"How'd she show that?"

"She had a pretty vicious tongue, Mr. McKinney. I guess she'd heard every pickup line in the book so her comebacks were designed to cut through all the crap, separate the men from the boys. She kept me on a tight wire for the first couple of weeks, threatening to destroy anything in my life I cared about."

"Did you date her?" Pat asked. I knew that Mike was as ready to hijack the questioning and let Guidi tell his story as I was, but Pat plugged ahead.

"Aurora didn't date. She conquered. Took me home with her that night and-"

"Where did she live? On Third Street?"

Let him finish his goddamn sentences, I thought to myself.

"No. No, not where the bones were found. I don't know anything about that place. We went to a pad on Bleecker Street. I thought it was where she lived, but it turned out to be just a place she flopped for the night. Anyway, Aurora showed me some tricks," Guidi said, looking over his shoulder at me, as though to make sure he wasn't offending me. "Some experiences that were new to me. And then, of course, there were the drugs."

"What drugs?"

"Aurora introduced me to crack, Mr. McKinney. I was a big drinker at the time. Both my parents were alcoholics, so whatever genetic predisposition there was kind of doubled up in me. But I was in denial, like most alcoholics. I thought everyone in college drank like I did. Then I had my first job on Wall Street and got into the two-martini lunches of the eighties, to get me through the afternoon until I could start drinking in earnest. Went on to business school, where I mixed my liquor with the occasional line of coke."

"Why crack?"

Guidi leaned in and lighted a cigarette, throwing the match into a half-empty coffee cup. "Because Aurora Tait lit the pipe and put it in my mouth while she was lying naked next to me in bed. It seemed like a fine idea at the time."

"And then?"

"I guess you haven't talked with many crack addicts, have you, Mr. McKinney?"

McKinney had spent too much time doing administrative work behind his closed office door to know, from witnesses, the things the rest of the line assistants and cops heard firsthand every single day.

"I don't understand, Mr. Guidi."

"The first time I smoked crack I thought I had found nirvana. I wanted to do it again, that night, and every night thereafter. I felt a sense of freedom I'd never known before-no pressure, no anxiety- completely sensual and pleasurable. And like every truly addictive personality, I began by assuming that I could control my reaction to the drug. Denial worked just as well for crack cocaine as it did for alcohol."

"And Aurora was with you throughout all this?"

Guidi exhaled and laughed at the same time. "No. She was just the siren, luring me onto the rocks."

"Excuse me, what siren?"

McKinney was so literal, so rigid, he was undoubtedly thinking of the sound box of a police cruiser, not the legendary women of Greek mythology whose singing was the downfall of unwary sailors.

"She was a stone-cold junkie who supported her habit by selling drugs. She'd found the perfect niche, Mr. McKinney. She set herself up in the middle of Greenwich Village, cruising the campus and the bars and the parties to find guys like me-rich boys with generous allowances to spend on books and dates and work clothes. Only, me? I never made it to the bookstore. She had me hooked within two weeks of meeting her. Left me with an expensive habit and moved right on to the next guy."

"What happened to you?"

"I had a very sobering wake-up call about a year and a half later. I ran into the sharp end of a jackknife at four in the morning on Avenue C, desperate to find some crack. I was admitted to Bellevue Hospital and regained consciousness three days later. While I was convalescing, the shrink on intake was Dr. Wo-Jin Ichiko. He worked with me while I was in withdrawal and detoxing. Then he introduced me to SABA, the rehab program at the university."

Guidi paused and dropped his cigarette butt in the cup. "The prick probably saved my life. But today, I'll be honest with you, I was ready to kill him."

"Because?"

"Because I've spent two decades of my life trying to put the pieces back together. I've got a very understanding wife, who met me fifteen years ago. I flunked out of business school while all this drug involvement was going on, so I had to claw my way in by starting from scratch. I worked in the mail room at Credit Suisse until I could make enough money to get back into school. But my kids have no idea that for almost three years I lived like a derelict and came close to throwing every advantage I'd been given to the wind. And I bet they'd understand and accept it a whole helluva lot better than my partners and most of my clients."

"When's the last time you saw Dr. Ichiko?" McKinney asked.

"Eighteen, twenty years ago."

"And you haven't spoken to him either?"

Guidi tapped another cigarette out of his pack and lit up. "Yeah, I did. Last night. I called his house."

"You had his home number?"

"No. I called the office and got his service. I told them I was a patient with an emergency and they patched me through."

"Did you have a conversation with him?"

"When I stopped cursing at him, I guess you'd call it that."

"What did you say?"

"I called him every name in the book. I thought there was some kind of privilege between doctors and their patients. I didn't know why the hell he was going to go on television and give out the name of someone he treated years ago. I don't need this kind of shit, this kind of publicity, coming out now-not for my family, not for my clients."

"Why were you so concerned about Aurora Tait?" McKinney asked.

"I never said I was," Guidi replied. "But if a medical doctor could be paid by a television show to make Aurora's name public, what was to stop him from identifying the rest of us?"

"Well, she's dead, so the question of privilege-"

Guidi leaned forward and interrupted McKinney. "You're damn right she's dead and it doesn't make a bit of difference in her sorry case. Nobody even missed her when she drifted out of our lives, so it's nice to know she can finally be laid to rest. But the last thing I need to see on some tabloid television show is a feature about my own wasted youth and drug addiction."

"The girl was buried alive, Mr. Guidi. Somebody had to hate her awful bad to wish that kind of ending."

Gino Guidi covered his eyes with his hand and leaned his head back. He actually seemed shocked. "I saw the news story. I just figured she ran into the wrong junkie, made the same mistakes I did," he said, now rubbing a finger along the length of his scar. "That's chilling."

"Did you threaten Dr. Ichiko?" McKinney had to change direction to show his authority.

Guidi tossed his head and took a draw on his cigarette. "I get it. He taped me. Yeah, I threatened him. So what? I told him I'd nail him, one way or another. I told him I'd sue his Oriental ass from here to Hong Kong."

Mike spoke for the first time. "Rugs are Oriental, Mr. Guidi. People are Asian. PC enough for you, Coop?"

Guidi snapped his head around to look at Mike. "I told him he was dead meat if he messed with me."

A sharp rap on the glass pane startled me. Without waiting for an invitation, someone pushed open the door and walked in.

"Cut it out, McKinney." The speaker was Roy Kirby, from the white-shoe law firm in which he was a name partner. "Give me some place to talk to my client. Gino, don't say another word."