From the book

SAT ON MY LIVING ROOM SOFA at five o'clock in the morning with a copy of the mock-up of the front page of the day's New York Post in my hand, looking at my own obituary. The headline I was reading had been prepared hours earlier, when the cops thought that it was my head that had been blown apart by a rifle blast on a quiet country road in a little Massachusetts town called Chilmark.

Mike Chapman sat opposite me as he worked on his second egg sandwich and lukewarm cup of coffee. He had brought them along with the news story, and in the fashion of an experienced Homicide detective he continued chewing even as he described to me the details of the murder scene -- bullet holes, blood spatter, and body bag.

"Good thing you've been a source for so many stories at the Post all these years. It's a very complimentary obit..." He stopped eating long enough for that familiar grin to emerge, then added, "And a great picture of you -- looks like they airbrushed most of your wrinkles out. Your phone'll be ringing off the hook once all those lonely guys in this city realize you're still alive -- maybe you'll get lucky."

Most of the time Mike could defuse every situation and get me to laugh, but I had been crying for so many hours that it was impossible to respond to his lousy cracks or to focus on anything else but the dreadful day that lay ahead. A woman had been killed on the path leading to my country house, driving a car that had been rented in my name. The body of the tall, slender, thirtyish victim was missing her face, so most of the local cops who arrived on the scene assumed that I had been the target.

WE WERE MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED miles away from the crime scene, twenty stories above the noise of the garbage trucks that rolled through Manhattan streets every morning before dawn, in the safe confines of my high-rise apartment on the Upper East Side. Too many years of investigating break-ins of brownstones and townhouses, with rapists climbing in from fire escapes or pushing in vestibule doors behind unsuspecting tenants, had driven me to a luxury building -- low on quaintness and charm but high on doormen and rent. My mother had come into town for two weeks to decorate for me when I moved a few years earlier, but the French provincial antiques and lavish Erunschwig fabrics were an incongruous backdrop for this deadly conversation.

"How'd you get the call?" Mike asked, brushing the crumbs off his slacks and onto the carpet, ready to give me his undivided attention.

"One of the guys in the unit is about to start a trial in front of Torres and grabbed me just as I was going to leave the office for the night. His victim is a junkie -- she came in to be prepped for court and was so high she couldn't hold her head up. God knows if she remembers anything about the rape. I had to make the arrangements to get a hotel room for her overnight so we could try to dry her out before she gets on the witness stand. By the time we finished it was nine-thirty, and I just called my friend Joan Stafford to meet for a late supper."

"I didn't ask you for your alibi, for Chrissakes. How'd you hear about this?"

"I can't even focus straight, Mike. You've got to take me down to my office so I can be there before everyone starts to arrive -- I'll never make it through all the questions."

"Just talk to me, Alex."

Reliving the events of the past few hours as a witness and not a prosecutor was an unsettling role for me. I tried to reconstruct what had happened after I walked into my...

From the book

Chapter One

The answering machine kicked in a fourth irritating echo from the insistent caller. I listened to my recorded voice announce that I was not available to come to the phone right now, as little hammers pounded furiously inside my head. The last Dewar's of the evening had been unnecessary.

I cocked an eye to glance at the illuminated dial glowing an eerie shade of green in the still dark room. It read 5:38 A.M.

"If you're screening, Coop, pick it up. C'mon, kid."

I was unmoved, and mercifully not on duty this morning.

"It's early and it's cold, but don't leave me dangling at the end of the only working phone booth in Manhattan when I'm trying to do you a favor. Pick it up, Blondie. Don't give me that 'unavailable' stuff. Last I knew you were the most available broad in town."

"Good morning, Detective Chapman, and thank you for that vote of confidence," I murmured into the receiver as I brought my arm back under the comforter to keep it warm while I listened to Mike. Too bad I'd cracked open a window for some fresh air before going to sleep. The room was frigid.

"I got something for you. A big one, if you're ready to get back in the saddle again."

I winced at Chapman's reminder that I had not picked up any serious investigations for almost five months. My involvement last fall in the murder case of my friend, the actress Isabella Lascar, had derailed me professionally. It had prompted the District Attorney to direct the reassignment of most of my trial load, so I had taken a long vacation when the killer was caught. Mike had accused me of coasting through the winter season and avoiding the kinds of difficult matters that we had worked on together so often in the past.

"What have you got?" I asked him.

"Oh, no. This isn't one of those 'run it by me and if it's sexy enough I'll keep it' cases, Miss Cooper. You either accept this mission on faith, or I do this, the legitimate way and call whichever one of your mopes is on the homicide chart today. There'll be some eager beaver looking to get his teeth into this -- I can't help it if he won't happen to know the difference between DNA and NBC. At least he won't be afraid to --"

"All right, all right." Chapman had just said the magic word and I was sitting straight up in bed now. I wasn't certain if I was shivering because of the bitterly cold air that was blowing in from outdoors, or because I was frightened by the prospect of plunging back into the violent landscape of rapists and murderers that had dominated my professional life for almost a decade.

"Is that a yes, Blondie? You with us on this one?"

"I promise to sound more enthusiastic after some coffee, Mike. Yes, I'm with you." His exuberance at this moment would be offensive to anyone outside the family of police and prosecutors who worked in the same orbit as he did, since it was fueled by the unnatural death of a human being. The only comfort it offered was the fact that the particular murder victim in question would be the undistracted focus of the best homicide detective in the business: Mike Chapman.

"Great. Now, get out of bed, suit up, take a few Advil for that hangover --"

"Is that just a guess, Dr. Holmes, or do you have me under surveillance?"

"Mercer told me he was in your office yesterday. Got an overheard on your evening plans -- Knicks game with your law school friends, followed by supper in the bar at '21.' Elementary, Miss Cooper. The only thing he couldn't figure was whether we'd be interrupting any steamy bedroom scene with a call at this hour. I assured him...

From the book

Chapter 1

It was after eight o'clock, and all I could see of the sun was its gleaming crown as it slipped behind the row of steep cliffs, giving off an iridescent pink haze that signaled the end of a long August day. Brackish gray water swirled and broke against the large rocks that edged the mound of dirt on which I stood, spitting up at my ankles as I stared out to the west at the Palisades. The pleats of my white linen skirt, which had seemed so cool and weightless as I moved about the air-conditioned courtroom all afternoon, were plastered against my thighs by the humidity, and I swatted off the mosquitoes as they searched for a place to land on my forearms.

I turned away from the striking vista across the Hudson River and glanced down at the body of the woman that had snagged on the boulders less than an hour earlier.

The detective from the Crime Scene Unit reloaded his camera and took another dozen shots. "Want a couple of Polaroids to work from till I get you a full set of blowups?" I nodded to him as he changed equipment, leaned in above the head of his partially clothed subject, and set off the flash attachment.

The old guy with the fishing rod who had made the grim discovery was twitching nervously while he answered questions hurled at him in Spanish by a young uniformed cop from the Thirty-fourth Precinct. The officer pointed at something bulging in the man's pocket, and the fisherman's free hand shook uncontrollably as he pulled out a small flask of red wine.

"Tell him to relax, Carrera," Detective Mike Chapman called over to the rookie. "Tell him this one's a keeper. Catch of the day. Haven't seen anything this clean pulled out of these waters since Rip Van Winkle used it as a bathtub."

Chapman and his good friend Mercer Wallace had been talking with each other from the time Mercer and I reached the site ten minutes earlier. They had walked away from me so that Lieutenant Peterson could fill Mercer in on what he and Mike had learned since being called to the scene, while I stood at the woman's feet, staring down at her from time to time, half hoping she would open her eyes and speak to us. We were all waiting for one of the medical examiners to arrive and take a look at the body so it could be bagged and removed from this desolate strip of earth on Manhattan's northernmost tip before onlookers began to gather.

Hal Sherman rested his camera on top of the evidence collection bag and wiped the rivulets of sweat off his neck. "How'd you get here so fast?" he asked me.

"Mike was reaching out for Mercer to help him on this one and got me in the deal. Mercer was down in court with me for pretrial hearings in an old case when Mike beeped him. Said he had a floater with a possible sexual assault, and he wanted Mercer to look at her."

"Tell the truth, kid. You couldn't resist a night on the town with the big guys, could you, blondie?" Chapman asked, after coming over to check whether Sherman had finished the photography. "Hey, Hal, who's the guy seems like he's about to lose his lunch over there?"

We all turned to look at the man, not more than twenty-five years old, who was leaning against a large boulder, taking in deep breaths of air and cupping one hand over his mouth. "Reporter for the Times, fresh out of journalism school. This is his third assignment, tailing me around to see how we process a crime scene. Two burglaries in the diamond district, one arson in a high school, and now -- Ophelia."

Chapman went into a squat next to the right side of the woman's head, impatient with the presence of amateurs...

From the book

Chapter One

I spent a long afternoon at the morgue. I had left my desk at the Manhattan district attorney's office shortly after lunch to review autopsy results on a new case with the deputy chief medical examiner. A nineteen-year-old, dressed in an outfit she had bought just hours earlier, was killed outside a social club as she waited on a street corner for her friends.

Now I walked a quiet corridor, again surrounded by death. I did not want to be here. I paused at the entrance of an ancient tomb, its painted limestone facade concealing the false doorway to an underground burial chamber. The faded reliefs that decorated its walls showed offerings of food and drink that would nourish the spirit of the dead. I didn't harbor any hope that the young woman whose body I had seen today would ever be in need of the kind of good meal displayed before me.

I made my way past a granite lion and nodded at the uniformed guard, who slouched on a folding chair beside the elegantly carved beast, once the protector of a royal grave. Both were sleeping soundly. The outstretched arms of the neighboring alabaster monkeys held empty vessels that had no doubt been receptacles of the body parts of some mummified dignitary of the Old Kingdom.

Voices echoing from behind me suggested that I was not going to be the last arrival at this evening's festive dinner. I quickened my pace and swept by cases filled with goddesses' stone heads, perched on shelves holding jeweled sandals and golden collars that had been buried with them for centuries. A sharp left turn brought me face-to-face with the enormous black sarcophagus of a Thirtieth Dynasty Egyptian queen, held open by two iron posts, so that passersby could see the image of her soul portrayed on the inside of the upper lid. The dark, heavy casket with a faint outline of the slender body it once housed chilled me, despite the unseasonal warmth of the late-spring night.

Then I turned the last corner, where the darkness of the funereal rooms gave way to the glorious open space that housed the Temple of Dendur. The northernmost end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a sloping, glass-paned wall soaring above the sandstone monuments, opening the vista into Central Park. It was almost nine o'clock, and the streetlamps beyond the windows lightened the night sky, giving definition to the leafy green trees bordering the great institution.

I stood at the edge of the moat that surrounded the two raised buildings in this stunning wing, searching the crowd for my friends. Waiters in sleek black suits zigzagged back and forth among the guests, stopping to dispense smoked salmon on black bread and caviar blinis. They were trailed by others who carried silver trays filled with glasses of white wine, champagne, and sparkling water, dodging the elbows and arms of the assembled museum members and supporters.

Nina Baum saw me before I spotted her. "You came just late enough to miss most of the speeches. Smart move."

She signaled to one of the servers, and handed me a flute of champagne. "Hungry?"

I shook my head.

"The morgue?"

"Not a very pleasant afternoon."

"Was she -- ?"

"I'll tell you about it later. Chapman thought he had a lead on a case he's been handling that's reached a dead end, so I wanted to get a clear understanding about the pattern of injuries and how they'd been inflicted. That way, if he picked up a suspect and I got a chance to question the guy tonight, I'd be ready for him. Turned out to be a bad tip, so there's no interrogation, no arrest. It's on the back burner for a...

Chapter One

Tom Junod

The Loved Ones

from Esquire

It was the right decision. Of course it was. Mamaw was killing herself taking care of Papaw. Papaw was killing himself taking care of Mamaw. You were killing yourself taking care of them both. They were going to burn the house down if they kept living in it. They were going to kill themselves or someone else if they kept driving. They couldn't see. They couldn't hear. They couldn't always remember your name. They were speaking gibberish. They were staring out into space. They fell asleep in the middle of conversations. They either weren't taking their pills or they were taking too many. They were found wandering around. They were falling. They were in wheelchairs. They were immobilized. They were sick. They were old. It was—and these were the words you heard yourself saying, the words you heard everybody saying, everybody except them—time.

It couldn't have been an easy decision, no. That it was a decision, and that you had to make it, was in itself a terrible burden. That you were the one called upon to do the final arithmetic seemed cosmically unfair. Your life and theirs, in a ledger. Well, not just your life—your spouse's, your kids'. You had to think of them, too. Did money play a part? Sure it did. But more important was the question of quality of life. Theirs. Yours. You were being eaten alive... and so in the end you did what you thought best. You made the Decision.

Mr. Cobb, how are you doing?" I asked James Cobb, a lawyer in New Orleans, Louisiana.

"It depends on what you mean," Mr. Cobb answered. "If you mean how am I doing after losing my house and every fucking thing in it, and after being forced to live in a two-bedroom shithole with my wife and two kids and being told how lucky I am to get it, and after being fucked—and I mean absolutely fucked—by my insurance company and by the United States government (and by the way, just so you know, if anybody from New Orleans, Louisiana, tells you that they're not getting fucked by their insurance company and by the United States government, they're fucking lying, all right?)... if you mean, how am I doing after all that is factored in: Well, I guess the answer is that I'm doing fine. Now, how can I help you?"

Jim Cobb and I had never spoken before. These were the first words he spoke after my initial greeting. I was calling him because he represented—and represents—Sal and Mabel Mangano, the couple who operated St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. They had not evacuated their residents when Hurricane Katrina was making its way to Louisiana—they had not evacuated in the face of what was said to be a mandatory evacuation order—and when the levees failed and St. Bernard was inundated with ten feet of water, thirty-five helpless people died. No: drowned. No: drowned screaming for someone to save them, at least according to the initial press accounts. No: "drowned like rats," in the words of a prosecutor in the office of Louisiana attorney general Charles Foti, who was charging the Manganos with nearly three dozen counts of negligent homicide. Now they were notorious—icons of abandonment whose mug shots after their arrest personified more than just the prevailing stereotype of unscrupulous nursing-home owners. An entire American city had been left to die, and sixty-five-year-old Sal and sixty-two-year-old Mabel Mangano had somehow become the public faces of a national disgrace.

I was calling Jim Cobb to talk...

From the book

"You think we've got a case?" Mercer Wallace asked me.

"The answer's inside that cardboard box you're holding," I said, opening the glass-paneled door of his lieutenant's office in the Special Victims Squad.

I placed my hand on the shoulder of the young woman who was slumped over a desk, napping while she waited for my arrival. She lifted her head from her crossed arms and flicked her long auburn hair out of her eyes.

"I'm Alex Cooper. Manhattan DA's office." I tried not to convey the urgency of what we had to get done within the next few hours. "Are you Jean?"

"Yes. Jean Eaken."

"Has Detective Wallace explained what we need?"

"You're the prosecutor running the investigation, he told me. I've got to go through the details with you again, and then make a phone call that you're going to script for me. Is Cara still here?" Jean asked.

"She's in another office down the hall," Mercer said. "It's better we keep you separated until this is done. Then we'll take you over to the hotel and let you get some rest."

I had been the assistant district attorney in charge of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit for more than a decade, and Mercer had called me into the case to try to add something from my legal arsenal to speed the arrest process and increase the likelihood that Jean Eaken would be a successful witness in the courtroom.

Mercer told me that the twenty-four-year-old Canadian graduate student had met the suspect at a conference on adolescent psychology at the University of Toronto, which she had attended with her friend, Cara, four months earlier.

I sat opposite Jean, who stifled a yawn as I asked the first question. It was almost midnight. "When you met Selim back in January, how much time did you spend with him then?"

"I sat next to him at a couple of lectures. We made small talk during the breaks. He bought Cara and me a glass of wine on the last afternoon, at happy hour. Told us he lived in Manhattan, that he was a doctor. Nothing more than that."

"He invited you to New York?"

"Not exactly. I told him that we'd never been here, but that we had a trip planned for the spring. He was very friendly, very kind. Cara asked him if he knew any inexpensive hotels, since we're on student budgets, and he told us we could stay at his apartment."

"Did you talk about the sleeping arrangements?"

"Yes, of course. Selim told us he had a girlfriend, and that he'd either stay over at her place or sleep on a futon in the living room. He offered us the twin beds," Jean said. "He gave me his card, Ms. Cooper, with his office phone and everything. He's a medical doctor -- a psychiatric resident. It seemed perfectly safe to both of us."

"It should have been perfectly safe," I said, trying to reassure her that it was not her own judgment that precipitated her victimization. "Did you correspond with him after that first meeting?"

Jean shrugged. "A couple of e-mails, maybe. Nothing personal. I thanked him for his offer and asked him whether he really meant it. Then I sent him another one a month ago, after Cara and I set our travel dates, to see if those were still good for him."

Mercer nodded at me over Jean's head. He was keeping a list of things to do, and getting subpoenas for the e-mail records of both parties would be added to his tasks. We had worked together often enough to know each other's professional style, especially for documenting every corroborating fact we could in this often bizarre world of sex crimes.

"Were there any phone calls between you...

From the book

Chapter 1

"Murder. You should have charged the defendant with murder."

"He didn't kill anyone, Your Honor." Not yet. Not that I could prove.

"Juries like murder, Ms. Cooper. You should know that better than I do." Harlan Moffett read the indictment a second time as court officers herded sixty prospective jurors into the small courtroom. "Give these amateurs a dead body, a medical examiner who can tell them the knife wound in the back wasn't self-inflicted, a perp who was somewhere near the island of Manhattan when the crime occurred, and I guarantee you a conviction. This stuff you keep bringing me?"

Moffett underscored each of the charges with his red fountain pen. Next to the block letters of the defendant's name in the document's heading, People of the State of New York Against Andrew Tripping, he sketched the stick figure of a man hanging from the crosspiece of a gallows.

My adversary had been pleased when the case was sent out to Moffett for trial earlier in the afternoon. As tough as the old-timer was on homicide cases, he had been appointed to the bench thirty years ago, when the laws made it virtually impossible to take rape cases before a jury. No witness to the attack, no corroborating evidence, then there could be no prosecution. He clearly liked it better that way.

We both stood on the raised platform directly in front of Moffett, answering his questions about the matter for which we were about to select a panel. I was trying to divine my prospects as I watched the notations he was making on the face of the indictment I had handed up to him.

"You're right, Judge." Peter Robelon smiled as Moffett scribbled out the image of the doomed man on the gallows. "Alex has the classic 'he said-she said' situation here. She's got no physical evidence, no forensics."

"Would you mind keeping your voice down, Peter?" I couldn't direct the judge to lower his volume, but maybe he'd get my point. Robelon knew the acoustics in the room as well as I did, and was keenly aware that the twelve people being seated in the box could overhear him as the three of us talked about the facts and issues in the case.

"Speak up, Alexandra." Moffett cupped his hand to his ear.

"Would you mind if we had this conversation in your robing room?" My subtlety had escaped the judge.

"Alex is afraid the jurors are going to hear what she's about to tell them anyway as soon as she makes her opening statement. Smoke and mirrors, Your Honor. That's all she's got."

Moffett stood up and walked down the three steps, motioning both of us to follow him out the door, held open by the chief clerk, into the small office adjacent to the courtroom.

The room was bare, except for an old wooden desk and four chairs. The only decoration, next to the telephone mounted on the wall, were the names and numbers of every pizza, sandwich, and fast food joint in a five-block radius, scrawled on the peeling gray paint over the years by court officers who had ordered meals for deliberating jurors.

Moffett closed the window that looked down from the fifteenth floor above Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. Police sirens, from patrol cars streaking north out of headquarters, competed with our conversation.

"You know why juries like homicides so much? It's easy for them." The wide sleeves of his black robes flapped about as the judge waved his arms in the air. "A corpse, a weapon, an unnatural death. They know that a terrible crime occurred. You've just got to put the perp in the ballpark and they send him up the river for you."

I...

From the book

I was alone in the courtroom, sitting at counsel's table with a single slim folder opened before me. I had studied the photograph inside it hundreds of times in my office, but this morning I stared at it again for a different purpose.

The overhead shot of Amanda Quillian on a steel gurney had been taken at the morgue, shortly before her autopsy was performed eight months ago. Circular bruises were clustered on her throat, and crescent-shaped abrasions ringed the discolored areas of her skin, outlining the exact place where someone had ended her life by crushing her neck with his hands.

"Loneliest seat in town. Prosecutor in a domestic standing up before twelve good men and true -- plus a few whacky broads mixed in -- with a wee bit of circumstantial evidence, a snitch with a rap sheet longer than a roll of toilet paper, and no idea who actually squeezed the breath out of the late, lovely Mrs. Quillian."

I looked up at the sound of Mike Chapman's voice. "I didn't hear the door open. Is it unlocked already?"

Mike's smile was readiest at any chance to tease me. He brushed back his dark hair from his broad forehead, even his eyes laughing as he shook his head while reminding me of the uphill struggle that was about to unfold at trial.

"No. Artie Tramm let me in. Said to tell you the judge gave him orders to admit the riffraff at nine fifteen. Get rid of your coffee and say a little prayer to Our Lady of the Perpetually Hopeless Case."

"It gives me such a warm feeling in my gut when the detective who made the arrest lacks conviction before even one of my witnesses is cross-examined."

"Conviction? This may be the last time you get to use that word for a while, Coop."

Mike walked toward the well of the courtroom as I stood and took the last slug of cold coffee. "Three cups should do it," I said, tossing the cardboard container into the trash can. "Three cups and several hundred butterflies floating around inside me."

"You still get 'em?"

"Put me out to pasture if I'm ever trying a major case and tell you I don't."

He looked at the blowup of Amanda Quillian's face. "She talking to you, Coop? That why you slipped up here at eight thirty?"

I didn't answer. Mike Chapman and I had worked together on homicides for more than a decade, well familiar with each other's habits. We were professional partners and close friends. Mike knew that yesterday I had asked Artie, the officer in charge of Part 83 of the Supreme Court of New York County, Criminal Division, for permission to come up early to spend an hour in the courtroom before the day's proceedings began.

The large shopping cart that had become the favorite conveyance for prosecutorial case files over the last twenty years was parked behind my chair. It was loaded with Redwelds, part of every litigator's organizational system, and within them an array of colored folders -- purple for each civilian witness, blue for NYPD cops and detectives, green for medical and forensic experts, and a few yellow ones for the names my adversary had turned over as part of the defendant's case. The lower rack held the dozens of physical exhibits I planned to introduce into evidence, all of which had been pre-marked for identification to save time during the trial.

"Hey, Mike," Artie Tramm called out as he stepped into the back of the room. "You see the game last night? The Yankees were hitting like it was a home-run derby."

"Ms. Cooper had me hand-holding witnesses till ten o'clock. I only caught the last inning....

From the book

Chapter One

It was hard not to smile as I watched Lola Dakota die.

I clicked the remote control button and listened to the commentary again on another network.

"New Jersey police officers have released a portion of these dramatic videotapes to the media this evening. We're going to play for you the actual recordings the three hit men hired by her husband to kill Ms. Dakota made to prove to him that they had accomplished their mission."

The local reporter was posed in front of a large mansion in the town of Summit, less than an hour's drive from where I was sitting, in the video technicians' office of the New York County District Attorney. Snowflakes drifted and swirled around her head as she pointed a gloved hand at the darkened facade of a house ringed with strands of tiny white Christmas lights that outlined the roof, the windows, and the enormous wreath on the front door.

"Earlier this afternoon, before the sun went down, Hugh," the woman addressed the news channel's anchorman, "those of us who gathered here for word of Ms. Dakota's condition could see pools of blood, left in the snow during the early morning shooting. It will be a grim holiday season for this forty-two-year-old university professor's family. Let's take you back over the story that led to this morning's tragic events."

Mike Chapman grabbed the clicker from my hand and pressed the mute button, then jabbed at my back with it. "How come the Jersey prosecutors got to do this caper? Too big for you to handle, blondie?"

As the bureau chief in charge of sex crimes for the New York County District Attorney's Office for more than a decade, sexual assault cases -- as well as domestic violence and stalking crimes -- fell under my jurisdiction. The district attorney, Paul Battaglia, ran an office with a legal staff of more than six hundred lawyers, but he had taken a particular interest in the investigation of the professor's perilous marital entanglement.

"Battaglia didn't like the whole idea -- the risk, the melodrama, and...well, the emotional instability of Lola Dakota. He probably didn't know the story would look this good on the late news broadcast or he might have reconsidered."

Chapman lifted his foot to the edge of my chair and swiveled it around so that I faced him. "Had you worked with Lola for a long time?"

"I guess it's been almost two years since the first day I met her. Someone called Battaglia from the president's office at Columbia University. Said there was a matter that needed to be handled discreetly." I reached for a cup of coffee. "One of their professors had split from her husband, and he was stalking her. The usual domestic. She didn't want to have him arrested, didn't want any publicity that would embarrass the administration -- just wanted him to leave her alone. The DA kicked it over to me to try to make it happen. That's how I met Lola Dakota. And became aware of her miserable husband."

"What'd you do for her?"

Chapman worked homicides, most of the time relying on sophisticated forensic technology and reliable medical evidence to solve his cases. He rarely dealt with breathing witnesses, and although he was the best detective in the Manhattan North Squad when he came face-to-face with a corpse, Chapman was always intrigued by how the rest of us in law enforcement managed to untangle and resolve the delicate problems of the living.

"Met with her several times, trying to convince her that we could make a prosecution stick and gain her trust to let me bring charges. I explained that filing a criminal complaint was the only way I...

From the book

Chapter 1

I looked at the pool of dried blood that covered the third-floor landing of a brownstone on one of the safest residential blocks in Manhattan and wondered how the young woman who'd been left here to die yesterday, her chest pierced by a steak knife, could still be alive this afternoon.

Mercer Wallace crouched beside the stained flooring, pointing out for me the smaller areas of discoloration. "These smudges, I figure, are partial imprints of the perp's shoe. He must have lost his footing over there."

The blood streaked away from the door of the victim's apartment, as though her attacker had slid in the slippery fluid and stumbled to the top of the staircase.

"So there's likely to be some of this on his clothing?"

"Pants leg and shoes for certain, until he cleans them. Look here," he said, and my eyes followed the tip of the pen he was using as a pointer. Outlined on the light gray paint of the door to 3B was another bloody design. "That's hers, Alex. She must have braced herself with one foot against that panel to push the guy off. She put up a fierce struggle."

I could make out the V-shaped tip of a woman's shoe sole, and inches lower the circular mark that confirmed it was a pump rather than a flat.

"High heels and all, she did pretty well for herself. Just lucky." The uniformed cop who had been assigned to safeguard the crime scene for the past twenty-four hours spoke to Mercer as he straightened up.

"That's what we're calling it now when someone resists a rapist and ends up in the intensive care unit with a few holes in her chest and a collapsed lung?"

"Sorry, Ms. Cooper. I mean the girl is fortunate to be alive. You know she went DOA when they pulled up to the docking bay at the emergency room?"

Mercer had told me that. Annika Jelt had stopped breathing on the short ride to New York Hospital. The cops who were dispatched to a neighbor's 911 call reporting screams in the stairwell knew there was no time to wait for an ambulance. The young officer who carried the victim down to the patrol car had served in the army reserves as a medic during the war in Iraq. Annika owed her life to the fact that he revived her in the backseat of the RMP, on the way to the ER, before she was rushed into surgery to inflate her lung and stanch the bleeding.

Mercer led the way down the staircase. The traces of black fingerprint dust on the banister and walls reminded me that the Crime Scene Unit had done a thorough workup of the building when they were summoned by Mercer, shortly after the 3 a.m. attack on a frigid morning in late January.

"He never got her inside the apartment?"

"Nope. She fought like hell to keep him out."

"Did he take anything?" I asked.

"Keys. He took the ring with the keys to both the vestibule door and the apartment. The super's changed both locks already."

"But money? Jewelry?"

"Her pocketbook was lying on the ground next to her. Cash and credit cards were inside and she still had on her earrings and bracelet. He wasn't there for the money."

Mercer had double-parked outside the five-story walk-up on East Sixty-sixth Street. He had awakened me yesterday at six o'clock to tell me about the case. We had worked together for the better part of the decade that I had run the sex crimes prosecution unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, while he had been assigned to the police department's Special Victims Squad. He knew I'd want the first heads-up about the crime, before it was reported on the local network news and before the DA, Paul Battaglia, hunted me...

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