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to put my head down for a couple of hours.”
    It was four a.m. and we were sitting in an all-night coffee shop on 125th Street. Luther Audley and his pals had been released after Mike’s Homicide Squad partners took statements from them. Sergeant Grayson had two teams looking for the fourth kid, who fled—with information from Shaquille, a willing snitch—in the unlikely event that he had any useful tidbits to offer. The Crime Scene Unit had started its painstaking work on the church steps and inside the sanctuary. And Amos Audley was left with the sad task of cleaning up behind them and his wayward grandson.
    We left as the tabloid newshounds and photographers had clustered in front of Mount Neboh, grumbling to Grayson that they had missed their most salacious shots.
    Murder never got in the way of Mike Chapman’s appetite or conscience. While Mercer and I sipped coffee, Mike was working his way through an order of scrambled eggs with onions and a slab of crisp bacon, using cornbread to mop up the grease on his plate.
    “I know, I know,” Mike said. “You’re wondering how I can eat like this after what we saw this morning, and I’m wondering why you’re drinking black java when you’re already so wired you could tap dance in the well of the courtroom while you’re cross-examining your worst enemy and not even come up for a breath of air.”
    The three of us had worked together on some of the city’s most horrific cases for more than ten years. We knew our respective foibles and strengths, considered ourselves family, could shoot barbs directly to the heart of either of the others without a second thought, but covered the others’ backs from any outside attacks. We came to this alliance from backgrounds so different that sometimes it was inconceivable to me that we understood one another as well as we did.
    “How soon till we find out who she is? That’s what I’m thinking about.”
    “Somebody’ll miss her, Coop.”
    “And who did she cross to come to such a hideous end?”
    The counterman walked over to the booth to refill our mugs.
    “It’s the setting that gets me,” Mike said. “Does Neboh speak to you, Mercer?”
    Mercer had been born in Harlem and worked in Manhattan North Homicide with Mike before transferring to Special Victims. He knew the streets and the people, even though he had been raised in Queens by his father—a mechanic for Delta at LaGuardia Airport—after his mother’s death in childbirth. He was forty-two, five years older than I, and married to another detective, Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a young son.
    “I’m not sure. Like Gaskin said, Mount Olivet Baptist, that was built as a synagogue too. It was Temple Israel in 1906. Abandoned with white flight. Baptist since 1926. They took the ark the Torah used to sit in and turned it into a baptismal pool.”
    “So?” Mike asked, crunching the bacon while he talked.
    “You said that you and Alex were headed to 120th and Lenox because of the fingertips in a garbage pail on the street.”
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s only one block from Mount Olivet. Gives something to your theory that the dead woman’s religion may be tied up in this. I mean, the best-known Baptist church in Harlem is Abyssinian. Built Baptist, stayed Baptist. Your murderer wants to send a message about Baptists, that’s where he goes. Not to both of these recycled synagogues.”
    “Maybe he didn’t know Neboh’s history,” I said. “I certainly didn’t.”
    “Too much of a coincidence, then, that he chose both Neboh and Olivet. I think Mike’s onto something.”
    Mike’s investigative instincts were probably in his DNA. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD, proud that his son had excelled in academics and had chosen Fordham University, majoring in history, as a way out of the dangerous street life in which his own career had been forged.
    Two days after retiring from the force, while Mike was in his junior year at