Chapter 1

At 1:27 p.m. on February 2, the temperature in Central Park rose above freezing for the first time in nine days, and the city began to drip.

Corrado heard the call eleven minutes later, half a sentence of it from across the squad room. Inwood. A woman in her twenties, in her own apartment. No forced entry.

He was on his feet before he heard the rest. It wasn’t his turn. He asked the lieutenant for it anyway, and the lieutenant looked at him a moment longer than the question needed and gave it to him. The detective who was up next said nothing, which meant he would say it later.

He took the Harlem River Drive north. The snowbanks along the river had gone gray and soft, and water ran off the overpasses in bright threads that broke across the windshield. He got off at Dyckman Street, where the drive ran out, and worked his way into Inwood.

Academy Street was a lane of buried cars. The city had suspended alternate-side parking after the storm eight days ago, and nobody on the block had moved a car since. The plows had walled the cars in where they stood, and now the walls were melting into the gutters. Halfway down the block a radio car sat double-parked with its lights turning, and a sergeant waited on a stoop with his phone to his ear.

The building was a five-story walk-up from around the First World War, dark brick, with fire escapes zigzagging down the front. By the time Corrado got there, every footprint on the stoop had gone to slush.

The sergeant lowered the phone.

“Third floor, front,” he said. “Squad’s up there. The super’s in the vestibule. The sister’s in my car. She won’t leave till they bring her sister out.”

Corrado glanced at the radio car. Through the back window he could see a woman with her head down.

He went in.

The vestibule smelled of radiator heat and wet wool. The super was a heavy man in his sixties in a Yankees jacket, standing with his back against the mailboxes as if somebody had put him there. A uniformed officer waited beside him, not talking. The super watched Corrado go by.

The stairs were marble, worn to a shallow dip in the middle of every tread. On the third-floor landing a young officer held the scene log on a clipboard, and a woman in a long black coat was writing in a notebook she held flat against the wall. She was small, about forty, with reading glasses low on her nose. She looked at Corrado the way precinct detectives looked at anybody from Homicide who turned up on their case: like weather. She would wait it out.

“You’re Corrado,” she said.

“Danny.”

“Yesenia Hiraldo.” She didn’t offer her hand. She had the pen in it. “It’s mine.”

“I know it is.”

The precinct squad carried the case. Homicide worked it alongside them, and on paper that was all he was there to do.

“They said you’d ask for this one.”

“Who said?”

“Everybody who heard the call.” She turned a page. “Paola Ovalles. Twenty-six. Patient care associate at the Allen Hospital. Moved in here right after Christmas. She had a seven o’clock shift and didn’t show. The hospital called her emergency contact, that’s the sister, and the sister called her all morning. Then she called the super. He opened up a little before one.”

“Opened what?”

Hiraldo raised her eyes from the notebook.

“He’s got a key to the lock that came with the door,” she said. “That one locks by itself when the door shuts. The three new ones are hers. She put them in herself, the week she moved in. He didn’t like it. Holes in his door.”

“Who else has keys to hers?”

“The sister says nobody. She doesn’t have a set either.”

“And they were open.”

“All of them. Chain off. He turned his key and pushed, and the sister went in past him.” She closed the notebook on the pen. “Crime Scene’s twenty minutes out. The M.E.’s investigator said two hours.”

Corrado signed the log. He pulled on booties and gloves and went as far as the doorway and no farther.

There were three deadbolts on the door, one above the other, so new the brass was still bright. The screws were bright too. The chain hung loose beside the locks. None of the strike plates was bent, and there wasn’t a mark on the frame. Either there were keys nobody knew about, or she had opened all three herself. Corrado thought he knew which.

He stayed where he was and let the apartment be quiet around him. A radiator knocked. Upstairs somebody had a television on, a game show, the audience clapping on cue. Whoever lived up there was home on a Monday afternoon, and might have been home earlier that morning. Down in the street a car door shut.

She lay a few steps inside, in the short hall between the door and the kitchen, on her side, with one arm under her. She wore black leggings and a gray Hostos Community College sweatshirt, and one sock was half off. Her hair had come loose from whatever had been holding it. Even from the door he could see the marks on her neck.

He read the rest of the place from where he stood. It was a one-bedroom, and not much of one. The kitchen was a counter, a two-burner stove and a window on an airshaft. There was one mug in the drying rack and one bowl. Her phone lay on the counter, face down, plugged into the wall. Whatever it knew about her morning would have to wait for a warrant. Her boots were on a folded towel inside the door. They were stained white with salt, and they were dry. He guessed she hadn’t been out that morning. If he was wrong, the phone might show it.

At the end of the hall, the front room’s one big window was full of low white sun.

Crime Scene hadn’t arrived. Corrado told Hiraldo he would take upstairs, and she told him to take it.

The man who opened the door on the fourth floor was in his seventies, in a cardigan buttoned wrong, with the game show still going behind him. He knew she was dead. She had lived below him since Christmas, and he had never learned her name.

“Her locks,” he said. “Every morning when she goes to work. Three of them, and the chain.”

“This morning?”

“Before six. I looked at the clock and thought, she’s early today.”

“Did you hear her go down the stairs?”

He thought about it. “No. I usually hear her boots. I lay there a few minutes before I went back to sleep. Nothing after the locks.”

Back on the third-floor landing, Corrado told Hiraldo what the man had said.

Crime Scene’s two detectives came up the stairs at a quarter to three with their cases and their cameras, and for an hour the apartment belonged to them. When they had photographed her and laid stepping plates down the hall, Hiraldo walked it, and Corrado went behind her and put his feet where she put hers.

On the refrigerator, under a magnet, was a postcard of the Dyckman Farmhouse, the last Dutch farmhouse in Manhattan, three blocks away on Broadway. More than a century ago, when it was falling down, two Dyckman sisters bought it, restored it and gave it to the city. Paola must have walked over to see it.

The front room had a couch with a blanket folded over the arm, a television on a stand with the cardboard corners still on it, and three boxes against the wall labeled BOOKS in black marker, in careful capitals. A curtain rod in its box lay along the windowsill. She had been here five weeks and hadn’t hung the curtains.

The sun had gone off the window while Crime Scene worked. Corrado stood there and took in what she had seen from it: the brick front of the building across the street, a fire escape with a dead plant on it, the corner at the end of the block and a strip of sky.

He had stood in a doorway like hers before. In 2012, on a Harlem block he still drove past when he didn’t have to, a woman had lain a few steps inside her own door, and he had been sure, before anyone told him, who had put her there. He had been sure of it for fourteen years. The man had walked.

Hiraldo was waiting for him at the apartment door.

“She had an order of protection,” she said. “On the ex.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Two years together, at his place. Then she left him. She went down to Family Court on Lafayette in December and got a temporary order, full stay-away. He’s been calling the sister since Christmas, asking where she lives.”

“Did the sister tell him?”

“The sister says nobody told him. He found her anyway.” She nodded at the deadbolts. “She bought those because of him.”

Corrado didn’t answer. The radiator under the window knocked twice and was quiet.

“Three new locks,” Hiraldo said. “And she opened every one of them.”

“They do,” Corrado said. He had seen it before. A woman put in new locks against one man, and when that man came to the door, she let him in.

He went down the stairs and out onto the stoop. The street was in shadow now. A dozen people stood behind the tape at the corner, and a boy had his phone up over their heads. A woman asked the officer there, in Spanish, who it was. He told her he couldn’t say. By dark the slush would be ice.

The sister was still in the back of the radio car. She was older than Paola, maybe thirty, in a parka with the hood down, and she held her phone in both hands.

Corrado opened the back door and crouched in the slush beside it, so she wouldn’t have to look up at him.

“I’m Danny Corrado,” he said. “I’m sorry. What’s your name?”

“Dilenia.”

She studied him. Then she turned and looked past him, at the door of the building.

“She was so proud of those locks,” she said.