"How much time?"

"Took him a good hour to do this." Dan Hippolito's hairline had receded halfway up his skull, lending his dark eyes a grim prominence. "A professional could have done it in fifteen minutes."

"How did she die?" Cardozo prayed to God she had died before any of this butchery had started.

"She wasn't exactly preserved for posterity in that Styrofoam box. Most of the soft tissue is gone. What we've got here is mostly bones and teeth and they don't tell us how she died."

"So what do we know?"

"We know she didn't die of a fracture. We can see she was out in the park twelve, fifteen months. She's got the femurs and the pelvis of a woman fifteen, sixteen years old, give or take a year on either end. Skull indicates she's Caucasian, possibly northern European ancestry. She has no cavities, no dental work at all-so she could have grown up in a state that has fluoridated water-or she could have been a conscientious kid who brushed her teeth and flossed after every meal. Don't know how many decent meals she had-these bones are borderline calcium-deficient, unusual in a person her age. But she did eat shortly before death. She's got bread mold on her teeth. The bread mold is weird-there are no yeast cells, dead or alive."

"What does that tell us?"

"She could have been eating matzo."

"And so were two million other girls her age. You're not giving me much, Dan."

"Stick around, there's more. Look here at her third rib...it's been broken-twice-and healed twice. Not as well the second time, though."

"What would have caused that?"

"Bare fist could have done it-or a frying pan, steam iron-anything heavy and compact."

"So someone hit her."

"Hit her hard when she was eight or nine and harder when she was eleven or twelve."

"I don't remember Sally getting-"

Dan Hippolito finished the sentence for him. "Getting a rib broken?"

"Not twice." Cardozo frowned, trying to remember. "Once I might have forgotten, but not twice."

"From what you've told me about Sally Manfredo, I doubt this is her. I'll have to check, but I very much doubt it."

Cardozo didn't know whether he felt relief or pain. His niece had vanished six years ago, and every time an unidentified female teenager turned up dead he had that instant of black dread: this time it's Sally. "Would you check, Dan? Just to keep my mind at ease? I'd appreciate it."

Dan picked up a bone from the lower leg and for one surrealistic moment Cardozo thought Dan was going to ask him to touch it, feel it, get to know it.

"Now, this is her left ankle and this"-Dan's finger ran along an uneven inch-long fissure-"is a bad fracture...happened no more than eight weeks before death. Hasn't healed...she should have stayed off it, but obviously she didn't. She probably got it set by a doctor, then she started putting weight on it, which is how it developed this seventeen-degree twist that you see here. Safe bet she was taking painkillers."

"This girl led a rough life."

"That's understating the case." Dan pointed to an area above the break. "There's a fair amount of skin tissue still adhering to the tibia-and these things here are leather particles."

Cardozo squinted. There was a layer of dark matter stuck to the bone, and he couldn't see which particles Dan was talking about. "Leather?"

Dan's dark eyes met Cardozo's. He nodded. "Commercially treated and tanned and dyed black. Hard to see without a microscope."

"What's leather doing on her shin?"

"It could be someone secured her bare feet with a belt."

Cardozo frowned. "How soon before death?"

"Put it this way: between that belt and death, no shower intervened." Now Dan pointed to the rib cage. "Exactly the same thing goes for these patches on the sternum, the clavicle, the seventh rib-her skin's been preserved."

Cardozo could see the patches, gray against the intermittent ivory of the bone, but he would never have recognized them as skin. "Preserved how?"

"With wax."

"I don't get it."

"Somebody most likely lit a candle and dripped it on her. Probably while her feet were tied with that belt. Most people wouldn't hold still for hot candle wax." Dan's hand made an arcing gesture toward the arm bones. "If any of the tissue around the radius or ulna had survived, we might have found that her forearms had been secured too."

Dan walked around to the front of the body tray.

"I've cleaned her hair a little-wanted you to see the way this is woven in." The gloved hand lifted one of the girl's braids. Something foreign glinted through dully, something that wasn't dirt or dead cells or decayed vegetation.

Cardozo could make out a series of tiny metal links. "Looks like a jewelry chain." Or a dime-store key chain that had been pressed into service as jewelry.

Dan nodded. "She didn't do it herself-someone helped her." He reached into the pocket of his rubber apron. "I found one other piece of jewelry on her person." He placed something in the palm of his outstretched glove. It was a tiny, very tarnished metal ring.

Cardozo frowned. "That's too small even for a pinkie."

"It's not a finger ring. It was in her left nipple-preserved in wax. The nipple was pierced four, five years prior to death. The other nipple didn't get the wax treatment, so we don't know if she had a pair of rings. I didn't find any other ring with the bones. The lab may have found something in the hamper."

Cardozo shook his head. "Not yet."

"The maggots left a little marrow in the right femur-possibly I can liquefy some blood cells. Don't get your hopes up, but sometimes even a few cells can tell us what infections she was carrying, what drugs were in her system."

Cardozo was still for a moment. He was aware of a desolating flow of sadness inside his chest. It was an old sadness-he had been handling it for six years, he would handle it now. He wasn't going to let sadness keep him from doing his job.

"What's your feeling, Dan? What's her story?"

"I hate to extrapolate from the condition this body is in." Dan's gloves smoothed down his surgical smock, leaving ashen tracks. "But I get a feeling she was a teen hooker-with a heavy s/m sideline."

FOUR.

AS CARDOZO CAME UP the precinct steps, he saw that one of the two green globes flanking the doorway had been shattered again. He shook his head. If it hadn't been the station house, the five-story brick building would have been run off Sixty-third Street for pulling down the neighborhood. Broken panes had been patched with duct tape. Half the iron bars over the windows had rusted, and the nineteenth-century facade was caked with grime that dated from the era when Teddy Roosevelt had been police commissioner. Since World War II, city hall had been promising to rebuild. It had never happened.

Cardozo stepped inside, where peeling industrial-green paint maintained the level of shabbiness. The female lieutenant on duty at the complaint desk was trying to calm down a hyperkinetic blue-haired lady.

"Razors!" The lady waved two purseless blue leather straps. "The kids had razors! White kids! We pay your salary and you let that happen to us!"

Cardozo tossed the lieutenant a sympathetic nod and took a deep breath. He had a two-story climb. He dodged a pizza delivery boy barreling downhill and bypassed two shouting lawyers on their way up.

A century of tramping feet had worn a dip into the marble stairway. Weekly moppings had preserved only a narrow central channel of the original gray-brown grain.

On the second floor, a white skinhead was cursing as three sergeants shoved him into the holding cage where a black man sat reading an old issue of U.S. News & World Report. Two steps down from the third-floor landing, a woman was sitting trying to quiet a screaming child.

Cardozo said, "Excuse me." He wondered how she could sit there. The sides of the steps were caked with built-up gunk that had the color of unprocessed petroleum.

"Anyone belong to that madonna and child out there?" he shouted as he came into the detective unit squad room. Phones were ringing. Voices were hollering. A fax was beeping and a PTP radio was sending out soft rock music with bursts of static.

"She's mine," Sergeant Henahan called out. "She witnessed a shooting."

Cardozo had to turn sideways to squeeze between crammed-together metal desks and wood tables. "You're deposing the baby too?"

Henahan was filling out a form, hunting for the keys on an old typewriter. "She couldn't get a sitter."

Cardozo shrugged. "What's one decibel more or less."

He crossed to his office, a small one-windowed cubicle off the main room. He shut the door. It didn't keep any of the racket out, but he felt better knowing he had tried.

Departmental paper had a way of piling up on his desk. He could swear it was an inch higher than when he'd gone out. He sat down and cleared enough space to open the case folder on the girl in the basket.

CASE UP61 #11214 OF THE 22ND PRECINCT, DETECTIVE VINCENT R. CARDOZO, SHIELD #1864, ASSIGNED.

He turned pages. The facts were still alarmingly few: JANE DOE, CAUCASIAN, HOMICIDE BY MEANS UNKNOWN.

In 80 percent of homicide cases, the important breaks came within the first forty-eight hours, or they didn't come at all. Ms. Basket Case didn't look like she was going to get her break.

In the space where a passport-sized photograph of the dead girl's face would ordinarily have been stapled, a photo of the skull had been stapled instead. It looked like an artifact from a museum of primitive art.

The spaces for time and place of homicide were still blank. Description of crime scene, still blank. Victim's name and employment, notifications made, all empty.

The spaces for names and addresses of persons interviewed were beginning to fill up. So far, detectives had questioned over thirty guests from the opening ceremony and twelve doormen from the apartment buildings overlooking the garden. Cardozo skimmed their reports.

None of the guests had had anything useful to say. None of the doormen could recall seeing any kind of truck or van inside the garden during the last sixteen months-except for park department vehicles.

Cardozo sighed. The sound of the air conditioner washed over him.

He slipped a cassette into the VCR and pressed the play button. Unedited TV footage of the garden ceremonies came up on the screen. This wasn't the first time he had viewed it and he knew it was far from the last.

Actors from Sesame Street, dressed up in their animal costumes, cavorted on a specially built stage. Celebrities and socialites mixed with a mob of Guardian Angels trying for a comeback and carefully selected, non-threatening ghetto kids.

The camera wandered past brown and tan and yellow faces till it picked up another cluster of whites. Cardozo recognized the faces from newspapers and TV-Samantha and Houghton Schuyler, premier Manhattan party givers and partygoers, chatting with Tina Vanderbilt-the aged First Lady of New York society. The gaunt-looking man holding Mrs. Vanderbilt's left elbow wore an obvious yellow wig.

There was a knock. Cardozo didn't turn. "Come in."

"I just got off the phone with the National Register of Runaways." A woman stepped into the cubicle.

Now he turned.

Detective Ellie Siegel's dark eyes gazed at him out of a fine-boned, honey-skinned face. "They estimate they have over twenty-one hundred possible matches."

"They always say twenty-one hundred possible matches. Keeps them in business." Cardozo stopped the tape. "Who's that guy with the nonhair product on his head?"

Ellie leaned toward the hiccupping image. Today she was wearing a violet dress that hugged every carefully exercised curve in her body. "According to the columns, his name is Whitney Carls and he's Mrs. Vee's walker."

Cardozo sat tapping a pencil on the arm of his wooden swivel chair. There was little to absorb sound in the dimly lit space: no curtains, no carpet. In places, the linoleum had worn down to the wood flooring. The furnishings were City of New York standard issue: a battered steel desk; a seriously abused steel filing cabinet; a straight-backed steel chair that visitors rarely opted to sit in.

"Can we narrow our description of the dead girl?"

Ellie pushed a waving strand of light brown hair away from her eyes. "Not yet we can't."

"How about the X rays?"

For the last forty-eight hours four detectives had been combing emergency room records for fractured ankles, female, fourteen to seventeen years of age, occurring one to two years ago.

Ellie shook her head. "Nothing so far."

Cardozo looked up at the sound of knocking on the open door. Detective Greg Monteleone was holding a notepad in one hand and a toasted bagel in the other. At six-foot-one, two hundred five pounds, he was definitely an overeater. He mumbled something.

"Swallow your food," Cardozo said. "Please."

Greg swallowed. "Styrobasket of Kalamazoo."

"What about them?"

"They made the meat container. It's the institutional size-the largest. The sales department says they sell over eight hundred thousand a year. There's no serial number, so individual Styrobaskets are untraceable."

"How many dealers handle them in the metropolitan area?"

"Over three hundred. They're faxing us the names."

"Mazel tov," Ellie muttered. "How long was it in the park?"

Cardozo dug through the papers on his desk and found the lab report. "At least fifteen months. Which is in the same ballpark as the broken dogwood branches. The only tire marks in the immediate area were made by a four-wheel-drive vehicle-but they can't be dated because leaves don't fall in discrete layers. Lou found a narrow indentation in the earth four feet from the grave-it could have been made by some kind of loading and unloading ramp...." He thumbed through sheets of computer printout. "Which suggests we're dealing with a van."

"Hallelujah," Greg said. "There are only about three hundred thousand of those in Manhattan."

Cardozo flipped a page. "A pair of Levi's and a T-shirt were in the basket with her."

Ellie grimaced. "That's not adequate clothing, not for the time of year she died."

Greg sighed. "Try to get a kid to dress right."

"Greg." Ellie glared at him. "Shut up."

"The lab has found bits of acrylic gray shag carpet sticking to the blue jeans." Cardozo skipped over the chemical analysis. "It's an inexpensive variety-Monsanto-designed for office buildings and hotels."