“Could be just that.”

Chatterjee took him by the elbow. “Talk to her,” he said, gently launching him toward the examination room. “Youth wants to know.”

Room 23 was smaller and more private than the general surgery room—three fixed gurneys ringed with plastic curtains, a view of the Hudson. Brenda Martin, sporting a shiny goose egg high on her forehead from her earlier fall in the ER, sat slumped and disheveled on the edge of one of the gurneys. Her legs dangled lifelessly, and a mahogany spray of Betadine solution ran in a comet tail from her jeans to her chin, as if she had struggled with whoever had tried to disinfect her wounds. Both her palms were fat with bandages, and one wrist sported a Curlex splint.

Lorenzo eased into the room, not wanting to step up until the two uniforms who were squatting below her, bouncing on their haunches, found a natural break-off point in their interview. Hands folded across his belt buckle, he lay back in the cut, like a soloist waiting for his cue, and attempted to size her up. Thin and colorless, she struck him as one of those people whose fervent desire to be unnoticed, to be invisible, makes them disappear before your eyes. Picking up only an honest aura of emotional distress, he would just have to see what else developed.

The only other patient in the room, a fat, unkempt white man, sat in a corner reading Moby-Dick. One bare, diabetically bloated foot was propped up on a chair in front of him, an IV drip ran into his left arm from a stand, and under his right arm, nesting on the chair beside him, three yellow semitransparent Foodtown bags bulged with clothing and paperbacks.

The two other gurneys were unoccupied, one piled high with a wild rumple of bedsheets, the other stripped to its rubberized surface.

“You say black,” one of the cops said softly, shifting his weight. “Black, like, darker than me? Lighter than me?”

Brenda held a Diet Coke between her bandaged palms and brought it to her mouth with both hands, as if she were a bear trying to get honey out of a jar. “I told you, I don’t want to say. It was, you know, night.”

Her voice was small, her eyes stark yet avoiding direct contact. Lorenzo wondered if that was about deception or shame.

“OK, fair enough,” the cop said. “And you say five-ten, six foot, about?”

“About.”

“One eighty, two hundred pounds? You still feel that?”

“Guessing.” She saw Lorenzo and quickly took him in, head to toe. Lorenzo tried to throw her a smile, but her eyes were moving too fast to catch it, now staring down at her bandages, then across the room to the slovenly diabetic.

“Moby-Dick,” she said hoarsely, looking again at her lap. “That’s a good book.”

The diabetic eyed her for a moment before returning to his reading; Lorenzo thinking, Miss Peekaboo.

“Anything else you can tell us?” the other cop said, shifting his weight in obvious discomfort.

Lorenzo assumed that they had both positioned themselves below her because they were black, like the carjacker, and wanted to adopt a nonthreatening posture to make her feel as relaxed as possible. But why the hell didn’t they just pull up some chairs?

One cop tapped his partner on the shoulder and they both turned to him, then stood upright, somebody’s kneecaps popping.

“Hey, boss,” he addressed both of them, using his business smile. “Can I…” He left it hanging, nodded to Brenda.

“You gonna write the report?” one of the uniforms asked hopefully.

Lorenzo shrugged: No problem.

“Brenda?” the same cop spoke up. “This is Detective Lorenzo Council.”

Lorenzo smiled at her again, took another half step forward.

Brenda’s eyes went up as far as his chin, and then she did something that threw him: she extended one of her bandaged hands, saying, “Hi,” almost inaudibly Warily Lorenzo made physical contact. Her fingertips were like ice.

“How you doin’, Brenda?”

The other cops began to back out of the room.

“Not good.”

He pulled up a chair, thinking, Six-foot, two-hundred-pound black man knocks her around, here comes me—she should be jumping out the window. Shaking my hand…

“Brenda, anything I can get you?” He tried again to catch her eye. “Anything you need?”

She raised her soda can. “They got me this,” she said, nodding to the doorway where the cops had exited.

“You comfortable?”

“No.”

“OK, listen. I know you’re upset, all right? And I know you’re probably real tired right now.” He waited for a reaction, but she just stared at her soda. “But the sooner we go through this the faster we can make something good happen, OK?”

She looked like she was about to cry, her face bunching up again, but all that came out was a vibrating sigh, Lorenzo thinking, Something else.

“Brenda? Would you like a female investigator here? Would that make you more comfortable?”

She compressed her lips, eyes on her hands. “I wasn’t raped, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“Good.” He studied her. “I’m glad to hear that. Now, the other officers? They already put out a description of the car and the actor; everybody’s already looking for him, OK? But if you can bear with me, just tell the story one more time, so I can—”

“I was trying to get from Hurley Street to Gannon,” she said, cutting him off. “I live in Gannon.”

Lorenzo had guessed as much, Gannon being the mostly white blue-collar town bordering the so-called Darktown section of Dempsy.