"And she came to the station house?" Mike asked.

"You mean did she come that same night, when she should have?" Kittredge sneered. "Yeah, about four months too late. Not that night, not the next day."

"Why not?" I asked, speaking for the first time.

"Typical broad bullshit. Emily didn't think it was possible. Such a sensitive soul, the guy was. Good family roots, poetic genius, brilliant student, kind to animals. She laid it off to the white powder he shoved up his nostrils."

"She stayed with him?"

"Yeah. Then things got more desperate after the shoplifting. Truth is I never knew whether she was really afraid of him, or he just dumped her and she had nowhere to go."

"How'd she wind up with you?" Mike asked.

"She told her lawyer-Legal Aid, he was-that she had a friend in the police department. He called and told me that if she had a transient address like the Y, the DA's office wouldn't dismiss the case. He just asked me to let her use my crib for a month."

"Did you and she-?"

"None of your fucking business, Chapman."

"But you actually investigated the case?" I asked. "I mean, did you talk to other people in his SABA group?"

Kittredge looked at Mike while he talked to me. "Hard to do. By the time Emily got to me, school was out for the summer. The rehab meetings had been confidential-you know the law, drug treatment stuff is privileged-so the college didn't have any record of who attended."

"All you had was a half-assed confession, fueled by cocaine," Mike said.

"With no body, no crime scene, and not even a suspect I could put my hands on. I kicked it around for a few months," Kittredge said.

Probably, I thought, for as long as Emily was putting out for him.

"Then my boss took me off it. He figured that she was just squealing on a guy who had dumped her and we couldn't go digging up ground all over Manhattan unless we had a report of somebody missing."

"You keep a file on it?" Mike asked.

"There was the usual paperwork I did in the squad, back before we had computers."

"Take any of your case folders with you? Something that might have names on-"

"For what? My memoirs?" Kittredge laughed as he walked to the front door and put his hand on the knob.

"You mind if we come back to you when we have more information?" Mike said, realizing the opportunity for conversation was about to be over.

"Try not to waste my time. Emily wasn't known for her taste in men. She probably picked up one too many barflys with a rough edge. She just couldn't keep off the juice, I guess."

We were back out on the stoop, headed for the car, when Mike's cell phone rang. He opened it to say hello, and I could see the condensation of his breath in the air. It made him look as though he was as fired up inside as I figured him to be.

"Where? Does Scotty Taren know?" Mike asked, getting answers that he liked. "Thanks, Hal. I owe you big-time."

I waited for him to unlock the car and let me inside. He slammed the door and pursed his lips. "That was Hal Sherman. Looks like all the pressure of going public with a patient's history may have been too much for Dr. Ichiko. He killed himself today. They just found his body up in the Bronx."

"Why did Hal call you?" I asked. "It's Scotty's case now."

"'Cause Scotty's a stand-up guy. When Hal reached out to him, Scotty said to play dumb and give me the first heads-up. After all, I was in the basement after the skeleton was discovered and Hal took the photos. So it would make sense for him to have to call me in order to find out that Taren's got the case now. And why should I know McKinney forbade him to talk to you about it?"

"Don't think you're leaving me behind on this one."

"McKinney'll go nuts if you show up at the scene, Coop."

"That fact alone is enough to make me want to go twice as badly. You're always telling me how much I'd love the Bronx. So far I've limited most of my experience to Yankee Stadium. Now's your chance to show me the borough's charms."

Mike had gone to college at Fordham and loved the rich history of the borough, once the seventeenth-century farmland of Swedish-born Jonas Bronck, the first European settler to live on the mainland northeast of Manhattan.

"Yeah, but a death scene wasn't my vision of an introduction."

"I guess Crime Factor will have to go with a rerun for tonight's show. Dr. Ichiko won't be revealing the identity of our skeleton on this episode. C'mon, let's see what happened to this greedy shrink. Where to?"

Mike shifted into gear and pulled out into the traffic. "The gorge."

"What?"

"The Bronx River Gorge."

"Never heard of it," I said, as he took advantage of the early evening lull in traffic to race across town to the Triborough Bridge, and up the Major Deegan Expressway to wind through what to me was the unfamiliar territory of the Bronx.

"You've never been to the Botanical Gardens?"

"Not since I was a kid." I had grown up in the suburbs north of the city and remembered visits to the gardens with my mother, who took me there for the brilliant spring displays of roses and the seasonal show of dozens of orchid varieties that she so loved.

"That's where we're headed. The gorge is inside the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. The Fordham campus is right across the street."

"I know the hothouses and the-"

"No flowerpots, Coop. This is part of the Bronx River. You know that's the only freshwater river in New York City?"

"What about the Hudson, or the East River?"

"They're tidal estuaries, Coop. You got to pay more attention to your surroundings."

For much of the ride, Mike gave me the early history of the area. After its discovery by Henry Hudson and its control by the Dutch West India Company as New Netherland, there were frequent and violent clashes with the local Indian tribes.

"You would have had your little prosecutorial hands full here, even in the 1640s."

"Doing what?"

"Ever hear of Anne Hutchinson?"

"Yes. She was exiled from Massachusetts by the Puritans. Brought a whole little colony somewhere down here because of religious intolerance."

"This is it. Chief Wampage was a bit peeved about the slaughter of some of his people, so he made his way to Hutchinson's house and whacked her right in the forehead with his tomahawk. Scalped her and her kids."

By the time we reached Bronx River Park, I had a thumbnail sketch of the county's major military skirmishes, from the revolutionary fortifications at the King's Bridge to the Battle of Pell's Point.

At the entrance to the park, long after closing time, a uniformed officer opened the gate when Mike flashed his badge. He directed us south and told us that the Crime Scene Unit and some grounds-keepers were waiting for us there, half a mile inside.

My childhood memories of sun-filled gardens with vividly colored flowers bore no resemblance to the vast, darkened park that we had entered. There were occasional streetlamps along the route, but the roadway was surrounded on both sides by a tall, dense growth of trees. The wind caused tall shadows to dance in front of our headlights, and the sprawling grounds seemed an eerily sinister place.

Some snakelike curves in the road and half a mile later, Hal Sherman waved us down and came over to open my car door.

"I doubt you were ever a Boy Scout, Chapman," he called out over my head, "but you might wanna rub a couple of sticks together and start a little fire if you're thinking of keeping me out here any longer. I can't stand much more of this cold."

"That the doctor?" Mike asked, pointing at an ambulance parked at the curb.

"Not a pretty picture."

Mike held his arm straight at me, palm out. He walked to the open end, said something to the two EMTs, and they unzipped the black body bag. He leaned in with a flashlight and studied the head and chest of the dead man.