“Okay, so Dr. DuPre and you went to the second floor-then what happened?”

Harper’s version dovetailed with DuPre’s from that point on. “I mean, once I saw the blood I thought immediately of Gemma. Has he admitted anything yet?”

“Let me askyou, Dr. Harper, did you hear him say anything about Dr. Dogen or the assault?”

“No, he barely spoke in my presence. But I ran down the hall to use the telephone. He wasn’t making much sense between the time I got back to him and the time your detective got there. Man seems unstable to me.”

“Did you know Dr. Dogen well?”

“Depends on what you mean by that. She wasn’t an easy-”

Lieutenant Peterson opened the door. “Excuse me, Alex. Sarah’s here, and I think we’re almost ready to go with some stand-ins. And keep away from the windows in the squad room. Somebody’s flapping his mouth to the press. You got a couple of camera crews setting up in front of the building and if they could get a shot of you up here I’m sure they’d love it.”

“Thanks, Dr. Harper. Sorry to interrupt you. Would you mind waiting across the hall again? We’ll try to get back to you as soon as we finish up some of this other business.”

“Have a slice of pizza, Doc,” Chapman said as he got to his feet and gave Coleman Harper a slap on the back. “We got some homeless guys watching the ball game inside who could use a good checkup. Maybe you and Dr. DuPre could make yourselves useful.”

WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?“ SARAH asked, already set up at a desk with her laptop computer.

“Try cranking out a couple of warrants for those two shopping carts. One of them belongs to Pops, the other one to a friend of his. See if Ramirez and Losenti can help you with the probable cause-they know a lot more about the facts than I do at this point. Peterson wants to run some lineups, and I may need help interviewing a couple of the witnesses if they make IDs. Pace yourself, please, will you?”

I left her in the squad room and walked down the hallway to the lineup cubicle. Wallace and Chapman were trying to arrange Pops and the five fillers in positions for the viewing. Jerry McCabe was handing each of them a clean, V-necked surgical blouse so all of their clothing would be similar.

Pops had been relieved of the bloody pants and was sitting in the fourth chair from the door holding a placard with his number printed on it and talking to himself.

“No good, Jerry,” I said as I scanned the pack. “The two closest to me look much too young.”

“Yeah, well,you try finding stand-ins at this hour of the night. They’re not exactly throwing themselves at me.”

“Send one of the uniformed guys down to that all-night drugstore on the corner of Lex. Get some talcum powder. I’d just like to gray them up a bit so they look a little more like Pops, okay?”

Mercer was telling the array what they had to do to earn their five dollars for the night. Hold their numbers in front of their chests, on their feet when he told them to be, approach the mirror and stand before it for as long as directed, facing front before turning to display each profile, then come back and sit in their seats. A half-hour’s work as a lineup extra would keep these guys in Thunderbird wine for the night.

I walked out to check on Sarah. She was pounding away at her laptop computer and looked up to tell me that Pops’s clothing was on its way to the lab for analysis.

Anna Bartoldi was still manning the hotline phone in the corner of the squad room. She got up from her desk and passed me on her way out to the soda machine. “Dinner?”

I waved Sarah along and the three of us crossed the hallway to pick up a soda from the vending machine and munch on a slice of lukewarm pizza. “Calls still coming in?” I asked Anna.

“I’m up over three hundred fifty. So far, four women have turned in their husbands and six suspect their boyfriends. It’ll slow up for me tomorrow once word gets out we got a candidate.”

I put down the pizza and took the soda can with me when I heard Mercer’s voice booming out my name. When I got back to the lineup room, he was sprinkling Johnson’s baby powder on the heads of the younger fillers and I viewed them through the window to compare them to their more mature companions. “Much better, Mercer. Let’s not waste any more time.”

Peterson’s men had assembled four people to look at the array. One was a third-year student at Minuit who had worked in the sixth-floor library-down the hall from Dogen’s office-until one in the morning on the night she was killed. Two others were the cleaning staff who covered that shift, and the last was a nurse’s aide who sneaked into the medical school on her breaks so she could use the phones at the reception desk to call and talk to her boyfriend at odd times throughout the night.

I stood in the back of the darkened viewing room while Wallace and McCabe led each of the witnesses through in turn. None of the group looked familiar to the medical student or the nurse’s aide. But both of the women who cleaned the professors’ offices each night recognized the man who called himself Pops.

I left the room and told Mike to bring the two housekeepers in to me, one at a time, in Peterson’s office.

I took out a fresh pad and headed it with the date and time: 11:45P.M. Pedigree information on each had already been documented by the detectives who had canvassed the hospital, so I reviewed the Xerox of the notes that told me that Ludmila Grascowicz and Graciela Martinez were both assigned to clean the fifth- and sixth-floor offices in the Minuit Medical Center.

Both women were immigrants-Ludmila from Poland and Graciela from the Dominican Republic. The former had been at Mid-Manhattan for three years and the latter for six months. Ludmila had requested a change of assignment to day duty after the murder of Gemma Dogen and Graciela had resigned altogether. Both of them knew Dogen by sight since she was often around in the midnight-to-eight shift that they had worked. Neither had much to do with her because they had strict instructions never to enter Dogen’s office during the night. She didn’t like to be disturbed when she was doing her research and writing so her chambers were always cleaned by the day staff and only if her door had been left open. The doctor didn’t like intrusions and she didn’t like anyone touching her files.

Ludmila’s accent was as thick as her waist and her ankles. Her chest was heaving as she tried to answer my questions, making the sign of the cross after every response. Yes, during the last few weeks she had often seen the man who was holding the number 4 in the lineup. He had tried to talk to her several times but she was unable to understand his speech. She came on duty at eleven-thirty Monday evening and had encountered the man in the stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors. No, there was nothing unusual about his appearance or his clothing. But, then, she usually averted her eyes when she approached him since she had repeatedly complained to security about his presence after hours in the medical college. One last sign of the cross, and an extra blessing for Dr. Dogen, and Ludmila had no more to add.

Graciela’s jumpiness made Ludmila seem almost calm by contrast. She shared responsibility for cleaning the same two floors. Although she and Ludmila rarely communicated with each other, they had joined forces to complain about Pops’s nocturnal wanderings. The water cup that someone had given the young woman to fortify her for her conversation with me was spilling its supply over the edge onto the desk where I was taking notes because her hand was shaking so badly. Graciela was certain she had seen this man on the sixth floor after midnight in the early hours of Tuesday morning coming out of the men’s room. She didn’t call security because they never listened to her when she tried to make herself heard. But she went immediately to the library to clean there since she knew it was likely that at least one of the students would be burning the midnight oil.