"I asked for substantial bail, Paul. Moffett bought into the fact that he was a doctor with roots in the community and let him out."

"Roots, my ass. Any chance of getting him back?"

"The treaty allows extradition for murder and rape, but the State Department liaison just told me there's never once been a return of a Turkish national. They'll send back Americans or other Europeans, but they won't give up one of their own. Sengor was on the phone from Ankara telling me he didn't even commit a crime."

"You don't think it'll get press, do you?" Battaglia seemed as anxious to keep it out of the headlines now as the defendant did.

"More ink than you'll want, I'm afraid. The commissioner's going to take the case to Interpol, boss. He's going to ask them to issue a red notice on this." The international notice system would rely on my indictment to try to arrest Selim Sengor with a view to encouraging the Turks to let us extradite.

"Damn it."

"It gets worse. Mercer just seized a video collection from the perp's apartment. We're probably talking multiple victims-maybe dozens, here and abroad. Seems he drugged and raped them, recording the entire encounter with a camera hidden in his bookcase."

Battaglia spun his chair around away from me, pretending to fiddle with documents on the table behind his desk. He liked the success of my unit's innovative prosecution tactics, but he hated discussing the details of bizarre sexual habits. "Now what the-what the hell is that all about?"

"Paraphilia."

"Para what?

"Dr. Sengor's a paraphiliac, if I had to guess from the box of tapes Mercer just picked up. As Mike likes to say, it's Latin for 'sick puppy.' It's one of the categories of sexual dysfunction in the DSM," I said, referring to forensic psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. "The guy acts out his deviant fantasies with unwilling victims. What gets him aroused is doing things he wouldn't be able to do to a conscious partner, like maybe anal intercourse or-well, we'll know as soon as we watch the videotapes."

"But why put it on film?" Battaglia asked, still with his back to me.

"To create a masturbatory scenario, a way to reenact the events to stimulate himself when the night is over. To keep a trophy of the event." Great. I'm talking dirty to the most powerful prosecutor in the country and he's pretending to be shuffling folders on his desk, looking for an irrelevant piece of paper that doesn't even exist. "These guys lead double lives, Paul. Sengor's a licensed professional in a well-respected field, but he's obviously got a fantasy about necrophilia."

"So how come he says he didn't do anything wrong?" Battaglia said, holding up a file from the bottom of a tall Stack of yellowed papers and staring at a page of statistical information that was at least two years old. Anything to avoid eye contact with me in the middle of this discussion.

"Rapists who drug their victims don't see themselves as criminals. The women are with them by choice, the pills aren't administered by force-even though the victims aren't aware they're drinking the substance-their clothes aren't torn off them, and they're rarely injured. It's delusional on Sengor's part, but that's the nature of this kind of assault."

"Anything else on this?"

"Not for now."

He wheeled his chair around to face me. "Meanwhile, what's the progress on the case at the Met? The press iskilling us on this. There are front-page stories every day."

Like most high-profile crimes, Natalya Galinova's murder spawned a related series of features. There was a retelling of the dramatic death onstage at the Old Met of the great baritone, Leonard Warren, in 1960, as someone in the packed audience screamed out to the paralyzed cast and crew, "For God's sake, bring down the curtain!";interviews with suburban teachers and parents who worried about sending their children on Lincoln Center tours because the killer was still atlarge in the neighborhood; and countless profiles ofGalinova quoting the great, world-famous men who had partnered her of the other primas with whom she had shared a stage.

There was even a sidebar by Mickey Diamond, who had covered the first murder at the Met. Running out of fresh leads to keep the current frenzy on the front pages, Diamond revealed that the only time the Post had ever rejected one of his tasteless headlines was in that earlier case, when he submitted his story with a title captioned Fiddler Off the Roof.

"Lieutenant Peterson's got everybody working double shifts, Paul, You know how methodical he is."

"I've got a black-tie dinner at the Pierre Hotel Saturday night for some committee my wife's on-I can't remember which disease. Odds are that somebody or other from the Lincoln Center board will be there. You've got to give me something to say about the progress of the investigation."

"You'll have whatever I know by then."

Prominent people tried to treat the DA as their private attorney. Church leaders called to press for leniency when parishioners were caught up in white-collar crimes, parents of elite prep school students urged the hush-up of teachers arrested in Internet pedophile stings, and well-to-do investment bankers promised treatment programs for offspring netted in campus drug sweeps. Battaglia had developed an enviable immunity to all the pressure, and settled for being in the know about every detail of a case before muscle was applied by outsiders.

"Alex," Battaglia said as I started to get up to leave, "those television monitors that were in Joe Berk's apartment. The commissioner told me about them, even though you saw fit to leave me in the dark. You ever find out what they were filming?"

"We didn't have any way to run with that, Paul. Especially once they disappeared. I just don't know what he could have been watching."

"Have you talked to the tech guys about it?"

"Yes, of course. They're on standby to give us a hand. But first we have to know exactly where the cameras were concealed-I mean, in what building-and what Berk was looking at. We never got there."

"I'm just wondering whether he could be a-a-" He stopped himself midsentence, not even wanting to say the word.

"A paraphiliac?"

I thought about the interiors Mike and I had seen on the screens in the brief moments before Mona Berk had interrupted us. "Possible. Voyeurism's a form of paraphilia. Peeping, watching someone disrobe or engage in a sexual act. Depends where he had those cameras positioned. We thought it looked like dressing rooms or bath-rooms, maybe in some of the Berk theaters."

"So why didn't you follow up?"

"It didn't seem to have anything to do with Galinova's murder, Paul. The cops went over her dressing room with every piece of equipment they had. There were no cameras concealed there, at the Met."

"Let me know if you come up with any dirt on old Joe," Battaglia said, smiling as he chewed on the wet tip of his cigar. "I'd love to have it in my arsenal."

I could see where he was going now. He wasn't suggesting that Berk was involved in Talya's death. In Battaglia's world of power and privilege, it would be a useful chit to know that Berk had a personal point of vulnerability, something he might someday trade for information of value in another case.

"Sure, Paul. When I was in here on Monday, you mentioned that you had a lot of background on Berk. That you thought he'd been involved in some kind of illegal tax schemes."

Again he removed the cigar from his mouth. "Yeah."

"He told Mike and me there's a messy lawsuit going on. His niece wouldn't let us get into the details at all. Do you know anything about it? Maybe it would give us a broader family picture if I under-stood it, now that we've also got this incident with the girl who fell from the swing."