Dr. Ga.s.s, as it turned out, had good reason to pursue anonymity, which he couldn't get from 911 because 911 traced every incoming call. A married man, Ga.s.s had just come from the apartment of Vivian Krepp, one of several married men who visited her on a regular basis.

The only thing Dwyer failed to disclose, because he didn't know it, was Dr. Ga.s.s's home address, forcing Lane and Julia to detour upstairs and confront Vivian Krepp in her Swedish-modern lair on the ninth floor. Bosomy and even more blond than Julia, Vivian readily acknowledged the nature of her relationship with the good and gentle physician. He, along with four other men, each of whom believed themselves to be her one and only, paid the eighteen hundred a month rent on her sublet apartment. "It's a living," she explained.

II R. LEONARD Ga.s.s was alone in his York Avenue condominium when Julia Brennan knocked on his door. Short and flabby, he wore what was left of his tightly curled, salt-and-pepper hair in a comb over that began at the top of his left ear.

"My wife and daughter will be home any minute," he explained. "We need to do this in a hurry."

Smart cops that they were, David Lane and Julia Brennan understood that Dr. Ga.s.s's standing in the community precluded the possibility of a good shot in the face. It was one of those sad facts of cop life. You just couldn't smack wealthy white professionals, no matter how much they deserved it.

Fortunately, Julia's anger had already dissipated. She was there only to put Ga.s.s on the record, knowing that if he was facing west as Blue ran by he couldn't know where she came from. Julia already knew where she went.

"When I left," Ga.s.s explained, "I a.s.sumed Linus was going to report the .. . incident."

"Is that what he told you?"

"He has a telephone at his desk in the lobby."

"That's not an answer."

"Do I need a lawyer, detective?"

"Lawyers are for suspects, and you're not a suspect." Julia paused long enough to allow the message to settle, then asked, "Did you give Dwyer fifty dollars and ask him not to report the .. . incident?"

"Is that what he said?"

"That's what he said."

"Well, he's lying."

"I see." Julia glanced at David Lane's reddening face and moved slightly to the left, placing herself between Ga.s.s and Lane. "Tell me this, doctor. On Sunday morning, when you found out that a little girl's naked body had been discovered in Central Park, approximately three blocks from where you'd stood with Linus Dwyer, why didn't you pick up the phone and report what you observed?"

Ga.s.s stood silently for a moment, then shoved his hands into his pockets. "How did I know it was the same girl?" he countered. "It could've been anyone."

A few minutes later, as they were exiting the lobby of Ga.s.s's building, Lane waved the doorman away, then opened the door for Julia. "You got a mean streak," he told her, his tone admiring. "No doubt about it." When Julia failed to respond, he continued. "What you need is a nickname. How 'bout we call you Tiger? Tiger Brennan. Whatta ya think?"

"What I think, Detective Lane," she replied after a moment, "is that I'm your boss and if you get too familiar, I'm gonna bust your sorry a.s.s all the way back to patrol."

SEVEN.

THOUGH JULIA repaired her makeup and ran a brush through her hair, she didn't really expect to find any television reporters on the scene when Lane finally pulled to the curb. It was twenty after six, ten minutes from the completion of the local nightly news. Nevertheless she wanted to be ready, just in case, and this time she got lucky. Angelina Valero, a twenty-something who'd only recently come to New York from KRAM in California, had somehow convinced her CBS crew to hang around, also just in case.

Angelina's dark brows rose to form perfect little crescents above her pudding-brown eyes when she saw Julia. Her arm began to pin-wheel. "Yo, team, wake up. Time to go to work." She ran her fingers through her hair, the gesture automatic, like a ballplayer tracing the sign of the cross before stepping up to the plate.

"You're not gonna do this?" Lane asked Julia as they watched the van's door open from the inside.

"What'd you think, detective, I was going to let them get away with it?"

Now Lane's eyes positively glittered. "And it's not like folks wouldn't find out eventually, right?"

"Right."

Julia was content to let it go at that, but she had an additional reason for disclosing the existence of her two witnesses. The press and the public, as they tore these men to pieces, would take its collective eye off C Squad, at least for the duration of the feeding frenzy. After all, n.o.body could say they weren't making progress.

"We've placed the child, alone, on East Seventy-third, between Fifth and Madison at 2:11 A.M.," she told Angelina Valero and several print reporters. "She was seen by two witnesses."

"Did those witnesses call 911?"

"They did not."

"Are you prepared to name them?"

"Not at this time." As all involved knew, the phrase meant: Check with your sources. "However, we feel there are other witnesses out there and we beg them to come forth voluntarily."

UN THAT righteous note, Julia marched off to the squad room, where she found Bert Griffith and Frank Turro sharing a cup of coffee. Both appeared to be exhausted.

"Anything new?" she asked.

Turro shook his head. "Uh-uh."

"Then go home, get some sleep. I want you out knocking on doors early tomorrow morning, while the night-shift doormen are still on duty. Now that we know Blue was on the street at 2:11 we may be able to locate someone who was outside at the same time, maybe a cop pa.s.sing by, or a pedestrian. It's supposed to snow hard tonight and you'll find people at home, which is all to the good."

When Turro sighed, Julia quickly added, "Frank, we don't put this one down in a few days, you know what's gonna happen."

"They'll take it away from us."

"And you know what they're gonna tell us? When they take it away? They're gonna tell us, "Hey, you had your chance and you couldn't cut it. So sorry."" She turned her attention to Bert Griffith. "I want you to re-work the surveillance tapes, Bert. Now that we have time of day, it shouldn't take all that long. Start with the tape closest to the Sherbourne, then move east toward Madison. If she's not on any of those tapes, then she must have come from a building on the block."

"Fine," Griffith responded, "but there's a little problem. As in the Indonesian Mission to the United Nations, which just happens to be located on Seventy-third between Fifth and Madison. As in diplomatic immunity, as in we can't touch them."

"And they refused to hand over their tape?"

"Not exactly, loo. They told me the system wasn't working."

"System?"

"The mission, it's in a townhouse near Madison Avenue. There's steel grates on the windows and the place is covered, front and rear, by four surveillance cameras."

IIULIA TOOK that thought to Bea Shepherd, tracking her down by phone just as she and her current boyfriend, a cellist with the New York Philharmonic named Milos something-or-other, were about to set off for dinner. According to Bea, she and Milos were in the infatuation stage of their relationship, a stage she hoped to prolong indefinitely.

"You can go public with the emba.s.sy's refusal to cooperate," she told Julia, "and hope the political pressure will convince them to change their att.i.tude, but you can't force the Indonesian Mission to hand over those tapes. If they claim the system was down, that's it"

"I think what I'll do," Julia replied, "is bank it."

"Bank it?"

"We found a couple of witnesses. That'll satisfy the press for now. Later on, we'll give 'em Indonesia. A whole country? I'm sure they'll be properly grateful." She took a moment to describe the sequence of events that led C Squad to Linus Dwyer and Dr. Ga.s.s, knowing full well that Bea would pa.s.s the information along, that come tomorrow morning, Ga.s.s and Dwyer would awaken to their fifteen minutes of fame.

"Something else," Julia finally said. "Clark's putting a couple of suits in the ME's office. To expedite requests for fingerprints and DNA samples. I get the feeling I'm about to be blindsided just when I'm starting to make progress. It'd be a real drag, Bea, if Clark took over at the last minute, not to mention cruel, unfair, and just another example of the male hierarchy putting a female police officer in her place."

Bea Shepherd laughed. "Att.i.tude, girl, that's how we do it. That's how we survive. Now, I gotta run. Milos dropped a tab of v.i.a.g.r.a a few minutes ago and we wanna have dinner before it kicks in."

"Trust me on this, Bea, after six months of celibacy, I'm sympathetic. But there's just one more thing. You remember my asking you to reach into s.e.x Crimes, find somebody willing to talk to me off the record? Well, I could use a little help here. A guide to put me on the right track. The way it is now, I feel out of my depth."

"I'm working on it," Bea announced, a note of exasperation, not to mention finality, in her voice. "Just as I intend to work on Milos an hour from now. Good night."

UUL1A HUNG up, her eyes sweeping the room, then searching her desk for unattended tasks. In many ways, this was the hardest part of her day getting ready to go home, to become a mother. It wasn't merely that she repressed her motherly instincts while she was at work, but that she buried them so deep she was never entirely sure they were still there, or that she could retrieve them.

She put her hands behind her head, leaned back, let her eyes close. Her thoughts returned to David Lane's comment after they'd finished with Ga.s.s. For the whole of her career, Julia Brennan had made an effort mostly successful to separate her work from her family. Personal was for Corry, and her Uncle Bob, and even her greedy, grasping mother. Personal did not extend to crime victims who were ent.i.tled to no more than respect, a bit of rote sympathy, and the punishment of those responsible for their pain. Her entire career affirmed that basic principle. Since making lieutenant, she'd rarely had contact with victims.

Well, the child had drawn her out, the sensational aspects of her discovery mandating that Julia Brennan pay close attention, that she come to Central Park on a freezing Sunday morning and see what Blue looked like, a little girl, naked and huddled up, fleeing a terror beyond Julia's imagining. Julia could hear the footsteps, the slap of the girl's bare feet on the cold sidewalk, the huff of her breathing, could see the plume of her breath as she rushed past the Sherbourne. Blue had run until she couldn't run any more, until she was exhausted and she had to stop, to lay down, to die.

How fast did the wind and the cold do their work? Thirty seconds? A minute? What did she feel in those last seconds? Fear? Relief? What did she think? Certainly not of rescue, because she'd sprinted past Ga.s.s and Dwyer, hadn't turned to them for help, believing in her heart that she could trust no one. That she was utterly alone.

The phone rang at that moment, and Julia, glad for the interruption, picked up. "Brennan," she said.

"I'm gonna try to make this clear, lieutenant." The voice belonged to Commander Clark, though he didn't identify himself. "In the future, you get any developments, I don't wanna hear about 'em on the f.u.c.king nightly news."

He hung up before she could reply, leaving her to consider the possibility that her strategy had backfired, that her impromptu news conference would result in her losing control of the case even sooner. Still, if she'd phoned Clark first, he might very well have nixed a press conference, or demanded that he be the one to give it.

The phone rang again and Julia picked up, figuring it was Clark back for a second round. Instead, she heard the voice of her daughter.

"Mom," Corry said, "do you have any idea when you're coming home? I was about to start cooking dinner, but I can wait a few minutes if you're getting ready to leave."

EIGHT.

PETER FOLEY sat before the computer in his west-side apartment, scanning photos into the Mac, photos of children. His apartment was tiny, a single room with a micro-kitchen against one wall, a bed against another, a long workbench holding his computer equipment against a third. A battered Formica table, a single chair, and a row of gray metal filing cabinets occupied the fourth wall. The table was covered with files, thick and thin.

Foley's work was tedious, requiring little of his attention. He placed the photographs, one at a time, on the scanner's face, clicked twice, then waited for the two machines to do their work. Computers, he was certain, and their inevitable descendants, thinking robots, would one day relieve humans of the Biblical obligation to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brows. Necessity would then vanish, consigning poor h.o.m.o sapiens to their own perverted devices.

Well, he needed those perversions, no doubt about it, to animate his own life. Without them, he would shrivel, diminish, atom by atom, like a puddle of city water beneath an August sun. Perversion kept him alive.

Once he finished scanning the photos into the computer, Foley used Adobe Go Live to set about arranging them in a series of thumbnail sheets, so that visitors could view fifteen children at a time, then expand whatever thumbnail excited them until it filled the monitor. Until it filled their imaginations.

Foley updated his website every month, religiously. The site's visitors lived mostly in fantasy, and their fantasies required periodic refueling, the need for that fuel as powerful as a junkie's need for a fix. That was why they risked everything their families, their reputations, their freedom by downloading the chicken p.o.r.n Foley provided into their home computers.

He glanced at the clock. It was 4:08 P.M. Still plenty of time to finish up and make the six o'clock ma.s.s at Holy Savior. Foley returned to the computer and quickly encrypted the update before sending it off. Then he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. He'd always liked this part of it, imagining the data as they ripped (not in a stream, but in small pellets of information, little Pac Men tracing the maze, one behind the other) through wire and cable, always at the speed of light. Running beneath rivers and oceans, across mountains, through cities, overcoming every obstacle until they found the single computer, of all the millions of computers in the world, prepared to receive them. To decrypt the data, to follow instructions, to post the photos in a small corner of the computer that ran New York University.

They would uncover the site, of course, the computer security people at NYU, sooner or later. But if any government agency thought him worth pursuing it would have to trace the same route his upload had taken. From New York University, that route would lead, first to a computer in Moscow, then to a second computer, this one in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Then to a third, and a fourth. Each, in turn, though guaranteeing anonymity, might be persuaded to cooperate, but it would take a joint effort by the FBI and the State Department extending over several years to navigate the route that led to Peter Foley's front door. By that time, of course, he would be long gone. One way or the other.

NINE.

THAT NIGHT, Julia left her Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot of a diner fronting Queens Boulevard. It was already snowing, and according to the forecasters it would snow until morning, blocking the narrower residential streets. At another time, Julia would have parked the Jeep in her own tiny driveway. She would have been glad of an excuse to spend the morning with Corry, waiting for the plow to come through, eating French toast smothered in real maple syrup from a can that'd been sitting in the cupboard for the last year. But this was not another time and Julia would leave for work (if not on time, because shifts and tours were meaningless now) within an hour of awakening. Bert Griffith would do the same, as would the rest of her detectives. It was just part of the job, the balancing of career and family, a problem for every cop. Which was why so many cops were divorced, about to be divorced, contemplating divorce. That's why so many cops were estranged.

Over another meticulously prepared dinner, Corry asked Julia about the case. "I mean, like," she declared, a forkful of salad poised a few inches from her lips, "Blue was just abandoned? Like there isn't anybody who wants her?"

Julia flinched at her daughter's casual use of the word Blue, as if that were the victim's actual name. She wondered if the whole city was calling her Blue, if she, Julia Brennan, had gotten what she wanted, a monkey's paw in the making.

"I guess she's our baby," Julia said, more to herself than Corry.

"You mean like when they find a dead baby in a dumpster?"

"Yes," Julia replied, "just like that. Only with a little more human emotion."

"I didn't mean ..."

"It's all right, Corry." Julia cut into her lamb chop. "I never had that happen to me, finding an abandoned infant, but it happened to another cop I knew. This was in the Bronx, a few months after I came out of the Academy. The cop's name was John Richmond and he was a cla.s.smate. He found .. . yeah, it was a girl, and he found her on the the hood of his patrol car. She was wrapped in a pink blanket." "Was she dead?"

"Yes, and John Richmond couldn't deal with it. He quit the job a couple of months later. If I remember, he had a little girl of his own."

Corry's mouth curled into an elaborate pout, an expression she'd only recently begun to display. Like her emerging b.r.e.a.s.t.s and rounded hips, the changes in Corry's life were coming to define her in Julia's eyes. At times, Corry seemed to be only about change, to have no fixed anything.

"How could somebody do that?" Corry finally asked.

"I don't know." It was the simple truth. Julia's need to protect her daughter had begun with Corry's birth and showed no sign of abatement. A month before, when Corry announced that an older boy in her school had made a crude s.e.xual remark, Julia's first urge was to put her Glock to the jerk's head, explain the facts of real life. As in power grows out of the barrel of a gun. "They eventually found the birth mother. She was severely r.e.t.a.r.ded and it was her own mother, the baby's grandmother, who dumped the baby. The grandmother told John that it was his fault the baby died. If he'd ordered his hamburger and fries to go, he would have gotten to the girl in time."

"Was she crazy?"

Perhaps a year before, having come to realize that if her daughter was to be open and confiding during her adolescence, she would have to reciprocate, Julia had begun to reveal a bit of her working life to Corry. "You gotta figure, daughter of mine, that a grandma who leaves her granddaughter on the hood of a car in the middle of winter.. .. Well, you gotta figure there's a glitch in her computer somewhere."

Two hours later, as Julia was undressing in her bedroom, Bea Shepherd took advantage of a postcoital interval to call. She'd been in touch with s.e.x Crimes in the DA's office and she had a contact for Julia, a.s.suming Julia hadn't by now cracked the case. As the case was closer to cracking Julia, she gratefully accepted the name, Lily Han, and the phone number Bea offered, then hung up. A moment later, before she could slide into the oversized T-shirt and nylon running shorts she wore to bed, the phone rang again. It was Robert Reid, just checking in.

"Did you get the names of the witnesses?" Julia asked.

"I did," Reid announced, "from an anonymous source who outranks you by a considerable degree."

"Ah, I see." Julia knew that her uncle was hard-wired to the NYPD hierarchy. She also knew that Bea Shepherd was not one of his sources. That meant somebody else was leaking information. "Tell me, Uncle Bob, is an anonymous source anything like a confidential informant?"

"More like an unindicted co-conspirator."

Julia started to laugh, then caught a glimpse of her naked body in a full-length mirror hanging on the closet door. A sobering moment for an unmarried thirty-something whose last serious relationship was a distant memory. "I know you have something on your mind, Uncle Bob, or you wouldn't have called so late. C'mon, fess up. You'll feel much better afterwards."