“That victim last summer was a guy, right?” Mercer asked me.

“Yes, but cross-dressing. Perp might have thought he was picking up a woman and gone berserk.”

“Now I’ve got a naked cadaver dumped in a public place. Headless. I gotta think sexual assault, I gotta think torture, I gotta think mutilation again,” Mike said. “And I gotta think possible hate crime’cause the perp picked a religious institution for the drop. Sex crimes, torture, hate — it’s got Alex Cooper written all over it.”

I had run the Special Victims Unit in Paul Battaglia’s office for more than a decade and partnered often with Mercer, who worked in the counterpart NYPD bureau almost as long. Mike was assigned to the elite Manhattan North Homicide Squad — responsible for all of the murders above Fifty-Ninth Street — and knew that so many of the sadistic serial rapists Mercer and I investigated often escalated to killing their prey.

Mercer walked over to the body and kneeled to pull back the sheet Dr. Bixby had placed over it so he could eyeball the woman. “And she’s white. Dead center of Harlem and you’ve got a white girl snuffed out on a big stage.”

“We’ve been gentrified, Mercer,” Grayson said. “Don’t go playing the race card here.”

“I’m betting you she’s not from the ’hood.”

“When’s the last time you stopped into Sylvia’s for some ribs?” the sergeant asked, referring to the legendary soul food restaurant. “Looks like the limos full of ladies who lunch got lost on their way to tea at the Plaza.”

Mercer’s jurisdiction was countywide, like mine. He knew about the cross-dressing victim who had been bludgeoned to death in the Ramble by a guy he’d picked up on the street. The gay man who got his signals mixed was black. His fingertips had been mutilated, probably in an attempt by his killer to slow down the identification process. His penis had also been cut. The NYPD had classified the unsolved murder as a hate crime, though it was safe to say that most assaults that occurred within the thirty-six-acre enclave of Central Park’s densely foliated Ramble were assumed to have an element of bias.