His demeanor changed abruptly as he sat upright in my chair and dropped the paper onto the desk in front of him. “Where did this come from? Why didn’t you call me?”

Sarah reached for a corner of the page. “Let’s get you in to Battaglia, pronto. He’s not going to like this.”

“Get me a plastic folder-that kind you use to hold your trial exhibits. Might as well take it over to look for prints.”

“Yeah, but first you’ve got to do eliminations on your favorite weimaraner. Some guy slipped it under the door. Zac’s paws were on it-probably some drool, too. I don’t know what you’ll get off it even though I was careful with it.”

“What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you hear anything at the door, see anybody-?”

“I wasn’t home, Mike. I’d gone out for dinner and the doorman just let some delivery guy type on upstairs. It was there when I got home.”

“I’m just as curious about the dinner date as I am about the note,” Sarah said.

“Look, whoever left it is just trying to throw a scare into me. The doorman didn’t even know I wasn’t home and the guy didn’t wait around to see.”

“Yeah, and you’re not going to have Zac there all the time to scare him off if he had tried. How do you know what he was doing at your door? This time you just happened to have a dog who was likely to bark at an intruder, am I right?”

He probably was. I called Battaglia’s office and Rose answered. I told her that I needed to see the District Attorney about something urgent that had come up, and she told me to come right over.

“Let’s go. Might as well all hear what he has to say.”

The three of us left our coffees on my desk, crossed the corridor, and were buzzed into Battaglia’s suite by the security officer on duty. Rose looked happy to see us and told us to go right into the boss’s office. He was on the phone and waved us over to the conference table in the middle of the room while he finished his conversation.

“Another three-quarters of a million dollars in that grant proposal and we can knock those garment district thieves out of the ballpark. I’ve got to finish my speech before I go out of town at the end of the week. The Congressional committee meets in mid-April and I’m the floor show. The usual pitch-figures don’t lie but liars figure. Tell the Senator I’ll be there.”

Battaglia joined us at the table, nodding to Sarah and me and shaking Chapman’s hand. “Cigar, Mike? Ladies?”

“No, thanks, Mr. Battaglia,” Chapman said.

“You did a great job with that drug massacre on Forty-third Street. Nice collar-quick and clean. Congratulations.”

“It helps when they’re stupid, Mr. B. Makes my job a lot easier. Shoots four people to death at twenty to eight in a flophouse in the middle of the theater district, then tells the getaway driver to step on it. I think only thirty or forty witnesses had time to get the plate number. It didn’t hurt. Wish this Mid-Manhattan nightmare’d give us a break.”

“What’s new?”

We filled the District Attorney in on everything that had happened since I had phoned him about Bailey’s exclusion and showed him the letter that had been delivered to my home. I even mentioned the episode with the car that I thought had tried to sideswipe me while I was walking Prozac, but I tried to downplay it as best I could.

“Do I have to worry that-”

“Absolutely not, Paul. I just wanted you to know about it and see if you had any other ideas.”

“My best idea is that you solve the damn thing quickly. I’m leaving Thursday for London. There’s an interdisciplinary conference on ethics. Guidelines for the new millennium or some such crap. I promised to participate six months ago, but it doesn’t come at a very convenient time now with Congress trying to take back the money they promised me last fall.”

Chapman teased him. “Hey, Mr. B., while you’re over there, mind interviewing a few witnesses? I’ll show you the ropes before you go, give you a few pointers on technique.”

Battaglia rose and returned to his desk, signaling the end of our meeting. “Might take you up on it. Beats sitting around a stuffy boardroom listening to some European sociologists talking about how their biggest crime problem is hooliganism after soccer games. Watch out for yourself, Cooper, understand?”

By the time we were over the threshold, he was on the phone to City Hall telling the Mayor that his position on narcotics sweeps was untenable and had to be reworked.

We walked back under the glare of dozens of the District Attorneys of bygone days whose unsmiling portraits lined Battaglia’s hallway. I had spent so many hours waiting to see him over the last ten years that I could name each of the long-forgotten lawmen and their periods in office. Put that in the category of “nice to know” as my father used to say, referring to the useless trivia with which Mike and I cluttered our minds.

“Game plan?” I asked as we trailed back to my office. Chapman sat at my desk listing all the people he thought we needed to see and talk to while I gazed over his head at the pigeons perched atop the baroque gargoyles of the building across the street.

“Sarah holds down the fort here at the office. We start with Bob Spector. Then Spector wants us to go to New York Hospital to interview a doctor there. Name’s Gig Babson. Spector says Babson was one of Gemma’s closest friends. We gotta run down this rumor about her leaving the hospital-when and why. That should keep us going through the afternoon.”

My ordinary business traffic began to appear in the doorway.

Stacy Williams stood by Laura’s desk with a voucher in her hand. She needed my signature to authorize the expense of a plane ticket to bring a rape victim in from Kansas City for trial.

“Where you been, Stace?” Chapman asked. A paralegal who worked for one of the guys in the unit, Stacy had been dating one of Mike’s friends from the Homicide Squad for almost six months.

“It’s over, Mike. I broke up with Pete a couple of weeks ago. He lied to me, you know. All that time, he told me he’d been separated from his wife.”

I looked over the flight arrangements and signed the form. Sarah was into her maternal role. “Stacy, don’t you remember Pat McKinney’s orientation speech? When a cop tells you he’s separated, it means that at the moment he’s talking to you he’s at one end of the Long Island Expressway and his wife is eighty miles away at the other end in their house with the four kids. That’s the PD’s definition of marital separation.”

One look at Stacy’s adorable face and figure as she turned to walk away and I doubted she’d be pining for him very long. “Here’s the voucher. Be sure and let me know when the trial starts, Stacy.”

“Not exactly a rocket scientist, Coop,” Chapman said. “Three words printed on the front of the baseball cap that Pete wears every day and she couldn’t figure out he was married? I guess she thought MASSAPEQUA LITTLE LEAGUE was his favorite charity.”

“Leave the girl alone, Mikey.” Sarah got up to go back to her office and organize her day. “Let me know what happens, Alex, okay?”

Mike called Lieutenant Peterson to get a detective to my office to pick up the papered threat for lab analysis. We called Bob Bannion to arrange a viewing of the video of the crime scene so that we could spend an hour examining it in close-up, to get ideas about what parts of Dogen’s files and shelves had been rifled through.

Sitting in a carrel in the video unit, Chapman and I replayed the scene over and over, zooming in and out of targeted areas in an attempt to determine what had been the goal of the trespasser. Did the files we could see-and we’d obviously have to examine them in person-resemble the files the detectives had found in the garbage? If the killer had taken the files that had been found in the garbage from Dogen’s office, where exactly had he found them? On top of her desk or inside one of the many file drawers?