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admitted with cuts to their arms and hands. It is hard to stab someone many times, in haste and agitation, and avoid a slip or two.
    Monte Milcray slipped. He had been admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital around 2 a.m. on August 2 after being picked up by police near Sheridan Square. Central Dispatch had sent a squad car to follow up on the report of a young African-American man with an ugly hand wound who was making his way along the outdoor cafés of the neighborhood asking anyone with a cell phone to call 911. His right pinky was more or less severed, and there was a good deal of blood on his overalls, his shoes, and his personal effects.
    When investigators pulled the file on this incident, they saw a suspicious story. Milcray had told the responding officers (who called in the paramedics) that he had been in an extended altercation with “five white males,” a posse that initially confronted him outside his gym in the Flatiron District, and then pursued him on a wild chase, punctuated by beatings, all the way down to an area he vaguely indicated lay to the west on Christopher Street. Shaking them finally (though having managed to conserve his hip pack, its water bottles, a CD Walkman, and his jacket), Milcray discovered his hand injury and sought help. Where was his shirt? Lost in the fight. Had he tried to alert passers-by or duck into an attended building during the twenty-five-block bias crime? Apparently not. Could he describe the attackers? Loosely at best.
    It is hard to come up with a good lie. Monte Milcray immediately became the leading suspect in the death of Randolph Cuffee. This was not, of course, how police then approached him. Rather, the detectives who visited him in his hospital room expressed a desire to learn more about his own assailants, and asked permission to take his bag and shoes to the lab in order to run some tests that might aid in this investigation. Meanwhile, the precinct sent two intrepid gumshoes to a medical-waste incinerator on Long Island, where they spent several hours picking over the contents of a large dump truck in an effort to recover Milcray’s overalls, which the hospital had discarded. Amazingly, they succeeded. Later, most of these items would prove to be splattered with a mixture of human bloods: Milcray’s and Cuffee’s.
    When Milcray came out of surgery the next day, his finger largely reconnected, he was asked if he would be willing to take a ride down to the station house in order to look over some photos, in hopes of making an identification. He agreed, and was shuttled to a neighboring precinct, because cameras and press reporters were on stakeout at the Sixth, clamoring for a break in the Cuffee case. The specter of a gay-bashing incident had attracted much attention.
    The two lead detectives in the case put Milcray in a small, windowless interrogation room with a spy-through mirror and gave him a can of lemonade and a random book of mug shots. There was a bit of desultory flipping, but it was now late evening, and Milcray had just undergone major surgery in which a pair of steel pins were drilled into the bones in his hand—this at the end of a very eventful thirty-six hours. He was tired and in pain.
    At some point in the questioning that followed, one of the detectives either did, or did not, tell Milcray that the body of Randolph Cuffee had been discovered at 103 Corlears Street. The detectives would remember this detail differently. Either way, Milcray announced the desire to make a statement, but said he wished to do so only to the male detective. Obligingly, the lead detective (a woman) left the room. Milcray then received his
Miranda
warnings, first orally, then in writing, on a sheet he signed. As Milcray perused this document, the male detective exited the room and conferred with his superior, who had been looking on through the mirror.
    â€œHe’s going to give it up,” he said to her, and went back into the room.
    She