People were ambling along Forty-second Street, self-absorbed or talking to whomever they were with. Some were looking at Bryant Park or toward Times Square or the Chrysler Building. They were oblivious to the hidden worlds of the city, to the hidden dangers behind walls or beneath their feet. Which was how it should be. The job of the city’s forty thousand police officers was to give them that luxury. He was proud of the way they handled that responsibility even when, as now, the problem was moving faster than he was.

After the silence of the underground world, the Midtown South station house seemed unusually raucous. Gentry got himself coffee, shut the door to his office, opened the window, and stared at the street for several minutes before starting through the folders on his desk.

The phone beeped. He snapped it up.

“This is Detective-”

“What’s going on in the subway, Robert?”

“Kathy. How are you?”

“Not good.”

“Sorry to hear that…”

“Come on, Robert, talk to me. What’s going down?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” she snapped. “Subway service has been disrupted, and I got a solid tip that there was a dismembered bicyclist down there and that you found her among a bunch of dead homeless people. True?”

“If the tip’s solid, why are you asking me?”

“Because I need two sources, and that’s all my other source would tell me.”

“Which source was that?”

“Don’t do that,” Kathy warned.

And then it hit him. “I saw you on TV last night withKathy.” Not Kathy Leung, just Kathy. Officer Arvids Stiebris, you dumb, beauty-struck, horse’s ass of a rookie. He’d been sticking up for Nancy, too, the Romeo.

“I’ll tell you what, Kathy,” Gentry said. “I’ll tell you what we found if you promise to do me a favor.”

“That depends. What kind of favor?”

“I want you to spin it as an aberration, a one-time event. You go tabloid on me, give me a subway system under siege, and I’ll make sure Arvids Stiebris is transferred to a place where he’ll do you absolutely no good in the future.”

“You’ve got a deal,” Kathy said quickly.

“We found the body of a young woman in a bicycle helmet down there. We also found several dead homeless persons. We have no idea who the woman was,” he lied to protect the privacy of the family, “but it looked like all of them were killed by animals.”

“What kind of animals?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Dogs? Rats?”

“We’re not sure.”

“How old was the woman?”

“Our guess is late twenties.”

“How’d she get down in the subway?”

“We don’t know. Maybe she was some kind of outreach worker-we just don’t know.”

“How long will subway service be disrupted?”

“Until the bodies have been removed.”

“Good,” she said. “Now that you’ve told me not very much, how about the truth?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re playing me. I want to know about the bat guano that was found on the tracks.”

What did that dopey bastard Arvids do? Tell her everything?

“Kathy, there’s nothing unusual about bat guano on subway tracks,” he said. “Ask Al Doyle over at health.”

“I will. In the meantime, what really went on down there?”

“I told you, we don’t know.”

“What do youthink? Is there any connection between the dead people in the subway and bats? Could this be related to what happened in Westchester?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“Whatdo you know?”

“Nothing other than what I’ve told you,” Gentry said. “Maybe your source can tell you more. Why don’t you go back to him?”

“I will. But frankly I’d rather talk to you. I’d rather that you help me-that we help each other.”

“I know. Wasn’t that the real reason you agreed to date me after the Mizuno bust?”

“Not entirely-”

“That didn’t do a lot for my ego.”

“Look,” she said, “I went from Connecticut to Westchester, which isn’t exactly a step up. I want off the fucking beat. If these incidents are connected, the story’s still mine. That puts me in the big city with a big breaking headline. Help me and I can help you in the future. Promote the work you’re doing.”

“I don’t need help, thanks.”

“Maybe not now. But one day you will.”

Gentry said nothing. The idea of cooperating with Kathy was not an option. When he worked undercover his policy was to trust only those people who were with him in the trenches. He paid for help or information in cash, not trust.

“Kathy, I’m sorry. No.”

“Detective, I’mgoing to get this story.”

“I know.”

“I can call Dr. Joyce. She went on the consultant payroll last night.”

“Fine.”

Kathy hung up.

Gentry placed the receiver in the cradle. He looked out at the street. He smelled hot tar from a roof across the street.

Part of him actually wished he could have helped Kathy. He admired independence and tenacity, and she had a lot of both. And he still liked her. But until he knew exactly what had happened in the subway, he wasn’t going to say anything.

Gentry put in a call to Moreaux to find out whether he’d discovered anything about where Barbara Mathis had been before they found her. Captain Moreaux said that a patrol car had found her abandoned bicycle and makeup kits on Riverside Drive near 120th Street at 5:22A.M. There were traces of blood on the seat. They found the address inside one of the kits, went to her apartment building, and contacted her husband at work. He gave them her destination and they confirmed that she never arrived.

“What was the condition of the bicycle?”Gentry asked.

“Absolutely intact,” Moreaux told him. “Spokes, paint job, everything. It was just lying near the curb. A little later in the day, with more traffic, it probably would’ve been ripped off.”

Gentry thanked him. He got on the computer and asked the interlinked citywide Stat Unit for a list of any reported carjackings or parked-auto thefts the night before, anywhere from the Bronx down to the Upper West Side. Nothing had been reported. Often, joyriders will stop and grab a “snack” for the road. A lone woman on a bicycle would have been a perfect target, bumped and abducted. Sometimes the kidnappers will kill them and dump them when they’re finished; that was what had happened to the dead woman Gentry had pulled from the Hudson River. But joyriders don’t typically stop, crawl into a subway tunnel, gut a body, then leave it underground. Besides, a good nudge from a car usually leaves a mark on a bicycle.

Gentry went down the hall and refilled his coffee cup. Then he turned to accident reports that had been filed last night and early this morning by personnel in his unit. A horse-drawn carriage colliding with a bicycle deliveryman. A window box falling onto a woman walking her daughter to school. Nineteen others. He signed all but one and left them to be filed. Then-leaving his door open in case the phone rang-Gentry went over to the squad pit with the unsigned report, an investigation into an early morning fire at a Times Square movie theater. Apparently, a broken wire had shorted inside the wall of the projection booth. There was a little bit of smoke and no one was injured.

“Do you have any idea what caused the wire to break?” Gentry asked.

“Looks like a nail might’ve gone through it during renovation,” the officer said. “The Fire Department’s bureau of investigation has that one.”

“Did you make it to the booth?”

“Yes.”

“Was there any kind of unusual smell up there?”

“Just the burning insulation.”

“What’d it smell like?”

The officer shrugged. “It smelled like burning rubber, Detective.”

“Not ammonia?”

“No.”

“Any cockroaches running around?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Thanks,” Gentry said.

“Can I ask what this is about?” the officer said.

“Yeah. I was thinking some bats might’ve gotten into the wall and chewed through the wire. Their guano smells like burning leaves and they scare the hell out of bugs.”