“Almost to the All-Stars and we’re only a game and a half in front of Boston. We better liven up our bats,” Mike said.

“There it is, Alex. Do you see now?”

“What, Jerry? What am I looking for?”

“That pea-size bulge, right under my blade.”

“Yes, yes, I do.”

“It’s an embryo, Alex. I’m pretty sure of it. You see how the embryonic substance looks entirely different than the uterus? I’ll confirm it under the scope, but I’m certain what you see is fetal tissue.”

Mike looked up from the newspaper. “What the hell are you telling us?”

“That your girl Rebecca Hassett was pregnant at the time she was killed.”

“Don’t defend the guy, Jerry. How did a doc miss the kid’s pregnancy, can you explain that to me? That fact could have changed the way the entire case shook out. Maybe it gave somebody a motive, maybe it gave-”

“Don’t fly off the handle, Mike. It wouldn’t have been easy to see. I’d say the fetus wasn’t even three months yet-probably just a bit over two. The uterus is barely enlarged. Here-you can see the incision he made-will you look at this, please?” Jerry said. “The pathologist made one cut from front to back-right here-so he didn’t see all of the uterus, any more than I did when I made mine. The place where he sliced? There was nothing to show it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Since there was no trauma to the vaginal vault, no signs of a sexual assault at autopsy, a superficial visual of the reproductive organs would be all most docs would have done. Not uncommon. This was a sixteen-year-old girl-eight, maybe nine weeks pregnant. If nobody brought that piece of information in as part of her history, most pathologists doing the postmortem on an asphyxial death might have missed it.”

Mike’s argument with Jerry Genco faded to background noise. My thoughts were somewhere else.

I was trying to put together what I remembered of the time frame during which Bex Hassett’s life had spun so terribly out of control. How much earlier was it that her father had died? When had she started spending all that time away from home? Who was in the pack she was hanging with in Pelham Bay Park? What had caused her to turn against her friend Trish Quillian? Had anyone realized she’d been impregnated just a couple of months before her death?

“I wonder how religious the family was. What if Mrs. Hassett knew her daughter was pregnant and threw her out of the house?” I asked. “Parents have done that with girls who embarrassed them-more often than you think.”

“You’re a bit tardy with that thought, Coop. About six months too late to ask Mama, according to the headstone on her grave.”

“Maybe Bobby knew. Maybe the brothers had some idea. What if that’s why he didn’t want the exhumation done?”

Mike’s eyes narrowed as he considered the idea. “Guess I’ll have to talk to him again. Put him back on the list, after I’m done with Trish Quillian.”

“You think it throws Reuben DeSoto-the original suspect-back in the mix? What if she’d been sleeping with him and told him he was the father of the baby? He’d have no reason to rape her then-but they might have argued about it. Maybe he did kill her.”

“That whole gang she was running with in the park? I guess we’ll have to see if we can scare up any of those guys.”

Jerry Genco was ready to get us out of his hair. “Odds are this had nothing to do with the girl’s death. You know the numbers on teen pregnancy in this country? It’s a staggering figure. She had a high-risk lifestyle, this Hassett kid. We see it all too frequently here. Quite sad, really.”

The arguments I had made to Judge Gertz about my motion to use an expert on interpersonal violence in Brendan Quillian’s trial were triggered now by Genco’s dismissal of the relevance of this murder victim’s pregnancy.

“The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is homicide,” I said.

Genco was labeling his specimens for storage. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“Pregnancy-like separation-is one of the two most dangerous times for women in a bad relationship,” I went on. “Most of them are killed by the men they’d been intimate with-I hesitate to use the word lover. You know that, too.”

“And one of the most common causes of death in those circumstances is strangulation,” Mike said, looking at me a bit less skeptically.

“So if somebody knew Rebecca Hassett was pregnant, and that somebody wasn’t happy about it, maybe it gives us a new suspect.”

“Well, I’ll be the first to tell you if I was wrong about the insignificance of this-this pregnancy. I’ll call you tomorrow to see if I can give you two any direction,” Jerry Genco said. “Maybe we can help figure the paternity. We’ll have a preliminary on the DNA of the fetal tissue in twenty-four hours.”

Ignacia Bliss took over the task of guarding me for the twelve-hour shift starting at 8 p.m. She met me inside the funeral home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, where Elsie Evers’s grieving relatives and an honor guard of court officers surrounded the closed coffin. The most skilled technicians in the funeral business couldn’t have reconstructed her face well enough to allow anyone to view the slain woman.

My closest friends from the office-Nan, Catherine, and Marisa-had come to the wake as well, arranging with Ignacia to follow us to my apartment. They were determined to distract me and get a read on my emotional well-being. Fortunately for me, Paul Battaglia had become mired in another matter that required his attention in Manhattan, where the people who vote for him live.

“We’re in charge of dinner,” Catherine said. “Go get into your robe.”

While I changed and Ignacia went into the guest room to make some calls, the three of them poured drinks and opened a bottle of wine.

Marisa called into the bedroom, “Does Swifty’s deliver? Delicious thought, isn’t it?”

“When they get a break in the action, ask them to send a waiter in a cab with the order. Get something for the two cops in the lobby, too.”

I padded out in a short silk robe and my ballet slippers. They were listening to television news in the den, and Nan muted it when she saw me.

“I need to hear it. It’s fine.”

“Mike and Mercer said we shouldn’t let you-”

I rolled my eyes. “I need my pals around me, just like this. I don’t need a censor.”

A seasoned crime reporter was leading off the nine o’clock hour. The chiron below him was running a strip that said BREAKING NEWS across the bottom of the screen.

“We begin with a story about the many possible sightings of the armed fugitive Brendan Quillian, who broke out of a Manhattan courtroom yesterday in a deadly blaze of gunfire.”

In the top right corner, over his head, the news producer had gathered an array of photographs of Quillian that were displayed for several seconds each. Most had been cropped from the social columns, although it was unlikely that the tuxedo-and-bow-tie outfit he was often seen in would translate to someone readily recognizable in casual street clothes.

“The damn eye,” I said, sinking into my most comfortable wing chair. “Why don’t they use that in their description?”

“Frankly, it never seemed as obvious to me,” Marisa said, “the times I’ve seen him in court.”

“He hasn’t glared at you the way he fixes on Alex,” Nan said.

“…and tips have continued to come in to police, as well as to our newsroom, from all over the Northeast. Earlier today, Brendan Quillian was reportedly sighted on an Amtrak train to Washington, as well as in a diner in Poughkeepsie, New York,” the reporter said. “So as you can imagine, it’s quite a task for the NYPD to follow up on all these calls to determine which ones have any credibility.”