"So Beale's giving Coffey a hard time?"

"You know the drill. The press crucifies Beale, Beale waves his little fists and squeaks, and Coffey pretends to be afraid of mice."

She pinned one sheet of the report to the board. "Any deviations this time? Anything odd?"

"Yeah. That one's crooked," he said, pointing to the last paper she had pinned up.

"Get serious."

He was serious. It was odd for her to make any departure from perfectionist neatness. He looked down at the chipped fingernail on her right hand, and he began to hunt the room in earnest for anything else out of place. The television and VCR had been pulled in from another room. The slide-projector was new. But no dust gathered, that was certain. He supposed even a perfectionist could have an off day.

"No deviation from the MO." He shrugged. "Same old, same old. Her purse was gone. No deviations among the local corpse-robbers, either."

She smiled, and that worried him. What was the deal here? Why did she find that so interesting?

"What about the wounds?" she asked. "Consistent?"

"Slope says he can't match wounds if the bastard uses a different knife every time. But the areas and the order of the cuts are the same. He always goes for the throat first."

"What odds does he give for two of them?"

"I tried that one. Slope won't give odds, and he's a betting man."

As Mallory pinned up the last photo, Riker noticed her alignment was off again. Now he stepped back from the board. Markowitz's side of the wall was the usual mess. Kathy's side was neater, but with each addition to the board, less neat. Every time he came into the room, something new had been added, and item by item, her pushpin precision was going down the tubes. The preliminary report hung on the diagonal by one tack. So, what was going on here? The rest of the apartment was immaculate as always. He wondered how much time she spent in this room.

She handed him a photograph of a woman dwarfing a cab driver. "Her name is Redwing. She's running a scam in Gramercy Park. Ever see her before?"

"She's on the park surveillance log, but I don't know her face," said Riker. Redwing was not a new element in the square, but a once-a-week pattern over more than a year. It was the shots of Jonathan Gaynor and Henry Cathery which had his full attention.

"I'm meeting her tomorrow at a seance," said Mallory.

"I want some background on her, but she's not on computer as Redwing. If you tripped over an alias with a rap sheet, you'd tell me, right?… Riker?"

Riker nodded, only half-listening, preoccupied with the surveillance shots. "Kid, we gotta talk about your style, okay? You don't get shots like this unless you're so close the perp can see you, too."

She turned her back on him and tacked up Redwing's shot. "You interviewed Gaynor with Markowitz, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Notes?"

Riker flipped through his notebook, a dog-eared dangle of pages. "Windmill," he said, marking the note with one finger.

"Huh?"

"It's the way he moves. He makes a lot of gestures, sprawly, all arms. So, Markowitz and me, we're walkin' through the lobby with this guy, and his arms are wavin' all over the place while he talks. We pass by this group of little old ladies and they scatter like crows."

"They were afraid of him?"

"Naw, it wasn't like that. You gotta be careful with old people. They break easy. So I guess he makes them a little skittish is all, arms waving in the breeze, never looking to see where he's going."

"Like a scarecrow."

"Yeah, I like that." He scratched out windmill and wrote in scarecrow.

"What did Markowitz think of Gaynor?"

"I'm not sure. Markowitz spent the whole time pumping him for free professional advice."

"Gaynor's a sociologist not a shrink."

"Yeah, but he did an article or a book or something on the elderly. Markowitz was getting into the territory, you know? This was early days, only ten hours into the second kill."

"What did he tell Markowitz?"

"Nothin' I had notes on. Old people's role in society, that kind of crap. Markowitz thought it was real interesting. I didn't."

"What's Coffey's angle these days?"

"He's got me running background on the Siddon kid." He pulled a videotape from his jacket pocket. "You wanna see the latest interview? I got her on tape."

She took the tape from his hand, fed it into the mouth of the VCR and pushed the play button.

Margot Siddon appeared on the screen only to be ejected ten minutes later, and before the interview concluded. Mallory tossed him the tape.

"I've seen her around the park. I don't know any more than the surveillance team would. She hangs out with Henry Cathery sometimes. Most of the time he just ignores her, won't even unlock the park gate for her. He'd rather play chess than talk to girls."

Mallory stood in the fourth-floor hallway by Martin Teller's apartment and stared down at the neat stacks of books and magazines, a vacuum cleaner, a copper tea kettle, and a portable electric fan assembled outside his door. These were not castaway items to be put out with the trash; this, according to Charles, was where Martin, the minimalist artist, stored everything which was not pure white.

She glanced at the door across the hall from Martin's. She had been forbidden to terrorize Herbert of 4B. Reluctantly, she turned back to Martin's door at the sound of four locks being undone. Three of the locks were shiny new metal in contrast with the landlord's lock which was close to twenty years old by the make.

The door opened, and she was silently invited into the apartment by the barely perceptible inclination of Martin's hairless head. Minimal Martin had also done away with unnecessary eyebrows. His white shirt, bulking out around the bulletproof vest, the white pants and socks all blended him into the white walls. The front room had the look of a vacant apartment freshly broken into. The windows were bereft of curtains, and the walls were bare except for the small collection of stamp-size artwork mounted one on each wall. Each tiny bit of art was a faint pencil line.

She preferred minimalist art over every other school; it was neat and clean and hardly there, no garish colors, nothing to think about, less work.

The doorless closet in the front room contained the minimum amount of clothes which were also white and, hence, invisible in these quarters. Square white pedestals passed for chairs and were indistinguishable from the square white pedestal which was his breakfast table laid with one white dish and a single egg. Mallory had no view into the bedroom, but she could hazard a narrow mattress on the floor, covered with one doubled-over white sheet.

A bulletproof vest seemed like such a complicated addition to these rooms and to Martin.

"Martin, I'm curious about the writing on the wall in Edith Candle's apartment."

Martin merely stared, not at her but towards her, like a blind man listening for a clue as to her position. He showed no signs of a pending response. She moved into alignment with his gaze and smiled. A worry line made inroads in his brow which, for Martin, was tantamount to an emotional outburst. Perhaps Martin had a truer perception of her than most people, who took her smile for a smile.

"The writing on the wall, Martin?" She rose up on the balls of her feet with anticipation, further prompting the man only with her eyes. If she pressed him too hard, he might walk off into some autistic dimension and close the door behind him. And so she waited on him.

And waited on him.

Nothing.

Oh, of course. She hadn't asked a solid question, had she?

"Could you tell me what the writing was?"

"Red," said Martin, after she had counted off thirty seconds.