‘So, if she didn’t run, what happened?’

‘Rape murder, most probably. The body buried in some shallow grave or cut up and stored in someone’s ice compartment.’ She saw Denise’s face whiten. ‘Sorry, Denise. But it’s the truth. These things we know and it takes some doing to keep her old man from thinking them. I’m not cynical. I hope that she is a damn runaway. I hope she’s on some romantic delusion with some idiot boyfriend — I hope she’s screwing half of New Jersey to impress her mom. I hope she’ll come back tomorrow, but they don’t come back, not often, not after eight days. Not when they’re sixteen and don’t have a drug or home problem.’

‘How much time you got left on the case?’

‘None. We’ve been busting a gut to finish our other caseloads, working our own time, and generally lying and shit to give this case some light, but we’re all done. The Squad Sergeant is going to move it to the back room.’

‘And then what happens to Abby?’

‘We keep in contact with her father every few months, we give the impression that we’re still looking. Officially it’s still an open case, but between you and me, it doesn’t get a second of our time.’

‘He’s a smart man, he probably guesses. I was thinking that’s why he mentioned me. I’m a link — Columbia and NYPD.’

‘Yes, it could be. You want some time with this stuff?’

‘Please.’

‘Well, let us know if you think we’ve missed something.’

‘What’s the bottom line?’

‘Unless you can find some physical evidence to prove to the Squad Sergeant that this is an abduction or murder, then it’s over for Abby. She’s a statistic.’

Denise nodded. She looked down at the FBI profile. ‘They sent this through to you?’

‘We made up some details about the case to get a second opinion.’

Denise read the profile.

‘Any use?’ said Gauge.

‘Inductive profiling. It’s pretty basic. They use the limited information they’ve got about known criminals and match them up with the crime under consideration. All this tells you is that in the last twenty years, the kind of person abducting teenage girls in this type of location tended to be men aged somewhere between thirty-two and forty-five years old who have previous convictions. It’s not going to help you much.’

‘It didn’t.’

Denise took a pen and pulled a clean sheet of paper from the tray on the desk. ‘Deductive profiling works quite differently. The Feds use statistical averages, but that’s a blunt tool. Deductive reasoning is harder but it uses every piece of forensic evidence, every detail of the victim, the location and time of the attack to build an individualized picture of the perpetrator.’

‘There’s nothing for you to work on.’

‘I can piece something together. At least, I can try.’

‘Well, let us know if you need anything else,’ said Sarah Gauge. ‘Right now I’ve got a missing prostitute and an absconded husband to track down.’

Detective Gauge left the room and Denise was alone. A research psychologist by training, she had worked for years on the relationships between behavior and personality types, comparing these to criminal profiles and then analyzing where FBI and police profiles had gone wrong. It had drawn her into contact with killers across America, but always from a safe distance.

She took the job at the NYPD to get closer to the action and in a very short time, she was too close altogether.

Her research had shown her that inductive profiling worked in less than fifty per cent of cases. Human beings were not entirely predictable and Denise was interested in the fifty per cent who were more difficult to profile simply by using statistics. These were difficult because they were not normal. They were the criminals with psychologies so distorted and perverse that basic models and types didn’t help. They needed individual attention.

On the piece of paper in front of her, she started to analyze the victim. It was often the biggest part of the profile, trying to understand why the killer was motivated to take this particular girl and for what particular reason. Denise wrote down everything she could about the kind of girl that Abby was.

The facts were simple. The last thing they knew about Abby was that she left home just before 5.15 p.m. and was last seen leaving the house by her father. A driver spotted her crossing Parkway, but didn’t see anyone following her. There was a report that a truck nearly knocked her over. So presumably Abby was preoccupied. She was going somewhere secretive and she changed her clothes, so it would be something to do with a boy or a band. Denise couldn’t really see another reason for her to deceive her father. And this was to protect him, not harm him.

Denise concluded that Abby was someone who was willing to listen to her own feelings and not be swayed by others. It seemed unlikely then, that she would have been seduced into a car, as some girls were by clever kidnappers who appeared injured, or seemed to need help or offer some inducement. She would also have had a high degree of self-confidence.

Abby was sixteen, pretty, adventurous and slim. A sexual motive was certainly possible, if not probable. She was also Jewish and Denise couldn’t rule out that this might have been important to the killer in some way. There had been no contact with the family — no ransom request, and the family was not wealthy. Kidnapping for monetary gain seemed implausible. It was more probable, therefore, that it was someone she knew or who knew her family.

A personal motive seemed likely. It might well have been someone who had become obsessed with her. But the cops had exhausted that train of enquiry and found nothing. If it was a relative, a friend or a stalker, they’d kept their interests well hidden.

Abby had left the house in the dark just before it started to rain. It was not even a predictable event, as Abby rarely went out on a school night and this seemed to be a plan that she told no one about.

An opportunist would more likely be trawling in a car and would take someone waiting or in need of help, not someone rushing to meet up with the new man in her life.

No, Denise thought, Abby wasn’t just unlucky — someone had targeted her specifically and either knew she was heading out that night or was following her. For that reason, Denise thought that the killer was likely to be known to the suspect and to live close. It might have even been a neighbor who saw her pass and decided to follow.

If someone had planned to kidnap the girl, it was likely that they would scope the victim’s movements and choose a place and time that was part of the girl’s normal routine. But this wasn’t part of her normal routine and yet they somehow knew she was heading out and knew to be there. The perpetrator had to be very confident and very proficient to take someone and leave no evidence.

Denise pushed her short blond hair back and rubbed her forehead. She tried to clear her head. A moment later, Sarah Gauge ran back in the room. She walked past Denise and across to a couple of guys on the far-side desks. ‘Guys, switch on the TV,’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘Captain says they’ve identified the body in Harlem.’

‘What body?’ called Denise.

‘Unidentified bodies excite Missing Persons; they found one this morning in East Harlem.’

A couple of the guys from the squad started searching for the remote. Sarah walked across and reached up to the TV. ‘It works with a switch, too, fellas.’

‘Jesus, Johnny,’ said one of them. ‘Did you know they made them with switches? Is that like the latest thing, Gauge?’

‘No,’ said Gauge. ‘The latest thing is a wise-ass cop with a face full of pizza.’ The TV came on. It was an old model, pinned to the wall high on a metal arm. Sarah said to Denise, ‘Lot of our cases turn up at the morgue as unidentified bodies.’

Denise rose and stood next to Sarah. ‘It’s a cruel job you’ve got.’