I looked to the flat ladders against the backstage wall for any sign of Mike, and saw only shadows from above. I turned my head to the theater entrance, hoping a crew of EMTs would be nearby again this time. And I checked Lucy's face, to see whether she had opened her eyes yet, but that had not happened.

Mike was back at my side by the time the paramedics arrived. I stepped away and made room for them as they began to check Lucy's vital signs and got to work.

I followed Mike to Mona Berk's little group. "There's no one up there. Where the hell are those guys?"

"Look," Kehoe said, "it's just a skeleton crew we brought in for the afternoon. The Imperial's stagehands and techs don't come in till later in the day."

"Bad choice of words, 'skeleton crew.' Who are they and where'd they go? Was this just a way to do it on the cheap? Avoid union labor?"

"It was supposed to be a simple walk-through, Mike. You think I wanted the kid to get hurt? The last thing I need is a goddamn law-suit before I even close on the property. Look at them," Mona said, pointing at the actors. "All these morons need to do is start the story that this show is jinxed. The whole industry rides on superstition. I'll end up spending a fortune and never get this show off the ground."

She wasn't much concerned about Lucy DeVore's life, especially if these events got in the way of ticket sales.

Vicci whispered something to Kehoe and they started to walk toward the ladder that went up to the fly platform.

"Hold it," Mike said.

"I only asked to see what happened to the swing, detective. To see how the ropes holding it look like," said Vicci, his accent thickening as he pleaded for Mike's understanding.

"I got Crime Scene guys coming to do that. Just stay off, got it?"

"But, crime…? Who said anything about a crime?"

"Nobody yet. But this setup is going to be examined before any one of you touches anything. The swing, where'd it come from?"

Kehoe called over to Mona, "Sweetheart, Mr. Chapman wants to know about the swing. Where'd we get it?"

"The Brooks Atkinson Theater, Ross. Revival of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, remember? The girl on the swing that was decorated with the crescent moon. Christ, isn't this one moving yet? Why don't they get her out of here and over to the hospital? This is such fucking bad karma for me."

Mike was standing over the shoulder of one of the medics when he gave me a thumbs-up. They had secured Lucy's neck in a cervical collar and were getting ready to move her, which meant that it was unlikely she had sustained any spinal cord injury. With Mike's help they lifted her onto a gurney, which in turn fit on a collapsible set of wheels, carrying the young woman out of the theater and to the ambulance.

Once the most critical matter was dealt with, Mike turned his attention back to the producers. "The crew, where are they?"

"On the street in the back. Grabbing a smoke. They're pretty scared," Kehoe said, walking upstage to call out the back door.

Two kids in their twenties, dressed in jeans and filthy T-shirts, came back into the theater. Mike wrote their names and pedigree information in his pad and directed them to take him back up on the catwalk to see the pipes in the fly from which the swing had been suspended.

"You're not going to the hospital with Lucy?" I asked Rinaldo Vicci.

"I-I don't know what to do about the poor child. Perhaps you could tell me where they've taken her." He rubbed his extended abdomen with one hand, again wiping sweat from his forehead with the other. "I'm not really responsible for her."

"Someone should be with her. The doctors will need an adult to sign a consent form for the surgery. Don't any of you care what happens to her?"

Mona held up her hands, as though telling me to stop talking. "Wait a minute. I've got to speak to my lawyer before I even think of getting involved. Rinaldo, this is really in your lap. Isn't she eighteen? You told me she was eighteen, that we were just going to say sixteen for the publicity. You know her family?"

"Nobody. I don't know anything at all. She told me she's from West Virginia. She told me she's here alone."

"Mr. Vicci, I expect you can do better than that. Surely you must have some better information, something back in your office, perhaps?"

He was playing with the fringe of the lavender cashmere scarf he had tossed around his neck, on this mild spring afternoon. "I'm thinking very hard, Miss Cooper. I'm thinking I don't know very much at all. This was all to be so informal today, you understand me?"

I was thinking that if I could pull the two ends of the scarf a bit tighter around the neck he might cough up whatever it was he didn't want to tell me. "Who brought her to you, Mr. Vicci? How did she come to your attention? I want some explanation, some-"

"Scusi, signora. There would be notes in my office. I'm pleased to get that information for you and give you a call later on, but for now, she's just one of the many young ladies who knock on the door or someone refers to me."

"Where are her clothes? There must be a bag with some beatification. Someone to get in touch with?" I turned to the small group of actors and asked them to take me to the dressing room.

We walked behind the curtain on stage left, up a ramp to a cheerless communal room. One side of it was lined with mirrors, below which stood a ledge wide enough to hold makeup and hair supplies, with stools scattered beneath that. On the opposite wall were hooks and hangers. One of the girls from the dance number pointed at the black sweater and Capri pants that belonged to Lucy, and the tote bag that hung with them.

I dug around in the tote-pushing aside sunglasses, birth control pills, a strip of nicotine gum, and a container of mace-until I found a plastic wallet. There was thirty-four dollars in cash, an ATM card, and a New York State driver's license. The date of birth would have made Lucy twenty-one years old, a much more convenient age to do just about anything a beautiful young woman might choose to do in the big city. The residential address listed was on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan-no mention of any connection to West Virginia-and I guessed that whoever she really was, she had purchased the identification in some illegal joint, not too long ago and not very far from Times Square.

When I got back to the stage, Mike was standing in front of the orchestra pit, writing down names and numbers of the impatient angels who were waiting to get out of the theater. He turned his back and put his arm around me to explain what he had seen.

"Those kids don't know anything. One of them is doped up to the gills-it's amazing with all the marijuana in him he could balance on the fly without taking a header himself."

"Who hired them?"

"The older one of them got a call last week from his cousin, who's on the crew at the Belasco. That guy didn't want to get in dutch with Joe Berk, so he passed the job along to these two, who are buddies. The script just tells them which pipe to move and when to move it. They have no idea who set the swing or when it was hung here."

"You got the names of everyone in the peanut gallery?"

"Yeah, these mopes can go. Hubert Alden's agreed to stay to talk to us."

"Which one is he?" I asked, taking a casual glance at the dozen people still milling about in the side aisles.

"The tall guy in the gray suit, trench coat over his shoulders. Looks like an ad for Brylcreem."

Mike let the others go, still waiting for the Crime Scene Unit to show up. This kind of event-seemingly accidental-would not trump the day's other mayhem. I called my paralegal, Maxine, and dispatched her to the hospital to wait outside the recovery room for Lucy DeVore-no matter how long, no matter how late. Whoever Lucy really was and whatever her story, this was not a time for her to be without someone to help care for her, and Max had tended more victims through trauma than almost anyone I knew outside of an emergency room.