"Last month I missed my period, and then I started getting sick and stuff, so when I told my boyfriend about it he said he had an uncle who could solve the problem."

"How?"

"That he was a doctor. That he would-you know-take care of things for me. So Friday I went to his office."

"Where?" I asked, to make sure that whatever event brought her to me was something over which I had jurisdiction. "In Manhattan?"

"Yeah. But I don't know the street. Somewhere in midtown," she said, smiling at Vandomir and waiting for him to agree with her. "Right?"

"What happened at his office?"

"First thing he did was make me undress."

"Was there a nurse in the room, or any kind of assistant?"

"Just Dr. Foster and me."

"Did he give you a gown to put on?"

"No. He told me to take all my clothes off and put them on a chair."

"Have you ever had a gynecological exam before?"

"Nope."

"Did the doctor know that?"

"Uh-huh. He asked me who did the last one and I told him I never had one."

The fact that it was the first time the girl was going through the procedure made it impossible for her to know what the standard practice should be in such exams. It was the perfect moment for someone to take advantage of her.

"What did Dr. Foster do next?"

"First he told me he had to do a breast exam."

"How did he do that?"

"Like he was feeling up on me, is what I thought."

"Can you tell us exactly how and where he touched you?"

First Darcy told us how the doctor rubbed his hands around her chest, then she demonstrated on herself. The long caresses and manipulation of the girl's ample breasts bore no resemblance to the steps physicians took in legitimate examinations. Neither did his repeated questioning, asking her whether it felt good while he touched her.

"What was next?"

"He made me lie down on the table and put his fingers inside me. He was touching me funny and poking me inside with some kind of instrument that I couldn't see, and that's when the man knocked on the door."

"What man? Touching you how? Slow down, Darcy."

"Somebody just banged and Dr. Foster, he like got real nervous. He told me to get up and get dressed, and he started to hide all his medical tools back in his bag."

"Did the other man come into the room?"

"Nope. He kept calling the name Pierre-telling him to open up. But he didn't. Not then. Not till he threatened me."

"What did he say?"

"'If you tell anybody about this, I'll get you. I know how to find you and I'll make sure you never talk again.' Then he took me by the arm and made me walk through the waiting area, out the back door to the alleyway. He tossed his case with all the stuff in it into the Dumpster, which I thought was really weird."

"How did you get away from him?"

"He made me walk to the subway station and he waited until I got on the downtown train to go home. Said if I told anyone about this except my boyfriend I'd never see my mother again."

"I'm glad you decided to tell someone, Darcy."

"I didn't have a choice, really. I was bleeding so badly that night that I had to get my mother to take me to the hospital." She smiled at Alan Vandomir. "They're the ones who called the police."

"So you paid a visit to Dr. Foster?" I asked Vandomir.

"By way of the back door on Saturday morning. That's where we found all the equipment inside the Dumpster. And Lucky Pierre was right at his desk."

"What kind of medicine is he licensed to practice?"

"None, actually. That's why we're here."

I looked at the vulnerable teen and wondered what would have happened to her had there not been such an opportune knock on the door. "Don't tell me he's a gardener or a hairdresser?"

"Nah. He's a phlebotomist. All he's trained to do is to draw blood for lab tests. Doesn't know the first thing about gynecology or anything else medical. And you're certainly not going to like where he works, Alex."

"I'm afraid to ask."

"Try the court system. He's employed by the Midtown Community Court. His assignment is to draw blood from hookers to test for sexually transmitted diseases."

"Public service is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Now I'll have the chief administrative judge on my back for embarrassing him with this arrest."

The MCC had been a controversial innovation from the outset, almost a decade ago. The mayor and the judicial head of the criminal court system had been allies in moving some misdemeanor cases out of the Centre Street courthouse and handling them in the neighborhood in which they'd occurred. It hardly made a difference to any of us in the DA's office to have the cases-mostly prostitution and low-level drug dealing-out from under our feet. But Battaglia had been hell-bent on maintaining jurisdiction over every offense, no matter how petty, and he would revel in this bit of mismanagement by his adversaries.

"I'll have it written up as sexual abuse and throw in an unauthorized medical practice. We can have Darcy sign the affidavit and send her on her way, for today."

By two o'clock, I had finished charging Vandomir's case and when Mercer arrived, I had the John Doe serial rapist indictment signed and filed. By the time I made the rounds from my eighth-floor office to the ninth-floor grand jury rooms to the tenth-floor Supreme Court clerk's office and then up to fifteen so the judge overseeing grand jury matters could unseal the indictment, it was after three and Mike Chapman was sitting at my desk.

"The plot thickens, Coop."

"Were you there for the autopsy this morning?"

"Yeah. Tell your pal Mr. Kroon you kept your promise. If Emily Upshaw wasn't already dead before she met Dr. Kirschner today, it's a sure thing now."

"Was it as obvious as what it looked like?"

"Five stab wounds to the back with a carving knife. Got the heart, one lung, the kidney, and anything else that matters."

"Was she-?"

"Sexually assaulted? The jury's out on that one. No semen in the vaginal vault, but don't gloat about it yet. There's some bruising on her inner thighs, like it was an attempt. Your perp had attempts that weren't consummated, didn't he?"

Mercer and I looked at each other and nodded our heads.

"Plus Crime Scene found something unusual in the bathroom."

"What?"

Mike took a Polaroid photo out of his pocket and showed it to us. "See the sink counter on the right? There's a plastic bottle of bleach on top."

"Okay, so?"

"Emily wasn't exactly a meticulous housekeeper. Look at the dingy towels and the ring in the bathtub."

The photo made it obvious that the only clean surfaces in the room were the toilet seat and bowl.

"Hal thinks the killer finished in the bathroom what he started in the bedroom. Masturbated here and then wiped the toilet bowl to clean off anything that would leave a trace of DNA. Ever seen that before?"

"No."

"Well, Hal has. There was a case in Queens last October. Perp had only been out of jail a week, paroled on an old sex offense. Did a push-in burglary in Astoria and when he couldn't get it up to complete the rape, he went into the bathroom and played with himself."

"And the Mr. Clean routine?"

"Just before his release from prison he'd been swabbed, by law, to put his profile in the convicted offender data bank. He knew that was a surefire way to identify him in the new venture, so he scoured away the DNA."

"All that tells me is that Emily's killer was smart enough to eliminate any traces of himself. It doesn't help to figure out whether or not he's our East Side rapist."

"Damn, you're stubborn. Mr. Silk Stockings didn't complete the assault on Annika Jelt, did he? I'm sure he wasn't even aware you'd be able to connect the cigarette outside on the stoop to that crime. Maybe Emily's killer is keen to the fact that if you don't match him to the old cases, you can't identify him or even link the two series. Maybe this is a leopard who actually has changed his spots."