“Oh, no, you gotta save me from him,” Mike responded. “Son of a senator. That’s about as useful as having my mother at the station house. Fremont ’s a whackjob of the first order-I don’t think he’d know probable cause if it bit him in the ass.”

Chapman often did a stand-up comic routine at the bar at Forlini’s, the courthouse watering hole, with the monthly calendar and chart in his hand, calling out the name of the assigned assistants and reliving some embarrassing episode from the career of each of us as he rolled off the dates. Fremont was an easy target, one of those brilliant students with impeccable academic credentials that simply failed to translate to the courtroom. Everyone assumed he had been hired as a “contract,” because his father, the former senior senator from Indiana, had been Paul Battaglia’s roommate at Columbia Law School.

“Or if you wait until a few minutes after eight, you can have Laurie Deitcher,” I countered, aware that she would be responsible for decisions on anything coming in during the next twenty-four hours.

“The Princess? Never again, Blondie. The only time I had a high-profile case with her, it was a disaster. During the lunch hour, instead of prepping witnesses and outlining her cross-examinations, she’d make us wait in the hallway while she plugged in her hot rollers and troweled on some more makeup. Then she’d belly up to the jury box like she was Norma Desmond ready for her close-up. She looked great for the cameras, but the friggin‘ perp walked. Nope. You just call Battaglia and tell him Wallace and I woke you up in the middle of the night because you were the only person who could answer our questions. Hang tough with him, Cooper. This is your case.”

“Like what kind of questions, Mike?”

“Like can you tell if she was raped before she was killed or after? Like does establishing the time of death have anything to do with the speed at which the sperm deteriorates, because of interference from her body fluids?”

“Now you’re talking my language. Of course he’ll let me keep a case like that. What do you need from me?”

“I think you’ll want to get down here as soon as you can. Have your video guys meet us, too. The Crime Scene Unit has already processed the room and taken photos, but they had to move really fast. I’m just worried we all may have overlooked something that might turn out to be important, so I’d like your crew to go over the whole area and record it. Once the story breaks, the place’ll be crawling with press and we won’t be able to preserve it.”

“Back up, Mike, and start at the top. Where are you?”

“ Mid-Manhattan Medical Center. Sixth floor of the Minuit Building.” East Forty-eighth Street, right off the FDR Drive. The oldest and largest medical compound in the city. The victim must have been transported there for an attempt at treatment after she was found.

“Well, where shall I meet you? Where’s the scene?”

“I just told you. The sixth floor at Mid-Manhattan.”

“You mean the victim was killed in the hospital?”

“Raped and killed in the hospital. Big wheel. Head of the neurosurgery department at the medical college, brain surgeon, professor. Name’s Gemma Dogen.”

After ten years at my job, there were very few things that surprised me, but this news was shocking.

I had always thought of hospitals as sanctuaries, places for healing the sick and wounded, comforting and easing the days of the terminally ill. I had been in and out of Mid-Manhattan countless times, visiting witnesses as well as training medical personnel in the treatment of sexual assault survivors. Its original red-brick buildings, almost a century old, had been restored to recapture the look of the antiquated sanitarium, and generous patrons of more recent times had lent their family names to a handful of granite skyscrapers that housed the latest in medical technology and a superb teaching facility-the Minuit Medical College.

The familiar knots that tied and untied themselves in my stomach whenever I received news of a senseless crime and a sacrificed human existence took over control from the pounding noise inside my head. I began to conjure mental images of Dr. Dogen, and scores of questions-about her life and death, her career and family, her friends and enemies-followed each other into my mind before I could form the words with my mouth.

“When did it happen, Mike? And how-”

“Sometime in the last fifteen to twenty hours-I’ll fill you in when you get here. We got the call just after midnight. Stabbed six times. Collapsed a lung, must have hit a couple of major organs. The killer left her for dead, soaked in blood, but she actually held on for a bit. We got her as a ‘likely to die.’ And she did, before we got anywhere near the hospital.”

Likely to die. An unfortunate name for a category of cases handled by Manhattan ’s elite homicide squad. Victims whose condition is so extreme when police officers reach the crime scene that no matter what herculean efforts are undertaken by medics and clerics, the next stop for these bodies is undoubtedly the morgue.

Stop wasting time, I chided myself. You’ll know more than you ever wanted to know about all of this after a few hours with Chapman and Wallace.

“I can be there in less than forty-five minutes.”

I got out of bed and closed the window, raising the Duette shade to look out from my apartment on the twentieth floor of an Upper East Side high-rise across the city as it began to come awake on this gray and grisly day. I have always enjoyed the crisp chill of autumn, leading as it does into the winter holiday season and the snowy blankets of January and February. My favorite months are April and May, when the city parks blossom with the green buds of springtime and the promise of warmer days of summer. So as I scanned the horizon and saw only a bleak and cheerless palette, I figured that Gemma Dogen might also have scoffed at the great poets and agreed with my personal view that March, in fact, is the cruelest month.

SORRY, MA’AM, THERE’S NO PARKING IN front of the hospital.“

The uniformed cop was waving me away from the curb as I pulled in shortly before 7A.M., so I rolled down the window of my brand-new Grand Cherokee to explain my purpose and knock ten minutes off my arrival time by avoiding the multistory underground parking lot which was two blocks farther south.

Before I could speak, a gruff voice barked out at the young recruit and my head snapped around to see Chief McGraw slamming the door of his unmarked car. “Let her be, officer. Unless you want to find yourself walking a beat on Staten Island. Pull it in behind my driver, Alex, and stick your plate in the windshield. I assume we’re headed for the same place.”

Dammit. Danny McGraw was no happier to see me heading for a murder scene than I was to see him. Once police brass were on the location, they liked to tighten their control of the circumstances and not yield to direction from prosecutors. He’d probably berate Chapman for getting to me so early, preferring that we not learn about cases like this one until he had a complete opportunity to brief the Commissioner. I fished my laminated NYPD vehicle identification placard out of my tote and wedged it above the steering wheel facing out, announcing my presence as official police business. The numbered tags were harder to get than winning lottery tickets, and most of my fellow bureau chiefs considered them the best perk of our job.

I stepped out of the Jeep into a puddle of filthy slush and hustled to catch up with McGraw so that I could follow him through security and up to meet the detectives. The square badgers-cop slang for unarmed guards who stood watch at hospitals and department stores, movie theaters, and ball games-looked more alert than usual this morning, and were themselves flanked by real police at each information booth and elevator bank. Everyone we passed recognized the Chief of Detectives and greeted him formally as we strode quickly down the enormous central corridor of the medical center, through four sets of swinging double doors, until we were led by a detective I had never met before into the hallway marked Minuit Medical College.