“Whom?” I asked. “That’s all we’ve got to figure. He must have been in this with someone else, someone who had his own scam in mind for Denise.”

“Or for Lowell,” Mike reminded me. “I’m not sure who was out to get which one first.”

“You don’t really think Lowell was intended to be a victim in all this, do you?”

Mercer had been listening to us without joining the conversation, as he struggled against dozing off. “You said you spoke to that Sette woman out in Santa Fe yesterday, Mike? That she really was back there?”

Mike paused before answering. “It was actually her housekeeper who answered the phone and told me she expected Sette back in an hour or so. She was Mexican, with a thick accent, and hard to understand. No, I didn’t speak to Sette directly. And I forgot to check the airline manifest afterward to see if she really flew out there. Sorry, Mercer. I’ll get on that tonight.”

It was Marina Sette’s message-or one that had been left for us using her name-that had resulted in my trip to the Focus gallery with Mercer yesterday and that had set us up to be shot. For good reason, Mike was concentrating more on that intrigue at the moment than on piecing together the puzzle of Deni Caxton’s death.

The phone rang again and I answered it. “Alexandra? It’s Rose Malone. I thought you might be there with Mercer. I wanted you to know that Mr. Battaglia is on his way home. He’s going to stop in at the hospital.”

Thank goodness for Rose. She was better than a radar detector. I’d say good night to Mercer before Battaglia arrived, and let the squad detectives take me back to Jake’s apartment for the night.

“And one other thing. The police have arrested that Wakefield man who was here at the office looking for you earlier.”

“Did he come back?” I asked, alarmed at his persistence.

“No. But that young girl who was in your office-was it Ruth?”

“Yes.”

“She showed up at his apartment this afternoon, to try to get together with him again. He beat her up pretty seriously. For admitting to you that she’d been sleeping with his roommate.”

“Oh, no.” I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth at the thought of the anger that Wakefield must have unleashed at that child. I thanked Rose for the call and hung up the phone.

“You’re running on fumes, Coop,” Mike said. “I’ll sit with Mercer tonight. Let me take you downstairs and send you off. Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll talk in the morning. Put a double rush on those prison phone records when you get to the office. We gotta figure out who Bailey’s connected with, okay? And I think we need to find Marina Sette as soon as possible.”

I sat in the back of the unmarked car, looking out at the dark streets as we drove uptown and making small talk with the detectives about the usual office gossip. They discharged me in front of Jake’s building, watching as the doorman let me in and then parking at the curb, where they would sit out their shift before they were replaced by the midnight team in a couple of hours.

I turned the key in the lock and entered the apartment. A small lamp was lighted on the vestibule table, where I saw a handwritten note addressed to me.

“Dearest A- My turn to disappear. Running for the last shuttle to Washington. Have a 7 a.m. interview with the secretary of defense. Sweet dreams, see you tomorrow. Love, J.”

I groped the walls in the semidarkness of the unfamiliar layout to turn on a light switch in the hallway leading to the bedroom. Once I found my way, I reached for the suitcase I had packed the evening before and laid out some of the clothes for the next day.

The silence and the emptiness made me uncomfortable. I wanted the comfort of my own home, and the warmth of Jake’s caress.

28

I couldn’t find the coffee beans in Jake’s kitchen when I got out of bed, shortly before seven o’clock. I showered and dressed, joining the team in the department car for the ride down to 1 Hogan Place. They let me out right in front of the building, and I bought us each some breakfast at the cart on the corner before going up to my office. Now that Wakim had been arrested I felt at least somewhat more secure.

The pile of unanswered correspondence on my desk was growing out of control. There was a stack of indictments on sex crimes cases that needed to be proofread and approved before the end of the August term, which was a week away. Phone messages from friends were taped to the computer screen; a request from Elaine to set a time to come into the Escada store to have the clothes I ordered from the fall collection shortened had been ignored; and solicitations for charitable fund-raisers collected dust on the far corner of the desk. It was still too early to find most people at their offices, so I busied myself in the review of grand jury proceedings to make sure the lawyers in the unit met their filing deadlines.

The first call was from Bob Thaler, the chief serologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office. It was not even eight thirty, and I was answering my own phones because Laura would not arrive for another hour.

“Sorry it took me so long for the tox on Omar Sheffield.” While autopsy results were available to us quickly, it frequently took weeks to run all the toxicological tests looking for foreign substances in the deceased’s brain, liver, tissue, or lungs.

“Find anything?”

“Just about everything. Omar might have been breathing when that train ran over him, but he wouldn’t have been aware of very much. He was loaded up with speedballs, more than enough to kill himself with if he’d been attempting to O.D.”

“And if someone else was trying to kill him?” Speedballs were a deadly combination of heroin and cocaine, usually mainlined right into the system.

“It’d work like a charm. Just keep pumping it into his arm.”

“But the cause of death, what have you put down for that?”

“Gross internal trauma. I mean, he died at the moment the train ran over his body, Alex. But in all likelihood the drugs could have done the trick by themselves. Somebody finds you in a hotel room in a coma, they can still get you to a hospital and try to pump the stuff out of you. Slim chance, with this amount of poison in his veins, but it might have been possible for him to survive. Run a few railroad cars over this perfectly inert body, it’s a sure thing he’s gone to meet his maker.”

“Thanks, Bob. Would you fax over a copy of the report to me?”

Lawyers were beginning to dribble into the office. I had my door open, listening for Pat McKinney’s arrival. The click of high heels on the tiles of the deserted hallway caught my attention. Pat’s office, like Rod Squires’s, was at the far end of my corridor. But there were no other women assigned to this executive wing of the Trial Division, so I stepped out to Laura’s desk to see who was walking by.

I recognized Ellen Gunsher from the back. She was junior to me, having been in the office for almost eight years. Bright enough and quite aggressive, she had taken to all of the duties of a prosecutor fairly well-except for the one that counted most. She had never grown comfortable in the courtroom and backed away from trying cases. Her surname lent itself to the unfortunate alias “Gun-shy,” and her colleagues teased her mercilessly about her retreat from the kind of professional battle that most of us relished.

Ellen had found a protector in Pat McKinney. As deputy chief of the division, he had taken her out of her trial bureau and created a special unit for her to supervise. Most of us recognized that it was a make-work kind of assignment-to serve as a contact with the NYPD’s Warrant Squad, to initiate and oversee active searches for the most dangerous of the thousands of defendants who failed to appear on their cases after bail had been granted. Many of the prisoners for whom Wanted cards had been issued were petty offenders who would turn up in the system before too long on charges of shoplifting or jumping a turnstile. Ellen’s job consisted of sifting through court papers and targeting the more violent offenders, then assigning Warrant Squad officers to make an active search for their return.