"Did he talk to you? Say anything that suggests he knew who you were?"

"Talk to me? It wasn't a pickup, Detective Chapman. The plan was obviously to kill me by choking or-"

"Whoa. A little dramatic tonight, aren't we? Kill you?"

"I called out to him, thinking maybe he was a neighbor. He never answered. All he wanted to do was overtake me and pin me down so that he could-well, he could do whatever it was he intended to do to me." I rubbed my neck. "I'm telling you he gripped me so hard that if I hadn't gotten away from him he'd have stopped my breathing within seconds."

The sergeant was emboldened by Mike's skepticism. "Maybe, ma'am, he was just coming along behind you and fell on the staircase. My guys are knocking on-"

"Oh, my masked neighbor? The one who dresses for blizzards in April? The clumsy one who can't stay on his feet?" I stood up and walked to the front door. "Why am I wasting time with you two? Sergeant, I'd like you to take me down to the lobby so I can see who these guys are from Con Edison."

"Coop, stay here and I'll bring up their supervisor so you can satisfy yourself that none of them have anything-"

"I wasn't talking to you, Mike. You might as well go home and keep wallowing in your own misery. No need to take me seriously."

Mike grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me away from the door. "Wallowing? Is that what I've been doing for three months? Is that what Val-"

"I'm sorry. That's not what I meant to-"

"You don't usually have any difficulty expressing yourself. I get your point."

"I apologize, Mike." I squared off to face him directly. "I'm scared and I'm tired and I'm the one who's feeling sorry for myself tonight. Please accept my apology."

"Whoever did this to you was either inside another apartment or out of the building by the time the first RMP got here."

"Mike, will you forgive-"

"It's not the time for this, Coop. The sergeant doesn't need to know my backstory, okay? These Con Ed guys who are here-"

"You've seen them yourself? They're legit?"

"There's bad wiring, they say, that took the electricity in this whole line down."

"Bad, like it's damaged? Or like it was intentionally altered?"

"It's two o'clock in the morning. Bad is all they know so far." Mike took a slug of vodka and adjusted the collar of his jacket.

"You know more than you're telling me."

"I always know more than you give me credit for, kid, don't I?"

"I'll give you an acknowledgment in my next legal brief. What is it?"

"It doesn't take a law degree to know that the source for all the electricity in the building comes in through the basement. The basement is accessible from within the building, isn't it?"

I nodded. "From the garage, too. And from the outside, although I assume those doors are locked at night. It's huge. There's a storage room, a laundry room. I've never even been inside the custodial area."

"Working a toaster oven is high tech for you," Mike said. "Once inside that boiler room, a guy with a few high school vocational classes under his belt could easily find the main electrical panel that connects to the A-line apartments and with not much more than a pair of needle-nose pliers, put you and anyone else he wanted out of business for the night."

"And the elevator banks?" I asked. "Was the super really ordered to shut them down?"

"Yeah. You can smell the burnt rubber in the basement. They had to take that precaution with both banks of elevators."

"You believe there was a man after me, right?"

"I'd believe you if you told me you saw a UFO, kid. I'm not the enemy here," Mike said, steering me back to the living room sofa to sit down. "Face it. This building is a block long. You've got the north and south wings, two elevator banks for residents plus the freight elevator, and two sets of fire stairs. All your stalker had to do was make the place go dark, then walk up the staircase and wait for all the pigeons to come out of their cubbyholes. It's not the how that's hard to figure, it's the why."

"Security cameras?" the sergeant asked.

"Too snooty here," Mike said. "Management wanted them installed after an incident a few years back. Coop's neighbors were up in arms. Invasion of privacy and all that crap. No cameras."

"All he had to do after the attack," I said, "was go back up to one of the floors above me and walk across the hallway to the other side of the building-"

Mike took over from there. "Take off his mask and gloves, drop them and the black sweater in the garbage chute, and walk down and out like any other respectable citizen, unnoticed because of all the commotion that's going on in the lobby and outside the building."

"The CO has a man on each entrance of the building. Everybody passing through this morning will have to stop to be identified, residents or not," Camacho said.

"Can't wait till I get my eviction notice," I said. "Talk about a nuisance tenant."

"Give me your keys."

"What?"

"Your keys. I'm going to take the sergeant downstairs to see where things stand while you grab a few hours of that sleep you say you need. I'll let myself back in for a nap. Better than wallowing alone at home."

"Mike, I feel like-"

"The keys," he said, holding a hand up in my face to stop me from going on. "Rest up 'cause we got an early-morning meeting with Joe Berk."

"I'm not sure I have the fortitude for him first thing in the morning. He's so crude. You got something I don't know about?"

"I've been working on that photograph of Lucy DeVore. You know, the recent one, looks like it could have been taken since she got to New York."

"Wearing the fez, leaning on a doorknob with a word inscribed in the metal that begins with the initial M?"

"Yeah, that one. So first I stopped by the task force operation at the opera house. Not even close. There's nothing that looks like the same design or lettering on anything at the Met. So I got a list of the other legitimate theaters from one of the old-timers who works the box office, for all the Broadway houses that begin with M. I started at the Music Box."

"What a beauty, isn't it? It was designed to house musicals by Irving Berlin. That's why my father always loved to go there-reminded him of his childhood."

"Too delicate. Not a match. So I tried the Majestic."

"That one's huge."

"No good. Forever Phantom. Even threw in the Martin Beck. Nada. And there used to be a theater called the Morosco, the old broad told me, but it was demolished a long time ago."

"I can't think of any others."

"I couldn't, either. But the same dame told me about the Brooks Atkinson, whoever the hell he was."

"A critic. He wrote theater reviews for the Times."

"Yeah, well, that was built back in the 1920s. And it was called the Mansfield then," Mike said, not even trying to suppress a smile. "Why you'd name anything for a critic is beyond me. I still thought it was worth checking out the original fixtures despite the change on the marquee."

"I take it you found your doorknob."

"Nope. But hanging in the theater lobby was a whole bunch of blowups of famous actors from forty, fifty years ago, celebrating at Sardi's after some kind of award show. In one of them, you can see Yul Brynner, Zero Mostel, and Richard Burton, each raising a glass, with Joe Berk smack in the middle of the group. And on top of his foul-mouthed fat head is the same, exact kind of tasseled red fez that Lucy DeVore was wearing in that photograph we found in her hotel room."