Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

or visit us online to sign up at

eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Rhymes with Prey

Jeffery Deaver and John Sandford

From the anthology FaceOff

Simon & Schuster

New York   London   Toronto   Sydney   New Delhi

JEFFERY DEAVER

VS. JOHN SANDFORD

Combining Lincoln Rhyme and Lucas Davenport in a single adventure seemed an insurmountable problem. Rhyme, the hero of Jeffery Deaver’s series that began with The Bone Collector (1997), is a quadriplegic and, of necessity, sticks close to home in New York City. Davenport, the star of John Sandford’s Prey series, is an ace investigator living in Minnesota—working presently for that state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

How could the two ever meet?

Fortunately, Davenport’s talents as a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners cop have transported him to the Big Apple before. In Silent Prey (1992), NYPD Detective Lily Rothenburg enlisted Davenport’s aid in nailing the psychotic killer Dr. Michael Bekker, who was prowling the streets of Manhattan. Rhyme, too, has a partner, Detective Amelia Sachs, so Jeff and John decided it was a natural fit for this foursome to join forces to tackle the case of a murderous sculptor for whom art and death are inextricably—and gruesomely—intertwined.

The combination of these four was particularly harmonious since Lucas Davenport and Lily Rothenburg are known for their streetwise policing and skill at psychological profiling—while Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs ply the complementary skill of forensic science. Together, they take on the task of figuring out who’s doing what and why to victims in Lower Manhattan’s chic art scene.

The process of writing this story was seamless. Both John and Jeff are experienced at this sort of thing. Together, they developed an outline, comprising about eight scenes, then divided up the task of writing each one. Jeff handled the crime scene and forensics-oriented portions, John the undercover and street investigations. Rather than writing serially—one section after the other, sending the finished portions to each other—amazingly, they worked simultaneously. When the rough story was finished, they each polished the completed manuscript, combined edits, and, voila, they had a story.

It’s a chilling tale, one filled with each author’s trademark reversals and twists. You’ll think twice about ever walking into an art gallery again.

And heaven help you if you ever strike up a conversation with a stranger in a bar.

Rhymes with Prey

THE NIGHT WAS HOT, AND close, and the midsummer perfume of Central Park West—the odor of melted bubble gum, mixed with discarded cheese pretzels and rotten bananas, or something just like that—seeped into the backseat of the taxi as it cleared Fifty-seventh Street and headed north.

The taxi driver was Pakistani, from Karachi, he said, a slender, mild-mannered man who smelled lightly of cumin with an overlay of Drakkar Noir cologne. He listened to what might have been Pakistani jazz, or Afghani rap, or something even more exotic; the couple in the backseat wouldn’t have known the difference, if there was any difference. When the male passenger asked how big Karachi was, the driver said, “More big than New York City, but more small than New York City if includes the suburgers.”

The woman said, “Really,” with an edge of skepticism.

The Pakistani picked up the skepticism and said, “I look in Wiki, and this is what Wiki say.”

The male passenger was from Minnesota and, not knowing any better, or because he was rich and didn’t care, overtipped the driver as he and the woman got out of the cab. As it moved away, he said to her, “I could use a suburger right now. With catsup and fries.”

“You just don’t want to deal with Rhyme,” she said. “He makes you nervous.”

Lucas Davenport looked up at Lincoln Rhyme’s town house, a Victorian pile facing the park, with a weak, old-fashioned light over the doorway. “I’m getting over it. When I first went in there, I had a hard time looking at him. That pissed him off. I could feel it, and I feel kinda bad about it.”

“Didn’t have any trouble looking at Amelia,” said Lily Rothenburg.

“Be nice,” Lucas said, as they walked toward the front steps. “I’m happily married.”

“Doesn’t keep you from checking out the market,” Lily said.

“I don’t think she’s on the market,” Lucas said. He made a circling motion with an index finger. “I mean, can they—?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “Why don’t you ask? Just wait until I’m out of there.”

“Maybe not,” Lucas said. “I’m getting over it, but I’m not that far over it. And he’s not exactly Mr. Warmth.”

“Somebody might say that about you, too,” Lily observed.

“Hey. Nobody said that to me while getting busy in my Porsche.”

Lily laughed and turned a little pink. Way back, back before their respective marriages, they’d dallied. In fact, Lucas had dallied her brains loose in a Porsche 911, a feat that not everyone thought possible, especially for people their size. “A long time ago, when we were young,” she said, as they climbed the steps to Lincoln’s front door. “I was slender as a fairy then.”

Lucas was a tall man, heavy in the shoulders, with a hawk nose and blue eyes. His black hair was touched with a bit of silver at the temples and a long thin scar ran from his forehead across his brow ridge and down onto his cheek, the product of a fishing accident. Another scar, on his throat, was not quite as outdoorsy, though it happened outdoors, when a young girl shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 and he almost died.

Lily was dark-haired and full-figured, constantly dieting and constantly finding more interesting things to eat. She never gained enough to be fat, couldn’t lose enough to be thin. She’d never been a fairy. She was paid as a captain in the NYPD, but she was more than that: one of the plainclothes influentials who floated around the top of the department, doing things meant to be invisible to the media. As someone said of her, she was the nut cutter they called when nuts seriously needed to be cut.

Like now. She’d brought Lucas in as a “consultant” from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, because she didn’t know who she could trust in her own department. They might have a serial-killer cop on the loose—or even worse, a bunch of cops. And if that was right, the cops wouldn’t be out-of-control dumbass flatfoots, but serious guys, narcotics detectives who’d become fed up with the pointlessness and ineffectiveness of the war on drugs.

The four dead were all female, all illegal Mexicans, all had been tortured, and all had some connection to drug sales—although with two of them, Lucas thought, the connection was fairly thin. Still, if they were dealing with the cartels, and if there was a turf war going on, they could have been killed simply as warnings. And torture was something the cartels did as other people might play cards.

On the other hand, the women may have been tortured not as punishment, or to make a point, but for information. Somebody, the commissioner feared, had decided to take direct action to eliminate the drug problem, with the emphasis on eliminate. The bodies were piling up: so he called his nut cutter and the nut cutter called Lucas. The duo had just been downtown checking out and talking with the honchos that made up the department’s famous Narcotics Unit Four. Or infamous, some said. The trio of shields—two men and a woman—had earned the highest drug-conviction rate in the city with, the rumors went, less than kosher tactics. Lately they’d been running ops in the area where the women had been killed.

Lily pushed the doorbell.

Amelia Sachs came to the door, chewing on a celery stalk, and let them in. She was a tall woman, slender and redheaded, a former model, which pushed several of Lucas’s buttons. Given all of that, their relationship had been testy, maybe because of Lucas’s initial attitude toward Lincoln and his disability.

Lincoln was in his Storm-Arrow wheelchair, peering at a high-def video screen. Without looking at them, he said, “You got nothing.”

“Not entirely true,” Lucas said. “All three of them were dressed carelessly.”

Lincoln turned his head and squinted at him. “Why is that important?”

Lucas shrugged. “Anyone who dresses carelessly bears watching, in my estimation,” he said. He was wearing a Ralph Lauren Purple Label summer-weight wool suit in medium blue, a white dress shirt with one of the more muted Hermès ties, and bespoke shoes from a London shoemaker.

Amelia made a rude noise, and Lucas grinned at her, or at least showed his teeth.

“Easy,” Lily said. To Lincoln: “You’re basically right. We got nothing. We weren’t exactly stonewalled, we were know-nothinged. Like it was all a big puzzle, and why were we there?”

“Were they acting?” Lincoln asked.

“Hard to tell,” Lucas said. “Most detectives are good liars. But if somebody put a gun to my head, I’d say no, they weren’t acting. They didn’t know what we were talking about.”

“Mmm, I like that concept,” Amelia said.

“What?” Lucas asked. “Lying?”

“No. Putting a gun to your head.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Amelia.”

“Just having fun, Lily,” Amelia said. “You know I love Lucas like a brother.”

“And I hope it stays that way,” Lincoln grumped. “Anyway . . . while you were out touring the city, we’ve made some significant progress here. There were some anomalies in the autopsy photos that I thought worth revisiting. The bodies were found nude, of course, and so dirt and sand had been comprehensively impressed in the victims’ skins, along with grains of concrete. However, in examining the photos, I noticed that in several of these flecks, we were getting more light return than you might expect from grains of sand or soil or concrete. The photos were taken with flash, of course, a very intense light. The enhanced light return would not have been especially noticeable under the lights of an autopsy table. I sent Amelia to investigate.”

“I found that all four victims had tiny bits of metal ingrained in their skin. The cut surfaces were shiny, which is why Lincoln was able to see them in the high-res photos,” Amelia said. “There weren’t many of them, but some in each. I recovered them—”

“And brought them here,” Lincoln said. “They were uniform in size, and smaller than the average brown sugar ant. We ran them through the GDS 400A Glow Discharge Spectrometer, a Hewlett Packard Gas Chromatograph, and a JEOL SEM-scanning electron microscope. Those’re instruments for determining the composition of a liquid, gas, or solid—”

“I know what they are; I’m a cop, not a fucking moron,” Lucas said.

Lincoln continued without acknowledging the interruption. “And found that they were flecks of bronze.”

Lily said, “Bronze. That’s good, right? We need a bronze-working shop.”

Amelia said, “It’s good in a way. The fact is, bronze has become pretty much a specialty metal—it’s used to make bells, cymbals, some ship propellers, Olympic medals, and bronze wool replaces steel wool for some woodworking applications. It’s used in high-end weather stripping for doors.”

Lincoln, impatient, said, “Yes, yes, yes. But the flecks are not bronze wool, and they are rounded, with no flat sides, as you would get from weather stripping, and so on. Nor do they appear to be millings, which you would get with propellers and cymbals and such, because the grain size is too consistent.”

“How about sculpture?” Lucas asked.

Lincoln was momentarily disconcerted, then said, “I concluded that since the grains were so uniformly sized, and so sharply cut, they most likely came from a hand-filing process. The most common hand-filing process used with bronze involves . . . sculpture casting.”

Lucas said to Lily, “That was apparent to me as soon as they mentioned bronze.”

“Quite,” Lincoln said.

Lily: “So we’re looking for a foundry.”

“Perhaps not,” Lincoln said. “There is another aspect worth mentioning. There weren’t many of these bronze filings. I surmise that the murders may have taken place not in the foundry area, where you would expect a variety of returns from the casting process—and we have no bronze-related returns other than these flecks—and probably not even in the filing or grinding area. It appears to me that the grains were tracked into the area where the murders took place. Still, the kill site was near the filing area, or there would have been even fewer grains.”

Lucas said, “So, what, we’re looking for a room off a studio? Maybe even living quarters?”

“Not living quarters. I think we’re looking for a loft of some kind. A loft with a concrete floor. All four victims had flecks of concrete buried in their skin, but two of them were found lying on blacktop, not concrete. And it’s an empty building. Probably an abandoned warehouse.”

“Where do you get that?” Lucas asked.

Lincoln twitched his shoulders, which Lucas had learned was a shrug. “The women weren’t gagged. Whoever killed them let them scream. Either because it didn’t bother them, or because they enjoyed it. And they felt safe in letting them scream.”

Lucas nodded at him: “Interesting,” he said.

Lily ticked it off on her fingers. “We’re looking for a male, probably, because they’re the ones who do this kind of thing; either a sculptor, or somebody who works with a sculptor, who has a studio or a workshop in an empty warehouse.”

“Either that, or somebody picked the building without knowing about the bronze filings,” Amelia said. “They have nothing to do with bronze, except that they happened to pick a place with bronze filings on the floor. Could have been there forever.”

“I doubt that,” Lincoln said.

“It’s a logical possibility, though,” Lily said.

Lucas: “I’m with Lincoln on this.”

Lily asked, “Why?”

Lincoln looked at Lucas and said, “You tell them.”

“Because the particles are still shiny enough that Lincoln picked them up on the bodies. They’re new.”

Lily nodded and Amelia said, “Okay.”

“And he’s a freak. He’s a sadomasochist who knows what he’s doing. He’s got a record,” Lucas said. He turned to Lily. “Time to fire up the computers.”

And the computers were fired up, not by Lucas, Lily, Amelia, or Lincoln, but by a clerk in the basement of the FBI building in Washington. Lily spoke quietly into the shell-like ear of the chief of detectives, Stan Markowitz, who spoke to a pal in the upper strata of the FBI, who wrote a memo that drifted down through several layers of the bureaucracy, and wound up on the desk of an inveterate war-game player named Barry.

Barry read the note, and punched in a bunch of keywords, and found, oddly enough, that there were four bronze sculptors in the United States who had been arrested for sex crimes involving some level of violence, and two of them had had studios in New York.

One of them was dead.

But James Robert Verlaine wasn’t.

“JAMES ROBERT VERLAINE,” LILY READ the next morning. They were in Lincoln’s crime lab, once a parlor.

“Or as we know him, ‘Jim Bob,’ ” Lucas said.

“Has a fondness for cocaine, has been arrested twice for possession of small amounts, did no time. Also arrested years ago for possession of LSD, did two months. Four years ago, he was charged with possession of thirty hits of ecstasy, but he’d wiped the Ziploc bag they were in and he’d thrown it into the next toilet stall, where it landed in the toilet and wasn’t fished out for a while. Quite a while—somebody hadn’t flushed. The prosecutor dumped it for faulty chain of evidence. Last year he was arrested in an apartment over on skid row in a raid on a meth cooker, but he was released when it turned out the actual cooker was the woman who was renting the apartment. Verlaine said he was just an innocent visitor. The prosecutor dumped it again, insufficient evidence.”

“Get to the sex,” Lucas said.

“He’s never been arrested for a sex crime, but he’s been investigated,” Lily said, reading from the FBI report. “He’s known for sculptures with slave themes involving bondage, whipping, various kinds of subjugation of women. A woman named Tina Martinez—note the last names here—complained to police that he’d injured a friend of hers named Maria Corso, who was supposedly modeling for one of these bondage sculptures. Corso refused to prosecute, said there’d been a misunderstanding with her friend. The investigators say they believe she was paid off.”

“He’s a bad man,” Amelia said.

“Bad,” Lincoln agreed. “With a substantial interest in drugs.”

“And probably with the kind of brain rot you get from meth,” Lucas said.

“Do you have a plan?” Lincoln asked.

“I plan to spend some time with him today. Just watching. Amelia and Lily can help out. See what he does, who he talks to, where he hangs out.”

“Do we know where he lives?” Lincoln asked.

“We do,” Lily said.

Lincoln said to Lucas, “I wonder if the women could handle the surveillance and keep you informed, of course.”

Lucas said, “No reason they couldn’t, I guess. Easier with three of us. Why?”

“I have an idea, but I want to speak to you privately about it. Just to avoid the inevitable question of conspiracy.”

“Oh, shit,” Lily said.

WELL, NOW, HERE’S A PRETTY.

Tasty, this one.

Oh, he could picture her on her back, arms outstretched, yeah, yeah, lying on something rough—concrete or wood. Or metal.

Metal’s always good.

Sweat on her forehead, sweat on her tits, sweat everywhere. Mewing, gasping, pleading.

For a luscious moment, every other person in the club vanished from James Robert Verlaine’s consciousness as his eyes, his artist’s eyes, lapped up the brunette in black at the end of the bar.

Tasty . . .

Raven hair, tinting from red to blue to green to violet in the spotlights. Disco décor, punk music. Rasta’s could never make up its mind.

Hair. That aspect of the human form fascinated him. A sculptor of hard materials, he could reproduce flesh and organ, but hair remained ever elusive.

She glanced toward him once, no message in the gaze, but then a second time, which was, possibly, a message in itself.

Studying her more closely now, the oval face, the sensuous figure, the provocative way she leaned against the bar as she carried on a conversation on her cell phone.

It irritated him that her attention was now on some asshole a mile or ten miles or a hundred miles away. A smile. But not at Verlaine.

Mona Lisa, he reflected. That’s who she reminded him of. Not a compliment, of course. Da Vinci’s babe was a smirky bitch. And, Lord knew, the painting was way overrated.

Hey, look over here, Mona.

But she didn’t.

Verlaine flagged down the bartender and ordered. Like always, here or at one of the other clubs where he hung out, Verlaine drank bourbon, straight, because girls liked it when men drank liquor that wasn’t ruined with fruit juice. Beer was for kids, wine for the bedroom after fucking.

Mona looked in his direction once again. But didn’t lock eyes.

He was getting angry now. Who the hell was she talking to?

Another scan. Little black dresses were a coward’s choice—worn by women afraid to make a statement. But in Mona’s case, he forgave her. The silk plunged and hovered just where it ought to and the cloth clung like latex paint to her voluptuous figure.

And what hands! Long fingers, tipped in black nails.

Hair was tough to duplicate, but hands were the most arduous of sculptors’ challenges. Michelangelo was a genius at them, finding perfect palms and digits and nails in the heart of marble.

And James Robert Verlaine, who knew he was an artistic, if not blood, descendant of the great master, created the same magic, though with metal, not stone.

Which was much, much tougher to accomplish.

The crowd in Rasta’s, Midtown, was typical for this time of night—artsy sorts who were really ad agency account managers, nerds who were really artists, hipsters pathetically clinging to their fading youth like a life preserver, players from Wall Street. Packed already. Soon to be more packed.

Finally, he caught Mona’s eye. Her gaze flickered. Could be flirt, could be fuck off.

But Verlaine doubted the latter. He believed she liked what she saw. Why wouldn’t she? He had a lean, wolfish face, which looked younger than his forty years. His hair, a mop, thick and inky. He worked hard to keep the do in a state of controlled unruliness. His eyes were as focused as lasers. Thin hips, encased in his trademark black jeans, tight. His work shirt was DKNY, but suitably flecked and worn. The garment was two-buttons undone with the pecs just slightly visible. Verlaine humped ingots and bars of metal around his studio and the junkyards where he bought his raw materials. Carried oxygen and propane and acetylene tanks, too.

Another glance at Mona. He was losing control, as that familiar feeling rippled through him from chest to crotch.

Picking up his Basil Hayden’s, he pushed away from the bar to circle Mona’s way. He tried to get past a knot of young businessmen in suits. They ignored him. Verlaine hated people like this. He detested their conformity, their smugness, their utter ignorance of culture. They’d judge art by the price tag; Verlaine bet he could wipe his ass with a canvas, spray some varnish on it, and set a reserve price of a hundred thousand bucks—and philistines like this’d fight to outbid themselves at Christie’s.

L’art du merde.

He pushed through the young men.

“Hey,” one muttered. “Asshole, you spilled my—”

Verlaine turned fast, firing off a searing gaze, like a spurt of pepper spray. The businessman, though taller and heavier, went still. His friends stirred, but chose not to come to his defense, returning quickly to a stilted conversation about the game.

When it was clear Mr. Brooks Brothers wasn’t going to do something stupid and get a finger or face broken, or worse, Verlaine gave him a condescending smile and moved on.

Easing up to Mona, Verlaine hovered. He wasn’t going to play the let’s-ignore-each-other game. He was too worked up for that. He whispered, “I’ve got one advantage over who you’re talking to.” A nod at the phone.

She stopped speaking and turned to him.

Verlaine grinned. “I can buy you a drink and he can’t.”

Tense. Would she balk?

Mona looked him over. Slow. Not smiling now. She said into the phone, “Gotta go.”

Click.

His index finger crooked for the bartender.

“So, I’m James.”

Playing it coy, of course. She said something. He couldn’t hear. The music at Rasta’s was a one-hundred-decibel remix of groups from twenty years ago, the worst of CBGBs.

He leaned closer and smelled a luscious floral scent rising from her skin.

Man, he wanted her. Wanted her tied down. Wanted her sweating. Wanted her crying.

“What’s that?” he called.

Mona shouted, “I said, so what do you do, James?”

Of course. This was Manhattan. That was always question number one.

“I’m a sculptor.”

“Yeah?” A faint Brooklyn lilt. He could tolerate that. The skepticism in her eyes, no.

His iPhone appeared and, shoving it her way, he flipped through the pictures.

“Jesus, you really are.”

Then Mona looked past him. He followed her gaze and saw a tall redhead, smiling as she made her way through the crowd. A stunner. His eyes did the triplet glance: face, tits, ass. And he didn’t care that she saw him doing it.

As tasty as Mona.

And no LBD for her. Leather miniskirt, fishnets, low-cut dark-blue sequined top, strapless.

The arrivee tossed her beautiful hair off her shoulders, glistening with sweat. She cheek-kissed Mona. Then pitched a smile Verlaine’s way.

Mona said, “This is James. He’s a real sculptor. He’s famous.”

“Cool,” the redhead said, eyes wide and impressed—just the way he liked the pretties to be.

He shook their hands.

“And you are?” he asked the redhead.

“I’m Amelia.”

Mona turned out to be Lily.

Verlaine got Amelia a Pinot gris and a refill of his bourbon.

Conversation wandered. Protocol demanded that, and Verlaine had to play the game a little longer before he could bring up the subject. You had to be careful. You could ruin an evening if you moved too fast. A girl by herself? You got her drunk enough, you could usually get her to “try something different” back at your place without too much effort.

But two together? That took a lot more work.

In fact, he wasn’t sure he could pull this one off. They seemed, fuck it, smart, savvy. They weren’t going to fall for lines like, “I can open up a whole new world for you.”

No, may have to write this evening off. Hell.

But just then Lily leaned forward and whispered, “So what’re you into, James?”

“Hobbies, you mean?” he asked.

The women regarded each other and broke out in laughs. “Yeah, hobbies. You have any hobbies?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“If we tell you about our hobby, will you tell us about yours?”

When a sultry raven-haired pretty in a tight LBD asks you that question, there’s only one answer: “You bet.”

The redhead reached into her tiny purse and displayed a pair of handcuffs.

Okay, maybe the night was going to be easier than he thought.

JAMES ROBERT VERLAINE HAD A certain charm, Amelia Sachs gave him that.

The clothes were weird—Midnight Cowboy meets Versace—and he probably owned more hair products than she did. But, despite that, his witty attention was completely on her and Lily.

With Lincoln Rhyme as a romantic as well as professional partner, Amelia had been freed from the madness of the dating world. But before him there’d been innumerable evenings in restaurants and bars with men who were anything but present. Their thoughts kept zipping back to Nokias or BlackBerrys in jacket pockets, to business deals sitting on office desktops, to girlfriends or wives they’d forgotten to mention.

A woman knows right away when a man’s with her or not.

And Jim Bob—she loved Lucas Davenport’s nic for him—definitely was. His sniper eyes bored into theirs, he touched arms, he asked questions, made jokes. He inquired.

Of course, this wasn’t typical bar meeting talk—about family and exes, about the Mets, the Knicks, politics, and the latest retreads from Hollywood. No, the theme for tonight was such esoterica as describing the type of rope he enjoyed tying “girls” up with, where to get the best mouth gags, and what kind of whips and canes caused the most pain but left the fewest marks.

Back at Lincoln’s loft, the four investigators had decided the way to Verlaine’s psyche was through his fly. His sado-sexual history would give them entry. Lily had gone to the bar first—strategizing that a single bulb might draw the moth less suspiciously. Yep on that one. Then Amelia—in an outfit she’d had to purchase an hour earlier—had arrived to seal the deal. And it had taken a whole sixty seconds to find out that Verlaine usually came to Rasta’s before heading to his fave S&M dives.

Thank you, Facebook.

Verlaine’s phone appeared again and he punched in a passcode. A private photo album opened. And he leaned forward to show off his prize shots.

Amelia struggled not to show her disgust. She heard Lily inhale fast, but the senior detective turned the sound into a whisper of admiration. Verlaine missed her dismay.

The first image was of a naked woman, wearing only a necklace, blindfolded, with her hands taped or tied behind her. She was kneeling on a slab of concrete. Interesting, Amelia thought, and caught Lily’s eye. Concrete, just like the victims.

The woman in the picture had been crying—her makeup had run to her chin—and her breasts were streaked with ugly welts.

Verlaine, obviously aroused, eagerly scrolled through more images, which Amelia found increasingly hard to look at. It took all her willpower to appear aroused by the images of cruelty.

He gave a running narrative of the “partners.” Amelia only heard the word “victims.”

Ten minutes.

Fifteen.

At that point Verlaine said, “Excuse me, ladies. I need to run to the little boy’s room. Behave while I’m away. Or not!” He laughed. “Back in a sec.”

“Wait,” Lily said.

Verlaine turned.

“Always wondered something.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“What’s the plural of sec?”

·  ·  ·

“That son of a bitch,” Lily said. She wasn’t smiling.

“God, that was awful,” Amelia added. “What do you think?” She was nodding back toward the toilets where Jim Bob might be emptying his bladder but was sure to be filling his nostrils.

“Sleazy, scummy, I want to take a shower in hand sanitizer.”

“Agreed. But is he a killer?”

“Those pictures,” Lily whispered. “I’ve worked sex crimes but that’s about the worst I’ve seen. From some of those wounds, I guarantee he put one or two of them in the hospital.” She considered the question. “Yeah, I could see him taking it a step further and killing somebody. You?”

“I think so.”

Lily continued, “I hope so. Man, I really do. I don’t want the crew from Narcotics Four to be behind this.”

Amelia didn’t much care for the detectives running the elite unit—Martin Glover, Danny Vincenzo, and Candy Preston all had egos like runaway stallions—but no cop wants to think that colleagues are torturing and killing wits just to up their conviction rate, however noble their cause.

Amelia looked over her friend. “So. You and Lucas, you had a thing, right?”

“A while ago, yeah. In Minnesota and when he came here. Really clicked between us. Still does. But not that way. We’ve moved on. And you and Lincoln seem like a good fit.”

“Just like you were saying. It clicks. Can’t explain it, don’t think about it.”

“Lucas has some problems with him. You know, being in the chair.”

“Happens some.” Amelia laughed. “Of course, Lincoln rides people hard and then they get fed up and go, ‘You’re such an asshole.’ Or, ‘Fuck you.’ They forget he’s a quad. That breaks the ice and it’s all good.”

“With Lucas, I think it’s something more. He won’t talk about it.” Lily lowered her voice. “For me, I have to say, when Lucas and I met, it was, a lot of it was physical. I need that. You and Lincoln?”

“Oh, yeah. Believe it or not, it’s good. Different obviously. But good . . . Ah, here comes our lord and master.”

Wiping his nose with his fingers, Verlaine was oozing his way through the crowd. Amelia was sure he turned sideways intentionally to rub against an ass or two.

One of his “accidental” victims—a petite redhead in a leather skirt and black blouse—turned fast and, eyes dark angry disks, shouted words they couldn’t hear. Fast as a gun hammer falling on a primer, he wheeled and shoved his face into hers.

“Christ,” Amelia muttered, reaching toward her purse, where a baby Glock rested. “He’s going to hurt her.”

“Wait. We move in, that fucks up the whole op.”

They watched closely. A cold smile blossomed on Verlaine’s face as the woman looked at him warily. She was attractive and her figure was perfect, though it was clear she’d had acne in her youth or some illness that left scarring.

In the space of a few seconds, as he spoke to her, still smiling coolly, her expression morphed from confused to shocked to devastated; Amelia knew he was commenting on her complexion. He kept leaning forward, taunting, taunting, until she picked up her purse and fled into the bathroom, sobbing.

Amelia said to Lily, “His expression. What’s it look like to you?”

“Like he just fucked somebody and wants a cigarette.”

Verlaine eased through the crowd back to the bar.

“Hey, there, ladies. Miss me?”

THE THING ABOUT BURGLARY WAS, the careful burglar was rarely disturbed by the homeowner. It was always some snoopy neighbor who did him in.

Lucas sat on a darkened stoop across the street from Verlaine’s building, just watching and listening. The neighborhood was a tough one, not far from the East River, and not yet gentrifying; the buildings might be a little too rotten, a little too undistinguished, a little too far upriver. Verlaine’s building was a bit of a puzzle—only two stories tall, but wide and deep. Too large for a single inhabitant, Lucas thought. It had a shallow entrance above a wide one-step stoop, with bricked-up spaces on the bottom floor that were once windows. The place could have been a hardware store at one time, with walk-up apartments above it; in another neighborhood, farther downtown, it would have become a nightclub, or a restaurant. Here, it was just a derelict building, without a single light showing, either through the barred windows on the main door, or from the windows on the second floor. Was there somebody else in there? Verlaine himself, Lucas knew, was at a Midtown bar.

Nothing moving. And still Lucas waited.

He’d had a little heart-to-heart with Lincoln. When the women were gone, Lincoln said, “If you go to the black cabinet by the window, in the bottom section, the left side, there’s a drawer.”

Lucas went to the cabinet, opened a lower-level door, pulled out the drawer, and found an electric lock rake.

He took it out and pulled the trigger. Dead.

“An artifact from my former life. It’ll still work, but you’ll have to put some double-A batteries in it.”

“You want me to crack Verlaine’s apartment?”

“Lily said you occasionally used unconventional tactics.”

Lucas said, “I’ll take a look at it. Even if this thing works, there could be other problems. Might be other people around, locks have gotten better.”

“So then you don’t go in,” Lincoln said. “I just feel it would be useful if somebody could take a preliminary look. Can’t use it as evidence, of course.”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah. Once you know, everything else gets easier.”

Then he said, “Look, I know I pissed you off because I was having trouble dealing with your disability.”

“You did. Piss me off,” Lincoln said.

“Yeah, well,” Lucas scratched his neck. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s purely out of fear. This scar”—he touched his neck again—“a little girl shot me in the throat with a .22. Went through a coat collar, through my windpipe, got to my spine, but not into it. The kid should have killed me—she would have, but there was a doc right there, and she did a tracheotomy, and kept me breathing until we got to the hospital. But if the kid had had any other kind of gun, or if the slug hadn’t gone through the collar first, she would have either blown my spine out, and I would have been dead on the spot, or I would have been like you. It was a matter of a quarter inch or so, or any other caliber. I look at you and I see me.”

“Interesting,” Lincoln said.

“After the accident, did you think about suicide?”

“Yes. Quite considerably,” Lincoln said. “Sometimes, I’m not sure I made the right choice, staying alive. But my curiosity keeps me going; I always seem to have work.” He smiled. “God bless all the little criminals.”

“And then there’s Amelia,” Lucas said.

“Yes. Then there’s Amelia.”

“You’re a lucky man, Lincoln,” Lucas said.

Lincoln laughed and said, “It’s been a while since anyone told me that.”

·  ·  ·

After an hour on the stoop, Lucas decided that he’d either have to make a move on the building, or go away. He stood up, dusted off the seat of his jeans, and saw a man walking along the sidewalk toward him, alone. The man spit in the gutter and came on. When he got to Lucas, he stopped and said, “You got an extra twenty?”

“No.”

“I’m not really asking,” the man said.

“Take a close look at me,” Lucas said.

The man took a closer look, then said, “Fuck you,” and went on down the street. He looked back once, then turned the corner and was gone. Lucas waited another few minutes, to see if the man came back, then crossed the street and, using his cell phone as a flashlight, looked at the lock. An old one—a good one, when it was made, but now old. With a last look around, Lucas took the rake out of his pocket, slipped the pick-arm into the lock. The rake chattered for a moment, as Lucas kept the turning pressure on, and then the lock went.

He stepped inside, closed the door, and called, “Anybody home?”

He listened, got no response, except a scrabbling sound in the ceiling—a rat.

“Hey, anybody? Anybody here?”

Nobody answered. He took a flashlight from his pocket, turned it on. He was in a wide hallway, with steps going up to his right, and with a double door to the left. The hallway smelled of burned metal, as though somebody had been working with a welding torch. He was in the right place.

He tried the double door and found it open, with a bank of light switches on the wall to the left. He closed the door behind him and turned on the lights. He was in a wide-open studio with several two-foot-tall bronze sculptures sitting on heavy wooden tables, with a variety of metalworking tools—files, electric grinders, polishers, hand scribes. The air inside smelled of burned metal and polishing compound.

The sculptures were all on sadomasochistic themes: nude women being whipped, bound, beaten. Just what you need to add that extra spark to your living room, Lucas thought.

At the far edge of the studio was a low, wooden wall, perhaps ten feet high, which was two or three feet short of the ceiling. Behind it, Lucas found a queen-sized bed, a chest of drawers, a large closet stuffed with clothing, a bathroom, a second closet with an apartment-sized washer and dryer stacked one on top of the other, a kitchenette, and a small breakfast table with two chairs. A television was mounted on a swing arm at the foot of the bed. He poked through the living area for a moment, found nothing of particular interest, and continued his tour of the studio. And found, at the back, an internal door, sheathed in metal, that was set in a frame a step below the rest of the floor—a door that most likely led to a basement, Lucas thought. He looked at the lock, and realized that the rake wouldn’t work: the thing was probably a year old, a Medeco.

After the quick tour of the lower floor, he turned out the lights, stepped back in the hallway, and used the flashlight to climb the stairs to the second floor. The second floor was a trash heap: a line of single rooms that had apparently last been used as a flophouse, each with a wrecked cot or a stained mattress, various pieces of mostly broken furniture. More rats: he never saw one, but he could hear them.

Nothing for him there.

He went back down to the studio, closed the door, turned the lights on, went to look at the cellar door again. No way to open it: it was impossible. He pounded on it a few times and listened, heard nothing. What they really needed, he thought, was behind that door, and he had no way to get there.

He’d been inside for five or six minutes, and time was wearing on him.

He took a plastic bag out of his pocket, and from the bag, several more Ziploc-style bags, each with a white spongelike pad in it. Lincoln’s instructions had been simple enough: press the pad into anything you’d like to pick up, then put the pad back in the plastic bag, and seal it. Lucas worked his way through the studio, doing just that: sampling bronze filings from the floor, off a workbench, and out of the teeth of a metal file. Moving to the welding area, he found a selection of welding rods, and stuck one of each kind in his pocket, and, from a trash bin, several used rods.

He sampled several stains that might possibly have been blood, but there were enough stains around the place, oil and lubricants, that he had his doubts. He was taking a sample when he saw, in a small niche off the main working space, a half dozen crucifixes on neck chains, along with a necklace of cheap aqua-colored stones, a thin string of seed pearls, a ring on a chain, and three sets of earrings, all pinned to the wall with tacks. And he thought, Trophies? If they were, there were twelve of them. There was nothing else like them in the room: he took a half dozen photos with his cell phone.

Time to leave. On his way out, he looked at each of the bronze sculptures, and a clay maquette for another, and noticed that each of the women portrayed in the sculptures was wearing a single piece of jewelry of some kind, apparently to emphasize her nakedness. Was it possible that the jewelry collection did not represent trophies, but was for use with models?

He was thinking about that when Lily called. “He’s moving.”

“And I’m gone,” Lucas said. And he thought, Not for models. They were trophies, and there were twelve of them.

·  ·  ·

“You believe it?” Lucas Davenport said, walking into the town house. He held up the plastic bags. “This shit fell out the window when I was walking by Verlaine’s apartment.”

Lincoln spun the motorized wheelchair around, noting eagerly—almost hungrily—the evidence in the Minnesotan’s hand.

“Sometimes you catch a break. Anything obvious?”

“No piles of bones or bloody shackles. There’s a steel door leads somewhere—the cellar, I think. Love to see what’s behind that.” He explained that the lock rake wasn’t up to the task, though. They’d need a warrant and a sledgehammer.

Lincoln turned his attention to the evidence.

Lucas dropped down into one of the wicker chairs near one of the large high-definition monitors that glowed like a billboard in Times Square.

“Lucas?” Thom Reston, Lincoln’s aide, stood in the doorway. He was a slim, young man, dressed in a lavender shirt, dark tie, and beige slacks. “Tempt you? Beer? Anything else?”

“Later, thanks.”

Lincoln said, “Whiskey for me.”

“You’ve had two already,” Thom countered.

“I’m so pleased at your sterling memory. Could I have a whiskey? Please and thank you?”

“No.”

“Get me—” But he was speaking to an empty doorway. He grimaced. “All right. Let’s get to work. Mel, what’s in the haul?”

Mel Cooper looked like a geek, which he probably was since he was the Mr. Wizard of forensic science on the East Coast, if not the country. The man was pale and trim and had thin hair and Harry Potter glasses that invariably slid down his nose.

Pulling on gloves, a surgeon’s cap, and a disposable jacket, Cooper took the bag and set the contents out on an examination pad—large sheets of sterile newsprint.

“Good job,” he mused, looking at the carefully sealed bags. “You worked crime scene before?”

“Naw,” Lucas said. “But I lost a rape-murder conviction once ’cause some rookie tripped and dropped the perp’s shoe into Medicine Lake. It was the only evidence we had that would’ve nailed the prick and I had a very uncircumstantial-minded jury. The prick walked.”

“That hurts,” Lincoln said.

“Course, he went after another vic a month later. He didn’t pick well. She kept a five-five Redhawk under her mattress. Just a three fifty-seven, not a forty-four. But it did the trick.”

“Was there anything left of the guy?”

“Not much above the neck. Justice got done, but it would’ve been a whole lot cleaner if the CS kid had held on to the evidence. Taught me to treat it like gold.”

First, Cooper and Lincoln did a visual of the splinters and curlicues of bronze and other metals.

Using an optical microscope on low power, Lincoln compared them with the scraps found in the backs of the women victims. He was looking at the shape of the scraps, along with the indentations from the tools that had trimmed them off a large piece of metal—presumably one of the sculptures. “Tool marks look real close to me,” Lincoln said.

Lucas walked over to the high-def monitor plugged into the microscope via an HDMI cable. “Yeah, I agree.”

They next had to compare the chemical composition of the metal from the crime scenes with that of the scraps Lucas had found at the studio. Cooper went to work analyzing each one, using the glow discharge spectrometer, the gas chromatograph, and the scanning electron microscope.

“While we’re waiting,” Lucas said, pointing to a bag. “Possible blood stains. From the floor near his bedroom.”

Cooper tested with luminol and alternative light sources.

“Yep, we’ve got blood.”

A reagent test confirmed it was human, and the tech typed it. The sample, however, didn’t match the types of the women victims from the earlier scenes.

They tested concrete samples that Lucas had collected, too, and compared them with the concrete particles found in the women’s backs. “Close,” Cooper assessed. “No cigar.”

“Hell.” Lincoln then glanced at the doorway; he’d heard the nearly undetectable sound of the key in the lock. A moment later the female detectives walked into the parlor.

“How’d it go?” Lily asked Lucas.

He shrugged. “Some evidence fell off the truck.” He nodded to the equipment, merrily analyzing away. He glanced at Amelia’s outfit. “Damn, you need to go undercover more often.”

Lily hit him on the arm. “Behave.”

Lucas then asked the women, “What was Verlaine like?”

“Dangerous,” Amelia said.

Lily filled in, “He looks at you like you’re naked and he can’t decide what to lick first.”

“And then what to whip.”

“So the S&M hunch paid off?”

“Big-time. He’s the S all the way. Wants to be the hurter, not the hurtee.”

Lily explained about his personal Pinterest album. “Jesus, took all my willpower not to kick him in the balls. You should’ve seen what he did to some of those women.”

“He pressure you two lovely ladies to go home with him?” Lucas asked.

“Sure, but we had to postpone our threesome. Somehow his glass kept getting refilled. He was in no shape to tie anybody up after that much bourbon. I was tempted to let the asshole stagger home and hope some mugger beat the crap out of him. But Amelia was the mature one and we got him into a cab.”

Sachs glanced at the plastic bags. “What does the evidence say?”

“Just getting it now,” Lincoln told her, and grumbled, “Right, Mel? It seems to be taking forever.”

Mel Cooper, hunched over a computer monitor, didn’t respond. He shoved his glasses higher on his nose and said, “Interesting.”

“That’s not a useful term, Mel,” Lincoln snapped.

“I’m getting there. Lucas collected five different kinds of bronze from Verlaine’s. One is typical modern formula: eighty-eight percent copper and twelve percent tin. Then alpha bronze, with about four to five percent tin.

“Some other samples have a higher concentration of copper and zinc and some lead—that’s architectural bronze. Others are bismuth bronze—an alloy that’s got a lot of nickel, and traces of bismuth. One sample surprised me—it had a Vickers hardness value of two hundred.”

“That’s the bronze used in swords,” Lucas said.

They all looked at him. “For the role-playing games I write. Helps to know about old-time weapons. Roman officers had bronze swords; foot soldiers had iron.”

Amelia asked, “You think he uses bronze as a weapon?”

Lucas shook his head. “No, I think what it means is that he gets his materials wherever he can find them. Probably from dozens of junkyards and construction sites.”

“I agree,” Lincoln said.

Cooper added, “And there’s triethanolamine, fluoroboric acid, and cadmium fluoroborate.”

“That’s flux—used in brazing and soldering,” Lincoln said absently.

“Okay, the big question: any associations, Mel?” Lucas asked.

In crime scene work, very few samples of evidence actually “matched,” meaning they were literally the same. DNA and fingerprints established true identity but little else did. However, samples of evidence from two scenes could be “associated,” meaning they were similar. If close enough, the jury could deduce that they came from the same source. Here, the team had to show that the shavings found in the first victims’ bodies could be closely associated with those Lucas had collected from Verlaine’s studio.

Cooper finally pushed back from the screen. He didn’t seem happy. “Like the concrete, the flux and welding rods are close to the trace from the earlier crime scenes.”

Lincoln’s face tightened into a frown. “But those are used by anyone brazing, welding, or working with bronze. I want to establish identity with the bronze scraps themselves.”

“Understood. But that’s more of a problem.” He explained that four of the bronze samples at the first crime scene were completely different from any of the metal collected by Lucas. One sample Lucas had collected that night had the same composition as several fragments in the first scenes. The others were similar but had “some compositional differences.”

“How similar?” Lincoln snapped.

“I’d feel comfortable testifying that it was possible the scraps embedded in the victims came from Verlaine’s loft. But I couldn’t do better than that.”

The evidence suggested but didn’t prove that Verlaine was the killer.

“Same with his behavioral profile and his history of sex offenses,” Lily added. “The S&M. It’s likely he’s antisocial enough to kill. But that ain’t enough to swing the jury.”

That irritating little “beyond a reasonable doubt” requirement.

Lucas told the women about the mysterious door to the basement. “I’m betting there’s something incriminating down there, but without a warrant, we’re not getting in.”

Cooper now put the pictures of the necklaces up on the high-def TV. “Trophies, I’m betting,” Lucas said.

“Crosses mostly,” Lincoln observed. “Hell, that means there are seven or eight more victims out there. Nobody’s found the bodies yet.”

“Or,” Lucas said, “that those are for vics he’s got coming up?”

Lily said angrily, “We’ve gotta stop this fucker. I mean now!”

“Trophies, some evidence, a behavioral profile that’s in the ballpark,” Amelia summarized. “He’s gotta be the one, even if we can’t make a case just yet. But the good news is if he’s the one, nobody from the department is involved. Verlaine’s just some lone psycho.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Lucas said. “There’s another possibility.”

Lincoln understood. “Could be that Narcotics Four has been using Verlaine to torture and kill the women to get leads they could use.”

“Exactly.”

Amelia scowled. “Sure. Verlaine’s been a bad boy. Maybe somebody from the drug detail’s been extorting him to get information from the women. That way the cops’ll keep their hands clean.”

Lily sighed. “I’ll take the hit on this one.”

They looked at her.

“We’ve got to tell Markowitz the news: A, we don’t have enough evidence to collar our favorite suspect. And B, his world-famous drug detail isn’t in the clear, either.” She looked over her teammates. “Unless, of course, somebody else’d rather have that little chat.”

They all smiled her way.

“WE’VE CAUGHT ANOTHER ONE, SIR. Woman, twenties.”

It was eight thirty the next morning and COD Stan Markowitz was sipping his first coffee of the day, in one of the old-time containers, blue with Greek athletes on it. But hearing this news he lost all taste for java. And for the bagel sitting in front of him, too.

It took a fuck of a lot for him to sour on walnut cream cheese.

The chief of detectives snapped, “In her twenties? Or in the twenties?”

The young detective, a skinny Italian American, said, “She was twenty-nine. Latina. Found the body in a vacant lot in NoHo.” He was standing in the doorway, not in or out, as if Markowitz might decide to fling a stapler at him. It’d happened before.

“I don’t like the name NoHo. It’s not a real place. I can live with SoHo but even TriBeCa’s pushing it.”

The kid didn’t respond but there was really nothing to respond to.

“Crime Scene’s on it now,” he said.

Markowitz stroked his round belly through the striped white shirt the wife had laid out for him that morning. He wadded up the oozing bagel and pitched it emphatically into the wastebasket. It landed with a surprisingly loud thud; this was the first entry of the morning.

“TOD?”

“Examiner’s saying about midnight,” the detective said. “No specific leads yet. No wits. Same as the others: she was a user, crack and smack. Found in a lot known for drug activity.”

“He’s a psycho, that’s what he is. It has nothing to do with the drugs. Don’t get that rumor started.”

“Sure. Only—”

“Only what?”

A hesitation at this. “All right.”

Markowitz glanced down at a file on his desk.

RED HOOK OPERATION. CLASSIFIED.

The NYPD had top-secret files, too. Langley has nothing on us, he thought.

“That’s all,” Markowitz said. “I want the crime scene report before the ink’s dry. Got it?”

“Sure.” The young detective remained standing.

With a glare, the COD sent him scurrying.

His landline had started ringing. Six buttons, lighting up like Christmas trees.

One reporter, two reporters, three reporters, four.

He glanced at the empty doorway and sent a text, then hit the intercom switch.

“Yes, sir?”

“Hold all calls.”

“Yes, sir, except the—”

“I said hold—”

“The commissioner’s on two.”

Naturally.

“Stan. There’s another one?” The man didn’t have a brogue, but Markowitz often imagined that Commissioner of Police Patrick O’Brien sounded like he just came off the boat from the old country.

“Afraid so, Pat.”

“This is a nightmare. I’m getting calls from Gracie Mansion. I’m getting calls from Albany.” His voice lowered and delivered the most devastating news. “I’m getting calls from the Daily News and the Times. The Huffington Post, for heaven’s sake.”

One reporter, two reporters.

The commissioner continued, “The vics are minorities, Stan. The killings are bad for everyone.”

Especially them, Markowitz thought.

Then finally the commish wasn’t wailing anymore, but asking a question. “What do you have, Stan?” A grave tone in his voice, then: “It’s pretty important that you have something. You hear me, Stan? I mean, really important.”

You have something.

Not we. Not the department. Not the city.

Markowitz said quickly, “We’ve got a suspect.”

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” But his voice was balmed with relief.

“It happened fast.”

“You’ve got him in custody?”

“No, but he’s more than a person of interest.”

The pause said that wasn’t what the commissioner wanted to hear. “Is he the perp or not?”

“Has to be. Just a few loose ends on the case before we can collar him.”

“Who is he?”

“Sculptor. Lives downtown. And the evidence is solid.”

“Listen, Stan,” the commissioner said, back to whining, “there is way too much flak hitting the fan.” Patrick O’Brien would rather butcher a figure of speech than utter an expletive. “Make it work.”

“Uhm, what, Pat?”

“Wouldn’t the citizens of New York love to read that we have a suspect?”

“Well, Pat, we do have a suspect. Just not enough for a warrant. Or an announcement in the press.”

“You said the evidence was solid. I heard you say that. The citizens of the city’d feel so much better knowing that we’re on top of it. It’d be great if they could read that by the time the Times online got updated in the next cycle.”

Which was about every half hour.

“And I’d feel better too, Stan.”

Despite the COD’s dozen-year track record, the commissioner could drop him to a low-level spot in public affairs in the time it took to microwave a Stouffer’s lasagna. “All right, Pat.”

After organizing his thoughts, Markowitz picked up his cell phone. Hit a number.

“Rothenburg.”

“I just heard, Detective. Another one.”

“That’s right, Stan. We’re at the scene. Amelia’s running it now. The vic was tortured first, just like the other ones.”

“I wanted to let you know you’re going to hear in the press that we have a suspect.”

After a dense pause, Lily said, “Who?”

“Well, the sculptor, Verlaine.”

“He’s our suspect, Stan. He’s not the press’s suspect. There’s a big difference. Verlaine’s not for public consumption at this point.”

“What does your gut tell you, Lily?”

“He’s an asshole, he’s a sadist. And he’s the doer.”

“What’s the percentage?”

“Percentage? Christ, I don’t know. How does ninety-six and three-tenths percent sound?”

The COD let the irrelevance pass.

“It’s going to put people at ease, Lily.”

Silence, presumably as she tried to process why they needed to put people at ease. “That’s not in my job description, Stan. My job is catching assholes and putting them in jail.”

He looked up. He noted a woman in a suit, standing in his outer office, waiting. She was the one he’d texted fifteen minutes ago.

Markowitz said, “And I’ve looked into your other theory.”

“What’s that?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

“What you told me last night. That somebody, maybe from Narcotics Four or someplace else in the department, was using Verlaine to kill the women. Don’t waste time pursuing that.”

“Why not?”

Now his voice was hard as a metal file. “Because, Detective, I was profiling perps when you were getting your knuckles rapped for mouthing off in class. Verlaine’s a single operator. His psych profile is as obvious as the front page of the Post. Now make the case against him. STAT.”

“What part are you missing, Stan? If you announce, he burns his fucking apartment down, there’s no evidence left, and the case goes to shit. He gets off . . . and goes on to kill somebody else.”

The thing about nut cutters is they sometimes cut any nuts in their path, not just the ones you want them to.

“Detective,” he snapped. “You’re going to hear on the news in a half hour that we have a suspect in the serial killing of those women. If that means you’ve gotta get your ass in gear and work faster and harder—then do it!”

Click.

He looked into the outer office and nodded. The stocky woman was in her forties, blond, and with a dry complexion and eyes that suggested she’d never laughed in her life. Her clothes were dowdy.

She looked around to make sure they were alone. Markowitz nodded at the door. Detective Candy Preston swung it shut.

He whispered, “We’ve got some problems.”

“I heard.” The woman was a nut cutter, too. But she had the most melodious voice. He could hear her reading stories to children.

“I need you to move forward with what we talked about.”

“Now? I thought we were taking things slow.”

“We don’t have the luxury of taking things slow.” The chief of detectives unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and handed her an envelope. It was thick but not as thick as you’d think. Fifty thousand dollars, in hundreds, really doesn’t take up a lot of space.

“I’ll do it now,” said Preston. She was one of the senior members of the Narcotics Unit Four detail. She slipped the money into her purse and rose, walked to the door. Her feet, he noticed, were as delicate as her voice.

Just before she touched the knob, Markowitz said, “Oh, some advice, Detective?”

She frowned at the implication that she was green. Stiffly she said, “I’ve handled things like this in the past, Stan. I know—”

“That’s not my advice. My advice is don’t fuck up.”

AMELIA WAS SWITCHING BACK AND forth between WABC and WNBC and said, before anyone else did, “We’re screwed.”

“Maybe,” Lucas said. He turned to Lincoln: “I understand from my BCA people that fires mess up DNA?”

“That’s right,” Lincoln said. “Theoretically, if he dumped a few gallons of gas down that basement—if the basement is the kill room—he could wipe out the most critical evidence. We wouldn’t get DNA unless we found an actual body.”

Lucas said to Lily, “You know what I think. If those are trophies hanging on his wall—”

“They are,” Lincoln said.

“Then we’re dealing with a lot more than four dead. Even if we don’t have what we need for a search warrant, we need to go in there anyway.”

Lily shook her head. “We need a warrant.”

Lucas turned to Lincoln. “Help me out here.”

Lincoln said, “We took samples from the poured concrete steps outside the building, for which we didn’t need a search warrant, and we found that the concrete matched the flecks of concrete in the victims’ backs. We also found flecks of bronze which are chemically identical to the bronze found in the victims’ backs.”

“But—” Amelia said.

Lincoln raised his hand. “Quiet.”

“That’s certainly enough for a warrant,” Lily said. “At least, if I go to the right judge, and I will. If you’ll write out the specs for the application, I can have it in an hour.”

“I’ll do that,” Lincoln said. And to Lucas: “If you’ll go back to the building with a couple of collection pads, get those samples for me. Backdate them to this morning. There may not be any bronze, but we’ve got a fair collection of it now. Take a few flecks with you. You know. Just in case.”

They all looked round at each other, then Lucas said, “At least a dozen trophies.”

“After you make the collection, just wait there,” Lily said. “I won’t be long behind you.”

“I’ll go with Lucas,” Amelia said. “If we need to block the back of the building, or he needs backup while we’re there.”

“You might want to bring an entry team,” Lucas said to Lily.

“Entry team? I’m bringing everybody. I’ll make a courtesy call to the FBI, they’ll want to have an observer.”

“I’ll be there,” Lincoln said. “I don’t want your entry team trashing my evidence.”

They took Amelia’s car, a maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, kicking out nifty 405 horsepower, with 447 pounds of torque. They made the twenty-minute trip in twelve minutes. Eight minutes out, she looked at Lucas and said, “You’re not holding on to anything.”

“You know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re almost as good as I am.”

She snorted: “What do you drive?”

“A 911.”

“I always heard”—she paused in her comment to chop the nose off a town car as she took a left turn—“that 911 drivers—”

“Have small penises. I know. Every time I meet somebody who can’t afford a 911, I get the ‘small penis’ line. So I ask them how large a sample they’ve looked at.”

She grinned as she said, “I’ll tell you what, though: in a fair run, I’d eat your 911 alive.”

“I don’t like the word ‘fair,’ ” Lucas replied. “ ‘Fair’ always means, ‘to my advantage.’ If it’s not to my advantage, it’s ‘unfair.’ If you guys ever get to Minneapolis, bring your car. I’ve got a run just across the border, in Wisconsin. Narrow blacktop, blind hills, twenty miles long, maybe two hundred braking curves.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, but she grinned again, and threw the Cobra down an alley, the walls whipping by, two feet away on each side, six inches from Lucas’s window when she dodged a trash can. Lucas yawned and said, “Wake me up when we get there.”

He tilted back in his seat and then said, “By the way, I’m one of the best action shooters around.”

Amelia dropped off Lucas, who was dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and running shoes, at Verlaine’s apartment. He was carrying a backpack loaned to him by Amelia. There were four men on the long block, two on each side, each one by himself.

Amelia was headed around the block, where she could watch the back of the building. Lucas sat on Verlaine’s stoop; he was too well fed to be a street person, but from a distance, with the pack by his feet, he could pass. They’d put a few bronze flakes in the bags with the sampling pads before they left, and now he took them out, one at a time, trying to look like he was shaking cigarettes out of a pack, and pressed them into the stoop. When he had five samples in place, he put them in the pack and zipped it up.

That done, he stood and ambled up the block, took out his cell phone, and called Lily, Lincoln, and Amelia, and said the same thing to all of them: “We’re good to go.”

Lily said, “Forty minutes.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“Nothing. You just got there quicker than you should have. I’ve got the application, I’m seeing the judge in about two minutes, and the entry team is gearing up. So, easy, boy.”

Lucas continued up the block, and on to the next block, and then walked back, and finally, with nothing at all going on at Verlaine’s building, he turned the corner and walked around the block, where he found Amelia’s car, parked, with Lincoln’s Chrysler van right behind it. Amelia climbed out of the passenger’s side: “Want to leave the pack?”

“Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “Half an hour, yet. I’ll find another place to sit.”

“Stay in touch,” Lincoln said, from the back.

Lincoln’s aide, Thom, who was driving, said, “I brought some sandwiches along. These two can spend hours at a crime scene. If you want a ham-and-cheese—”

“I not only want one, it’ll give me something to do while I’m watching,” Lucas said. “Some reason to be sitting there.”

Lucas ambled back around the block, carrying his brown-paper sandwich bag, and found a stoop fifty yards down the block from the entrance to Verlaine’s studio. He sat down, took Thom’s ham-and-cheese out of the sack, took a bite, and said, aloud, “That’s a great ham-and-cheese.”

He was thinking about the fact that you almost couldn’t buy a great ham-and-cheese in the Twin Cities, and why that might be, but that you could get a great one in Des Moines or Chicago, and then thought about Chicago being the “hog butcher to the world,” when a man stuck his head out of the door behind him and said, “This look like a fuckin’ cafeteria? Hit the road, asshole.”

Lucas chewed and swallowed, then shook his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Lily, ostentatiously pushed the speakerphone button, and, when she answered, said, “I’m being hassled by a guy across the street from the target, at 219—how long would it take to get, say, a half dozen building inspectors here? The place doesn’t look so sturdy.”

“I could have them there in an hour,” Lily said.

Lucas looked at the guy in the doorway. “An hour good for you?”

“Stay as long as you want,” the guy said, and eased the door shut.

Five minutes after that, a white van drove by Verlaine’s building, and the guy in the passenger’s seat took a close look at Lucas, and then nodded to him. Lucas nodded back. The van reappeared another five minutes later, going in the opposite direction, and this time the driver nodded to him.

Ten minutes after that, Amelia called: “We got the blocking squad here. Lincoln and I are coming around.”

And Lily: “One minute.”

The entry team arrived in two white, unmarked vans, closely followed by Lily in an unmarked car, another unmarked car, Amelia’s car, and two patrol cars. Behind them all, Lincoln’s van turned the corner. Lucas jogged down the street toward them as the vans stopped directly in front of Verlaine’s stoop and two guys carrying an entry ram hustled up to the door; four cops in armor were right behind them, and as Lucas came up, the ram handlers smashed the door open, and the armored cops went in.

Lucas was right there with Lily, and as they piled into the entryway, the team suddenly stopped, there was some milling, and the team leader called, “We got a body.”

Lily and Lucas shouldered their way from behind through the crowd, with Amelia a step behind, and they turned the corner at the door that went into the studio.

Verlaine was there, staring sightlessly at one of his sculptures. His head was a bloody mess, and a semiauto pistol lay on the floor by his fingertips.

“Got some brass,” Amelia said; she sounded like a professor of murder, her voice cool and analytical. Lucas saw the shell sitting by Verlaine’s foot. Then Amelia turned to the entry-team leader and said, “We’ve got to clear the building. But just two guys on this floor, and stay out on the perimeter, away from the kill site.”

The team leader nodded, and started calling names.

Lincoln pushed through the crowd in his chair, saw the body. Lily said to him, “This could solve a lot of problems.”

“Yes, it could,” he said. “But the statistics say that it probably won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Serial killers don’t often commit suicide. They like the attention they get from us. The spree killers, who are going through a psychotic break. They’ll kill themselves almost every time, if you give them a chance. It’s either a problem or an opportunity,” Lincoln said.

“Opportunity?”

“If he didn’t kill himself, it’s a problem,” Lincoln said. “If he did, I might get a nice paper out of it.”

“HOW BAD IS IT, SACHS?”

Looking over Verlaine’s apartment, she said, “Seen worse.” She was speaking to Lincoln, who was outside on the street in front of the place. They were connected via a headset and stalk mic.

Her judgment had nothing to do with the unpleasant detritus of gore and bits of bone littering the sculptor’s floor near the body (in fact, head wounds produce minimal blood flow). What she meant was that the place was relatively uncontaminated. If scenes were left virgin after the crime, forensic teams would have a much easier time processing the evidence. But that rarely happened. Bystanders, souvenir hunters, looters, grieving family members would pollute the scene with trace evidence, smear fingerprints, and walk off with everything from telltale epidermal cells to the murder weapon itself. And some of the worst offenders were the first-responders. Understandably, of course; saving lives and clearing a scene of the bad guys take priority. But leads have been destroyed and suspects found not guilty because otherwise solid evidence was destroyed by tactical teams and EMTs.

Here, though, once it looked like Verlaine had offed himself, the entry team backed out and let Lily and Amelia, armed with their Glocks, clear the place. They were careful not to disturb anything.

Then Lily backed away and let the expert do her thing. Now in her crime scene unit overalls, booties, and hood, Amelia was walking carefully through the fifty-by-fifty open space.

“It’s like a junkyard, Rhyme.”

Workbenches were littered with tools and slabs of metal and stone and instruments, welding masks, gloves, and leather jackets so thick they seemed bulletproof. The floor was equally cluttered. Rough-hewn wooden boxes holding ingots of metal. Pallets loaded with stone and more scrap. Gas tanks filled one wall. Hand trucks and jacks. Electric saws and drill presses. Overhead, a series of rails and tracks ran throughout the space at ceiling height, about fifteen feet up. These held electric pulleys and winches for transporting loads of metal and the finished sculptures throughout the space. Rusty chains and hooks dangled.

How homey, Amelia thought.

And everywhere: Verlaine’s sculptures, made of metal sheets and bars and rods, welded or soldered or bolted together. Bronze mostly, but some iron and steel and copper. It was as if he couldn’t bear to have a space in his studio not presided over by one of his ladies.

And ladies in extremis.

Though the works were impressionistic, there was no doubt what each one depicted, a woman in pain, just as horrific as Lucas Davenport had described. Bent over backward, on all fours, tied down on their backs, crying in agony, pleading. Some were pierced by lengths of rebar reinforcing rods.

She forced herself to look past the disturbing sculptures and get to work. Just because Verlaine apparently killed himself, Amelia didn’t search any less carefully. After all, suicide is technically a homicide. That the perp and the vic are the same simply means the investigators don’t have to hump as hard as in murder. But they still have to hump.

And in this case, of course, there was a lot at stake, even after Verlaine’s death. She was well aware that the sculptor might’ve kidnapped and stashed another victim somewhere else, chained underground, with only a few days to live before she died of thirst or bled out—if he’d been having some of his sick fun with her.

Amelia searched the hell out of the scene.

First, she processed the body, photographing and filming, then clearing and bagging the Glock he’d used, collecting the one spent nine-millimeter shell, swabbing his hands for gunshot residue and wrapping them in plastic bags as well.

She bagged his Dell laptop, along with the phone and iPad, noting that there’d been no hard copy or e-version suicide notes. She’d just run a case where a man’s farewell before leaping off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge had been tweeted.

Amelia searched the way she always did, walking the grid. This involved pacing step by step in a straight line from one end of the scene to the other and then turning around, moving slightly to the side, and returning. And then, when she was done with that, she covered the same ground again, perpendicular to the first search.

For an hour she walked the grid, taking samples of trace. She collected the necklaces and crosses in the alcove. Seeing them up close, Amelia realized that several of them looked familiar—and finally she knew why. In the pictures Verlaine had shown to her and Lily in the bar, the women he was playing his S&M games with had all been wearing necklaces like these. Yes, Lucas was right, they were trophies. Trophies not of the murder victims, but of his sexual conquests.

Then she turned to the steel door Lucas had told them about, the one leading to the basement. It had been unlocked when the team entered and she and Lily had cleared it fast. Now she searched it from the point of view of a forensic cop. The small underground chamber was brick-lined and had a raw concrete floor. The smells were of heating oil, mold, standing water, and sweat. Maybe that last scent was her imagination but she thought not.

She looked at the hooks protruding from the walls, the stains on the floor. Amelia walked down a set of rickety stairs into the thoroughly creepy place. She ran a fast fluorescein test on several of the dark patches; the results confirmed her initial hypothesis of blood. And there was no doubt about the bits of dark, elastic curls she popped into evidence bags. She knew dried flesh when she saw it.

Her gloved finger hit TRANSMIT and a moment later she heard Lincoln’s impatient voice. “Sachs. Where the hell are you?”

“On the other side of the steel door. In Verlaine’s basement.”

“And?”

“It’s almost a home run.”

“That’s like being nearly pregnant. But I’ll forgive the sloppy metaphor just this once. Get the evidence back ASAP.”

He disconnected without a good-bye.

LUCAS WAS STAYING AT THE Four Seasons on Fifty-seventh Street. He was lying in bed with his toenails scratching the top sheet, thinking about clipping his nails and then walking over to Madison Avenue to do a little shopping for an autumn ensemble, when his cell phone rang.

Amelia: “Get over here. Right now.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not good. And better not to talk about it on a cell phone.”

He needed to clean up: unless there was a shootout going on at Lincoln’s town house, he figured he had that much time. He was out of the hotel fifteen minutes after the call, and found a taxi outside the front door, dropping off a customer. Lucas got in the cab and gave the driver Lincoln’s address, and the driver said, “Not hardly worth turning on the meter for that.”

“Do what you want; I’ll give you a twenty when we get there.”

The driver drove with some enthusiasm, and Lucas was ringing Lincoln’s doorbell twenty minutes after Amelia called.

“What happened?” he asked, when she opened the door.

“Lily’s been detained by Internal Affairs. They could be coming for us next.”

“What?”

“I’ll let Lincoln tell you.”

Lincoln smiled when Lucas came in and said, “Now things are getting interesting.”

“Tell me.”

The evidence that Amelia had collected under Lincoln’s direction, which Lincoln conceded was “quite good, under typical circumstances,” had not been taken to Lincoln’s lab, but to the city laboratory.

First, they found some evidence that the dead women had been tortured and murdered in a small storage area in the basement of the sculptor’s studio. Not much evidence was visible, but the small stuff—tiny spatters of blood, flakes of skin, urine samples—proved that the dead women had been there.

The gun had also been examined—and that was where the problem arose.

“Last year, we had another psycho roaming around the city, but he was not particularly clever. He was a serial shooter. Guy named Levon Pitt. Owned a junkyard here in town. That’s where he had dumped the bodies. Lily ran the team that tracked him down. They had an entry team, and cracked his apartment but there was nobody home. So they set up outside the apartment to wait for him, and pretty soon, here he came, with his adult son. When the police approached him, he figured out what was about to happen, and pulled a gun, and actually tried to take his son hostage. In the scuffle, he fired the gun, once, and Lily shot him, firing three times, and he died on the way to the hospital.

“When the man had been shot, Lily froze the scene, and they brought in the crime scene crew. Among other things, they recovered seven different pistols in the man’s apartment. He’d used four different weapons in the murders that the police knew about, and after testing, they found that three of the guns they’d recovered were among the four used in the crime.”

Lincoln paused in his narration, and Lucas prompted, “So?”

“The gun we found yesterday, by Verlaine’s hand, was the fourth gun.”

“What?” Lucas was momentarily confused. “Verlaine was involved with Levon Pitt?”

“That’s not what they’re suggesting,” Lincoln said. “For one thing, there’s no apparent connection. For another, one of the shells in Verlaine’s gun had Lily’s fingerprint on it.”

It took Lucas a moment to get it. “So they’re saying, what? That she picked up a gun at the first site, and kept it as a throw-down? And then she went into Verlaine’s apartment sometime last night, killed him, and made it look like a suicide?”

“That’s what they’re suggesting.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lucas said.

“Internal Affairs doesn’t think so,” Amelia said. “The thing is, they can’t figure out any other mechanism for getting Lily’s fingerprint on that shell. She never touched the gun at Verlaine’s place.”

“But why would she do that? Why kill Verlaine? After I went in there, we knew we had him.”

“But we had no hard evidence, and that’s all Internal Affairs knows. That’s what Lily reported last night. We can’t tell them that we did have hard evidence, because then we’d have to tell them that you illegally entered. So their theory is she knew who the killer was, but couldn’t get at him, so she killed him. Got him off the street.”

“Aw, man, that’s not right,” Lucas said.

“There’s another aspect to it,” Amelia said. “Lily is an operator. She gets things done, but she steps on a lot of toes. That’s fine, when she’s got all that protection at the top. But now, with this, well, somebody leaked the lab results almost instantly. Probably some old bureaucratic enemy. It’s on every TV station in New York. They’re screaming for her head.”

“Don’t forget to tell him about what else is coming down the line,” Lincoln said.

“Oh, yeah.” Amelia pulled out her cell phone and looked at the time. “IA wonders if any of us had anything to do with it. We’ve got a couple of homicide cops on the way here. They want to talk to us. I know them. They’re hard-nosed guys.”

Lucas shrugged. “We leave out the burglary, leave out the evidence collection from last night, and tell them everything else. And we tell them that they’re being taken as chumps—that Lily couldn’t have done this, and that somebody is running a con on them.”

“That’ll piss them off,” Amelia said.

“Which is what we want to do,” Lucas said. “We want them on the defensive. We want them off our backs so we can figure out what actually happened. And we tell them that.”

·  ·  ·

“The question,” Lucas Davenport spat out, “is who’s setting her up?”

Lincoln agreed. That was the only question. There was no doubt in the minds of Lucas, Amelia, and Lincoln that Lily was innocent.

However much of a shit Jim Bob Verlaine had been, however guilty he was of sadistic murder—and however much of a tough number Lily Rothenburg was—there was no way she’d take him out like that.

The team was back in Lincoln’s town house—all of them except Lily, of course, who was still being detained.

And whose absence was glaringly obvious.

“So,” Lucas repeated. “Who’s behind it?”

“Somebody with a grudge?” Amelia offered.

“Could be,” Lucas said. “She’s made some enemies in her day. Or maybe some asshole wants to derail a case she’s running.”

“And what about Verlaine?” Amelia asked. “Did he kill those women? Or was he being set up, too? And what’s the reason behind that?”

Lincoln’s view, admittedly myopic at times, as to the questions why and who was generally best answered by how and what: that is, by the evidence. “Why waste fucking time speculating? Look at the facts.”

“You ever in a good mood, Lincoln?” Lucas asked.

A grunt suggested that the answer might be no.

But Lucas took his point. “What do we have to prove the suicide was faked?”

Looking over Amelia’s photos of the body, Mel Cooper said, “Powder burns and muzzle stamp’re consistent with a close-contact gunshot.”

Lucas regarded the pictures, too. “And the tissue, blood, and bone on the receiver of the piece confirm that. But it was a temple shot. That’s rare in self-inflicted wounds. Usually the poor bastard bites the muzzle.”

“Which means somebody could’ve pulled out the piece when Verlaine was turned away, come up behind or beside him, and shot. So, maybe he knew the shooter.”

Cooper said, “But there was gunshot residue on Verlaine’s hands.”

Firing any pistol, and most rifles, results in burnt gunpowder particles and gases contaminating the hand holding the weapon.

But Lucas muttered, “Fuck, that’s easy. He fired twice.”

“Yes!” Lincoln said enthusiastically. “Good. Verlaine lets the perp in. He—or she—stands beside him and blows his brains out. Then the perp puts the gun in Verlaine’s hand and pulls the trigger again. Bang . . . Verlaine’s fingerprints’re on the piece, and GSR’s on his hand. Perp collects the second shell and leaves the gun on the floor.”

“But where’s the other slug?” Cooper asked.

Lucas, clearly pissed his friend had been set up, snapped, “Christ, just look at the pictures of the scene! The whole goddamn studio’s like a gun-range bullet trap—a thousand hunks of metal. Half of his quote art looks like a monkey pounded on it with a hammer. Nobody’d spot a bullet ding.”

Amelia said, “Okay, that could work. But the big issue: what about Lily’s fingerprint on the shell casing fired from the murder weapon? How the hell did the perp finesse that?” She tossed her long red hair over a shoulder. Lincoln was amused to see Lucas following the sweep closely. He reflected: Just ’cause you’re a faithful husband doesn’t mean you are blind.

Lincoln said, “Internal Affairs is claiming that Lily picked the gun up at the scene where she shot Levon Pitt—rescuing his son. What was the name again?”

“The boy?” Mel Cooper asked, flipping through a file. “Andy.”

Lucas then snapped his fingers. “Hold on. Something’s wrong here. It’s Levon Pitt’s gun—and presumably it was loaded with Pitt’s ammo. Why would Lily reload the mag with her rounds? That makes no sense. I’m not saying she’d take somebody out like that, but if she did, she wouldn’t be stupid about it.”

Amelia said, “Somebody stole one of her cartridges and popped it in the mag.”

“Wore gloves.”

“Or knuckled it,” Lucas said, referring to loading a weapon by holding the bullets between your fingers, never letting the tips come in contact with the brass or slug.

Lucas nodded. “Our friend Markowitz ain’t real crazy about the boys and girls from Narcotics being involved. But it’s leaning that way to me.”

“Well, IA’s not going to take our word for it,” Cooper pointed out. “How do we prove somebody copped a spent shell from Lily?”

An idea occurred to Lincoln. “Call Ballistics. Have them test fire a round from the bottom of the mag of the gun at Verlaine’s suicide. I want three-D images of that shell compared with the one with Lily’s prints on it. And I fucking want them now.”

“Will do.”

Not that fast, but it wasn’t bad. A half hour later the images were on the big monitor in front of them.

Lincoln glanced toward Lucas then Amelia. “You two are the shoot-em-up mavens. What do you think?”

It took no more than a fast glance. They nodded at each other. Lucas said, “The shell with Lily’s prints was machined to fit the receiver of Pitt’s gun. The real perp got one of her cartridges and altered it.”

“Yep,” Amelia agreed. “So whoever did it knows weapons and metalwork. It’s real high quality, close tolerances.”

“Okay, that proves she was set up. But it doesn’t get us any closer to who’s setting Lily up,” Cooper said.

Breaking a lengthy silence, Lucas said, “Maybe it does. Amelia, you know somebody in the NYPD evidence room?”

“Know somebody?” she asked, laughing. “It’s my home away from home.”

STAN MARKOWITZ STOOD AT THE podium beside the police commissioner, along with some minion from the mayor’s office and a Public Affairs officer or two. They were in the Press Room in One Police Plaza.

Microphones and cameras and cell phones in video mode bristled like RPGs and machine guns, aimed the officials’ way—though Markowitz, it seemed, was the preferred prey in the crosshairs, to judge from the tight shots.

“I don’t think your boss’s having a good day,” Lincoln said to Amelia. They sat beside each other, watching on the big-screen TV in the corner of his parlor.

Lucas was elsewhere, preparing.

“Doesn’t look it. And what do you think?” she mused. “Half the city’s watching?”

“Half the country,” Lincoln countered. “No good serial killers in the news lately. All the sharks want a piece of this one.”

Every media outlet except CSPAN and Telemundo, it seemed, was represented.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Markowitz began reasonably, though with a tone that suggested he actually viewed them as sharks.

He was drowned out by their shouted questions.

“What was the motive for the torture?”

“Is it significant that the victims were minorities?”

“Is there a connection between this case and the Bekker case a few years ago, involving Lucas Davenport?”

“Could you fill us in about Verlaine’s sex life?”

Frenzy.

Markowitz had obviously done this before and he began speaking very softly—an old trick. Suddenly the sharks realized that they weren’t going to hear anything if they kept yammering away and they spontaneously, to a fish, fell silent.

The COD gave it a beat and then continued. “As you are probably aware, a thorough examination and analysis of evidence and behavioral profiling led investigators to believe that a resident of Manhattan, James Robert Verlaine, was the perpetrator in the spate of recent killings of women in the city. Mr. Verlaine appeared to take his own life as a result of said investigation. And evidence supported that supposition.”

Lincoln muttered, “Ah, sooo pleased to see that they still teach courses at the academy in using ten words when one will do.”

Amelia laughed and kissed his neck.

“You are probably also aware that it was believed that an NYPD detective shot and killed Mr. Verlaine and attempted to cover up the murder by making it appear that the death was a suicide.

“Further investigation has determined that the detective, Lily Rothenburg, was not, in fact, involved in the death of Mr. Verlaine. A person or persons intentionally planted evidence in an attempt to implicate the detective. This officer has been exonerated. It now appears, too, that Mr. Verlaine was not the perpetrator behind the murder of the women. Detective Rothenburg is once again in charge of the task force investigating the killings. We expect to have a suspect in custody soon. I have no further comments at this time.”

“Does that mean, Chief of Detectives, that Verlaine was murdered by this suspect as well? . . .”

A new microphone logo popped into sight. Telemundo had arrived.

“Can you tell us what leads Detective Rothenburg is working on? . . . Can you reassure the people of New York that no one else is at risk?”

Markowitz studied the sharks for a moment and Lincoln thought he was actually going to say, “How fucking stupid do you have to be not to understand ‘I have no further comments’?”

Instead: “Thank you.” He turned and walked off the stage.

AMELIA MADE A FEW CALLS to the television stations, posing as an angry cop, and told them that Lily was at Lincoln’s town house. “She’s guilty, she’s the one who did it, you got to get on her,” she told the newsies.

Within the hour, there were six news crews and fifty rubberneckers on the sidewalk outside of Lincoln’s town house. One of them finally came up and pounded on the door, and Amelia peeked out and asked what they wanted.

They wanted Lily.

After some back-and-forth, Lily went out on the stoop, told them that she would make one statement for the record, and that would be it.

“I have some very clear ideas of how this may have happened,” she began.

“Are you guilty?” somebody shouted.

“Of course I’m not guilty,” Lily said. “I’m not guilty of anything except trying to track down a torture-killer. But the possibilities now are quite few: the logical possibilities. I’ll knock them down one at a time, and when I’m finished, we’ll have this madman. Within the next day or two. I’m confident of that.”

The press conference lasted for another two or three minutes, then she said she would not talk anymore about it, and went back inside. The news crews dispersed, with the exception of a radio reporter. The rubberneckers went with them.

An hour later, Lucas stuck his head out the door. “If you’re waiting for Lily, she went out the back a half hour ago.”

At ten o’clock that night, Lucas and Lily headed over to the West Side, in the Thirties west of Ninth Avenue. They were tracked by two other cars, each with two cops in them, including Amelia.

Lily took a call, and then said to Lucas, “He’s on the way. He’ll get off at Penn Station and then walk over, unless he’s going somewhere else.”

“I’m worried,” Lucas said. “He’s nuts. If he goes off on you, I mean he could just—”

“He works at a hospital. He’s unlikely to be carrying a gun. And the stuff I’m wearing is stab-resistant.”

“Nothing is stab-proof, though,” Lucas said. “What we really need to do is slow down.”

“I disagree,” Lily said. “This is hot, right now. He’s got to be feeling the street. If he has too much time to think about it, he can start covering it up. If he really thinks about it, he’d know that I’d never approach him alone. We can’t let him think.”

Andy Pitt lived in a dark brownstone building that would take at least fifty yuppies and a couple of generations to gentrify, Lucas thought. They sat a block away, and the few people on the sidewalks either crossed the street or moved to the far edge of the sidewalk when they realized that there were people in the parked cars. A couple went by, and then a too-happy guy with a white dog.

Lily took a call on a police handset. “He’s on the sidewalk. He’s coming this way.”

“Wire is good,” Lucas said. Lily was wearing a wire over her vest, which made her look a little paunchy; but paunchy was okay, considering the alternative.

They took a call from Amelia, who was with three other cops, concealed down some cellar steps at a building on the other side of the street. “We’re set here.”

A minute later she took another call: “He’s across Ninth, still coming on. He’s got a grocery sack.”

Another two minutes: “He’s two blocks out.”

Lily said, “Let’s go.”

Lily went to the stoop that led into the apartment building. The doors were locked, but the rake opened them in a moment, and Lucas stepped into the entry hall. There was a weak bare-bulb light inside, and he reached up and unscrewed it, a quarter inch at a time, because of the heat. When it went out, he unscrewed it another quarter inch, then pulled his gun, cocked it, and leaned against the wall. Lily was facing him through the glass, five inches away, and he could hear her radio. “He’ll turn the corner in ten seconds. Nine. Eight.”

Lily opened the door, turned off the radio, and handed it to Lucas. They were both counting. Seven. Six. Five. Four.

Andy turned the corner. Lucas was looking past Lily’s head, and he said, just loud enough for her to hear, “He’s seen you. Bang on the door.”

She banged on the door.

Lucas said, “He’s coming up. He’s a hundred feet out.”

Lily turned away from the door, as if giving up, then saw Andy and his bag. Andy stopped under the only nearby streetlight, and Lily walked down the steps and called, “Police. Is that you, Andy? Wait there.”

If he ran, they’d have to try something different.

He didn’t run. He said, “You’re the cop who killed my father.”

“That’s right. I have a few questions for you. We’re trying to find out how a piece of brass, a shell from a nine-millimeter cartridge, got into a gun that was used in another killing. You may have heard about it. After I thought about it, Andy, there’s only one way, isn’t there? You picked it up. We froze the crime scene, but you were right in the middle of it, with your father. What did you do, step on it? Kneel on it? You were kneeling right next to him.”

Lucas, watching from the window, saw Andy do something with his left hand, his free hand; something in the pocket of his jacket. Couldn’t see what, but Lily didn’t seem worried; but then she might not have been able to see the move. She pushed him, still talking. “Found the kill room, and found some DNA that shouldn’t have been there. Not much, a few flakes of skin, but good enough for us. So, I have a warrant. We need a DNA sample from you. It won’t hurt. I have a kit, we need you to scrub a swab against your gums.”

“I knelt on it,” Andy said.

“What?”

“I knelt on it. The shell. I didn’t try to do that, I just knelt on it by accident. When I saw what it was, I put it in my pocket.”

“And you reloaded it.”

“Of course. My pop and I reloaded everything. When you shoot a lot, you don’t want to waste all that brass. We saved more than half, except that we shot more.”

“Who killed the women? You or Verlaine?”

“Not Verlaine.” Andy laughed, and dropped his grocery sack by his ankle. “We had the same interests, but he never had the guts to do anything real. He just liked to get the women in there and pose them like slave girls and make his sculptures, and then he’d go around to the S&M clubs and brag about it. But he had that room down in the basement where he kept his finished work—he had that big steel door because the metal thieves will take that bronze shit and melt it right down—but that was perfect. I’d get the girls down there and do what I wanted. What he dreamed about. You ever had a slave? There’s nothing like it.”

“Why’d you kill him?”

“Because of you. I didn’t even know how close you were to finding him, even with all those clues I left for you. All those brass filings. But I had that shell, and a shell is a terrible thing to waste. You killed my pop. I thought they’d put you in prison, so you’d have all that time to think about it.”

“Why those victims, Andy? Why those particular women?”

But he didn’t answer, just stepped closer. Fist coming out of his pocket.

Lucas stepped through the door with his gun and shouted, “He’s got something in his hand, Lily, he’s got something.”

Lily jumped back, but Andy was right with her, grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back, looking around. “Stay away. Stay away,” he screamed. “I got a scalpel, I’ll cut her face off.”

Amelia and the other cops emerged from the stairway across the street and spread out.

“Get away. Get away or I’ll cut her throat, I swear to God, I’ll cut her fuckin’ throat.”

He yanked Lily backward, and Lily called to Lucas, “I can’t reach my gun. It got stuck under the damn vest when he pulled me back.”

Lucas: “Can you go down?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t try anything. I just want to go away. I walk her up the block and I—”

Lily, using both hands, grabbed his knife arm and pushed it away from her, just an inch, and at the same time kicked her feet out from under herself and dropped. Amelia and Lucas fired at the same time, and Andy’s head exploded.

Lily landed on her ass and rolled away from the falling body; the scalpel tinkled to the ground six feet away. “That was not optimal,” she said, as she got back to her feet and turned to look down at the body.

After that, it was mostly routine: checking the tape, calling crime scene. Andy Pitt had two bullet holes in his head, one right through the forehead and out the back, and the second in one temple and out the other.

As the scene was taped off, Lucas stepped over to Amelia and asked, “You okay?”

“I’m okay. How about you?”

“I’m okay,” he said. He looked her over and said, “Do you know that you smile when you pull the trigger?”

THEY SAT IN GOVERNMENT-ISSUE FURNITURE and wheelchair, across from the chief of detectives. His office.

Lucas, Lily, Amelia, and Lincoln. They were here for what Lincoln joked was the post postmortem. Maybe in bad taste, but nobody was all that upset that Andy Pitt was lying in the morgue at the moment.

Markowitz was on a call (nodding subconsciously, from which Lincoln deduced he was speaking, well, most likely listening, to his boss, the commissioner). Lincoln looked around. He thought the office was pretty nice. Big, ordered, with nice views, though Lincoln had no use for views. His town house, for instance, offered a nice scene of Central Park. He invariably ordered Thom to close the curtains.

Distracting.

Finally, Markowitz hung up. His gaze incorporated them all. “Everybody upstairs’s happy. I was worried, they were worried, well, it was a little radical what you wanted to do. But it worked out.”

Lincoln shrugged—one of the few gestures he was capable of—and turned his chair slightly to face Markowitz. “The plan was logical, the execution competent,” he said. Those were about his highest forms of praise.

It was Lucas who’d initially come up with the theory of who’d killed Verlaine and set Lily up.

Amelia, you know somebody in the NYPD evidence room?

He had a possible source for the shell casing with Lily’s fingerprint on it: the crime scene where she’d tapped Levon Pitt. Sure enough, the evidence log from that crime reported three slugs recovered but only two spent casings. Somebody, possibly, had pocketed the third.

“Okay, the gun at Verlaine’s belonged to Levon Pitt. The shell casing at Verlaine’s had been Lily’s, fired when Pitt was shot,” Lucas had pointed out when they’d learned this. “How could they be linked? Only through the one individual who had a connection to them both: Andy Pitt, Levon’s son, the kid who had—supposedly—been held hostage by his father.”

But what, Lucas speculated, if he hadn’t been a hostage? What if he was his father’s accomplice in the serial shootings back then? And he was enraged that Lily had killed his father?

It made sense, Lincoln had agreed, and he’d pointed out that Andy might’ve met Verlaine through his father’s junkyard, where, possibly, the sculptor bought metal for his art.

They’d found where the young man lived and worked and set up surveillance.

But no evidence implicated him. They needed more. They had to flush him, force him into making a move.

And Lincoln had come up with a plan. Using Lily as bait. They’d proved to Markowitz she was innocent and asked him to make the initial press announcement to that effect. Then Amelia contacted more reporters. Lily, too, had made her statement.

That virtually guaranteed that Andy knew Lily was getting close. He’d have to make his move.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Markowitz said. “I mean, you, Lucas, coming all the way from Minneapolis. That was really above and beyond the call.”

“Glad to help out.”

“Better get back to it.” Markowitz’s attention was elsewhere now. He was glancing at the notepad on which he’d jotted notes during his conversation with the commissioner. There were a lot of notes.

But nobody rose. Lincoln glanced at Lily, who was the senior law officer here. She said, “Stan, just one thing we were thinking about. One loose end, sort of.”

Still distracted. “Loose end?” He was ticking off something on the paper in front of him.

“You know what occurred to us? Remember we had the idea that somebody was using Verlaine to kill those women? Well, what if it wasn’t Verlaine they were using, but Andy Pitt?

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

Lily continued, “Sure, he had a motive to get even with me. But that doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t force him or hire him to kill those women, and Verlaine.”

Amelia said, “Like maybe somebody from Narcotics Four, after all. Andy Pitt never got to tell us why he picked those women. Why? Maybe the women could provide good info on drug operations in the city. Maybe it was Andy who got recruited by somebody in Narc Four.”

“And another thing that we were pondering,” Lincoln said. “Who exactly was it doing everything he could to protect the unit? The one who insisted that the killings had to be the work of a psycho, nothing to do with any cops?”

Lily took over again. “That’d be you, Stan.”

If the words didn’t have Markowitz’s full attention, the Glock that Lily drew and pointed more or less in his direction sealed the deal.

THE CHIEF OF DETECTIVES SIGHED. “Goddamnit.”

“What’s the story, Stan?” Amelia asked. Voice cold. She tossed her hair. Lucas was still looking.

There was a pause.

“All right,” Markowitz muttered. “I did pull some strings to get the drug side of the investigation downplayed.”

“Let me guess,” Lily snapped. “Because the women were tortured and killed to get information on the drug player in town so Narc Four could become the shining star of the department.”

“Guess again, Detective.” Markowitz gave a guttural laugh. “Do you think there might’ve been some other reason why Narc Four has such a great conviction record—other than hiring a psycho to torture and kill users?”

No one replied.

“How ’bout because the fucking head of Narc Four was on the take.”

“Marty Glover?”

“Yeah. Exactly. We’ve suspected it for six months. Sure, the team was collaring suppliers and importers and meth cookers all over the city—except for one location. A big heroin distribution operation based in Red Hook, Brooklyn.” He tapped a file on his desk. “Glover was on their payroll and using Narc Four to take down their competition. The others on the team weren’t in on it. All they knew was that Glover had good sources.”

Markowitz waved at Lily’s weapon as if it were an irritating wasp. “Could you? Do you mind?”

She holstered the Glock, but kept her hand near the grip.

The COD continued. “But the Internal Affairs Red Hook operation against Glover had nothing to do with Verlaine or Pitt, or the torture-murders. It was just a coincidence the women were druggies, the victims. But then you started looking for connections. Glover freaked out. I thought he was gonna rabbit, go underground and burn the evidence. So I told you to back off. That’s all there was to it.”

Lucas asked, “What happened with Glover?”

“I didn’t want to move so fast but there was no choice. I called Candy Preston—from Narc Four—and we set up a sting to nail Glover. I had her use one of her snitches to offer him a payoff. Fifty thousand. I didn’t think he’d go for it, but he couldn’t resist. We got him on camera taking the bribe. It’s not as righteous a collar as we’d like—I wanted some of the Red Hook scum, too. But the prosecutor’ll work him over. He’ll give up names if we play with the sentencing.”

Lincoln gave him points for credibility. But he remained skeptical.

Lucas, too, apparently. He said, “Good story, Stan. But I think we’d all like confirmation. Who can we talk to who’ll vouch for you?”

“Well, there’s somebody who’s been in the loop from the beginning of the Red Hook op.”

“Who?”

“The mayor.”

Lincoln glanced toward Lucas and said, “Works for me.”

·  ·  ·

Outside, they headed toward the accessible van, where Thom sat in the driver’s seat. He saw the entourage and hit the button that opened the door and lowered the ramp. Then he climbed out.

Lincoln wheeled up to the van then braked to a stop, spun around. “Anyone care to come back to the town house for an aperitivo? It’s approaching cocktail hour.”

“Bit early,” the aide pointed out. Such a mother hen.

“Thom, our guests have had an extremely traumatic time. Kidnapping was involved, knives were involved, gunplay was involved. If anybody deserves a bit of refreshment, it’s them.”

“Love to,” Lucas offered. “But I’m heading back to the family. Got a flight in an hour.”

“I’m going to make sure he gets to the airport,” Lily said. “Without getting into any trouble.”

They shook hands. Lincoln wheeled onto the ramp and his aide fixed the chair to it with canvas straps. The criminalist said, “We should think about doing this again, Davenport.”

Thom lifted his eyebrow. “Last name. Means he likes you. And he doesn’t like many people.”

Lincoln grumbled. “I’m not saying I like anyone. Where did that subtext come from? I’m simply saying this case didn’t turn out to be the disaster it might have.”

“I may not be back here soon,” Lucas said, and cocked his head. “But you ever get to Minnesota?”

“Used to go quite a bit.”

“You’ve been?” Amelia asked.

“Of course. I grew up in the Midwest, remember,” Lincoln said impatiently. “I’d go fishing for muskie and pike in Swan Lake and Minnetonka.”

“You fished?” Thom asked. He seemed astonished.

“And I’ve been to Hibbing. A Bob Dylan pilgrimage.”

“Site of the largest open-pit iron mine in the world,” Lucas said.

Lincoln nodded. “My first impression was that it’d be a great place to dispose of bodies.”

“Had the same thought myself.”

“Then it’s settled,” Rhyme muttered. “You catch any good cases up there—something interesting, something challenging, give me a call.”

“Lily’s been there, too, helping us out. We could get the team back together.” Lucas glanced at Amelia. “We’ll go out to the range, you and me. I can teach you how to shoot.”

“And we can hit that highway you were mentioning. I’ll give you a few tips on how to drive that toy car of yours.”

“Let’s go, Sachs,” Lincoln called. “We’ve got a crime scene report to write up.”

WANT MORE THRILLING STORIES?

Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Jeffery Deaver, John Sandford, and more bestselling authors pit your favorite characters head-to-head in FACEOFF. Read it now!

FaceOff

ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY!

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

or visit us online to sign up at

eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by International Thriller Writers, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

This Simon & Schuster ebook edition September 2014

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

ISBN 978-1-4767-8874-6 (ebook)

Contents

Rhymes with Prey: Jeffery Deaver vs. John Sandford