Dr. Slope continued his observation of the corpse. “Not the usual way for a woman to kill herself.” Women were self-poisoners and wrist slashers. Their suicides were rarely this violent.

“Yeah,” said Riker, “but it happens. This looks like a typical vanity shot to me.” That much was true; men were inclined to eat their guns, but the ladies seldom messed up their faces with headshots. He saw the victim’s chest wound as a small blessing in Mallory’s favor.

“There’s no evidence that Miss Sirus held the muzzle to her breast,” said Dr. Slope, raising a point on the debit side.

Absent was the gunshot residue, the smoky halo of point-blank range, and this had set off alarm bells for the first officer on the scene tonight. This wound more closely resembled a conversational range between victim and shooter. Rather than turn another cop over to Internal Affairs, the West Side detectives had shifted this case to the SoHo precinct where Mallory worked. Riker could still make a case for suicide if the woman had held the gun at arm’s length-and that scenario spoke to fear of firearms. Perhaps Savannah Sirus had even closed her eyes before she pulled the trigger.

Or maybe Mallory shot her.

After the corpse had been rolled over, Dr. Slope pulled a thermometer from his black bag. Riker, who was old school, averted his eyes as the medical examiner raised the lady’s s kirt and pulled her panties down. The detective moved to the couch to wait out the findings on the body temperature.

Alongside the Polaroid shots he had taken of the dead body, a cheap handbag lay on the coffee table. It could only belong to the victim, for this was nothing that his partner would carry. Mallory’s t aste ran upscale; even her blue jeans were tailored, and squad-room gossip had it that the studs were made of gold. Perverse kid, she did what she could to encourage rumors of illegal income. This was her idea of fun: Catch me if you can.

Hard rain beat down upon a speeding car that was far from home. The small vehicle was deceptive in its styling, for this was not a model rumored to eat up the road, and yet it raced at wild, outlaw speeds.

Nearing the western edge of rainy Ohio, a lone patrolman blinked rapidly to clear his tired eyes, but there was no mistake of blurred vision. His engine was powerful, pushed to the limit on this wet road-and the Vo lkswagen Beetle was leaving him behind.

Impossible.

His aunt owned a car like that one, and he knew the speedometer topped out at one-forty, though he considered that to be a private joke on the part of the manufacturer.

The convertible’s color scheme of silver body and black ragtop was all too popular, and the lack of a visible license plate further complicated the problem of identification. It was a short chase-hardly a race. The other car was not speeding up, nor was there any wobble or weave to signify that the driver was in any way alarmed by the spinning red light and scream- ing siren. The trooper’s radar clocked the VW’s cruising speed at a constant one hundred and eighty miles an hour.

Oh, fool!

What was he thinking?

He banged his fist on the dashboard. Damned equipment never worked right. Rain-slick road or dry pavement, that speed was an impossible feat for the little ragtop Beetle. But then, he had never met the driver.

And he never would.

At the subtle rise of road ahead, he could swear that he saw bright streaks of forked lightning under the wheels; the silver car had left the ground, flying, hydroplaning on the water.

The silver Beetle was out of sight when the trooper’s c ar stopped well short of the Ohio state line-beaten. There would be no official report on his patrol car being humiliated by, of all things, a V o lkswagen, for this would be akin to reporting alien spacecraft. And so, without a single speeding ticket, the small convertible would run Route 80 through the neighboring state of Indiana and across another border into Illinois. The driver’s destination was the Chicago intersection of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue -the eye of the storm.

Behind his back, Riker heard the snap of the doctor’s latex gloves. The examination of Savannah Sirus was done.

The detective asked, oh so casually, as if there were not a great deal riding on the answer, “So, Doc, what do I put down for the time of death?”

“Your absolute faith in rectal thermometers is really quite touching,” said Dr. Slope. “I don’t s u ppose a helpful neighbor heard the shot while he was looking at his wristwatch?”

The detective looked over one shoulder and smiled at the older man to say, No such luck. The neighbors had heard gunfire from this apartment on other occasions, and, good New Yorkers all, they had become selectively deaf to what Mallory was doing in here.

“Well, then,” said Slope, “just put down today’s d ate for now. Rigor mortis is always a crapshoot, and I’ve got too many variables to call a time of death with body temperature. An open window on a cold night-dried sweat stains on her blouse. For all I know, the woman had a raging fever when she died.” He circled the couch to stand before the detective. “So what’ve you got?”

Riker upended Savannah Sirus’s purse and spilled her possessions across the glass coffee table. There were two clusters of house keys. He recognized a silver fob on the set that would open the door to this apartment. “Looks like the lady was Mallory’s houseguest.” Another item from the purse was an airplane ticket from Chicago to New York. “I don’t t hink we’ll be calling out a crime-scene unit for this one.” He was testing the waters here, for the medical examiner had not yet made a pronouncement of suicide.

Dr. Slope turned to face his minions waiting in the hallway beyond the open door. He gave them a curt nod. The two men wheeled a gurney through the front door and set to work on bagging the victim’s remains. When they had cleared the room, taking the late Savannah Sirus with them, the doctor sank down on the couch beside Riker. “You think your partner knows what happened here tonight?”

Rather than lie, the detective said, “Well, you tell me.” One wave of his right hand included the leftovers of a take-out dinner, an empty wineglass and a saucer full of cigarette butts. “Point taken?”

The medical examiner nodded. He was well acquainted with Mallory’s freakish neatness. The young homicide detective would never tolerate anything out of place in her apartment. She was the sort who compulsively straightened picture frames in other people’s houses. Ergo, the mess had been made after her departure. Dr. Slope stared at the open window. “Riker? You think our victim originally planned to jump, then changed her mind and shot herself?”

“No.” But he understood the other man’s reasoning. This was the only open window on a cold spring night-and the screen had been raised. “The woman knew Mallory reasonably well. She’s been staying here awhile.” He held up the plane ticket. “Got here three weeks ago.” He neglected to mention that the ticket was round-trip; Mallory’s houseguest had no thoughts of dying in New York City -not on the day she arrived. “Savannah Sirus didn’t know much about guns and ammo. Now this is the way I see it. She thought the bullet might pass through her body and mess up a wall. Well, Mallory wouldn’t like that, would she?”

The doctor was shaking his head in accord with this.

Riker continued. “So the lady opened that window and pulled up the screen. That’s where she was standing when she shot herself. And it looks like she’s been planning this for a while.” He pointed to the gun on the floor. “You didn’t t hink that was Mallory’s, did you?”

“No,” said Dr. Slope. “I suppose not.”

The weapon on the carpet was a lightweight twenty-two, a lady’s g u n. Kathy Mallory was no lady; she carried a cannon, a Smith & Wesson.357 with a bigger kick and better stopping, maiming, killing power.