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weeks.”
    “Why the hell didn’t he notify anyone?”
    “Says he figured she was on vacation. We went up there and pulled a set of prints. We matched them downtown with what the M.E.‘s got. It’s her, all right.”
    “So what the hell are you so browned off about?”
    “What the hell am I browned off about?” Mooney could hear the words gagging in the chief of detectives’ throat. “I’ve had a half-dozen guys up on Seventy-third Street all day, doing your goddamned job, while you’re off at the flats.”
    “So I slipped out for a couple of hours. Big deal.”
    “Big deal is right. It should’ve been you up there on Seventy-third Street pulling prints. There’s a family up in Great Barrington has to be notified.”
    Mooney groaned. “Oh, Christ, Mulvaney. Don’t give me that job. If you’ve a shred of decency, I beg you.”
    “You notify those people tonight, Frank. Get ‘em down here first thing in the morning to make an identification. Then get on to the girl’s boss.”
    “Her boss?”
    “She worked for some kind of literary agency up on Fifty-seventh Street. Crane, Poole Associates. You get your ass up there tomorrow and —”
    By that time Mooney was steaming. “Listen, I’m just sitting down to dinner.”
    “How swell for you. I’m not. I’m three hours away from dinner. Buried under a mound of turd here. Anything yet on those number scribblings?”
    Mooney sighed, resigned to what he knew must follow. “The math professor up at Columbia tells me they looked to him like a fixed series.”
    “A fixed what?”
    “He says they’re things called fibonacci numbers, tribonacci numbers …”
    “Oh, Christ.”
    “Yeah, I know. He’s got a lot of fancy names for it. Integer sequences. Combinatorics. Numbers theory. Solid state physics. It all boils down to the fact that there are repetitions of certain sequences all throughout nature, and these sequences sometimes tie things together which you wouldn’t normally think tie together. Get it?”
    “No,” Mulvaney snapped. “I’m not too big on nature. What the hell does that tell me specifically about these numbers we keep finding?”
    Mooney swallowed hard. “Nothing. But you know that string of numbers we found down in the drain on that Bailey job last month, fourteen, twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-four, forty-two?”
    “What about ‘em?”
    “Mussacchio over at the Nineteenth swears they’re also the local stops on the West Side IRT.”
    “Terrific. Now we can start patrolling the whole goddamned subway.”
    “I’m also talking to a linguist guy up at Natural History,” Mooney went on with failing courage. “He’s sure the numbers have something to do with the alphabet.”
    “Alphabet?” Mulvaney s voice made a sharp squeal as if he’d been struck.
    “The idea being that in standard cryptography you can assign a numerical value for every letter in the alphabet, A being one; B, two; C, three; and so forth.”
    “Brilliant. And how does that jibe with the numbers we’ve got?”
    “It doesn’t. At least not for the Roman alphabet. Now he’s checking the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Greek, the Pythagorean, the Phoenician, the Syriac …”
    “And what’s all this supposed to tell us?”
    “Who knows? Maybe that our guy is a Syrian math whiz. How the hell should I know?”
    “Sounds like a pile of horseshit to me.”
    “Bingo.”
    “Anything new on that Torrelson job?”
    There wasn’t, but Mooney felt it might be prudent to make it appear there was. “Well, maybe.”
    “Maybe what?”
    “The car. It looks like it’s green.”
    “Green what?”
    “Just that. That’s all we know.”
    Mulvaney made a strangled sound. “You really outdid yourself, didn’t you?”
    “We squeezed a little more out of the old dame next door. We’re trying to put a make on the car now.”
    “Take my advice, Frank. You try hard. Real hard. There’s a lot of people watching you.”
    “I’ll try not to disappoint them,”