Mallory was marking the strikes, when Heller took the floor plan and the pencil from her hand. “I’m gonna teach you a trade secret, kid.” He made lines on her diagram. “This is how I knew how many times he cut her before she died. I never even had to look at the bodies. Slope agreed with my figures.”

Now her diagram showed a march of lines moving across the floor and then changing direction and moving back. He handed it back to her. “Every time the attacker pulled the weapon back for another strike, he sent out a flying line of blood from the axe to the floor and part of the wall. That’s how you can tell where he was, what direction he was walking in. So here, you can see him walking along beside her, making the blows while she crawled.” He pointed to a change of line angles. “This is where Aubry turned and made one last try for the door.”

He walked back to the front of the room. “She’s crawling toward the door, and this is where the killer made the fatal strike. This is where I found skull fragments in between the floorboards. And then the body was dragged to the back of the room.”

Mallory walked back to the site of the first blow. “It doesn’t work. She didn’t have to come this far into the room to see what was happening to Peter Ariel’s body. She would have turned to run long before she got this far.”

“She could have fainted or frozen with the-”

“Aubry was no helpless bimbo. She was a dancer with good reflexes. She was young with good eyes. She wanted to live just like the rest of us. Maybe there were two killers.”

“Markowitz didn’t figure it that way.” Heller’s tone was skeptical.

“How do you know he didn’t? The old man was always holding out. He held out on everybody else-why not you? But this time, he played it too cagey. Everybody got information on a need-to-know basis. If he’d laid open all the problems with the case, Quinn might have told him about the ritual of whitewashing the gallery walls and waxing the floor the day before every opening. Peter Ariel’s show was scheduled for the next day.”

“Oh, Christ, all the-”

“Yeah, if you’d only known, you might’ve gotten latent prints and worked up the hair and fiber evidence. But I’m sure Koozeman never volunteered that information. And he never mentioned the door in the wall either. Not your fault, Heller.”

But Heller didn’t agree. He stared up at the ceiling, shaking his head, his expression wafting between anger and frustration. “So, what now, Mallory?”

“Well, Starr and Koozeman would make a neat party of two.”

“So you’re tying their murders together with a revenge motive?”

“Maybe. When Dean Starr was a critic, he gave Peter Ariel two rave reviews. Suppose Koozeman wasn’t the only one who owned a piece of the artist?”

“I can still run the old physical evidence. Would that help you any?”

“I can’t have any paperwork on a case I’m not supposed to be working.”

“I’ll do it off the books. I can bury the cost in other investigations if I spread it around.”

“You won’t let me break into an empty gallery, but you’ll risk your job to work evidence off the books?”

“If I break the rules, I’ve got a good reason. You break rules because you can get away with it. It’s a game to you. Time to grow up, kid.”

“Heller, I don’t want any-”

“Grow up or fake it. At least try to make it look like Markowitz raised you right.”

Blakely parked his car on Mott Street and fumbled with the childproof cap on a small medicine bottle. He dry-swallowed a pill as he looked down the street to the line of three limos along the curb. Young men, wearing dark suits and dark glasses, walked between the cars, carrying coffee containers and slips of paper. Blakely walked up to the second limousine in the parked parade. A conversation passed between a man wearing driver’s gloves and his passenger beyond the crack of the tinted-glass window. The car’s rear door opened and Blakely bent down to shift his bulk into the spacious compartment. He sat down beside an old man with yellow teeth and listless black eyes. The air smelled like a sickroom.

After a few minutes of Blakely sweating through his story, the old man laughed.

“She made you shit in your pants, Blakely.” And now the laughing man began to cough into a handkerchief, and small spots of red bled through the white linen. The handkerchief disappeared into a massive hand with bulging blue arteries, crepe flesh and a vestige of power in the clenched fist. “Markowitz did a good job raising his kid. You know, I always liked that old bastard. I even turned out for his damn funeral.”

“She knows all about the bodega,” said Blakely, listening to the desperate notes in his own voice. “She could cause us both a lot of trouble.”

“But she won’t. Sounds like she has Markowitz’s style. You know, if her old man had been for sale, he would have been chief of detectives, not you.”

“But you did a deal with him on the-”

“Not what you’re thinking, Blakely. It wasn’t a payoff. And why doesn’t it surprise me that you don’t know the details? What do you know about what’s going on with your own department?”

“I know he backed off the-”

“Markowitz didn’t care how you bought your job. He didn’t have any hard evidence, but I didn’t know that then. He ran a bluff on me, and it worked. But it was never about money. He only wanted that freak who was killing all the winos, and you wouldn’t give him the manpower to do the job. So he and I, we did a trade. I put a small army on the street for three days and three nights. One of my boys delivered the freak to Special Crimes, and without a scratch on him. A nice clean job, and the deal was done.”

“He might not have had any evidence then, but the kid has something now.”

“So? She won’t use it. Her old man made a deal, and his kid will honor it.”

“Mallory doesn’t have a sense of honor. She’s a loose cannon. I know her.”

“She’s a loose cannon? I think you’re confused, Blakely. Look at you. You’re sweating like a pig. You’re a man on the edge of a heart attack. You come to me to put out your fires? You have no control over your own people, and you know why? They don’t fear you.”

“It’s more than the bodega connection. She’s going back into the Oren Watt case.”

“What’s that to me?”

“Senator Berman collected the ghoul art. He’s one of the-”

“The senator? That clown is going down in the next election. You might owe him something, I don’t. I’m cutting my losses on him.” He began to cough again. “I’m thinking of getting out of politics. It’s not like the old days. If you want to buy a politician, you have to outbid all those special interest groups. There’s so many of them. They grow like cancer. This town is going down-hill, you know that? It’s one big flea market of souls for sale.”

The old Mafia don turned his head sharply, to stare out the window, and what he saw made him angry. Then the anger resolved itself into a sigh of resignation. “Blakely, do you ever think about retirement? No? Perhaps you should. You see that?” He pointed one palsied finger at the window.

Across the street a young Hispanic, walking at a leisurely pace, led an entourage of men all decked out in fur coats, though the day was mild. The sun glinted off the gold jewelry at the young men’s throats and the diamonds at their ears.

“Crazy bastards,” said the old man in disgust. “They shouldn’t be here, not today. But they’ve got no sense of fear, you know? That’s what makes them dangerous. Now watch our people, see what they do.”

Two well-dressed young men in dark suits stood at attention, faces swiveling slowly, tracking the walking men. Now they were in motion, moving in concert toward the troop of furs and jewels. The furs smiled at the suits, flashing every tooth of white mixed with crowns of gold.

The old man turned back to Blakely. “If I don’t call the boys off, the razors and the guns come out. I don’t like a bloodbath in my neighborhood. The one up front, the Dominican punk, knows that. He’s counting on it. He’s just playin‘ with us, you see? But he doesn’t know I’m dying. So-not today-but one day soon, I won’t call my boys back.”