"I'll take your twenty dollars and bet it on this. They're not going to find semen when they autopsy her," I said to Mike as we climbed the staircase to the squad room in the Nineteenth Precinct station house at 5A.M. "This wasn't a rape."

We walked in, greeted by the frightened or sullen faces of more than a dozen men-black men-seated on every available chair. The metal gate of the holding pen was thrown open so that others could sit on the benches usually reserved for prisoners.

"What the hell's happening here? Somebody holding auditions for The Jeffersons?" Mike asked Mercer, who was coming up behind us. "One look around and I know it ain't hockey tryouts."

"Same damn thing as last time. This is where the RoboCop business gets ugly."

After the serial rapist task force had been formed several years back, the moment there was a report of an attack that fit the pattern, police swept the neighborhood for every dark-skinned man who was on the street. A single glance around and it was obvious that no one in this crowd even remotely resembled the roundcheeked suspect depicted in the victims' composite sketch.

A lone detective sat in a corner in front of a computer monitor, entering pedigree information into the system. "What are you doing, DeGraw?" Mercer asked.

"I'm trying to get these guys out of here as fast as I can. Two doctors-they're the quiet ones behind bars over there. One partner at some fancy-dancy law firm-he's the one screaming about the racial-profiling suit he's gonna file on behalf of everyone who's keeping me company this dark and lonely night. A banker, two cooks, a fireman, a hot dog vendor, a paroled burglar with six misdemeanor convictions, a couple of lounge lizards hanging out at the local bars looking for a lonely piece of ass."

"Why are they here at all?" I asked. "This is appalling." The usual procedure was to do a stop-and-frisk on the street, fill out the necessary paperwork that accompanied the search, and let the men go.

"The guys stopped so many people they ran out of forms. We had to bring the rest of them in to process."

Mercer was making the rounds, shaking everyone's hand and apologizing for this outrageous fallout from the murder investigation.

"You swabbing 'em?" Mike asked.

"I've been asking for volunteers. So far, the legal eagle told them they don't gotta do it. One of the docs went along with the program," DeGraw said, showing me a single Q-tips in a glassine envelope. "Nobody else is in the mood."

"You want to take a shot at it, Mercer?" I asked. "Just for elimination purposes?"

"That is one mean assignment, Ms. Cooper. Me, leaning on the brothers to help elevate the African-American statistics in the population genetics pool of the data bank," Mercer said, doubling back to ask again whether any of the men were willing to give us a saliva sample.

"Where's m' man Teddy?"

DeGraw pointed Mike in the direction of the lieutenant's office at the far end of the room. "He's in there, unless he flung himself out the window already. Go easy on him-he's a wreck."

Theodore Kroon lifted his head from his folded arms on the desktop when he heard the door open. His lean, pale face was streaked with tears and his reddish-brown hair was tousled and unkempt. There were bloodstains on the front of his shirt and pants.

He began to wail as soon as he saw Mike Chapman. "I touched everything, Detective. I couldn't help it. I didn't know what I was supposed to do."

"It's okay, buddy. I wouldn't expect anything else."

"But I mean my fingerprints must be everywhere in Emily's apartment. I tried to see if she was alive, I untied her hands, I… I even held the handle of the knife. I wrote it all out for you, just like you asked." Teddy thrust several pieces of paper at Mike.

"First thing you're gonna do is go into the men's room and wash up. You're no good to me if you don't calm down. This is Alexandra Cooper. She's from the DA's office. I'd like to go over everything with you again, so Ms. Cooper can hear it."

Kroon closed his eyes and breathed deeply before he stood up and left the small room.

"See what I mean? Too light in the loafers for a job like this murder."

The political correctness of the nineties had not even been a blip on Mike's radar screen. "Please stop with that kind of talk. You know it drives me crazy. And what if I'm right that Emily wasn't raped?"

"I realize you're tired but you're never gonna change my spots, kid. It's just my bad mouth-inside you know I'm like butter."

"Yes, but it's your mouth that makes such an indelible impression."

"My cousin Sean-did I tell you he's getting married in June? I'm the best man. The bride's a guy he met playing soccer in Ireland. I got twenty-two first cousins, and if you don't think the odds are that at least five of them are gay, then you can sit there praying with my aunt Bridget and her rosary beads, trying to pretend it only happens in other people's families. Now I have to take Teddy seriously as a suspect-that's what you're telling me?"

"Is it all right for me to come in?" Teddy said, pushing open the door.

Mike put a hand on Teddy's shoulder and steadied him as he walked back to the lieutenant's chair. We seated ourselves across the desk from him.

I opened the coffee I needed to keep myself going and the bag of bagels that I had stopped to pick up for the detectives and witnesses. Mike asked Teddy Kroon to tell us about himself.

"I was born forty-eight years ago in Bangor, Maine. My parents-"

"How about we fast-forward and start from this end. What do you do?"

"Retail, Mr. Chapman. I own a shop in TriBeCa that sells highend cooking utensils-pots and pans, table toppings-"

"Carving knives?"

"Yes, sir. The one-um-the one that's in Emily's back? I gave her that set for her birthday last year." He shook his head and tried to open a packet of sugar with his shaking hands.

"You work in the shop, too?"

"Six days a week. I get down there at eight before we open and stay late most nights to do all the paperwork. We're closed on Sundays."

"And Emily Upshaw, what's your relationship been with her?"

"She's my best friend, Detective." Teddy's eyes welled up with tears again. "She's been my very dearest friend for almost a decade."

"How'd you meet?"

He paused. "Fifteen years ago. At an AA meeting."

"Alcoholics Anonymous? Since when did they start holding sessions in a bar on York Avenue?"

Teddy flashed a glare at Mike. "I didn't make it, Mr. Chapman. Neither did Emily. That's why we got along so well."

"Take me through it."

"I was new to the whole twelve-step-program idea. We were a small group, meeting in a church basement on Lexington Avenue late in the evening so those of us who worked long hours could keep up. Emily was doing really well then. She had a steady job at a woman's magazine doing some editing, in addition to her writing."

"Did you see her outside the meetings?"

"Not at first. We'd sometimes walk home together. She was very smart and I liked to listen to her talk about her work. She was always interviewing someone interesting."

"You bonded right away?"

"It was just a few months and then her schedule changed completely. She had a good offer from a travel magazine. The only problem was that it required her to be on the road a great deal of time. She started to miss meetings. Lots of them."

"There's hardly a place you can go that doesn't have a branch of AA," I said.

"True. But the reality was that Emily couldn't manage it. She assured herself that she could skip a session every now and then, but traveling offered too many temptations. There were time changes that left her jet-lagged and more resistant to squeezing in a meeting. There were minibars in the hotel room and expense accounts to charge them to. There was that beverage cart on the airplanes that pulled right up next to her seat. So we fell out of touch for a while."