“And he gave you forty bucks and you gave him the change.”

Something registered. “He gave me two twenties and forty cents in change,” the man said. “And I gave him a ten and a one.”

“See? You remember the transaction.”

“Yeah, I do. Sort of.”

“Now tell me what he looked like. He white?”

“Yeah, sure. White.”

“Heavy? Thin?”

“Thin but not too thin. On the thin side.”

“Beard?”

“No.”

“Moustache?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“There was something about him, though, something that stuck in your memory.”

“What?”

“That’s what we’re trying to get, John. That what they call you? John?”

“Mostly it’s Jack.”

“Okay, Jack. You’re doin’ fine now. What about his hair?”

“I didn’t pay attention to his hair.”

“Sure you did. He bent over to sign in and you saw the top of his head, remember?”

“I don’t—”

“Full head of hair?”

“I don’t—”

“They’ll sit him down with one of our artists,” Durkin said, “and he’ll come up with something. And when this fucking psycho ripper steps on his cock one of these days, when we catch him in the act or on his way out the door, he’ll look as much like the police artist’s sketch as I look like Sara fucking Blaustein. She looked like a woman, didn’t she?”

“Mostly she looked dead.”

“I know. Meat in a butcher’s window.” We were in his car, driving over the bumpy surface of the Queensboro Bridge. The sky was starting to lighten up already. I was beyond tiredness by now, with the ragged edges of my emotions perilously close to the surface. I could feel my own vulnerability; the smallest thing could nudge me to tears or laughter.

“You gotta wonder what it would be like,” he said.

“What?”

“Picking up somebody who looked like that. On the street or in a bar, whatever. Then you get her someplace and she takes her clothes off and surprise. I mean, how do you react?”

“I don’t know.”

“ ‘Course if she already had the operation, you could go with her and never know. Her hands didn’t look so big to me. There’s women with big hands and men with little hands, far as that goes.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She had a couple rings on, speaking of her hands. You happen to notice?”

“I noticed.”

“One on each hand, she had.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t take ’em.”

“Why would he take her rings?”

“You were saying he took Dakkinen’s.”

I didn’t say anything.

Gently he said, “Matt, you don’t still think Dakkinen got killed for a reason?”

I felt rage swelling up within me, bulging like an aneurysm in a blood vessel. I sat there trying to will it away.