with Death.

Saskia, Lauren, and Belinda had not been robbed. Their finger rings, earrings, chokers, and upper-arm bracelets were all found to be in place. Nor had they been sexually assaulted. No motive for the murders had emerged, but all three boyfriends raised the possibility of a stalker. In the days before their deaths, all the dead women had mentioned seeing a Panama-hatted stranger “lurking oddly.” “It’s like Sky was executed,” a somber, cigar-smoking Brad Marsalis told the press at a photo-op and Qand-A at a hotel suite in Vineyard Haven. “It’s like somebody sentenced her to death and carried out that sentence in, like, cold blood.”