She nodded. “It’s police procedure from here on in, isn’t it? Sifting evidence, running down all the details.”

“I suppose so.”

“And it’s not as though they’re likely to put this on the shelf and forget about it, the way you thought they might when it was just Kim who was dead. The papers wouldn’t let them shelve it even if they wanted to.”

“That’s true.”

“So is there a reason why you have to push yourself on this? You already gave your client his money’s worth.”

“Did I?”

“Didn’t you? I think you worked harder for the money than he did.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“So why stay with it? What can you do that the whole police force can’t?”

I wrestled with that one. After a moment I said, “There’s got to be a connection.”

“What kind of connection?”

“Between Kim and Cookie. Because, damnit, otherwise they don’t make sense. A psycho killer always has a pattern for what he’s doing, even if it only exists in his own mind. Kim and Cookie didn’t look alike and didn’t have similar lives. For Christ’s sake, they weren’t even the same sex to start with. Kim worked off a phone in her own apartment and had a pimp. Cookie was a transsexual streetwalker doing the johns in their cars. She was an outlaw. Chance is doing some double-checking to see if she had a pimp nobody knew about, but it doesn’t look likely.”

I drank some cold coffee. “And he picked Cookie,” I went on. “He took his time, he drove up and down those streets, he made sure he got her and not somebody else. Where’s the connection? It’s not a matter of type. She was a completely different physical type from Kim.”

“Something in her personal life?”

“Maybe. Her personal life’s hard to trace. She lived in the East Village and tricked in Long Island City. I couldn’t find anybody in the West Side gay bars who knew her. She didn’t have a pimp and she didn’t have a lover. Her neighbors on East Fifth Street never knew she was a prostitute, and only a few of them suspected she wasn’t a woman. Her only family’s her brother and he doesn’t even know she’s dead.”

I talked some more. Ricone wasn’t an Italian word, and if it was a name it was an uncommon one. I’d checked telephone directories for Manhattan and Queens without finding a single Ricone listed.

When I ran dry she got more coffee for both of us and we sat for a few minutes without speaking. Then I said, “Thanks.”

“For the coffee?”

“For listening. I feel better now. I had to talk my way through it.”

“Talking always helps.”

“I suppose so.”

“You don’t talk at meetings, do you?”