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plugged someone.”
    “So far, Raymond, I can’t poke any big holes in this version. What’s your next take?”
    “Trickier, a lot trickier. Reilly knows who they are. And they know who he is. And he’s the target. Why? Okay, we’re only on page one. This second route is much more demanding.”
    “And what about this man, Raymond?” Flo pointed at O’Hara’s representation of the victim with his nose over the end of his seat, the man called Sidney R. Davidov, ex-convict. “Was he trying to stand up, get a good look at someone? Unlikely he fell over a seat and just landed like that. Or was he trying to stand up to get off? Or was he the target and he recognized them and he was going for them?”
    “Tell me something, Lieutenant, just this little bit, I understand you can’t release details, but…was he armed, too? This Davidov guy.”
    Flo hesitated, then shook her head.
    “Then I’d say first, Lieutenant, with no other details, he’s not top priority. Not this guy. If he was armed and he knew them, he might go for them. If he was unarmed and knew them, more likely he’d try to get away. In which case, he’s heading in the wrong direction. He was looking toward that bucket when he toppled over. My guess now, without further details? He didn’t know them. He’s only trying to stand up and see what’s going on. Or get off soon and, boom, he keels over.”
    “Raymond, far as it goes, I think we’re in agreement here. But it’s worth everything to hear it from someone like you, the first one there. It’s a confirmation. Can we call you back? And I’m serious about lunch, Raymond, I owe you.”
    “Anytime. I’m retired, I got nothing to do.”
    5:20 P.M.
    Alone in her office—only photographic evidence of the F train corpses for company, ghostly images projected on the wall—Flo could focus, uninterrupted, no distractions at least for a few moments.
    She stood and walked around the room and returned to her desk, watching the dead out of the corner of her eye.
    The dead demanding justice.
    She heard, and only a slight awareness here, a distant jackhammer, four stories below somewhere out in the street, an implacable steel bit pneumatically pounding through concrete, incessant, persistent, unrelenting, as if to get down to some buried truth and expose it to daylight.
    Then, interruption.
    Reality resumed. An occurrence at the door: mayor’s promise fulfilled in the flesh. Time for the unavoidable appointment with Dr. Howard Gerald, criminal psychologist.
    “Just call me Howie,” the short, plump man said, bouncing into her office like a beach ball in a suit and tie. “You don’t have to call me doctor. And please, don’t get up, Lieutenant.”
    Adjusting his bifocals, the mayor’s man, psychologist Howard Gerald, PhD, moved with a display of great deliberation from projected photograph to photograph, his nose inches from the wall, his shadow obliterating crime scene images as he progressed.
    “I’m beside myself,” he said, “absolutely beside myself with horror. How can I ever ride the subway again, and not,
not
picture this, this obscenity, this grotesquerie, this— Words simply fail me.”
    Howard Gerald carried a double mocha decaf latte and a prune pastry, a hunk of Danish about the size of the pigeons roosting on Flo’s office windowsill.
    “Want a piece?” He hefted his pastry.
    “No, thanks, I’ll wait for supper.”
    “Then please excuse me.” Howie Gerald attacked his pastry. “But I have to finish this, before”—he nodded at the wall display of death—“before I look at them again, and then it’s bye-bye, appetite. You don’t really sit with these bodies around you all day up on the wall, do you, Lieutenant?”
    “Until we arrest the killers and close the case, they’re not going anywhere.”
    The mayor’s favorite psychologist rolled his eyes, his attention returning to the prune pastry as he consumed it with the assiduous deliberation he then devoted to