"How about hospitals?"

"We've got two big ones in this zone-New York Hospital and Lenox Hill. Same thing-it's a natural fit with shift turnovers. We subpoenaed the files of every male who worked there, from brain surgeons to male nurses to orderlies. Took months to get them all. By the time we'd gone through most of them, he had vanished."

"And we swabbed plenty of the employees, too," I said. "They've been entered in the data bank against the profile."

"I studied all the police reports Mercer sent me while I was on the plane. Can you give me more details-personal details-about your victims?"

"Everything you want to know," I said.

"Alex and the lawyers do the most thorough interviews you can imagine. There's nothing we can't tell you about these women."

I operated on the theory that I needed to know as much about the victim as the defendant knew, and more than the best defense investigator could find out if he applied every resource he had. We also tried to reconstruct every second of the victim's interaction with the offender, things that might help us connect to a suspect and give us probable cause to swab his saliva for DNA comparison.

"Can you bring the task force members together for a brainstorming?" Karras asked.

"Of course. Alex and Sarah Brenner, her deputy, have handled all the victims themselves. I'll round up the team of detectives. For when?"

"I'll let you know when I'm ready."

"Sure. What do you do now?"

"All this data on street locations that I've been mapping, this tracks the spatial characteristics of the pattern. There's a prototype computer system called Rigel. Once I dump in every crime scene- every hospital, store, school, possible physical boundaries-"

"There are no physical boundaries."

"You can't have linkage blindness, Alex. There may be more clues that I can pick up on than you're even aware of. This case is going to create a very colorful map."

"We've already got a map." I was tired and impatient, growing fearful that this was as useless as the psychological crap.

"I'll give you a jeopardy surface, the rapist's center of operation. You haven't had that yet. The perp's most likely base or anchor point."

I rolled my eyes at Mercer. "A jeopardy surface, that's what it's called? Don't tell Mike Chapman, okay?"

"Yeah, I try to pinpoint that-his home or his job. It gets superimposed on the scene locations, which are the virtual fingerprints of the perp. The more crime sites there are, the better the predictive power of this system."

So Karras's goal was the exact opposite of ours-he'd be happy with even more crimes to fill his colorful grid. I was looking at one of his old samples. A bright red dot for the jeopardy center, orange shading for the offender's preferred area of operation, changing to yellow and then green, blue, and purple for the outer limits of his quarry.

"You basically provide us with where he selects his victims," Karras said. "He's got a clear comfort zone, and we know that some of the women are low risk-from his perspective-because he thinks they're alone and in some cases intoxicated. His signatures are obvious-the weapon, the kind of binds, not much profanity, minimal verbalization, the way he subdues his prey. The computer uses his movement patterns and his previous hunting habits."

"To do what?"

"Statistics tell us that right-handed criminals in a hurry to flee generally make their escape to the left. But they discard their weapons to the right. You haven't charted that fact yourselves, have you? See what happens if you take him left out of every one of these buildings. Where does it lead him? That's what I'm supposed to figure out."

"Oh," I said grudgingly, toying with my scrambled eggs and lukewarm decaf.

"Did you know that when lost or confused, men go downhill but women go up?"

He was losing me now. "It's a perfectly flat neighborhood, Greg. This isn't San Francisco."

"The guy who first developed this program ten years ago? He did it with a serial rapist in Vancouver. Came up with exactly the same kind of map I'm going to create. Charted seventy-nine crime scenes and the computer spit out a red dot on the exact spot in which his perp lived. Nailed him the next day."

I wasn't focused on the good news. "Seventy-nine cases before he got a solution? Couldn't have been many places left in Vancouver to look for the guy by that time. I'll be too old to celebrate if I live through that many more attacks."

"Wait that long and neither one of us will have a job," Mercer said.

Mercer's cell phone vibrated and he picked it up off the Formica tabletop. "Wallace here. Hey, loo, what's up?"

It was 4:17A.M. and I was fading. The lieutenant was undoubtedly worried about how much overtime he would have to authorize for Mercer on this untested caper.

He stood up and walked to the front of the shop to finish the conversation, scribbling something on a napkin the waitress handed him at the counter. He flipped the phone closed, motioned to us to come as he paid the tab.

"Can you take a cab back to your hotel, Greg? Alex and I have business."

Mercer moved away from the register and pushed open the front door. The blast of cold air revived me as I stepped onto the sidewalk.

"East Eighty-third Street, between First and York. Brownstone with a locked front door. Female white, panty hose, knifepoint assault."

Karras had his PalmPilot in his hand, entering the address. "Boy, once they get good at something, these perverts don't change their style."

"This one's different, Alex," Mercer said, ignoring the profiler. "This time the girl is dead."

Mike Chapman was whistling a Sam Cooke tune, meant to get under my skin, as he opened the door to let us into the vestibule of the small building. "'Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody…'

"Don't you have better things to do with your time, Coop?" he asked, handing us the rubber gloves and mesh booties we needed to enter the crime scene, which was still being worked by Hal Sherman and his crew.

"Where to?" Mercer asked.

"C'mon up to three. It's a floor-through," Mike said, telling us that the deceased had lived in an apartment that occupied the entire third floor of the building.

I trailed behind them, up the staircase where the clean yellow paint on the walls and banister had now been coated with black fingerprint dust.

"Is she here?" Mercer asked.

"We just got her out fifteen minutes ago. I didn't want to deal with the neighbors and a body bag first thing on Sunday morning."

The third-floor landing was full of Sherman's baggage-metal trunks that held every piece of equipment necessary to process a crime scene. I stepped over them and into the entryway of the victim's apartment.

Hal was on his knees, taking a series of photographs of smudges-probably blood-on the area rug that covered the hallway. I squeezed his shoulder and stayed behind him until he finished shooting and greeted us.

"You got a time of death?" Mercer asked. A death investigator from the medical examiner's office responded to every homicide in the city. The body wasn't removed from the scene until that had happened.

"He thinks she'd been dead only a couple of hours," Mike said. "A friend of the deceased let himself in downstairs at two. They were supposed to meet earlier but she didn't show up. Claims he had a duplicate key, for emergencies. That's when we got the call. The ME was here within an hour."

"The friend-you holding on to him?"

"Yep. He's cooling his heels at the precinct, writing out a statement. Trust me, he's not the man."

"Is there a story?"

Mike led us from the entry through the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and into the bedroom, a series of long narrow cubicles that gave the feel of walking through the cars of a railroad train.