“I get the picture,” Rogan said. “I wouldn’t call that nothing. The vic had meth in her system, and if it didn’t come from her friends, it came from somewhere else.”

“Problem is, Rodriguez wasn’t working last night.”

“Damn.”

“We’ll get to him, but-”

“Yeah, I know. Anyone else?”

“I got a janitor. Leon Symanski.”

“A Polish janitor? Insert joke here.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that.” Ellie wagged a finger in Rogan’s direction. “Leon the janitor has a prior conviction for sexual misconduct. But it was twenty years ago.”

“Could you track down any of the facts?”

“I already had the reports faxed over. He admitted having sex with a sixteen-year-old who lived in his building. Apparently the girl was a regular at the Symanski apartment-talking to the wife, helping with the baby, that kind of thing. The dad was snooping around the girl’s room and found some records from an abortion clinic. He pulled her out of the Symanskis’ apartment and was smacking her around in the hallway. All hell broke loose, and when the cops showed up, Symanski owned up that he was the one who got the girl pregnant. The girl said it was consensual, but at sixteen, of course, that doesn’t matter.”

“Twenty years ago?”

“Yeah. Symanski would’ve been twenty-six at the time. He got a year’s probation. No problems since.”

“A year of probation? No time?” Rogan asked.

“Weird, huh?”

“I’ve got to think that even twenty years ago you got more for sleeping with a teenager than shoplifting.”

“Right. So that’s why I don’t think we’ve got anything here. My Spidey senses tell me that whatever ADA caught Symanski’s case didn’t think it was a predator kind of situation.” Although all kids under the age of consent were legally off-limits, those in law enforcement frequently used their discretion to distinguish between men wrapped up in a precocious teenager’s March-September experiment and the true sex offenders. “Twenty years of law-abiding behavior since then suggests they got it right.”

“I’ll call Mariah Florkoski at CSU to make sure she compares the latent from the victim’s shirt against both Rodriguez and Symanski. Maybe one of them somehow got left out of NCIC.”

“Can’t hurt,” she said. It wasn’t likely to help, either. Florkoski had already run the latent in the NCIC database, which should have contained prints for both Rodriguez and Symanski.

“Well, on that uplifting note, I say we get some rest and start anew tomorrow,” Rogan said. “We’ll start with the biggest credit card charge and work our way down until we find the right VIP lounge. We should have a doodle from the sketch artist by then. That will help.”

Ellie was never good at walking away from a case before she at least had a theory. She’d been that way even with her petty fraud cases. But fresh eyes and a rested mind could make up for hours of spinning the same old wheels. As much as she hated to leave, she could feel in her bones they weren’t going to break this case today. Starting again tomorrow sounded good.

THE MAN WAS DISAPPOINTED to find a woman named Gail in the seldom-used lunchroom. She was one of a few different two-hundred-pound assistants who seemed to roam the building. He found her unpleasant to look at. Her hair dye was so black it was blue. She wore too much blush, too much lipstick, and too colorful an outfit for her amorphous frame.

But he made a point of being pleasant, even to his most disgusting coworkers.

“Hey, Gail.”

Gail glanced up from her fashion magazine, grunted a hello, and removed her second Twix bar from the wrapper. The idea of a woman like Gail using her break to focus on fashion and beauty tips struck him as pathetic. Here’s a tip on self-improvement: Walk around the block and stop eating candy bars.

The man fed a dollar into one of two side-by-side vending machines. It took three attempts before the machine registered his credit. He pushed the buttons B and 3 and watched the black metal spiral spin on the second row of the machine, releasing a bag of peanut M &Ms. He retrieved the candy and his quarter of change from the machine.

On the muted television that hung on the wall next to the vending machine, the credits were rolling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The man watched as Oprah peacocked across the set of her talk show in a red turtleneck and black pants, alternately pointing at the guests in their comfortable chairs and pumping her flattened palms robustly above her head. He could imagine her voice, imploring her audience to “give it up” for the earnest speakers.

“I just love her,” Gail said.

“Doesn’t everyone?” the man said in agreement.

He made his way back to his office and sat in his black leather desk chair. Using the remote control on his desk, he turned up the volume on his flat-screen TV. He pulled on the sides of his M &Ms bag to open it, then shook a couple of the colored candies directly into his mouth.

The chipper music on the television changed to a lower, more staccato tune, and Oprah’s designer set was replaced by an image of the station’s talking-heads duo sitting behind a desk. As seemed to be the case at least twice a week in New York, the top story was a fire, this time at a home in Long Island. Cause? Most likely an electrical problem, although police were investigating reported connections between the homeowner and the Mafia. The flames made good film from the helicopter hovering above. More at eleven.

Up in the Boogie Down Bronx, police exchanged bullets with a car full of teenagers outside the Morris housing projects in a late-night shootout. One suspect was in custody, and police continued the search for four more.

Only two stories, then straight to commercials. A freckle-faced imp fed his oatmeal to the family DVD machine; it was time for a visit to the appliance store. He flipped to another network. A dog rubbed his backside on the carpet; time to buy rug cleaner. Flip. A smiling brunette trying to convince him he needed pore-cleansing facial strips.

Back to ABC.

One more advertisement-another canine, this time selling him on light beer-and then the talking heads returned. The attractive Latina woman on the right side of the screen broke the story:

It was supposed to be the spring break of a lifetime, the trip that a young midwestern woman would always remember. But after the body of an Indiana college student was found early this morning in Manhattan’s East River Park, the police are now searching for her killer.

Sources tell WABC that the victim is nineteen-year-old Chelsea Hart, a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was visiting New York City this week for spring break. Friends who accompanied Hart to a nightclub last night in the Meatpacking District say they tried to persuade her to leave earlier in the evening, but Hart chose to stay behind for one last drink. That decision proved deadly.

The frame cut to the face of a young woman with cropped black hair. The bottom of the television screen read, “Jordan McLaughlin, friend of victim.” A reporter held a WABC microphone below her chin. The man recognized the girl from the previous night. She’d been wearing a short yellow dress.

“All we heard before we came here was how the city had changed from the old days, how it was good for tourists now. That it was safe for us to come here alone. Now I wish we’d stayed home.”

The clip ended, and the attractive news anchor returned to the screen. “Police are still investigating. We’ll bring you more, right here at WABC, as the story unfolds.”

The gray-haired male anchor on the left side of the screen used the Indiana girl’s comment about good ol’ safe New York to segue into another crime story, this time a home invasion in Westchester.

The man flipped through the other networks, searching for additional reports about the early morning discovery of the dead body in East River Park. Nothing. Either the other stations were all finished with their coverage, or only the ABC affiliate had broken the story.