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got here before her.
    â€œPretty horrendous,” says Loomis, an even-keeled big guy not prone to exaggeration. “How long she been here, Russ?” asks O’Hara.
    â€œIt’s been cold,” says Dineen, and having squeezed whatever distraction he can from an unlit cigarette, finally cups his hands around it and fires it up. “Decomp is nothing like thesummer, Dar. Based on color, smell, maggot activity and everything else, I’d say less than a week, but not much.”
    â€œThat works,” says Krekorian. “Pena hasn’t been seen since early Thursday morning.”
    O’Hara takes out a copy of the picture on lampposts and doors all over the LES. “She look like this?”
    â€œThis girl doesn’t look like anything, Dar,” says Navarro.
    â€œWhoever killed her had some fun first,” says Dineen. “Rape probably. Torture definitely. She’s carved up like a totem pole.”
    â€œWho found her?”
    Navarro nods at the backseat of the squad car, where a man in rags is having a heated conversation with himself. “The plumbing in the bathroom hasn’t worked for years, but sometimes the skels go in to get out of the weather.”
    â€œHe goes by Pythagoras,” says Loomis. “Last known address, the planet Nebulon. We’d talk to him but didn’t want to interrupt.”
    â€œFellas, I got to take a look,” says O’Hara. “Me and K. been working this all day.”
    Whatever excitement O’Hara feels at the prospect of catching her first homicide turns into something stronger and murkier as she and Krekorian stoop under the yellow tape and inch into the bathroom. The body of a naked girl, encased in a pair of clear plastic shower curtains, lies on its side under the urinals. The two techs from Crime Scene, who stare at them unpleasantly from where they are stringing lights, wear masks, but the smell—equal parts excrement, decomposition and brand-new plastic—is not as foul as O’Hara had braced for. Much worse isthe way the victim’s final anguish is sealed and shrink-wrapped in bloodstained plastic. Her terribly constricted body is trapped exactly as the murderer left her, with her wrists bound behind her back and her legs bent slightly backward, tied at the ankles, her mouth sealed with tape, and her eyes wide open, as if still disbelieving what is being done to her. O’Hara feels as if she’s watching the crime itself, not the result.
    As O’Hara strains to take in the corpse in near darkness, the generator surges and the bathroom is flooded with light. Once her eyes adjust, she notices the missing tips from several toes chewed off by rats and at the other open end of the plastic tube, the missing tufts of short black hair. She now sees what Dineen meant by the totem pole. Livid circles cover the front of the victim’s body from ankles to shoulder blades. Before the lights went on, O’Hara thought they were bruises, the product of a terrible beating. Now she sees that they are gouges, some an inch deep. And although, as Navarro said, the victim has been far too brutalized to resemble a snapshot taken in better times, and in the harsh light her skin is ghostly pale, the victim’s height, weight, age and eye color all fit the description of the missing girl. O’Hara has no doubt she is looking at the body of Francesca Pena.
    Technicians work the crime scene for hours, taking countless measurements and photographs. A team from Forensics dusts the bathroom door for prints, and an hour later a second team unscrews the door from its hinges and carts the whole thing away. O’Hara, Krekorian, Loomis and Navarro spend much of the night in the Real Time Crime Van. This recentaddition to the NYPD motor pool is filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of nearly useless customized electronics and computers, but at least the coffeemaker works. At 3:15 a.m. Navarro snorts