She might as well have shot him.

Deluthe’s hand went to his chest as he lifted his head and stammered to the ceiling, ‘I got a uniform to stand guard in front of her door.’

Mallory sat down at the table, the picture of calm, shaking her head slowly from side to side. ‘No, you don’t get to issue orders to the uniforms. That’s not your job, and you don’t have the rank.’

‘And it pisses off their sergeants,’ Riker added.

Mallory lowered her glasses so Deluthe could see that she was three seconds away from doing some real damage. ‘That uniform was pulled off guard duty to settle a domestic dispute in another building. Nobody bothered to tell his sergeant that waiting for Stella Small was a matter of life and death.’

Deluthe could not look away from her. He was waiting for the explosion of temper, but Mallory was only stringing out his imagination, his anticipation of what she might do.

‘I’ll go back.’ Deluthe was rising from his chair.

‘No you won’t.’

He froze in an awkward stance, half sitting, half standing, awaiting permission to wet his pants.

She never raised her voice. ‘I patched things up with the cop’s sergeant. He gave me a guard for the door and another man to canvas the neighbors in her building. That was also your job.’

‘You didn’t tell me that you wanted – ’

‘I shouldn’t have to tell you every damn thing, Deluthe. Sit down.’

He sank to the chair.

‘The uniforms will do the job,’ she said. ‘You stay the hell out of it. Just sit on your hands.’

Riker kept silent until she left the room, and then he turned to the problem of rebuilding the shattered whiteshield. ‘How long were you with Loman’s squad? Four months?’

The younger man nodded.

‘Did they teach you anything?

‘Yes, sir.’ There was a curious lack of sarcasm in Deluthe’s voice when he said, ‘I know which guys take cream and sugar, and who likes their coffee black. I know who wants mayo on their sandwiches and who wants butter. And I never get their deli orders wrong.’

‘Yeah,’ said Detective Janos. ‘The tunnel’s crawling with whores.’ Hookers had reinvaded old territories while the mayor was concentrating on a new psychosis, exterminating all winged insects that might be carrying the East Village virus. This summer, insecticides had killed two elderly people with severe emphysema, and the insects, who had killed no one, were being executed en masse. But the hookers had escaped the city-wide extermination of bugs and old people, or so said Janos as he lumbered down the sidewalk with Riker.

‘You gotta see it for yourself Janos’s large hands were rising, thick fingers fluttering, delicately plucking words from the air. ‘All those whores at the mouth of the tunnel. Well, the whole tableau is just gorgeously phallic’

This from a man with the face and physique of a bone-crushing hitman. Riker turned around and waited for Deluthe to catch up. ‘Hey, kid. You wanna go down to the Lincoln Tunnel and roust some whores?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Deluthe was grinning.

‘You can’t wear gloves. That’s the giveaway that we’re gonna chase ‘em down. So think about it, kid. We’re talkin’ body lice and head lice, crabs and herpes – every disease in the world is down there.’

Janos smiled. ‘It’s God’s little waiting room for dying whores.’

‘Should be fun,’ said Riker. ‘Still wanna go?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Lieutenant Coffey watched the television set in the incident room. Stella Small was now the subject of a fifteen-minute news segment. The police were requesting public assistance in the hunt for a potential crime victim. ‘Prime-time news. This is too good to be true.’

‘Oh, they were happy to do it,’ said Detective Wang. ‘It’s ratings week. This’ll send advertising revenues through the roof. They loved the part about the serial hangman.’

The reporter on screen interviewed a bartender in Stella Small’s neighborhood. The tavern’s customers leaned into the shot and waved to the audience. The camera panned to the window, then out the door and into the street, turning left and right. The reporter asked, ‘Where is she now? Have you seen her?’ His voice had the tenor of a game-show host inviting the home viewers to play.

A banner ran across the bottom of the screen with telephone numbers for the police tip line as the picture changed to a group of small children in costumes. Coffey wondered how a local news station had obtained this video of a kindergarten play in Ohio. A child-size Stella Small wobbled onstage, precariously balanced atop a pair of grown-up’s high heels. The little girl promptly fell off her shoes and landed on her little backside, endearing her to two homicide cops and eight million New Yorkers. Tiny snow-white socks waved in the air while the child cried, ‘Mommy!’

‘Oh, no.’ Coffey knew where the film had come from. ‘It was that damn agent. She turned the reporters loose on Stella’s family.’

Ronald Deluthe parked the car some distance from the mouth of the tunnel, where a battalion of women were working the lanes of congested traffic. Slow-stepping in high heels, the whores flashed bosoms pearled with sweat. Cars crawled through the street market of skirts hiked up to buttocks, twin moons in every shade of skin, spangles and cheap wigs in copper and gold – red, red mouths.

Some of the women were diving into cars, heads down and disappearing from view, then emerging with cash.

‘Hookers never file complaints,’ said Riker, turning to the young cop behind the wheel. ‘And they never identify suspects. You know why? When the perps get out on bail, they beat the crap out of the women – or they kill them. Dead witness? Case dismissed. That’s our criminal justice system. So we need to convince the ladies they’ll never make a court appearance. But leave that to me, kid. I’ve got more experience lying to women.’

He loosened his tie and buttoned his suit jacket so the gun and holster would not show. ‘Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll pick out some likely whores. Then we’ll try to bag two or three.’

Riker stepped out on the pavement and raised the hood of Deluthe’s car, disguising it as a disabled vehicle. Then he wandered toward the women, weaving slightly and snapping his fingers, but not in time to the blaring music from a slow moving car, for he was playing the role of a harmless drunk out of tempo with the rest of the world, so as not to trigger the hookers’ cop radar.

Twenty minutes later, he had picked out three junkies, older prostitutes in Sparrow’s age bracket. They would be climbing the walls inside of an hour in custody, and a dope-sick whore was a talkative whore. One looked familiar, but if he had ever arrested her, she did not remember him either. He had asked no questions about Sparrow, for these women were streetwise, but he had managed to pick out regulars who had worked this part of town when Sparrow was last seen whoring.

The detective looked at his watch. Where was Deluthe? More than the allotted time had passed, and one of his best whores was getting away.

A red sedan crawled by, and a pair of high-heeled sandals clacked alongside the moving vehicle as a woman leaned down to smile at the driver, singing to him, ‘Hey, sweet thing.’ The prostitute rolled on to the hood of the car and rode it into the mouth of the tunnel, shouting into the windshield, negotiating her price with the driver.

Riker turned around to see the rookie cop make a hasty exit from his car. Now Deluthe remembered to slow his steps as he approached the women. What was he carrying? Riker squinted, and then his hand went to his own jacket pocket.

Empty.

The paperback western must have fallen out in the car.

Deluthe was trying not to stare at all the undressed skin, and this attracted immediate attention. Alerted now, the women lifted their heads, all but sniffing the wind for the smell of a cop. Some edged away, and some stayed to watch from a distance, wary and tense, ready to fly. And Riker knew he would be lucky to catch a single whore.