We were more than two hundred miles away from the crime scene, twenty stories above the noise of the garbage trucks that rolled through Manhattan streets every morning before dawn, in the safe confines of my high-rise apartment on the Upper East Side. Too many years of investigating break-ins of brownstones and townhouses, with rapists climbing in from fire escapes or pushing in vestibule doors behind unsuspecting tenants, had driven me to a luxury building low on quaintness and charm but high on doormen and rent.

My mother had come into town for two weeks to decorate for me when I moved a few years earlier, but the French provincial antiques and lavish Brunschwig fabrics were an incongruous backdrop for this deadly conversation.

“How’d you get the call?” Mike asked, brushing the crumbs off his slacks and onto the carpet, ready to give me his undivided attention.

“One of the guys in the unit is about to start a trial in front of Torres and grabbed me just as I was going to leave the office for the night. His victim is a junkie – she came in to be prepped for court and was so high she couldn’t hold her head up. God knows if she remembers anything about the rape. I had to make the arrangements to get a hotel room for her overnight so we could try to dry her out before she gets on the witness stand. By the time we finished it was nine-thirty, and I just called my friend Joan Stafford to meet for a late supper.”

“I didn’t ask you for your alibi, for Chrissakes. How’d you hear about this?”

“I can’t even focus straight, Mike. You’ve got to take me down to my office so I can be there before everyone starts to arrive – I’ll never make it through all the questions.”

“Just talk to me, Alex.”

Reliving the events of the past few hours as a witness and not a prosecutor was an unsettling role for me. I tried to reconstruct what had happened after I walked into my apartment shortly before midnight and headed to the answering machine to play back the messages as I started to undress.