“She was still alive?”

“Using that term very loosely, kid. Body was like Swiss cheese-lost most of her blood. I’d bet she was unconscious when the killer left her. Could have been lying there for hours, then got a last spurt of oxygen good for a few gasps, which is what the guard heard. Doctors came running up from the ER and tried to hook her up to life support and get her into surgery to inflate the lung and size up the internal damage but she was too far gone for that. Nothing could have saved her. ‘Likely to die’ was a gross understatement of Dr. Dogen’s condition.”

“ME give you a time the stabbing occurred?”

“What do you think this is, the movies? After the autopsy, and after I interview the coworkers and friends and neighbors who tell me when they last saw Gemma and spoke with her, and after I tell the pathologist that I’ve narrowed the killer’s window of opportunity down to fifteen minutes on the day the good doctor disappeared, he’ll look me in the eye with great sincerity and give me exactly the time I just spoon-fed to him.”

A single professional woman, no children, no pets, no one to depend on her for contact. I tried to push any personal comparisons out of my mind and concentrate on the facts Mike was feeding me, but I kept bringing up the image of my own corpse, lying behind a locked door on the eighth-floor corridor of the District Attorney’s Office, with people passing by it all day and nobody checking on whether anyone was inside. Was it possible?

“You think she could have been in that room all day and not a soul knew about it or looked for her? That’s really gruesome.”

“Alex, she had a schedule just like the one you try to keep. She’s lucky her right hand and left hand showed up in the operating room on the same day. She taught at the medical school, did surgery next door in the hospital, lectured all over the world, consulted in major cases wherever she was called in, and in her spare time had the government fly her over to war zones like Bosnia and Rwanda for trauma work, like for charity-and that’s just the stuff I can scan from the date book on top of her desk for the month of March.”

“What was her schedule yesterday?”

“I had the dean of the medical school check it out for us when I woke him up. Dogen had been out of town over the weekend and had been expected back in the city sometime on Monday. But she wasn’t due at the hospital until eight o’clock Tuesday morning-yesterday-when she had been invited to participate in a surgical procedure by a colleague. Everybody on the team had scrubbed and was in the OR, the patient was anesthetized and had his head shaved and was waiting-and they got this amphitheater where all the med students can watch-”

“I know, it’s a very prestigious teaching hospital.”

“Well, she just never showed up. The surgeon, Bob Spector, sent one of the nurses out to call. Got the answering machine, which was still playing the message that Dogen was out of town. Spector just picked out a couple of the young residents or attendings from the peanut gallery to work with him, bitched about Gemma and her overambitious schedule, and went right on drilling a hole through the middle of some guy’s cerebellum.”

“That will teach me to call Laura more regularly and let her know my whereabouts,” I mumbled aloud. Too often I put myself “in the field,” while I raced from the Police Academy to a squad room to the rape crisis counseling unit at a hospital, squeezing in lunch with a girlfriend along the way. There were days when Laura, my secretary, had a hard time keeping up with me and figuring out where I was.

“What are you daydreaming about, Blondie? If you’re missing too long the judge just tells somebody to check the dressing room in the lingerie department at Saks-probably find you strangled by whoever didn’t get to the sale items as fast as you did. Whoops-turn around and wave good-bye to McGraw.”

The Chief was making his way back to the elevator, pausing long enough to call out to Chapman, “Show Miss Cooper around, Mike, then let her get on down to her office to get to work. I’m sure she’s got things to do today.”

“Let’s go. Did you catch the question last night?”

Mike was referring to the Final Jeopardy question on the quiz show to which both of us shared an addiction. “No, I was on my way to the Garden for the game.”

“Gotcha, then. Category was transportation. How much would you have bet?”

“Twenty bucks.” Our habit was passing ten dollars back and forth every few days, since we had different strengths and weaknesses, but this didn’t sound like too esoteric-or religious-a topic.

“Okay, the answer is, the U.S. airport that handles the greatest volume of cargo in the country every day of the year.”

Just my luck, a trick question. It couldn’t be O’Hare because that would be too obvious, and it specified cargo, not passengers. I was running all the major cities through my mind as we walked down the hall toward Dogen’s office.

“Time’s up. Got a guess?”

“ Miami?” I asked tentatively, thinking of all the kilos of drugs that passed through there on a daily basis but knowing that the show’s creators weren’t apt to be banking on contraband.

“Wrong, Miss Cooper. Would you believe Memphis? It’s where all the Federal Express planes go and get rerouted to whatever their final destination is. Interesting, huh? Pay up, kid.”

“Why? Did you get it right?”

“Nope. But that isn’t the issue inour bet, is it?”

Mike knocked on the heavy wooden door with its elegant gold stenciled lettering that spelled out Dogen’s full name and title. Mercer Wallace swung it open and I reeled at the sight of the light blue carpet drenched in so much human blood. It was incredible that she could have had a single drop left in her veins, much less the strength to have tried to drag herself out of harm’s way as she obviously had. It was moments before I could look up, and it would be days before I could get that shade of deep scarlet out of my mind’s eye.

MERCER REACHED HIS HAND OUT TO STEER me around the stained portion of the floor and across Gemma Dogen’s office to the area near her desk. Raymond Peterson, the lieutenant in charge of the Homicide Squad and a thirty-year veteran of the force, was talking into his cell phone, his back to me as he stared out the window, which overlooked the East River and the shoreline of Queens. One of the guys from the Crime Scene Unit was still hunched over the open file drawers, rubber-gloved hands poring through folders to consider which surfaces he might dust for latent prints.

The usually laconic Peterson was obviously agitated as he shouted into the telephone, “Bullshit. I don’t care how many guys you have to pull off that security detail or authorize for overtime. We need ‘em here to go through the garbage. Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. Garbage. Whoever did this had to be covered with the deceased’s blood when he left this room. Not a pail goes outta here until it’s searched for clothing, weapons-”

Chapman was shaking his head at Mercer and me. “Every container in this hospital has waste items covered with blood in it. It’s a medical center, not a nursery school. We’re never going to break the case that way.”

“Gotta do it, man,” Mercer responded. “Probably be a huge loss of time and manpower, but you just can’t ignore it.”

“Good morning, Loo,” I said to Peterson, calling him by the nickname used to address police lieutenants throughout the department. “Thanks for letting me in on this one.”

He punched the end button on his phone, then turned and smiled in my direction. “Glad to have you here, Alex. These clowns think you might be able to help us shed some light on it.”

I was grateful for Peterson’s acceptance. He and Chief McGraw were from the same era in their NYPD training-a time when females were not allowed to be either homicide detectives or prosecutors. They had both entered the Academy in 1965 when murder was considered men’s work only. Paul Battaglia had changed the face of our business a decade later when he opened the ranks to young women who were graduating from law schools in great numbers. The New York County District Attorney’s Office had grown to six hundred lawyers in the 1990s. Now half of the assistant D.A.s who handled every crime from petit larceny to first degree murder were women.