Since they had a tentative identity for the victim, Glitsky had made a courtesy call to Missing Persons and asked if they had an outstanding MP named Victor Trang. Which had alerted Paul Thieu, who'd asked if he could tag along.

A couple of squad cars were parked in front of a squat, faceless, depressing building on a side street off Geneva. Two uniformed officers stood shivering four steps up in a little semi-enclosed portico, smelling of urine and littered with newspaper and broken glass. Identifying himself and Thieu, Glitsky asked them to wait until the coroner and the Crime Scene Investigators arrived.

Then he and Thieu opened the door and entered the building.

Inside, two bare bulbs illuminated a long hallway, in which three doors were staggered on opposite sides. At the far end, the other two officers and either another plainclothes cop or a civilian stood in a tight knot, whispering. Glitsky was aware of his and Thieu's echoing, hollow footfalls on the wooden floors.

Though the other doors in the hallway were wood-faced, pitted and stained, with the lacquer peeling off, this one's top half was of frosted glass, upon which had been etched the name Victor Trang and under it, in script, Attorney At Law.

'He had that door made special,' the civilian said. His name was Harry something and he lived upstairs and said he managed the place.

Poorly, Glitsky thought.

Harry did have master keys for the building – the uniforms had located him as soon as they'd set up. It was a minor miracle, and Glitsky was grateful for it. 'Must of cost him a thousand bucks, the door.' Harry was trying to be helpful, talking to be saying something.

Glitsky ignored him and turned to Thieu, to whom the likely presence of a dead person was having the opposite effect than it was having on Harry. Thieu had stopped chattering. 'You ever do this before?'

'No.'

'You might want to wait then.'

Steeling himself- it was never routine – Glitsky opened the door, flicked on the light. Fortunately, he thought, it had been cold in the office. Even now the room was chilly, but he could detect, before he saw anything, the distinctive smell. Something was rotting in here.

In Glitsky's experience, real-life crime scenes tended to be prosaically ordinary, rarely capturing the vividness, the sense of evil and foreboding so favored by cop shows and B movies. This one, though, Victor Trang's office, came close.

Trang had evidently blown all of his appearances money on his door. Once inside, the office reverted to the form of the rest of the building and neighborhood. The long desk was an eight-foot slab of white-washed plywood – in fact, Glitsky realized, it was another door, perhaps the original. At an L to the desk, a table held a computer and printer, the phone and answering machine.

The walls were a fly-specked shiny beige which might once have been white, and they were absolutely bare – not a calendar, not a picture, not even a post-it. Behind the desk, a dark window, without blinds or curtains, was a black hole. There was an off-green couch along the side wall, a wooden library chair with a pillow seat, a folding chair set up facing the desk.

Slowly taking it in as he moved, Glitsky walked around the folding chair. Had it been set up for an appointment? Was it always where it was now?

He stopped. The chair behind the desk had been knocked over – he could see it now up against the back wall.

The body rested along the length of the desk in an attitude of repose, almost as though – no, Glitsky realized, exactly as though – it had been placed there. Carefully laid down.

Trang had been wearing an off-white linen suit, and now it was striped with red, in neat rows. There was a large bloodstain in the center of the chest, but it was roughly circular – it hadn't run down the front of his shirt. Therefore – strangely – it hadn't bled much until Trang was already on the floor.

Glitsky stood looking for a moment, letting it all sink in. He would wait until the coroner arrived, until he'd read the forensic reports, but his impressions were coalescing into a certainty. He knew what the red stripes were. It chilled him.

The killer had used a knife, then had held Trang up in some death embrace, holding him up, maybe for as long as a minute, leaving the knife in, perhaps twisting it toward the heart. Then, with his victim good and completely dead, he'd laid him down carefully on the floor, finally pulled out the knife, then calmly wiped the blade off on Trang's suit – two or three swipes at first glance.

Glitsky had been a cop for twenty-two years, in Homicide for the last seven of them. From the evidence of what he was seeing here, he thought he might be looking at the most cold-blooded, up-close and personal murder of his career.

'Mark, are you all right?'

Christina stood in the doorway, one arm propped against the frame. Her hair was down. She wore a navy blazer over a white silk blouse, two buttons open, just this side of demure. She wouldn't start her summer job until late June, but she'd been coming in regularly for the past couple of weeks – ever since Dooher had counselled her to be supportive yet independent – to help Joe get his workload organized for the move south.

She'd also gotten into the habit of stopping by Dooher's office after business hours, just before she went home. Daylight Savings Time had begun two weeks ago, and the office was above the fog layer, bathed in an amber light from the sunset. 'Is something wrong?'

'No. Nothing's wrong.'

'Something, I think.' Moving into the room, she stopped behind the brocaded easy chair, hands resting on it.

He took in a deep breath, held it a moment, exhaled heavily. 'The Trang thing, I guess. Can't get it out of my mind.'

He raised a hand to his eye and rubbed. Weary and distressed. An apologetic half-smile at Christina, a shake of his head. 'What's the sense in it, huh? Here's a guy who's just getting started, prime of his life, perfect health… I don't know. You wonder. It rocks you.'

'The big plan?'

'Yeah, I guess. The big plan.'

'Maybe there isn't one.'

'It's all random, you mean?'

'If it isn't, what's free will?'

He paused a minute, nodding as though in agreement. 'That's a good lawyer question. I'll have to get back to you on it.'

Her lips curved up slightly and she came around the chair, sat on the edge of it, pulling at her skirt, meeting his eyes, then looking down. 'You do hide behind that, you know? That lawyer pose. The glib answer.'

'I am a lawyer, Christina. If I'm glib, it's a line of defense. First we argue, then we deflect the direction words might be going, and on those rare occasions when it doesn't look like we're going to win, we… obfuscate. But I'm not hiding from you. I hope you believe that.'

'I do. I know that.'

He shook his head again. 'I feel bad about Trang, but what's the point of belaboring it? Nothing's going to bring him back. It's the simple fact of it… of life being so fragile. I don't feel so glib about that. Not at my age.'

'Your age again. How old are you, anyway? Sixty? Sixty-five? You couldn't be seventy.' She was teasing him, trying to cheer him up.

'Eighty-three next month,' he said. 'But I work out.' He pushed around some items on his desk. 'Actually, since you're as young as you feel, I couldn't be a day over eighty-one.' He shook his head. 'Sometimes the world gets to me, Christina. I shouldn't burden you with it.' Shifting around behind the desk, he flashed his self-deprecating grin. 'You're just lucky, I suppose, getting to listen to my moaning.'

'I do feel lucky.'

'Well, I'm glad. I do, too.'

'You do?'

He nodded. 'Why do you think the managing partner takes fifteen minutes at the end of the day just to visit, risking not only the office gossip but the wrath of people who think they need my time?'