Mike shrugged.

"Yeah," Mercer went on. "Five secretaries all over the map got lit up just like you. The other intended bombs sat in stacks of correspondence and they all got tracked to the same inmate. It's not hard to do, Alex."

"You'll let me know about the fingerprints in the morning?"

Mercer pointed at my hair. "You take care of the 'do'-the rest is up to me."

"You ready for a refill?" I asked Mike after I closed the door and locked the deadbolt.

"Sure. We'll watch the ten o'clock news and then it's lights out for you."

"That's fine with me, Dr. Chapman. I'm really whipped. You can sleep in the guest room, you know."

"This sofa's worked for me before. I'm cool with it."

"I'll get a quilt to put over you. And how about a robe?"

"Pink's not my best look."

"No, I mean, I'm sure I've got a-um-an old-"

"You think I want to wrap myself in some rag that one of your lovers left behind? No thanks-I might begin to feel entitled, then what the hell would I do? Hey, I've had worse details than this. You just try to calm yourself down."

I was yawning before the anchor turned things over to the weatherman and said good night as I went to put myself to steep.

But by four o'clock, I was wide awake and rolling restlessly from side to side. I had been dreaming about Natalya Galinova, a night-mare in which her broken body appeared as it had when I saw her in the bottom of the shaft at the Met. It was such a vivid image that for seconds I couldn't figure out whether or not I was still asleep, so unnerving that I got out of bed and went into-the bathroom for a drink of water to change the setting.

I wrapped a dressing gown around me and walked in my bare feet to the living room to see whether Mike had stirred. He was curled up on the sofa, the half-empty vodka bottle beside his empty glass. It was probably the way he had anesthetized himself on more than one or two nights since Valerie had been killed.

I pulled a pillow off the armchair and stretched out on the floor beneath him, resting my head on the soft cushion, tracing the pattern of the pale green design in the soft wool threads of the Persian car* pet with my finger. I was hoping the monotony of the motion would lull me back to sleep.

Images of Jean Eaken in Sengor's videotaped assault were hard to erase. The Kristofferson lyrics that had played in the background also kept repeating. Let the devil take tomorrow, I thought, 'cause tonight I really did need a friend.

Nothing worked. I watched the sky turn from deep cobalt to hazy gray to a bright cloudless blue. Whatever demons I was fighting, the basic problem was that I had been disturbed enough by the week's events-and by the letter bomb-that for at least this time, I didn't want to be alone anymore.

At six forty-five, I decided to shower and dress. I accidentally brushed against one of Mike's legs as I stood and he picked his head up, squinting as he tried to get his bearings.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

He looked at his watch. "Damn. I better put a move on if we're going to make you look presentable today. What's with the pillow? How long have you been out here?"

"Ten, fifteen minutes. I just got antsy, is all. I'll be quick."

"I'd like to stop by my place and clean up, too. Okay? Something wrong that you were out here? Something you want to talk about?"

"No. I was just slept out, I guess. I'm not used to going to bed so early." He couldn't see the expression on my face as I walked away.

On our way out the door, Mike stooped to pick up the newspapers. The front page of the Times had no mention of Selim Sengor, but the Post editors couldn't resist another banner headline: DOC CONCOCTS TURKISH DELIGHT -FLIGHT.

We were in Mike's car, parking near his tiny walk-up apartment on York Avenue, when his beeper went off. He returned the call and seemed pleased with the message.

"The man's glove that was picked up near where Galinova was dumped, at the Met? The one that gave up two different DNA profiles?"

"Yeah."

"Inside the glove, the DNA from the skin cells is a perfect match to Joe Berk."

"Joe Berk? What's the exemplar they used? What'd they have with his profile on it to make the comparison?"

"That plastic drinking cup you didn't want me to take from his apartment, Coop. You can cut your teeth on some more breaking law. Make it legal for me so it sticks in court. Hate to jam you up with a bad search, but the practice will be good for you."

"I asked you to throw the damn cup away. Why do you risk getting good evidence by being a cowboy?" I asked Mike.

"Hey, the first time we were in Berk's apartment, you were hoping to pick up some white hairs, weren't you?"

"I didn't do it then, did I?"

"Garbage. I took the cup because it was garbage. Argue that to the stiffs who sit on the appellate court bench and wouldn't know a crime scene from a cocktail party. Let's go-out of the car."

"I'll wait for you down here."

"Battaglia said to keep an eye on you. I got this far so there's no point in letting you be a sitting target on a street corner. Don't pout about Joe Berk's DNA. I got what we need, didn't I?"

I followed Mike up the narrow staircase that led to his fifth-floor apartment. It was a studio that he had long ago christened "the coffin" because of its small size and dark interior. Since Val's death, that nickname must have made each homecoming a reminder of his loss.

"Just throw those things on the floor and have a seat," he said, pointing to a chair in the corner of the room. He grabbed clean clothes from the closet and dresser and went into the bathroom to shower.

The disarray in the apartment was startling. While his department car was usually littered with empty coffee containers and food wrappers, Mike's personal appearance-most often a blazer, button-down-collar shirt, and neatly pressed slacks or jeans-was ordinarily reflected in his home surroundings. I started to hang up a wind-breaker that had fallen to the floor and stuff socks and underwear in his laundry bag.

But more disturbing than the messiness was that this intimate space had been transformed into a shrine to Valerie. There were photographs of her on every surface, and her belongings were crowded onto shelves-architectural design books stacked on top of Mike's collection of historical biographies, and the exotic shells she brought back from her tropical vacations. I didn't know whether Val had moved all these things into Mike's apartment, or he had retrieved them from her place and set them up here after her death.

I bent over to study a photograph of Val I had never seen before. It was a close-up of her face, beaming back at the photographer- Mike, no doubt-from beneath the brim of an NYPD baseball cap. I was ashamed to catch myself making superficial comparisons-how much more even Val's features were than my own, what a fine beauty she possessed. I straightened up and dusted off the picture with any sleeve.

And then there were the clothes-several pastel-colored crewneck sweaters stacked on a closet shelf beside Mike's darker ones, strappy sandals lined up next to his loafers, and a diaphanous robe in Val's favorite lavender hues that was still draped across the back of the wooden chair that he had offered me to sit on.

I was smoothing the covers on the bed that had been unmade, probably for days, when Mike came out of the bathroom. "What are you doing?"

"We can come back later on and I can help you straighten things up."

"It's not Buckingham Palace, Coop. It's the way I live, okay?"

"It didn't used to be."

"A lot of things didn't used to be. C'mon. Twelve-minute turnaround. Not bad, huh?"

"Would you like me to-well, to sort of go through some of Val's things with you?"