Mercer was steaming. "Kittredge? Did you give her Kittredge's name?"

"Yes."

"What else? Did you talk about Monty?"

"Only that I don't know who he could be. I wasn't suggesting she try to find out."

"But she's desperate for information about her birth parents. For all we know you've sent her out in harm's way. Now how the hell do you help us find her again?" Mercer asked. "At least if you'd given her Tormey's name, maybe he'd have taken her in and we'd know she's safe."

Now the written words made more sense, came clearer on the page when Kroon answered Mercer's questions.

"Of course you didn't want her to get to Noah Tormey quite yet," I said, looking up at Kroon. "You were hoping to extort a little money from him in order to let his secret go to the grave with Emily."

From Kroon's apartment, I placed a call to Sally Brandon. Amelia had come to New York to look at graduate schools, but had never told the Brandons what she had learned about her birth mother nor about her efforts to reconnect to Emily's world. Sally's distress and pain rang through the telephone wires as clearly as her voice.

We waited while Sally tried to reach Amelia on her cell, without success. Mercer called Peterson to start in motion efforts to find the girl before she knocked on the wrong door.

Mercer and I stopped at Swifty's for a late lunch. Neither of us had received any messages from Mike, and we were both distracted by our thoughts of his grief.

"What do you make of Dr. Ichiko contacting Emily Upshaw the day she was murdered?" Mercer asked.

"I've been thinking about his last phone call-the one to the Raven Society. What if something Emily said in that conversation pointed him in that direction, caused him to make the call?"

"To Zeldin?"

"Or to anyone else who's a member. The number he called wasn't Zeldin's personal phone. It was just his recording on the answering machine. It can't be a coincidence that the doctor phoned the Raven Society. Maybe Emily unwittingly provided a clue that Ichiko followed up on. A fatal one."

I walked back from the restaurant at four in the afternoon, splitting with Mercer so that he could spend a long evening with Vickee and Logan. Grace's Marketplace featured jumbo stone crab claws flown in from Florida, and I took home half a dozen, already cooked and cracked, as an effortless attempt at feeding myself a good dinner.

I changed into casual clothes and stared at the display on my own answering machine. No messages. When I didn't take time to remind most of my friends that I thrived on human contact, they ceased calling, believing that I was too consumed by my cases to socialize.

I cocooned myself in the den with a couple of old movie DVDs and let the week's weariness overtake me. The dull headache I'd been lugging around with me since our visit to Poe Cottage had faded to an occasional thud. I picked at the meaty crabs when I got hungry and put myself to bed early after a few chapters of the latest biography of Marie Antoinette.

I was still claustrophobic and opened the window wider, despite the midwinter chill. I left the light on in the hallway, newly uncomfortable in the dark. My last thoughts were about Mike and how lost he must have been feeling.

The cop on the security desk was the only person in the lobby of the DA's office when I pushed through the revolving door at seven-fifteen. There was a lot of catching up to do. Getting in ahead of the troops would allow me two hours of work with no phone interruptions, and the added advantage of not having to see everyone's expression of surprise as they passed me in the hallway, back on the job at Hogan Place.

The routine business of the sex crimes unit had gone on under the meticulous watch of my deputy, Sarah Brenner. The in-house cold case experts, Catherine and Marisa, had left memos detailing the eight DNA hits that came back from CODIS in a single week, solving crimes committed as far back as eight years ago. The line assistants-forty of them who specialized in this sensitive work- had responded to crime scenes and hospital beds dozens of times, interviewed scores of witnesses at their desks, and answered "ready for trial"-the three magic words that jump-started the process of jury selection-on six felony sexual assault indictments.

I read all the new screening sheets, which summarized the facts of the cases for me, so that I could get a sense of every assault and each assistant's caseload. We had been working around the clock to stop the Silk Stocking Rapist, to identify Emily Upshaw's killer, and to put some flesh on the entombed skeleton in order to learn her backstory.

In the movies, cops and prosecutors working the big case never seemed to have to worry about other old or new business. In fact, burglars still climbed up fire escapes and raped sleeping victims, women who separated from abusive partners were stalked and assaulted as they left their jobs, college students were preyed on by peers who plied them with alcohol to make them more vulnerable, and children were molested by pedophiles in places they should have been most safe-their homes, houses of worship, and school grounds.

When Laura arrived at nine, I spent half an hour with her, dictating correspondence, listing phone messages for her to return, and organizing memos to be filed. The first paper to go out was a subpoena faxed to the protocol chief at the UN, to be followed by a hand-delivered original. In lieu of an appearance by 2P.M. at this afternoon's grand jury, he could make the home addresses of the requested representatives available to Mercer Wallace.

The morning filled up as Sarah and I reviewed the new cases and she advised me of the direction each was going, and the assistants who wanted to discuss their investigations rolled in and out in response to Laura's summons.

Mercer called me from the protocol office at 1:45. He was holding the list of residential addresses. "We're talking more than thirty countries," he said. "It looks like eleven of them fit nicely inside our geographic range."

"Is the lieutenant on board?"

"Yeah. He went to the top on this. The chief of d's is pulling in guys from the street crime unit to sit on each house starting with today's four-to-twelve shift." Those cops patrolled in plainclothes and unmarked cars, usually saturating high crime areas, without the obvious labels of the distinctive blue and white RMPs to give them away.

"Any other ideas?"

"Next call is to INS, to see if we can get pedigree information on all the family members who have visited or lived here." That would have been impossible to do a few short years ago, before the Immigration and Naturalization Services had computerized their systems.

"Great. Battaglia wants to conference everything we did last week at four. Tell Laura to pull me out if anything develops," I said. "And, Mercer, you hear anything from Mike?"

"I've left some voice mails on his cell, just rambling and telling him what we've been doing. No callbacks yet."

Pat McKinney walked into my office at 3:55. He told the assistant with whom I was working to come by later on and said Battaglia had asked him to pick me up. The meeting was long, as I had expected. Battaglia was a detail man, always wanting to have the most current theories of major investigations so that he could repay media favors by planting discreet leaks when he thought they were reliable enough to release.

"I don't care what time of night, Alex. You get anything connected to the UN, I'm the first to know."

"Of course."

"And the rest of the week?"

"We've got to go back to some of the people we talked to briefly-Gino Guidi, Noah Tormey, the men at the Botanical-"

I must have missed a signal from McKinney to the district attorney.