Inside the apartment, whose ceilings are double-high and whose east-facing windows give onto a heart-stopping panorama of Central Park and the East Side skyline beyond, lights are on. Nothing appears disturbed.

Till we reach the master bedroom.

In the doorway lies the crumpled form of the security man. His weapon, an old-school Smith & Wesson .38, lies a body length away from his outstretched right hand, its smoking barrel searing the nub ends of the carpet pile.

MANNING

The bathroom.

Manning steps over the security man’s body. The bathroom’s mirrored double doors are shattered, as if someone had been flung bodily against them.

Manning enters, weapon in hand.

MANNING

Christ.

He draws up.

I stop at his shoulder.

Ellie Landau’s nightgown-clad body lies, limp and broken, over the rim of a porcelain lion’s-leg tub. Her left hand clutches the shower curtain, which she has, in her fall, pulled down on top of herself like a shroud.

A Glock 19, with its slide open and locked, indicating that its magazine has been fully discharged, lies on the marble floor beside her. Cartridge cases, still releasing wisps of spent cordite, are scattered atop a microfiber bath mat and under the tub. The inner surface of the bathroom door holds a tight group of nine shots, fired through the door from the inside.

Manning withdraws a handkerchief from his jacket pocket.

He kneels.

Setting the cloth over the fingertips of his right hand, he reaches and checks Ellie Landau’s laryngeal airway.

His expression confirms, Crushed.

20

A RIGHTEOUS WOMAN

URIBE IN SCRUBS stands beside the stainless steel table, upon which Ellie Landau’s corpse lies, naked (though covered from the collarbone down by a paper surgical sheet), faceup, skull shaved. An autopsy tech readies the bone saw, like the one the Metro D.C. medical examiner used to uncap the skull of Michael Justman.

URIBE

(to Manning)

You don’t have to stay for this, Jimmy.

The Forensic Pathology Center of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is at 421 East Twenty-Sixth Street, adjacent to Bellevue Hospital and one block west of the FDR Drive. Autopsies are performed on the eighth floor, between the hours of nine and noon. That’s the workday schedule for the MEs. It has been overridden in the emergency. Uribe will work at night.

Manning signs to Uribe that he will remain. Manning must confirm the existence or absence of an “LV” sign between the eyes of the decedent. He needs as well to determine for himself, and to acquire Uribe’s sign-off to that effect, that cause of death is from a crushed tracheal airway.

Then there’s something else.

Manning’s terminal responsibility, at least in his mind, is to the family of Ellie Landau, for whom religious custom directs that the deceased’s remains be interred within twenty-four hours or as soon thereafter as circumstances permit.