"Your guys pick up anything yet?" Mike asked. "Nope. Did I mention her hands and feet were tied?"

"Cuffed?"

"Not exactly. Plastic ties. That's the only thing we've got so far. Like one of them was caught up in the fabric of the blanket. There was some of her hair stuck to the tape, too."

Bound. Undoubtedly tortured. Killed.

"How far back off the roadway was the body?" Mike asked. "Thirty feet, at least. Somebody had the confidence to park at the side of the road and carry the girl all the way to this drop."

"And you think she's been out here for a few days?"

"Hey, everybody has to be somewhere. She's certainly been dead for a while."

"Have you had any other squeals like this?" Mike asked. "Brooklyn SVU's lookin' for a phony livery cabdriver picking up teenage girls. Taping their mouths and binding their hands. Rapes them but lets them go alive."

"Could be the others never struggled and this one did," Mercer said. "Huff was out bouncing with her friends. Where are your witnesses from in the livery case?"

"All started out in Queens, the opposite direction," Draper said.

"Three of them."

"No open homicides?"

"Nothing close." Draper made a circle in the mud and started back toward his car. "This stuff is for the young pups. I'm outta here."

"We've got a dump job in the South," Mike said.

"Any of this ring a bell?"

"Blunt force. Restraints. Not a fresh kill, either. Naked-and the guy cleaned up after himself pretty well."

"DNA?"

"Nothing by the time the docs got to her."

"A little early to be thinking serial," Draper said.

The FBI tagged serial killers-a term coined in the 1970s-as those who had committed three murders over an extended period of time, with cooling-off periods in between, during which their other actions seemed to be normal.

"I guess that's how you do it in Brooklyn, Dickie. Just sit back and wait for a third body to show up. Beats working for a living. I'm not saying it's the same guy yet, but maybe you haven't seen the end of us." Dickie Draper was breathing heavily from the exertion of the short walk. He opened the door of his unmarked car and sat in the passenger seat. Rolling down the window, he passed a handful of Polaroid photos out to Mike and me.

The last friend to have seen Elise Huff alive had taken a snapshot with her cell phone just hours before they parted ways. I had downloaded the close-up, which showed Elise's laughing eyes and big smile, and tacked it to my bulletin board. I had studied the picture, and I knew her face.

There was no mistaking that the body was Elise, despite the grotesque injuries. Now both eyes were swollen and discolored, the nose appeared broken and twisted to one side, and blood was caked over the crown of her head, which seemed to have been splintered like a broken lightbulb. Two overheads, a profile from each side, and long shots of the battered body lying against the drab green cloth that had covered her were Draper's unofficial record of the scene. Tomorrow, in the morgue, after she'd been cleaned up, she would be posed for 8 × 10 glossies in the room where her autopsy would be performed.

"The 911 call came in at 5:08 p.m.," Dickie Draper said, flipping open his pad. He thumbed through several pages before handing out another Polaroid that was clipped to the paper. "Here's your clue, Sherlock. Run with it."

Half of a short white label was still affixed to a corner of the blanket with tight, tiny stitches. The other ragged edge looked like it had been torn off over time. The lettering had faded and I could barely make out a word.

"Give me your flashlight, Dickie," Mike said.

He shined the beam at the photograph and I read aloud what was left of the maker's name. "There are three letters, the end of a longer word, obviously," I said. "L, A, N-before the abbreviation 'Bros.' "

"Hey, Chapman, did I tell you about the sand?"

"What sand?"

"On the blanket. There was a lot of sand clumped on it. Maybe this scumbag was into picnics at the beach."

I looked down at the muddy rims of our shoes, then up at the horizon.

"Not here, Ms. Cooper. But you oughta come back for a swim some afternoon. We got some nice beaches in Brooklyn," Draper said. "Now why don't you tell me what you know about this Huff girl?" I started to fill in some information about her background and her disappearance.

He looked over my head at the flashing lights that signaled the arrival of a high-ranking official.

"That'll be the district attorney pulling in," Draper said, reaching into his pocket for a glassine envelope as he picked up my hand. He shook some sand into my palm. "See this? You've got nothing like it in Manhattan, young lady. You tell Mr. Battaglia to stick to the pavement.

Mr. Raynes and me, we're on the job.

We know that DNA is good science," I told the jurors the next morning. "It works when it exonerates the innocent, and it works just as well when it points a finger directly and reliably to those who are guilty.

"You could fill the 56,546 seats at Yankee Stadium every day for the next fifty thousand years," I said, speaking to the majority of jurors who had listed themselves as baseball fans, "and the possibility simply doesn't exist that you will find another human being who could be linked to the seminal stain that Floyd Warren left behind the night he raped Kerry Hastings."

Just in my time in the practice of law, science had changed the way sexual assaults were being tried. That was not true for the victims of acquaintance rape or domestic violence, who were still subjected to rigorous crosses about their relationships with the alleged abusers and the degree to which they had consented to some kind of sexual encounter.

But in cases of stranger rape, victims had historically been vulnerable to defenses of mistaken identification. DNA took that issue completely out of the line of attack.

The crime that had condemned Kerry Hastings to self-doubt for thirty-five years had been retried in a day and a half.

I was grateful that none of the Latin Princes had appeared in the courtroom this morning. I was hoping that no juror had been affected by the chanting gang member who had screamed out that I was a liar. Judge Lamont took the jury through the legal definitions of firstdegree rape and sodomy. I could recite those lines as easily as a three year-old could sing the alphabet.

"The penal law defines dangerous instrument as follows: any instrument-like a knife-under the circumstances in which it is to be used, attempts to be used or threatens to be used, is readily capable of causing death or other serious physical injury."

I watched the jurors absorb the information. How had I missed the nut-a well-educated housewife and mother-who had hung one of my cases two years earlier because the victim had not been stabbed by the knife-wielding rapist? Using a knife, she had argued to her eleven frustrated colleagues, didn't mean just holding it against someone's neck. If the defendant had wanted to use it, he would have killed the woman against whose throat he had held the blade.

The charge went on for more than an hour. Often, at this point in the trial, I used my legal pad to make lists of the groceries I had run out of during prolonged litigation or the names of friends whose calls I'd neglected because of the intensity of the case.

Today, glancing up from time to time to try to read the expressions on the jurors' faces, I was charting the similarities-and the distinctions-in the circumstances of the deaths of Amber Bristol and Elise Huff.

"You have the obligation to deliberate, ladies and gentlemen, and to attempt to reach a verdict that will be fair, both to the people of this state and to the defendant, a verdict that will reflect the truth based on the evidence in this case that you believe and on the law as I charged it, whether you agree with that law or not.