The blood had dried and was caked in little mountainous crusts of crimson on her pale skin. The word "Heaven" was cut into her abdomen, just over the light dusting of dark pubic hair on her pelvis. There was little excess blood around the altar, and no signs of struggle, suggesting that she was killed elsewhere.

"What happened to you?" Lee whispered. "Who did this to you?" Even at a whisper, his voice echoed and fluttered, ghostlike, through the tall stone columns of the chapel's interior. Lee had never been on the Bronx campus of Fordham University before, and he was surprised by the size of the campus chapel. But then, Fordham was a Catholic school-in fact, the college seminary was just across the quad.

Lee studied the dead girl's face, waiting for the eyes to flutter open, and realized with a start that she resembled his sister-the same curly dark hair and white skin. He had often imagined seeing Laura like this, wondering what he would do or say, but her body had never been found. And so that encounter hung in suspended animation, waiting for him in some near or distant future. He looked down at Marie, cold and unmoving upon the altar, not a line creasing her smooth cheeks, her youth a rebuke to the person who had squeezed the life from her body. Lee was relatively new to such intimacy with the dead, and it held a fascination he knew was not entirely healthy.

But Leonard Butts, the Bronx detective assigned to this case, had no such fascination, nor was he of a sentimental turn of mind.

"Okay, Doc," he said, approaching Lee. "You 'bout done there? ME's here, and we'd like to get the vic downtown ASAP."

Butts indicated several men unloading a stretcher from a van outside the chapel. Lee could see the words MEDICAL EXAMINER in large yellow letters emblazoned on the backs of their dark blue jackets as they brought in the stretcher, its wheels clacking on the stone floor. A couple of members of the forensics team glanced up briefly, then went on with their work-dusting, photographing, inspecting. They worked with swift, practiced gestures, moving smoothly through the crime scene, gathering evidence. A thin young Asian woman snapped photographs of Marie from every angle, her face set in a stoic, businesslike expression.