Mallory could not put one sound to a human being. Had the woman found her way out of the cellar? Mallory stood dead still in the pure blackness until she lost the sense of her own body. She reached out with her hands and encountered another wall. On again, moving slowly, listening to the rats’ feet and the sound of water dripping from a leaking pipe. Her fingers found a wet stream with the rank smell of rusted plumbing. The wall turned a corner, and the next panel was made of something less substantial, she guessed plywood. Reaching out with the other hand, she discovered another partition of the same flimsy material. She was in a narrow passage. Exploring hands found the seam of a door, and farther down, the knob. She pressed her ear to the wood and knew there was nothing living on the other side of it, nothing larger than the cockroaches. The musty odor of their pollution was everywhere. She found another door on the other side of the small passage. No one home there, either.

She stopped to listen for the larger creature, as if believing she could detect the heartbeat of a human apart from the collective life signs of rats and insects.

But the woman was here. Mallory could feel the presence, the tension of one who waited and listened. It was guarded intuition, the awareness of a nearby animal set to spring. Mallory wandered farther down the passage, passing other doors. She guessed this basement had once been rented out for storage rooms. A good guess. She turned another corner and found herself in an identical row of facing doors.

“Tell me what you want with me,” commanded a woman’s voice, floating free in the black space.

There was no way to orient the sound except by the distance, which was neither near nor far. Mallory revolved slowly in the dark.

“Tell me what you want,” said the voice.

This time, the voice came from behind her. She turned around. “My name is Mallory.”

“I know who you are, Detective. I asked you what you wanted.”

The position had changed.

“I only want to talk to you,” said Mallory. And I wonder, do you read the papers, Sabra? Or did someone tell you my name and rank?

She had a vague direction now, and she moved toward it. A rat ran over her foot and squealed in terror as she kicked it.

“Stay where you are, Mallory. Don’t come any closer. I wouldn’t like that. You may be younger, but I know the terrain and you don’t.”

“All right, Sabra, we’ll do it your way,” she called into the void, moving forward with softer footfalls than any of the other creatures in the basement.

“You have no children, do you, Detective Mallory?”

“No, Sabra. No children, no family.”

“You can’t know what it’s like to have your child slaughtered.”

“I’ve seen the crime-scene photographs.” And what had Sabra seen? The real thing?

“Photographs won’t show you the half of it, not the pain she was in, not any of the terror. Is there anything in your experience that can tell you what that was like?”

You and the priest and the rabbi. You all want a piece of me. All right, I’ll play.

“I saw my mother slaughtered before I was seven years old. I know exactly what it’s like.”

She stopped moving in the silence and waited for the voice to begin again, to give her bearings and direction.

“I’m sorry. So sorry.” The voice softened now, a mother’s voice. “It’s incomprehensible, isn’t it? You can’t quite believe that you’ll never see the one you love again. How could it be possible that this person could just cease to be? Detective Mallory, how did you feel when you finally understood that you would never kiss your mother again?”

Was the voice farther away now? Mallory moved forward in the dark, making no sound. “That was the thing I missed the most-the kiss. For a long time, I couldn’t go to sleep without it. The dark was always difficult for me. The dark of night and no mother. I’m afraid of the dark, Sabra. Can we go somewhere in the light and talk? Can we, please?‘’ Wheedle of a child to a mother.

“Perhaps.” Sabra’s voice was edging away.

Mallory stepped forward again.

“Tell me about your mother,” said Sabra.

You and the priest and the rabbi.

“I think I look like my mother,” said Mallory. “For years it drove me crazy because her face was slipping away from me. And then one day, there she was in the mirror. But by then I had another mother-Helen Markowitz. Helen was wonderful. I loved her, too. And then Helen died a few years ago. I was very angry with her. Does it sound strange to be angry with someone for dying?”

She waited for Sabra’s answer. And waited.

And now Mallory knew she had been abandoned. She had been talking to no one.

She moved forward with speed, too reckless, and her blind feet stumbled over a crate. Her shin hit the wood, but she did not cry out. Mallory felt her way along the corridor of doors to empty rooms. She stopped and listened to the sound of the boards being pushed out to the pavement beyond the window. Moving forward again, she hit a wall in a blind corridor, a dead end. She turned back, moving faster now in her familiarity with space already covered, rounding a wall of lockers, and then another. But she realized too late that she had lost her orientation. She was heading deeper into the room, and away from the window.

Sabra was gone by now, slipped away down some street in the invisible cloak of poverty. No one on the sidewalk would be able to point the way she’d gone, for who ever looked at the face of a bag lady?

When Mallory rounded the storage cabinets into the next row, she saw a flickering light leaking out from the crack beneath one of the doors, and she hurried toward it, flying through the suffocating darkness.

She pushed open the door, knowing that no one would be there. The tiny room was lit with candles. Newspapers lined one side of the room with black-and-white pictures of Oren Watt. Color photographs of a child were pinned to the opposite wall. Cracked dishes were neatly stacked in a corner. It was too familiar.

The storage room was small and close. The photo graphs of the child gave Mallory glimpses into a background of more open spaces and graceful living, a happier time in Sabra’s life. All around this cramped space were the signs of obsession. The woman must have collected every newspaper article ever printed about the murders. Mallory understood obsession. It was a basic thing. It was important to find a place to put your hate. She understood, but it would make no difference.

I have to get the press off my back and the feds out of NYPD or I lose my case.

The bedding on the floor was a rotting blanket pulled over a makeshift mattress of old clothes and newspapers. One photograph lay on a tattered pillow. It was Aubry dancing. How beautiful she was. Mallory looked closely at the photograph, then turned it over facedown.

Sabra, it’s a big mistake to get between me and a case.

She turned to see another photograph pinned to the wall, and this one was startling. Sabra smiled for the camera as she was holding Aubry on her lap. The resemblance between mother and child was a strong one. This might be the only likeness of Sabra in existence, the single breach of her fanatic rejection of portraits. It must have meant a great deal to her. It must have been hard to leave it behind. Sabra’s eyes stared into Mallory’s.

You lose, Sabra!

In the shimmer of candlelight, the walls seemed to move. The candles were everywhere. Mallory walked around the tiny room, blowing them out in the familiar manner of an old ritual, until there was only one candle left to illuminate the photograph of mother and child. Aubry was perhaps four years old. Sabra was planting a kiss on her cheek, as Aubry was squirming free to mug for the camera, eyes crossing, laughter spilling out of the photograph.