The Kills

I walked to the elevator and met the guys, who were deep in conversation about how far ahead of Boston the Yankees would end the season. The cop who had the lobby security post bid us good night. 'Full moon, Ms. Cooper. I'd get rid of Chapman first shot you get.'

I gave him a thumbs-up and got into the passenger seat of Mercer's car, parked up the street on Hogan Place, telling Mike we'd meet him at the restaurant on Sixty-fourth Street.

'Mercer, before you get in, remember to dig out the pictures, okay?'

He nodded and opened the trunk, handing me four packages of snapshots of the baby who had been born in the spring to him and his wife Vickee. As we pulled away from the curb, I turned on the interior light and flipped through the photographs.

'It's amazing how much they change in just one month. He's enormous.'

Mercer Wallace was forty-two, six years older than Mike and me. He was one of a handful of African Americans who had been promoted to the coveted first-grade rank in the detective division of the NYPD. After his mother died in childbirth, he had been raised by his father, Spencer, in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, where the elder Wallace had worked as a mechanic at Delta Airlines.

His second marriage, to an equally talented detective named Vickee Eaton whom he admired and adored, had ended a few years ago when she walked out on him. But after Mercer was wounded in a shoot-out during a murder investigation, Vickee had come back to help him heal, and the quietly charismatic man had rejoiced at his great good fortune. The remarriage and recent birth of Logan Wallace marked the first go at establishing a family among what Mike, Mercer, and I liked to think of as our modern urban trio of musketeers.

I listened to Mercer's description of his new lifestyle, my head against the car window, mindlessly watching the overhead lights as we streaked past them up the East River Drive. Sleepless nights were nothing new for any of us. But bottles, feedings, formula, disposable diapers, and a wonderful little life for which both Mercer and Vickee were completely responsible was a whole new dynamic.

'I know I'm boring you to pieces, Alex.'

'Not at all. I love hearing about him. I intend to try very hard to spoil him beyond imagining and be his favorite auntie,' I said. 'On the other hand, the minute you start proselytizing like Mike, I'll treat you the same way I treat telemarketers who call in the middle of my dinner hour.'

I listened to him tell me about the joys of fatherhood while my mind wandered for the rest of the ride. Something had brought me close enough to formalizing my relationship with Jake that I had tried living with him in the middle of the previous winter. When I took a step backward from that move, it was without any regret that I was putting off a decision about marriage and raising a child.

I had often tried to figure out what it was that made me so content with my present single situation, since I had experienced all the benefits of a warm and loving family throughout my youth and adolescence. My mother, Maude, had met my father while she was at college getting her nursing degree. She had every superb nurturing quality of a great RN, but had diverted her skills and her own career to the paramount feature of her life: her marriage. My two older brothers and I were brought up in a household in which family came first-parents, grandparents, and siblings. Now it seemed the independence that everyone had worked so hard to instill in me had firmly taken root and made me entirely comfortable in my own skin.

'What do you hear from your folks? They okay?'

'They're fine. They're out West, visiting my brother and his kids,' I said to Mercer.

My father, Benjamin, had retired from his cardiology practice years ago. The simple plastic tubing that he and his partner had developed three decades earlier had been used in all open-heart surgery in virtually every operating room in the country. It was the Cooper-Hoffman valve that had cushioned my lifestyle, providing a superb education-my degree in English literature from Wellesley and the subsequent Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia-as well as the means to maintain my apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and my beloved farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard.

But it was my father's devotion to public service in his medical career that led me to try something comparable in the law by applying to the Office of the District Attorney following my graduation more than twelve years earlier. I had anticipated spending five or six years there before moving on to private practice. As I rotated through the routine assignments of the young prosecutorial staff, I'd been fascinated and engaged by the work of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit. The endless challenges-legal, investigative, scientific, and emotional-kept me riveted, and committed to making a professional home for myself in this new specialty within the law, created just a generation earlier.

We pulled off the drive and circled the block before Mercer spotted a parking place on Second Avenue.

Mike was standing on the sidewalk with Giuliano, the owner of the restaurant. Both seemed to be enjoying the warm September evening.

' Ciao, Signorina Cooper. Com'e stai?How was your holiday?' He held the door open and ushered us to the corner table at the window, where Adolfo seated us and started to describe the specials.

'Fine, thanks. And Italy?'

' Bellissima,like always. Fenton,' he called to the bartender. 'Dewar's on the rocks for Ms. Cooper. Doppio. And your best vodka for the gentlemen. On me.'

'You oughta stay away more often, Coop. Giuliano's so happy to see you he's giving away his booze. That's a first.'

I ordered the veal special, a paillard pounded thin and lightly breaded, with arugula and chopped tomatoes on top. Mercer asked for sausage and pepper with a side dish of fettuccine, and Mike settled on the lobster fra diavolo.

'How's Valerie?' I asked.

'Pretty good. She never seems to pick her head up from the drafting table long enough to tell me.' Mike had been dating a woman for the past year, an architect who was involved in planning the redesign of the Museum of Modern Art. They'd met when Valerie was in the early stages of recovering from a mastectomy, in treatment at Sloan-Kettering Hospital, where Mike had gone to donate blood.

'How did the trip to California go?' Valerie had taken him home to Palo Alto to meet her family over the Labor Day weekend.

'I'm not sure Professor Jacobsen's first choice for his daughter's beau is a New York City detective, but the old lady handled it pretty well.'

Michael Patrick Chapman was the son of a legendary street cop, a second-generation immigrant who had met his wife on a visit to the family home in County Cork. Brian was on the job for twenty-six years, dying of a massive coronary barely two days after turning in his gun and shield. That had been during Mike's junior year at Fordham, and although he'd completed school the following year, he'd applied for admission to the police academy before he handed back his cap and gown. He had idolized his father, longed to follow in his footsteps, and distinguished himself in his rookie year with a major arrest following the drug-related massacre of a Colombian family in Washington Heights.

I raised my glass and clinked it against the others'. For the better part of the last decade, these two men had become my closest friends. They'd taught me the creative investigative skills they themselves had mastered, they covered my back whenever I was exposed to danger or double-dealing, and they could make me laugh at the darkest moments of my life.

Dinner was casual and easy. We caught up on each other's personal lives and reminded Mike of the details of the Tripping case. I wanted an early night, so Mercer dropped me in front of my building before ten, and Mike went on to his office to do paperwork, ready for the long tour ahead.

The doorman let me in and handed me the mail and dry cleaning that had been left in the valet's room. I rode up the twenty stories in the elevator, key in hand, opening my apartment door and flipping on the lights.

I spent an hour at my desk organizing my questions for the morning. Jake called at eleven-fifteen, when he got off the air after delivering his piece.

'Hope you don't mind that I stayed in D.C.'

'Good timing, actually. I get to concentrate on the trial. The sooner I have it behind me, the happier I'll be.'

'Remind me what we've got on for the weekend.'

'Saturday night we've got theater tickets with Joan and Jim. Friday night I thought we'd have a quiet evening