They found each other amid the city's tangle of disconnected lives.
Both executives, Rick Varela and Sarah Auerbach met last year at a wine tasting. They dated. She broke it off.Then came harassing phone calls. She accused him of rape. More complaints followed.
Then on Thursday morning, Varela donned a disguise, followed Auerbach into a dry cleaning shop and pumped six bullets into her head in front of several customers. Sometime later, Varela shot himself in the head.
Varela's body was found early Friday on a park bench in the elegant Brooklyn Heights section, along a promenade offering a striking view of the Wall Street world where Auerbach had prospered.
The suicide ended a dark story of obsession that stunned those who knew the pair as stable, successful professionals.
"We were shocked and saddened," said Mort Myerson of Ernst & Young, the accounting firm where Varela had worked for the past year.
"We're all in shock," said Robert Baker, spokesman for Salomon Brothers, the investment house where the 35-year-old Auerbach was a vice president in the financial division.
Auerbach was in the midst of a divorce after a lengthy separation, friends said. Last summer, she met Varela, a 46-year-old management consultant who was divorced and had recently moved to Manhattan from the Chicago area.
Their seven-month relationship ended in October. Then came a string of harassing phone calls.
On Nov. 19, Auerbach told police that Varela had appeared at her apartment the night before and raped her at knifepoint. But she did not press charges.
Less than a week later, Auerbach filed a harassment complaint after Varela allegedly showed up at her office. Private security guards at Salomon Brothers were given a photo of Varela and told to turn him away.
She filed another harassment complaint in February but apparently never sought an order of protection from the courts.
On a visit to Illinois in late March, Varela legally purchased a semiautomatic handgun believed to be the murder weapon, said Lt. Raymond O'Donnell, a Police Department spokesman.
On Thursday morning, Varela drove a rented car to Auerbach's neighborhood. He waited for a few minutes in a bakery across the street from the dry cleaner she had patronized for seven years.
Tony Morales, who works at the bakery, said Varela was wearing a wig, granny glasses and a long military coat. When Morales tried to wait on him, he left.
Varela had watched as Auerbach dropped off her dry cleaning. He stole up behind her, put the gun to her head and fired several rounds.
"I thought it was a toy gun," said Sun Hi Song, wife of the manager at the cleaners. "It went off - Pow! Pow! Pow! . . . Then he just walked out of the store, and she fell down to the floor."
Varela returned his rental car in midtown Manhattan, then went to a movie. Later, he went back to Brooklyn Heights.
His life ended just a short walk away from Auerbach's apartment. Before killing himself, Varela called his ex-wife in Illinois to bid her and their daughter goodbye, police said.
On Friday, someone left a dozen pink tulips on the sidewalk outside the dry cleaners. A greeting card was taped to a parking meter above the flowers.
"Sarah - God bless you," the card read, "and all the women who have been murdered."