"You told me you were going to assign last night's homicide to someone."

"I forgot about it completely." I had promised Mike that I would tell Sarah Brenner, my deputy, to make one of the unit assistants available on the murder of the elderly woman.

"I know. I just tried to reach Sarah so I wouldn't bother you. She didn't know what I was talking about. I could hear her kids in the background-"

"She's got her hands full at this hour."

"I think I can make it easy for you. Just a quick detour. Dr. Kirschner thinks I'm wrong about the rape. Autopsy shows no sign of sexual assault."

"Nothing?" I asked.

"Not a single thing with a foreign profile. No semen, no loose pubic hair-"

"Bruising?" I would expect, in a woman as old as Mike's victim, that the vaginal vault would exhibit lacerations and swelling, because of the atrophy that accompanied the lack of sexual activity.

"Not internal. Not even on her thighs."

"Sounds like a blessing to me if she wasn't subjected to rape as a final indignity."

"Kirschner thinks the scene was staged to look like a sexual assault. He just finished up and if you can get there within the hour, he'd go over the results with you and show you the crime scene photos. Brainstorm and see what you think. That way I can get started in a new direction when I go in tomorrow morning."

"Okay."

"And Coop? Say good night to Queenie for me?"

"Is that her name?"

"McQueen Ransome. Known to her neighbors as Queenie. Lived in that same little apartment for the last fifty years. Never hurt a fly."

"Family? Next of kin?"

"Not a soul. Had one son who died before he got to high school. No sign that she was ever married, but there are pictures of the boy on the wall in the living room."

"Sounds like a stupid question to ask about an eighty-two-year-old lady, but did she have any enemies?"

"Not that I heard about today. Kids were hanging out all over the stoop. They loved her. Did all the errands for her in exchange for candy, and some entertainment."

"What do you mean?"

"She'd sing and dance for the kids, that's what they say. Put on her old vinyl records and cut a rug. I got a whole children's crusade working on the case with me. Told 'em all they could be my deputies if they catch the killer. Anyway, leave a message on my cell and I'll speak to you at the end of the day tomorrow."

"Last thing, Mike. You make any progress on Tiffany Gatts?"

"She won't be arraigned before morning. There was a labor demonstration over in the garment district, and the backup cause of all the extra arrests for dis con is cramming the system. Have Mercer walk you to your car. Mama Gatts'll be looking for blood."

"Thanks for the reminder."

"We may have a lead on the mink. Found an open squeal in the Seventeenth Precinct. UN delegate from France named du Rosier. Reported a theft six months back. He and his wife thought it was an inside job. His chauffeur had access to the apartment, even when the couple was back in Europe. A bunch of jewelry, two furs, and some pricey antique silver service."

"Any description?"

"The du Rosiers are traveling at the moment. I'll try and get something more detailed from their insurance company tomorrow. Speak to you then."

Mercer waited while I closed up and we headed out the door together. My car was parked near the intersection of Centre Street and Hogan Place, at the corner of the courthouse. The laminated NYPD plate displayed in the windshield was one of the privileges of rank in the office, and I was pleased that no one had double-parked me in place, as often happened when cops delivered prisoners to the courthouse.

The dump sticker from the town of Chilmark, where my home on Martha's Vineyard was located, and the Squibnocket beach pass on the rear window, were the only things that personalized my winter-green SUV. It was even more heartwarming to see that the Vineyard stickers had not seemed to draw the attention or wrath of Etta Gatts, who might have noticed the Vineyard posters in my office. The windows were intact.

I stepped off the curb at the rear of the car, keys in hand. Mercer went around in front to open the door for me.

"Looks like I'm your transportation for the evening," he said, taking the keys out of my hand. "Your car's in dry dock, Alex. Someone slashed your two front tires."

8

There is a cruel invasion of privacy that attends a death by violence.

Mercer and I sat in a small cubicle adjacent to the autopsy theater in the office of the chief medical examiner, Chet Kirschner. The brilliant pathologist had finished his work for the day, and was taking us through the Queenie Ransome homicide findings.

The strong odor of formalin was exaggerated by the closeness of the room. I coughed to clear my dry throat, listening to Kirschner's voice, which was so oddly comforting in these starkly clinical circumstances.

I stared at close-ups of the nude corpse, taken in her home by a Crime Scene Unit detective, shuffling them around on the table in front of me.

"There are two different scenarios you want to think about here," he told us, after describing what McQueen Ransome's body had revealed to him. "You remember the old Park Plaza cases?"

Both Mercer and I recognized the name. The building had been a flophouse on the West Side of Manhattan, a dilapidated single-room-occupancy hotel that was home to dozens of senior citizens living on welfare. Throughout a two-year period, several of the octogenarians had died without any suspicion of foul play.

"The first five women had no relatives in the city to raise any concerns, no property of any value, and histories of illness that allowed their physicians to certify their deaths as occurring from natural causes."

"They weren't even autopsied?" I asked.

Kirschner shook his head. "The sixth one was slightly different. Mildred Vargas. She owned a television set, and it was missing from her room when her body was found. We did a postmortem, even though there were no signs of a struggle, and we wound up with unexpected evidence that there had been a sexual assault."

"What killed her?" Mercer wanted to know.

"She was suffocated. Smothered with a pillow."

Exactly what Mike said had happened to Queenie.

"I got an order to exhume the other bodies and autopsy them," Kirschner said.

Mercer remembered the outcome. "All five had been raped."

"And smothered. No external signs of injury. Just the internal bruising, and the minute petechial hemorrhages in their eyes that the physicians missed in each case."

Hallmarks of an asphyxial death, the tiny red pinpoint markers were quiet indicators of strangulation and suffocation, blood vessels bursting in eyes as they were deprived of oxygen.

Kirschner straightened his lean body and rested an elbow atop a file cabinet. "That killer made a specialty of getting in and out of apartments with no visible signs of forced entry. He even took the time to re-dress three of his victims, so the sexual assault was not the least bit obvious. Chapman's looking to link McQueen Ransome's death to those cases."

"Do you have DNA in any of those?"

"In all of them, actually. Our own databank linked them to each other after the exhumation and examination."

"Has the profile been uploaded to Albany and CODIS?"

The medical examiner's local databank could match unsolved cases to each other because of evidence taken from a crime scene or victim's body. The profile would be sent on to Albany, and a computer would scan the results against convicted offenders in the New York State databank, who were mandated, according to category of criminal offense, to submit blood or saliva samples for the profiling of their DNA. CODIS, the Combined DNA Identification System, was capable of linking unsolved cases in one jurisdiction to a burglar, rapist, or killer anywhere in the entire country.