Rolling down the window, he barked a short burst of commands to the men in suits and gave the fur men the finger as he closed the window again. The men in suits retreated to stand at attention beside their respective limousines. The smiling parade of fur coats and insulting hand gestures passed by, unmolested.

“The Dominican is your future, Blakely. He’s dangerous because he’s crazy and stupid and hot. If he thinks you’re crossing him, the razor comes out and your nose is gone. Or maybe he’ll take an ear, and then he’ll make you kiss his shoe. And you will do that. After I’m dead, you will sleep in a bath of sweat every night that’s left to you. If you can’t handle a little girl, what chance do you have against the Dominican?”

“I can get a handle on this case.”

“No, you can’t. Let Senator Berman go down. It’s going to happen anyway, and I want him to go down for something that isn’t tied to me. In fact, I like this a lot. He’ll be turned out of the Senate, but he won’t do jail time, so he won’t be looking to make any deals with the feds. And don’t interfere with Jack Coffey. You’re too clumsy, too obvious. It’ll come back on me, so I’m telling you to let him alone. Mallory did a deal with you, and it’s in my best interests that you honor it.”

“Coffey disobeyed a direct order. The son of a bitch gave me attitude, and then he worked around me.”

“So? Markowitz’s kid did a lot worse. She made you eat shit. But maybe she’ll save you from the punk in the fur coat. Maybe you’ll become her dog instead. Damn Markowitz had all the luck. Mallory should have been my kid.”

“I can’t let her get away with this.”

“Well, you’re right about that. Never let your people muscle you. But you’ve got enough dirty cops to do any job you want. You only ask me to handle it so it won’t come back on you. Well, if you wanted to go behind my back, I suppose you could get one of these Young Turks to do it.” He gestured to the man who stood outside the car. “These boys have no respect for the old ways. They’re punks, no style, no honor, not one good brain in the pack. Yeah, one of them might do the job for you, maybe figuring I’d never find out. They’d be wrong about that. I don’t miss much. If one of them tried to touch Markowitz’s kid, it’d blow up in your face and mine. I’d have to get you for that.”

“I need your-”

“If you can’t control Mallory, then maybe I bought the wrong man for the job. I’ll give you my advice, and then you and I will have no more conversation on this business. We will never speak of it again. Is that understood?”

Blakely nodded and the old man continued. “Fear works. Remember, you can’t touch her. All you can do now is teach her to fear you. But to pull that off, you’ll have to become a better man than she is.”

Long after Heller had gone, she sat in the center of the floor with crime-scene photographs and diagrams spread on the dust. Now she cleansed the room in her mind’s eye. She painted the walls white and waxed the floors to a high shine. After looking around at her imaginary handiwork, she began the slow work of willing the room into a bloodbath, just as it was on the killing night.

She looked down at the diagram of the crime scene, which exactly placed the spot where axe slices had been found in the floor. This is where the artist had been cut to pieces half an hour after he was dead.

She took out a gold pocket watch and opened it. She depressed the stem to check the stopwatch function. In the facing circle of gold was the inscription of her own name, just Mallory, which followed the generations of names back to Markowitz’s grandfather.

She imagined Peter Ariel lying on the floor and set the watch to Slope’s estimate for his time of death. Another half hour must pass before the first postmortem cut.

What was going on? What was the killer doing, saying?-conversation? Was there more than one person in the room?

Mallory stood up and began to pace back and forth between her mental re-creations of the artist’s body and the sculpture of iron rods and a rusted, crushed car. She went to the back room where the hanging wire was kept and brought the imaginary spools back to the gallery.

She looked down at the watch and allowed a few minutes more for the time the killer might have taken to remove his clothes and pile them away from the mess of the makeshift abattoir. Only minutes had passed. What was the killer doing with the time?

She moved the watch ahead, and knelt down beside the body that was not there. She began to cut away at Peter Ariel with the imaginary axe, a few sure blows for each of the hands and feet, a bit more work for the head. The axe blade was dulling with every cut. The meat was splaying out instead of the clean sever. It was harder work to sever the torso into two parts, to hack through the spinal column and the meat. She would need to rest periodically.

The minute hand of the watch swept several times around the dial, allowing for the rest period. Before the mutilation was half done, her watch said it was time to bring on the dancer.

Mallory looked toward the main entrance and created a vision of Aubry Gilette. She brought the dancer through the door with slow grace.

“Hold it, kid.”

She stopped the action in her mind and listened to another voice.

“Naw, that’s all wrong, Kathy,”‘ said Markowitz. Though he was dead and in the ground, he sat beside her in the dust on the floor. “This is a critical moment. What’s Aubry thinking and feeling as she comes through that door?”

“I don’t know,” Mallory whispered to the dead Markowitz. “I can’t go where the ballerina goes.”

“You can do this, baby. Hell, a bright chimp could work it out. Now think. Aubry’s a young kid in a strange neighborhood after dark. She doesn’t carry a gun like you-she’s got no defenses at all. So you bring her in cautious, all tense, all eyes. She thinks something’s wrong. The message said it was an emergency, right? So she’s moving faster. Her face is all worried-she’s looking for bad news.

Mallory turned her watch back for the next try. Now the twenty-year-old dancer came through the door with more tension and energy. If Madame Burnstien told the truth, this would be a strange place to her-she would be wary. Mallory brought young Aubry across the small reception area and into the main room. Mallory rose and moved toward her, holding the axe high. The phantom Aubry turned and ran.

“Stop!” Markowitz called time out. And Mallory stopped the watch.

She’s looking at a body hacked up in pieces and someone standing over it still hacking. Give her time to take it in, to be sure it’s not her uncle. Then give her credit for world-class reflexes and adrenaline, pure fear feeding her veins, giving her speed.

Mallory set the watch back thirty seconds. She made another whack in Ariel’s torso and looked up to Aubry, allowing time for the shock to set in, then the fear. Mallory had already taken up the chase as the dancer was turning. Mallory ran fast, but not fast enough to overtake a dancer at physical peak and with a head start of at least twenty feet. No, Aubry would be out the door and into the street by now.

Mallory turned back her watch. This time, when she ran at Aubry, she created a companion phantom with no face. She placed this figure near the door. As Aubry recovered her wits and turned to run, the shadowy phantom reached for her and dragged her farther into the room. The body of Peter Ariel was thirty feet from the first spill of Aubry’s blood. Mallory was halfway across the room now, swinging the axe high over her head and bringing it down on the dancer’s neck.

Aubry would be screaming, so Mallory aimed the next blow at the front of the neck. This would have been the blow that flooded Aubry’s throat with blood, making breath near impossible. The dancer was down, rising on one arm to lock eyes with Mallory. Aubry’s young face was gone to shock and wild panic, not believing that this could be happening to her. Her hands flew up to ward off the next blow to create the defensive wounds found on her corpse.