Lieut. Jack Coffey held his suit jacket slung over one arm. The wet stains on his pin-stripe shirt were darkest at the shoulder holster. His lean and sun-brown face was slack at the jaw, and his eyes were closing to slits.

Oh, talk about rookie cops. Maybe if he'd had a decent night's sleep he might not have behaved like one himself, stumbling out to the sidewalk to lose his last meal on the pavement. And now his knees were foiling him. He covered himself by leaning casually against one of the black-and-white units.

The street was crawling with black-and-whites and a few of the department's less conspicuous tan cars. The meat wagon was waiting patiently, doors hanging open. The two men from the medical examiner's office stubbed out their cigarettes and walked back inside. Nothing would get Jack Coffey back in there, nothing but the possibility of losing face in front of Kathy Mallory.

A siren cut the thick humid air, screaming like a woman. Some fool had called an ambulance, and it was rushing toward them as though there was still time for Louis Markowitz, as though the man had not been dead for two days.

And what a place to die. The windows of the six-storey building were all cracked glass and black holes. Chunks of concrete lay on the sidewalk, having fallen from the once-elaborate facade. In the past few weeks, this abandoned East Village tenement had done some service as a crack house. The addicts had left a trail of works winding from the sidewalk to the door.

The car dipped as another, heavier man joined him on the car's fender.

"Hello, Coffey," said Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely who was all gone to gray hair and not so lean as the younger man by forty pounds, nor so beautiful by twenty years of drink which put veins in his eyes and sallowed his flesh.

"Chief," Coffey nodded. "Riker filled you in?"

"Much as he could. It's the same freak? You're positive?"

"It's the same pattern with the wounds."