Thanks, chief. And you wonder why morale's in the toilet?

At the press conference, amping it up another notch, Batiste also announced that he and Mayor West had assigned an Event Number to the case, meaning that they were freeing up nearly unlimited funds from the city's general fund, outside of the police budget, for the investigation.

No mistake about it: If Juhle and Shiu hadn't felt the pressure from the beginning, and they had, they were in a cooker now. And they still hadn't even identified the female victim. All the usual inquiries failed. No criminal history, no military record, no applications where she'd submitted fingerprints to any agency. Fingerprints sent to DMV came back negative.

She didn't even have a driver's license?

Now, Shiu driving and closing in on one in the morning, the two inspectors parked in the cops' lot behind the Hall of Justice. Groggy and silent, they walked up the dimly lit outdoor corridor that led them to the morgue, just across the way from the jail.

It was a clear night, cold and quiet.

Shiu rang the coroner's night bell-Juhle hadn't taken any pain medication since the morning, and his hand was throbbing. After a moment the silhouette of Janey Parks appeared back in the darkened recesses of the outer office. She was the efficient yet generally friendly bureaucrat with whom they'd hitched a ride downtown twelve hours before.

When she opened the door, leading them back through the desks the way she'd come, she started right in: "The witness is Mary Mahoney. She's a waitress at MoMo's. Twenty-seven. Came down by herself. No question on the ID. Positive."

This last wasn't much of a surprise, since the young woman's face hadn't been touched by the bullet, a mystery which Ms. Parks had solved earlier in the day at Palmer's house by opening the victim's mouth with her rubber-gloved hands and looking inside with her flashlight, thereby discovering the entry wound at the back of her throat. The girl had had her mouth open when the shot was fired. All the teeth were intact. The slug didn't have enough punch to penetrate the skull, so there was no exit wound, either. "But, man, it did some damage inside," Janey was saying. "Ricocheted up and kicked around in there like a pinball. The brain was scrambled eggs."

"Hey, great. Good detail. Thanks, Janey." This was the kind of image that tended to stick with Juhle and wake him up with the sweats. But he shook it off-it would come back to haunt him, anyway, get him on the ricochet, as it were.

They got to the office of John Strout, the medical examiner who was now in his mid-seventies and had long since ceased caring about the formal appearance of professionalism. The place was a museum of the bizarre, the outright macabre, and the dangerous. Three hand grenades, reputedly live, served as paperweights on his desk. By the entrance to the morgue's cold room, a skeleton with a pipe in its teeth and a silken rope around its neck relaxed on an authentic antique Spanish garrote. On the bookshelf counter, Strout kept his collection of knives, brass knuckles, sharp and deadly ninja paraphernalia. Several rifles and shotguns leaned against the walls. In an immense terrarium in the center of the office-and completely illegally as a technical matter-he kept his favorite murder weapons from actual cases he'd worked, many complete with bloodstains: an ice pick, a beaker full of empty syringes, a baseball bat, various pokers and blunt objects, a couple more knives of particularly creative design.

Even if you hadn't just come from having identified a deceased acquaintance, the place could be unnerving. And on top of all this, Parks had kept the lights dim, which maximized the terror factor.

Juhle flicked the switch and the room lit up. It helped.

And here was Mary Mahoney, sitting with her arms crossed tight over her chest, her eyes reddened from recent tears. Juhle moved a wooden chair over beside her and sat down. Parks, he noticed, had gone to sit in Strout's chair.

On his own footstool, Shiu broke the ice. "I want to thank you for coming in tonight. It's not something everyone would have done."

"I didn't know what else I should do," Ms. Mahoney said.

"Well, you did the right thing," Shiu said. "Every minute we save early on in the investigation increases the odds that we'll find who did this."

"I kind of thought that." Ms. Mahoney had short, spiky black hair, wide-set liquid brown eyes-her best feature-lips that had been collagened, a nose she hadn't been born with. The effect wasn't negative.

"So how did you come to think it might have been…your friend?" Shiu asked.

"Staci. Staci Rosalier." In her small voice, she continued, "Well, when I came in about four, everybody at the restaurant was talking about the judge, about what happened. He ate there, you know, just about every day. Nobody could believe it. And then, I don't know when exactly, but after the rush started, I heard something about a woman being with him. A young woman. Not his wife." She looked from Shiu to Juhle, who nodded, encouraging her to go on. "And so-we were jamming all night-but it got me worried. So when I got a minute-by now it's, like, ten thirty?-I went and asked one of the managers if she could check and see if Staci was in today. She worked lunch, which I did, too, when I first met her. Which is how we became friends, you know?"

"So," Juhle said, "you asked the manager if Staci had come in?"

"Right. But she hadn't even called in. And Staci never missed. She was like the rock at lunch." Mahoney closed her eyes, drew a deep breath. "So, anyway, when I found that out, now I'm really worried."

Shiu stepped in. "So what's the connection between Staci and Judge Palmer? That you were so concerned about?"

But suddenly Mahoney was shaking her head from side to side. Tears appeared in her eyes. "I just can't believe that's all that's left of her in there. I mean, she was the sweetest person. Who would do that to her?"

"That's what we're trying to find out," Shiu said.

Mahoney went silent. Shiu gave her a handkerchief, and she dabbed at her eyes. "I might be the only one who knew about it, but Staci and the judge had a thing."

"You mean an affair?" Juhle asked.

"Well, not exactly. Maybe more than that. He put her up, you know. Paid her rent."

Juhle saying, "Do you know how long this had been going on, Mary?"

"Him and her? I don't know exactly, but at least since last fall. Although the new place, she just moved in there only a couple of months or so ago."

The two inspectors exchanged a glance. Juhle came forward. "The new place?"

"Just across from the store. MoMo's. In those lofts, the new ones."

Juhle knew them. Prices on the one-room studios started at around four hundred thousand dollars and topped out at well over a million for the penthouses. If Judge Palmer had put Staci Rosalier in one of these places, he'd made a serious commitment to her.

"Have you ever been up to her place?" Shiu asked.

"A couple of times, although she was pretty private about it. She couldn't let anybody find out about them, which you can understand."

"But she let you," Shiu said.

"We were real friends. Plus, it was so cool, she just had to show somebody." The tears spilled over. "I just…" she began, then lowered her head and fell silent.

Juhle gave her a moment. Then gently, "You're talking the new condos on Second, right directly across from MoMo's?"

She looked up at him and nodded. "Why did this have to happen?" she asked.

Juhle had no answer.

The building supervisor, Jim Franks, wasn't thrilled to get woken up at 1:50 A.M. It took the sallow, potbellied, middle-aged man nearly ten minutes to get to the door, another very long minute to find the one key on his twelve-key ring that would open it. Juhle and Shiu stood outside all the while in the now fully gathered cold-impatient, unspeaking, unamused.