There was only one anomaly.

"Hey, Mercer. The snowstorm two weeks ago, do you remember what night it was?"

"It was a Monday. I don't remember the date but it was my RDO"-police jargon for regular day off-"and I was home after the weekend. Why?"

"Give me a minute."

Mercer's Metro man had followed his usual route in the morning, going back uptown from Fifty-first Street a bit earlier than usual, at five-thirty in the afternoon. An hour later, he got on the southbound train again at Seventy-seventh Street.

At ten that same evening, the rider took his first bus ride using this pass. All his other travel had been in the tube. He boarded the M2 on First Avenue, scanning the MetroCard in at the Forty-fourth Street stop.

All the details began to click into place. The secure residence on the Upper East Side; the physical description of the clean-cut, well-spoken assailant; Annika's good ear-picking out a single word that sounded like the accent of an upper-class British student; a rapist who disappeared from the city-perhaps the country-for four years before returning; a compulsive criminal whose DNA didn't seem to be in any data bank in America; and a MetroCard from the perp's pocket that suggested he entered a bus in front of the only buildings that stand on the east side of First Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.

"John frigging Doe. You want to nail the bastard, Mercer? Call the squad and get somebody over to the United Nations stat. Find out whether there was a reception, a speech, a party-whatever was going on the night of that storm. Get the list of whoever attended-spouses, children, staff. Get the address of every ambassador and delegate who lives in Manhattan."

Mercer was watching me in the rearview mirror, smiling for the first time in two days.

"Take it to the bank, gentlemen. John Doe is the son of an African diplomat."

Mike didn't even seem to be listening to me.

Mercer was interested in my idea. "Break it down for me, Alex."

"We're talking about the comfort zone of the perp, right? We've been looking at black men who work on the Upper East Side- restaurants, hospitals, high-rise buildings. Clerical jobs, dishwashers, janitorial staff, and all the other menial positions. Now think about how many of the diplomatic corps and consulate employees associated with the United Nations live in town houses in the exact same neighborhood. Do you have any idea how many African diplomats and their families are living there?"

"The map has changed so many times since I was in college, I'm embarrassed to say I can't even tell you how many countries are in the UN."

"Coop's stretching on this one," Mike said.

"Maybe so. Maybe I'm too high up the ladder, but these missions all have big staffs, and most staff members have families here, even U.S. nationals who live in the zone."

"What else?" Mercer said. "I better give our profiler a nudge. See if he's ready with his geographic jeopardy spot, and if your theory works with it."

"This guy is well dressed and carefully groomed. If you trust Annika, he may even have been educated in England, like so many families from the territories of the former British Empire," I said. "That one little word she picked up had me thinking this guy didn't learn English in America. It fits so well with a connection to the UN."

"That could be why his DNA isn't in any data bank in the States."

"I'm figuring it can't be an ambassador or high-ranking diplomat himself, just 'cause the age we're going for is too young for that," I said. "But suppose his father is posted here. The son gets a job as an investment banker-an office on Park that fits with the subway stop on East Fifty-first Street and with hanging out at the bar at Primola with a handful of yuppies, yapping on their cell phones the night Giuliano made him."

Mercer picked up the thread. "Maybe someone on the father's staff got wise to the fact that the kid's got a problem. Maybe even tags his comings and goings to the nights of the attacks, back four years ago when the newspaper coverage was saturating the city. Shows Papa the sketch that was plastered all over the East Side and that convinces the father to send him back to the mother country."

"The rapes stop happening for a few years. The father doesn't have any reason to know the pathology of a rapist. Figures his son has outgrown the problem and decides it's time to ease his way back into town," I said.

"That's a lot of data to read into a few MetroCard entries, but it makes as much sense as every other shadow we've been chasing. I'll get on it tomorrow."

It was after 7P.M. when the guys dropped me at my apartment. We had talked Mike into taking time off, spending a few days with Val's brother when he came into town to close up her apartment at the end of the week. I had never seen him look as lost as he did when the car pulled away from my building, and I wonderd when I would hear from him again.

There were so many messages of concern about Mike on my answering machine that it had run out of space. I played them all back and settled in to return some of the calls.

The last conversation was with Joan Stafford, who adored Mike and spent some portion of each of our daily phone calls inquiring about him. I didn't repeat everything that had happened during the last few days, but I confided in her about the engagement band that Mike had heaved into the ocean.

"Did you know he had bought Val a ring?"

"Not until he put it in my hand. I-uh, I hadn't really thought he was that close to a proposal. He seemed like the last guy in the world to make that kind of commitment."

"Yeah, it would have changed everything between the two of you. The way you work together, the way he protects you, the joking-"

"That's just ridiculous. His marriage was bound to have happened sooner or later. It wouldn't have made the least bit of difference on the job. Look at the way Mercer and Vickee have got it together. We're still-"

"It's me you're talking to, sweetie. Didn't the sight of that ring make you just a little bit jealous?"

"Jealous? Are you crazy, Joan? My heart just breaks for Mike, seeing him like this." I tried to sort through my emotions and reassure myself that one of my very closest girlfriends hadn't seen something more clearly than I had.

"He's going to need you to get him through this."

"Right now he's pushing everyone away. I don't even know how to begin to help him."

"Trust me, Alex. When he's ready for a shoulder to lean on, it's going to be yours."

I called P. J. Bernstein's deli to get the last delivery at nine o'clock, and ate half a turkey sandwich before abandoning it in favor of a comforting bath.

I ran the water steaming hot and filled it with a fresh-scented bubble bath. I poured myself a scotch, then stopped in the den to look at my bookshelves. There was an old volume of Poe-not the stories, just the collected poems-and I pulled it down to take with me as I soaked and sulked.

My mood was maudlin. I couldn't blame Mike for shutting me out, yet it was difficult to be kept at arm's length when he was so very alone. He would have to go through much of his grieving by himself, and I understood that completely.

I turned up the jets on the whirlpool and started flipping the pages. So many of the poems were written to dead and dying women-various names, all meant to be Poe's Virginia-and so many had as their theme the loss of a loved one. I started to read them aloud, one by one, matching the somber cadences to my mood.

I finally came to "The Raven." It had been years since I had read the poem in its entirety. The editor of the anthology had written an introduction, proclaiming that this work had made an impression that had probably never been surpassed by any single piece of American poetry. More than one hundred and fifty years had gone by since its publication. Reflecting on it, I viewed that a stunning fact.