White Star

CHAPTER ONE

The star appeared in the void where none had been before, flickering as it struggled to life, sending forth delicate tendrils of light that lanced the eternal darkness. Then the star burst to full radiance, filling the vault of heaven with opalescent rays.

"Are you kidding me?" Anna Renthal whispered. "Origami?"

Owen Gray looked down at his hand. The star rested in his palm. Startled, he flicked his fingers and it fell to the table where it lay lifeless and tiny.

She leaned slightly along the prosecutors' table toward him, looking at the jury as it filed into the courtroom. "It's a pissant hobby for a grown man, if you ask me." She spoke almost without moving her lips, her eyes following the jurors as they took their seats.

"Goddamnit." Pete Coates was also whispering. "None of the jurors is looking at us. We've lost."

"Number eight just smiled at Owen," Anna Renthal insisted.

Coates said out of the side of his mouth, "Number eight sat there for sixteen weeks and wet her pants every time Owen took the stand. She's in love with him. Sure she's going to grin."

Anna Renthal asked, "You okay, Owen?"

Gray looked again at the paper star. He had no recollection of folding it. The star often appeared at times of stress, emerging from whatever piece of paper was in front of him.

Gray shook his head. "Three years' work on the Chinaman all boils down to whether a juror smiles at me."

He ran a finger along his nose. Even this small motion required an effort. Eighty-hour weeks had worn him shiny. He had caught himself in a mirror that morning. He seemed to have aged five years during the trial. The new lines around his eyes looked permanent. His black hair still had the tight waves, only there was less above his temples. He had seen so little sun during the trial that his skin had faded to a prison pallor. Gray had a thin dagger of a nose and slate-gray eyes. A grin would have softened the sharp angles of his face, but in front of a jury his expression was always carefully deadpan.

The jurors moved more slowly than in days and months past, taking their time, enjoying their portentous arrival. Gray glanced over his shoulder at the courtroom's gallery.

There was not a seat to be had, not a square foot of the back aisle unoccupied, and there was not one sound or movement from the spectators. All the throat clearing, fingernail clipping, tooth sucking, knuckle cracking, and butt scratching were at last quelled. Even the pencil hands of the media sketch artists were motionless.

Carmine "Chinaman" De Sallo had been charged with thirty-eight counts, everything from money laundering to hijacking to racketeering to conspiracy. The jury had deliberated eight days. De Sallo faced eighty-eight years in prison. "He deserves life in the electric chair," Anna Renthal had said.

The spectators were arranged as if at a wedding. Wiseguys were shoulder to shoulder in the gallery on the defendant's side of the courtroom. Federal agents and New York City police sat on the other side, behind the prosecutors' table.

De Sallo had packed the courtroom day after day with his soldiers. They were referred to as "our friends" and "nice guys" on the three hundred hours of tapes Owen Gray had listened to preparing for the trial. Pete Coates had once said that if a computer could eliminate the profanity from the tapes, there'd only be six hours left.

Detective Coates was the NYPD case officer, allowed to sit at the prosecutors' table. He had tiny features — pinprick eyes and a splinter of a nose, so small that his head appeared to have swollen around his face. His hair was a dun color and was as short as a drill instructor's. His chest had the dimensions of an oil drum, and his coat sleeves were two inches too short. He wore a sagging gray suit. His blue-rimmed spectacles were surprisingly stylish, given the sprung and faded look to the rest of him.

Also at the table, for the first time since the trial began, was Gray's boss, Frank Luca, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He had said nothing since the judge had reconvened the court to hear the verdict. Newspaper columnists judged that Luca's senatorial ambitions depended on De Sallo's fate.

But this was Owen Gray's case. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney and the chief prosecutor, the mastermind of the government's massive effort to put Carmine De Sallo into prison. Anna Renthal was his able co-prosecutor. She had postponed her wedding and honeymoon because of this trial. Her walnut-colored hair was pulled back in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a gray suit with a white cotton blouse buttoned to the neck. Her lip gloss was neutral, no color. At the beginning of the trial Gray had told her, "You want this guy to do time, don't let the jury see you looking like a Bergdorf mannequin."

As the last of the jurors filed into the box, Gray said in a low voice, "I'm going to indict Pots next. Jesus, that guy sets me off."

Joseph "Pots" Asperanti was in his usual position directly behind De Sallo. He wore glasses with amber lenses and a silk handkerchief in his suit pocket. Once a month he hosted a poker game, and when he had lost everything in his wallet he would put his wife into the pot. The winner disappeared into the bedroom for twenty minutes, collecting the wager from Pots's wife. At trial, every time he found Owen Gray looking in his direction Pots mouthed a kiss.

Next to Pots was Danny Garbanto, known as the Boatman because it was thought he piloted the De Sallo runabout that dumped bodies into Jamaica Bay off Howard Beach. FBI agents called the bay the Jamaica Cemetery. Also in the room were Luigi Massarli, a De Sallo soldier said to have a collection of four thousand handguns, and Dominick "Four Nines" Rompuni, a spallone (a money mover, from the Italian for smuggler), who performed countless transactions involving $9,999, one dollar less than the amount federal law required banks to report.

A dozen other wiseguys had visited the gallery every day, but the star was Chinaman De Sallo, and he never let the limelight drift from him. Each day his measured gait, imperious nod, and sanguine smile told his audience and jury that he fully expected an acquittal. He would not be inconvenienced, as Vito Genovese and Anthony Salerno had been, forced to run their organizations from prisons.

The source of De Sallo's nickname had been a matter of endless speculation among the prosecutors, police, and agents. Finally, informer BQ 6675-TE (BQ for the FBI's Brooklyn-Queens office, and TE for top echelon, the highest rank the FBI assigned an informer) revealed the solution. The informer was now almost eighty years old and had made his bones the same year as De Sallo's father. In 1966, the father and the informer visited Carmine at St. Luke's Hospital, where Carmine had just had a cancerous testicle removed. The first words out of his father's mouth on seeing Carmine were "Well, kid, we'll just have to call you the Chinaman. Won Hung Lo. Get it? One hung low." The name stuck.

Each of De Sallo's suits cost more than Gray made in a month, and the gangster never wore shoes unless they were made from some endangered species. His only jewelry was a pinkie ring. An NYPD telephoto showed it to be a Harvard class ring, unusual for a man who had left school forever after two and a half years in sixth grade at Brooklyn's P.S. 209.

The NYPD claimed De Sallo had four toupees, each with slightly different length hair. He rotated the wigs once a week so it appeared his hair was getting longer between alleged visits to his hairstylist. A plastic surgeon had strengthened his chin and added a slight cleft. His eyes were feminine, with long lashes. His eyebrows appeared plucked. De Sallo's delicate eyes had occasionally emboldened his underworld enemies to make mistakes, usually fatal.

Chinaman was six feet four and weighed somewhere between three hundred and three fifty pounds. The U.S. Attorney's office had a pool on what his prison weigh-in would be. Gray had paid his five dollars, and if De Sallo flattened the scales at 342 at the penitentiary strip search and medical, Gray would be five hundred dollars to the good.

On the other side of the courtroom aisle were the feds and cops — the operations supervisors of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Customs Service and many of their agents, deputies from the U. S. Marshal's office, the chief of the Southern District Organized Crime Strike Force, and at least two dozen agents from the Manhattan and Queens-Brooklyn FBI offices. Ninety FBI agents had worked on the investigation, fully a quarter of the agents in the Bureau's New York criminal division. Twenty New York City police detectives had joined them, and most were in the courtroom. Also in the spectator section were representatives of the Italian Treasury Police and the Italian Anti-Mafia Commission. Reporters filled every spare corner of the courtroom, ready to lift cellular phones from their pockets to call their newsrooms.

The judge said, "Mr. Foreman, I understand you've reached a verdict."

Gray turned back to the jury. His breath was shallow, and he felt as if he were wearing a jacket three sizes too small. He whispered, "Here we go, Anna."

The foreman, juror number three, replied, "We have, Your Honor."

This criminal trial had been the longest ever in the Southern District of New York. Judge Robert Kennelly had withered and grown smaller as the trial played itself out in front of him. The bags under his eyes had lately come to resemble black oysters. "Please hand your verdict to the clerk."

The clerk stepped toward the jury box.

"Please, God," Anna Renthal breathed, her eyes closed in prayer. "Call my beloved parents to your kingdom today if you must, but convict this bastard. Mom and Dad live at 1441 Harrison Street, East Orange, dear Lord."

All FBI and DEA and NYPD eyes were on De Sallo. The mobster's expression as he realized he'd never again terrorize his beloved Brooklyn streets would be the agents' and officers' reward for their years of work.

The clerk took the slip from the foreman, then stepped to the elevated dais. Judge Kennelly reached across the bench for the paper. With his face professionally impassive he opened the slip to read it.

Count one was conspiracy, the easiest of the prosecution's burdens. If De Sallo walked on the conspiracy count, he'd walk on them all. Everyone in the courtroom knew it.

The accused and his attorneys rose from their chairs. De Sallo stood with his back as rigid as a fireplace poker. His expression was one of sublime confidence, as if he owned the jury, the judge, the building, and all of Foley Square outside. De Sallo's battery of lawyers, arrayed at the table across the courtroom from Gray, each had an impeccably British name and a clock running at three hundred dollars an hour.

"Ah, goddamnit," Coates muttered. "Number ten just winked at that piece of dirt Chinaman."

"Contact lens problems," Gray whispered hopefully. "She's had trouble before."

The judge passed the slip back to the clerk. "You may read the verdict."

Gray glanced at his superior, Frank Luca. The U. S. Attorney dipped his chin. Christ, Gray thought, he's watching me, not De Sallo. Three years' work, and it's come down to this second.

"In the matter of the United States versus Carmine De Sallo," the clerk intoned. "On count one, we the jury find the defendant…"

Frank Luca inhaled sharply, the first sound he had made since arriving at the prosecutors' table.

"…not guilty."

Gasps filled the courtroom. Then dazed silence. Then the room erupted. The wiseguys hooted and whistled and applauded. A defense lawyer raised his arms into the air like a sprinter first to break the finish-line tape. Journalists reached for their phones. Another lawyer hugged De Sallo, carefully. Several spectators began a rhythmic "Chinaman, Chinaman, Chinaman," clapping their hands in time to their chant. Some jurors grinned. Others wept.

Owen Gray's face flushed so rapidly that it felt bloated. He sagged back into his chair.

Boatman Garbanto called out, "Attaway, boss."

Luigi Massarli hollered, "You banged them, boss."

Pots Asperanti blew a particularly juicy kiss at Gray.

That is, half the courtroom erupted. The agents and cops slumped as if in unison. Some leaned forward, arms on the seat back ahead of them, hands limp. Some closed their eyes.

"I'll be go to hell," Pete Coates said. "The puke is going to walk."

The judge pounded his desk with a gavel. After a moment a semblance of order settled on the courtroom.

Next was a related RICO charge. The court clerk read, "On count two, we find the defendant not guilty."

Another smattering of applause. De Sallo brought his arm up to check his wristwatch as if he had other plans, an impressive display of impertinence.

Next was the kidnapping charge. "On count three, we find the defendant not guilty."

A line of sweat formed on Gray's forehead, and a hum of humiliation sounded in his ears, muting the rest of the clerk's recital. Anna Renthal involuntarily leaned into him. Too weak to offer support, he leaned with her.

The clerk's voice seemed far away. "Not guilty… not guilty…"

"Jesus," Anna said miserably. Her face had gained a yellow malarial hue. "I think I'm going to vomit."

Ignoring the clerk, Carmine De Sallo pulled a photo of his daughter from his wallet to show one of his lawyers.

Judge Kennelly angrily twirled his gavel. When the acquittal on the last count was read, the judge said, "I'm going to poll the jury on my own motion. Juror number one, is that your verdict and the verdict of the jury?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

Kennelly went through the list of jurors. Each affirmed the verdict.

One of De Sallo's lawyers then said, "Your Honor, I move to exonerate bail."

"Granted. Mr. De Sallo, you are released." The judge thanked the jury, then asked, "Is there anything else to come before the court today?"

"Yeah, Your Worship," Pots Asperanti said. "I move that the chief prosecutor, Mr. Gray here, take a vacation, maybe to Fantasyland down in Florida."

That passed as high humor in half the courtroom. The laughter raised more color in Gray's face.

The judge dismissed court on his way to the door and disappeared into his chambers before the bailiff could call out, "All rise."

Gray squeezed Anna Renthal's hand. He put his notes into his leather accordion briefcase. He ventured a look sideways at the chair where his boss had been sitting. Frank Luca had already slipped out of the courtroom.

Pete Coates had followed Gray's eyes. "Luca wants to avoid the reporters. Smart guy."

The detective patted one of Gray's shoulders, then joined the other cops and agents as they left the courtroom. Gray and Anna trailed after them. The paper star was left on the prosecutors' table.

The crowd was slowed by reporters who shoved their microphones into De Sallo's face the moment he reached the hallway. Camera flashes came as steadily as a strobe light. De Sallo pushed ahead, his troupe in tow.

With reporters shouting questions, the crowd passed down the marble hallway. De Sallo remained silent but waved his hand like a Rose Parade queen. On the ceiling intricate flowers were patterned on squares of green and red and were bordered with painted gray mazes, and to Gray seemed suffocating. He and Anna Renthal shuffled along at the end of the throng.

"We'll wait two years, then indict him again," Anna said with false cheer. "We'll get him next time, Owen."

"Yeah, you bet we will." His voice was doubtful.

They passed the metal detector. The guard, from a private security company, thrust a notepad and pen at De Sallo, who paused to sign it.

The guard beamed. "My kids'll be thrilled."

A bottleneck developed at the revolving door. Gray and Anna Renthal were the last to push through. Outside they passed between two of the fourteen columns fronting the building. Topping the columns were Corinthian capitals, each with rows of acanthus leaves appearing to have wilted in the summer heat. Above the columns, carved on the entablature in block letters, was "United States Court House."

Gray saw a bank of microphones set up near the sidewalk. The reporters had known they would get an interview irrespective of the verdict, because had the jury convicted De Sallo, bail pending appeal would have been immediately posted.

Anna shaded her eyes against the glaucous midday light. "A world record, I swear. Must be forty mikes."

A mob of reporters was gathered around the microphones. A dozen videotape cameras on tripods surrounded the mikes. Furiously working their cameras, photographers flanked De Sallo as he descended the steps.

"This way, Chinaman," some shouted. "Just a few more."

"He's usually camera shy," Anna said, descending the stairs next to Gray. She carried her briefcase in one hand and three volumes of the US Code under her other arm.

Gray replied, "This is his chance to make you and me and especially Frank look like dunces. He won't pass it up."

Behind them, the thirty-two stories of the United States Court House rose to the gold-leafed pyramid roof. The building had been designed to blend with the neoclassic structures on both sides. Foley Square was a collection of traffic islands, each with ragged hedges and a few uneven trees. Across the square was the United States Court for International Trade. The cabbies had stopped their vehicles to gawk at the commotion.

De Sallo stepped down to the microphones. Many reporters pushed their hand-held recorders toward him. Questions were shouted until he held up both hands.

"I just got a couple of things to let you guys in on," he said in his street accent.

When Gray and Anna started away, a reporter from the swarm yelled, "You're next, Owen. Stick around, will you?"

Gray knew better than to duck the press. Part of his job at times like this was damage control. He gripped his briefcase handle with both hands and waited his turn.

The Chinaman's soldiers gathered around their boss. A short distance from the microphones Pete Coates also waited. He would give the NYPD's version of the verdict.

Wind tugged at strands of De Sallo's wig. He patted them down with a hand. He began, "Let me first say that America is a great country."

A flock of pigeons lifted from Foley Square, passing over the Chambers Street subway station, then toward Federal Plaza. To the south was the Municipal Building.

De Sallo held forth magnificently, "I would like to thank my beloved father, whose memory I carry with me like a wallet. And my mother, still alive but on the brink, who gave me the courage to be—"

At that instant the Chinaman's head ruptured. Brains and bone blew out the back of his head in a spray of crimson and gray gore. Slivers of De Sallo's skull and brain and shreds of his toupee rained on his soldiers.

The body, its face now a mask with nothing behind it, fell heavily to the steps. It rolled against the microphone stand, the flap of face dragging after it, streaking the steps in red.

Screams and oaths filled the square. A dozen handguns and one Uzi abruptly appeared in the hands of the agents and detectives. Pots Asperanti pulled out a .38 snubnose, having somehow snuck it in and out of the courthouse. Pots waved his pistol at imaginary targets, then quickly slid it back into his coat, nervously scanning the FBI agents.

Spectators ran for cover, some up the steps into the courthouse, others toward the subway station. Several taxis drove onto the sidewalk trying to flee the scene. One yellow bounced into a USA Today dispenser, crumpling the box.

The agents scanned the crowd, then the rooftops and windows, looking for the killer. They had heard nothing, no shot. And now they saw nothing.

Asperanti rolled De Sallo's body over. A hole the size of a dime had been punched between his eyes. Detritus from De Sallo's head oozed down the steps.

Asperanti said softly, "Son of bitch, Boatman, we better—" He turned to find Garbanto.

Garbanto had also collapsed to the steps, where he sat with his hand over his suit's wide lapel. Blood oozed between his fingers. The bullet that had ended De Sallo's life had also clipped Garbanto's shoulder. He blinked rapidly but made no sound. He was splattered with his boss's blood and brains.

"Goddamn, Boatman, I've seen you look better." Asperanti tried to lift Garbanto to his feet, but the wounded man swayed, then sank back to the steps. Asperanti sat next to him to wait for help.

Anna Renthal dropped to the steps, books falling from her arm. Her mouth fished open. Her breath whistled. "This time I mean it. I'm going to be sick."

Holding his revolver near his ear, Pete Coates said with ill-disguised glee, "I'll take that over a guilty verdict any day."

Owen Gray bent to help Anna, but his gaze remained on the growing congregation around the body. He said quietly, "I'm going to bring up Pots on a weapons charge. He's got no license for that pistol."

Her eyes wide, Anna looked up at him. "Owen, a man just died. Murdered. And you're worried about a weapons charge on a two-bit hood?"

Gray's face was as cold as a carving. His eyes were shadowed and remote. His impassiveness, his refusal to register the slightest emotion, had abruptly given Gray an aura of uncontrolled violence.

He said, "Pots blew me a kiss once too often."

She touched his sleeve. "Owen, goddamnit. We've just witnessed a killing."

She yanked her hand back from a particle of De Sallo's head that had landed on Gray's jacket.

Anna swallowed repeatedly, fighting sickness. Then her voice rose. "I'm shaking from head to toe. Doesn't this get to you?"

Gray looked down at his sleeve, then casually brushed the scrap away. "Pots has a sheet, so he's looking at two years."

"Owen, listen to me," she cried out. "You… you're frightening me."

"Anna, I'm not going to get misty-eyed over some mafioso getting shot, probably by some other hoodlum." He gathered her books and helped her to her feet. "Come on. We deserve a couple of beers."

The wail of bubbletops and an ambulance trying to enter Foley Square resonated between the buildings. Down the block cabdrivers honked angrily at the delay.

"Owen…"

Gray moved down the steps toward Pearl Street, leaving the baffled assembly behind. Anna unsteadily hurried after him.

CHAPTER TWO

The hand-printed sign on Owen Gray's apartment door read "U.N. Security Council" and was stuck there by two Sesame Street Band-Aids, one of Big Bird and the other of the Count. Gray could hear the sparkling notes of a piano through the door.

He had spent that entire day at his desk replaying the Chinaman's trial in his mind, re-introducing the evidence and re-questioning the witnesses, trying to alter yesterday's acquittal. He had been unable to leave his frustration at the office and had worn it home on the subway like a yoke, but at the piano's bright sounds it suddenly lifted.

He twisted a key in the dead bolt. Pushing open the door, he called out, "I'm home and, no, we aren't having a Security Council meeting."

The twins slid off the piano bench and rushed to greet him. Gray dropped his briefcase and hugged one in each arm.

Carolyn giggled. "We already had a vote."

Julie added, "And you lost three to one."

They kissed him, Julie always on the right cheek, Carolyn always on the left.

"I want a recount," he said. "I'll bet I can change the tally."

"You lost fair and square," Carolyn countered. "We get the new piano."

This lobbying had been going on a month. One piano apparently was not enough for four hands. The twins, twelve years old, practiced with adult stamina on the old Clarendon upright, encouraging and competing with each other. Gray was tone deaf, but even he could hear they were talented.

The twins were Korean, adopted by Gray eight years ago. They had lately begun to revel in their heritage, frequently pointing out to Gray the advantages of Asian ancestry ("We're better looking and there's more of us"), and naming the doorway to their bedroom the DMZ.

When Gray had challenged Julie and Carolyn to find a place in the apartment where another piano would fit, they proposed putting one on rollers across the doorway to the bathroom and moving it aside whenever anyone needed to pee. Occasionally during this campaign they would taunt him by switching to Korean and wagging their fingers. He suspected they didn't remember a word of Korean and were inventing it on the spot, but he couldn't prove otherwise.

The twins were identical and blossoming. Gray knew that in a few years he would be sweeping neighborhood boys out of the apartment with a broom. The girls had wide cheekbones, teardrop eyes, and sculpted lips. Their teeth were as white and even as the keys on their piano, and their smiles were glorious.

His son John always got the third hug. The boy never charged his father, always waiting until the girls were done. John smiled shyly from the kitchen doorway, half an Oreo in his good hand.

Gray crossed the small room to him. He lifted the boy so their noses touched and accused, "Did your sisters buy your Security Council vote with that cookie?"

John laughed wildly and held the Oreo away from his father. "Three cookies," he crowed. "I already ate two."

"Does Mrs. Orlando know you've been pigging out on Oreos?"

The boy looked with transparent guilt toward the kitchen, then crammed the cookie into his mouth. He shook his head and laughed again, showing a mouth full of mashed cookie.

John was nine years old and of Vietnamese ancestry. Like his sisters he had been an orphan. When he was three he had found a shell in a pasture near the foundling home in the Dong Nai province and had hammered it with a stone. The explosion had ripped his hand from his arm. He had been brought to the United States by a Greenwich Village couple who somehow had not known that John's arm ended three inches below his elbow and who had changed their minds once they saw him.

Gray had been successful adopting John when he persuaded his landlord to temporarily switch apartments for the adoption-agency interview. The landlord's place had three bedrooms. Gray's had only two. The ruse worked. Now the girls occupied one bedroom, John the other, and Gray used a hide-a-bed in the living room. Unfolding the bed every evening had proven too much trouble, so he slept on it as a couch. His back ached every morning.

One day half a year ago John came home from school inconsolably bawling. Playmates had made fun of his arm, with its clamp prosthesis where a hand should have been. Gray had visited a friend, a sergeant who was an armorer at the 42nd Infantry Division at its armory on West Fourteenth Street. The sergeant had rigged a new prosthesis, a one-pound ball bearing on a short iron shaft. Next day when the teasing began again at school, John smashed the steel ball into his desktop, splintering the wood. The harassing stopped instantly. John wore the daunting battering ram only once a month now as a reminder.

Gray kissed the boy's forehead. John had ebony hair. Gray had given him haircuts in the kitchen until the twins said John was looking like Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. Now John went to the same barber Gray did. His son had gaps between his front teeth, so Gray had just started writing checks in startling amounts to an orthodontist. With John's braces and prosthesis, the twins called him their Man of Steel. He loved it.

Julie began again: "John's vote counts. Three to one."

"This family is a monarchy." Gray lowered the boy and removed his jacket. "I'm the cruel king. You three are serfs. The king scoffs at voting."

"Aw, Dad," Carolyn said.

John lifted the briefcase with his hook. He showed his braces in a smile and swung the case back and forth like a pendulum.

"Do you not hear the king scoffing at you serfs' impertinence?" Gray snorted, "Scoff, scoff, scoff."

Mrs. Orlando emerged from the kitchen and handed him a glass of iced tea. "You must choose, Mr. Gray. Me or the kimchi. Make your choice."

"Three more days, Mrs. Orlando," Gray said. "If I can stand it, so can you."

"The smell." She waved her hand in front of her face. "It is killing me."

For most of a week the apartment has smelled of kimchi. The twins had coaxed Mrs. Orlando into buying a jar of it. They both gagged at their first taste of the fermented fish, cabbage, onions, garlic, and horseradish; but in an attempt to savor Korean culture, the girls were determined to last a week of kimchi breakfasts. Julie and Carolyn had been singularly unsuccessful in getting their father to taste the dish. John had also refused to try kimchi, saying it would give him a case of the zacklies. When his father had blithely asked what the zacklies were, John had hooted, "It's when your mouth smells zackly like your butt." He had been sentenced to a night without the Nickelodeon channel.

The apartment was normally redolent of Mrs. Orlando's Caribbean cooking. She was from Haiti. When Gray interviewed her for the job, he had asked to see her green card so he could fill out the 1–9 form. She had produced a photograph of her neighborhood in Cap Haitien on Haiti's north shore showing a row of destitute tar-paper shacks on a dusty road, an abandoned wringer clothes washer on its side near a mound of rubbish, and two ragged chickens. She had said in her melodic accent, "That's all the paper I've got." It was enough for Gray.

Mrs. Orlando was wearing her usual riotous colors. For Christmas, Gray had given her an ornate silver necklace with a dozen tiny bells hung among stylized fish and shells, and she had not taken it off since. The necklace made her jangle like a belled cat when she walked. Her skin was bronze and her eyes were set at a laughing cant. The children adored her but were wary of the voodoo curses she threatened them with when they watched too much television. She was generous with her singing talent, and Gray credited her with instilling musical ability in the twins. She was patient and loving with John when the boy cried out against his missing hand. If she had a fault it was that she would occasionally miss an afternoon of work, always because she had met a new boyfriend, and would later claim with heavy invention that she had come down with Haitian pox, a little-known disease whose most distressing symptoms were an inability to work and a fuzziness of mind that precluded calling in sick. Gray suspected she devoured and tossed aside these boyfriends, leaving them nothing but husks.

"Are you feeling better, Dad?" Carolyn asked.

Gray removed Julie's Discman from an overstuffed chair next to the piano, then sank into the chair. He had been unable to hide from them his bitter disappointment over the De Sallo verdict. He balanced his glass of tea on the torn armrest.

"I feel great," he said, more a sigh. He yanked on his tie, loosening it, revealing an unnatural ridge of purple skin on his neck. He leaned to the floor to pick up a schoolbook about the solar system. He laid it on the stand at the end of the couch. "Pete Coates, the lead NYPD detective on the case, is coming over in a few minutes. Will you kids pick up this place?"

"Are you going to talk about how you blew the case?" Julie asked.

"You are too kind." Gray sipped the tea. "We didn't exactly blow it."

"The New York Times said you did," Carolyn teased. "You and your boss blew it, the editorial said."

"John, stop swinging your father's briefcase," Mrs. Orlando ordered as she returned to the kitchen. "You'll break something."

The apartment was in Bay Ridge, a Brooklyn neighborhood of Italians and Greeks, pizza joints and Optimos, fifty minutes by subway from Gray's office in lower Manhattan. The living room was about the width of John's swing. The television, a twenty-five-inch monster purchased as the result of an earlier lobbying effort by the twins, was the only item in the living room not careworn, dented, or frayed with age. The couch was sprung. The coffee table wore the marks of John's experiments with a hammer several years ago. The living-room rug was an old and fine Sarouk that belonged to Gray's ex-wife Cathryn. In a puerile fit, he had changed the lock before she remembered she had left the rug behind. She had also forgotten their framed wedding photo, and it remained on the end table. His family had never met Cathryn.

He said, "John, the briefcase goes—"

The door buzzer interrupted him. Gray rose from the chair and crossed to the intercom. When Pete Coates identified himself, Gray pressed the lobby door button.

Gray had no idea why Coates would visit his apartment, unprecedented in all the years of preparation and trial in the De Sallo case.

"Better warn Mrs. Orlando," Carolyn exclaimed, glancing into the kitchen. "It's a cop."

Julie laughed. "Maybe she can make it down the fire escape."

Gray waved them to silence. He tightened his tie and opened the door. Pete Coates climbed the last few stairs to the third floor. He was a large man, but his bulk was in his chest, not his belly. He moved with a lively gait despite years on the beat before earning his gold badge. He was breathing easily, a man in shape.

Coates said, "I'd have been here earlier, but I stopped at Junior's for a couple slices of cheesecake. Too bad you weren't along to pick up the tab."

Gray laughed as Coates entered the room. The detective had not once paid a check in the years he and Gray had worked on the De Sallo investigation. It seemed a point of honor with him. He had once told Gray, "I've never taken a nickel under the table on this job, so I've got to make up for it by stiffing people for food."

The twins were wide-eyed. A real police detective in their apartment. John stepped quickly to his special corner beside Gray's chair.

"Nice-looking bunch of kids," Coates said as he helped himself to the couch. A fleck of cheesecake clung to the corner of his mouth. "Looks like you got your own Third World country here."

Early in the De Sallo probe, Gray had learned that the trade-off for Coates's legendary tenacity was his relentless unrefinement. At first Gray thought the crassness was an act, part of the detective's tough-cop routine. But Coates was so persistent in his boorishness that Gray concluded he had brought it into the world with him like a birthmark.

Coates had proved himself again and again on the De Sallo investigation. The detective had once dug in a Staten Island garbage landfill searching for Pots Asperanti's numbers receipts for forty-eight hours without stopping, bringing in klieg lights so he could work at night. On another occasion, when his car stalled, Coates commandeered a Number 16 bus on Second Avenue and ordered it to follow De Sallo's Cadillac across the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, the passengers on the verge of a riot. On one January night Coates had posted himself down the block from De Sallo's Jamaica Bay Club while the thermometer dipped below five degrees and stayed there for the entire ten hours Coates was on duty. The next day a surgeon removed the tip of Coates's frostbitten small toe.

Coates had another quality Gray valued. He detested gangsters. The detective's loathing of organized crime brought an unbending moral principle to his police work. He hated the mob so much that he could not bring himself to call them hoodlums or gangsters or any other label imparting even a modicum of dignity. Instead Coates usually used the term pukes, and had done so while testifying against Carmine De Sallo, causing defense attorneys to move for a mistrial, which was denied. So Gray gladly put up with Coates and had even become fond of him.

The detective kicked off a loafer and rubbed the ball of his left foot. "It's good to get off my goddamn feet."

John gasped at the profanity. The twins tittered and looked knowingly at each other. They were convinced they knew words their father had missed all his life. The kitchen door opened slightly. Mrs. Orlando peered out.

Coates began, "Owen, you're a cool customer, I got to admit. After the Chinaman went down, you left the scene like you had ice in your veins."

Gray opened his hands in a vague gesture. Looking back on the scene later that evening, Gray had been vexed and angered at his own dispassion, at his own callousness at the gruesome event at Foley Square. His long journey back to normalcy — for years a day-to-day harrowing struggle that had exhausted and confused him and had cost him dearly — might not have succeeded. A healthy person would have reacted differently, more like Anna Renthal, sick at the abrupt and gory passage from life to death.

"Owen, you've got a lot of scars, those ones on your arms and legs," Coates said. "But remember that first day when you went to the gym with me and I saw your neck and asked about the scar there? You said you choked on a piece of ham in your dormitory at college and had to have a tracheotomy. Well, I recently was talking to a surgeon friend of mine and he said tracheotomies shouldn't leave much of a scar, not these days. So I got a little curious and did a little digging."

The children were quiet, peering at the detective.

"If I showed initiative like this all the time I'd be mayor by now, I'll guarantee you that," Coates said. "Owen, everybody at NYPD thinks you are just a run-of-the-mill prosecutor, a damn good one, but just your average PA making life miserable for us police."

The twins inched closer.

Julie needled, "You aren't a run-of-the-mill prosecutor, Dad?"

Carolyn joined in, "We thought you were."

Gray cautioned, "I'm good enough to put you two girls in juvie for ragging your father."

The detective asked, "You got a beer?"

Gray shook his head.

John called from his spot, "We got Yoo Hoos in the 'frigerator."

"Who'd have figured it?" Coates asked. "I read about that scar in your service file an FBI friend sent me. Made me queasy. No beer?"

"Pete, why were you interested in my service file?"

Carolyn asked, "Why'd the scar make you queasy? It's not too bad."

"Just some blue and red and purple skin," Julie chimed in.

The detective asked, "Your old man ever tell you how he got that scar?"

"A leech," Julie replied. "Big deal. We Koreans eat them for breakfast."

"You want that Yoo Hoo, mister?" John asked from his spot.

Gray said, "My kids know I had an accident."

"I'll say." Coates put his shoe back on. "One day out in the jungle you picked up your canteen and took a big gulp of water. And you swallowed a leech that had gotten inside your canteen when you were filling it."

Carolyn made a production of shrugging. "Wouldn't have bothered me."

"And the damned thing got stuck in your throat where it grabbed on with its little teeth. The leech started swelling with your blood, right there while it was in your throat. Your air was cut off and you started turning blue. Your spotter wasn't nearby, so he was no help."

"What's a spotter?" Carolyn asked.

"So you took out your service knife and punched a hole in your own throat, a big ragged hole. Then you cut off a short piece of bamboo and used it as a tube for air."

John moved quickly from his corner. "I'm going to ask Mrs. Orlando for Yoo Hoos."

"You got your color back but you couldn't dig out the leech. You were deep behind enemy lines and it took two days to get to an aid station and the leech was in your throat all that time getting fatter and happier."

The twins beamed.

Coates turned to the twins. "Girls, I don't know about you, but a leech stuck in my craw could take some of the luster off an otherwise fine day."

John marched back into the room carrying Yoo Hoos and straws. He handed a carton to the detective and lectured, "You open the flap and stick the straw in."

Coates did as told. He sipped on the chocolate drink. "It ain't a Guinness, but not bad. What'd you do to your hand, kid?"

John glanced at his clamp. "I don't remember." He expertly punched a hole into the carton with the tip of the clamp.

"What's a spotter?" Carolyn asked again.

"Your dad was with the 1st Battalion, Fourth Marines, in a sniper-scout platoon."

Gray quickly turned to his children. "Girls, John, I need to talk to Detective Coates privately. Go to your rooms, please."

They could tell he meant business. They disappeared into their rooms without dawdling or argument.

The detective emptied the carton with a loud gurgle. "You know, I'd be proud as hell if a rifle range down at Quantico was named after me."

Gray replied tonelessly, "I don't think you would, actually."

The detective persisted. "I made a phone call to a gunnery sergeant down there this afternoon. Sergeant Arlen Able, an old friend of yours, turns out. They still talk about you. The sergeant called you a legend."

Gray rubbed his chin. "Yeah, well, I've left all that behind."

"After talking to the sergeant, I was hoping to see the Wimbledon Cup on your mantel." The detective scanned the apartment. "But you don't have a mantel. Or even a decent table to put it on."

He looked back at Gray. "I asked the Marine sergeant over the phone, I says, 'Sergeant, you mean Wimbledon like in tennis?' And he laughs like I'm a pussy and says the Wimbledon Cup is the Thousand-Yard National High-Power Rifle Championship held at Camp Perry, Ohio, and that you won it three years running."

"I don't talk about it much."

"You know what my nickname was in the Marines?" Coates asked.

"I can only imagine."

"Pogey. That's what Marines working in an office are called. I was a typing instructor for the quartermaster at the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point. Fifteen words a minute and they make me a typing teacher, for Christ sake. I should've had a name like White Star. The chicks loved that nickname, I'll bet?"

When Gray said nothing, the detective continued, "The sergeant at Quantico told me the Viet Cong and NVA called you White Star due to the little paper star you always left behind."

In fact, the name had come first, then the paper star. The enemy began calling Gray White Star early in Gray's tour because of the sniper's penchant for using twilight. All Marine snipers knew the sailors' rhyme, altered slightly: Red sky at night, sniper's delight. A lingering pink and red and purple dusk prompts the hunted to leave the safety of the trees or hedges too early. First darkness is an illusion where the near foreground seems darker to the target than it is to a marksman viewing from a distance. During a red twilight the hunted may not suspect he can still be seen in the shooter's crosshairs. Gray's name came from the first heavenly body visible in the sky at twilight, Venus, which westerners call the evening star but which Vietnamese know as the white star.

Then one day in Vietnam in his blind, waiting, it turned out, thirty-six hours for the shot, Gray had idly begun folding a small piece of paper torn from his sniper's log. He folded, unfolded, and refolded, experimenting with an intricate but random design. Eventually his spotter, Corporal Allen Berkowitz, said, "You've made a star, looks like. Just like your nickname." After the kill, Gray left the star behind. From then on, he left a paper star behind at every firing site or, if he could get there, on the corpse.

Many of history's snipers left a calling card of some sort, Gray discovered later. John Paudash, the Chippewa Indian who fought in the 21st Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War One and who was famous for working alone, left a bird feather at his kills. In the Civil War, Corporal Ben Burton of the 18th North Carolina Regiment was known as the Choirboy because he claimed the pitch of a bullet passing overhead could tell him the precise distance to the enemy rifleman. The Choirboy always left a squirrel's tail. The Viet Minh sniper Vo Li Giap, renowned for firing through airplane windscreens at French pilots trying to take off from the Dien Bien Phu airfield, left braided pieces of twine. One of history's first recorded snipers, Leonardo da Vinci, shot several enemy soldiers while standing on the walls of besieged Florence using a rifle he had designed himself. Whether Leonardo felt compelled to leave a calling card is unknown.

"And the Viet Cong had a reward for your head, the equivalent of five years' pay for a soldier." Coates gurgled the dregs of the Yoo Hoo again. "The VC blanketed Vietnam with a drawing of your face on a wanted poster. Where'd they get the drawing?"

Gray was becoming resigned to the conversation. "From a photo of me run in Sea Tiger, the III Marine Amphibious Force's weekly newspaper, is my guess."

"So how many of the enemy did you whack?"

Gray glanced at the wall over Coates's head. Several of John's crayon drawings had been taped there. He always painted the sky red. "A few."

"Christ, I'll say." Coates laughed, a peculiar clatter, like a stick dragged along a picket fence. "Ninety-six is quite a few. It's hard to believe, zotzing ninety-six people. More kills than any other sniper in American military history, the sergeant at Quantico told me. I asked the sergeant why you left the service, but he didn't know or more probably he wouldn't say, and your file wasn't too clear on the subject."

Gray replied, "Well, my tour was up—"

"Not quite," the detective cut in. "Your second tour was two months from being up when you flew back to San Diego on a medevac plane."

John's door opened and the boy walked out, straight for the detective. He had taken a liking to the brusque policeman.

The boy asked, "Want another Yoo Hoo?"

"Sure. And add a shot of vodka while you're at it."

"Yum. I love vodka." John grinned widely. He turned for the kitchen.

Gray rose from the chair to intercept his son. He gently grabbed the boy's shoulders and turned him. "You better tell me you've never tasted vodka once in your whole life."

"I put it in my Yoo Hoos all the time just like the detective does."

"Back to your room with you, you big fibber."

John laughed in his tinkling way. He hadn't expected his mission to be a success.

"Nice kid you got there. I see the family resemblance."

"Why are we honored with your visit tonight, Pete?" Gray asked.

"We need your expertise," Coates said, crumpling the carton. "De Sallo's killer was an ace with a rifle. And you know more about using a rifle than anyone else we can find. Maybe more than anybody else in history."

Gray knew it to be true.

Coates went on: "Carmine De Sallo was killed thirty hours ago and we have only one hard piece of evidence — the bullet that passed through his head and then through Boatman Garbanto's shoulder. And by the way, that puke Boatman will be all right, to my regret. We dug the slug out of the courthouse steps."

Gray nodded.

"The lab is looking at its contours and weight," Coates said, "and trying to figure out the number, size, and design of any cannelures. We'll hear from them shortly. And, of course, we also know the bullet came from a westerly direction. The complete absence of other evidence also means something, but we're not sure what."

Coates leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. "I mean, we've found utterly nothing other than that slug. My people have talked to thirty-five witnesses to the De Sallo killing. Nobody saw anything. And more puzzling, nobody heard anything. Even in Manhattan's perpetual din the sound of a gunshot should have been noticed. We thought of a silencer." Coates dipped his chin at Gray as if testing him.

"Silencers louse up the aim," Gray answered. "A rifleman wouldn't use one if he was shooting from any distance."

"That's what we thought, too."

"There were television news cameras there," Gray said. "What's on their tapes?"

"We've got the tapes from all the TV stations. They don't show anything other than a third eye opening up in the Chinaman's head. A fast-thinking WABC cameraman turned his camera around to Foley Square just after the shooting. He did a slow sweep of the buildings. We've studied that tape, looking at all the windows in the Fidelity Building, the U.S. Court for International Trade, Federal Plaza, the State Office Building, every window where a rifleman could have hidden. The tape showed quite a few open windows, and we checked them out. Nothing."

Owen Gray reached around to an end-table drawer to pull out a map of Manhattan. He unfolded it carefully. Scotch tape held the map together.

Coates emphasized, "We checked every likely firing position. We came up with zip."

"You did all this checking since yesterday?" Gray examined the map, first looking at the scale. "That's a lot of potential firing sites."

"We're damn thorough," Coates said defensively. "You've worked with us long enough to know that."

"So you looked at every building with a view of the courthouse steps" — Gray traced a circle on the map—"all the way west to Battery City and the Hudson River?"

Coates ran his tongue along his teeth. "You think we didn't go out from the courthouse far enough?"

"A talented sniper could have fired from thirteen hundred yards."

Coates corrected, "Thirteen hundred feet, you mean."

"Yards. Almost three-quarters of a mile."

The detective grinned. "I'll bet you've done that yourself to some poor bastard from three-quarters of a mile. Am I right? He was probably squatting there eating some rice, daydreaming of his poontang back home in Hanoi, and you tooted him from another time zone."

Gray pursed his lips noncommittally.

"Christ." Coates stared intently at Gray. "You must've been a real shooter."

Gray studied the map.

Coates said, "We've got another puzzle, something that's rarely happened before. We haven't heard anything on the street about the Chinaman's killing. Usually when a puke gets thumped, gossip about it gets back to us. That's usually the point of the whole exercise, one puke sending a message."

Gray had often wondered at the NYPD's inexhaustible supply of synonyms for killed. The cops borrowed from sports ("The guy was dunked," or tagged out, beaned, or called out), the fashion industry (zipped, ironed, hung out to dry), the culinary arts (cored, fried, plucked, basted), pest control (zapped, flicked, swatted), and apparently nursery school (dinked, thwacked, and boinged). There were a hundred others. Gray figured the police had a Department of Slang that issued a new word every few days.

The detective concluded, "But this time we've heard nothing. Nobody, not even some of the lums we've rolled over, has a hint about who took out De Sallo."

Lums was short for hoodlums, and rolled over meant making a lum an informer. This was worse than the twins' fake Korean, Gray reflected.

"Can you give us a hand tomorrow?" Coates asked. "If you can just find his firing station we'll take it from there."

Gray carefully folded the map. "You've got enough guys to dump on the investigation, Pete."

"Sure, but you know sniping. You'll save us days, maybe weeks."

"Yeah, well, I promised to take the kids—"

"And you might put me back in the good graces of my captain. After the De Sallo acquittal I could use a win."

Gray wearily rubbed the side of his nose with a finger. "All right, I'll go to Foley Square and look around."

Coates rose quickly. "Tomorrow, eight in the morning. I'll meet you there."

"Bring a spotting scope," Gray said. "A 20-power M49 if you've got one. And a tripod."

Coates nodded and started for the door. "Thank your boy for the Yoo Hoo. Tell him I'll buy him a beer someday. A rice beer if he wants." He laughed and started down the stairs.

Gray closed and bolted the door. Mrs. Orlando immediately appeared from the kitchen.

"You've got calluses on your ear from the door, Mrs. Orlando," Gray chided.

"You told me you were trying to leave all that behind you," she whispered, glancing at a bedroom door, expecting the children to appear. Faint Nintendo sounds came from John's room.

Except for his ex-wife and his psychiatrists, Mrs. Orlando was the only person in two decades Gray had spoken to about his Vietnam tours. More a confession. She had been a steady and devoted source of strength.

"Now you're going to bring it all back," she scolded. "All those bad memories." She opened the door to John's room.

"Just helping out a friend for a few hours." Gray pulled his tie out and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. The skin below his Adam's apple was discolored and misshapen, resembling a dried fruit. Gray knew it was useless to try to hide anything from Mrs. Orlando, but he did not want to admit that during his conversation with Pete Coates, Gray's mouth had dried up and his chest had become tight. She would know these things anyway, always able to read him as if his mental state were written in red ink on his forehead.

She clucked her tongue. "You know what we say in my country?"

"Yeah." Gray smiled at her. "You say, 'Get me the hell out of this stinking place.'"

She said over her shoulder as she went into his room, "He who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas."

Gray pulled a coffee-table book from the couch stand. The book was entitled Manhattan On High and contained aerial photographs of the island. He sank into the chair and began leafing through the volume, studying SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and other neighborhoods near Foley Square. Again his hands started to quiver.

Ten minutes later Gray said to himself in a falsely composed voice, "That guy was a passable marksman, I'll say that much for him."

CHAPTER THREE

"The Chinaman's killer must've been in one of those trees was our first thought." Pete Coates pointed to the scraggly elms in the Foley Square traffic divider. The trees were thirty feet high and were sagging and broken, struggling for survival in the city. "But nobody was up there. We couldn't have missed him."

He and Gray were standing on the courthouse steps on the precise spot where Carmine De Sallo had met his maker. Gray was staring across Centre Street into the trees. He was carrying a spotting scope aluminum case. Coates held a collapsible tripod.

"The killer wouldn't have been able to see through the elm leaves," the detective said, pointing west down Duane Street. He was wearing the same gray suit as the day before and it looked as if he had slept in it. "So we could rule out some of the distant buildings due west as his firing site."

"That was your first mistake," Gray replied. "The farther a rifleman is from foliage the easier he can see through it."

Coates asked, "What sense does that make?"

"I don't know the physics of it, but take my word for it. The killer probably could see through those sparse leaves to De Sallo even though we can't see in the other direction." Gray turned to the steps, running his eyes left and right. "There's his zero shot, that fracture in the riser of that step."

The stone riser had a pocket dug out of it. A few chips of stone and concrete lay along the tread below the gouge.

"What's a zero shot?" Coates asked.

"The rifleman sighted his weapon and scope by firing a practice round sometime before he let loose at the Chinaman." Gray bent to the cracked riser to stick his finger into the hole. "The bullet isn't here. Probably bounced out and was kicked away by a pedestrian or swept up by the grounds crew."

Gray led the detective away from the steps, between several parked cars, and across Centre Street toward the Court for International Trade. They walked west along Duane Street. A man wearing a black leather coat, open in front with no shirt underneath, handed Gray a leaflet that read, "Beautiful Girls, All Nationalities, A Unique Concept, No Hidden Charges Whatsoever." Gray wadded it up and pushed it into his pants pocket. He slowed his pace and looked skyward, up the side of the twelve-story Mardin Building. He narrowed his eyes, studying cornices several floors above the street. He saw nothing of interest and moved along the sidewalk.

"You looking for the sniper's window?" Coates asked. "These windows don't even face the courthouse."

Gray was silent, intent on a light pole.

The detective walked beside him, his hands jammed into his pockets. "You know, I would've made a pretty good sniper."

Still looking skyward, this time toward a lamp fixture attached to the front of the next building, Gray said, "Sure, and I could've played center field for the Mets."

He stopped at another light pole on which was a tattered poster reading "Awake! Cruelties Go Unchecked in Malawi." He stared above him at the light bracket for a moment, then walked on.

"Son of a bitch!" Coates exclaimed. Trying to follow Gray's gaze, the detective had stepped on a discarded soiled Pampers. He tried to scrape it off his shoe, but the diaper's adhesive strip clung to him and he kicked several times before he could dislodge it. He caught up with Gray. "I'm serious, Owen. I'm pretty damn good at the NYPD firing range. I could've been a sniper."

They approached Broadway and the sound of a conga band. Gray was still peering skyward. He said absently, "You wouldn't have had a chance to become a sniper, Pete."

"Hell yes, I would have." Coates's face lengthened. "What do you mean?"

"You wear eyeglasses. The Marines don't let you become a sniper if you need spectacles."

Coates argued, "A lot of good Marine marksmen wear glasses."

"Yes, but they aren't allowed to become snipers. The reflection off the glasses makes it too dangerous in the field." Gray looked at a power pole, then at the brackets holding a sign that said "Pal's Loans."

The detective said, "Well, assuming I didn't wear glasses, I would've made a great sniper."

"Not at all." Gray's eyes were still skyward. His gaze moved in a measured grid pattern. He had done nothing like this with his eyes for over two decades. A steady clicking — right, right, right, then back again, right, right, right, like a typewriter carriage, and shifting focus near to far, near to far. The small skill had not been forgotten. "You are left-handed. Lefties aren't allowed to become snipers because the additional movement required to operate the bolt over the top of the scope escalates the risk of detection."

At the corner of Broadway and Duane they stepped around a band of street musicians playing a maraca, a cowbell, a conga drum, and a percussion instrument made of four crushed beer cans. Their only audience was a transient with a full white beard and a red cap, eerily resembling Santa Claus, carrying a bottle of cheap port and sticking out his tongue through blackened teeth at the conga player. The hat on the ground in front of the band contained two dimes.

Gray's eyes scanned iron mounts attached to a building on the corner, perhaps once used to hold flowerpots. They crossed Broadway. A vendor had spread out several dozen wigs on a blanket on the sidewalk. The hairpieces were neon red, steel blue, and eggshell white. He was haggling with a woman in five-inch heels whose skirt had less fabric than most belts. Gray stepped around the display, veered through the stream of people walking along Broadway, and continued west along Duane Street, the detective in tow.

Gray's eyes were again turned skyward. He almost bumped into a woman in a Burberry plaid skirt who was stooped over trying to shove a newspaper under her squatting poodle. The dog preferred the cement and kept inching forward, so the woman had to scoot the newspaper after the poodle, saying again and again, "Do your duty, Pumpkin. Do your duty."

Coates tried again. "Well, if I didn't wear glasses and wasn't left-handed, I would've made a great sniper."

"Not even then, Pete." Gray stopped abruptly at the Winlox Building, a gray fifteen-story 1940s structure notable only for its refusal to leave an impression. Six stories up the side of the building a flagpole was attached to a column between windows.

Eyeing the pole, Gray said, "You need to have been a hunter or a tracker or a wilderness guide to get into the sniper program. You've only left New York City a couple of times in your entire life, and couldn't follow a bleeding coyote across fresh snow."

"Well, hell—"

"And even if you weren't a nearsighted citified leftie, you couldn't have become a sniper because they don't allow horses' butts into the program."

Coates laughed. "That last qualification would have sunk me for sure."

Gray pointed to the flagpole. "Your killer left some tracks. Take a look."

"I don't see anything."

"About halfway out the pole, there's a red streamer, cloth of some sort."

"So?"

"It's his wind telltale, like on a sailboat. A sniper usually uses a strip of red cloth two feet long."

"That could be just a piece of trash hanging there. Lots of crap hangs from flagpoles and signposts and power poles in this city."

Gray opened the spotting scope case. "I know a telltale when I see one. Set up the tripod, will you?"

"How'd he get it out there?"

"The window near the pole is probably in a lavatory or an empty office that he got into."

An elderly woman wearing a coat and a hand-knitted scarf despite the day's heat paused to say, "If you're looking for a peregrine falcon, there's a nest on the Wexler Building. Saw him snatch a pigeon right out of the air."

"Thank you, ma'am." Gray smiled. "We'll go there next."

"I'd have to be pretty hungry to eat a pigeon," she added as she shuffled on.

When the detective fumbled with the tripod, Gray tugged it out of his hands. The tripod was a government-issue Ml5. Gray pulled it open and locked the leg nuts, then withdrew the scope from its case. He attached the scope to the stand and removed the eyepiece cover and objective lens cover. The scope's lenses were coated with a hard film of magnesium fluoride to enhance light transmission. Bending over the eyepiece, he altered the focusing sleeve. Without looking up, he adjusted the azimuth with the screw clamps on the tripod shaft, and the elevating thumbscrew on the lens cradle.

He said, "If the sniper could see that telltale we might be able to see his firing site from here."

For twenty minutes Gray leaned over the scope, frequently looking up to relieve eyestrain. During that time Coates kept a running count of the passersby he chased away. "Eight palmers, six jackets, five prunes, and one mattress," meaning panhandlers, mental cases, senior citizens, and a hooker.

Finally Gray straightened himself to stare at an apartment building, two blocks in the distance. He blinked deliberately several times, then lowered himself again to the scope. "I've found it."

Coates excitedly nudged Gray away from the scope, but after a moment of squinting into the eyepiece, he said, "Goddamnit, what am I looking for?"

"A hole in that window. On the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth floor."

"I see it."

"Your sniper was up there."

Coates raised himself. He pulled back his jacket and appeared to be reaching for his pistol. For an instant Gray thought the detective was going to crazily fire his handgun at the distant window.

Instead, Coates pulled out a cellular phone. "I'm going to call the crime-scene people." He hesitated, scratching his chin. He looked skeptically at Gray. "You positive that's his firing site?"

"It's where I would have fired from."

"We searched our asses off and missed this place," Pete Coates said as he followed the building superintendent down the hallway. The detective was moving quickly, almost running up the super's legs. "Makes us look like morons, I'll guarantee you that."

Gray was carrying the spotting scope and the compressed tripod.

As they hurried down the hall, Coates jabbed the super's shoulder with a finger. "You're telling me you thought this guy was into orgies?"

"Yes, sir." The super wore a blue blazer, washed-out jeans, and ankle-top Reeboks. His hair was tied with a rubber band in a short ponytail. He carried fifty or so keys on a ring. He ran his tongue over his lips. "What else was I to think? He had those mattresses delivered two and three at a time. Too many to sleep on, so I figure he's having a bunch of people over to get naked."

"You ever see the guy?" Coates asked.

"It was just a month sublease. I handled the paperwork. Did it through the mail. He paid up front."

Coates brushed by the superintendent and drew a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver from inside his jacket as they neared the end of the hall.

The superintendent found the right keys. "I'm paid to keep the halls clean and the furnace running. Guy wants to have a Crisco party with all his friends, it's all right by me."

Coates stepped to the other side of the door frame, under the exit sign.

Owen Gray stayed well back. "The chance of this guy being in there is nil."

"Then you stand with your belly in front of the door. Not me."

The detective held his revolver near his chin. He reached across to the door and hammered on it. After a moment he tried again.

"I don't hear anything." Coates jerked a thumb at the superintendent. "You open the door."

"I don't plan on dying in a burst of gunfire." The super tried to give the key ring to Gray.

Gray refused to take it. "That's one of my main principles, too."

The detective took the keys, gingerly inserted one into the dead bolt, and turned it. Then the doorknob key.

Coates lunged against the door. His bulk should have snapped it open. It gave only a few inches and he rebounded back into the hall. He charged again. The door moved slightly, grudgingly.

"What in hell? He got some furniture against the door?" The detective called, "Open up. Police."

He shoved again. With a soft scraping the door slowly opened.

Both hands on his revolver, Coates rushed into the apartment. The room was dim, with little daylight entering. The detective flicked on an overhead light.

"I'll be damned," Coates said. "Place looks like a drunk tank." His pistol still in front of him, he walked through a door into a bedroom.

As he stepped into the apartment, Gray almost tripped on the first mattress. The room's floor was covered with them, as were the walls. A mattress had also been secured to the inside of the door. The only furniture in the room was a cane chair and a folding table. Stacked on the table were several bulky books next to a Sony television set with a five-inch screen.

Coates returned from the bedroom, moving unsteadily over the mattresses. "Smell anything?"

Gray looked at him.

"Got to get the smell first," Coates said. "It dissipates fast once the doors are open. CSI will ask us about it. Put your hands in your pockets, will you, Owen."

"I'm not going to muck up your crime scene."

"Not on purpose. But you might pick your nose, get a dried flake of mucus under your fingernail, and later it might fall to the floor. Then CSI would find it, pick it up with tweezers, put it into a Baggie, and take it to the lab for analysis. They don't get the kick out of that you might imagine."

Gray lowered his scope and tripod to a mattress, then shoved his hands into his pockets.

The detective added, "Don't flush the toilet. Don't run water into a sink. Don't breathe on any surface. Don't pick your teeth. Don't scratch your head. Don't do anything."

Gray glanced above him. "He's even got mattresses on the ceiling." A bulb on a wire hung between two mattresses. "Twelve inch screws, right through the mattresses into the ceiling. Probably had to use plaster screw casings."

The living-room windows looked east down Duane Street. Mattresses leaned against the windows, blocking out the light. Only one window in the room had any exposed glass, an aperture a foot square, bordered on all sides by mattresses.

Coates asked, "Why did he bother with the mattresses? He could've fired, then raced out of the building."

"Yes, if he was only going to fire once. But he wanted the zero shot, which he probably did an hour or two before the reporters arrived, maybe a day or two. He didn't want a lot of sound because he was going to hang around after the first shot."

A circular hole had been cut into the glass. The opening was ten inches in diameter.

"The killer traced a pattern, maybe around a plate, with a glass cutter," Coates explained. "He used masking or duct tape to make sure the circle of glass didn't fall outside. He was here awhile and kept himself company with that television set."

Gray shook his head. "The TV means he was probably working alone and didn't have a spotter."

Coates looked at him.

"A rifleman can seldom see whether he hits his target," Gray went on. "The rifle kicks up and he can't quickly find the bull again. Sometimes dirt blows up at the target and other times there's a lot of confusion in the target area like there was on the courthouse steps."

"So what about the TV?"

"One of a spotter's jobs is to see if the target went down. The De Sallo courthouse steps interview was run live on the local TV stations, and the sniper would have known it. He fired the shot, then watched the results on his TV. Let me cross the room to the window to set up the tripod."

The detective nodded at Gray. "Watch your feet."

Gray gingerly moved to the window, sinking into the mattresses with each step. The opening in the window between mattresses was at Gray's chest level.

As he set up the tripod and attached the scope, Gray said, "He sat at the table and balanced the rifle on the books. He fired with the rifle's barrel well inside the room. The mattresses muffled the noise of the shot in all directions. Very little sound would have escaped out this hole in the glass. And we're on the twenty-fifth floor. No sound got down to the street."

"How do you know the barrel was inside the room?" Coates asked.

"There are powder particles on the window around the hole. Those crusty specks. You can see them without a microscope."

Coates ordered, "Don't touch the GSR." When Gray looked at him, he added, "Gunshot residue particles." He high-stepped over a mattress to the spotting scope. "So you can see De Sallo's position on the courthouse steps through the scope?"

"Take a look."

Coates lowered his head to the eyepiece. "I see mostly green. A lot of leaves."

"When the wind moves the leaves, you'll see the steps right where De Sallo stood."

"He was firing between moving leaves?" the detective asked. "You're right. I can see the steps."

Gray resumed his position behind the spotting scope. He loosened the clamping screw and rotated the telescope a fraction of an inch. After a moment he said, "Take another look. Don't jostle the scope."

The detective again replaced Gray behind the telescope. "I don't see anything interesting. A fire escape." Coates raised his head to peer out the window. He scratched his cheek. "The fire escape is on the Atonio Building three blocks toward Foley Square. What am I looking for?"

"Another piece of red cloth."

He went back to the eyepiece. "Yeah, I see it."

"De Sallo's killer tied the cloth strip to the fire escape to judge windage, same as he did on that flagpole. There are probably a few more telltales along the twelve hundred fifty yards of Duane Street between here and the courthouse. And he also had the Foley Square trees as a telltale. Let me see the printout we looked at earlier."

Coates lifted from his suit pocket a folded fax from the National Weather Service and passed it to Gray.

As he looked down a column of dot-matrix numbers, Gray said, "At noon that day the wind was blowing a fairly steady twelve miles an hour out of the south."

"And the telltales told him that," the detective concluded.

"Them and this scope. Take another look."

Coates bent over the scope.

Gray said, "By focusing the scope on the target and rotating the eyepiece a quarter to a half turn counterclockwise, a mirage will appear short of the target."

"What kind of a mirage?" Coates asked.

"It's the shimmer, the ascending waves you see over a hot road in the summer. Wind bends those waves in the direction of the air flow. On a clear day, like it was when De Sallo was killed, the mirage would have been pronounced."

Coates fiddled with the eyepiece.

Gray went on: "If the mirage is flowing from the right, which it would have been that day, the wind is coming from either one, two, three, four, or five o'clock. The rifleman would have turned the scope slowly to the right. As the scope turns the mirage will boil. When it does, the direction in which the scope is pointing is the direction from which the wind is blowing."

"So the wind was coming from the rifleman's three o'clock, out of the south," Coates said. "And then how does he estimate how fast it's blowing?"

"The flatter the mirage waves, the faster the wind. That day there would've been some undulation to the mirage, but not much, not with a twelve-mile-an-hour wind."

Gray looked again at the NWS printout. "The humidity that day was close to one hundred percent. The rifleman would have also known that from the mirage waves. The thicker the waves, the more humid it is."

"Why was the killer worried about humidity?" Coates asked.

"As humidity increases, air density increases, which slows the bullet and lowers its point of impact. The marksman would have had to raise the rifle to compensate for the sticky weather."

"So the rifleman would have made adjustments to his scope to account for the wind and humidity?"

"There were undoubtedly elevation and windage turrets in the scope assembly. He would have presighted on the spot directly behind the microphones, but he wouldn't have had time to tune them when the target appeared. So he would have compensated for the breeze and humidity by aligning the barrel to his right."

"How much off-target did he sight?" Coates asked.

"In a twelve-mile-an-hour wind over twelve hundred fifty feet, about thirteen feet."

Coates's chin came up. "Thirteen feet? I was standing about that distance to De Sallo's left when he was killed. And I was up six or eight courthouse steps from him."

"That's right." Gray smiled thinly. "The killer probably had your head in his sights when he pulled the trigger."

The detective was aghast. "What if the wind had suddenly calmed?"

"Then you'd have been… " Gray paused. "What's the word I'm looking for?"

"Tattooed."

"That's it," Gray said.

Coates blurted, "Maybe the killer was after me. I mean, maybe he knew nothing about wind and humidity. He just got my face in his crosshairs and pulled the trigger, hoping I'd go down."

"He had no interest in you," Gray calmed him. "Just De Sallo. From everything we've seen — the setup of his firing position, the telltales, the shot — the guy was an artist."

Coates laughed sharply. "Is that how you snipers think of yourselves? Artists?"

"I don't think about it at all anymore," Gray said.

"You shipped ninety-six guys to the big pachinko game in the sky and you don't think about it?" Coates cackled. "I can die happy now because I've heard everything."

Coates padded around the room. After a moment he said with glee, "Well, lookee here." He pointed to the edge of the mattress covering the main window. A spent cartridge was balanced there.

Gray bent for a closer look. "That's not the fatal bullet's cartridge."

"We'll run a neutron activation analysis on it," Coates said.

"You can tell by looking at it," Gray replied.

"And we'll do an atomic absorption spectrophotometry on it. And we'll do a scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersive X-ray analysis on it."

"Maybe you'll find the red paint on it by then." With a finger, Gray indicated a narrow ring of red just above the cartridge's extractor recess.

Coates peered closely at the shell. "Looks like fingernail polish to me. What's it doing on a shell?"

"It's the rifleman's sign. He carries an empty red shell and leaves it behind as a signature."

"Like your paper star? Any chance you know the rifleman? A sniper who leaves a painted cartridge?"

"Never heard of him," Gray answered. "But I've been out of the business awhile." Gray looked at his watch. "I'm going back to my kids. Maybe we'll get to the zoo yet today."

Gray followed the police detective toward the door. Two crime-scene investigators entered the apartment. One wore a salt-and-pepper goatee and had a jeweler's loupe attached to his spectacles. He carried two carpenter's toolboxes. The second CSI detective had a bunched face and a leprous complexion. A camcorder hung from his shoulder.

The bearded detective asked as he passed, "Smell anything, Coates?"

"Not until just now." Coates pointed to the empty cartridge, and the investigator opened a box to pull a plastic sack from a roll.

Detective Coates started down the hall. Gray followed. The superintendent had disappeared.

Coates said, "Christ, a paper star and a red shell. Cases for an insane asylum somewhere. And from what I read in your service file, you came close."

"Not that close," Gray said.

"You got pretty damn close to the loony bin," Coates insisted.

"Not that close." Gray felt like he was arguing with his son, John. "Give me a piece of paper from your notebook, will you, Pete?"

The detective lifted a small spiral binder from his coat pocket, tore out a page, and passed it to Gray.

Coates said, "Speaking professionally as a policeman, I can understand how giving the doughnut to ninety-six guys could put you on Valium by the truckload."

Gray's hands worked rapidly. The slip of paper seemed to leap into life.

When they reached the elevator, Gray handed the paper back to Coates. "A little souvenir."

An instant passed before the detective recognized the white star in his palm. He recoiled and his hand flew to his side. The star fluttered to the floor.

The elevator opened.

"That scared the crap out of me, Owen," he said huskily.

"I'm a sensitive type." Gray smiled thinly. "I don't like talk about the loony bin."

CHAPTER FOUR

Faces flashed in the circle quickly, one after another like cards dealt onto a pile. Children's faces, laughing and whooping at the end of the school day, a cascade of faces as boys and girls walked down the school building's steps, faces falling into the ring, then out again, each face just a fleeting glimpse, inside the circle an instant, then out. To the top of the site post, then down and away.

Red Army sniper scopes use a pointed aiming post rather than crosshairs. As the children descended the steps, one face after another slid down the aiming post, beaming smiles, gap-tooth grins, ponytails and ribbons, innocent eyes, shirts and pants and skirts of wild colors, all in animation, spilling into and out of the circular frame, all flowing down the aiming post.

Hazel flecks on a green iris surrounding a flat black pupil. Frozen and unchanging, neither blinking nor altering distance to the front lens, the eye behind the telescope might have been part of the scope's optics. Even the pupil was still, neither expanding nor contracting. The eye was locked in position as firmly as the scope was fixed to the rifle. Colors and smiles flickered before it.

Then a long swath of gray rippled down the circle. A pant leg belonging to an adult. Owen Gray's face dropped into the circle. And now the scope moved fractionally, keeping Gray's face atop the aiming post. Owen Gray. White Star. Only then did the eye blink, and only once. Tight black curls, a few lines around the eyes, pale skin, a wise smile, then lips moving soundlessly, Gray's face turned to speak to someone, the aiming post just under his nose, following him smoothly. White Star. Once more the eye blinked.

The circle slowed, and Owen Gray slid out of the ring. Next came a kaleidoscope of colors — green and red and yellow and blue, an exotic scarf wrapped around a woman's head. The aiming post came to rest below her nose. Her skin was brown and burnished. Her eyes were narrowed as she laughed. Bits of metal — a necklace — danced in the sunlight, tossing back shards of light. The circle lingered on her a moment, an image of whirling colors and glittering light. Then the ring found the boy with one arm accompanying Gray and the black woman as they moved east along the sidewalk.

The aiming post returned to Gray, his head in profile as he walked east. Owen Gray.

The circle went to black when the eyelid behind the scope slowly lowered and stayed closed. White Star.

Gray met Pete Coates at the Columbus Park Gym at the edge of Chinatown. They had begun their workout skipping rope and had moved to a heavy bag. Gray wore lead-lined bag gloves. The detective held the bag from behind while Gray jabbed and crossed.

Coates asked, "What's Frank Luca got you working on?"

"He wasted little time," Gray answered from behind his fists. He was breathing heavily. "On returning to work Monday, he handed me sixteen files, all of them thin. A Mann Act, an interstate flight, an illegal pen-register, and the like."

The bag bounced against Coates as he said, "Real piddlers."

"The De Sallo prosecution took forty file cabinets and eight hundred megabytes of our mainframe. All my new cases wouldn't take a single cabinet drawer and a hand-held calculator."

Early in the De Sallo investigation the detective had suggested that Gray join him at his gym for a workout. Gray had never heard of the place, and had expected the usual Nautilus equipment, stationary bicycles, Precor step machines, tiny chrome dumbbells, and all those unnaturally happy, muscled, spotless youths paid to urge him on.

The Columbus Park Gym was over the Three Musketeers pawn-shop, up a narrow, squeaking flight of stairs to an ill-lit space that at the turn of the century had been a shirtwaist plant. A boxing ring filled most of the room. Everlast speed bags and heavy bags hung from frames on one wall and an assortment of Olympic free weights were along another.

The gym was owned by Sam Owl, who was in his seventies. Owl opened and closed the gym every day and spent the entire time in between teaching boxing. He referred to himself as a fistic scientist. Owl had trained welterweight champion Marco Genaro and the lightweight champ Kid Raynes, and the old man knew more about boxing than any man in New York.

The gym was last painted when Eisenhower was president. Paint chips and plaster regularly fell to the hardwood floor. All the equipment, from the bags to the ring ropes, was faded and frayed. The only bright spot was one wall decorated with a reproduction of Lord Byron's screen depicting battles for the English championship between Tom Johnson and Big Ben Brain in 1791, between Johnson and Daniel Mendoza in 1788, and many others. The floor-to-ceiling reproduction was painted by an artist in exchange for membership in the gym.

Most of Sam Owl's clientele were club fighters with ring talents far superior to Gray or Coates's. That first day in the gym Gray had been ensnared by the rhythms of the workouts — the loud tattoos from the speed bags and jumping ropes, the scuffing of black shoes on the ring mats, and Sam Owl's incessant jabber at the boxers. Gray grew to love the scents of leather and sweat and the body ache after a workout with ropes and bags, followed by a three-round match. Gray began appearing at the club almost every noon with Coates. The prosecutor and the detective had invariably briefed each other on the De Sallo investigation during their workouts, talking through their mouthguards.

Coates released the heavy bag and stepped up to a speed bag. Both men wore running trunks but no shirts. Coates's white terrycloth band on his forehead was dark with perspiration.

Gray followed him to a nearby bag.

The detective nodded at Gray's fists. "New gloves?"

Gray's gloves were bright red Surefits rather than the brown Everlasts he usually wore. "Borrowed them from Sam. I misplaced mine. Or John took them to school. So tell me about the lab report."

"You've got to admit," the detective said over the pounding of the bag, "there're some mighty interesting things in your personnel files. Coming to New York City after being raised in Nowhere, Idaho, for one." He pronounced it "Eye-Day-Ho."

"Actually it was Hobart, Idaho." Gray's pattern on the bag included fists and elbows, all moving in a circular whir.

"How'd you end up out here?"

"After the service I got into NYU law school and met my wife there. She was from New York and loathed everywhere else, so I stayed. What about the lab report on the cartridges?"

"You said a sniper has to have hunting or tracking experience." Coates's voice boomed over the staccato of the speed bags. "Where'd you pick up yours?"

"My father owned a lodge north of Ketchum, a hunting lodge. He'd take hunters into the mountains to find deer and goats and, in the early days, cougars. I learned from him."

"You a good tracker?"

Gray paused in his workout to wipe his forehead with a towel that hung from the waistband of his shorts. "I was leading four-man parties into the mountains when I was thirteen years old. I'd be out there for a week, and we'd usually come back with game strapped to our mules. So you could say I was pretty good."

"You had a tough couple of years after you got out of the Marines."

Nearby old Sam Owl barked at a black middleweight who repeatedly threw left crosses at a heavy bag. Sam Owl's bifocals rested high on his head, and every time the fighter brought back his hook Owl tapped his elbow, reminding the fighter to keep his arm tight to protect his ribs.

Gray began a new pattern on the bag, using fists and backhands. "I'm not the only person in history to have a little clinical depression. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, for example."

"But they both died, so maybe you're in worse shape than you thought." Coates chuckled, but Gray wouldn't join in. "The doctors didn't jolt you with electricity, did they?"

"My therapy consisted of counseling and a few modest medications."

The detective left the speed bag and walked to a rack of equipment on a wall. He donned a headguard and shoved his hands into sixteen-ounce gloves, brushing the Velcro straps across the wrists. Gray did the same. Coates left his spectacles on the wood bench. They bent through the ropes into the ring. They sparred lightly, bobbing and ducking, blocking most blows with their fists. Gray once determined that during the De Sallo investigation he and the detective had boxed over fifteen hundred rounds with each other. Their sparring had become choreography.

"Your file said you tried to zonk yourself," Coates said, breathing heavily. He launched a right jab that grazed the pad over Gray's ear. "How long did that urge last?"

Gray gestured, a nonresponse, letting Coates snap his head with another jab. "It never entered my drugged-up mind after that one time."

"You think it was your sniping that caused the depression?" The detective stepped back to wipe sweat off his forehead with the back of a glove.

"Hell, no." Gray's voice was too adamant. He sent a smooth combination at Coates, the left cross catching the detective in the ear. "I was a soldier."

"Ever been back to the hospital?"

"Not in ten years." Gray grinned baitingly, showing his mouthguard. "But — the strangest thing — all my dreams are still seen through crosshairs." Good effort, Gray thought. Making a small joke of the horror. He sounded fairly normal.

Coates came straight at Gray, throwing four jabs, then a right straight, finding Gray's nose. "One of your victims was a woman, I read."

"She was a Viet Cong major who had cut off the testicles of two Marines." Gray backstepped, his breath coming in gulps. "You could have done her, too, believe me. You know, Pete, you are out of character this morning, what with all this polite chat. No cracks about the loony bin."

"Not from this lovable guy."

"And this pleasant chat has a professional scent. You on the job right now?"

Coates jabbed, but Gray slipped it and found Coates's chin with a right. The big gloves resembled pillows, and the blows had little effect.

The detective said, "I'm trying to learn how a sniper thinks. You're the only one I've ever met. Thank God."

Sam Owl and the middleweight stepped to the ring. The fighter said, "Look at those two white pussies, Sam. For Christ sake, looks like the Michelin Man versus the Pillsbury Doughboy."

Without taking his eyes off Gray, Coates called, "I'll take care of you, Joe, once I'm done with this victim."

The middleweight chortled. His name was Joe Leonard, one of Sam Owl's promising youngsters. He had eighteen professional wins, twelve by KO, and no losses, and was ranked eighth in the country by Ring magazine.

Sam Owl said, "You two guys hurry up with your patty-cake. Bennie'll be here in a minute for Joe's workout and I want the ring free."

Bennie Jones, Brooklyn Golden Gloves welterweight champion for three years, had won his first six pro fights and was Leonard's regular sparring partner.

Owl led Leonard to a mat and lectured him about his crouch.

Gray jabbed and said, "I've got a plea-change hearing this afternoon and I want to hear the results of the lab work. Are you done interrogating me?"

Coates was huffing and dropping his guard, tiring. "Is our killer married, you think?"

Gray spread his gloves. "How would I know?"

"Is it possible for a woman to be married to a sniper?"

"It wasn't possible for Cathryn to be married to me." Gray jabbed lightly, catching Coates's forehead. Perspiration gathered in the folds of Gray's tracheotomy scar and pooled in the other shallow scars on his arms. Other puncture scare — purple and deep — stitched both of Gray's legs.

Leonard called, "Two marshmallows fighting, looks like."

"Shut the hell up, Joe, or I'll arrest you for impersonating a fighter," Coates called, backpedaling. Sweat ran down his face in steady rivulets. "So what happened?"

Gray moved in again, jabbing, finding Coates's chin twice with light jabs. "I was carrying too much freight. That was her term. Too much freight."

"From your sniping days?"

The telephone rang in Sam Owl's office, a cubbyhole near the locker room. Curled photographs of Owl and his fighters covered the office's walls. Owl walked across a mat toward the phone.

"I was up and down, a little wild maybe," Gray replied. "She thought it was an echo from the sniping. But she wasn't a psychiatrist, I told her."

"You've been divorced ten years, but it doesn't sound like you've worked her out of your system."

"Pete, if I want counseling I'll go back to the Veterans Hospital."

"I quit," Coates said, lowering his gloves. He slipped through the ropes. "Looks like I win again. Do you still love her?"

Gray smiled wanly, stepping through the ropes. "They don't teach questions like that at the NYPD detective school."

"One friend asking another."

"I did when she left, but that didn't stop her from leaving. Couple years ago Cathryn married a pediatrician and lives in the East Eighties. Has a maid. Probably belongs to a couple nice clubs. Has a weekend house in the Hamptons."

"Ever hear from her?"

"Not in years."

Gray pulled off his gloves and grabbed a towel from a table. He wiped his face. Coates pushed his glasses onto his face. They sat on a bench watching Joe Leonard shadowbox.

Gray draped the towel over his shoulder, then added, "I haven't even bumped into her on the street. But I've worked it out now. I've got a family. Three kids and Mrs. Orlando."

Coates laughed. "I'll bet those kids scare off your girlfriends."

"Yeah, something like that."

"You got a girlfriend?" Coates asked bluntly. He took out his mouthguard.

Gray raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to try to set me up with your sister, are you? I've met her and she looks too much like Casey Stengel for my tastes."

Coates went on. "I never heard you talk about anybody, no woman anxiously waiting for you while we were putting in those late nights on the Chinaman's case."

"I'll go out and find somebody today if that'll make you happy."

"Just trying to fill in my file on you." Coates stared at Gray a moment before changing the subject. "The lab report. The color on the red cartridge was indeed fingernail polish, manufactured by Maybelline. No help there."

Gray wiped his face again.

"And no fingerprints on the television or in the john or anywhere else." Coates pulled off his training shoes and rubbed his feet. "But the CSI guys found another shell in the sniper's apartment, the killer cartridge. It was against a seam of the mattress nearest the north wall, and was identical to the red shell but without the paint. Why would someone as talented as our sniper do something as stupid as leaving his spent cartridge behind?"

"Don't know."

"You leave yours, Owen?"

"When I didn't have time to look for them. Otherwise I always cleaned up."

"The spent cartridge was informative," Coates said. "In its computers the lab has the characteristic markings from over three thousand makes and models of firearms, markings from the mechanical action of loading, chambering, and firing the round and from extracting and ejecting the casing."

"And?"

"The lab looked at the number and direction of twist and the measurements of land and groove markings."

"Out with it," Gray demanded. "What kind of weapon?"

"An M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant."

"A Soviet sniper rifle." Gray moved his mouth as if tasting the information. "Why would the sniper use an inferior rifle when he could buy better equipment in any American gun shop?"

"Maybe he's a Russian and he likes his old rifle."

"Why would a Russian kill an American gangster?" Gray asked.

"Maybe with Afghanistan and the Cold War over, he's freelancing. I've got no better guess, but I've been charged with finding out."

"Keep me posted," Gray said. "And during your investigation don't get your sniper pissed off at you. It wouldn't be too healthy."

Sam Owl called from his office, "Bennie can't make it today. Some problem with his mother getting a chicken bone stuck in her throat, or so he says, the lazy bum."

Joe Leonard climbed into the ring and pointed a glove at Gray and Coates. "One of you pasty guys want to spar?"

Gray answered, "You must think Dalton and Ruth Gray raised a complete idiot, Joe."

"I'll take it easy. Pull my punches."

"No way," Coates said.

Leonard leaned against the ropes. "Owen, someday you'll be able to tell your boy — what's his name? John? — that you were in the ring with the future middleweight champ."

Gray stared balefully at the fighter.

"You'll be able to tell him you actually got in a few pops at the legendary fighter. And you need a boxing lesson, I'll swear to that."

Gray jumped up from the seat and shoved his hands back into the gloves.

"That nice tie you been wearing lately, Owen?" the detective asked. "The blue with the red birds in it? Will you leave that to me?"

Leonard laughed evilly. The bridge of his nose had a lump the size of a marble. Scar tissue had begun closing his left ear. He shaved his head every morning. He looked as hard as a fireplug. He widely gestured Gray into the ring like he was gathering sheaves.

Gray slipped through the ropes, raised his hands, and squared himself to the middleweight.

Leonard lowered himself to a stance and danced toward Gray, lecturing importantly, "Now the first lesson to learn about boxing is not to get hit."

His left hand exploded forward, landing like a hammer on Gray's nose. Gray staggered, then collapsed to a sitting position, his legs splayed out. He held a glove over his nose, which began squirting blood.

"Goddamnit, Joe, that hurt." Gray's voice wavered. "That really hurt."

"Hey, man don't want to be hit, he takes up bobsledding."

Gray struggled to his feet. Blood dribbled around his mouth and dropped from his chin.

"And that was just my pretend punch," the middleweight said. "That's the punch I give my kid brother to thank him for bringing me a Pepsi from the refrigerator."

Gray gamely held up his hands again.

Coates yelled from the bench, "Owen, you're a slower learner than I thought."

Leonard came on, speaking from behind his gloves. "Now the second lesson is, Don't ever forget the first lesson, the one about not getting hit."

Leonard feinted with his left and threw his right, a rocket that landed on Gray's nose and blew him off his feet to bounce against the ropes. Again he slid to a sitting position. He shook his head and leaned almost to the mat.

Coates stepped to the ring. "You okay, Owen?"

Gray managed to focus his eyes. He blinked and nodded.

"Your face has lost that little bit of color it had," Leonard said as he helped Gray up. He passed him through the ropes to Coates.

Gray spit out his mouthpiece and wiped away blood with a towel Sam Owl handed him. Owl clucked with disapproval at the spectacle.

"Goddamnit." A moment passed before Gray could pluck another thought from the cotton in his head. "I'm going to sue your ass for something, Joe, as soon as I figure out what."

Leonard laughed again and resumed his shadowboxing. "Pete's going to arrest me. You're going to sue me. I'm in a world of trouble now."

Weaving slightly, Gray followed the detective toward the shower.

Coates said over his shoulder, "You looked goofy in that ring, to put it charitably."

Gray managed, "Not as goofy as you're going to look, you don't find the Chinaman's killer."

Forty minutes later Gray met defense attorney Phil Hampton at the federal courthouse's alley door, where prisoners brought from Manhattan jails entered the building for court dates.

Hampton's first words were "Frank Luca didn't waste any time, did he?"

Gray gave him a pained expression, not far from how he felt. His nose still smarted.

"One day you've got the hottest case in America and the next day you're prosecuting one of my grubby clients." Hampton laughed. "The mighty have done some serious falling."

"Speculating on my career is something I can handle without your help, Phil."

"What happened to your nose? Looks like your girlfriend crossed her legs."

"Let's do some business, Phil."

"My guy is just so much chaff for your office, Owen. You don't need to stick him, do you?"

Phil Hampton rarely practiced before the federal bar. Most of his clients were B&Es, car thieves, snatch-and-grabs, and muggers, all brought up on state charges. Hampton's brother owned Bob's Bonds near the Tombs. On Bob's window: "Let Bob Be Your Ace in the Hole." The brothers fed each other clients.

Hampton resembled a pile of dirty laundry. His coat was askew on his shoulders. His tie was pulled to one side and had a splat of mustard near the knot. His shoes had been scuffed to the leather. His mustache was a haphazard collection of stray hairs. Eager to cut someone off, he worked his mouth even when not speaking.

"I haven't studied the record yet, Phil." Gray had not even looked at the file. He opened it. "Donald Bledsoe. A counterfeiter, it seems."

"Nothing of the sort." Hampton was carrying a battered briefcase. "He's just an alleged passer. Hell, the cops found four bad bills on my guy. Just four bad hundreds."

"We've got the change of plea in five minutes. I need a proffer."

At a change-of-plea hearing the accused usually switched his plea from not guilty to guilty under the terms of a deal with the prosecutor.

"What can I tell you, Owen? Mike Olander is my client's brother-in-law. Bledsoe can't really turn on him."

Olander was a co-defendant. He owned the suspect copy machine.

Gray flipped to the second page — the last page — of the file. "Detective Ames says Bledsoe is going to clam up. I'm not going to do a plea unless I get a proffer."

A Dodge van turned into the alley and approached slowly. A marshal was visible through the windshield and behind him a cage. Buildings on both sides of the alley blocked the daylight.

Hampton said, "My client is afraid of a snitch-jacket."

"I hear that every day. I want the proffer before we get to the change of plea. Tell me all he knows about Olander or I'm going to recommend the charts."

The van stopped in front of Gray. A deputy U.S. marshal climbed down from the passenger side. He wore a ring made of an unmilled nugget of gold, a brown suit with a bulge under his arm, and bell-bottom pants. He was chewing a toothpick. His nose was bent twenty degrees out of alignment, making him look as if he were about to walk off in another direction. He nodded to Gray and stepped toward the rear of the van.

"Can you get him protective custody?" Hampton asked.

"For a lousy paper passer? I'll consider asking the court for something below the sentencing guidelines but only after I've heard what he has to say."

"Jesus, can't you give me anything up front?"

"Phil, you're whining. Give me the proffer first."

The deputy marshal opened the van's rear door and pulled Donald Bledsoe from the cage, then righted him and pushed him toward the alley door.

Bledsoe had spent fifteen of his forty years on this earth in assorted jails and prisons. He stole a car low on fuel. He burgled the house of a man who kept a pistol collection in his bedroom. He robbed a bank, then attempted his escape by running through the bank's closed glass door, knocking himself senseless. And now, hundred-dollar bills that felt like fax paper. He had not once in his entire life as a criminal gotten anything right.

Bledsoe ducked his head as if a flock of photographers had descended on him. Then he braved a look. He appeared only slightly relieved to see his attorney. His hands were cuffed and secured to a chain belt around his waist. Bledsoe had stopped shaving at his arrest and now wore a dark shadow across his face. His hair was tossed and oily.

"What'm I going to do, Phil?" The prisoner's voice was fogged with self-pity.

Hampton put a hand on his client's shoulder. "We don't know yet."

Bledsoe glanced at Owen Gray, then back at his lawyer. "What'd this guy say, Phil? You cut a deal?"

Hampton stepped toward the door, moving his client along with him. The marshal had one of Bledsoe's elbows.

Two steps from the door, the marshal said, "Goddamn rain. Goddamn New York weather."

There was not a cloud in the sky. Holding Donald Bledsoe by the arm, the deputy was abruptly pulled off balance as the paper passer collapsed to the concrete. The deputy had been dappled with Bledsoe's blood and brains, not rainwater. The side of Bledsoe's head was a mash of gray and red pulp.

Owen Gray ducked behind the van, pulling the defense attorney after him. The marshal lunged for the protection of the courthouse door, drawing his pistol.

"What in hell happened?" the deputy yelled around his toothpick. He was breathing stertorously as if someone had yanked his tie tight. "You see anybody?"

A still moment passed. The distant babel of traffic reached them.

"Son of a bitch," the deputy cried, brushing the pith of Bledsoe's head from his jacket. "Look at my new suit."

Holding the van's door handle, Gray rose unsteadily. He levered his head left and right. The streets on both ends of the alley were artificially bright in contrast to the shaded alley. Delivery trucks and taxis passed at the ends of the alley. The chirp of an auto alarm sounded from somewhere. He stepped into the alley and pushed Bledsoe's shoulder with his foot to roll him over. A hole had been punched into an ear.

The deputy made a show of calmly squaring his coat. "He looks a little late for CPR, don't you think, Counselor?"

Gray was silent, so the deputy added, "Who'd want to gun down a zero like Donald Bledsoe?" The marshal spat out his toothpick and pulled another from his coat pocket. "Stupid errand boy was all he was."

Phil Hampton had crawled under the front axle and showed no inclination to reappear. Bledsoe's blood snaked across the cement toward the defense attorney. Hampton's briefcase was lying in a pile of unidentifiable brown sludge at the edge of the alley.

The deputy said, "Man, the paperwork on this is going to kill me."

Gray rubbed his temple, staring down the alley. There would be a window in a building — a sniper's hide — in the deep distance amid many other buildings and among the countless windows, but the day was too brilliant and the window too far to guess where. Gray's hand on his head was trembling and he lowered it quickly. He had to work to swallow.

He whispered to that distant window, to whoever might be peering back through a scope, "Tell me who you are."

CHAPTER FIVE

From any distance the shooter resembled a clump of dried weeds, nothing but a mound of dusty vegetation wilting in the Virginia heat, attended only by two dragonflies who flashed iridescence as they darted among the leaves. But from the weeds protruded a rifle barrel, its unyielding horizontal plane at odds with the wafting thistle and burr and crabgrass from which the barrel seemed to have grown. A gust of wind tossed the weeds, rolling them flat in a wave. Then the breeze stilled.

The rifle barked, a flat crack that dissipated quickly across the terrain. A handkerchief-sized piece of canvas on the ground below the muzzle prevented a dust signature. A smoking brass casing was ejected.

"It's a flyer." The voice came from another cluster of weeds, this one nudged up against a tripod-mounted spotting scope.

"Missed entirely?" the shooter asked. "Goddamnit. You swagging me?" Swag was short for a scientific wild-ass guess.

"This time I picked up the course of the bullet in my scope. No chance you hit target."

"My problem is I can't get my pulse rhythm," the shooter complained.

"Yeah, right." The spotter laughed. "Your problem is that your finger twitches like an old man's. You got to squeeze the trigger like you would a woman's nipple."

"As if you know anything about a woman's nipple, Bobby."

The spotter leered. "Ask your sister what I know about nipples."

"No talking about nipples on the firing line, goddamnit," bayed Gunnery Sergeant Arlen Able from his position behind the sniper team. "How many times I got to tell you? You get a hard pecker, you won't be able to feel your pulse in your arms and neck, and you'll be shooting on the beat rather than between it."

Down-range a circular disc on a pole waved for five seconds, indicating the bullet had missed the target. The pole was held by a Marine in the concrete butt below ground level.

The marksman and his spotter were dressed in Ghilli suits, an invention of ancient Scottish gamekeepers that had been adopted by Britain's Royal Marines during World War One. Long strips of tan, olive, and brown burlap were attached to the team's uniforms and field hats. The Ghillis broke up the Marines' outlines. With their shifting, variegated suits and faces painted olive and brown, the shooter and spotter resembled earthen berms.

Sergeant Able called from behind the line, "I can see your problem from here, Paley." He spoke with an East Texas piney woods accent.

The sergeant walked to the two weed clumps, then bent to a knee. He tapped the shooter's hand and said, "Part of your trigger finger is touching the side of the stock as you pull back, causing side pressure, rather than getting a straight front-to-rear movement. You're going to bust a flyer every time."

"Okay, Gunnery Sergeant."

"You're at a thousand yards. The smallest finger juke is going to be exaggerated by the distance."

"Okay, Gunnery Sergeant."

Calling Arlen Able just "Sergeant" would have sufficed, but the students always tacked on "Gunnery" as a mark of respect for their instructor, a compliment each time they addressed him. They knew Abie's record. Sergeant Abie's face was tanned dirt brown and was lined like a cracked window. His eyes were canted as if always amused. He was a small man and graveyard thin, with abrupt movements that broadcast an enormous energy, a terrier of a man. He was wearing field khaki with a whistle around his neck and a two-way radio on his belt.

"Trigger control is the hardest shooting skill to master, Paley. You got a ways to go and I want you to keep at it."

The shooter nodded, wiggling the camouflage tassels hanging from his field cap. In his scope a thousand yards down-range was a twenty-inch ring target made watery by heat waves. On three poles — at the firing line, halfway down the range, and near the target butt — were red streamers, always displayed during live-fire daylight exercises.

Behind the firing line was a control tower, a glass and panel miniature replica of one at an airport. The range master in the tower had binoculars at his eyes. He wore a microphone mounted on a headset. He could speak over loudspeakers at the firing line or the four target butts, at four hundred, seven hundred, a thousand, and fifteen hundred yards. On this range — the Sergeant Owen Gray Range at the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School near Quantico, Virginia — no targets were ever placed at less than four hundred yards, because each painstakingly screened, highly trained Marine allowed into the advanced training unit could already hit perfect scores at anything under four hundred, and because snipers were taught here never to fire at less than four hundred yards because of the risk of detection.

Few Marine Corps riflemen — even a Distinguished Marksman, a coveted classification earned when the Marine has won a medal in a division rifle match and two other awards from competitive matches — have seen the Sergeant Owen Gray Range. Rather, they believe the most challenging Marine training range is Number 4 at Quantico, a thousand-yarder competitors call Death Valley. Number 4 is indeed a challenge.

It is not true that Marines on the Sergeant Owen Gray Range sniff contemptuously at Death Valley, but they have graduated from that range. Theirs is a different science. Shooting is only a fraction of sniping. At the Sergeant Owen Gray Range marksmanship is taught, but also camouflage and concealment, target detection, range estimation, holds and leads, intelligence collection, sniper employment, survival, evasion and escape. The Scout Sniper school is the first permanent facility in the United States to teach snipers, and it is the finest sniper school in the world.

The sniper school hopes to reverse a long trend in American soldiering. In the Great War, American infantrymen loosed 7,000 rounds for each enemy casualty. In World War Two the number rose to 25,000, and in the Korean War 50,000. In Vietnam the figure was a startling 300,000 rounds per casualty. Yet one Vietnam specialist, the American sniper, expended less than two shells per kill.

The spotter's eye was above the scope as he stared down range. When the breeze rolled the red pendants along the range, he lowered himself to the eyepiece and said, "Better click in a degree of windage, Paley."

"I'm dinked right already. I'm going to wing it."

The shooter inhaled, slowly let half of it out, then gently brought back the trigger, this time keeping his finger away from the side of the stock. The rifle bounced back against the Marine's shoulder. The sound chased the bullet down the range.

After a few seconds the spotter said, "I can't make out any new bangs on the bull."

The red disc appeared above the butt, waving left and right.

"Goddamnit," Paley said glumly. "Another flyer."

He was reproving himself for a difficult shot. Median range for a sniper shot is six hundred to eight hundred yards. For most snipers, firing at thousand yards is considered chancy.

"Still thinking about me and your sister, I bet," the spotter chided. "Lost your concentration."

Sergeant Able hollered, "You guys want to giggle and chat, go join the Navy."

Before 1977, sniper instruction had been haphazard in the Marine Corps. That year the Scout/ Sniper Instructor School had opened when the Corps determined that each Marine infantry battalion would have a sniper team, part of a scout and sniper platoon called a Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon. For a decade most of their marksmanship training had occurred at the Quantico training and competition ranges. Two years ago the new range had opened, a dozen miles southeast of Quantico, hidden among gentle hills. The sniper for whom the range had been named had not responded to the invitation to the opening ceremony mailed to his New York address.

With only one firing line, the facility was small compared with other service rifle ranges. Target butts were found at the four distances. Other than the fifteen hundred yards of range ground, which resembled a wildflower meadow, the installation consisted only of the control tower, a gun shed, a small headquarters building, and a locker room. The Marine Corps also owned the surrounding fourteen hundred acres of pine and dogwood woodlands and meadows where snipers were instructed in fieldcraft. The facility was approached on a gravel road, and a parking lot was in front of the headquarters. Across from the lot was a low-rising hill spotted with pine trees, mountain laurel, and tufts of weeds, these weeds real. A few wild rhododendrons adorned the hill, their scrawny, sparse leaves in contrast with their flawless pink and crimson flowers.

"Cleared for firing, Paley," the sergeant said. "Get on with it."

"Lay it in there, partner," the spotter said.

The trigger had a three-pound pull. Knowing the target could be maintained precisely in the crosshairs for only an instant, the shooter applied pressure to the trigger until the slightest additional pull would be required to release the firing pin. He halted his exhale. He was so still that he could feel his pulse in his arms. He waited for that instant when two critical events occurred at once — when the bull was quartered in the crosshairs at the same time his heart was between pulses. Then he smoothly applied the last bit of pull.

The rifle spoke, leaving a diaphanous black cloud ten feet in front of the barrel. Snipers know that even smokeless powder leaves smoke. It dissipated quickly in the air currents.

"Can't see it," the spotter said.

A black disc waved above the butt, meaning the target had been struck.

"Finally," Paley muttered.

A thousand yards down-range, the pit officer pulled the target, a hundred-pound wood rack on glides, down into the butt. A moment later it slid back up on its frame, a yellow triangle marking the hit.

His eye at the scope, the spotter said, "A wart. Second ring, eight o'clock."

A wart was a shot on the white but only a fraction of an inch from the black.

"Cease firing," crackled the loudspeaker. "Civilian approaching the range."

"Christ on a crutch," the sergeant blurted, turning toward the office. "If we get any more congressmen on inspection tours I'm going to piss blood."

A man walked from around the headquarters building toward the line. The sergeant stared hard at the civilian as the visitor crossed the pebble grounds, then made his way toward the firing line. The visitor was wearing a madras shirt, casual slacks, penny loafers, and a tentative smile. Something was familiar about the stranger, maybe the way he held his head, at a slight cant as if favoring an eye, his scope eye.

Sergeant Able squinted at the tall man, then leaned forward as if being an inch closer would make the intruder more readily recognizable. Then Abie's eyes widened. "Well I'll be goddamned." His face creased into a grin and his words were rough with emotion. "It's Owen Gray."

Gray returned the smile. "I thought you'd find honest work someday, Arlen. Guess I was wrong."

Sergeant Able shook Gray's hand, then must have decided that was insufficient, so he bear-hugged him, pinning Gray's hands to his side and almost lifting him off the ground.

The sergeant's voice wavered. "Man, it's good to see you, Owen. You've been hiding, seems like."

The Marines left the firing line and gathered around. The shooter carried his rifle with the barrel up. He and the spotter maintained a respectful distance. The spotter, Bobby Sims, cast his eyes at the sign above the headquarters door that read "Sergeant Owen Gray Range," then looked back at Gray. The shooter, Larry Paley, cleared his throat, prompting the sergeant to make introductions.

"Have you kept up with the science, Owen?" the sergeant asked. "Know anything about your range or our new equipment?"

"Haven't had much occasion." Gray caught the sharp scent of Hoppe's No. 9 cleaning solvent.

"The service eighty-sixed our old Winchesters." When Able held out a hand, Paley passed him his rifle. "Take a look. It's the M-40A1, developed especially for Marine snipers. This is a pressure-molded fiberglass Remington Model 700 rifle receiver. Nothing alters the stock — rain, humidity, heat, or cold."

Sergeant Able patted the rifle proudly and went on. "And remember the trouble we had keeping the camo on the wood when it rained? This stock's coloring, the green and copper here, is pigment impregnated into the stock. We've got other rifles for snow and still others for the desert."

Able attempted to pass the rifle to Gray, who involuntarily stepped back. He wouldn't raise his hands to accept the weapon.

The sergeant retained the rifle. "Atkinson Company sends us the twenty-four-inch heavy stainless steel barrel as a blank, and our armorers cut a recessed crown, then pipe-thread it to fit the receiver. The barrel has a diameter of almost an inch and it's free-floated. The rifle is chambered for 7.62 match ammo."

"You got a moment, Arlen?" Gray asked. "I've got a couple questions for you."

Able might not have heard him. He continued, "Makes our Winchesters and Springfields and Remingtons from the old days look like Model A's."

"I'm in a bit of a hurry, Arlen." Gray tried to turn him toward the office door.

"Can I ask you a question, Mr. Gray?" Paley asked.

Owen Gray tried to mix both courtesy and dismissal into his smile and again tried to lead Sergeant Able away. Gray knew the questions these students would ask of him.

Paley said, "We heard that one time in Vietnam you were in a hide for four days and that you crapped your pants and sat in it rather than chance giving yourself away and losing your shot. That true?"

Gray shook his head. "That was before you were born, if it occurred at all."

"Christ yes, it occurred," Able said. "Our fire station was at Din Po, remember? I was there when you came in from the field. You smelled bad enough to gag a maggot, pants all soiled and everything." Able may have seen Gray's frown, so he halted the reminiscence. He said, "We take our schooling more seriously than when you and I trained, Owen. Today we are practicing in full camouflage, which we do once a week."

This time Bobby Sims tried. "Can I ask you something, Sergeant Gray?"

"I'm no longer in the service," Gray answered quickly. "Nobody calls me sergeant anymore. And asking me questions about your profession won't get you much because what little I knew I forgot."

The corporal had a beatific face even under his paint, with blue eyes under long lashes and a gentle smile. "But this is a philosophical question."

Sergeant Able scowled. "Sims, you want philosophy, go figure out why Goofy can talk and Pluto can't. That's all the goddamn philosophy I allow in this school."

Corporal Sims plunged ahead. "How do you know you'll pull the trigger that first time? Sergeant Able says the thing you notice most is the target's eyes. They jump out at you through the scope. So how do you know you'll do the deed?"

Abie's face registered utter astonishment. "What else you going to do to the enemy? Give him a Tootsie Roll? You'll pull the jack when the time comes, Sims. No buck fever. Don't worry your little head about it."

The gunnery sergeant looked at Gray, who was utterly still, not willing to confirm the principle by the slightest motion.

Able lectured, "And after your first kill you'll find it easier to shoot a human than a stray dog. Am I right, Owen?"

With some force Gray grabbed Sergeant Abie's elbow to lead him toward the office. They left the sniper students behind and stepped toward the headquarters building, a gray clapboard one-story portable unit indistinguishable from a thousand other Marine portables except for the thick bars over the windows. The only cosmetic touch to the structure was a wood planter near the doorstep that trailed ivy to the ground. A siren loudspeaker was attached to a corner of the building.

"You were always a kook about sniping, Arlen," Gray said in a pleasant voice.

"Sniping is my life," the sergeant replied defensively. "That and my church. I'm the choir director."

"You leading a choir? That's not an image that comes readily to mind."

"I'm catching up with you, Owen. Three kills in Beirut and six in Iraq. I'm up to forty-eight."

Gray avoided the invitation to discuss statistics. "I made a few calls. You've made an avocation of studying snipers."

"I wrote the Topps Company and suggested they issue sniper cards, like baseball cards. A natural, I told them. Big hit with the kids. I'd supply them with all the material. Biographies, photos, interesting tidbits. They sent back a nice thanks but they declined."

"I've got some trouble with one of our old friends," Gray said. "Or one of our old enemies. I can't figure out which or who."

The dead bolt on the door was unlocked. They stepped into the headquarters building. The front room was almost all government issue, with a metal desk, a swivel chair, lockers, a bench, and a dozen clipboards hung on a wall. An alarm control pad was on the wall near the door, and an infrared sweeper hung in a corner, its red light flickering.

"Paley's mother sent us that quilt," Able said. "I was touched."

The patchwork quilt hung on a wall and was made of red and white swatches with gold lettering that spelled out "Second place is a body bag."

Two dozen framed photographs were on one wall, most showing a Marine receiving a trophy. Gray recognized the Lauchheimer Trophy, first awarded in 1921, which bore the name of Brigadier General Charles H. Lauchheimer, who as a major in 1901 captained the first Corps team to enter a rifle competition. Another Marine was shown receiving the Elliot Trophy, a loving cup named after a commandant who brought the Marines their first rifle range, at Winthrop, Maryland. Gray recognized himself, shaking the hand of Camp Perry's commandant after winning the national title.

The room was the repository of Sergeant Abie's collection, the result of a thirty-year search for the odds and ends of a singular profession. Rifles, scopes, sniper logs, and other mementos. The weapons were mounted on the walls.

"Here's my latest acquisition." Able lifted a skull from the display case. The skull had a hole in both temples. "This is all that remains of Horace Wade, the seventy-three-year-old veteran of the Mexican War who joined the 7th Wisconsin Volunteers, and picked off twelve Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg before one of the rebels paid him back in kind. I traded four scalps for it. But I still got five scalps left." He pulled a string of hair knots from the case. Blackened flesh rinds hung from the tufts. "Our old friend Sam Short Bear sent me these. He was an Indian but a good Indian. Only shooter we ever knew who took scalps, remember? Sent me nine of them for my collection, so I had enough to trade for Horace Wade's skull."

"Arlen, I'm not talking to a lunatic, am I?"

Able lifted a rifle from the wall. "Here is my museum's pièce de résistance. A Winchester Model 70 under an Unertl scope. Recognize it?"

"Jesus, I hope not."

"It's your old smoke pole."

Gray took an uneasy step back, as if his old rifle were infectious. He breathed heavily, unable to remove his eyes from his old weapon. His mouth felt cottony, and he moved his tongue over his lips.

"Brings back memories, I'll bet," Able prompted.

Gray wiped his hand across his mouth. He was determined not to let this weapon regain an advantage over him. He knew this rifle more intimately than he had known his wife, knew every grain in the wood, every tiny pock on the barrel, every curve and hollow. In the past three or four years, as much as sixty minutes would elapse without this rifle rising from the dark pit of his memory. And here it was again, thrust up in front of him, heartless, mindless, and soulless. The torturous memory of this rifle was his constant and faithful companion, outlasting his military service, outlasting his marriage, living with him with unswerving and appalling fidelity.

But Owen Gray had built a sanity stick by stick, layer after layer over the years, and he could beat this weapon. He had learned to suppress the memory, will it away from him, if only for short times. He could do so now with the actual weapon. Surely. He would not allow the grisly Winchester to possess him again. With an effort that seemed to snap ligaments in his neck and shoulders, he turned away from the Winchester and focused on the gunnery sergeant.

"You know about snipers." Gray lowered himself to the bench. He found he could continue. "And you know the stuff the Marine Corps doesn't tell the public, like Sam Short Bear and his scalps."

"Yeah," Able said with satisfaction, leaning against the display case. "Collecting these things has given me insights about snipers that've escaped most people."

Gray dipped his chin, encouraging Able.

"Do you know that heart attacks are almost unheard of among ex-snipers? Type A's can't last in the lonely bush, so they don't become shooters in the first place, I figure."

"What else?" Gray asked.

"Snipers prefer gold crowns to the new natural-looking ceramics."

"I wanted information, Arlen, but this isn't what I had in mind."

"Then how about this?" the gunnery sergeant asked with undampened enthusiasm. "Almost all snipers can routinely snatch mosquitoes and flies in midflight."

Gray scratched the side of his nose. "So?"

"Can you? Catch a buzzing mosquito or fly right out of the air every time?"

"Sure." He added hastily, "Not that I do it much. What of it?"

"Owen, I'll bet you don't even know that very, very few folks can do that. Catching bugs isn't something people sit around and talk about like they do bowling or fishing. It's our phenomenal eye-hand coordination that makes such feats possible. Same thing that makes us great shooters."

Gray sighed audibly, something he did not like to be heard doing. "Arlen, do you remember how I used to leave a paper star at my hides?"

"Sure. Wish I had one for my collection."

"Have you ever heard of a sniper who left a cartridge with a red ring painted around it?"

Able looked at the ceiling. "I haven't. He American?"

"Russian, maybe."

"Is he the shooter who nailed your gangster up in New York? I saw it on TV. Sounded like a pro."

Gray nodded. He told Sergeant Able the little he knew about the killings of the Chinaman and Donald Bledsoe.

"Wish I could help you, Owen, but I've never heard of red shells." He put his collection back in the case and the Winchester on the wall. "That all you want to know?"

"That's it."

"How come you flew all the way down to Quantico to ask me one question, Owen? I mean, it's great to see you and all, but don't they have telephones in New York?"

Gray risked another glimpse at his Winchester. It was apparent that the years had recast the rifle in his mind. It was smaller and less malignant than he had remembered, a piece of equipment rather than the embodiment of evil. Gray suffered the fleeting fancy that the Winchester was deliberately disguising its true lines, trying to woo him again, an old suitor returning with a soft knock on the door, a placatory smile, and smooth promises.

"Owen, you've got the Asiatic stare." Able laughed. "The twenty-yard gaze in a ten-yard room."

Gray shook off the notion. "I'm not welcome at my office in New York. Too dangerous to be around, what with holes appearing in anybody I'm standing next to. So I had some time and I drove down in a rental car rather than fly. Brought my kids and their nanny. They're at a motel swimming pool over in Quantico."

Sergeant Able led Gray from the building. The Marines were still standing ten yards behind the firing line, an invitation to Gray to rejoin them. Able gently placed his hand in the small of Gray's back lest his visitor escape to his car. The sun beat down from overhead, seeming to flatten the land under its weight and chasing away birds and insects. The air rippled with heat.

Corporal Paley held his arms out and turned a circle. "Anything wrong with my presentation, Mr. Gray? Am I ready for the field?"

Gray generated a smile. "Your sergeant knows far better than I do."

"I mean, Sergeant Able tells us to fit ourselves out for these sessions as if we were going into the field. Have I missed anything?"

"You look great," Gray said quickly. "You'll do fine. So long, Arlen." He started for the parking lot.

Corporal Paley said, "Advice from you could someday save my life, Mr. Gray."

Gray slowly turned back. "Your dog tags."

"Yeah?"

"I heard them click together when you got up from your firing position. Wrap some tape around them."

Paley nodded, then asked, "Want to show your stuff on this range, Mr. Gray? You can use my smoke pole." He held out the M-40A1.

The spotter, Corporal Sims, added, "There's five degrees of left cranked in."

"Go ahead, Owen," Able said. "Show these young pups what us old gummers can do. The firing lane is open to the thousand-yard targets."

When Able spoke into his radio, the range master bawled over the loudspeakers, "Butt officer, clear for firing. Ready on the left. Ready on the right. Ready on the firing line."

Able took the weapon from Paley and held it closer to Gray, wiggling it by way of invitation like an angler setting a jig. With his other hand, he pointed down-range at the bull's-eye over half a mile away. "You used to own the thousand-yard line. Let's see if you still do."

"Damn it, Arlen. Haven't I made myself clear? I hate to disillusion your men, but I detest weapons. I'm through with them forever."

"What in hell?" Able stared down range.

A red disc was waving above the butt. A bullet had hit the bull's-eye. The distant sound of a rifle shot finally washed over them, softened by echoes and distance.

"Who fired that?" demanded the range master, his anger magnified by the metallic resonance of the speakers. "Take that name, Sergeant Able." Then after a moment, "There's nobody on the line. Who's shooting?"

Owen Gray knew. He spun around to search the headquarters building, then the parking lot, then the hill behind the lot. There the shooter was, amid the pines and grass and wild rhododendrons, made insubstantial by the contours and foliage of the hillside. Then he was invisible, veiled by vegetation as if claimed by the wilderness as its own, merged entirely with the trees and undergrowth.

The shooter moved again, a short mechanical motion at odds with the timberland that hid him, a motion Gray sensed was designed to alert the watchers to his location.

"There he is," Paley yelled.

The form stood out against the backdrop of greenery. A human head, maybe blond, but at too great a distance to be sure. Was that a flash of teeth, a smile? And a rifle. But then he was gone, again slipping into the disguise of the vegetation, shedding his human form to become one with the landscape.

"I can't make him out," Sergeant Able said, shading his eyes with a hand. "That's eerie. He's there, then he's not."

"Your binoculars," Gray demanded.

Bobby Sims passed the Bushnells over. Gray held them up, scanning the hill, but he saw only pines and low bushes, tufts of bluegrass, and gray stone tinged by gold moss. Branches bent and released in the wind, rustling leaves and shifting shadows. Bumblebees flitted in and out of the sun. The shooter had vanished.

Gunnery Sergeant Able whistled appreciatively. "That target he hit is a good fifteen, sixteen hundred yards from his spot on that hill. And it was a center bull's-eye. A pure unconscious shot, a professional cap bust."

Gray's eyes remained at the binoculars. He saw only the lovely east Virginia terrain.

"That was your shooter, you think?" Able asked. "The one who leaves a red shell?"

Gray nodded.

"Looks like he's following you around."

Gray lowered the binoculars. "He is."

The sergeant added quietly, "Looks like you've got a big problem."

CHAPTER SIX

"My dad was an undertaker," Pete Coates said, rubbing the ball of his right foot. His black shoe was on the path next to the bench leg. "I ever tell you that?"

Gray squinted against the sun and shook his head.

"He owned a mortuary on Atlantic over in Brooklyn. I was working up bodies when I was twelve years old. Worst thing I had to do was stitch closed the stiffs' mouths. I'd have to stuff their swollen black tongues back into their gullets, yellow dentures, dead breath, flies trying to get into their yaps. It was no lifeguard job at the country club pool, I'll guarantee you that."

"You sewed their mouths up?"

"Otherwise the jaw drops open during the memorial service. Then you end up with the beloved in the casket who is not only dead but who also looks stupid."

"My life was better before I knew that," Gray said. When a jogger passed close to the bench he pulled in his legs. The runner trailed Joy perfume behind her.

"You also sew their eyes closed. My dad would fine me half a dollar for every eyeball I punctured with the needle. I never got the hang of it, and some days I'd have no take-home at all."

A woman carrying a Saks bag walked her dachshund past the bench. The dog pulled the leash taut to sniff Coates's shoe.

Coates said, "Lady, I don't like wiener dogs smelling my wingtips."

With an imperious lift of her nose the woman pulled her dog away.

Still rubbing his foot, the detective turned back to Gray. "But worse than all that was the sore feet. You can't work on bodies sitting down, so I had aching feet all the time. I became a cop instead of a mortician. Shows what I know about anything."

"Your father still around?"

"Gone fifteen years. Every time I see a body I think of him. How far did you run today?"

"Ten miles, give or take a hundred yards. It's quite a luxury, actually, not being allowed into my office because everyone is afraid to stand near me. I've got a lot of time on my hands."

"You don't feel nervous running along, knowing there's a rifleman out there following you?"

"I'm the safest person in New York. He's had three clear chances to nail me and he hasn't. It's everybody else who should be worried."

They were in a portion of Central Park called Cedar Hill near the mid-seventies. Gray had been jogging and wore a line of perspiration across his forehead. His T-shirt was stuck to his chest with dampness. Gray bent over to wipe his sweaty hands on his socks. Coates was wearing a narrow blue tie that was loose at the neck and a sports coat so frayed it looked as if he buffed his car with it. Their bench was in front of a granite outcropping and was surrounded by red maple, sycamore, and paper birch trees. The path fed a stream of joggers, walkers, bicyclists, and baby strollers past them. Overhead an orange and blue Japanese kite sliced through the wind. The distant sounds of a children's soccer game sounded like wind chimes.

Gray glanced over his shoulder. "This must be the only place in the park where you can't see a window or a building on Fifth or over on the West Side. We're completely enclosed by leaves and branches. Not by chance, I'd guess."

"Sitting near you out in the open might open up my mind, literally."

"You've used this bench before?"

Coates pulled a sack of Planters peanuts from his pants pocket.

"When a puke wants to talk to me, he doesn't want to do it in Brooklyn or down in Little Italy, so we meet here."

"You talk to the law-enforcement people in Virginia?"

"The Prince William County sheriff told me he had two dozen men looking for the shooter's tracks, led by a bloodhound named Old Blue."

Taking a peanut, Gray said, "They're all named Old Blue."

"They followed his trail for a quarter mile as the shooter rounded the hill, but the trail ended at a roadside where he must have gotten into a car."

Gray smiled at a parade of ten preschoolers as they slowly passed the bench, each child tightly grasping a loop in a long rope that kept them together. A young woman led the troop and another brought up the rear.

Gray's hand moved so quickly the detective started. It was an abrupt blur that ended in a fist.

Gray held his balled hand at eye level and asked, "Can you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Catch a fly in midflight like I just did?"

"You caught it just now?" Coates regarded him narrowly. "Is this one of your boy John's jokes?"

"I always thought snipers were made, not born," Gray said. "I'm not so sure now."

"What do you do with the fly now that you've caught it?"

"Maybe I was destined to be a sniper. I had no choice."

"Am I missing something?" Coates dug for another nut. "What's catching a fly have to do with being a sniper?"

"My point is that I can snatch a dragonfly or a mosquito or a fly out of the air every time I try. I never realized before my talk with Arlen Able yesterday that few other people can. How could I have missed it?"

"Each and every time?" Coates stared at Gray's fist. "No way. Nobody can do that, and I've got a beer that says you can't either."

Gray smiled. He slowly opened his hand. The fly remained motionless on his palm for an instant, then shot angrily into the air toward the sun, a flicker of vanishing iridescence. But Gray was faster. He had to partly rise from the bench, his hand in the fly's wake. Gray's hand snapped shut. He lowered himself again to the bench.

He held his fist up to Coates's nose. "It's in here again. You owe me a beer."

"That's the goddamnedest thing I've ever seen."

"There is a Homeric quality to it, you have to admit," Gray said.

"Mr. Gray?" The new voice came from the south, ten yards away at a bend in the path. "Are you Owen Gray?"

Gray jerked to the voice, wincing as if he had been caught smoking in the boys' lavatory. He quickly released the insect.

A woman in a rumpled maroon business suit and carrying an attaché case stared at him. "After watching this little exhibition, I'm praying you aren't Owen Gray."

"Then I've got some bad news for you," Gray said.

"And you are Pete Coates?" She took a few tentative steps forward. "Two grown men? Playing with bugs?"

"He's a policeman." Gray pointed at Coates. "He made me do it." He smiled but she wouldn't return it.

She circled in front of the bench as if afraid to approach them. "I worked my tail off in Moscow. An emergency, I was told. I haven't slept or had a good meal in a week. Then I fly five thousand miles into JFK, call your office to locate you and Detective Coates, and race here in a cab."

"I'm honored, truly," Gray said. "Who are you?"

"And then I find you out in a park catching insects." She watched them both with cold surmise. Then for an instant it appeared she might laugh. But she mastered herself. Her hair was crow-black. Her eyes were a glacial blue. "I'm Adrian Wade."

Coates quickly rose from the bench. "You're the ace Don Shearson at the FBI told me about."

"Shearson contacted me after it was determined your sniper's shell was Russian. I work for the Security Section of the State Department in Moscow."

Rising to his feet, Gray offered his hand. A twist of distaste crossed her face.

"You don't need to look like a martyr shaking my hand," Gray said lightly. "The fly is gone."

"It's not the fly," she replied, lowering her briefcase to the path. "It's your Marine Corps file. I've read it."

Coates said hurriedly, "Don said Adrian has learned as much about the Russian criminal investigative system as has ever been allowed an American."

"Maybe you should've also learned about tact," Gray said.

Earlier in his life Gray had decided he had seen too much and done too much to tolerate ball-busters, men or women who try to dominate by their willingness to inflict their self-importance on others. His usual tactic was to remain silent, looking slightly bored, only occasionally nodding in a woolly way, contributing nothing and refusing to engage in the exercise until the ball-buster realized Gray was happily off somewhere more pleasant. Gray's boss, Frank Luca, never did get it, thinking Gray's silences a mark of understanding and agreement and therefore immense intelligence.

Gray had been slow to realize that he brought from his military service anything but torment, but his unwillingness to suffer unsufferables came from that time. As was his refusal to measure himself by others' opinions. So vast was the difference in experience between Gray and almost everyone else that he distrusted others' judgments about him. They hadn't looked through the scope. They didn't know and would never know.

"Adrian is a real Moscow gumshoe," Coates forged ahead. "At Shearson's request she took a crack at our puzzle of the red shell. But we weren't expecting you to show up here."

She sat at the far end of the bench at a distance that implied Gray and Coates had bad smells. A jogger with the bouncing lope of a beginner passed by.

Adrian Wade's smile was wintry. "After reading about your military service in Vietnam, Mr. Gray, I had expected to meet a Jack the Ripper but with better technology. Instead I find a goof on a bench. I'm relieved."

Gray rose from the bench. His voice was deliberately dry and bored. "Pete, you can brief me later on whatever Ms. Wade has to say. Suddenly I feel like I can run another ten miles."

She smiled with the magnanimity of superior knowledge. "Then you'll miss hearing the name of the sniper who leaves a red shell."

Gray's mouth moved, trying to find the right words. Nothing came, so he returned to his spot on the bench, defeated.

"The name is Trusov," she announced.

"Trusov?" Gray exclaimed. "World War Two's Victor Trusov? He left a red shell? I never heard that before."

She went on, "I spent the week speaking with members of three Russian police organizations, one civilian and two military. I must have set a world record for enduring patent lies, evasive answers, and protect-your-butt responses."

"And flat-out lewd propositions, I'll bet," Coates said flatteringly.

"Thirteen by my conservative estimate." She turned to give her smile only to the detective. "Russian men view western women as both naive and generous."

Gray had no doubt about the number of propositions. Adrian Wade was a startling combination of pure colors. Her hair was so black it reflected light like obsidian. The bangs were swept to one side with apparent unconcern but the result was a stylish rake. The rest of her hair ended at her shoulders, tucked in a way that flowed alongside her head as she moved. The contrast between her sable hair and the white skin of her face was almost shocking, and made her resemble a Victorian brooch. Her eyes were so blue they seemed lit from within. Her lips were painted a blood red, a bold color that set off marble-white teeth. She used her smile, it seemed to Gray. One instant it was street smart, then it was cryptic and beguiling.

"Stop staring at me, Mr. Gray." Her words percussed like a sledge on a railroad spike.

Gray scratched his nose, feeling ridiculous. Another jogger passed, this one wearing a shirt with a print of the Jolly Green Giant and a logo, "Visualize World Peas."

Adrian Wade said, "I spent most of my time at the Red Army's Armed Forces Inspectorate, whose territory covers crimes by Russian soldiers. Their building is near the Khodinka end of Leningrad Prospekt."

"I've never been to Moscow," Coates said.

"The Khodinka is the huge expanse of land in the middle of the city. It has a little-used airstrip that is connected to the Kremlin by a once-secret Metro tunnel. Other than an occasional flight by a Russian leader, the Khodinka is used only for practice for the Red Square military parades. The Inspectorate's building is on the Prospekt within sight of the Khodinka. My visit there produced amazement from a Red Army captain that I should be asking such questions. I got no higher and no further."

"But you persisted," Coates encouraged. "Don Shearson said you could be like a dog with a bone."

"That afternoon I received a call at my apartment. Then a black Zil limousine picked me up at the American compound to return me to the Inspectorate. This time I met with Major General Georgi Kulikov, chief of the Inspectorate. He and his superiors had apparently decided that if there is indeed a renegade Russian soldier shooting Americans they'd better do all they can to try to catch him. Doors began to open."

A panhandler dressed in a pea jacket, tattered black Keds, and a Navy wool watch cap encrusted with grime stopped in front of the bench. He bubbled a few vowels through black, broken teeth and held out his hand. Coates waved him away, but the beggar moved closer, pushing his open hand almost under Adrian Wade's chin. Coates flashed his gold badge. The panhandler grunted and shuffled on.

The detective slipped his badge case back into his coat pocket. "The general must've made some phone calls."

"Better than that. He brought in Colonel Gregor Rokossosky, who heads what was once called the KGB's Second Chief Directorate."

"Never heard of it."

"It investigates major crimes including homicide involving foreigners."

After what he thought was a respectable interlude, Gray again let his eyes settle on her, but guardedly, like a thief. At first glance Gray had mistaken her wild coloring for youth, but he now saw she had done some living. A fine pattern of lines — new and gentle lines — touched the corners of her eyes. A few strands of gray-white were lost in her black hair like shooting stars on a moonless night. Her voice had a knowing lilt and throatiness gained only with seasoning. And her manner — the way she easily crossed her legs and leaned against the seat back, the way she conversed with the police detective and, in particular, the way she had roughed up Gray — indicated she was no stripling. Late thirties, Gray guessed.

She was saying, "In the Red Army the left hand truly does not know what the right hand is doing. I think General Kulikov was being candid when he first said the army did not have a specialized sniper school. Colonel Rokossosky seconded him. But prodded from on high, I believe, they started to dig."

"You speak Russian?" Coates asked.

She hesitated, then with a glance at Gray as if he were the source of all exasperation, she asked, "Do you know anything about me?"

Coates replied, "Don Shearson recommended you highly, said you knew your way around Moscow, and that's about all."

"I have a master's degree in police science and was an FBI special agent for ten years. Then I went to work for the Foreign Service in Moscow, where I've been for eight years. Most of my work is with the Moscow police, but I've also spent time with the police commissioners and security chiefs of the independent republics. My job is to investigate crimes against United States citizens. I can't pass as a Russian, but I speak the language well enough."

A young couple on Rollerblades passed the bench. His arms were flapping but his girlfriend skated smoothly beside him, her hand on his hip as she cooed encouragement. Her clinging blue nylon exercise top was cut so low and her matching trunks so high that in most countries she would have been arrested.

"And the two Russians produced?" Coates asked.

"It took them a while, and they got tired of me always prodding, always implying I'd call ever higher in the Kremlin."

As she spoke, Adrian Wade flicked her head to rearrange her hair. The black hair jumped and rolled. Gray wondered if she was aware of the motion, one she might have been doing all her life. This shiver of her head produced a fresh angle of her chin, as if she were renewing her presence and demanding the attention due her. At some level of her consciousness she knew of her glamour and its breath-catching effect on others and was not afraid to make those conversing with her focus on it. Perhaps she traded on her appearance. With this little shake, Gray knew something about her that she had not intentionally revealed, and he was chagrined that such a trifling discovery felt like a victory.

She went on, "General Kulikov was discomfited when he called me in again to say he had found the Red Army snipers' school, something he had sworn the day before did not exist. He said the school was run by the Spetsnaz, and nodded at me meaningfully, indicating he could not have been expected to know anything about the Spetsnaz."

Coates said, "General Kulikov and I have much in common in our understanding of the Spetsnaz."

Her silvery laugh provided grace notes to cheers from the nearby children's soccer game. She seemed quite charmed by the detective. And the detective seemed polite and subdued, far from his normal whoopee-cushion self.

She said, "The Red Army consists of five armed services, one of which is the Land Services. One of the Land Services' units is the Spetsnaz, diversionary airborne troops who are parachuted behind the enemy lines to destroy headquarters, forward command posts, and communications centers. They are a highly trained elite. Most Russian boxers, marksmen, and wrestlers who appear in the Olympics as amateurs are actually active Spetsnaz soldiers, though if you ask a Spetsnaz he'll say he's been trained at the Central Army Sports Club or Moscow's Dynamo Sports Club."

"The cheaters," Gray said genially. "Small wonder the Soviet Union collapsed."

She gave him the swiftest of glances. "General Kulikov and I drove sixty-five miles south of Moscow to the city of Kolomna, near the confluence of the Moskva and Oka rivers."

"Kolomna was sacked four times by the Tatars," Gray injected.

This time she turned her head slowly to Gray, as if reluctant to make the effort.

He said, "I studied Moskva River Basin history at Stanford. For a while I was thinking of majoring in it."

"I read your file," she corrected him sternly. "You never attended Stanford."

"I meant Oregon State."

He absolutely could not get her to crack a smile in his direction.

She shifted on the bench, turning more to Pete Coates, dismissing Gray once again. "The sniper school was another five miles beyond Kolomna. The 1st Spetsnaz Long Range Reconnaissance Regiment operates the school, but shortages in army appropriations after the breakup have closed it temporarily, Kulikov and I were told by its commander, a Spetsnaz colonel who claimed to have enough funds to run a desk but not much more."

"The colonel gave you the information?" Coates asked.

"He had never been a sniper, just a paper pusher. But a number of the school's instructors still lived nearby, too poor to move away. We spoke with three of them at their club, a clapboard hovel with a plank table in the center and a gravel floor. They were noncommissioned officers in their fifties."

"They don't sound like they'd be a fount of information," Coates said.

"General Kulikov ordered them to speak candidly to me about a sniper whose signature was a red shell. One of the instructors replied, 'The Red October plant,' as if that should mean anything to me. They seemed hurt when I drew a blank on the Red October plant."

"It's the most famous sniper duel in history," Gray said.

"Once I apologized for my ignorance, they quickly filled me in. Victor Trusov was with the 284th Division at Stalingrad in 1942, where in a three-day duel in the no-man's-land between Mamaev Hill and the Red October plant he killed a German—"

"It was Major Erwin König," Gray interrupted.

"… a German who was the finest sharpshooter in the Reich and who had been brought to Stalingrad specifically to kill the Russian sniper."

Gray added, "Trusov was named a Hero of the Soviet Union for his eighty-two kills."

"Russian grade schoolers are taught to recite Trusov's story," she said. "But what is omitted from their lessons — and something few Russians, even Russian soldiers, know — is that Trusov left a red shell at his firing sites. Apparently" — she looked directly at Gray—"leaving something like a red shell was considered vulgar braggadocio that the masses could live without."

"Trusov must be seventy-five or eighty years old," Coates said. "Could an old guy be our killer?"

With the angles of her face set with professional pride, she announced, "We can ask him."

Gray and Coates leaned forward in unison as if by some signal.

"He's a mile and a half from here at the Russian consulate."

The detective yanked the telephone from his pocket. "Christ, is he in custody?"

"He lost his leg to gangrene about ten years ago," she said. "He's in a wheelchair and he's recovering from heart surgery that he had two weeks ago. And I've just talked to the Russian Consul General. He is more than willing to help, probably on orders from the Kremlin, and has promised that Mr. Trusov won't go anywhere. We're free to interview him."

Gray remarked, "Doesn't sound like our man, red shell or no."

"You asked me to find a Russian sniper who left a red shell," she said in a strychnine voice. "I have done so."

"What's this old fellow doing at the Russian consulate?" Coates asked.

"A Hero of the Soviet Union, or Hero of Russia as it is now called, is treated regally. Trusov came to the United States for surgery at Columbia Medical Center, then he was given a room in the consulate to recover. The consulate has even hired a nurse for him."

They rose to their feet. Two children on BMX bikes swerved around them.

Coates said, "Let's go talk to him."

"I need to check into my hotel and at least wash my contact lenses. Can I meet you there in an hour?"

Coates nodded. "Adrian, you walk south and I'll go north with Owen until the trees open up, then I'll take off in another direction. We'll meet at the consulate."

"Skulking around?" she said. "That's the kind of thing we in my Moscow office did before the Soviet Union broke up."

Coates said, "Standing next to Owen out in the open might result in your own personal breakup."

Perhaps unwilling to concede she had not thought of the danger, she only dipped her chin before starting south along the path. "I'll see you in an hour."

After she had rounded an ash tree and disappeared from sight, Gray said, "You've just seen the perfect example of why I don't like people knowing about my experience in Vietnam. They conclude I'm loathsome without getting to know me. Adrian What's-Her-Name acted like I was an ogre."

Coates smiled. "It could be your looks."

"Working with that woman is going to be like having a boil on my butt."

"You can tolerate her for a day or two, then she'll be on a plane back to Moscow."

"I don't like being called a goof on a bench." Gray started north along the path.

Coates followed. "You know, other than Anna Renthal, I've never seen you interact with a woman."

"So?"

"You're not very good at it."

The Assistant Consul General pushed open a door on the Russian consulate's third floor. He was wearing a herringbone sports coat with the cuffs two inches above his wrist bones. His hair was slicked back with an oil or pomade, so his forehead seemed two-thirds of his face.

"Please go right in," the assistant said in heavily accented English, sounding as if he had a mouthful of pebbles. "I'll return in fifteen minutes."

Adrian Wade asked, "You aren't going to insist on being present for the interview?"

The assistant shrugged. "This room is bugged. I'll listen while I eat my sandwich in the radio room." He smiled. "Or I might tune in Rush Limbaugh."

She shook her head. "Sometimes I long for the good old days."

Gray followed Coates and Adrian Wade into the room. His first impression was that it was a storehouse for old furniture. Antique pieces cluttered the room, seeming to overflow the purple Kashan rug to spill into the corners and wash up against the walls. The furnishings were opulent and overbearing, too rich and florid for a single room. Along just one wall were an ebonized wood dressing table inlaid with satinwood, a burr walnut scriptor on a carved and turned stand, and a walnut cabinet inlaid with enamel plaques of birds. Crowding the rug were a Victorian papier-mâché pedestal table, several Berlin woolwork stools, and a dozen Queen Anne and Georgian chairs, not one matching another. Haphazardly placed among all the rest were assorted fern stands, a lowboy, a long horse dressing glass, a globe that showed the Ottoman Empire and other vanished entities, and a leaded glass china display case. A clock with an ormolu case sat on a walnut mantel. The fireplace was blocked by a needlework fire screen mounted on a tripod foot.

"Smells like my grandmother's attic," Gray said softly as if in the presence of the dead. He wrinkled his nose against the odors of mildew, mothballs, old dust, and, strangely, fish. Gray had showered and changed his clothes at the Westside Athletic Club, where after discovering Sam Owl's gym he had retained his membership only for shower and lunch privileges.

Amid the jumble of precious furniture was an English brass half-tester bed from the mid-nineteenth century, manufactured just after it was discovered that brass beds housed fewer bedbugs than wood. The blankets were made up in a taut four-square military manner.

"The Soviets filled their consulates and embassies with ornate furniture to impress visitors," Adrian Wade said. "It's their Potemkin complex. Notice that they are all French and English pieces with almost nothing Russian."

"I don't see anybody in here," Coates said.

Gray caught his own reflection in a wall mirror framed with gilded pinewood bellflowers. His gaze moved to a pile of yellowed rags on top of the only comfortable item in the room, a La-Z-Boy recliner. "There he is."

Rather than rags, the heap of motley ocher cloth was a man in a dowdy bathrobe and one matching slipper. His other leg ended at the edge of the chair. He was caught in a stark ray of sunlight from a window. His bald head shared the bathrobe's saffron color. His few remaining hairs hovered above him like insects. Blue veins showed under the stippled skin of his crown. His face seemed made of transparent parchment, and Gray imagined he could see through his skin to the skull. Spatulate cheekbones rose from the sunken skin of the old man's cheeks. His masterful nose was hooked and narrow, a blade that in old age had drooped almost to his lower lip. His lips were thin and bloodless and fluttered with each exhale. His eyes were closed. He was asleep.

"Did he know we were coming?" Coates asked.

The old man started and cried out, a tenor chirp. His eyes rolled open. He blinked, then chuckled, a wheeze that sounded like paper being crumpled into a wad. "Koshmar."

Adrian Wade translated. "A nightmare."

The old man said, "Nu, byvaet."

"He says, 'Well, it happens,' meaning his nightmares. Maybe he has a lot of them, given his history."

She stepped into the bath of sunlight at the foot of the recliner and introduced herself in speedy Russian. The old man's jaw sagged and the lips lifted, presenting an unsettling hollow of bad teeth. He replied in Russian and held out a bony hand that resembled a vulture's talons.

He spoke for a moment in Russian, grinning and lifting his eyebrows invitingly. She laughed and replied, also in Russian. He cackled appreciatively and rubbed his hands together.

"What'd he say?" Coates asked.

"He asked me for a date."

"And?"

"I told him a night with me would turn him into a burned-out cinder, a mere husk of his former self, and that he would spend the rest of his days drooling and weeping."

Coates looked at Gray. "Women tell me that all the time when I ask them for dates. I never tire of it."

"I was exaggerating." She smiled. "But only a little. And now Mr. Trusov and I are the best of friends."

She made introductions, switching back and forth between Russian and English. Victor Trusov's grin spread. He seemed delighted with the visit. He nodded to Gray and Coates. His eyes were milk-glass blue and quick. Gray suspected they missed nothing.

"Zakuski?" He pointed to a television table.

She translated, "Hors d'oeuvres. Someone has provided Mr. Trusov with a nice spread. This is yobla, a dried and salted fish, and this is osyotr caviar. It's not as rare as beluga, but it tastes as good. Do you like caviar, Pete?"

"Is a frog's butt watertight?" Coates dug into the tin with a blini. He sculpted the eggs onto the pancake with a finger, then jammed the entire thing into his mouth.

She lifted a blini from a plate and scooped a small portion of the black beads onto it. Gray noticed that she touched the caviar with her tongue, exploring the eggs before she bit into them as if she wanted tactile pleasure as well as the taste from the caviar. She was wearing a suit with stern lines but of a softening bachelor-button blue. On her lapel was a finely wrought silver brooch representing a bunch of grapes and curled grape leaves. A plain band of silver hung around her left wrist.

The old man spoke quickly, making small gestures with his right hand. Tiny prisms of his spit flashed in the sun on their way down to the rug.

Adrian Wade said, "He says the consulate is treating him like a nachestvo, one of the privileged. He's calling me kotik, a pussycat, a term of endearment."

Owen Gray stepped forward. "Tell Mr. Trusov that I've long known about his exploits and heroism, and that I'm honored to meet him."

After the translation, the old man dipped his head at Gray. His eyes moved back to Adrian. Gray suspected that as a Hero of the Soviet Union Trusov was accustomed to praise for accomplishments the flatterers knew nothing about.

Gray added, "Erwin König, Hans Diebnitz, Otto Franz."

The names needed no translations. The old man's eyebrows came up. He eyed Gray closely, hair to shoes, a professional casing. Then he said something directly to Gray.

Adrian interpreted, "Mr. Trusov says, 'We study each other, don't we?' "

Gray nodded.

"He asks, 'What did you learn from me?' "

"The hat trick."

For three glorious seconds on the rubble mound at Stalingrad, Wehrmacht Major Erwin König had thought his bullet had soared through Trusov's head. Then König was dead.

The old man waved his hand dismissively. Adrian translated, " 'A stupid trick. It has galled me ever since that someone of Major König's stature fell for it. It cheapens my accomplishment.' "

"And the over-tree shot," Gray said. "I learned that from you."

An appreciative expression settled on Trusov's face. He spoke with enthusiasm, staring intently into Gray's gray eyes.

Again Adrian rendered his words into English. ' "You probably read the German interrogation report.' "

"Yes."

" 'I was held by the SS for five days. I thought I was tough, but they broke me. I told them all I knew, everything under the sun about my history and sniping.' "

"But you got away," Gray prompted.

" 'Can you imagine being careless with a firearm around me?' " Adrian translated.

Trusov laughed, which turned into a gasping cough. After a moment he could continue, with Adrian translating, " 'One of the bucket-heads forgot himself. I took care of him and my two interrogators, goddamn them, then it took me three weeks to cross the lines.' "

"The notes of that interrogation were captured by Patton's Third Army. They are still in a Pentagon library. I memorized them."

"What's an over-tree shot?" Coates asked.

"The sniper fires over an intervening tree or building. The target invariably thinks the shooter's hide is in the tree or building, so they concentrate their return fire on it. Mr. Trusov invented that ruse."

Adrian translated Gray's answer into Russian for the old man's benefit. The old man bowed his head modestly.

Gray said, "But my favorite—"

"Favorite what?" she cut in. "Favorite way of killing someone? Like your favorite pizza topping?"

Gray snapped, "If I want moralizing, I'll dial Pat Robertson's eight hundred number." Then to the old man, "My favorite of yours was the pine needles."

Scowling, Adrian turned Gray's words to Russian.

"Da, da, da," the old man chortled.

Gray explained in English for Coates's benefit, "Mr. Trusov could often smell an enemy's breath at a hundred yards."

" 'It was the goddamn sauerkraut,' " Adrian translated as Trusov spoke.

"So Mr. Trusov suspected the enemy might also be able to detect his breath."

" 'Beet soup. That's all we had to eat and it has an odor that carries.' "

"So before a mission he would chew pine needles. I learned that from him. Needles will kill any breath."

Adrian Wade's Russian came so easily that she would finish her translated sentence only a second or two after the speaker did. She continued with Trusov's words, " 'And I learned it from my father.' "

"Your father?" Gray asked. "I don't know about him."

" 'Sure you do, if you are a student of the art,' " Adrian rendered it into English. " 'You just don't know his name. The Red Army never released his name.' "

The pride in the old man's words was evident to Gray even in Russian.

" 'My father was the rifleman who froze the front at Tannenberg in the Great War.' "

Gray was astonished. "August 29 and 30, 1914, General Samsonov's Russian 2nd Army. The Red Devil?"

Trusov laughed. He patted his knee and a puff of dust rose from the yellow bathrobe to swirl in the sunlight.

Adrian translated, " 'Yes, the Germans called him the Red Devil. Tannenberg was a disaster for our army, but my father and his rifle stalled a part of the German pincer for almost eighteen hours, allowing thousands of Russian soldiers to escape east. He killed thirty-four of Ludendorff's soldiers in that eighteen hours alone. The Germans didn't dare lift their heads above the road embankments. He was the first in my family to leave a red shell.'"

"Did he survive the war?" Gray asked.

" 'He later rose to the rank of colonel, but one day in 1938 he disappeared from his office along with every other officer in the Kiev Military District above the rank of major.'" Trusov leaned forward to the television table to lift a podstakannik, a silver-handled glass containing tea. He sipped loudly, then continued," 'He was a good teacher, and I learned the sniper's craft from him.'"

Coates dipped into the caviar again and asked with a full mouth, "When is the last time you fired a rifle, Mr. Trusov?"

After the translation, the old man pursed his lips, then said with Adrian translating," 'I suppose it's been two decades. The government didn't allow citizens to own firearms unless they were hunters, and I've never found any pleasure at shooting at animals. No sport to it. They can't shoot back.' "

Adrian shook her head at the last sentence.

The Russian continued: " 'I passed along the torch long ago.'"

Coates had been reaching for yet another blini, and his hand stopped abruptly. "You passed along the torch? To whom?"

More translation, then another proud beam from the old man. " 'To my boy Nikolai. He also served in the army.'"

Coates glanced at Adrian Wade. "Know anything about Mr. Trusov's son?"

"Nobody I spoke with ever mentioned him," she replied, her words quick in defense of herself. "But I wouldn't be surprised. The Red Army is like an onion, and maybe I wasn't allowed to peel it back far enough. Perhaps even the instructors at the Spetsnaz school had never heard of him."

"Could there be other sniper schools in Russia?" Gray asked. "Another group with its own instructors and history?"

"Not that I know about," she answered. "But maybe. The Red Army is famous for redundancy. Perhaps Kulikov and Rokossosky never heard of it either."

The old man dipped a finger into the tin and brought a dab of caviar to his lips. Several black eggs caught in the corner of his mouth, and only after a moment did he find them with his tongue. He began speaking again, and Adrian translated.

" 'My boy walked in my footsteps in Afghanistan.' "

"He was a sniper, Mr. Trusov?" Gray asked.

" 'Seventy-eight confirmed kills in Afghanistan,' " Adrian translated. " 'Lots of turbans got ruined, thanks to my boy. If the army had kept him there, we wouldn't have lost Afghanistan, and maybe the Soviet Union wouldn't have collapsed.' "

He laughed heartily, which shook his frame like a leaf in a wind. " 'He left a red shell at his firing sites, too. Three generations of red shells.' "

With that revelation, Adrian Wade found Gray's eyes. She smiled narrowly. The sun was edging lower in the sky, and rays reflected off the room's bright work — the antique key escutcheons, the brass hinges, the gilt on the mirror, the brass knockers on a dresser, and Adrian's silver brooch. The sun picked up the dust in the room, and a fine sheet of it lay over everything.

The old man added, " 'I don't have any grandchildren, so the family tradition will end with Nikolai.' " He lifted a finger toward Owen Gray. "Nikolai is about your age. Handsome boy, too, like you. His hair is lighter, though. I don't know where he got his blond hair. When I had hair, it was brown. Same with his mother.' "

"What's he doing now?" Gray asked.

The Russian squinted his eyes at the mantel clock. Adrian turned his answer to English. " 'I imagine he is getting ready for dinner.' "

Gray smiled. "I mean, where is he now?"

" 'I don't know,' " Adrian translated. " 'I haven't seen him since yesterday.' " Then she blurted in Russian, "You mean he's here in the United States?"

Trusov replied and Adrian turned it to English, " 'He received an emergency visitor's visa and escorted me here for the surgery. He's having a good time in New York, too, from what he tells me.' "

Gray mulled over this news. Nikolai Trusov. Did the name mean anything to him? The detective was staring at Gray, doubtless wondering the same thing. Gray didn't think so.

"Does your son know me, Mr. Trusov?" Gray asked.

The old man scooped the last of the caviar onto a finger, dropping a few eggs onto his plate.

He spoke and Adrian interpreted, " 'Nikolai didn't know anybody in the United States. Either did I. But I've met a lot of nice people, though. My surgeons and nurses. You three. You people aren't as bad as Khrushchev said.' "

"When do you expect Nikolai to visit you again?" the detective asked.

He chewed the caviar. Adrian echoed his words," 'He comes and goes. Brings me sausage and this caviar and yobla. He is a dutiful son.'"

When the old man hesitated, Adrian nodded encouragement. Finally Victor Trusov continued. " 'My boy, I love him very much. But' " — he paused and a few seconds passed before he went on—" 'but there is something missing from him. My father and I were snipers because of war. Nikolai is a sniper because that is all he can be. It is the center of him.' "

Coates said, "We'll swamp the streets around here with my people. Nikolai won't be coming and going anymore, not until we talk to him."

Adrian Wade thanked the old sniper. Gray said he was honored to have met him. They all moved toward the door.

Adrian turned back and asked in Russian, then in English, "Mr. Trusov, do you ever catch flies out of the air?"

The old fellow narrowed his eyes at her. He finally said, and Adrian translated," 'Why would I do that?' "

She looked at Gray with both censure and triumph.

" 'But there was a time during the war when I caught bats. They were all I had to eat.' "

As she translated, Adrian looked back and forth between the two snipers. " 'Not many people can seize a bat right out of the air.' "

Adrian Wade's glare swept into Gray. Reassessing him or dismissing him, Gray couldn't tell which. She said her goodbye in Russian, then left the room. Coates followed.

Gray gave the sniper the thumbs-up salute. Trusov returned it.

"I know you can't understand me, Mr. Trusov" — Gray laughed as he crossed to the door—"but I owe you one for the bat story."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Gunnery Sergeant Arlen Able poured two fingers of Jim Beam into the range master's glass, then into his own. "Can you believe I was ever that young, Bud? I look like I'm twelve."

Sergeant Bud Blackman held up the photograph. "You and Gray look like you should be carrying squirt guns, not real guns."

The photograph dated from 1969 and showed Arlen Able and Owen Gray kneeling on a dusty patch of ground, each holding a rifle, the butts resting on their thighs and the barrels pointing to the sky. Both were wearing olive T-shirts, field pants, and boots. Their heads were shaved to the skin along the sides and burr cut on top. Both Marines' smiles were broad and engaging. Their eyes were slanted with amusement and their heads were cocked at the camera in confident angles. These were the guileless, hopeful faces of youth, faces that belonged in a high school album.

"Don't let the dummy grins fool you, Bud." Able sipped his drink. "We were already proven headhunters."

Sergeant Blackman had been in the range tower during Owen Gray's visit. Blackman swirled the whiskey, staring at the snapshot. He had seen it before. Early in any friendship Arlen Able trotted out his photograph of himself kneeling next to the legend. Blackman had a miser's face, with a pinched mouth and suspicious slits for eyes. He had started going bald early in life, and rather than tolerate a horseshoe of hair he shaved his entire scalp every morning. He was wearing field khaki. His cap and binoculars were on the desk. "He must've left it all behind in Vietnam. He looked like any other lawyer."

"I ever tell you he saved my life?" Able asked.

"No, but I can't believe there isn't a story left about Owen Gray you haven't told me."

"Maybe I never mentioned it because it makes me look a little goofy," Able said. "Owen was even a better tracker than a shooter, if you can believe it."

"We're all good trackers," Blackman said, taking another small swallow of Jim Beam and breathing in a soothing draft of air through his teeth. "It's part of our training."

Able shook his head. "I don't mean like you and I can track. Owen had a sixth sense about it. Sometimes the ground and the vegetation seemed to be speaking to him. Before he joined the Marines, he and his old man would often be asked by the county sheriff in Idaho to track lost hunters and climbers. Rescued quite a few over the years. He rescued me, too. One day in October 1969 near Tu Lun hill I took a mortar blast to the face."

"That explains a lot of things." Blackman chuckled.

"You laugh because it wasn't you, goddamnit. When a shell blew me down, I got right back up, climbed out of the hole, and moseyed into the field."

"You were ordered forward?" Blackman asked.

"No, hell no. I was blacked out on my feet. Concussed. To this day I have no memory of it. I got up — shells landing all around, machine gun fire overhead — and strolled into the forest. None of my mates saw me. It wasn't until dawn, after the firefight ended, that I was reported missing."

"I gather you weren't killed by the enemy." Blackman helped himself to another shot.

"Nobody could follow me, because I had wandered into NVA territory. I could've been out there picking daisies for all I remember. But Owen Gray figures out two things: one, that I'm addled, and two, where he can find me."

"I'll bite. How'd he figure them out?"

Sergeant Able leaned back in his chair and lifted his feet to the desktop. "He knows nobody goes into the field in a firefight without a lot of equipment. Not just a sniper rifle, because a sniper rifle is as worthless as tits on a goat in a firefight. No, if I'd been going anywhere with all my senses I'd have been carrying heavy armament and a pack and kit. But my footprint tells him my hands are empty and there's nothing on my back."

"I'll bite again."

Able said with satisfaction, "A person carrying some weight rolls his foot out on the big toe side as he walks. My register didn't show that. Plus, a walker carrying equipment takes shorter strides and has light heel pressure and a deep toe pushoff. I wasn't leaving any of these signs, so Owen knew I was out there damn near naked."

"Which meant you were acting wacko."

"Concussed, not wacko." Able added a splash of Jim Beam to his glass. The desk lamp was the only illumination in the office except for the tiny infrared light in the corner, which blinked on and off irregularly, detecting the sergeants' motions. The bloody remains of sunset were visible through the bars of the west windows. "Owen knew that if I survived my stupid walk I'd wander to a certain spot in the Vietnam wilderness. He met me there."

"He must've been guessing."

Able shook his head. "He knew that I would gradually circle to the right."

"How?"

"Right-handed people take a slightly larger step with their left foot. They walk in a big clockwise loop. By my bootprints Owen determined how fast I was ambling along, how tired I was, and then determined when I'd get to the half circle point. He met me there."

Blackman protested, "He couldn't have known precisely where you'd show up."

"He listened for me. Someone wandering lost in the wilderness makes a lot of noise."

"What'd he do? Put his ear to a stump like Sacajawea?"

"He used an anti-sapper parabolic listening dish. He took the dish to where his calculations suggested I'd appear. When he heard me thrashing around in the bush from about a quarter mile away, he came and retrieved me."

Sergeant Blackman threw back the last of his Jim Beam. "If Gray's so smart, why didn't he wait until you had walked in the full circle right back to your foxhole?"

"That would've doubled the time I was out there wandering, and the place was infested with NVA."

"Gray would've saved himself a lot of trouble," Blackman said.

"And he might've missed me. It has something to do with the margin of error of the angles."

"I would've just sat on an old artillery shell, sipped some Tiger Beer, and hoped you showed up, having walked a full circle."

Sergeant Able wagged his head with resignation. "Bud, arguing with you is like wiping my butt with a hoop. It's endless."

Blackman laughed.

Able lowered the bottle into a lower drawer, then rose from his chair. "I'll see you tomorrow bright and early."

Blackman stepped toward the door. "Bright and early is what the Marine Corps is all about."

Pulling his ring of keys from a pocket, Sergeant Able snapped off the desk lamp. The room was shadowy, with only the last shards of daylight coming through the windows. He stepped toward the burglar alarm pad. The code was the last four numbers of his service serial number.

Able spun to the hollow sound of a blow, a dull and sickening report followed by a soft groan. A whirling blur swept in through the door, a man dressed in black and moving so quickly in the half light that his image would not fully form in Abie's mind. The club swept down again, and Able heard Blackman's other collarbone break, sounding like a lath snapped over a knee.

Bud Blackman collapsed back into the room. He landed hard on the floor, an arm bent under his body and his legs buckled under him.

It was a baseball bat. And it soared high as the intruder rushed into the room toward Able. The dark demon under the bat was hidden behind a veil of dark clothes and dusky light and swift motion. Abie's service 9-mm was in his drawer. He stumbled toward it in the dark but made only a few steps before the intruder was on him. Able reflexively raised a hand, a futile gesture against the bat that slammed into his nose.

Able was enveloped in agony. His knees swayed and he started to sag. He blacked out before he hit the floor.

Owen Gray knew fifteen patterns on the speed bag, and he could blend them together in a lovely swirling and surging routine. The Everlast leather bag and his mitts were blurs producing a loud pounding rhythm as the bag struck the backboard. Knuckles, backs of his hands, palms, elbows, even his chin, all were used to whip the bag around on its universal joint. The leather mitts were designed for the work, with only a thin padding at the knuckles and with lead bars sewn into the palms to weight the fists.

He might not be much of a boxer, but Gray had mastered the subsidiary skill of bag punching. He worked on the bag with a savage precision. Perspiration slid down his arms and flipped into the air around the reeling bag.

"This is your health club?" the tittering voice asked from the gym door.

Gray lowered his fists and turned to see Mrs. Orlando escorting the twins into the gym. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, showing an acre of white. "Looks like nothing but convicts in here."

Mrs. Orlando was wearing a flowing dress decorated with dozens of tiny red prints of Che Guevara's bearded face. She carried a string purse. Her necklace tinkled lightly as she guided Julie and Carolyn to the bench. "Don't you girls talk to anyone here except maybe your father."

Gray called his thanks to her. She retreated the way she had come, shaking her head all the while. She disappeared through the door.

The oldest twin — Carolyn by five minutes — wore a bulky sweater of a dozen colors and black tights, while Julie had on jeans and a red denim jacket. They never dressed in identical clothes. They turned to watch two boxers spar in the ring.

Gray had asked Mrs. Orlando to bring the girls to the gym because except for their apartment there were few venues where Gray could spend time with his family. With the sniper at large, there were no walks along Bay Ridge avenues, no visits to parks, no shopping trips, no escorting them to school, nothing out of doors, and nothing indoors near windows with distant views. Sam Owl's windows looked across a narrow alley to a brown brick wall. That morning at breakfast Gray had offered to show them the speed bag if they would meet him at his gym, then had to explain what a speed bag was.

The twins had never been to Sam Owl's gym, and they seemed spellbound by the skipping, sparring, and bag punching.

Gray decided to show off. "Watch this, girls."

Then Adrian Wade entered. Sound seemed abruptly sucked from the room. The speed bags were silenced. The boxers lowered their gloves. The heavy bags swung loosely. The gymnasium became as still as a photograph. Her eyes swept left and right as if her head were a turret.

Gray groaned when Adrian Wade's gaze found him. She marched around the ring in his direction. In the faded, steamy, tumbledown gymnasium she was wildly out of place, an electric flash of fierce colors. A spotlight seemed to pick her up, and the gym became even duller, with its olive and pea-green and dun shades fading away. Even the magnificent boxing mural lost its luster. All eyes were on her, ogling and appreciating as she made her way to the speed bags. Adrian seemed aware of her effect and accepted the silence as her due. The slightest of smiles — perhaps one of mild cynicism — passed across the surface of her face like a breeze.

From the ring Benny Jones said, "Thank you, God. My dating service finally came through."

She winked at him, a slow, lascivious, welder's torch of a wink. Jones returned a gratified grin.

She was wearing a tight black skirt that ended two inches above her knees and a cedar green jacket over a white silk blouse. Around her neck was a thin silver chain. Again Gray was startled by the contrast between her fire-red mouth, raven hair, and blue eyes, immaculate colors setting off her bone-white face. She was carrying a manila envelope.

"It smells like old sweat socks in here," she said to Gray.

"Yeah, it's great, isn't it?"

"I've got news, none of it good."

"That bench is my new office. Come on over."

The twins drew themselves up, awkwardly and anxiously, prepared for an introduction. But their father said briskly, "Girls, I need to talk to this lady. Will you excuse us?"

"Your daughters?" Adrian asked. "Introduce me."

The twins might have been witnessing the raising of the dead from the Gospels. They seemed incapable of expression, their faces frozen by bafflement. Carolyn and Julie had never seen their father with a woman. Maybe a thank-you to a sales clerk or a quick word with a librarian. Mrs. Orlando didn't count. This was a real woman, someone their father's age, and so thoroughly attractive, a woman who belonged on a fashion magazine cover. This was a person of fluent confidence and obvious dignity, someone plainly of substance. And — could it be? — she had come to visit their father. It simply wasn't within their experience. Their eyes mirrored their wonder. Gray missed it, but Adrian rapidly searched their faces and may have understood.

She stepped close to the twins and extended her hand, first to one, then the other. Her smile might have been given to long lost loved ones. Her eyes engaged them fully and excluded all else in the gym, and certainly Gray. For a few moments it seemed all that mattered in the world were Owen Gray's daughters. They flushed with the attention and fairly stammered their replies. After a few minutes, Adrian Wade had learned much about school and piano practice and Bay Ridge and Mrs. Orlando.

Gray thought it a calculating inveiglement. She was overpowering his daughters and entrancing them, doubtless to irk him. He scanned the room. The fighters were slowly returning to their workouts. Joe Leonard smiled knowingly at Gray and mouthed, "Wow." Sam Owl was still staring at Adrian Wade as if she were an alien.

"We'd love to," both girls said as one. They were bouncing with excitement.

"Give me a few minutes with your father, then off we'll go."

Gray hadn't been listening. "Off you go? Where?"

She looked at him. "It's time for your girls to wear a little lipstick."

"Looks like you've got plenty to spare," he said, pleased with himself.

She ignored the jab. "I'm going to show them a few things at Bloomingdale's cosmetics counters."

"That place is the gate to hell. I don't want Carolyn and Julie anywhere near there."

"Well, that's settled," Adrian said, grinning at them. "We'll catch a cab uptown in a minute, girls."

The twins cheered.

"Am I just bumping my gums here?" Gray objected. "Is anybody listening?"

She took him by an elbow and turned him to the bench. The girls moved to a corner of the gym near the water fountain but could not remove their eyes from her.

Adrian lowered herself to the bench. "Your friend Sergeant Able at Quantico has been hurt. So has Sergeant Blackman."

Gray drew in a sharp breath.

She told him about the assault at the rifle range the night before, and ended with "Sergeant Blackman will be all right, a week in the hospital and then he'll need physical therapy. Sergeant Able has a broken nose, and was treated and released from the base hospital. He is back on duty already. The sergeants were hurt by someone who knew how to do it, someone with experience who was fast and competent."

"But what was he doing?"

She replied with gravity, "The only thing taken was your sniper rifle from Vietnam. Your Winchester .30–06."

Gray sank back against the chipped wall. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt that hid the scar on his neck. He peeled off the mitts to wipe sweat from his forehead. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. "I should've pitched that goddamn thing into the South China Sea when I had the chance."

She pulled a five-by-seven photograph from the manila envelope. "This is our man. Nikolai Trusov. It's his service ID photograph. General Kulikov wired it from Moscow this morning and we had it blown up. There isn't a sheriff or police department or FBI office on the east coast that doesn't have a copy by now. Kulikov also sent Trusov's fingerprints. The police agencies have them, too, and the prints have already produced results."

"Jesus." Gray stared at the photograph. "I wouldn't want to run into this guy in a dark alley."

With nothing but hard angles and sudden planes, Nikolai Trusov's face seemed chopped out of a log with an axe. The face was over-featured, with a broad and blunt nose and a jutting long chin with a slightly off-center cleft. His cheekbones were so rocky they threw shadows on the face below. Blond eyebrows had vanished in the photographer's flash. The brows were low and sunk deeply, and under them were flat, expressionless eyes. His forehead appeared too small because curly yellow hair was brushed forward. Hair on the sides of his head was short. His ears were button-sized and tight against his head. His mouth was crooked, and the left side might have been about to smile while the right was set in a stiff pedagogic line. It was a brawler's face, a dangerous face.

"What happened to him, do you think?" Adrian pointed at Nikolai Trusov's forehead. "A meat cleaver, looks like."

"He took a mean shot, that's for sure."

Trusov's forehead had a shallow trench in it, a furrow that ran from an inch above his right eye to disappear under the hairline. The groove was covered with puckered skin three shades darker than the rest of his face. The bone on both sides of the furrow was irregular, with chinks and facets. Skin alongside the fracture was pleated from surgeon's stitches. Gray guessed that the depression was half an inch below the curve of his forehead and crown. The trough and the corrugated skin added to the asymmetry and dissonance of Trusov's face.

"This injury would've killed most people," Gray said. "Did General Kulikov give an explanation?"

"So far he has found only Trusov's Spetsnaz file."

"Aren't a Russian soldier's files all in one place?"

"You'd think so, but not this guy, and I don't know why." She slid out a stack of paper from the envelope. "These were also faxed to me this morning from General Kulikov. It's Trusov's Soviet Army record from 1977 when he joined the Spetsnaz to 1988 when he left it."

"But he was in the Red Army before and after those dates, wasn't he?" Gray's wet shirt was clinging to his back, chilling him. His daughters were still staring at Adrian.

"He was already a Red Army sergeant when he entered Spetsnaz training, according to this."

She flipped through several pages. They were copies of military forms, some with unit formation signs printed alongside the letter-head. They were in Russian and Gray could make out nothing from the mass of Cyrillic letters. General Kulikov was being cooperative, but even so a number of lines had been blacked out with a heavy pen on each page before they were faxed to the United States.

She went on. "In 1988 he was transferred from the 1st Brigade, 1st All-Arms Army of the North West Front to a Spetsnaz training brigade in the North Caucasus military district at Rostov. He trained for eighteen months at Rostov. He was taught explosives, hand-to-hand combat, communications, parachuting, survival, and the like. But he taught rifle marksmanship."

"So he was already a shooter?"

She held up a page from the file, as if he could read it. "Trusov won a gold medal at the 1976 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck in the biathlon. Shooting and skiing."

"That's an asinine sport."

She looked up from the file. "You'd think a sniper like you would love that sport."

"I'm talking about the skiing part of it. If God wanted man to ski He wouldn't have invented the snowmobile."

After a moment she said, "Is that another attempt to be funny?"

"Probably." Gray exhaled slowly. "Where did Trusov go after his commando training in Rostov?"

"To a Spetsnaz company in the 3rd Army of the GSFG, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. He was posted there until a little while after the Afghanistan invasion, when his Spetsnaz company was transferred to the Turkestan Military District. The file shows he was in Afghanistan four years. That's where he killed the seventy-eight people."

"They weren't people," Gray corrected her. "They were enemy soldiers."

"I see now why you went to law school," she said with a school-teacher's inflection. "To learn to distinguish, which is what law school is all about. Not to understand, not to appreciate, not to sympathize, but to distinguish. It is one of the lesser talents."

"Were I to give it any thought at all," he said with seeming indifference, "I would conclude you are a bonebrain."

Her face turned a gratifying pink, and for a moment Adrian appeared to be chewing on her tongue. Then she said in the tone and cadence of a typewriter, "I'm not going to get into a kindergarten name-calling match with you. I know Russians and you know sniping. You and I are going to concentrate on finding Nikolai Trusov."

"I was being childish," Gray said equably. "But that doesn't mean you aren't a bonebrain."

Gray had a good nose, a trained nose. It had saved his life more than once in Vietnam. Adrian was wearing a perfume that was somehow both faint and arresting. The fragrance was not flowery but was darker and more veiled, maybe an exotic spice. It seemed to be dulling his senses. Calling her names, for Christ sake.

She gamely continued. "Here's more bad news. Nikolai Trusov has obtained a copy of your Marine Corps file, the same one I've read."

Until that revelation, a slight — admittedly an exceedingly slight — chance had remained that the Russian sniper's actions were unconnected to Gray, that the killer's plan, if indeed he had a plan, was impersonal, and that mad coincidence was playing a ghastly trick on Gray. No longer. Intelligence — knowing the enemy — was the heart of sniping. The Russian now knew more about Gray than Gray had let anyone learn in twenty-five years.

"How'd he get the file?"

"A Freedom of Information Act request, just like anybody else can get your file." She slid the photograph and file back into the envelope. "I mentioned that the fingerprints have produced results. Pete Coates and I have been wondering how Trusov is funding himself. Soviet soldiers are usually penniless, and even the Red Army sponsorship that sent his father and him here for the surgery would not have given him enough money to rent an apartment like he did and do the traveling he is doing."

Gray rubbed the back of his neck. He never used to get stiff like this, not playing high school football or in boot camp.

"Two weeks ago a cash machine near Great Neck was smashed and over ten thousand dollars was taken."

"I read about it in the paper. The robber used a backhoe."

"Instead of a hoe there was a pneumatic breaker hammer, like a big jackhammer, installed on the hydraulic arm. A Con Ed crew had been using the John Deere to tear up a concrete road to install electric lines underground. Sometime during that night he hotwired the tractor and drove it a block to a First New York cash machine. He used the breaker hammer to tear away the front panel and spring the money cartridge from the machine, then rupture the cartridge. He walked away with the money."

"Fingerprints?"

"The robber did nothing to hide his prints. They were all over the John Deere. But the FBI drew a blank when they tried to match them."

Gray said, "So when General Kulikov sent you Trusov's prints, you forwarded them to the FBI?"

"All this morning. The FBI just reported that Trusov is the cash machine robber. So we know how he bankrolled himself."

They sat for a moment watching Joe Leonard lashing into a heavy bag. Then she asked, "Have you ever been to Russia?"

"Never."

"Or Afghanistan?"

Gray shook his head.

She demanded, "Then how does this Nikolai Trusov know you?"

"I've thought of little else lately. I have no answer."

"Maybe the only connection is that he heard of your reputation, and he can't stand the idea of someone out there better at killing than he is. You had ninety-six kills, he had only seventy-eight. This town ain't big enough for the both of us, partner, that kind of macho testosterone foolishness."

Gray didn't feel like arguing with her. His workout had worn him down.

"I imagine that's why you became a sniper, isn't it?" she asked pointedly. "Testosterone?"

"You see that fellow over there?" Gray inquired obscurely. "The black fighter working the heavy bag? He's a middleweight named Joe Leonard. Why don't you ask him for a boxing lesson? I had a lesson from him and I learned a lot."

She rose from the bench. "I don't need a lesson. I'm already tougher than him. And you."

Gray prided himself on his poise and dispassion and his ability to step back from a situation to assess it critically. But her adeptness at reducing him to childish responses bordered on the bizarre. So he was delighted when he did not burst out with his first reaction: Oh yeah? Says who?

Still, he could not prevent himself from replying, "We are talking about different things here. You are tough only in an affirmative action, I Am Woman Hear Me Roar kind of way. You are not tough compared to me."

Gray finally caught himself. "Jesus, I'm arguing about who's bigger and meaner, you or me." He laughed in a brittle way and shook his head. "I apologize."

Her smile could have melted paint from a Chevrolet. "Let me show you something. Take a swing at me."

Take a swing? Alarms went off inside Gray's head. He brought his eyes up to hers, but they were unreadable. Unfathomable, maybe forever unknowable. But Christ they were blue.

"You mean hit you?" he asked. "I'm an adult, a member of society."

She laughed brightly, genuinely, Gray thought. Was this an awkward attempt at a truce?

"You don't have to actually hit me," she said. "Throw the punch but bring it up short."

Gray pushed himself up from the bench. "You know judo and I'm going to get my butt kicked. Am I right?"

"I don't know judo from jellybeans," she said.

"But I'm going to get hurt, right?" Gray asked warily.

"If we are going to work together you need to learn to trust me. Throw a jab and I'll show you something. Trust me."

Was this the siren's song that lured sailors upon the rocks?

She stepped closer, then tilted her head, presenting a target. Her hands were at her sides. Joe Leonard and Benny Jones paused in their workouts to watch. The girls were smiling widely, perhaps thinking Adrian Wade was lifting her head for a kiss.

Gray brought his hands up in good imitation of Muhammad Ali, he thought. He gently — very gently — jabbed his left hand at her face, intending to stop his fist well short of her chin.

She moved with a startling rapidity. Suddenly she was standing next to him, her black scented hair in his face, her hip dug into his thigh in a manner that in any other situation would be erotic. At the same instant, Gray felt her leg sweep into the back of his legs, low on his calves. Her arms shot up. His feet left the ground and began a wide arc. He swung on the axis of her hip, and the floor suddenly seemed to be above him. Her hand was at his throat and his windpipe felt like it was collapsing. He had no contact with the world, no stable point of reference except where their bodies were joined at their hips. He spun in a helpless cartwheel.

The gym's wood floor must have been traveling fifty miles an hour up at him. The entire length of his body from nose to toes slammed into the floor with a sickening crack. His mind fluttered to whiteness, then regained itself. A surge of nausea rose from behind his breastbone. He tried to look up, but her foot was across his face, pinning his head to the floor.

Carolyn and Julie stared but did not move toward him, perhaps thinking their father had just shown their new friend Adrian some self-defense technique. Joe Leonard and Benny Jones and Sam Owl were fond of Owen Gray, and were trying not to laugh, but with only limited success.

"You do have one tiny endearing element to your personality," Adrian said from high above him.

"Get your foot off my face." Gray's words were muffled by her shoe pressed against his lips.

"You are delightfully naive."

"Get your foot off my face." He was sprawled on the floor like a rag tossed aside, one arm twisted painfully under his back, his legs splayed out.

She removed her foot. Gray found he could focus his eyes. She was wearing the same smile. The girls ventured over.

"You okay, Dad?" Carolyn asked.

"I'm fine," Gray said weakly.

"He was showing me one of his moves," Adrian deadpanned. "How to make a gymnasium floor surrender."

"You going to get up, Dad?" Julie asked.

"I want to lie here a minute." He could still taste shoe leather in his mouth. No part of his body did not ache except maybe his hair. He didn't trust his legs to get him up or keep him up. "You girls can go with Ms. Wade now. She'll take care of you."

Adrian Wade led the twins away. Both girls glanced over their shoulders at him several times until they disappeared through the gym's door.

"I've heard these things about white girls, but I never believed it till now," Joe Leonard called. "Was it good, Owen?"

Gray levered himself to standing. His legs seemed to work. Maybe nothing was broken. Ignoring Leonard, he wobbled in the direction of the locker room. He was tiring of these ignominious retreats to the shower.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Idon't like it, none of it," Pete Coates said. "But I can't talk the commissioner out of the plan. He told me he'd sign the documents and have them here within the hour. He's going to turn that Marine and you into New York's finest for a day."

Gray was sitting on a metal folding chair across from the detective's desk. "Did you talk to the commissioner, level with him?"

"I told him the police department is in the business of arresting criminals, not whacking them. But he said Nikolai Trusov is never going to let himself be arrested, and he'll kill four or five policemen before he goes down. So your plan is a go."

"And my part in it?"

"The commissioner knows your file better than I do. He says you are the only one who has a chance to beat Trusov."

Coates's office had the dimensions of a closet. His desk filled most of the space, with room left only for two folding chairs and two black file cabinets. Gray had to sit rigidly upright because his knees were pressed against the front of Coates's desk. An interior window opened to a hallway and other offices. A hum of distant conversations and typing and telephone ringing filled the area. There was no window to the outside, but even so, other detectives and policemen stayed well away from Owen Gray. The office was not air conditioned, and Coates's tie was loose around his neck and damp patches appeared on his shirt under his arms.

The desk was covered by an inch of assorted documents, and by abandoned paper coffee cups, doughnut wrappers, a telephone, a Rolodex, and a plastic cup of pens. Files were piled high on the cabinets and on the floor in two corners. An empty coat hanger occupied another tight corner. The computer's CPU was squeezed between the desk and a wall, and its fan filled the office with a low drone. A square glass case was mounted on the back wall with a sign on it reading "In Case of Emergency, Break Glass." Inside was a Thompson submachine gun.

Coates turned from the monitor to Gray. "So you think Nikolai Trusov will go for it?"

"He wants something from me."

"Or he wants you to do something," Coates amended. He had been working two shifts, and his face was wan and his eyes red-rimmed behind his spectacles. He needed a shave.

"Trusov will strike again, because I haven't gotten his message yet. I don't have the slightest idea what he wants."

Coates said, "He hasn't had any targets in three days. You haven't been in the open near anybody."

"So the Russian is probably hungry to deliver his message again. Maybe even desperate. I think he'll go for it. The super at this condo four blocks from my place reported a suspicious-looking character on the roof of the building next to his condo. The description fits Trusov. The Russian was scouting a firing site. That building's roof has a clear view to my apartment."

"We should just wait for him on that roof," Coates said. "Surround him."

Gray adamantly shook his head. "Pete, you still don't realize who you're dealing with. He'll kill a lot of your men before it's over. The only way to get this guy is from a distance, a long one."

When the telephone chirped, Coates snatched it and pressed it to his ear. He said a few words, then held the phone out for Gray. "It's Adrian Wade."

Gray made a face. He had told Coates about his free fall at Sam Owl's gym. "Tell her I'm busy. Tell her an orthopedic surgeon is putting my legs in casts, thanks to her." But he reached for the telephone anyway, adding, "At least she can't maim me over the phone."

With overwrought courtesy, he conversed a moment with Adrian, ending with "I'll be there in about three hours." He passed the phone back to Coates and said, "Mrs. Orlando, our nanny, hasn't arrived at our place yet. She's late, and has undoubtedly found one of her new boyfriends. It's more romantic to walk along the Brooklyn Heights promenade than appear for work."

"Dock her a day's pay," Coates suggested. "That'll cure absenteeism fast."

"I might, depending on the cleverness of her excuse." Gray laughed. "But Adrian kidnapped my daughters at the gym, took them uptown and had a fine old time, then escorted them to Bay Ridge in a cab. Now John has arrived home from his friend's. The girls have told Adrian a little lie, saying that their father never, never leaves them in the apartment without adult supervision. So Adrian is stuck there with a bunch of hungry, tired kids." He chortled again. "She deserves it."

"I did you a favor." Coates tempted him by lifting a sheaf of papers and wagging them at him.

"You've agreed to fund my kids' college educations?"

"Better. I asked a friend at the FBI to send me some information about Adrian Wade." He waved the paper at Gray again. "When I'm working closely with people, I like to know what makes them breathe hard. This file has got some hot stuff in it. Want to read it?"

Gray rebuked him. "Pete, I'm surprised at you, thinking I'd stoop so low as to read someone's private file."

"That's truly noble," Coates replied sardonically. "A lesson I might profit from."

"Read it to me."

"She's a widow, for one," the detective said without missing a beat. "Her husband was a pilot for Chesapeake Air Charter, and he went down in a De Haviland Beaver four years ago."

"What happened?"

"He ran out of air, I guess. The file doesn't say. She has studied judo for eight years, and was Northeast Judo Association seniors champion two years running."

Gray said dully, "That news would have been more useful to me this morning."

"Let's see." The detective skimmed the pages. "She was raised in Los Angeles. Her father and mother were both professors at UCLA. She did her undergraduate work there. She has a BA in psychology and an advanced degree in police science. She works sixty hours a week on average, real gung ho, and appears to be in line for a transfer back to Washington and a promotion."

Gray shifted on the seat, pushing his knees to one side. "Isn't there anything juicy in there?"

"How's this? Last November she was walking along Strelka Prospekt in Moscow and was attacked by a guy, a Russian, who shoved her against a wall and tried to yank her handbag away."

"Poor fellow." Gray rubbed his shoulder, still sore from its collision with the gym floor. "What'd she do to him?"

"She stabbed two fingers into his left eye socket and flipped his eyeball out onto the snow. The guy ran away screaming and bleeding."

Gray bit his lip. "Maybe I'd better try harder not to upset her."

The door was opened by Gunnery Sergeant Arlen Able. The sergeant's nose was covered by black tape. Skin below his eyes had the texture of crepe paper, with touches of sunset purple and malaria yellow and splotches of red from burst capillaries. He was in civvies — navy blue chinos and a black sweatshirt. A cardboard case painted in olive and buff camouflage was in his hands.

Gray said, "Judging from your face, Arlen, it looks like Nikolai Trusov is hitting about .310."

"If I laugh, my face will crack open and my brains will fall out." The sergeant pulled a large scope from the box.

"How's Blackman?"

"He's got casts on him that make both hands stick out, so he's going to walk around like the mummy for two months, but he'll live. Have you used a starlight scope before?"

"Some," Gray replied quietly.

"This is our new model, the AN/PVS-5. Battery powered. Uses starlight and moonlight for target illumination and amplifies reflected ambient light to brighten the target. Bud Blackman and I were a team in Iraq. Sometimes he'd spot, sometimes I would. No clouds or smog there, lots of starlight, and we used this equipment to hellish effect."

The starlight scope resembled a bird watcher's spotting scope, about a foot long with an eye shield on one end and a range focus ring on the other from which hung a lens cap on a plastic tether. Above the image intensifier tube housing was a cylinder containing the battery cap, power switch, and oscillator cap. A boresight mount assembly, locking knobs, and an azimuth adjustment knob were on a frame below the central housing.

"Can I remind you of a couple of things?" Able asked.

Gray nodded.

"Keep your eye tight against the rubber eyeshield, or light from the eyepiece assembly will leak around the eyeshield and will illuminate your face, make it a target."

Gray remembered.

"You are right-eyed, Owen. The starlight scope will be offset to the left of the rifle, and it weighs five pounds, so it's tough to maintain a steady position when sighting with the right eye. Rest your cheek against the stock comb like you do when sighting with iron sights, and use your left eye to obtain the sight picture. And this might very slightly change your zero."

"What'll be the zero?"

"Eight hundred yards, the distance to that roof," Able replied. "And your eyes are out of practice. Eye fatigue with this Five will become a factor in about four minutes. So go easy." Able returned the scope to the box, then brought up his wristwatch. "The NYPD swat team is going to let us use their rifle range. It's about forty minutes from here. You ready?"

Pete Coates responded, "Give me a minute with Owen, will you, Sergeant?"

Able carried the scope from the office to disappear down the hall.

"So you are going to do this?" Coates asked. "Can you?"

"It's like riding a bicycle. You don't forget."

"How do you know you've still got the talent? You haven't been practicing."

Gray thought for a moment. "Ever since the Chinaman was killed I've been feeling the little skills coming back."

"Little skills? Like what?"

"You had fish for dinner last night. Probably a saltwater fish, salmon or tuna. Not lake trout."

"So?" A small moment passed, then Coates's features twisted. "How in hell do you know that?"

"The scent has come through your pores and is on your skin. I can smell it. Saltwater fish give off more odor than freshwater fish."

"Is that another of your weird talents?"

"I was born with a good nose but it's mostly learned. It's coming back."

"Maybe I should've changed my socks this week," Coates said.

"Another thing. This past couple of days I've been incapable of looking at a distant building or tree and not estimate its distance. Six hundred yards, eleven hundred yards, four hundred yards. My brain has been filled with an incessant flow of numbers. It took me a decade to stop doing yardage estimates, and the numbers are flooding back."

Coates sniffed his wrist, then pulled up his sleeve to smell his forearm. "It was tuna, but I can't smell it."

"And once again I've become acutely aware of motion at the periphery of my vision. I'm spinning to these vague movements to the right and left. These are little things, but they are changing me slowly and involuntarily as if I'm in the grip of some terrible potion."

"Why not just let NYPD SWAT team members handle it?"

"We know how good Nikolai Trusov is because we've seen him do his work. And the Russians confirm how talented he was in Afghanistan. So it has to be me." Gray took a long breath. "Pete, I've spent many years trying to forget that I'm a freak with a rifle. My talent is an aberration, a suspension of the rules of the physical world, like Michael Jordan with a basketball or Wayne Gretzky with a puck. I've known since I was seven years old that I could shoot the wings off a gnat at five hundred yards. Your swat team has damned good shooters, but on a range and in the field I'd chew them up, even after all this time."

Coates asked earnestly, "You've been sitting over there, fidgeting, licking your lip, staring at the wall. How's your mental health?"

Gray pressed two fingers against his temple. "What's worse for my mental health, knowing that anybody standing next to me may get an exploded head or me picking up a rifle again? I don't have a choice, Pete."

The detective leaned back, lifting the front legs of the chair off the floor. He tilted his head toward Gray as if he might hear his thoughts. "I don't know much about this because I was a desk jockey in the Marines, but have you ever thought that your role in Vietnam was no different than a bomber pilot's or an artilleryman's, just a little more personal? There was a war on. That was legal killing you did. You've been punishing yourself ever since for being a soldier, for doing your duty."

"You're right," Gray replied vehemently. "You don't know anything about it."

Coates asked cautiously, "Is there something about your Vietnam days — something more than your role as a sniper — that put you on the medication? There were quite a few American snipers in Vietnam. They didn't all end up as… as troubled as you."

Gray said nothing. He rose and walked down the hall toward the waiting Marine.

At ten o'clock that evening Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn was still radiating the day's heat. Bricks and concrete seemed to shimmer. Fireplugs and fire escapes and car hoods were still warm. Pink geraniums and purple petunias hung dispiritedly in their window planters. Not a whisper of wind touched the street, and air trapped between the buildings was heavy with the brown scents of auto exhaust, garlic, and sewage.

Sounds of the street seemed muffled under the blanket of heat. Two cats yowled at each other in the distance. Couples out for evening strolls chatted, but quietly, leaning toward each other as if the oppressive air made speaking loudly too much effort. A stereo playing heavy metal rock could be faintly heard, and the sounds of television sets came through open windows.

Bay Ridge's tidy apartments and fourplexes were a blend of Greek revival and federal and Italianate styles, most three and four stories high with subdued but distinctive ornamentation. The entrance to Owen Gray's building was guarded by two fluted columns supporting a porch roof above the top step. The small porch was enclosed on the sides by utilitarian iron pickets designed to meet the code. The door was ancient and pitted oak but was bright with red paint. The intercom panel to the right of the door had a button near each of four numbers. Names were not displayed.

Wood window frames on all four stories were painted black, and many windows were open this night. Gray's apartment was on the top floor. The large window facing the street was to the twins' bedroom. The sheer curtains were closed, but in the bright bedroom the shapes inside were visible — though surely nebulous — through the translucent cloth.

Gray's bathrobe was a Black Watch plaid that Mrs. Orlando had given him for Christmas. "Don't read too long tonight, girls."

The words were wasted. The bundles under the two beds were motionless. Above Julie's bed was a poster of Ken Griffey Jr. and above Carolyn's was a print of a woodcut of Frederic Chopin. The room was a mad scramble of tossed clothing, schoolbooks, old dolls, art equipment, and a collection of Breyer horses. A copy of Seventeen magazine was on Carolyn's desk. Mrs. Orlando insisted that the room be orderly each night before bedtime, but she had disappeared for the afternoon, and when that happened, the room's contents spread like a stain, with everything taken out of closets and off desks and from shelves but nothing put back. Gray would complain of having to high-step across their room like a fullback through the defensive line.

"You two must have had a big day. Adrian Wade wore you both out?" A soft chuckle. "She wears me out, too."

Each form in the beds received a kiss. "Good night, my girls. Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite."

The bathrobe moved toward the door to the hallway.

If that instant could be expanded through some quirk of nature, if that second could be dilated so that the swift appeared slow and the slow seemed still, the first indication of order gone awry would be the dime-sized hole appearing as if by sleight of hand in the curtain. The bullet breached the room like a beam of light, crossing the effluvia of the girls' lives, then ripping into the form in Carolyn's bed, digging an appalling trench the length of the body to punch through the headboard and bury itself in the wall.

Two seconds later another trespassing bullet entered the room through the curtain, this one plunging through the form in Julie's bed.

At the door, wearing Owen Gray's bathrobe, Pete Coates put the two-way radio to his mouth. "Now. He's done it."

On the roof of the building, only his starlight binoculars and the crown of his head visible above the cornice, Sergeant Able barked, "I just saw the flash. Zone two, point three, E.D. four. They were right, that apartment roof."

With those few words, referring to zones and reference points and distances, Able put the shooter on the target.

Owen Gray nudged the M-40A1 Marine Corps sniper rifle and mounted starlight scope an inch left.

Able said unnecessarily, "Chink it down a couple clicks."

"I have him." Gray did not have the time to wonder at the tenor of his own voice, a flat, stainless steel tone he had not heard in twenty-five years. The utter dispassion would have frightened him under other circumstances.

Through the scope Gray saw the head, low behind a roof cornice on a building four blocks away. A rifle was next to the head, pointed at the air, perhaps coming down for another shot or perhaps in retreat.

Gray inhaled, let half of it out. He had learned early in his sniping career that it was not always necessary to search for the pulse in his neck or arms, but rather that his vision — everyone's vision — blurred ever so slightly with each pump of the heart. He waited a fraction of a second for his sight of the target to clear between heartbeats. Then he brought back the trigger. Two seconds had passed since Able had given him the co-ordinates.

The rifle spoke and jumped back against his shoulder. His view through the scope bounced to the sky.

Arlen Able cheered, "You got him. He blew down. I saw his rifle fall over, too." He patted Gray's shoulder. "Nice work. You won't see that on the shopping channel."

Sergeant Able picked up the radio and pressed the send button. "Pete, we can stick a fork in Trusov. He's done. Let's go gather the carcass."

Below them, in the twins' room, Pete Coates muttered to himself, "Thank God. That son of a bitch." He stared down at the forms on the bed, forms made of artfully placed pillows. The bullets had spit up a few feathers. Julie and Carolyn and John were spending the night with Adrian Wade at her hotel.

At the roof's door, Able turned back to Gray. "You coming? Let's go dance a jig over this guy's body. I want to see you drop your paper star, just like the good old days."

Gray's rifle lay unattended on the cornice. He was slumped forward, leaning against the brick rail, blinking repeatedly and panting hoarsely. He had known he would pull the trigger. Of course he would. But the struggle to contain his disgust and confusion at his return to the profession and to suppress burning memories had exhausted him. Now it was done. With an effort, one of the most arduous in his life, he pushed himself upright, gathered the rifle.

He stared out into the darkness toward his target. He had seen a head and a rifle. His shot had been clean. He was sure of it. But he whispered to himself, "Something is wrong."

Then he followed Sergeant Able.

Shed of the bathrobe, the detective met them on the street. An unmarked police car picked them up at the curb. The sniper's lair was a five-story apartment building on Tenth Avenue. They arrived a few minutes later. According to the sign above the mail slots, the apartment building was named the Zenith.

Coates leaned against the buzzer until the landlord appeared. The detective had not alerted the landlord because of the risk of somehow spooking Trusov. The man was wearing a white T-shirt and Bermuda shorts and carried a half-empty package of Fig Newtons. The detective hung his gold badge in front of the man's eyes and pushed into the building, fairly dragging the landlord after him.

"Show us the way to the roof," Coates demanded. Gray and Able followed. The sniper rifle had been left in the police car.

"Sure, sure," the landlord cried. "Nothing up there, though. I run a clean place. No hookers, no drugs, and only one Greek couple on the third floor."

The party ran up the stairs, Coates's hand at the small of the landlord's back, prodding him along.

"It's them you're here for, ain't it?" the landlord asked, the wind loud in his throat. "Christ, I should've known. You should smell this place when they cook."

On the fourth-floor stairs to the roof Coates pushed the landlord aside and pulled his .38 from his belt holster.

"You won't need that," Able said. "I saw the spray."

Nevertheless Coates held the handgun in front of him as he climbed the last flight of stairs and opened the door to the roof, Gray and Able right behind.

Heat-softened tar clung to their shoes. They walked around the stair house to the east cornice. The body was in a tight curl three feet from the edge of the roof. Gray's eyes had not fully adjusted to the darkness after the bright hallways — he knew it took thirty minutes — but even so he could tell the body lay in a position he had never before seen, an unnaturally bent shape.

They drew close, their shoes squashing bits of brain.

"What the hell?" Coates snapped.

The body was tied to a toppled chair. Many strands of rope wound around the chest and waist and legs to secure the corpse to the chair. A duct tape gag was across the mouth.

A rifle had spilled to the roof near the body. Able lifted the weapon. "This is a Stevens .22. No sniper uses this. What's going on? A decoy?"

Pete Coates lifted a red-rimmed cartridge that had been carefully set on its end near the chair. "Here is Trusov's signature."

Owen Gray bent to the body. He grasped its shoulder to turn the face toward him. Tiny bells jingled. The top of her head was missing, leaving a gaping red and gray cleft where her lustrous hair had been.

Mrs. Orlando stared back at him in the sightless reproach of death.