Kovich said, 'Unless she kicked Newlin before he started stabbing.'

'If it's Newlin,' Brinkley corrected, then caught Kovich's annoyance. Davis, standing beside them both, said nothing and looked at the corpse. 'Newlin didn't say anything to us about her kicking him.'

'We didn't ask him, Mick.'

'But it doesn't jive with his story. The way Newlin tells it, all she did was yell. She provoked him verbally and he got aggressive. Yelled back. Threw the glass at her.'

'The toe's not that big a deal,' Kovich shot back. 'He overpowered her and she struggled. Anytime there's a struggle, things get broke.'

'I'm with Stan on this,' Davis said, speaking finally. His tone suggested a judge's ruling at the end of a case. 'The broken toe is not significant. She was drunk, she flailed out at Newlin, it's some sort of defensive wound.'

Brinkley eyed Davis. 'You're acting like you got your mind made up.'

'I do.' Davis nodded, almost cheerfully. 'I saw the tape, over and over, and I know how this went down.'

'You know?' Brinkley frowned. 'From a video?'

Hamburg waved them all into silence. 'Separate, you two,' he said, flicking on the overhead microphone.

After the autopsy, which ended routinely, Brinkley caught up with Davis outside the building. A squat edifice of tan brick with only a few slitted windows, the Joseph W. Spelman Medical Examiner's Building was situated on a busy corner, bordered by the Schuylkill Expressway and a complex of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Children's Hospital, and the Veteran's Hospitals. Wind swirled in unpredictable currents around the buildings and the traffic made a constant whooshing. ' Davis,' Brinkley shouted, knowing the D.A. was avoiding him. 'Got a minute?'

'For you, sure.' Davis turned, pad in hand, though he didn't break stride as he hurried across the parking lot to his car, a new white pool Ford. 'What can I do for you, champ?'

'You said you saw the tape of the confession.' Brinkley buttoned his jacket quickly in the cold air. Cars were parked willy-nilly in the lot, which was being repainted, and Davis was parked in a space with a sign that read PARKING FOR BEREAVED FAMILIES ONLY. 'Did you see what I meant about -'

'Yeah, matter of fact I did. I think Newlin's lying, too. But I think he's the doer.'

Brinkley didn't get it. 'What do you think he's lying about?'

The story he didn't plan it is bullshit. He's gonna plead out.' Davis 's determined chin cut the chill air. 'Or so he thinks.'

'Big mistake, Davis. I'm not sure he's the doer.'

'You got anything to back that up?'

'Not yet. I'm just starting -'

'Lemme know you find anything, okay, my man? Keep me up to speed. I gotta roll.' Davis opened the door of his car, but Brinkley held the door so it couldn't be closed.

'Listen, we talked to the daughter this morning, and I'm working on the theory that the father didn't do it. That he was protecting her, or somebody else.'

There's nothing to support that. Not a thing.'

'I'll find it.'

'You do that.' Davis gave him a dismissive wave, closed the Ford's door, and disappeared inside. The car's engine started quickly, and Davis took off, leaving Brinkley standing there.

When he turned back, he spotted Kovich waiting at the front of the coroner's building, a distant silhouette.

21

Mary glanced around the cavernous warehouse, as large a space as she had ever been in, especially in the city. It was near the Delaware River, bordering New Jersey. In Philadelphia you had to go to Camden to get any room. Afternoon sunlight streamed through the floor-high windows, their security cages casting a diamond-mesh pattern on the rough concrete floor. In Camden even empty space needed protection. You couldn't win on the East Coast, in general.

Mary stood there with her briefcase and said 'yo' to hear whether it echoed, but it didn't. The sound vanished into four tall stories of exposed brick. It was the shell of a furniture warehouse, completely empty except for the far corner, in which a little world had been created. She walked over, marveling as she approached. There were three distinct rooms of drywall, except that it looked as if the contractor had forgotten their ceilings and fourth walls. The first room on the left was an open dressing room, and young girls were changing clothes in front of everyone. Mary knew instantly that none of them was Catholic.

The room next to the dressing room was a makeup and hair salon, with two steel folding tables piled with an array of black makeup brushes and a layered box full of compacts and foundation. Models in lacy bras and slips sat on folding chairs, orange crates, and boxes while stylish men and women painted their eyes, contoured their cheeks, and styled their hair. One model was having a French twist combed out, and her head jerked back with each stroke. Mary winced. She was a lawyer, but she couldn't take that kind of pain.

Beside the makeup room was a final fitting room, with models going from one station to the next like a fashion assembly line, though Mary couldn't tell the order from all the milling around. In the corner stood a portable steam presser and movable racks of clothes, a quick glance revealing they were Young amp; Hip. From what Mary could tell, the Young amp; Hip biz was really thriving.

The operative word being Young. Mary got close enough to see the models and they looked like kids playing dress-up. They were preteens, starting at about age ten, up to fifteen or so. There wasn't a full breast in the crowd, though the kids appeared to be modeling slips that were supposed to be dresses. One model, a sprout of a blond with large blue eyes, looked barely twelve. She sat in a cloth-back director's chair while a man in black glued false lashes to her eyelids. Her feet, in strappy black sandals, didn't touch the ground and she clutched a Totally Hair Barbie, with coincidentally matching sandals. There was no mother in sight.

Suddenly shouting came from the largest room, which was merely a huge sheet of clean white paper hanging from a story-high steel brace. Background for the photographs, it curved onto the concrete floor like a paper carpet. The kids kept tripping on the paper's edge in their high heels, and a man kept yelling at them 'not to rip the seamless.' One of the mothers apologized for her daughter and grabbed her off the paper. Mary didn't get it. If anybody had spoken to her like that, her mother would have threatened to break his face. But Mary wasn't here to stop child labor. She had a client to defend.

She approached the closest man in black, a wavy brown ponytail snaking to his waist. He had his back to her and was bent over a large steel trunk of photographic equipment. Lenses, camera bodies, and flash units nestled in grey sponge cushioning, and Mary realized instantly that the cameras were treated better than the kids. 'Excuse me,' she said, but the ponytailed man didn't turn around. 'I'm looking for the photographer, Caleb Scott.'

'I'm his assistant, one of the million. He's over there but don't bother him. He's on the warpath for a change.' The assistant glanced over his shoulder, through the smallest glasses Mary had ever seen. 'I can tell you right now what he's going to say, honey. Save you the time.'

'Go ahead,' Mary said, surprised.

'You gotta lose thirty pounds, maybe more. You're too old for what he does. You need a nose job and you gotta do something with your hair. The color sucks and that cut is so last year.' He turned back to the trunk, and Mary considered giving the finger to his ponytail.

'I'm a lawyer, not a model.'

Then you're perfect,' he said, and didn't look back.

Caleb Scott simmered on the paper carpet, resting his Hasselblad on his slim hip like a gun. He was tall, reed-thin, and wore a black turtleneck, stone-washed jeans, and soft-soled Mephisto shoes. His spray of grey hair and a faux English accent served to distinguish him, in addition to his foul mood. Caleb Scott was angry about a yellow light on a tall steel stem, which kept firing at the wrong time. From the terrified attitude of the assistants struggling to fix the thing, Mary guessed that for Scott, anger was the status quo. But he didn't express his anger in a way familiar to Mary – shouts, tears, or the decade-long vendetta – he just got wound tighter and tighter.