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her late thirties. Maybe forty. An attractive woman. I liked her immediately. She looked relaxed and friendly. She showed me her gold shield and handed me her business card. It had numbers on it for her office and her cell. It had an NYPD e-mail address. She said the name on it out loud for me. The name was Theresa Lee, with the T and the h pronounced together, like theme or therapy . Theresa . She wasn’t Asian. Maybe the Lee came from an old marriage or was an Ellis Island version of Leigh, or some other longer and more
    complicated name. Or maybe she was descended from Robert E.
    She said ‘Can you tell me exactly what happened?’
    She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.
    So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.
    Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.
    ‘We have a copy,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be confidential.’
    ‘It’s been out in the world for twenty years,’ I said. ‘Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.’
    ‘Where did you see it?’
    ‘In Israel,’ I said. ‘Just after it was written.’
    ‘How?’
    So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defence budget, suddenly getting cut loose.
    ‘Officer or enlisted man?’ she asked.
    ‘Final rank of major,’ I said.
    ‘And now?’
    ‘I’m retired.’
    ‘You’re young to be retired.’
    ‘I figured I should enjoy it while I can.’
    ‘And are you?’
    ‘Never better.’
    ‘What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?’
    ‘Music,’ I said. ‘Those blues clubs on Bleecker.’
    ‘And where were you headed on the 6 train?’
    ‘I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.’
    ‘To where?’
    ‘Wherever.’
    ‘Short visit?’
    ‘The best kind.’
    ‘Where do you live?’
    ‘Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.’
    ‘Where’s your luggage?’
    ‘I don’t have any.’
    Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, ‘I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.’ She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.
    ‘It was only half wrong,’ I said. ‘The suicide part was right.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.’
    ‘Better than a false negative.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ she said again.
    I asked, ‘Do we know who she was?’
    ‘Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?’
    I said, ‘I have no idea.’
    She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, ‘These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her headscarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.’
    ‘Good point,’ she said.
    ‘And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation.