“C’mon,” Iverson said, turning his back on me. “They’re not gonna give something like this to one of your pals. Chief of detectives brought us in on it.” He looked over his shoulder and smiled at me. “He even mentioned that you might be difficult.”

“I’d like to have Detective Chapman with me, if that’s all-”

“And we’d rather not have him, if it’s all right with you. He wasn’t there, it’s not his case, and we’d like to handle this our way, okay, Miss D.A.?”

Clutching my paper bag, I obediently followed the pair down the quiet hallway to the elevator bank and downstairs to a small office with a plaque on the door that read Security.

For almost three hours, Iverson and Bellman grilled me about everything that had gone on since my return to Manhattan from the Vineyard the previous morning. I had done this myself to thousands of witnesses in my ten years as a prosecutor, and I was as impressed as I was exacerbated by their demand for precision and detail. Over and over again they pushed me to recall every physical twist, movement, footstep, direction, and sound that had been made or taken in the gallery that morning with Mercer. I strained every one of my senses to re-create the scene exactly, certain from their implacable expressions that I was failing some kind of test that they were giving me.

When Iverson closed his notepad and stood up, I looked at each of them the way witnesses had looked at me so many times, wanting to know if the answers supplied had been good or correct. And I kept my mouth shut, knowing that neither man could give me that assurance.

“Tommy’ll take you back up to intensive care, Alex. That’s it for now, but later in the week we’ll have to get you over to Twenty-first Street with us. Walk us through the place, okay?”

“Sure. Anything you need.”

Detective Bellman and I had nothing to say to each other on the way upstairs. He escorted me around to Mercer’s cubicle and shook my hand as he said good-bye. Mike had pulled a desk chair from the nurses’ station into the niche next to the bed, with his back to the door. He was leaning forward, his hand on one of Mercer’s, and he was speaking in a low voice. I could hear him naming friends they had worked with and knew that Mike was telling war stories and reminiscing, just chatting at his silent partner. The position of Mercer’s body had not changed at all since I had first seen him several hours ago.

“Hey, Mercer,” Mike said, “Coop’s back.” Now addressing me, “Where you been, blondie?”

I told him about the interrogation. “These dicks must’ve worked her over pretty good, Mercer. She looks like shit. I just wish you could open your eyes right now and take a look at her. I oughta borrow one of your intravenous tubes, man-run a little Dewar’s through it and give her some juice. Who’s the team?”

“Iverson and Bellman.”

“Dammit, Mercer. Get your ass outta that bed. I wouldn’t let those two lightweights handle a bad check. They treat you okay, Coop?”

I shook my head up and down.

At about midnight, a policewoman from the Sixth Precinct came up to the nurses’ station with a few containers of hot soup for Mike and me.

I walked it back over to Mercer’s room. Mike was standing now, and I could hear him saying something about an administration.

“What are you talking about now?” I asked. “Can I spell you for a while?”

“Know how they say people in a coma can hear you? Well, if that’s true and he’s only sleeping off some gas, I’ll be getting through to him before too long. I just want mine to be the first voice he hears. Remember my dictionary? I’m going through it with him now. Used to make Mercer so mad-especially if all the other guys were laughing when I did it-he’d be ready to punch me in the face.”

Chapman always joked that he was going to sell a reference book to compete with the O.E.D. -the Oxford English Dictionary. He called it the C.P.D. - Chapman’s Perpetrators’ Dictionary -and he thought it should be printed and issued to every rookie in the department.

He took his seat by Mercer’s side. “I’m only halfway through the A ’s. ‘Administration’-that’s when a woman gets her period.” Then he launched into an imitation of the highpitched voice of a female witness. “‘But Detective Wallace, I couldn’t let him do the nasty to me. I was on my administration last week.’

“ ‘Athaletic.’ Used interchangeably with the word ‘ epileptic.’ ‘Officer Chapman, you can’t go arresting my brother. He be having an athaletic fit right now.’

“ ‘Ax.’ What you do uptown with a question. ‘Officer, let me ax you this…’ You ever know anybody Irish or Jewish or Italian who axes questions, do you?”

“Alex, are you in here?”

Mercer’s frail voice came at us from the other side of the bed, his eyes still closed, his head still facing toward the wall, and his words barely audible. Mike bounced up from his chair, grabbed Mercer’s left ankle-which seemed to be the only part of him not hooked to any kind of medical device-and started kissing the sole of his foot. I answered “Yes,” and we both bent over to get close enough to hear Mercer speak.

His lips pulled together to form a smile. “Will you get that racist son of a bitch out of this room?”

23

“Cold hit, Coop.” I had just stepped out of the shower a few minutes after seven o’clock on Monday morning, and Jake handed me the telephone to take Mike Chapman’s call.

“On what?”

“Bob Thaler just called. He said they got a match on the semen found on the canvas tarp that was in the back of Omar Sheffield’s station wagon-the one that Denise Caxton’s body had been wrapped in. Did it through the data bank.”

“Cold hit” was the slang term that scientists used to describe what occurred when a computer made a successful comparison between DNA samples, linking a piece of forensic evidence to an actual human being.

The detectives did not have to submit names, latent prints, mug shots, or vouchers for hours of overtime legwork in order for this technology to work. The computer’s ability to make a cold hit took only an instant.

Thaler was the chief serologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office and had helped to pioneer this technology. The data bank had been established by the New York State legislature, and there were data banks in almost every state by the late 1990 s. New York’s was slowly being filled with the genetic fingerprints-DNA developed from a single vial of blood- taken from every prisoner in the state convicted of sexual assault or homicide. Like their latent print counterparts, these unique codes were becoming an invaluable tool in the solution of cases of rape and murder.

“Who’s the match?” I asked.

“Anton Bailey. Convicted of larceny three years ago up in Buffalo. Did half of a four-year sentence and was released to parole eight months back.”

“Then why was he in the data bank?” His blood would not have been taken for a crime like larceny, a nonviolent theft.

“That’s just it. He wasn’t in the New York base. Thaler had the Feds run it interstate and, sure enough, got a hit in the Florida data bank.” The Sunshine State had passed the legislation before most other parts of the country. “Seems like Mr. Bailey had gone by a different name down South-Anthony Bailor. And Mr. Bailor did some hard time back in Gainesville. Put away at eighteen, for almost twenty years. Rape in the first degree.

“So it looks like Anton Bailey is the man who sexually assaulted Denise Caxton.”

“And killed her.”

“Talk about cold hits,” Mike said. “If this isn’t a straightout sexual assault gone bad, then someone must have hired old Anton to do Deni in. That could be the coldest hit of all.”

“Now all we need to do is figure how and where he came into this picture.”