"So Talya could have been-"

"Having a tantrum? No way for me to know."

"Then how come you told me that?" Mike asked. "That was part of the first information from the scratch that came in last night."

"The masseur called it to my attention. I was already aware of the brouhaha about Berk storming back to the dressing area to wait for the end of the act. Talya got there and threw the poor man out of the room, then began her tirade at Berk."

"A masseur in her dressing room in the middle of a ballet?" Mike asked. "Coop, you're in the wrong line of work. What's his name and when can we talk to him?"

"You'll have it. You'll have whatever you need."

"Did anyone see Berk leave the theater?"

Vicci and Dobbis looked at each other. "No one's mentioned it to me," the agent said. "But we haven't exactly been concerned about him, to tell you the truth."

Mercer opened the door and signaled to Mike and me to come out into the hallway. I had seen him at crime scenes and hospital bedsides, in courtrooms and prison holding pens. There was no facial expression of Mercer's that I couldn't read. This one broadcast bad news.

"It's Natalya," I said.

"Let's get up there before the whole area is compromised," he said, shaking his head.

"If you hadn't ramped up this search like you did, Mike? They wouldn't have found her till summer."

"Where?"

"You'd have to know this place as well as the guys who built it."

Mike started walking to the bank of elevators behind stage right. "What floor?"

"They're up on six. Like a roof-"

"The roof's on ten," Mike said, a fact seared in the memory of a ten-year-old boy.

"It's an enclosure then, with a walkway that leads outside, over a great square pit. It's where the air-conditioning units are-with fans bigger than I am."

What better to mute the sounds of a final struggle.

We were there in less than four minutes, precinct detectives and uniformed rookies stepping aside and pressing their backs against the dirty gray walls as they saw Mike Chapman approach, everything about him signifying the arrival of a homicide cop who had come to take over control of the grim corridor.

The closer we got to the rampart that led outside, the bellow from the giant rotors made it more impossible to hear conversation. The pipes seemed to be vibrating as the monstrous blades circulated air and blew it up at us.

"What's the drop?" Mike asked a janitor who had apparently made the discovery and was standing closest to the opening.

"Thirty feet, easy."

Mike stepped down onto the rim of the fan pit-a platform a couple of feet wide-and was followed by Mercer, who held out a hand for me. I wanted to clutch one of the black pipes to steady myself, but knew they might hold trace evidence of value.

I glanced over the edge and at first saw only the blackness below. It took seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark as my body braced against the roaring blasts from the giant fan blades.

Even as the soot whirled around me, I could see the flash of a white tulle costume lifting with the current, revealing the motionless, broken body of Natalya Galinova, wedged into the remote corner of the filthy air shaft.

The janitor led us down to the third floor, through the electrical shop and the multistory paint bridges where crews of workers were constructing scenery, back to the interior point within the building where the air shaft bottomed out.

Only Mike, Mercer, and I entered the narrow passageway. The air circulation system had been turned off at Mike's direction and he led us in to check for any signs of life while we waited for someone from the medical examiner's office to make the decision about how to move Talya.

Mike kneeled at the wire-mesh cage, shining a torch-size flashlight into the hole, trying to get as close to her body as he could.

I flinched when the beam found Talya's head. Not much of it was intact. It didn't matter how many corpses I'd seen. The moment never got easier.

Mike was talking to Mercer, framing a description like the ones he'd heard week after week as he stood witness at the autopsy table in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. "Probably a circular fracture of the cranial vault. Can you see that split through the hairline?"

The long, fine strands of Talya's hair were plastered against her scalp. She had gone into the shaft headfirst, it appeared, her neck twisted under the weight of her slim body.

The skull was actually split in pieces, looking like the blood-stained map of an intersection of five major highways.

Mercer differentiated the injury from a depressed skull fracture, the kind that occurs when an object crushes a small area of the head. "Must have been alive when she was thrown over."

The circular fractures radiated out from the point of impact, aggravated by the velocity of the dancer's descent and the height of the drop.

Blood was everywhere, pooled beneath Talya's ear and splattered all over the satin torso of her costume.

"You see her arms?" Mercer asked.

"Looks like they're behind her. Probably tied."

The legs that had been so distinctly Galinova's-long and lean, well muscled and with extension that had been remarked upon by every reviewer since her debut in Moscow more than twenty years earlier-were visible from beneath the ripped tulle skirt. The left one was twisted inward, the knee apparently knocked out of its joint as it bounced off the wall of the shaft. The right one, closer to us, seemed broken in half at the calf, the bone protruding through the Lycra tights that covered Talya's leg. There was no toe shoe on that foot, as there appeared to be on the other.

Mike moved the light like a wand, up and down the lines of the body, looking for any other marks or signs of injuries unrelated to the fall.

Behind me I could hear the voices of new arrivals. "Chapman? We're comin' in."

"Move it, Coop. That's Emergency Services."

I backed out of the space and greeted the crew from ESU. They were lugging just about every kind of device that could be imagined to cut through the metal grating.

While I listened to them work their way into the small cell-the caged area above the giant fan-that held Talya Galinova, one of the death-scene investigators appeared to do a cursory study of the body, declare the matter a homicide, and supervise the delicate removal of the remains to the basement of the morgue.

Mike and Mercer joined me to make way for Hal Sherman, who had to photograph the body from every aspect before anyone could move the dancer from her painful pose.

When that was done, Dr. Kestenbaum, the medical examiner on duty, put on his lab suit, gloves, and booties, looking more like a space traveler than a forensic pathologist as he approached the air shaft. Within minutes, Kestenbaum returned and signaled the ambulance crew to bag the body.

We circled around him to see what he had to say. "I think you could have done this without me."

"Yeah, doc," Mike said. "But what killed her?"

"Skull fracture. Broken neck with cervical spinal injuries. Hands bound behind her back so nothing to cushion the blow before the head struck. Massive contrecoup contusions-a classic result of a fall. You and I had one like that before, Mike."

I had seen the photos of the brain in Mike's case in which a man was pushed off the roof of one of the city's great museums. The brain rebounds backward from the skull after striking with such great force, leaving the devastating marks at the location directly opposite the point of impact.

The young doctor turned to me. "Doesn't look like your Baliwick, Ms. Cooper. The leotard and tights are in place. No signs of an attempt at sexual assault."