“Coop may be looking for new digs if she blows her trial.”

“You got that rich boy that hired someone to off his wife, don’t you? Thin ice, Alex. Newspapers read like you’re on thin ice.”

“Stay tuned, Spiro. I’ve still got a few surprises left.”

“I don’t envy you going up against Lem Howell. He wiped the floor with one of the Bronx prosecutors a few weeks ago. Three-month trial and deliberations barely lasted through lunch.”

Spiro unlocked a file cabinet and tossed a couple of manila folders on one of the desks. “Whoever the squad boss was at the time must have dumped this one. Guy who had it wasn’t one of our sharpest. Retired about a year later. Doesn’t look like he did all that much detecting.”

Mike dragged a second chair over and sat beside me. “You know him?”

I started to skim the first few pages of documents.

“Only by reputation,” Spiro said from the doorway. “Looks like he had a confession and all. Perp skipped back to the Dominican Republic, so nobody went after him. Might keep it myself. Sounds like an easy collar. Help yourselves. The Xerox machine is over on our side.”

“Where’s the confession?” Mike asked, sliding the folder over as he picked through it.

“‘Rebecca Hassett. Female Caucasian. Sixteen,’” I said, reading aloud. “‘Found in a drainage ditch off the side of the fairway on the eighth hole of the golf course.’”

“There’s your girl,” Mike said. He studied two photographs that were in a small envelope stapled to the side of the folder, then passed them to me.

The first was from a school yearbook, probably taken just months before her death. Bex was unsmiling, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair-the color of Mike’s-framing her pale face in a layered cut. She looked older than her age, or perhaps it was the makeup she used to achieve that effect. She was rail thin, wearing a black turtleneck sweater with a plain crucifix on a chain around her neck.

“Pretty kid,” I said.

The second picture was one of the Polaroids taken by the detective at the crime scene.

He had obviously stood over the body, shooting down at Bex’s face and upper torso. I would never have recognized the solemn young woman who had earlier posed for the camera at school. Her head was turned to the side, against the ground-the once pale skin cyanotic and the swollen tongue protruding from her mouth. The sweater she was wearing was opened halfway down her chest, and abrasions lined the tip of her chin. Faint oval bruises were apparent on her neck, probably the fingertips of the killer.

“What’s this mark?” I asked Mike, pointing to a pattern within the discolored patch of skin.

He leaned over me and looked again. “I can’t tell. Your folder have the autopsy report?”

I turned several pages of DD5s until I came to the medical examiner’s findings.

“Manual strangulation,” I said, skimming the first page of the document. “The ME thinks those lines on the neck are caused by the zipper of her sweater, caught under the perp’s hands and pressed into the skin. There must be close-ups of the injury in the morgue archives.”

I looked at the Polaroid again. The thick metal zipper had left an imprint like miniature railroad ties as it was pressed against Bex’s throat.

“Sexual assault?” Mike asked.

My finger ran down the paragraphs as I looked for the doctor’s description of the vaginal vault. “No sign of it. Nothing completed, anyway.”

“How does it read, Coop? Like they looked?”

I knew what Mike meant. A sixteen-year-old kid who’d been living recklessly the last few weeks of her life might have been presumed by investigators as well as acquaintances to have contributed to her own death. Perhaps the case had not been worked as aggressively as the murder of a teenage girl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Perhaps there had been so many homicides the same week that this one was relegated to the back burner by a detective with less interest in his victims than Mike Chapman had.

“Covers the bases,” I said. “Detailed examinations of the external and internal genitalia. Vaginal swabs taken and prepared on slides. Both negative. The UV lamp showed nothing either.”

The presence of seminal fluid or sperm inside the body or on the thighs would have been suggestive of penetration. Since semen fluoresces under ultraviolet light, it was routine to scan the body for matter not visible to the naked eye.

“They did a pubic-hair combing, too,” I said. “Nothing loose, nothing foreign.”

“Bite marks?” Mike asked, referring to one of the classic injuries that often presents in a frenzied homicide in which the motive was sexual assault.

“No. Doesn’t look like there were abrasions anywhere else on Bex’s body.”

“Finger marks on the thighs? I mean, does it specifically say there were none?”

I shook my head. An attempt at a rape often resulted in minor bruising as the assailant tried to pry apart the victim’s legs.

“No, but look at the chart,” I said, referring to the outline of a human body that was part of the autopsy report. “The only notation of any focal point of injury anywhere on Bex Hassett is on her neck.”

I could see Mike’s expression changing as he evaluated the detective’s reports while he listened to me. Bex Hassett was becoming one of his victims. He was Monday-morning quarterbacking the guy who had dumped the case-even after getting a suspect to confess-as Mike liked to do with every unsolved homicide he came across.

Mike was flipping the pages of the second folder. “How about fingernail scrapings?”

I thought of Amanda Keating and her frantic effort to get her killer’s hands off her neck so that she could continue breathing.

“No.”

“No, they didn’t take any?” he asked impatiently.

“The doc scraped the nails. Negative findings.”

He reached across and tried to take the folder from me. “There must be some signs of a struggle. It sounds like the girl didn’t even fight. Why did Trish Quillian think she’d been sexually assaulted?”

“There’s your answer,” I said, passing the papers to him. “Third paragraph from the end. Bex’s blood alcohol level was over.23. That’s why she couldn’t fight.”

Mike answered with a whistle. “Jeez, the poor kid must have been dead drunk. What a target for any scumbag who happened to be hanging around.”

The most commonly abused drug in America is alcohol. The pack that Bex Hassett was running with in the park, if Trish Quillian had been right, had encouraged her to get in over her head once she began to be alienated from her family and friends. If she had voluntarily intoxicated herself-and the ME’s report had no findings of any other illegal substances in the toxicological studies performed-then she could have been either in a stupor or entirely unconscious when her life had been taken.

Mike had grabbed the autopsy report from me so that he could study it himself from top to bottom. I picked up the folder he had placed back on the desk to read through the detective’s follow-up reports to see how his suspect had been developed.

The description of the crime scene included a canvass of the area within the park that surrounded Bex Hassett’s body. An empty bottle of Courvoisier and several cans of beer were found a few feet away. DNA profiles had been developed from saliva left on the glass-including on the lip of the brandy bottle-and matched the genetic fingerprint of the deceased teenager. Results had also been compared to some of the street kids who had been picked up in the neighborhood for questioning, but none of them had been a hit.

“You can copy all this,” I said to Mike, rubbing my eyes. “Maybe I’m just tired-and my heart breaks for this lost child-but can we save this for another day?”

Mike started turning pages more quickly. “Make sense of this for me.”

“What?”

“The detective’s notes from the confession. Nineteen-year-old kid-one of the park regulars named Reuben DeSoto.” Mike stood up straight, obviously jarred by something he had seen in the case file. “Two of the other hoodlums fingered him as the last of the group to be seen drinking with the girl that night.”