“Whole song and dance in there about Ms. Grooten being from South Africa. She felt that too many black men had suffered in prisons in her country for crimes they didn’t commit, so she didn’t want to take the chance of starting a manhunt when she couldn’t even identify the rapist.”

“Great. So we got a bleeding heart. She’s got a Dutch name-descended from Boers, who killed more Africans than you or I could count,” Chapman said, holding his empty glass up in the air for Fenton to see, ordering another round of drinks. “Meantime, one of the brothers be having a field day in my neck of the woods and she decides she’s gonna give him a pass. America the Beautiful. And nobody notices a mope running around the park with a ski mask on in the middle of June, his dick hanging out of his pants.”

“Who was the outcry witness?” The first person Katrina called from the hospital might suggest the name of the friend or relative to whom she was closest, in whom she confided.

“She didn’t make any calls. She told Cathy she had no family in this country. And she didn’t want anyone at the museum to know what had happened. Katrina said she planned to be going back to Cape Town before the end of the year anyway.”

“What’d she do at the museum?” Chapman asked.

“Worked on medieval art. How’s this for weird, considering her final resting place? Had an expertise in tomb sculpture.”

“Nobody’s touched the story yet. You lead a charmed life, Alex.”

Battaglia had the morning newspapers stacked on his desk, and someone from the public relations office had gone through them to check for crime-related clippings before I showed up on his office doorstep shortly after 8A.M. on Thursday.

I had scanned them myself before leaving my apartment. Below the fold on page A1 of theTimes was the feature on Pierre Thibodaux’s sudden resignation. Trustees gave opinions in unsourced quotes, and art critics gnawed at some of the questionable purchases made during his tenure. Everyone was surprised at the timing of the announcement, and some even speculated at a behind-the-scenes scandal involving fiscal impropriety or a masterpiece of questionable provenance.

No mention was made of a dead woman found in an ancient sarcophagus. Thibodaux himself had made only a vague reference to the unfortunate coincidence of an ongoing police investigation. His assistant explained that he would hold a press conference in a week’s time, after he’d had an opportunity to brief the board members in private on his decision.

“Mickey Diamond called me at home late last night,” I told the boss. “He said they didn’t want to go with it because no one over at the museum would confirm the girl’s ID and the paper was spooked about the next-of-kin thing. Afraid to print something and find out she had family here who would only learn about her death that way.”

“Since when are they so sensitive? Truth of the matter is, as one of the other reporters put it to me, Katrina Grooten wasn’t really ‘anybody.’ Pretty pathetic commentary on their values.”

“Paul, I spoke to Jake about the leak.” He had returned my call shortly after I left the office. He’d also tried to get through to my cell phone, but it wasn’t working-just as Anna Friedrichs had described-while we were in the museum basement. So Jake had come over after dinner, when he finished working. “He didn’t do it. He wouldn’t lie to me.”

“It’s dead in the water. I trust it won’t happen again.”

“Have you heard from your counterpart in New Jersey?”

“A casual inquiry. I didn’t get the sense he’d want to fight for jurisdiction of the case unless he knew it could be solved with very little effort. Or until you solve it for him.”

“So I can keep working on it because the press isn’t interested?”

“You can stay with it because Katrina Grooten was a rape victim.” That would be his answer to Pat McKinney. “Any chance that attack last June is related to her death?”

“Very unlikely, but we’re going to run it down. She was treated at Presbyterian Hospital. An evidence collection kit was prepared, but it never went to the lab because she refused to cooperate with the investigation.”

“Didn’t the ME want the genetic profile developed from the DNA to put in the data bank?”

With the astounding technological advances in the science of DNA, it was the practice of the serology lab to develop the “fingerprint” from every piece of crime scene evidence-blood, semen, saliva-and add it to the local data bank. Unsolved cases that had never seemed to be part of a pattern before were connected by the cold hits that the computer made between one violent occurrence and another, all over the city. Some resulted in links to convicted offenders whose samples had been obtained prior to their release from state prison, leading to arrests in matters that had been investigative dead ends.

“If there had been any evidence to examine, of course it would have been analyzed and entered in the bank. Mercer Wallace is going to see whether the kit is still around. Most hospitals destroy them after ninety days, if the victim doesn’t want to go forward.”

“But you don’t doubt the rape allegation was legit?”

“Why would we? Seemed to be an attack by a stranger, with no reason to be fabricating it, and Grooten saying from the outset she couldn’t make an ID.”

“Suppose she was having a problem with someone at the museum, Alex. A lover, a coworker, a supervisor. Someone who was giving her a hard time, harassing her, frightening her.” Battaglia reached forward to light the end of his cigar. I hadn’t finished my coffee yet and he was probably on his third Monte Cristo of the morning.

“You scare me. You’re beginning to think like Mike Chapman.”

“Maybe she reports a rape-no physical evidence, no fingerpointing or framing a suspect-maybe she calls the cops just to send a shot over the bow. ‘I’m serious about this, Mr. Whoever You Are. Leave me alone or else. I’m not afraid to bring the police into this.’”

“Anything’s a possibility at this point, Paul. But most strangerrape victims have no reason to make up the story.”

“And most of them aren’t found dead within a year.”

“Katrina Grooten might have had reasons to act the way she did. A foreigner, alone in this country with what seems to be a very small network of emotional support. An incident that she feared would be racially charged if an arrest followed. The great unlikelihood of finding the assailant. In most other cultures, there’s still a societal stigma that attaches to victims of sexual assaults. Somewhere in her life, at work or at home, there would be someone to blame her for walking into the park alone.”

“Anybody dust her bicycle for prints?”

All I needed at this point was the district attorney to micromanage my cases. I had thirty-seven open files in various stages of their investigations, and the forty other lawyers whom Sarah and I supervised had scores more. Maybe I could drop them off with Rose, and Battaglia could try to sort his way through some of those while I helped find Grooten’s killer.

“Mercer is double-checking all the paperwork to see what was done, and whether anything can be reexamined at this point.”

When he lowered his head to look at the weekly figures in the report from the Office of Court Administration, noting the arrest-to-arraignment time lag, I knew Battaglia was finished with me. I was almost out the door before he spoke: “That big-needle thing, that phony lie detector scam you pull, how often is it successful?”

I bit my lip and paused in the doorway, knowing that McKinney had given me up again. “About ninety-eight percent of the time.”

“I like it. Might borrow it someday. Just promise me you won’t ever do it in an election year, okay?”

“Sure, boss.”

No one was in yet on either side of the hallway. The display on my phone reminded me to pick up my voice mails. I punched in my password and the mechanical recording told me I had two messages.