"It's all in the details," he repeated to her, gripping the arm of the chair. "What is it you remember? Every bit of it is important."

"Perhaps it's silly. It's just a single word that I noticed."

"Which word?"

She looked at Mercer. "Ass. When he tried to get me to open the door, he told me to get my ass inside."

"Go on."

Annika was doing what we had watched hundreds of other victims do. She was putting herself back in the moment, watching a slow-motion replay of the attack in her mind's eye, and fighting the emotions that bubbled to the surface as she did.

"I can hear him say that, just before I braced myself against the wall with my leg," she said, reminding me of the footprint on her door. "It's what I believed at the time. I thought he was from England, or that he went to school there."

"Why?" Mercer asked.

"A lot of my friends in Sweden, they learned their English in boarding school or college. My accent is from speaking it in class, as a second language. But the British pronunciation is different from you Americans'."

Annika smiled for the first time since I had seen her greet Mercer from her hospital bed. "My boyfriend? He spent a summer at Oxford. He says the word 'ass' exactly the same way. It's silly, no? I didn't think at the time, but whenever that night comes back to me, I realized that's what was so jarring, when I heard the man speak that word."

Mercer and I both laughed. "Nothing's silly, Annika," he said.

One more possible feature for the task force to factor into the investigation. All of the other women had been asked about the perp's speech and none had described it as accented. Unlike many attackers who talk to their victims all through the assault, the Silk Stocking Rapist had not been a man of many words.

We said our good-byes and Mercer took Annika and her attendant down to help them into the ambulette that had transported them from the hospital. He returned minutes later.

"Back to the drawing board." He tossed the case folder onto my desk and had an uncharacteristically discouraged frown on his face.

"I'm not exactly convinced that we're looking for an Oxfordeducated rapist on the basis of one syllable," I said.

"Yeah, but we've still got to reanalyze the language in every case and reinterview each victim about every single word the guy said. Annika's too smart to ignore. The list of things to do seems to get longer every day rather than shorter."

"That's because you two just aren't as efficient as I am," Mike said, walking into the room and waving his right hand with a flourish. "Emily Upshaw. Grand larceny in the third degree."

"Nice work," I said, clapping my hands in appreciation.

"Bloomingdale's. Men's department. Designer clothes and accessories," Mike said, as he began to quote from the old complaint report. "'Undersigned did observe above-named defendant conceal three long-sleeved men's shirts, an alligator belt'-there's your felony price tag-'and six pairs of socks in a shopping bag and attempt to leave the store without paying for said items.'"

"Who's the guy? Was he locked up, too?"

"Don't jump ahead, Coop. Seems the cowardly weasel waited outside the store and sent Emily in to do the lifting."

"Well, did the cop see-?"

"Not a cop. Square badge made the collar," Mike said, referring to a store security guard. "There's nothing to suggest a codefendant was picked up."

"Was there any bail set at the arraignment?" I asked.

"Five hundred bucks," he said, flipping a few sheets of paper. "What did Emily's sister say about a professor helping her out? The guy who posted bail was named Noah Tormey. Says he taught English at NYU."

"He put the money up either because he truly wanted to help her or-"

"Or because he was the unapprehended beneficiary of the shirts and belt."

"Isn't there a detective's name anywhere in the file?" I asked, thinking of Emily's sister's other comments, as I opened the telephone book to see if there was a listing in Manhattan for Tormey.

"Yeah. You'll like this. Emily Upshaw had a change of address on the date the case was dismissed. She had moved out of her apartment on Washington Square and was living on West End Avenue. With a detective named Aaron Kittredge."

"What? She moved in with a detective?"

"Don't make it sound like drinking poison, Coop. Could be good for you."

Noah Tormey wasn't in the book. I replaced it on the shelf and logged on to the Internet. "Kittredge still on the job?"

"Nope. Retired five years ago. Pension bureau still sends his checks to the Upper West Side address. We got places to go and people to see, kid. Saddle up."

Laura walked in and handed Mike a fax. "Andy Dorfman called from the medical examiner's office. Wanted you to look at this when you came in."

"It's the initial report of his exam of some of the things taken out of the basement in the room with the skeleton. No surprises. First of all, the pathologists agree there's nothing to work with but bones, which don't reveal any gross trauma that could have caused death. Buried alive-entombed in that basement-still seems the most likely way they're going to rule on this one," Mike said. "The bricks are a couple of hundred years old. But the sealant is a cement compound that didn't exist until the last fifty years."

"Those chips Andy pointed out to you, were they really fingernails?"

"Yes, ma'am. And this confirms the nails picked up some of the cement scrapings," he read to me in a quiet voice. "That broad wanted out. "

He skimmed the rest of the paragraphs. "What's 'vermeil'?"

"Silver, with a gilt finish on top."

"That's all Andy can tell us about the ring. But he's also picked up something that was scratched into one of the panes of glass on the basement door."

"What door?" I asked. I had been so absorbed once I saw the skeleton in her coffin I hadn't even noticed much else.

"In the corner of the basement there was a small door with two little windows that looked out onto the yard. Somebody etched this into one of them." Mike smiled as he read from Dorfman's report.

"O Thou timid one, do not let thy

Form slumber within these unhallowed walls,

For herein lies-"

I interrupted him to finish the stanza. "…The ghost of an awful crime."

"Trust me. It's not from having my nose in a book."

"But how'd you know those lines?" Mike asked again. Mercer had returned to his office to go over the casework with another of the task force members. I was riding uptown with Mike to try to find Aaron Kittredge.

"Remember that I told you that Poe was a student at the University of Virginia for a year? He lived on the Lawn, which is still the most magnificent part of the campus, with pavilion homes where professors lived and taught class, and student rooms around a common green, all that Jefferson himself designed. Well, legend has it that he etched those very words into his own window before he left the school, and the original pane of glass with that inscription has been on display in the Rotunda there for as long as I can remember."

"So maybe the killer was a schoolmate of yours."

"There were a few sharks in my class but nobody that lethal. I think whoever he is, he's made a life study of Edgar Allan Poe," I said.

Kittredge's address placed us in front of a small tenement building off West End Avenue in the high Nineties. There was a doorbell with his name on it, but no one answered when Mike rang. It was six-thirty, and the chilled darkness caused us to retreat to the parked car and wait to see whether we'd get lucky.

Within the hour, a stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair turned the corner and walked up the stoop of the building.