The cell phone in her hand rang. She flipped it open and looked at the incoming caller's number. "It's Jim Dylan. I don't need to take it. He can just rot in hell," Janet said, dropping the phone into her tote.

"Why do you think he's calling you now?" Mike asked.

"Oh-well, I just left him a message about Amber. About her murder."

Mike grimaced and tried to hide his displeasure. "From here on, Janet, I don't want you talking to him, or to any other people who might be witnesses, okay? I need to know exactly what you said to Dylan, and then I'll take it over now."

She pointed at me. "Ms. Cooper didn't tell me I couldn't speak to people about Amber."

"I'm sorry. It didn't occur to me that you would try to reach anyone but your family."

Janet's red-rimmed eyes were more focused now. "That prick has some answering to do, Mr. Chapman. For more than a year he'd been promising Amber he was going to leave his wife. We talked about it- we drank to it-on her last birthday. On Sunday, Jim told me he didn't want me to mention her name, that she wasn't welcome in his bar anymore. Well, let him come down here and take a look at what he drove her to."

I doubted it would be as simple as the formula to which Janet seemed to reduce Amber's fate.

"Does Dylan have a key to her place?" Mike asked.

"I don't know. I doubt she gave keys to a living soul. She didn't even give one to me," Janet said. "Not exactly the kind of habits you'd want someone to walk in on."

Mike was eager to get to Amber's apartment before anyone else tried to enter. "Why don't we start on up there."

"I want to know how she died, Doctor." Janet's hand trembled as she brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and lowered her voice. "Do you think she suffered much?"

There was no way to soften the blow. The best that forensics could do was to explain the manner of death, the mechanism that had cut short Amber's life. But the length of time Amber Bristol was in the company of her killer and what had happened to her while she was still conscious-the answers Mike Chapman wanted-would undoubtedly prove even uglier.

"It's quite possible that she did suffer," Kestenbaum said. "Your sister was-badly bruised, Ms. Bristol. Most of the injuries occurred before she died."

Janet winced and breathed in deeply.

"The newspapers-will there have to be stories about this? About Janet and her, uh, her lifestyle?"

"Hard to know," Mike said, pacing behind Kestenbaum's back in the narrow room. "Right now, there's no reason for any sensational press."

"Is there DNA?"

"It's unlikely that anything Dr. Kestenbaum recovered will identify the killer."

"Then at least she wasn't raped."

A little bit of television forensics was a dangerous thing. Maggots had done their work well, moving into body openings and cavities, destroying what the killer might have left behind.

"Do you have more, well-something else to go on?"

"Look, Janet," Mike said, leaning his strong forearms on the desk. He was impatient to get on his way, to get to work before the next shift brought him more cases. "We don't know the first thing about Amber. Till you walked in the station house today, we didn't have a clue to connect her to a name. There wasn't a shred of identification, not a piece of clothing, not a blessed thing-"

"There was the whip, wasn't there?" Janet said.

Mike lifted his head to glare at me. I shook mine back at him.

"What whip?" There was no sure way to link it to Amber's death at this point, and it was the kind of detail that investigators would withhold from the public for as long as possible-something about which only the killer might know.

"The sergeant," Janet said, "the man at the desk in the station house. He told me the cops fished a whip out of the river. He was trying to calm me down, telling me he hoped it wasn't the killer's."

Mike put his hand on the doorknob and held Janet's chair as she stood up.

"Be sure and look over Jimmy Dylan when you talk to him, Mr. Chapman. He's not what he appears to be-just a charming barkeep," Janet said. "He knew all about Amber, and he did nothing to stop it, nothing to help her. Jimmy knows that's what people paid Amber to do."

"What do you mean?"

"My sister's a dominatrix, Detective. She liked to hurt people- took pleasure in it. I'll bet if that whip had anything to do with Amber's murder, it belonged to her and not the killer.

Amber Bristol's studio apartment was on the third floor of a walkup building on East Ninety-first Street, near the corner of Lexington. The superintendent, Vargas Candera, had admitted us with a spare key that he said she had given him, reluctantly, after a kitchen blaze in one of the other units had forced the fire department to break down a door. He waited for us in the hallway.

Janet sat downstairs in a patrol car with two officers while Mike and I put on plastic gloves for a first look around.

"I'd say Amber was either a meticulous housekeeper or somebody else made a clean sweep around here," Mike said, adjusting the dimmer to its brightest position.

The kitchenette was to the left of the entrance door and the bathroom to its right. A curtain of black wooden beads separated the foyer from the king-size canopy bed just beyond. Mike held the swinging beads aside and I followed him in.

"Early American brothel. I guess you can take the girl out of Idaho, but you can't take the ho out of Ida."

The trim on the bedstead was a simple calico pattern that matched the cushions on the two armchairs. A hooked rug in the same pastel shades covered most of the floor. The walls were decorated with paintings of horses and mountains in cheap wooden frames meant to look rustic and folksy.

"No sheets?" I asked.

The quilt-a modern reproduction of a classic wedding ring pattern-was folded neatly in the center of the bed, which had been stripped even of its mattress pad.

"Maybe she was abducted on her way to the Laundromat. That's a route you've probably never taken, Coop."

"It's not only that it's been sanitized, Mike. This room is completely sterile. There's nothing personal on any surface."

"Remember, it was Amber's office. I'd hardly expect her to have photos of Ma and Pa on display. No pictures from the prom, no old boyfriends."

"I was counting on a computerized version of a little black book."

"You're a little late." Mike moved one of the bedside tables. The lamp and window air conditioner were plugged into a surge bar on the floor. So was a six-foot-long cable connector that fed the empty cradle of a PDA.

I looked around for a telephone and answering machine. There was a space on the small table, between the lamp and a decorative candle, and the line that fed the jack also snaked along the rug, attached to nothing.

"Somebody's taken stuff out of here. Anything that could connect Amber to her business," Mike said.

He was opening drawers. First, next to the bed, where I could see that she kept her supply of condoms, and then her dresser. Underwear, sweaters, and three drawers of negligees below that.

I pulled open the closet door. Slacks hung with skirts in a variety of lengths, everything black except for the blue jeans. Shoes were lined neatly on the floor-flats in front, backless pumps with high heels behind them, and six pairs of leather boots. There were a bunch of empty hangers and lots of large hooks affixed to the back of the door.

"Nothing unusual?" Mike asked. "No sex toys? No other obvious equipment?"

"I'll confess ignorance. I wouldn't know what it's supposed to look like."

"Right. And you're the expert.

"Sex crimes, not games."

"I love it when you play the dumb blond. Those are the rare times I feel most connected to you," Mike said.