"There's that word 'lucky' again. I was afraid we were hopeless on the serology because there was no semen. Thaler's got Annika's blood on one of the cigarette stubs. That's why he wanted to know where we found them. Looks like the guy stepped on it on his way out of the building, with wet fluid still in the creases of his shoes from where he dropped her on the landing."

"You heard something else you didn't like."

"They were able to work up a profile from the saliva on the same butt, too. I'd say it's our man, without a doubt."

It would be a stretch for Mercer to get excited about a random item that wasn't even found inside the apartment hallway, where the crime occurred. He knew better.

"Didn't you just say there were four-"

"I'm not talking about a foreign profile, Alex. It's a very familiar one. Three of the cigarettes are useless. The butt with both blood and saliva on it was dropped there-maybe on his way up the steps when he spotted his prey-by someone you and I haven't seen in a very long time."

"We know him?" Someone we sent away who got out of jail, I expected Mercer to tell me. Someone we'd put away who was back to haunt us. A paroled convict who would be easy to track down through new sex offender monitoring laws. The surprise chance of something breaking in our favor so early shot through me like a burst of adrenaline.

"If I knew who he was, if I could tell you his name, then I wouldn't be cruising you downtown right now. I'd be knocking on his door and throwing the cuffs on him tonight," he said. "The bastard beat us cold four years ago then disappeared long enough for me to begin to believe he'd come to his own violent end. Now here he is again, obviously more dangerous than before."

"You think you know-?"

"I do know, Alex. Thaler just confirmed it for me. The Silk Stocking Rapist is back in business."

I looked at the grid of the Manhattan street map mounted on poster board behind my desk and pressed a red plastic pushpin into the location of Annika Jelt's apartment. The distance between the building in which she had been attacked and the one in which I lived was less than the width of my fingernail, barely five blocks away.

I turned around to face the district attorney of New York County. "I'm ready to go to the grand jury tomorrow and start taking testimony."

"You've got to catch the creep first, Alex. You have to know who committed the crimes before you indict anyone for them."

"I do know who he is, boss."

"You got a name? You come up with something I'm not aware of?"

"I've got a DNA profile. I have five women-"

"What, from four years ago?"

You can interrupt me but you can't shut me down. "I said we've got five women whose cases were matched up to each other's by the serology lab and four more victims of attempts that scream his MO loud and clear, even without a trace of physical evidence. Now we have a fresh hit."

Paul Battaglia turned away from me and took a step toward the door. "So I'm supposed to tell the press that this maniac is back on the loose, and I've decided to indict some indecipherable genetic markers to make the public feel safe? Come back to me when Mercer has someone in handcuffs. Give me a name, a date of birth, and a mug shot I can plaster all over the newspapers. Am I right, Detective?"

The expression on Mercer's face was obscured by Battaglia's cigar smoke.

"I'd like your permission to indict him."

"Indict who, Alex?"

"John Doe. I want to charge this rapist as John Doe. Would you just stay here long enough to listen to what we've put together?" What I really wanted to tell him was not to be so dismissive of me without letting me make my case, but even after running his sex crimes prosecution unit for almost ten years, there were some lines I couldn't cross with Paul Battaglia.

"You've done this before, haven't you? Why do you need me-"

"I'm not wasting your time, Paul. We've only done it twice here, on cases that didn't have any ink. No press coverage. Sort of slipped it under the radar screen."

It had been a risky move the first time I decided to indict a rapist when all we knew about his identification was the unique combination of alleles that made up his DNA profile. No flesh-and-blood image to go with it, no clue what his name was or where to find him. I wasn't even sure Battaglia had been aware that I'd tried the novel approach.

"Once the commissioner goes public tonight with the fact that the Silk Stocking Rapist is back, you'll have the entire Upper East Side squeezing you for a solution."

I had his attention now. Maybe Battaglia's election campaign slogan assured Manhattan's citizens that you can't play politics with people's lives, but he would again be on the ballot in November and vulnerable to concerns about every spike in violent crime statistics.

He leaned against the doorframe and talked out of the side of his mouth, his cigar wedged firmly in the center. "What advantage does it give me, this John Doe indictment?"

"Two things. This new case isn't the issue. But the older attacks took place more than four years ago. If we don't get the guy soon, the statute of limitations runs out on those and he can't be charged for any of the cases."

Unlike murder, which could be prosecuted whenever the killer was caught, sexual assault cases in New York had to be brought within five years of the occurrence of the crime, barring special circumstances that the courts had recently allowed.

"So by charging him now, this, uh, this-"

"This John Doe, whose genetic profile we literally spell out in place of the defendant's name on the front of the indictment, has a combination of DNA alleles that the chief serologist is going to tell you is expected to be found in only one in a trillion African- American men. Once the squad puts a face and name to this evidence, I promise you we'll get a conviction on all counts."

Mercer's back was against a row of file cabinets in my crowded office. His soft, deep voice added the latest news from the NYPD's press office. "The commissioner's called a conference for seven o'clock. He's releasing the composite sketch from the last reign of terror. This new victim won't be able to work with the artist for days, but we don't have to worry about that with the match Thaler gave us. All of the women from four years ago signed off on the accuracy of the sketch back then. Same face as last time, same skills."

"When we get him, we make sure he never sees daylight again," I said. "He goes away for this case and anything else that he does from this point on. And trust me, Paul, he isn't stopping with Annika Jelt."

Mercer agreed with me. "He's way too frenzied now. Coop's plan gets him for every attack the first time he was in town. We beat the statute and ask for a sentence of life imprisonment-plus how's another two hundred fifty years for good measure?"

"Annika's mother and father are flying in from Sweden tomorrow. All she wants to do is go home, and all her parents want is to get her out of big, bad Gotham City. I've got to take her testimony as soon as she's able to move from the hospital bed."

"What else? You said there were two advantages to indicting Mr. Doe."

"We enter the profile in the data bank. Upload it to CODIS." The Combined DNA Index System collected results from both convicted offender databases and unsolved casework from every contributing lab in the country. Our evidence was routinely transmitted to Albany as well as to the federal system.

Battaglia shifted his position and chewed the cigar over to the corner of his mouth. "Why isn't it already in CODIS from the time the old cases were tested?"

Mercer spoke. "We weren't linked to the feds when the first cases occurred."