The body was still there, sprawled full-length on the king-size bed. It had bled white, leaving the skin with the trans-lucence of old china. Only the genitalia, hacked almost beyond recognition, identified the victim as male. The face was that of a woman. So was the smooth and hairless skin, the slender but full-breasted body.

“She’d fool you,” Garfein said. “See, she had the preliminary surgery. The breast implants, the Adam’s apple, the cheekbones. And of course the hormone shots all along. That keeps down the beard and the body hair, makes the skin nice and feminine. Look at the wound in the left breast there. You can see the silicone sac. See?”

Blood all over, and the smell of fresh death in the air. Not the stale reek of a late-found corpse, not the stench of decomposition, but the horrible odor of a slaughterhouse, the raw throat-catching smell of fresh blood. I felt not so much nauseated as overpowered, oppressed by the warmth and density of the air.

“What was lucky is I recognized her,” Garfein was saying. “That way I knew right off she was a pross and that made the connection in my mind with that case of yours, Joe. Was the one you caught as bloody as this?”

“Same thing,” Durkin said.

I said, “You recognized her?”

“Oh, right away. I did a hitch not that long ago with the Pussy Posse over in Long Island City. They still got a stroll there, they’ve had street prostitution in that same location for forty or fifty years, but now you’re getting a lot of middle-class people moving in there, converting lofts for residential use, buying up the old brownstones and converting them back from rooming houses to nice homes. They sign the lease in the daytime and then they move in and they look at what’s around them and they aren’t happy, and the pressure comes down to clean up the street.” He pointed at the figure on the bed. “I must have arrested her, oh, say three times.”

“You know her name?”

“Which name do you want? They’ve all got more than one. Her street name was Cookie. That was the name that came to me when I saw her. Then I called in to the station house at Fiftieth and Vernon and had somebody pull her file. She was calling herself Sara but back when she made her bar mitzvah the name they wrote down was Mark Blaustein.”

“She had a bar mitzvah?”

“Who knows? I wasn’t invited. But she’s a nice Jewish girl from Floral Park is the point I’m making. A nice Jewish girl who used to be a nice Jewish boy.”

“Sara Blaustein?”