"Blue?"

"Pale blue, Uncle Bob. Like she was reflecting the sky."

FIVE.

JULIA WITNESSED the autopsy from beginning to end, from the initial examination of the girl's body, through her gutting, through the inspection, weighing, and sectioning of her internal organs. She heard the plop of each organ as it was dropped onto a hanging scale, heard the girl's scalp emit a wet sucking sound when it was pulled from the midline of the skull and draped over her face as if to prevent her witnessing this particular degradation, the removal of her brain.

Julia watched and heard, thinking it would have been better that she, Lieutenant Julia Brennan, not witness it either. But there she was, standing next to Detective Frank Turro, who had no choice in the matter, a few feet from a.s.sistant Medical Examiner Solomon Bucevski, who wielded scalpel and saw and who also had no choice.

On the other hand, Julia Brennan might have been anywhere else, in her office, in the field, or even at home lingering over a cup of coffee and a burnt Pop Tart. The reason she'd given herself, her reason for coming, that she needed a cause of death and a finding of homicide as soon as possible, she now understood to be pure bulls.h.i.t. There wasn't going to be a finding of homicide and the cause of the little girl's Little Girl Blue, she might as well say it and get it over with Little Girl Blue's death would only deepen the mystery. The news was going to get worse before it got better, if it ever got better.

Bucevski gathered the girl's internal organs and dropped them into a blue recycling bag. He placed the bag into the yawning cavity produced by their removal, then began to sew the cavity shut. Bucevski worked quickly, drawing the st.i.tches tight, and the girl's body, what was left of it, rocked slightly from side to side, as if she was trying to rouse herself, to make some comment, to protest this last violation.

"Please to wait in my office," Bucevski said without turning. "And please to not smoke, detective. I am already in big trouble for this smoking in office."

Julia sat alone in Bucevski's office while Turro went out to the street for a cigarette. No doubt he believed her presence to indicate a lack of confidence. She hadn't, after all, looked over Bert Griffith's shoulder as he gathered video surveillance tapes and interviewed the doormen along 5th Avenue. Nor would she review the missing persons reports she'd a.s.signed to Carlos Serrano, though she might order him to go through them again.

Well, she'd just have make it up to Frank Turro. Sometime in the future, a.s.suming he didn't go into a sulk. If he decided to sulk, she'd take him off the case, let him chase somebody else's killer.

Bucevski and Turro came in together, Bucevski going to the chair behind his desk while Turro lounged against the door.

"Alright," Bucevski declared, "I get right down to my business." He swiveled the chair, folded a skinny leg over a bony knee, obviously enjoying himself and his authority. "Here is what we are knowing. Victim is a prep.u.b.escent Caucasian female, approximately ten years of old. Trauma to body as following: minor abrasions on chest, abdomen and upper thighs; abrasions containing solid matter including vegetable matter, probably gra.s.s, on the feet. All internal organs appear normal with no presence of disease or injury, but v.a.g.i.n.a and r.e.c.t.u.m exhibit scarring from previous trauma. Trauma appears to be caused by s.e.xual intercourse, but no sperm is present." He stopped long enough to tug at the knot of his yellow tie, smiling at Turro and Julia in turn. "We cannot be stating cause or manner of death until serology results are coming from laboratory. Girl seems to have died from exposure to elements, but also might to have been been drugged or poisoned. Time of death may be any time on Sat.u.r.day night. Cold weather makes it impossible to narrow further." He cleared his throat, then continued. "As you have seen, I have taken purple fibers from victim's hair. Examination under microscope is revealing these fibers are long, fine, and synthetic. From drapes perhaps, or bedspread."

Julia listened to the words bubble forth, Bucevski's accent so thick he might have been forcing the syllables around a ball of chewing gum. When he finally wound down, she posed a hypothetical question. "Let's suppose," she said to Bucevski, who lit a cigarette, then flashed Turro a triumphant smirk, "that the victim exited a warm place, a building to the east of Central Park, or even a vehicle. Let's say that she was running. How far could she have come? How long before the cold brought her down?"

"As long as girl continues to run, she maintains body temperature. If distance she can run is one mile, this is how far she is coming. If only one hundred meters, then one hundred meters."

Julia heard footsteps, at that moment, the slap of bare feet on concrete, the steps coming one after another, driven by fear whap .. . whap .. . whap .. . whap .. . whap. Then the huff of strained breathing, a bellows sharply compressed, opening out, again compressed, the exhalations slightly preceding the footsteps huh-uh .. . huh-uh .. . huh-uh.

"And when she couldn't run any more?" Turro asked. "What happened then?"

"Then her body temperature drops very fast .. ."

"How fast? We need some numbers, doc."

"If she has exhausted all reserves of energy, if she runs until she collapses, she would become unconscious in two or three minutes."

"Could she wake up again? After that?"

"No. After this, she will die."

Uetective David Lane approached Julia a few minutes after she entered her office. His nose and cheeks perpetually aflame, Lane was a burly, hard-drinking veteran who hated civilians nearly as much as he hated criminals. "I found the spot," he told her, "the spot where she came over the wall. It was obvious, lieutenant. The dirt was sc.r.a.ped away where she rubbed the wall with her chest, and there's an impression, too, of a naked foot with all five toes visible." He shook his head, loosing several flakes of dandruff which drifted from his hairline to his eyebrows. "Those jerks at Crime Scene, they couldn't find their a.s.ses with a handful of toilet paper."

That was the another thing about David Lane. He was crude to the very core of his being, a dinosaur who played the bad-cop as if born to the role. Meanwhile, he had more snitches on the street than the rest of the squad put together. David Lane, who closed cases.

"I called those a.s.sholes at Crime Scene and made them send out a team while I was there. Then, I watched them photograph the wall."

"Did you check the camera for film?"

"Lieutenant .. ."

"That's your problem, Lane. You're a f.u.c.kup."

Lane managed a smile. More than humorless, he viewed any attempt at humor as a personal affront, which is why Julia provoked him at every opportunity. "The kid jumped the wall," he continued, "maybe three blocks south of where she was found, and she was alone. n.o.body followed her into the park."

"It's what we figured," Julia said, "and now we can prove it. Anything else?"

"I canva.s.sed the doormen from Seventy-ninth down to Seventy-second Street, all the way to Lexington Avenue. Last night. n.o.body saw nothin'."

"How far do you think she could have come without anyone seeing her? Say at two o'clock in the morning?"

"Fifth? Madison? Park?" Lane named the avenues east of Central Park. "That time of night, you don't see too many pedestrians. But there's always traffic. I don't see how she could have crossed any of those avenues and not been spotted."

"So you think she came from close by?"

"Not necessarily." Lane's smile, this time, was purely malicious, making sure she understood that he wasn't above a little provoking in his own right. "Let's say you're some sc.u.mbag of a sleazy cab driver, like from Beirut, and you're working the Upper East Side of the island of Manhattan in the wee hours of the morning. You see this naked kid run across the street, right in front of you, and despite the cultural differences, you know something's wrong. That's because it's f.u.c.king freezing. But you don't stop. Uh-uh. You don't call the police, tell 'em there a little girl runnin' naked on the street. You just keep on getting' on. Pickin' 'em up, droppin' 'em off." Lane raised a triumphant finger. "Now, lieutenant, when you wake up the next day and find out the kid's dead the kid you drove by, the kid you left to freeze what's the chances, out of ten, you're gonna pick up the phone and admit it to the world?"

"Out of ten," Julia admitted, "none. Now do me a favor, tell Carlos I want to see him."

While she waited, Julia swiveled her chair around to face the grimy window. She kept her office as clean as possible, even whipping out a dust rag and a hand-vac from time to time, but she could do nothing about the peeling paint on the walls, or the city's refusal to accept the fact that gla.s.s was meant to be transparent. The outsides of the windows were nearly opaque with grime.

"Lieutenant?"

Turning back to find Carlos Serrano standing in the doorway, Julia quickly motioned him to a seat. Tall, slim, and very engaging, Serrano was her best detective, a master of details. That was why she'd a.s.signed him the task of sorting through the missing persons files. The same task, given to David Lane, would stretch into the next millennium.

"What's the good news, detective? You making any progress?"

"Actually, it wasn't as bad we thought it was gonna be. After you eliminate by age, race, and gender, you don't have that many cases left. And the ones you do have mostly involve custody disputes and there's usually a photograph."

"So it's just a matter of going through the open files?"

"That's about it."

"And how many open files would that be?"

"Citywide? Maybe ten thousand."

Julia sighed. The job commanded a budget sufficient to employ forty thousand cops, but couldn't afford a computer system that would allow a restricted search of missing persons files. No shock, though. The job had been neglecting the detectives in favor of patrol for the last fifteen years. "Keep at it," she told Serrano. "It's a base we have to touch."

"Got it." Serrano started to rise, hesitated, then dropped back into the chair. In his forties, his face was well-lined and very strong, especially his nose and chin. "If ya don't mind, there's something .. ."

Julia smiled. "Fire away."

"What I heard, the ME ain't gonna call this a homicide."

"So what are we doin here? Is that the question?"

Serrano returned Julia's smile. "That's it, loo."

"The Medical Examiner's office has no opinion as to the cause or the manner of Jane Doe's death. And it won't have an opinion until the toxicology reports come back from the lab. We're lookin' at a few days."

As Serrano rose, Julia realized that she'd answered the wrong question. It was the one Serrano had asked, but not the one he'd wanted to ask. Like Griffith, Carlos was smart enough to realize that his lieutenant was on her way up. There was no reason for her to hold onto a case like this, a pure headache, a mystery. He wanted to know if the case was being forced down their throats, or if Lieutenant Julia Brennan would cut it loose at the earliest opportunity, or if by far the least likely of all the possibilities the case was personal, if she'd go to the wall.

"You see Bert Griffith," Julia said after a moment, "send him in."

Bert's face appeared in the doorway a moment later, fast enough for Julia to wonder if he'd been waiting outside, a kid summoned to the princ.i.p.al's office.

"Any luck with those surveillance tapes?" Julia asked.

Griffith shook his head. "Most have them have been recorded over so many times they're completely black. You can't even see shadows. We're viewing the rest of them, but it's slow going. The only good news is that the tapes are recorded six to one. One second of tape for every six seconds of real time. It's choppy as h.e.l.l, but it cuts twelve hours of tape down to two."

"Any blocks completely uncovered?"

"Yeah, Seventy-eighth Street. If she came that way, we're not gonna know it." He crossed his legs and sipped from the coffee mug he'd carried into the office. "Something else, loo. For the last couple of hours I've been getting calls from all over the country. From law enforcement, and citizens, too. Seems they think our DOA might be some kid who disappeared six, seven, even eight years ago."

"How many so far?" Julia folded her arms across her chest. She should have antic.i.p.ated this. To the parents of a child missing for that length of time, any resemblance between their little girl and the sketch released on the prior night, even hair color, would raise long-buried hopes and fears.

"Twenty-eight. With more to come."

"And any one of them could be our victim."

"Yeah, Little Girl Blue."

Though Griffith's expression didn't so much as flicker, Julia was instantly guilty. The New York Post had used the phrase to headline their front page: LITTLE GIRL BLUE. Running it over a grainy photo of the ME's techs hoisting a body bag onto a gurney. Bea Shepherd's work, no doubt.

"I'm watching the tapes with one eye," Bert continued after a moment, "taking these calls at the same time ... I could use some help."

"I'll do what I can. In the meantime, tell the civilians to contact their local police departments. Be nice to them, but firm. Any calls you get from cops, you tell them if they want DNA samples or fingerprints, they should contact the Office of the Medical Examiner. Give them the number, then get them off the phone. We're talkin' about kids who've been missing for a long time."

"Gotcha," Griffith rose.

"Good. Is Frank Turro in the house?"

"No, he's still out canva.s.sing." Though Bert Griffith's expression remained grave, his black eyes glowed momentarily as he delivered a parting comment. "Him and the two uniforms you gave him to help out."

SIX.

JULIA SPENT the remainder of the morning and most of the afternoon at work in her office. The death of the little girl she'd begun to simply call Blue did not mean that everything else in C Squad's professional life had ground to a halt. There were ten cops under Julia's command and the cases of the four she'd detailed to cover the child's death had to be rea.s.signed to the other six, each of whom bellyached about the additional workload. Julia absorbed their complaints, knowing they viewed their failure to be included in the Blue investigation as a slight, and she tried her best to smooth their ruffled feathers. Bottom line, though, it was tough s.h.i.t on them. She was their supervisor, not their friend.

At two o'clock, as she was finishing an egg-salad sandwich and a bottle of Sprite delivered from a local deli, Julia received a phone call she'd been antic.i.p.ating for some time. It was Harry Clark, Manhattan North Detective Commander, asking for an update. If she could spare the time.

Ever the dutiful civil servant, Julia carefully detailed what C Squad had done, what they were doing, and what they hoped to do, all the while acutely aware of Clark's hidden message. The chain of command in the Detective Division normally ran from lieutenant, to captain, to deputy inspector, to inspector, to commander. By jumping three intermediate levels, Clark was making the bra.s.s's interest abundantly clear. Big Brother was watching her.

"What I'll do," Clark announced once she'd finished, "is a.s.sign a couple of detectives from my office to expedite the fingerprint and DNA requests. I'll a.s.sign them to the ME's office."

"You want to make identification a priority?"

Clark dismissed her with a snort. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he said, "did I hear you wrong? Did you say you were making .. . progress?"

Julia let Clark hang up first, wondering as she returned to her sandwich if this was the beginning of the end for C Squad. Even a.s.signed to the medical examiner and not to the investigation, Clark's detectives might eventually form the nucleus of a task force. Well, she had to call Bea Shepherd anyway. She would bring it up then, get a feel for what was going on.

Ten minutes later Bert Griffith, a huge smile dominating his normally deadpan expression, poked his head through the door. "I got her," he told Julia. "Little Girl Blue. I got her."

I HE CAMERA had been angled to sweep the entranceway of a twelve-story apartment building at 2 East 73rd Street. It was the merest luck that it also included a few yards of the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Even so, the little girl who appeared in just a single frame of the tape was no more than a white blur, a ghost. By contrast, the two men (one of whom sported a doorman's uniform, complete with gold epaulets) standing in front of 2 East 73rd Street were very substantial. Especially when their heads swiveled to follow that blur, that ghost, as it ran west toward Fifth Avenue. The time of day, stamped on the tape, was 2:11 A.M.

Julia watched the tape six times, stopping its progress on occasion to freeze a particular frame. When she was absolutely certain, she turned to the detectives who'd a.s.sembled behind her. "Lane," she said, "let's take a ride."

David Lane rose up like a bear released from a cage. He slapped his hands together, said, "Would ya believe I interviewed that p.r.i.c.k of a doorman last night?" Lane riffled through his notebook for a moment. "Linus Dwyer, that's his name. I made nice to him and he bulls.h.i.t ted me every step of the way? You want me to kill him, just say the word."

"And to think," Julia declared as she led him out of the squad room, "that I only chose you for your restraint."

IhHEY FOUND Linus Dwyer in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Sherbourne, a cooperative apartment building at 2 East 73rd Street. He was playing gin rummy with the Sherbourne's super, both of them sipping at quart bottles of Miller Light. Dwyer rose as they entered, his mouth jerking as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to smile or cry. Lane's return was the worst possible news for him, and he knew it.

"You wanna talk here?" Julia asked, nodding to the super who remained in his chair. "Or you wanna go someplace private?"

Dwyer led them along a narrow hallway to the furnace room at the far end of the building. He moved stiffly, as if to prevent the extra thirty pounds between his chest and his groin from jiggling. "In here," he told them, his brogue thick enough to slice, "if ya won't be mindin'." He let the detectives pa.s.s, then closed the door before finally turning, his most professional smile firmly in place. "Now, what can I be doin' for ya?"

Lane glanced at Julia, noted her quick nod, then slammed his fist into Dwyer's very soft gut. The doorman fell to his knees, gasping for breath. He made no effort to fight back. "You saw her." Julia squatted down so that her mouth was only a few inches from Dwyer's ear. "You saw her and didn't report it and now she'd dead. If life was fair, I'd get to kill you right where you are, then leave your body for the rats." She rose on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, until she was looking down her nose at Linus Dwyer. "You a citizen?" she asked.

Dwyer nodded his head. He was staring at the tips of Lane's well-scuffed brogans.

"Let's see your green card."

"Can I be getting' up? I've water on the knees, ya see, and it hurts me to kneel."

"Why not?" Julia replied. "I didn't tell you to get down there in the first place."

Dwyer grunted as he hauled himself to his feet and fished for his wallet. He had a moon face and tiny blue eyes set very close together. "Here she be," he said as he offered his Resident Alien Identification Card. "All stamped and legal-like."

If Julia had cared to examine Dwyer's green card (which, in fact, was white) she would, indeed, have found the card "all stamped and legal-like," but she simply took it from Linus Dwyer, then let her hand drop to her side. By federal law, a resident alien could be deported upon conviction for the most minor of crimes.

"Alright," Julia said, her tone matter-of-fact, "let's hear the story. And don't lie to me. And don't leave anything out."

Uwyer's STORY, which he told without hesitation, was simple enough. He was outside, trying to get a cab for a man he knew as Dr. Ga.s.s. Dwyer was looking east, toward Madison Avenue, the only direction from which a cab might come on the one-way street. The girl appeared out of nowhere, as if she'd just materialized on the block, in full flight; she was past him before he could react. Later, Dr. Ga.s.s, who'd been facing west toward Central Park and only seen the girl's retreating back, had begged him to keep it quiet.

"She'll go home," he'd said, reinforcing his conviction with a fifty-dollar bill. "When she gets cold enough, she'll go home."