Rhyme looked over the pictures of the scene, particularly the pattern the blood had made as it flowed onto the pier. He guessed that the victim had been hanging over the edge of the deck, at chest level, his fingers desperately wedged into the space between the planks. The fingernail marks showed that eventually he’d lost his grip. Rhyme wondered how long the vic had been able to hang on.

He nodded slowly. “Tell me about the next scene.”

Pulaski replied, “All right, that homicide occurred in an alley off Cedar Street, near Broadway. This alley featured a dead end. It was fifteen feet wide and one hundred and four feet long and was surfaced with cobblestones.”

The body, Rhyme recalled, was fifteen feet from the mouth of the alley.

“What’s the time of death?”

“At least eight hours before he was found, the ME tour doc said. The body was frozen solid so it’ll take a while to determine with any certainty.” The young officer suffered from the habit of copspeak.

“Amelia told me about the service and fire doors in the alley. Did anybody ask what time they were locked for the night?”

“Three of the buildings’re commercial. Two of them lock their service doors at eight thirty and one at ten. The other’s a government administration building. That door’s locked at six. There’s a late-night garbage pickup at ten.”

“Body discovered when?”

“Around seven A.M.”

“Okay, the vic in the alley was dead at least eight hours, last door was locked at ten and garbage picked up then. So the killing took place between, say, ten fifteen and eleven P.M. Parking situation?”

“I got the license plates of every car in a two-block radius.” Pulaski was holding up a Moby-Dick of a notebook.

“What the hell’s that?”

“Oh, I wrote down notes about all the cars. Thought it might be helpful. You know, where they were parked, anything suspicious about them.”

“Waste of time. We just needed the tag numbers for names and addresses,” Rhyme explained. “To cross-check DMV with NCIC and the other databases. We don’t care who needed bodywork or had bald tires or a crack pipe in the backseat. . . . Well, did you?”

“What?”

“Run the tags?”

“Not yet.”

Cooper went online but found no warrants on any of the registered owners of the cars. At Rhyme’s instruction he also checked to see if any parking tickets were issued in that area around the time of the killing. There were none.

“Mel, run the vic’s name. Warrants? Anything else about him?”

There were no state warrants on Theodore Adams, and Pulaski recounted what his sister had said about him—that he apparently had no enemies or personal life issues that might result in his murder.

“Why these vics, though?” Rhyme asked. “Are they random? . . . I know Dellray’s busy but this’s important. Give him a call and have him run Adams’s name. See if the feds have anything on him.”

Sellitto made a call to the federal building and got through to Dellray—who was in a bad mood because of the “fucking quagmire” of a financial fraud case he’d been assigned. Still, he managed to look through the federal databases and active case files. But the results were negative on Theodore Adams.