We went up to her loft and she made a pot of coffee. I sat with a cup of coffee in front of me and by the time I stopped talking and took a sip it was cold. I brought her up to date, told her about Kim’s fur jacket, about the drunken kids and the broken wine bottle, about the trip to Queens and what we’d found there. And I told her, too, how I’d spent this afternoon, riding the subway across the river and walking around Long Island City, returning to knock on doors in Cookie Blue’s East Village tenement, then crossed the island to work the gay bars on Christopher Street and up and down West Street.

By then it had been late enough to get in touch with Joe Durkin and learn what the lab had come up with.

“It was the same killer,” I told Jan. “And he used the same weapon. He’s tall, right handed, and pretty powerful, and he keeps a sharp edge on his machete, or whatever the hell he uses.”

Phone checks with Arkansas yielded nothing. The Fort Smith street address was a phony, predictably enough, and the auto license plate belonged to an orange Volkswagen owned by a nursery school teacher in Fayetteville.

“And she only drove it on Sundays,” Jan said.

“Something like that. He made up the whole Arkansas business the same as he made up Fort Wayne, Indiana. But the license plate was real, or almost real. Somebody thought to check the hot-car sheet, and there was a navy blue Impala stolen off the street in Jackson Heights just a couple hours before Cookie was killed. The plate number’s the same as he used checking in except for a pair of digits reversed, and of course it’s a New York plate instead of Arkansas.

“The car fits the motel clerk’s description, such as it was. It also fits what they got from some other hookers who were on the stroll when Cookie was picked up. They say there was a car like that cruising around for a while before the dude in it made up his mind and picked up Cookie.

“The car hasn’t turned up yet, but that doesn’t mean he’s still driving it. It can take a long time before an abandoned stolen car turns up. Sometimes the thieves leave ’em in a No Parking zone and the police tow truck hauls them to the pound. That’s not supposed to happen, somebody’s supposed to check towed cars against the hot sheet, but it doesn’t always go the way it’s supposed to. It doesn’t matter. It’ll turn out the killer dumped the car twenty minutes after he finished with Cookie, and that he wiped it clean of prints.”

“Matt, can’t you let go of it?”

“Of the whole business?”