"maybe she believes it."

"she probably will by the time she's done telling it. kaplan thought it sounded fine."

"did you tell him the real story?"

"no, there was no reason to do that. he knows what he's got is incomplete, but he can be comfortable with it. the important thing is that he'll keep the cops from ganging up on her and paying more attention to my role in the case than to who did it."

"would they do that?"

i shrugged. "i don't know what they'd do. there's a team of serial killers who've been doing their little number for over a year now and the nypd doesn't even know they exist. it's going to put a lot of people's noses out of joint to have a private detective come up with what everybody else missed."

"so they'll kill the messenger."

"it wouldn't be the first time. actually the cops didn't miss anything obvious. it's very easy to miss serial murder, especially when different precincts and boroughs get different cases and the unifying elements are the kind that don't make it into newspaper stories. but they could still hold it against pam for showing them up, especially given that she's a hooker and that she didn't mention that little tidbit first time around."

"is she going to mention is now?"

"she's going to mention now that she used to make ends meet by occasionally prostituting herself. we know they've got a sheet on her, she was booked a couple of times for prostitution and loitering with intent. they didn't find that out when they investigated her case because she was the victim, so there was no compelling need to determine whether she had a record."

"but you think they should have checked."

"well, it was pretty sloppy," i said. "hookers are targets for this all the time because they're so accessible. they could have checked. it should have been automatic."

"but she's going to tell them she stopped hooking after she got home from the hospital. that she was afraid to go back to it."

i nodded. she had quit for a while, scared to death at the thought of getting into a car with a stranger, but old habits die hard and she'd gone back to it. at first she limited herself to car dates, not wanting to risk disappointing or disgusting a man by taking off her shirt, but she'd found that most men didn't mind her deformity that much. some found it an interesting peculiarity, while a small minority were extremely excited by it, and became regular clients.

but nobody had to know any of that. so she would be telling them that she had had a couple of jobs waitressing, working off the books in the neighborhood, and that she was being more or less kept by the anonymous benefactor who had referred her to me.

"and what about you?" elaine wanted to know. "aren't you going to have to see kelly and give him a statement?"

"i suppose so, but there's no rush. i'll talk to him tomorrow and see if he needs anything formal from me. he may not. i don't have anything for him, really, because i didn't uncover any evidence. i just spotted some invisible links between three existing cases."

"so for you ze war is over, mein kapitдn?"

"looks that way."

"i'll bet you're exhausted. do you want to go in the other room and lie down?"

"i'd rather stay up so that i can get back on my normal schedule."

"makes sense. are you hungry? oh my god, you haven't eaten anything since breakfast, have you? sit there, i'll fix us something."

we had a tossed salad and a big bowl of butterfly pasta with oil and garlic. we ate at the kitchen table, and afterward she made tea for herself and coffee for me and we went into the living room and sat together on the couch. at one point she said something uncharacteristically coarse; when i laughed she asked me what was so funny.

i said, "i love it when you talk street."

"you think it's a pose, huh? you think i'm some sheltered hothouse blossom, don't you?"

"no, i think you're the rose of spanish harlem."

"i wonder if i could have made it on the street," she said thoughtfully. "i'm glad i never had to find out. i'll tell you one thing, though. when this is all over little miss street smarts is going to come in out of the cold. she can just bundle up her remaining tit and get the hell off the pavement."

"are you planning on adopting her?"

"no, and we're damn well not going to be roommates and do each other's hair, either. but i can get her a place in a decent house or show her how to build a book and work out of her apartment. if she's smart you know what she'll do? run a couple of ads in screw letting the tit fanciers out there know they can now get one for the price of two. you're laughing again, was that street talk?"

"no, it was just funny."

"then you're allowed to laugh. i don't know, maybe i should just butt out and let her live her life. but i liked her."

"so did i."

"i think she deserves better than the street."

"everybody does," i said. "she may come out of this all right. if they get the guys and there's a trial, she could have her allotted fifteen minutes of fame. and she's got a lawyer who'll make sure that nobody gets her story without paying her for it."

"maybe there'll be a tv movie."

"i wouldn't rule it out, although i don't think we can count on debra winger playing our friend."

"no, probably not. oh, i got it. are you with me on this? what you do, you get an actress to play her who's a postmastectomy patient in real life. i mean, are we talking high concept here or what? you see what a statement we'd be making?" she winked. "that's my show-biz persona. i bet you like my street act better."

"i'd call it a toss-up."

"fair enough. matt? does it bother you to work on a case like this and then hand it over to the police?"

"no."

"really?"

"why should it? i couldn't justify keeping it to myself. the nypd has resources and manpower i don't have. i'd taken it as far as i could, that end of it, anyway. i'll still follow up the lead i got last night and see what i can turn up in sunset park."

"you're not telling the police about sunset park."

"no way to do that."

"no, matt? i have a question."

"go ahead."

"i don't know if you want to hear it, but i have to ask. are you sure it's the same killers?"

"has to be. a piece of wire used to amputate a breast? once with leila alvarez, once with pam cassidy? both victims dumped in cemeteries? give me a break."

"i was assuming that the ones who did pam also did the alvarez girl. and the woman in forest park, the schoolteacher."

"marie gotteskind."

"but what about francine khoury? she was not dumped in a cemetery, she did not necessarily have a breast amputated with a garrote, and she was reportedly snatched by three men. if there was one thing pam was positive of it was that there were only two men. ray and the other one."

"there could have been just two with khoury."

"you said-"

"i know what i said. pam also said that they went from the driver's seat to the back of the truck and back again. maybe it just looked as though there were three people because when you see two guys enter the back of a truck and then it pulls away you assume somebody was up front to drive it."

"maybe."

"we know these guys did gotteskind. gotteskind and alvarez are tied together by the business with the fingers, amputation and insertion, and alvarez and cassidy both had the breast cut off, so that means-"

"they're all three the same. all right, i follow that."

"well, the gotteskind eyewitnesses also said there were three men, two who did the snatching and one who drove. that could have been an illusion. or they could have had three that day, and again the day they did francine, but one guy was home with the flu the night they picked up pam."

"home jerking off," she said.

"whatever. we could ask pam if there were any references to another man. 'mike would like her ass,' something like that."

"maybe they took her breast home for mike."

" 'hey, mike you should have seen the one that got away.' "

"spare me, will you? do you think they'll get a decent description out of her?"

"i couldn't." she'd said she didn't remember what the two men looked like, that when she tried to picture them she saw wholly undefined faces, as if they'd been wearing nylon stockings as masks. that had made the original investigation an exercise in futility when they gave her books full of sex-offender mug shots to pore over. she didn't know what faces she was looking for. they'd tried her with an identi-kit technician and that had been hopeless, too.

"when she was here," she said, "i kept thinking of ray galindez." he was an nypd cop and an artist, with an uncanny ability to hook up with a witness and extract a remarkable likeness. two of his sketches, matted and framed, were on elaine's bathroom wall.

"i had the same thought," i said, "but i don't know what he could get out of her. if he'd worked with her a day or two after it happened he might have got somewhere. now it's been too long."

"what about hypnosis?"

"it's possible. she must have blocked the memory, and a hypnotist could possibly unblock her. i don't know that much about it. juries don't necessarily trust it, and i'm not sure i do either."

"why not?"

"i think hypnotized witnesses can create memories out of their imaginations because of a desire to please. i'm suspicious of a lot of the incest memories i hear about in meetings, memories that suddenly surface twenty or thirty years after the event. i'm sure some of them are real, but i get the sense that more than a few of them are summoned up out of the whole cloth because the patient wants to make her therapist happy."

"sometimes it's real."

"no question. but sometimes it's not."

"maybe. i'll grant you it's the trauma du jour these days. pretty soon women without incest memories are going to start worrying that their fathers thought they were ugly. you want to play i'm a naughty little girl and you're my daddy?"

"i don't think so."

"you're no fun. you want to play i'm a hip slick and cool street hooker and you're sitting behind the wheel of your car?"

"would i have to go rent a car?"

"we could pretend the couch is a car, but that might be a stretch. what can we do that'll keep our relationship exciting and hot? i'd tie you up but i know you. you'd just go to sleep."

"especially tonight."

"uh-huh. we could pretend you're into deformities and i'm missing a breast."

"god forbid."

"yeah, amen to that. i don't want to beshrei it, as my mother would say. you know from beshrei? i think it means inviting a yiddish equivalent of hubris. 'don't even say it, you might give god ideas.' "

"well, don't."

"no. honey? do you want to just go to bed?"

"now you're talking."

chapter 15

tuesday i slept late, and elaine was gone when i woke up. a note on the kitchen table told me to stay as long as i wanted. i helped myself to breakfast and watched cnn for a while. then i went out and walked around for an hour or so, winding up at the citicorp building in time for the noon meeting. afterward i went to a movie on third avenue, walked to the frick and looked at the paintings, then took a bus down lexington and caught a five-thirty meeting a block from grand central, commuters bracing themselves to pass up the club car.