Stone looked her up and down—the luxuriant, dark hair; the chiseled face; the full breasts under the black cashmere; the long legs finishing in slender feet. He hooked an arm around her narrow waist and pulled her to him.

She smiled and rubbed her belly against his. “Apparently not,” she said, then kissed him.

Stone slid down a long, velvet tunnel of desire, made no attempt to slow his fall. Their clothes vanished, and they found the bed. Stone made to move on top of her, then cried out when his swollen knee took his weight.

She pushed him onto his back, kissed the knee, kissed his lips and his nipples, kissed his navel and his penis, took him in her mouth, nearly swallowed him, brought him fully erect, then slid him inside her.

Stone looked up at the long body, the firm breasts, freed from the cashmere, the lips parted in ecstasy, the glazed eyes. She sucked him inside her again and again. When he thought he would come, she stopped and sat still, kissing his ears and his eyes, then she began again. Half an hour seemed to stretch into weeks, until, bathed in sweat, his face buried between her breasts, he came with her, and their cries echoed around the underfurnished room.

They lay in each other’s arms, spent, breathing hard, caressing.

“You never told me what your favorite thing was,” Stone said.

“That was it,” Cary replied, kissing him.

Stone woke to broad daylight, and she was gone. A card was propped on the mantelpiece. There were phone numbers for home and work and an address: 1011 Fifth Avenue.

Chapter

11

Stone arrived in the detectives’ squad room of the 19th Precinct feeling rested, refreshed, fulfilled, and in an extremely good mood. The good mood was tempered somewhat by the rows of empty desks in the room. Twenty-four hours earlier, they had been filled with detectives doing his bidding, chasing down every lead on the Sasha Nijinsky disappearance, leaving only to interview her co-workers and acquaintances, again at his bidding. He had the sickening feeling that his time at the head of the investigation had come to an end.

Dino was in Lieutenant Leary’s glassed-in office at the end of the large room. Stone rapped on the glass and joined them. “Where is everybody?” he asked Dino as he pulled up a chair.

“On the cabdriver thing,” Dino said.

Stone turned to Leary. “Lieutenant, you’re not going to pull my guys off this investigation and put them on a cabdriver murder, are you?”

“Yeah,” Leary said, “but it’s three murders.”

“The cabdriver and who else?” Stone asked.

“The cabdriver and two other cabdrivers,” Leary said. “Don’t you watch TV or nothing?”

“I got a late start this morning,” Stone said. “You mean three cabdrivers on the same day?”