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like they’re arguing.” He flipped through the report, then narrowed his eyes, adjusted the distance until he could see the typing clearly. “The guy was yelling at her in Spanish?”
    “We’re working on a translation, Captain,” Miranda said. “No one we spoke to understood Spanish, but it seems, phonetically at least, that he was calling her names: cheat, liar, thief. And a few...sexual references.”
    Her delicacy was natural, as if she sensed O’Connor’s discomfort at her presence in his squad. There was a ladylike quality, a fine line that she had drawn around herself, an unspoken demand that she be accepted and respected on her own terms.
    O’Connor nodded. “So. Maybe we’re dealing with a lovers’ quarrel. Who the hell knows. The girl thought her mother was in Florida, but she’s coming to her apartment anyway instead of going home from the hospital where she works. Claimed she had a sick headache, so she left work two hours early. She’s got a key to her mother’s apartment in her hand. Which seems to indicate she believed she was heading to an empty apartment.”
    O’Connor gazed over the top of his sliding-down eyeglasses and waited for comments.
    Miranda sat, pen poised over a notebook.
    Dunphy said, “That might indicate that she had an arranged meeting with the guy. A couple of hours of bliss, maybe, then home to hubby. Who the hell would know the difference. A possibility.”
    “But why wouldn’t the guy wait until they were in the apartment if he was planning to attack her? Why in hell was he so out in the open about it?”
    Neither partner answered. They waited as their captain continued thinking out loud.
    “The consensus, so far, seems to be that this has nothing to do with the other murders. That this was a one-on-one thing, whatever else the hell it was. That makes sense, right?”
    “The circumstances of this killing are in no way—not one single way—similar to the other killings,” Dunphy said.
    “There is nothing to indicate a similarity,” Torres said. It registered with O’Connor that her answer was tentative and open-ended.
    The other three killings in Queens County seemed to be random sex murders. Within the last nine months, there had been three late-night attacks by an unidentified rapist-murderer who had followed women from deserted subways or bus stops, dragged them into alleys or bushes, raped and murdered them. He had been named in the headlines “The Beast of Queens.”
    The first victim had been found in Elmhurst at the end of January. She had been a sixty-three-year-old practical nurse. The second attack in April had been in Long Island City; a twenty-one-year-old factory worker on her way home. The third victim, an eighteen-year-old on her way home from night classes at Queens College, had been brutalized and killed two blocks from her home in Queens Village in June. There were definite similarities in all three attacks. Each victim had died from a puncture wound in the jugular. Very messy. There were certain other reasons to believe that the crimes had been committed by the same person.
    “I talked with Jaffee, over at Homicide, a while ago,” O’Connor said. “He’s anxious to keep this one separate and apart. Hell, all we need is a fourth unsolved serial killing on the streets of beautiful safe Queens County. He’s letting out a low, casual word through the PR people that this is very possibly a lovers’-quarrel kind of thing. Of course, if we find the guy within the next twenty-four hours and he confesses to all four murders, we’d be the first to announce we got the Beast himself. At any rate, we’re separating this killing out for logical reasons. It doesn’t connect with the other murders.”
    O’Connor took off his smudged, scratched glasses, blinked rapidly, then focused on Miranda Torres. She was an outline, sitting absolutely motionless, her face tilted, waiting. He put the glasses back on and flipped through the report.
    “Well, we