“The guy jumped me after I tripped.” He pointed under his foot to a bag from the museum store. “On that.” Rook opened it up and pulled out an art glass paperweight of a planet. “Check it out. I tripped on Uranus.”

When Heat and Rook entered the Interrogation Room, the prisoner snapped upright at the table the way fourth-graders do when the principal walks in. Rook took the side chair. Nikki Heat tossed a file on the table but stayed on her feet. “Stand up,” she said. And Barry Gable did. The detective walked a circle around him, enjoying his nervousness. She bent low to examine his blue jeans for any rips that could match the fabric shard the killer had left on the railing. “What did you do here?”

Gable arched himself to look at the scuff she was pointing to on the back of his leg. “I dunno. Maybe I scraped them on the Dumpster. These are brand-new,” he added, as if that might put him in a more favorable light.

“We’re going to want your pants.” The guy started to unhitch them right there, and she said, “Not now. After. Sit down.” He complied, and she eased into the seat opposite, all casual, all in charge. “You want to tell us why you attacked Kimberly Starr?”

“Ask her,” he said, trying to sound tough but shooting nervous looks at himself in the mirror, a giveaway to her he had never sat in Interrogation before.

“I’m asking you, Barry,” said Heat.

“It’s personal.”

“It is to me. Battery like that against a woman? I can get very personal about that. You want to see how personal?”

Rook chimed in, “Plus you assaulted me.”

“Hey, you were chasing me. How did I know what you were going to pull? I can tell a mile away you’re not a cop.”

Heat kind of liked that. She arched an eyebrow at Rook and he sat back to stew. She turned back to Gable. “Not your first assault, I see, is it, Barry?” She made a show of opening the file. There weren’t many pages in it, but her theater made him more uneasy, so she made the most of it. “Two thousand six scrape with a bouncer in SoHo; 2008, you pushed a guy who caught you keying the side of his Mercedes.”