A moment later he heard the sharp crack-boom of the stun grenade, followed by the double crash of the A-Team units simultaneously breaching the door and wall and storming the apartment. A shot rang out from inside, followed by another and another—and then it was over.

“Disarmed and apprehended,” came the announcement over the channel.

D’Agosta ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and entered the apartment. Here was Lasher, on the floor, cuffed, with two cops on him, in the middle of a tiny, messy, and malodorous hole of an apartment. They hauled him to his feet, whimpering. He was about five foot three, skinny, with acne and a wisp of a goatee. He was bleeding profusely from both the shoulder and the abdomen.

This is Lasher?

“He fired at us, sir,” one of the officers said, “justifying return fire to disarm him.”

“Good.” D’Agosta stepped aside as a medic came in to treat the gunshot wounds.

“You hurt me!” Lasher blubbered, and D’Agosta saw he was pissing himself.

D’Agosta scanned the room. There were posters for death-metal groups on the walls, a disorganized scatter of guns in a corner, half a dozen disassembled computers and heaps of other electronic devices of unknown function. The whole place was comico-absurd-frightening, like a dystopian movie set. This level of weirdness wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Looking at Lasher, his hair full of plaster dust, blood ponding across the littered floor, his skinny body shaking—well, was this really the guy who stalked and killed Cantucci with such ruthless precision? He just couldn’t see it. Then again, there was no denying the little prick had just shot a cop with a sawed-off shotgun…and then tried to kill some more.

“It hurts,” Lasher said more faintly, then slipped out of consciousness.

“Get him to Bellevue.” With a deep sigh, D’Agosta turned away. He would question the bastard once he was stabilized—his wounds were severe, but maybe not fatal. But not tonight. He needed to get some sleep—and the paperwork just kept piling up.

Christ, what a headache he had.

24

AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning of December 24, about an hour before dawn, Special Agent Pendergast appeared at the door of apartment 5B in the building at 355 West 14th Street. He found the lone cop guarding the scene of the crime—the CSU had already finished—who was almost, but not quite, dozing in his chair.

“I’m so sorry to trouble you,” Pendergast began as the man leapt to his feet, the cell phone he’d been holding in his hand dropping to the floor.

“I’m sorry, sir, I’m—”

“Please,” said Pendergast in a soothing voice, sliding out his FBI shield and letting it fall open. “Just going to have a peek—if that’s all right with you, of course.”

“Oh sure,” said the cop, “of course, but do you have the authorization…?” His face fell slightly as Pendergast shook his head gravely.

“At five in the morning, my good friend, it is hard to get a signature. However, if you think you should call Lieutenant D’Agosta, naturally I’d understand.”

“No, no, that’s not necessary,” he said hastily. “But you are already authorized on the case—?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then, I guess you can go ahead.”

“Good man.” Pendergast sliced the crime scene tape from the door, broke the seal, and slipped into the apartment, turning on his light and easing the door shut behind him. He did not want to be disturbed.

He shone the light around the miserable space, pivoting as he did so, taking everything in. The light lingered on each poster, then moved to the scatter of guns on a piece of dirty carpet on the floor, the heap of computer equipment, circuit boards and old CRTs, now spattered with blood. His gaze roved over a crude workbench hammered together out of deal lumber, its top scarred and burned; the wall behind it hung with tools. It moved to the rumpled bed, across the kitchen nook, unexpectedly tidy—and all the way back around to where it had started.

Now he moved toward the workbench. This was his focus of interest. He inspected it from left to right, examining every last thing with the flashlight and occasionally a loupe, now and then picking up something with a pair of jeweler’s tweezers and slipping it into a test tube. His pale visage, illuminated by the reflected flashlight, floated like a disembodied face, silvery eyes glittering in the darkness.

For fifteen minutes he performed his examinations until suddenly he froze. In the corner where the rough deal table had been pushed up against the wall, his light had illuminated what appeared to be two grains of yellowish salt. The first one he picked up in his fingers; he rubbed it, examined the resulting whitish dust on his fingertips, sniffed at it, and finally tasted it with the tip of his tongue. The second grain he picked up with the tweezers and dropped into a tiny ziplock bag, sealing it and slipping it back into his jacket pocket.

He turned and left the apartment. The policeman on duty, waiting with rigid attention, rose. Pendergast took his hand warmly. “I thank you, Officer, for your help and attention to duty. I shall certainly mention it to the lieutenant when I see him next.”

And then he slipped down the stairs as silently and smoothly as a cat.

25

ALMOST EXACTLY TWELVE hours after Pendergast left Lasher’s apartment, Bryce Harriman was pacing restlessly through his one-bedroom apartment on Seventy-Second and Madison. The apartment was in a converted prewar building, and the conversion had given the apartment a bizarre layout that allowed for a true circuit: from the living room, through the kitchen, into one door of the bathroom, out the other door into the bedroom, and then from the bedroom through a short, closet-lined hallway that led back to the living room.

The building had high ceilings, a posh lobby, and twenty-four-hour doormen, but the apartment was rent-stabilized and held under the name of Harriman’s aunt. When she passed away, which would probably be fairly soon, he’d have to leave and find someplace more in keeping with his salary. Just one more example of the fading fortunes of the Harriman family.

It was furnished in an eclectic style of cast-off pieces left to him by elderly relations, now departed. Many of them were valuable, and all were old. The only new thing in the entire apartment, outside of the kitchen appliances, was the laptop that sat on a Queen Anne table of figured Brazilian maple with cabriole legs—once in the possession of Great-Uncle Davidson, now these ten years under the earth.

Harriman paused in his pacing to approach the table. Besides the laptop with its glowing screen, there were three piles of paper, one for each murder, the sheets covered with notes, scrawls, doodles, rough diagrams, and the occasional question mark. He shuffled through them restlessly for a moment, then resumed his pacing.

That nagging frisson of professional anxiety, which had subsided somewhat after his coup with the Izolda Ozmian interview, had surfaced once again. He knew, he knew, what great stories these murders could be—but he was having his share of problems covering them. One difficulty was that his police sources weren’t that good, and they were not eager to help him out. His old archrival Smithback had been a master at cozying up to cops, buying them drinks, buttering them up, and cadging stories out of them. But, although he hated to admit it, Harriman just didn’t have the knack. Maybe it was his WASPy upbringing, the years at Choate and Dartmouth, growing up with the yacht-club-and-cocktail set—but whatever the reason, he just couldn’t relax with cops, couldn’t talk their talk. And they knew it. His stories suffered as a result.

But there was an even bigger problem here. Even if he was buddy-buddy with all the cops on the force, Harriman wasn’t sure it would help him this time around. Because they seemed as confused by these killings as he was. A dozen different theories were circulating: one killer, two killers, three killers, a copycat killer, a lone killer pretending to be a copycat. The theory du jour was that the Ozmian girl had been killed by one murderer, then decapitated later by somebody who had gone on to do more copycat killings. The cops wouldn’t say exactly why they thought the second and third killings were connected, but from what Harriman had been able to dig up it looked pretty clear the modus operandi was similar in both cases.