“It was an accident. I slipped. I’m not being difficult.”

“I thought you were so graceful,” she sneered, ‘the ballet dancer. Ha! Get on your feet.“

I pushed myself up, wiping the pebbles from the ie abrasions that now covered the palms of both hands, on but as I tried to stand it was obvious I had turned an ankle and couldn’t put my weight directly on it. as “Keep going. Drag your damn foot if you have to, but move it over this way.” She poked me with the gun barrel to be cross the paved sidewalk and moved me further downhill, st near a weeping willow that was bent over, gleaming in the ier moonlit radiance of the lake.

“Under these trees, here. Now sit down. Does this place look familiar to you?”

How closely she had done her research was even more apparent now. We weren’t more than thirty feet from the site of Harold McCoy’s last rape, diagrammed on the front pages of each of the city papers when he struck the last time before his arrest eleven months ago. McCoy had brought his victim in from the other direction after he dragged her off her bicycle late one night, coming to this area from the north, near the Loeb Boathouse.

I couldn’t tell which was throbbing more violently now, my head or my ankle. The former was urging me not to obey the command to sit, and the latter was eager to be relieved of my dead weight.

Goldman leaned over and seemed to be placing her gun in a holster on her ankle, hidden beneath the leg of her slacks. I lightened for a moment, thinking she had meant her statement not to shoot me, but closed my eyes in terror at the sight of the knife with the six-inch blade which she unsheathed and withdrew in the next gesture.

From her pants pocket she unrolled a small length of cord.

“Give me your hands. In front,” she demanded as she kneeled and wound the rope around my wrists, securing it with a knot that looked like some professional job the kind that might have been taught to an army Special Forces recruit.

Talk, I kept telling myself. You’ve heard of victims who have talked themselves out of their situations. Offenders who can be reached and reasoned with, who walk away from the ultimate crime and leave their prey unharmed.

“Ellen, I won’t run away, you don’t have to tie me up.

Please tell me what it is you want to know.“ I tried to be forceful without letting the degree of desperation that I felt spill over into my voice.

”This is how Harold McCoy would do it, isn’t it? This is his “signature,” you were quoted as saying. Get them into the park, off the roadway, always near one of the bodies of water, trussed up like the pigs they are, and then cut them up.“

There was no place for me to recoil as she took the knife and slit a line across my jeans, right at the crease where the top of the thigh meets the hip. The thick denim material yielded like butter to the fine-bladed, sharp knife, and like a paper cut, I didn’t even feel it pierce my skin until the stinging sensation began to smart and I looked down to see the oozing line of blood.

Ellen Goldman was laughing now as she saw the red stain creep onto the faded denim of my pants.

“I didn’t even mean to cut you yet. I have plenty of time for that.”

Talk to her, I thought to myself again. But words didn’t jy in ic as er come, and I didn’t want her to enjoy the fact that I was in pain.

She went on.

“Don’t you see how easily I could make it look like Harold McCoy did this to you? That he waited outside the precinct when he heard on the radio that you were there, then he forced you into the park. People would buy that, you know. The press would love that story.”

Was that her plan? To make it look like a copycat crime?

Goldman had studied my cases and knew that Harold McCoy was out of jail. She could make it look like he had stalked me his prosecutor, his nemesis and taken me to his special place in the park and killed me there.

“No one would believe that, Ellen. People saw me get in the car with you.” I prayed that was true, as I said it aloud, although I had no more reason to believe it than she did.

“No one saw that no one who knows me,” she snapped back at me.

“Yeah, but guys who know me saw us. That would destroy your game someone would put it together.”

“But at least this time they wouldn’t blame Jed. I never meant for that to happen, but you’ve got him in so much trouble he’s likely to be charged for a murder he didn’t commit.” Ellen Goldman was raging now, and suddenly things were coming into focus for me.

“Isabella Lascar?” I asked her. I was incredulous.

“This is about Isabella?”

“No, no, no. Not at all. She was nothing. This is about Jed Segal.”

Crystal clear. answer tonight is erotomania, and now I knew the question: “What killed Isabella Lascar?”

Sitting before me was the person who had shot Iz through the center of that magnificent head, and she did it because of an obsession with a man who barely knew her: Jed Segal.

This must be the woman who had stalked Jed in California, a woman whose delusion had already driven her to kill. I was about to become Ellen Goldman’s next victim, and I was struggling to call up the things I had read about her mental disorder erotomania before I fell asleep last night, hoping that something would trigger how to deal with this otherwise intelligent, functional human being.

The stillness of the night was cut by the shrill squeal of my beeper, ringing out high-pitched tones from its perch on my waistband. Ellen stood and reached down to rip the small black device from me, clicked it to the off position, and pressed the lever on the illuminated dial to see the caller’s number.

“Who’s looking for you? It’s a nine one seven number who is it?”

“It must be someone from my office. This happens all the time, Ellen. There must be a new case.” I tried to urge her to take me to a phone booth, sure that I could signal some kind of distress if I could get on the phone with Mike or Mercer or Sarah. “They’ll look for me if I don’t get back to them soon. Please let us call in, and then we can walk away from this rationally, Ellen. Please? I’m through with Jed, we can-‘ ”Well, he’s not through with you. Nor am I. Who is this trying to reach you now?“ She repeated the nine one seven area code and began to recite the rest of the number to me.

It was Chapman’s cell phone. He was somewhere in the field, roaming, probably in some joint having a beer and getting ready to hit on a girl at the next table, with no idea that I was sitting under a tree in Central Park with a lunatic.

I lied to Goldman: “I don’t recognize the number. It could be from any squad. I’m on call tonight, all night. Let’s just go on up to the street, we’ll phone them back and you can listen to the conversation.”

Chapman had tried to reach me at the Special Victims office during the line-ups tonight and I had put off the ie calls. Maybe that was Mike trying to contact me as I was on about to get in Goldman’s car, when the cop was yelling to me from the steps of the station house. Of course, as he must have spoken with David Mitchell after David’s rer appointment with Jed at seven-thirty this evening. They he had probably put some of this together tonight and wanted to tell me about it. Had they figured out that perhaps there ier was another connection between Jed and Isabella that both of them were being stalked by the same person one whom she wanted desperately, and one whom she desperately wanted out of the way? Maybe they had figured it out, but never dreamed she would be waiting for me as I emerged from the station house at the end of my long evening.

Goldman took the silenced beeper and stuck it in the pocket of the jacket.

“You’re the woman who met Jed in California, aren’t you?” I asked her as she loomed over me, looking around at the grounds above us, as though to see whether the loud ‘beeps’ had attracted any attention on the road or pathways.