My phone rang and Laura answered it, buzzing the intercom. Mike reached over and picked it up. "Yeah, sarge?"

He listened for a few seconds and hung up the phone. "No doubt about it. This time M is for Mecca."

"I'm quite pleased I could help you solve your puzzle, detective. Anything…?"

"When's the last time you were there, Mr. Alden?"

His forehead wrinkled and his dark, thick eyebrows met as one. "It's been weeks, Mr. Chapman. Several weeks."

"Exactly when?"

"Look, if you're back to playing 'gotcha' again, I'd obviously prefer to check my office diary."

"Why'd you go?"

Alden looked to me. "They have this wonderful Encore series- Broadway shows."

I knew the series, which had proved to be enormously successful for the center year after year.

"It was a performance of Bye, Bye, Birdie. That's amusing, come to think of it."

Mike was too focused on Lucy DeVore posed in someone's fez, leaning on a door handle in the Mecca Theater, to be easily amused. "How so?"

"Birdie was really the first musical to bring rock'n'roll to Broadway."

"Spare me the lyrics. Coop's likely to break into a dance. What of it?"

"There's a scene in the show where the characters go into the wrong room and break up a Shriners' meeting. Remember that?"

I didn't.

"Tarbooshes and flying tassels everywhere. I'm sure there are plenty of them in wardrobe over at City Center. You don't need to see mine."

The one on Lucy's head had distinctive markings. A crescent and scimitar-whose meaning I now understood-over some Arabic design. We'd be able to tell whether it was a costume from a Broadway performance or the real deal from an antique mosque.

"How about backstage, Mr. Alden? You been backstage lately?"

Again the man's brow furrowed as he tried, it seemed to me, to second-guess the direction Mike Chapman was going before he supplied an answer.

"I've been backstage dozens of times, detective. I'm a-"

"Yeah, I know. You're a friggin' patron of the friggin' arts. I've bought more beers at Yankee Stadium than you've got Playbills, but it doesn't get me in the locker room to pose for pictures with the boys after the game. Dancers. You been backstage here lately with any of the ladies?"

Mike was losing the bigger picture to close in on the image of Lucy DeVore. Hubert Alden had no idea where Mike was headed.

"Upstairs, certainly."

"Whaddaya mean? In the balcony?"

"No, no. There are nine or ten floors of studios in the office tower behind the auditorium, Mr. Chapman. Some of the most spectacular dance studios in the city are housed there, rented out to many of the companies for rehearsal space."

"And you've been up in there recently? Where exactly?"

"I'm surprised that Chet Dobbis didn't explain all of this to you when you talked to him about Talya Galinova."

"What's for Dobbis to tell?"

"Before he came to the Met, Chet was the artistic director at City Center. He knows every inch of that place from the top of the dome to the crawl spaces in the basement."

Mike looked at me to see if I was following Alden's point. "What does that have to do with Galinova?"

"Well, of course I've visited Talya at City Center. So did Dobbis, so did Rinaldo Vicci, so did Joe Berk. Talya's rehearsal studio was there, Mr. Chapman," Alden said, making the connection between Lucy DeVore's accident and Galinova's murder a bit less tenuous in my mind. "She spent much more time in that building than she did at the Met."

There was no point keeping Hubert Alden in my office any longer. His information was pointing us in a new direction, reweaving many of the same characters into a new tapestry, giving us another venue to explore-one that was familiar to most of them.

As Mike walked Alden to the elevators, Mercer Wallace came into my office carrying a bag full of sandwiches.

"Heard you were busy doing your StairMaster workout early this morning," he said, unpacking the late lunch he brought for each of us. "I figured after that you could even stand a bag of chips for a change."

"Feed me, m'man," Mike said, returning to the room and reaching for the roast beef hero, biting into it as though he hadn't eaten in days. "How was your weekend?"

"I think I've been in every homeless shelter and soup kitchen in the city since you left town. Still looking for Ramon Carido," Mercer said. "He must be living under a rock in the park, and it has gotta be driving him crazy. This beautiful spring weather-every jogger and biker and stroller is out there on his hunting ground, stoking his imagination. I doubt he'll ever go after a dog-walker again."

"Coop missed all the local news while she was on the Vineyard. Every station showed that sketch of him around the clock."

"Reward money's up to twenty grand from one of the victims-advocacy groups. Some mutt'll turn him in for the loot before too long."

"So you worked all weekend while I played hooky?"

"And lucky thing you did, Ms. Cooper. May I say that for once you are no longer the favorite prosecutor of the Manhattan Special Victims Squad? I don't want to be a snitch, but somebody drew a mustache and horns on that picture of you holding my baby boy last Christmas. You look downright evil."

"Easy come, easy go. What now?"

"The guys are really pissed at you because of the order from Judge McFarland in the Carido case."

"You mean not being able to try to match their DNA evidence to the linkage database? Two weeks and we'll have a whole new set of rules. Good ones, I hope."

"In the meantime, we caught six new squeals since Thursday night."

"Yeah, I saw the complaint reports on Laura's desk this morning. Four of them knew their attackers. DNA won't make the difference in those cases. Tell the squad to work those cases the old-fashioned way-with their brains."

"Well, they need the databank in the other two. In fact, when you look those reports over more carefully, you'll see that Saturday night's break-in down on Allen Street may be part of a pattern. We want to try to link it to an open series in Tribeca."

Mike had finished his hero and was working on his second bag of nachos. "She's not going to win any popularity contests in the Homicide Squad either. Same beef."

"I didn't go up to court intending to try to make new law, guys. It was a command performance."

"Yeah, well, don't go calling nine-one-one again any time soon," Mike said, wiping the mustard from his cheek with the back of his hand. "Some dick is likely to tell you to stick your DNA up your-"

"Laura? You just reminded me, Mike. Laura?" She poked her head through the doorway. "Would you call down to the supply office? They need to issue me a new cell phone. Beg them to let me keep my old number, okay?"

"Got it."

"I had to turn mine in to the detectives this morning so they can make a record of the exact times of the calls I made from my building last night," I explained to Mike and Mercer. "They have to check with Benito, too. Maybe he heard whether my attacker said anything while the line was open."

"I thought you told me he didn't say a word."

"That's exactly what I told you. And I'm Sure of it. They just want to double-check, in case I'm mistaken.''

"Guess you got zero credibility, Coop. Those cops trust you about twice as much as you trust your witnesses. It's good medicine for you. What'd you think of Hubert Alden?" Mike had finished his bottle of root beer and reached for a swig of my Diet Coke to wash down the food.

"Same as I think about anybody who throws a curve like that one. You and I had such tunnel vision about the Met as the geographic center of this investigation. There's something way too slick about Alden, and I worry that maybe he's just steering us away from the progress we were making," I said, as Mike started to tell Mercer about the rehearsal studios at City Center.