"How about Brian?" Mercer asked.

"Pop did what he had to do, asking the workers if they'd seen or heard anything, writing down all their names. He was happy just watching me, 'cause I really was entranced by the whole thing. Exactly what he wanted to bring me for. Till one of the rookies came running to get him, whispered something to him."

Mike paused and when the storytelling stopped, the smile was gone with it. When he went on, there was no trace of a pleasant memory.

"I can remember the look on my dad's face. He didn't seem to know what to do at that very moment, and I wasn't used to seeing him like that. I think he wanted to leave me right where I was, but he knew he couldn't do that. The guys were all working too hard to ask any of them to look after me. He gave me one of those very stern, hand-on-my-shoulder commands in his best brogue: 'Mikey, my son, just follow me and stay out of everyone's way.'"

"Where to?" Mercer asked.

"Back through the maze of shops and studios, till someone put us on an elevator that took us up to the roof. We stepped off and I saw Giorgio and Struk. One of them called out to Brian and pointed at me, telling him to leave me back, right where I was."

Mike stopped again. "My old man was wrong. That's the first thing I remembered thinking that day. I didn't believe the guy ever had a bad instinct in his life and maybe this time he'd screwed up for once. I was so shaken and disappointed, I thought I was gonna be sick. I knew he'd catch hell from my mother for bringing me along, for his thinking the missing musician was alive and well someplace else, and for his idea that the Met would be a good afternoon outing for his kid."

"You mean they told you what happened to the girl?" Mercer asked.

"Tell me? Nobody was paying any attention to me from that point on, with good reason. So I got down on the floor and held on to a pipe along the edge of the building, leaning out just enough to see what they were all staring at below us.

"There was her body, crumpled on the top of a setback, six floors down from the roof, four stories above the street. Long blond hair down most of her back, spattered with blood, her legs twisted and bent like a wishbone torn apart at a Thanksgiving dinner."

I thought immediately of the missing Natalya Galinova.

"I still can't shake that memory," Mike said. "You never forget the first time you see a corpse."

Murder at the Met. If it could happen a quarter of a century ago, it could happen again today. No matter how elegant the setting, no matter how benign the business going on inside, no matter how familiar the great urban institution, there was nothing that made any place in the city safe from violence. No wonder Mike was urging the police brass to get inside and moving on this case.

"Who killed the musician?" I asked.

"A twenty-one-year-old stage carpenter. Must have intercepted her when she got lost in a hallway, trying to get backstage to meet one of the dancers. He was a baby-faced kid with a bad alcohol problem. Pretended to show her the way, tried to rape her, and she fought him off. Got him the old-fashioned way, before DNA. Fingerprints on the pipe near where she went off the roof, and then a confession. That judge you're always flirting with?"

I laughed. "Roger Hayes?"

"He tried the case for your office. Brilliant job. My dad kept a scrapbook with all the clippings. I've got it at home-and the killer, he's still rotting away upstate."

Mike opened the auditorium door and asked Dobbis and Vicci to come out.

"Where would you like to start, Mr. Chapman?" Chet Dobbis asked.

"Crime scene is processing the site where the objects were found," Mike said to Mercer and me. "There's another area near that where a nail's sticking out of the wall. Looks like Talya's hair got caught on it. Pulled out a clump from her scalp."

He turned back to Dobbis. "Where's a good place to talk?"

"There's a rehearsal in the auditorium. I don't think that's a good idea. Perhaps Natalya's dressing room, Rinaldo?"

"Sure. That'll be fine."

Dobbis pointed to a doorway. "Behind stage right."

It was to the left of the great auditorium, and Mike reversed his course as he must have realized that stage directions were sited from the perspective of the artist facing the audience.

"Why don't you tell us what the security is like here?" Mike asked.

I was walking alongside Dobbis, with Mike and Mercer behind us and Rinaldo Vicci waddling in the rear.

"Until today I would have answered that it's been quite good."

"Talk about during the performances."

"Front of the house, of course, you can't get in without tickets. Thirty-eight hundred seats-center orchestra starts at ninety dollars, on up through six tiers, balcony at the top."

"The nose-bleed section," Mike said, poking me in the back. "Bet you've never been up there, Coop. You'd get vertigo just thinking about it."

"Two hundred seventy-five people pay for standing room at the back of the orchestra. That's your four thousand tally."

"Employees?"

"Several hundred. Stagehands, electricians, makeup artists, costume and set designers. Every piece of scenery, every item of clothing or headdress, every prop for more than twenty-five operas that are mounted here throughout the season is made in-house. And then we have guests who rent the space, if you will, ballet companies like the Royal, who bring their own people in."

"So every day…?" I asked.

"You've got hundreds of employees, and hundreds more transients passing through. Tours are conducted daily-schoolchildren, tourists of all ages and nationalities, visiting performers and dignitaries, materials are delivered from morning until night. Artists have visitors-family, friends, other producers they're auditioning for. We've got coaches and prompters and conductors. A cast of thousands, you might say."

"Screened by security?"

"They come in through the stage-door entrance. They've got to show identification, of course. Do they sign in or have we lists of their names? For the employees, certainly. For everyone else, I think not."

The gray cement corridor was cheerless and cold. Its walls were lined on one side with enormous trunks stamped with the Royal Ballet name in white stencils. A few were open, revealing peasant dresses and pirate shirts, all part of the repertoire that would be danced during the week.

Mike rapped his knuckles on a trunk and called to a uniformed cop at the far end of the long hall. "Get more guys in here. Open every one of these. I don't care if you have to break the locks to get inside, just check each of them."

We were single file going through now, Dobbis leading us as he talked. "That's the doctor's office," he said. "Nurses are on duty all throughout the day, and there's a physician in the house for every performance. Talya knew that as well."

Past another door. He turned the knob, but it didn't give. "Animal handlers. SPCA requirements. Whenever we've got an opera with a horse or a donkey or a camel, we've got to have someone who meets humane society regulations. In Giselle, there are a couple of borzois-Russian wolfhounds-so even this room was occupied last night."

Mike yelled again to the cop. "Yo. You doing anything? Get a custodian with keys or a sledgehammer to get through these doors."

Chet Dobbis showed his annoyance for the first time. "We're going as fast as we can manage, detective. I've given orders to have everything unlocked for you."

"After the show, Mr. Dobbis," I said, "suppose Talya had gone somewhere on another floor in the building, for a legitimate reason. How soon would the backstage area be emptied out of all the workers?"

"It never is. The Met stage is alive for the better part of twenty-four hours. The show will go on tonight, and when it's over, the stage crew will strike the sets that were used. The night gang will take over and they'll start working to put up the scenery for whatever the next day's dress rehearsal will be. When the rehearsal is finished, they strike that set and get things in place for the following night. The work is endless and the place is always bustling."