Beam, who enjoyed an occasional cigar, started to open a drawer to get out an ashtray, then paused. “Mind if we smoke?” he asked Nell.

“Tell you the truth, I do.”

Looper shot her an annoyed look.

Beam smiled and pushed the drawer closed. “Okay. We can save it for outside.”

Looper leaned forward and laid the murder files on Beam’s desk. “Your copies,” he said. “We each have ours.”

“You’ve studied them?” Beam asked.

Both detectives nodded.

“And?”

Nell spoke up first. “Same gun, same letter J.”

“An anti-Semite killer?” Beam asked.

She surprised him. “I don’t think so. It’s too much of a stretch.”

“I agree,” Beam said.

She swallowed, nervous, as if about to take a plunge. “I was up late working my computer,” she said, “checking into various databases. There’s something stronger linking these victims, something that can’t be coincidental. At one time or other, they all served as jury forepersons in the city of New York.” She glanced at her partner. “I already filled Loop in on this.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any other common denominator among the victims,” Looper said, coming to her defense. “Different parts of town, different occupations, different circles of friends and acquaintances, different sexes.”

“There’s something the juries they presided over had in common, though,” Nell said. “In all the cases, the defendants were almost certainly guilty but got off.”

“Were any of the prosecutors or defense attorneys the same?” Beam asked.

“Nope,” said the blond woman with dark roots, now with a certain confidence. Beam was taking her seriously, buying into her theory.

“Anybody Jewish in all this?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Nell said. “What you’d expect in New York, a royal mix. And some of the trials were years apart. The most recent was last year, the one longest ago happened…” She leaned forward to pick up one of the files and refresh her memory.

“Six years ago,” Looper said.

Nell sat back and took a swig of Zephyr Hills.

Beam leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So whaddya think?”

“Serial killer, obviously,” Looper said. His hand went to his shirt pocket, then quickly withdrew. Smoker’s arm. “He doesn’t seem to have a hard-on about the defendants, though; it’s the juries that set him off, especially the jury forepersons.”

“The jurors are the ones responsible for the defendants going free,” Nell pointed out. “And if you had to hang it on any one of them, it would be the foreperson.”

“So it’s the system our killer doesn’t like,” Beam said.

“You could say that,” Nell told him, “unless there’s a common thread we haven’t discovered yet.”

“What about a common thread connecting the freed defendants?”

Nell and Looper glanced at each other.

Looper emitted a volley of hoarse coughs, raising a yellowed finger to implore Nell and Beam to be patient. Each time he coughed, the scent of peppermint wafted across the desk.

Finally he stopped coughing, cleared his throat twice, and swallowed phlegm before trusting himself to speak. “The defendants: One wife killer; one gang member making his bones by shooting three people in a diner; one kidnapper-torturer who did a twenty-year-old NYU student.”

“Female student?” Beam asked.

“Yeah. The victims are three females and two males. Females are the dead wife and dead student. And of the three victims in the diner shooting, one was a woman.”

“So by way of defendants who got lucky and walked,” Nell said, “we got a jealous husband killed his wife, a gangbanger trying to impress his peers, and a sex maniac who liked college girls. Not much in common among defendants.”

“Except that they went free,” Beam said.

“Not for the same reasons. The gangbanger had a phony alibi that couldn’t be disproved, the sex maniac hadn’t been sufficiently informed of his rights, the wife killer simply got off even though the evidence against him was overwhelming.”

“So they all should have been convicted,” Beam said.

Nell took another swig of bottled water. “Read the court transcripts and you’d have to say that.”

Beam unlaced his fingers and sat forward, causing his swivel chair to squeak. “What we’re gonna do,” he said, “is pore over these murder files again—I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. Then we’ll revisit the crime scenes, talk again to witnesses, go over ground already covered, see if anybody’s memory can be jogged.” He looked at Looper. “You say it was the same gun used in all three murders, so what do we know about it?”

“Thirty-two caliber. That’s about all they can tell about it so far, with just the slugs to work from. No ejected cartridges were found.”

“So he cleans up after himself. What about the possibility of him being a professional?”

“Maybe,” Nell said, “except for his choice of victims and that red letter J he always leaves at the scene. That’s not very professional.”

“J for justice?” Beam asked.

“That’s what we both figure. Or maybe Judgment.”

“Most logical thing,” Looper said. “We figure it’s Justice.”

“Our guy hates the justice system,” Nell said, “but loves justice too much.”

“Yet he doesn’t hit the obviously guilty defendants who got off,” Looper said, playing with his shirt pocket again in search of phantom cigarettes.

“That would be the prosecutor’s job,” Beam said. “Retry them if possible. Nail them on a different charge. Don’t let them walk.”

“But they do walk. The cops, the prosecutors have moved on and are too busy worrying about the present and future to be able to reconstruct and repair the past. Crimes keep getting committed. Other assholes are moving through the system.”

“It’s the system that he hates,” Nell reiterated.

“So?” Beam stared at her, smiling, waiting.

She began to squirm, then suddenly sat still and gave him a level, appraising look, appreciative of the fact that he’d gotten there ahead of her. “He’s trying to change the system.”

Nobody spoke for a few moments.

“Could be,” Looper said finally. “Could very well be.”

“We can’t assume it yet,” Beam said, “but—”

He was interrupted by the phone chirping on his desk.

When he lifted the receiver and identified himself, he was surprised to hear da Vinci’s voice:

“Corey and Looper there yet?”

“Yeah. We were just discussing things.”

“You’ve got another one to discuss, Beam. Upper West Side, not far from your place. The letter J is written in lipstick on a mirror this time.”

“Shot to death?”

“That’s the preliminary.

“Got an address?”

Da Vinci gave it to him, in an area of apartment buildings and townhouses about five blocks away. “Uniforms have got the scene frozen. CSI unit is on the way.”

“So are we,” Beam said.

9

“The victim, Beverly Baker, worked as sales manager at Light and Shade Lamp Emporium on the West Side, not far from her apartment on West Eighty-ninth Street. Hubby Floyd returned from a golf outing with his buddies about five thirty—forty-five minutes ago—and found her dead body.”

So said the uniform guarding the Bakers’ apartment door, a young guy named Mansolaro. He had an improbably long chin, would always need a shave, and looked vaguely familiar to Beam. Looper seemed to know him.

“That hubby in the living room?” Beam asked, noticing beyond Mansolaro, in the apartment, a smallish, plump man in plaid slacks and a white golf shirt, seated slumped forward on a maroon sofa.

Mansolaro nodded. “One Floyd Baker.”

As if there were a two Floyd Baker, Beam thought. He’d been away from cop talk long enough that some of it struck his ear wrong.