For the moment, we both ignored that point. "They never heard of backup? What if Kralovic didn't trust the guys he hired in Jersey and wanted a little security, some extra insurance, to make sure his plan to kill Lola worked?"

"I don't need convincing. City Hall does. The first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a shove in the back and a trip to the morgue, right? The mayor doesn't want to add to the murder tally for the end of the year. And he's getting additional pressure from the powers that be at Columbia University."

"But Lola didn't even work there anymore."

"They farmed her out to a new, experimental school-King's College. It's got an entirely separate administration, but it bought some of the old Columbia buildings, so it's adjacent to the Columbia-Barnard campus. Somebody up there's got a direct pipeline to the mayor's office. The school officials don't want to open the whole can of worms about the history of their own tortured relationship with Lola Dakota, so they'd like this shoved under the carpet as well."

"They're leaving out a great big stumbling block, in the oversize form of the rotund, thick-skulled, and honorable Vinny Sinnelesi, the Jersey prosecutor who put together this clever sting operation. Battaglia thinks the entire plan was to snag some visibility to launch Sinnelesi's bid for the gubernatorial race next year. Vinny had no qualms about getting attention on the back of Ms. Dakota while she was alive, so I doubt he'll lose a minute's sleep about doing it over her dead body."

Mike laughed at my description of Sinnelesi, and at my obvious state of agitation. "Calm it, Coop."

I was too wound up to stop. "Easy for him to sit tight in his own little fiefdom and point his fat finger at us, calling this a murder-whether it is or isn't-knowing he can't screw up this investigation 'cause it will be in Battaglia's jurisdiction."

The front door of the building opened and, with the frigid air, in walked Lieutenant Peterson. Chapman got up and his trademark grin vanished in a flash. "I thought you'd gone home, Loo."

Without breaking stride as he moved toward the elevator, Peterson barked back, "I told you to get Ms. Cooper out of this building, Chapman. She's got nothing further to do with this matter. This, this,… accident."

I sat in Chapman's car, shivering against the chill of the night air, which kept me wide-awake despite the late hour. Peterson's unexpected reappearance in the lobby had been due to the arrival of the detective who had been sent to the morgue to fetch Dakota's keys. The two had crossed paths as Peterson was about to close his car door, so the lieutenant doubled back to see whether they could gain entry to Lola's fifteenth-floor apartment. Chapman knew that it wasn't Peterson's style to examine the woman's home himself. He wasn't a micromanager in that sense, and would rely on the intelligence of his men-and the photographs they would bring back-to highlight any information of significance. "Loo'll give it a once-over just to satisfy himself, somebody'll snap some pictures, and then I'll come down to get you," he said as he led me to his car and unlocked the door. "Just slink down in the seat so he doesn't make you when he's leaving- no heater, no radio. He'll be gone in twenty minutes."

"You know he'll kill us if we get caught."

"Can't happen, kid. It'll just be you, me, and George Zotos. Who's gonna squeal?"

Zotos was one of the guys on Mike's team in the squad, and I had worked well with him over the years. "There's no downside to this for you. Battaglia doesn't even know you're here, and Peterson gave orders to me, not to you."

Shortly before one-thirty in the morning, Peterson walked out on the sidewalk and his driver swung around in front of the building to pick him up. Ten minutes later, Chapman came out the same way, said something to the uniformed cops still posted next to the entrance, and crossed the street to the car to help me maneuver the icy road. We walked down to 115th Street and into the alley that led to the rear of the building. The heavy iron door was wedged ajar by the flashlight that Chapman had been holding earlier. He picked it up from the ground as he pulled open the door and took me inside through the basement. We rode to the fifteenth floor on the one elevator that was still in service, which creaked its way upward, slowly and noisily, then crossed over to the south side of the building to get to 15A. When Chapman tapped lightly on the door, Zotos opened it immediately and we joined him inside the apartment.

Mike passed me a pair of rubber gloves, in exchange for the black leather pair I'd been wearing all evening. "Don't touch anything without showing it to me first. Just poke around and see what strikes you as interesting."

"Some kind of slob, eh?" George was shaking his head, not knowing where to begin. "You think it was ransacked, or she just liked to live this way?"

I had been to Lola's office several times to discuss her case and to try to pressure her supervisors into supporting her during the process. "I think this is her natural habitat. It's pretty consistent with what I saw on campus."

We were standing in the living room, which appeared to have been decorated with the remains of a Salvation Army used-furniture sale. The classic bones of a prewar six-room apartment were practically obscured by the bizarre accumulation of odd-shaped chairs, a pair of Victorian love seats covered in faded burgundy velvet, a beige Naugahyde lounger, and cardboard boxes piled everywhere, with strapping tape still in place. Whenever she had moved them in, Lola had not yet opened or unpacked them.

I walked through the other rooms to get a sense of the layout. The small kitchen, still decorated in the drab avocado tones of the sixties, was quite bare, which fit with the fact that she had been living in New Jersey for almost a month. The dining room featured an old oak table, pushed up against the window, overlooking a glorious view of the park and river. It, too, was stacked with boxes, with the word BOOKS scrawled on the sides of almost every one.

The master bedroom had the same view, outside and within. Here, some of the cartons had been opened and the volumes were spread around the floor and partially scattered on shelves.

"What'd she teach?" Mike asked, moving into the room with me.

"Political science. When I first got the case and met her, she was still on the faculty at Columbia. Had a spectacular reputation as a scholar and a teacher. Lola was a brilliant lecturer."

I glanced at a small stack of books on her nightstand. They were all novels rather than textbooks. I wondered whether they were favorites she kept at hand to reread. A bookmark stuck out from the pages of the one on top of the pile-an early Le Carre, one that Lola would never finish.

"Students loved her because she brought the classroom alive. I remember one day last winter, I was going up to the school for a meeting with her. She said I could catch part of her class. Municipal institutions in the early part of the twentieth century-the mayoralty, the corrupt officials of Tammany Hall, the city jails and courthouses. Of course I was intrigued, so I made a point of getting there in time to walk in and sit in the back of the classroom."

"Busman's holiday," Mike said, opening drawers and examining their contents.

"Lola lured me right into that one." I smiled, remembering the day. "She'd spent the week on the politics of Gentleman Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York City in the late 1920s. But she had a unique method of showing the students the tone of the period. She was parading around the podium, doing a perfect imitation of Mae West, describing the actress's arrest and prosecution for the stage performance of her play-called Sex-in 1926. She was reading from West's autobiography, describing the condition of the prison cell in the Tombs, and how the confused, diseased women were herded inside like animals."