Gramercy Square had lost its cobblestones and gas lights, but little else had changed in the past hundred years. It was all sedate mansions of red brick and brown-stone, marble and granite, mahogany and brass. And there was an island quality to its tranquility. Though New York traffic drove through the square and walked through it, the formidable buildings, giant overlords with watching windows, managed to subdue what little those entered there on foot, and to intimidate those feet to a respectful march.

The grand design of the place made it clear that one who did not belong could not tarry here. The park at the heart of the square was enclosed in spiked wrought iron. Each of the residents had their own key, and all other New Yorkers did not. For outsiders, there was no place to pause, to rest. Each street of the square led the interloper straight out, and quickly. Only walkers of dogs might occasionally come to a halt. All others marched through and away and left no imprint in passing.

There was only an hour of good daylight left when she pulled close to the curb, well behind the cab which had carried the suspect from his last class at Columbia University. The streets were quiet around the park's iron bars which only caged Gramercy's own. Inside the bars, women in summer dresses and winter-white hair sat on the wooden benches, talking with their hands, and a young mother walked the gravel paths with a small child. An old man sat alone but for the company of pigeons. The perfume of flowers drifted through the open window of her car.

While the suspect paid his driver, she opened her glove compartment and pulled out the folder containing the print-out of his class schedule, an unwitting contribution of the university's computer, and the playbill of a student production which bore Gaynor's name on the cast listing. The murders always occurred in the daylight hours. There were gaps between his classes and the student-counseling appointments. With a fast car, and some luck with the traffic lights, there was time enough for a hundred-block dash to the square and a little murder. It was only a question of when.

It didn't actually bother her that Professor Jonathan Gaynor had an alibi for the time of his aunt's death. Anyone smart enough to pull off these murders was smart enough to convince a pack of students that they had seen him when they had not. That was the core of a magic act, wasn't it – convincing the audience they had seen what they had not. The daylight killing had the aspect of magic, but she was an unbeliever. It was a trick, and she would work it out.

She looked past the bars of the fence and the well-tended shrubbery and flowers, across the green grass to the murder site of the first victim. The Cathery woman had been found beside one of the small brown sheds constructed as toy houses at one end of the park.

It was a maddening puzzle: so simple in its brutality, so convoluted in its accomplishment. Twenty-eight of the square's residents had admitted to being in the park at various hours of that day. Not one of them remembered any stranger entering the park, luring an old woman to the shed, cutting her up, and scattering her beads and her blood with surprisingly little cover. Well, there wouldn't have been any noise to speak of, no screaming. In Slope's opinion the first thrust of the knife to the victim's throat had prevented that. Maybe a gurgle had come up with the blood, nothing more.

She knew she was missing something simple here, but she was damned if she could see it. There had to be a logical explanation. Smart the freak might be, but not invisible, not supernatural.

The playbill from the university theater slipped from the folder and wafted to the floor of the car. She stared down onto the bold-face type. Radio Days was the name of the production by students from Barnard College. The only segment that interested her was the title of an old program from the Shadow series. She knew all the scripts by heart. In the basement of the house in Brooklyn was a space for Markowitz's old records. He had collected the gamut of popular music from Artie Shaw to Elvis, but his best-loved albums were the recordings of the Shadow. There were others he had liked well enough, the Lone Ranger and Johnny Dollar, but he dearly loved the Shadow. She had sat beside him on countless Saturdays, listening to recordings of the old broadcasts from the Forties and Fifties.

Most of the fathers in the neighborhood had workshops in the basement where they built furniture which their wives would not allow on the upper levels. In Markowitz's workshop, he was building an imagination for a child who had lived too real a life, eating out of garbage cans and holing up for the night in doorways and discarded cartons.

The hero of the old radio series had the ability to cloud men's minds and render himself invisible.

No, she was not buying it, she had told Markowitz then. "No way could anyone pull that off," said the child she had been.

"Make believe he can, Kathy," Markowitz had said to her, looking down at her in the days when she was much shorter than he was.

"No. Only suckers believe in crap like that."

"Don't say crap, dear," said Helen who had suddenly appeared at the foot of the basement stairs to wrap a sweater around the child who was sitting within four feet of the furnace. "She can't possibly be cold," Markowitz had protested. So Kathy had shivered to please Helen, and Markowitz had said, "Now you've got it, kid."

Mallory had parked her car near the doorway of the Players' Club. She shrank down in the seat when she spotted Jack Coffey chatting up the doorman. Now he was going in. This was the building the stake-out team had selected for the department's watchers on the square. This was also the spot where the second victim, Jonathan Gaynor's aunt, had been found inside a private car with tinted windows. The second murder had been daring, but not quite the stunning trick of a kill in full view of every living thing in the square.

Estelle Gaynor had also been a brutal daylight kill. Impossible, but it had happened in this place of Social Register old money and new-wealth rock stars. Pearl Whitman, the third victim, had broken the pattern by dying in low-rent environs. Why? And what had the old man seen that she was missing? Pearl Whitman was a tantalizing snag because she had left no heirs. The old SEC connection to Edith Candle, the woman who lived in Charles's building, was also nagging at her. Perhaps it was the scarcity of information on Candle that made her suspicious. This woman knew how to keep her private business underground.

Another cab pulled up to the curb on the adjacent street. The rear windows of the car were blocked by shopping bags and cloth of bright colors, and, here and there, a white face and a brown one. The rear doors on both sides of the cab opened, and an endless stream of goods spilled out onto the sidewalk with the cab driver, a small boy and a Dobermann puppy. The shopping bags were every color of the rainbow, and bulged to rips at the paper seams. A flimsy circular table with folded legs leaned against the car. Boxes were being stacked precariously by the driver while the boy grappled with an antique gramophone with a large horn.

What now piled up on the sidewalk was greater than the interior volume of the cab. The magic show went on. The front passenger door opened, and an immense woman stepped out. She was at least six feet tall and simply too wide in the girth to have come out of that cab.

Now the cabby launched into a screaming match with this woman who had crossed his palm with too few dollars. He was an Arab, not too long in the country, judging by the barely comprehensible English and the inability to deal with American women without going ballistic. He was making fisted hand gestures to go with the inarticulate screams. All Mallory could understand of the bad hollered English was 'You don't rob me, you bitch!"