“Prescription?” I asked optimistically.

“Not so lucky. Could belong to anybody, but they’re just a bit too mod for the old man. And there is a young apprentice who worked for Varelli. He’s been home in California all month, visiting his family. He wasn’t due back here until after Labor Day. But he’s apparently distraught, so he’s coming in tonight to see the widow. We can interview him on Monday.

“Also, Caxton’s lawyer came up with more of the letters that Denise had received from her blackmailer. Mike didn’t see any point in taking them to the lab for fingerprints. They’d already been handled by too many people for us to get anything off them. He copied them for the case folder. Said he’d take a set home to read this weekend.”

We had gone through the security checkpoint and were in the elevator heading upstairs to the artists’ unit.

Josie Malendez was sitting with two plainclothes detectives, eating a roast beef sandwich and drinking a can of soda. She smiled as she saw Mercer enter the room, and I struggled to show no reaction as I looked at the large purple bruise that had swelled and caused the closing of her left eye. She squinted at me from the good one and held out a hand. “You must be Alex Cooper.”

Mercer and I let her finish her lunch. We examined the sketch that resulted from her session with the detectives. “She gives him a rounder face than the last two. Thinner mustache, same eyes, same nose. And she’s adamant about the lisp. Slight, but it’s there. She’s the first one to mention anything significant about his speech.”

“She’s the first one to engage him in as much conversation, trying to talk him down, talk him out of it, isn’t she?” I asked, relying on Mercer’s knowledge of the details. “And she was stone sober-unlike the last two-which makes me want to trust her observations even more. They giving this one to the press?”

“Yeah. The commissioner and the mayor want it for the six o’clock news. Any objections?”

“Nope. Ask them to use the same quote from Battaglia’s comment, the one he gave last time the guy struck. It got lost in the coverage of the bomb scare story that broke the same night.”

We knew that for a rapist to be operating in the same geographic area for more than two years, it had to be, for him, a comfort zone. Clearly he was someone who lived or worked in the neighborhood and could move about it easily without seeming to be suspicious. If the police and scientific techniques did not break the case, our best hope was that a neighbor or coworker would notice a resemblance to the sketch and call the hot line with a tip. The most difficult thing to overcome was the stereotypical reaction of most of the public- that the guy who lives next door couldn’t possibly be a rapist.

When it appeared that Josie had finished eating and had a few minutes to rest quietly, I went over to sit with her and began to talk, to explain the process. The detectives who had worked with her on the drawing excused themselves, and Mercer replaced them at the table, ready to take notes of our conversation.

Our questions had to be more specific than those that had yet been asked. While the physician who had conducted the physical needed answers to what kind of contact had occurred and what Josie had experienced at her attacker’s hands, and the uniformed cop who responded to her home had asked for the broad outlines of the criminal event, Mercer and I began our probe in microscopic detail. Things that frequently seemed insignificant to the victim were crucial to our ability to put the puzzle together, and often to link one case to another. I always started the process by explaining to the witness why such seemingly irrelevant minutiae could be useful to us.

And so we went on, asking Josie to explain her whereabouts all throughout the previous afternoon and early evening. While her actions may have had nothing to do with what happened on her front doorstep, we could not eliminate the possibility that she and her assailant had crossed paths earlier that night, or that he had followed her from one location to another.

The original police report, as in most cases, had summed up Josie’s assault in a single sentence: “At the time and place of occurrence, the defendant displayed a pistol, beat the complaining witness about the face with his fists, causing physical injury, and thereby forcibly engaged her in an act of sexual intercourse.”

Almost four hours after we began to talk with our victim, Mercer and I were ready to wrap up the interview. We knew exactly how the rapist’s approach had been made, where Josie was in regard to him when she was first aware of his presence, the precise language he had used when he accosted her in the vestibule of the building, and how she had responded to him. We knew in which hand he had held the weapon, and what about its design and appearance had allowed her to assume that it was an imitation.

The process was inordinately draining on the witness, and we were keenly aware of that.

“Can you think of anything else that we haven’t asked you that you think we should know?”

“Not a thing.” Josie’s fatigue was obvious.

“Are you going home tonight?” I asked. It was almost six o’clock.

“No, no. I’m not ready to go back there alone. My sister lives in Brooklyn Heights. I’m going to spend some time with her till I figure out what I want to do.”

“That’s smart. I’m sure the counselor at the hospital told you, but these first few nights are going to be hard.”

“I know. The doctor gave me something to help me sleep.”

“Yeah, but even sleeping doesn’t always provide an escape. You may have dreams-nightmares, actually-and flashbacks. You’ll see people on the streets who will remind you physically of your attacker, and you may have a visceral reaction- tremble, recoil, cry. All of these things are normal in light of your experience. And believe it or not, time will truly make it better.”

“And finding this son of a bitch will be the best of all,” Mercer assured her.

One of the detectives who had done the sketch was driving home to Bay Ridge and said he would deliver Josie to her sister’s apartment. I walked with her to the restrooms down the quiet hallway, and waited while she went inside. In a few minutes, from where I stood, I could hear her sobs coming from within. I opened the door and found the young woman leaning against the sink, running a finger over the discolored portion of her thin face as she stared at her almost unrecognizable image in the mirror.

I walked to her side and placed my arm around her shoulder. She turned and pressed the unharmed side of her face against me, her chest heaving as she tried to speak but couldn’t catch her breath to do so.

“Don’t try to talk. Let it go, Josie.”

Her body became deadweight in my arms as she cried for several minutes. She pulled away from me and washed her face again in the sink. “Whew. I hadn’t shed a tear until now. I was so intent on following everyone’s directions and being cooperative, but there’s nothing left in me to give. It’s like he took everything away from me.”

“You’re alive, Josie, and that’s the most important thing. Whatever you did last night was the right thing, because you walked away from him in one piece. You’ll triumph in the end. The hard part is catching him-that’s Mercer’s job. Convicting him, with a witness like you, won’t be difficult at all. We won’t let you down-I can promise you that.”

I led her back to the detectives’ office. Mercer told Josie that he’d be in touch with her on Monday to set up an appointment to look through mug shots of sex offenders, and we said good-bye to her.

“We’ve got to figure out what to do about you for the rest of the weekend. Battaglia thinks you’re safely tucked away in the country.”

“Drive me home and I swear to you I’ll stay at the apartment all day tomorrow. Sleep in, read books, watch old movies. Nobody knows I’m in town. It’ll be heaven.”