"The law says that it's not betraying the privilege for me to tell you if a patient threatens your-"

"I know what the case law says, Joan. The patient's privilege ends when the public peril begins. I want to know what Shirley said."

"She told me that she wanted to see you dead, just like the professor. She asked me how you got to work every day, and what time you left for home."

So far, I wasn't worried. The answers were that my travel route and hours were never the same two days in a row. This outpatient on a heavy diet of psychotropic drugs might be interested in making me unhappy, but she hadn't seemed the least bit dangerous to me.

"Actually, Ms. Cooper, I didn't know whether to believe her or not, but she told me she had a gun. Stole it from her father's house last weekend when she went home to Baltimore."

That racheted up my attention a notch. "And tonight? What happened tonight?"

"She showed up at Witness Aid. Told one of my colleagues that she was a victim in a case of yours. That you had given her your home number. That she'd been thrown out of her apartment for not paying rent, and wanted to leave a small gift for you with your doorman. They know you give witnesses your number from time to time."

Yeah, but generally not to lunatics, if I can help it.

"She acted so upset and all that they gave her the information. They didn't know how she really felt about you. I'm the only one she told that to. I just wanted to give you a little warning tonight in case she shows up. She's very, very mad at you."

"Thanks, Joan. I'm going to have one of the guys from the DA's squad make a report about this on Monday morning, okay? I'll send him down to your office. Just tell him what you told me."

I walked to the hall closet and hung up my coat and scarf. I was too wired to sleep and didn't need any more to drink, so I tried settling into bed with The Great Gatsby. I had embarked on a plan to reread all of Fitzgerald's novels, but this wasn't the time to begin. I went back to the living room to find my tote and fished out the crossword puzzle. The bottom left corner stumped me completely but I was determined not to go to the encyclopedia to find the four-letter name of a Tasmanian Indian tribe. I worked around the blank spaces.

At 1 A.M., I called Mike's number to apologize to him for my remarks at the end of the evening. The phone rang five times before his outgoing message kicked in. I guess he did have better things to do with himself than I had suggested.

"Just me. Sorry I snapped at you. Hope you're having a good time, wherever you are." No point telling him about my disgruntled victim. He'd hear soon enough. "And you're right about one thing. I should have taken the shuttle tonight."

I slept fitfully and got out of bed at six-thirty, when I heard the thud of the Sunday Times landing against my door.

I poured coffee beans into the machine and opened the paper while they ground and the brew began to drip, looking for stories about local crimes in the Metro section, before turning to the national and international news.

Mike was right about the food supply in my home, too. There were three English muffins left in my freezer, so I defrosted one and popped it into the toaster. I sat at the table and made a shopping list of groceries to order, figuring that there were some new leaves easier to turn over in my life than others. Filling the bare cupboards was one of them.

"When the phone rang at seven-thirty, I was sure it was Jake, and I picked it up, eager to make our plans for the holiday week. "Alex? It's Ned Tacchi. Sorry to hit you so early on a Sunday, but we picked one up during the night that you'll want to know about."

Tacchi and his partner, Alan Vandomir, were two of my favorite detectives at Special Victims. Smart, sensitive, and good-humored, they got victims through the investigative process with kid gloves. When they called me, I knew it was something I needed to hear.

"Sure. "What did you get?"

"Push-in sodomy. East Sixty-fourth Street, right off York Avenue. Fifty-five-year-old woman coming home from a Christmas party at three this morning."

"How is she?"

"Seems to be doing okay. She's in the ER now. We'll pick her up as soon as she's released and do a more thorough interview."

"Injuries?"

"Nope. In fact, she called nine-one-one to report it, but didn't want to go to the hospital. The perp pushed in behind her when she opened the vestibule door. A bit tipsy."

"Him or her?"

"She was. A little too much holiday cheer. He knew exactly what he wanted. Told her to get down on her knees, right there in the hallway. First he lifted her sweater, opened her bra, and put his mouth on her breasts. Then he exposed himself and made her put her mouth on his penis."

"Did he ejaculate?"

"Yeah. But she went right upstairs and brushed her teeth. Doubt we'll get anything for DNA, but she still said she had an awful taste in her mouth. That's probably more psychological than anything else. We asked the nurse examiner to do the swabs anyway. We're also having them swab her breasts."

"Good thinking." Even the microscopic amounts of saliva that might be found on the victim's torso would yield enough material for the newer kind of DNA process-STR testing-in which "short tandem repeats" of the genetic fingerprint are multiplied millions of times to yield the unique, identifiable patterns.

"Get her toothbrush, too. You may get lucky. Did he take anything?"

"Yeah. Left with her pocketbook. Didn't get much. She was holding her keys in her hand the whole time. Just had thirty bucks in her purse, along with some business cards and her cell phone. Schmuck dumped the bag in a trash basket a block away. Cell phone is gone, but we've got the purse. I'm sending the cards over to latent prints, hoping they can lift something off the surfaces, if he touched them."

"Has she canceled the cell phone yet?"

"No. We told her not to for twenty-four hours."

"Great. When I get to the office in the morning, I'll fax you up a subpoena." Most of the guys who stole cell phones during robberies were stupid enough to make calls on them until the phones were cut off or the batteries went dead. With records from the companies available in three or four days, we could often track down the offenders through the calls they placed to friends or relatives.

"Thought Battaglia might want to know that the commissioner is looking over a bunch of cases in the Nineteenth Precinct. They're probably going to declare this as part of a pattern." "I didn't know we had anything else like this going on." "Not up at our shop. But the precinct has about four other push-in robberies between Sixtieth and Sixty-eighth Streets, Second Avenue to the river, since the beginning of November. Mostly weekends. All the victims are women. This is the first time the perp has forced a sexual assault, but the MO is pretty much the same. Then he snatches the bag every time and he always runs south."

"Same 'scrip?"

"Pretty close. Most describe him as a male black, five-ten to six feet, stocky. Well dressed, clean-cut, very articulate. Has a slight accent, but nobody can place exactly what it is. Some say islands, some say French. Hard to know."

"Can you get all the paperwork down to me in the morning so I can assign it? I'm jammed up with the Dakota case. I'll probably give it to Marisa Bourges or Catherine Dashfer, okay? But keep me posted on any developments. Are they going to beef up patrol in that area on the midnight tour, Friday to Sunday?"

"The boss in the Nineteenth wants them to saturate it, but we've still got Savino and his gang running the task force on the West Side rapist, so we're stripped of manpower as it is." For almost three years, an attacker had been operating on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and despite an extensive manhunt and a genetic profile that had been entered in local, state, and national data banks, he continued to elude us. "We'll call you later if we break anything else on this today."