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"
What?
"

"I don't know—interchangeable?"

Janek
exhaled. "That's it."

Aaron shut his eyes tight to clear away the images. He turned from the wall. "You mean that they fit each other so well?"

"You got it. I think that's what we saw before. And it goes with something else that's strange about this case, something we've never talked about. Remember how the people who first found the bodies weren't sure what they'd seen. Pierson didn't notice that it wasn't Amanda. He took one quick look, then turned away. It didn't register on the super either. And
Bitong
said he thought something was wrong but he didn't know exactly what. When you think about it, that was pretty strange, and that it took the Medical Examiner to discover there'd been a switch. Look at their faces again. They're similar, not identical, not like twins or even sisters, but close enough so you could get confused. Same features, roughly the same-shaped eyes and chins, same hair color, similar haircut, same age and size. If you squint—well, on a quick-glance basis they look more or less the same."

Aaron studied the photographs. "I think that's true. Funny it didn't register."

"You explained it yourself. If you look hard you don't see it anymore. The resemblance is superficial. When you look for it, it disappears. I think, too, if we'd seen the bodies it would have been clearer than it is in photographs."

Aaron grinned. "That's fantastic, Frank. You're good. I'm sure you're right. But—" he looked at
Janek
evenly—"okay, you got something. So now tell me what it means."

Janek
smiled, walked back to his swivel chair, sat down and stretched his legs. He waited while Aaron poised himself on the rear ledge of his desk.

"Suppose the resemblance is the connection we've been looking for. Quite a different thing than mounting a blonde's head on a brunette. Seems to me if you wanted to make these women look different you wouldn't choose this particular pair."

"So?"

"So, suppose you don't want them to look different. Suppose you want to keep them looking pretty much the same."

"Why?"

"To change them in a certain way, but keep the illusion going that you haven't. Take Amanda: so distant, self-contained, inaccessible. Stick the head of a whore who sort of looks like her on her and you give her a whore's personality. Better still, stick her head on the body of a whore and you get an Amanda who's basically a slut."

"What about the other way around? Stick Brenda's head on Amanda's body and that way clean up her act."

"Sure. But why bother? I'm betting on Amanda. She's the one you can't get to, the one you'd want to change. She's so good, you know, so clean, the kind you'd want to dirty up. It seems to me that, once you decide on that, it's a relatively simple matter to shop around for a whore who looks the same and, when you find her, start to plan your switch."

"A headhunting expedition. I don't know, Frank. You're in the stratosphere. I mean, if that's what you want to do, why not just mount Amanda's head on the whore and leave it at that?"

"Then what do you do with Brenda's head?"

"What difference does it make? Stash it in the closet. Roll it under the bed."

Janek
shook his head. He felt sure Aaron was wrong. "You're neat and orderly. You're an artist constructing a puzzle. You're into symmetry and design. You don't like loose ends, so you've got to replace the head you took."

Aaron gazed at him, then announced that he was going home. He'd participated in some pretty weird brainstorming sessions since he'd been in the division, he said, but tonight's was the weirdest yet. He turned when he reached the door. "This kind of stuff can make you crazy, Frank. I'd come down off of it if I were you. You got a theory, sure, and for all I know you're right. But where does it leave you? How does it help you find the guy?"

Janek
wasn't sure where or how, but he felt that it would help, that if he could enter into the madness of this crime the madman would stand revealed. There was always a reason. Killings for gain or revenge were easy, the motives obvious and stark. This was a crime conceived in the shadows and carried out purposefully in the night. There was precision in it and passion. Concentrated rage and a love of order. A need to beautify. Even some strange, unfathomable, as yet
uncatalogued
species of love.

He sat alone in the squad room after Aaron left. Yes, he was betting on Amanda. He thought of calling Caroline, telling her what he'd discovered, then suggesting he come over and spend the night. He stared at the phone, thinking about that. But in the end he didn't pick it up.

When he left the precinct house he drove downtown, ate dinner at a Greek restaurant on Howard Street, then lingered over his coffee staring into space. When he came out it was nearly ten. He got back into his car, crossed to Brooklyn, followed the expressway to Queens, exited on
Greenpoint
Avenue, then worked his way to Corona, knowing that though he was pretending to wander the outer boroughs he was heading straight for the block where Al and Lou had built their wood-frame house.

He parked a few doors down and across the street, turned off his ignition and extinguished his lights. Most of the houses were still lit. He could glimpse the glow of TV screens in living rooms, hear the occasional sound of raised voices, of children laughing, a door being slammed, a dog barking from someone's porch.

What was he doing here?

He had no desire now to visit Lou, confront again her confusion and hurt. He had not come to spy on her house, or to imagine Al still alive inside. He felt no particular remorse, did not believe he had let Al down, should have been there, could have been there, might have saved Al if he had. It was something else, something troubling, something he felt but could not confront. He was resisting it just as for days he had resisted seeing the resemblance between Amanda Ireland and Brenda Beard. It eluded him, but, sitting in his car demanding an explanation, he knew finally the reason he was there: he had come to take a measurement.

He drove slowly, fifteen miles an hour, which he guessed was roughly four times the speed of a person moving normally on foot, and made his
way by
the most direct route he could to the vicinity of Caroline's tennis club. When he was near, roughly halfway between it and her building, he stopped, checked his watch and speedometer and began to calculate. No matter how he figured it, and he tried it several different ways, it did not seem possible that a sixty-six-year-old man could have walked that distance in less than an hour.

And that was just too long for a man who never walked anywhere, who so hated to walk that he'd take his car out on a sparkling autumn day just to drive three blocks for a pack of cigarettes. Which still didn't rule out other possibilities. Al could have come by bus, except he'd have had to change buses three times, or he could have driven over, parked in the neighborhood, then taken a brief stroll around though there wasn't anything worth strolling by or to. Which didn't make it impossible—in the solitude of his retirement Al might have taken to making unexpected expeditions to nondescript neighborhoods in Queens. Oh yes, there were possibilities, infinite possibilities, but the most likely one of all,
Janek
knew, and the one that wrenched his heart, was that the encounter of the fallen bicycle had never taken place.

A
pproaching the
Queensboro
on his way back to Manhattan, he passed a line of hookers on Northern Boulevard lingering in the doorways of the closed and shuttered shops. This, he knew, was the infamous "Truckers' Row" about which there were many tales—of a cross-eyed whore whose eyes uncrossed only when she came, and a Park Avenue socialite the teamsters called "the Countess" who waited there with the hookers because she required the rough embraces of burly tattooed arms.

Driving by them,
Janek
wondered if the Switched Heads killer had also cruised this strip in his long search for a prostitute whose face resembled the inaccessible impenetrable Amanda of his dreams.

A bad night for
Janek
, of blocked trails and ideas he could not sustain: Al and Brenda, Amanda and Caroline; heads mounted on bodies upon which they did not belong. He flung himself from side to side seeking sleep to end his agony, found it finally, but in the morning when he awoke he felt a stab of panic followed by an aching loneliness.

Showering, he heard his telephone. He turned off the water, stood naked and still listening to the rings resound like moans. It was Caroline, he knew, and knew that he wasn't ready yet to deal with her. The thought that when he did he must show her a concealing face caused him to shiver on the tiles.

When he was dressed he called her back, told her he was about to leave for work.

"You sound, I don't know, like you're under strain," she said.

"Guess I am. It's the case. The pressure's on me now."

"Missed you last night. Missed watching you take off your gun." He didn't answer. "Something the matter, Frank?" He was stunned; this was the first time he could recall her using his first name.

"I think something is the matter," he said. "But I can't talk about it now. I'm running late."

"Tonight?"

"Sure."

"I hear something in your voice I haven't heard before."

"Didn't sleep well. I'll try to call you later on."

A long pause. He knew she was struggling, deciding whether to ask him to explain what she was hearing in his voice.

"Goodbye till later, then," he said.

Another pause, and then her own rueful "Goodbye."

At the precinct house there was the smell of a case going bad: detectives making busywork; a lack of firm direction and control. There was no way he could fake it. He had no theory to define the work. He told his team to keep plugging, then took the victim profile books into one of the windowless interrogation rooms, shut the door, sat down at the tiny table, checked out the crummy atmosphere and settled down to read.

He believed in Brenda. There was enough of her there for him to reconstruct her life. He believed in her slow drift downward from aspiring actress through failed model to trick-a-day girl on the escort-agency list. He believed in her alliance with shabby-slick
Prudencio
Bitong
, her love of late-night soul-food dinners, of revival screenings of romantic movies, Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall. Her descent into the degradation of the weekly ad in the sex tabloid was balanced off by halfhearted attempts to pull herself back up. She paid a dentist four thousand dollars to straighten her teeth. She attended classes at the Hazel Carter Fitness Center, where she hoped to meet successful models who would help her resume a modeling career.

Yes,
Janek
believed in Brenda. When he closed his eyes he could see the way she moved. He imagined her slipping out of bed beside a snoring john, padding to the bathroom, rinsing out her mouth, then examining herself in the mirror above the sink until she met her own eyes, froze suddenly and asked, "What will my life be like in twenty years?"

He recaptured the rainy, sullen, New York afternoon she clung to
Prudencio
, sprawled out on her chocolate-colored couch, the way he stroked her and soothed her as he told her how they would make a fortune in Manila, and the way she smiled even as she knew that he was lying when he said he was saving his money to take her there and set her up in style.

Janek
imagined her delight as she aroused a sixteen-year-old boy who came to her terrified, then called her "candy-ass" as he strutted out. And the Thanksgiving Day trick with the balding Dayton businessman who took her out for a turkey sandwich afterward and pressed an extra fifty into her palm when he said goodbye. Brenda was there for him, alive between the lines. She had heart and a kind of passionate desperation. He even thought he might have liked her if she'd lived and they had met.

But Amanda was different. She wasn't there, this Madonna with the self-drawn halo around her head. She was good, oh-so-very-good. Sal had said it first: "Little Miss Perfect—I don't buy that. I don't believe in that."

She paid her bills the day she got them. She ironed her blouses, saved gift-wrap paper, sewed her own dresses from patterns in magazines. She wrote a bland letter home every Sunday, kept photographs of her sister's children on her desk. She ate health foods and subscribed to
Audubon
and headed up the blood drive at the Weston School.

Janek
looked for indications that belied the perfect image—her strange choice of friends, for instance, selfish demanding people he wouldn't have expected her to like. A sickly couple in their seventies, a complaining failed feminist writer, and Gary Pierson with his narcissistic tales of destructive transient love affairs. No doubt Amanda was attractive to these people, an attentive listener. She shook her head sympathetically and clucked at all the proper times. But was there the hint of a smirk in her responses, a smugness, a superiority? She chose people who would open up to her but to whom she would never have to show herself.

Then there was the dog. Something peculiar and revealing about that dog, a sense that it had picked up her concealed feelings and turned them into obnoxious traits. Nobody liked the dog, named, maddeningly, Petunia—a nasty, yelping, snarling little creature who dragged Amanda along as if she were the one on the leash. This little darling leaped aggressively at strangers while Amanda smiled weakly as if the matter was beyond control. People in the building reported she muttered to it, "Oh,
Petti
, there's that
bad
man from the pharmacy," or "There's the
mean
woman who lives downstairs."