Mallory swung again, and again. Aubry was crawling now, clawing her way back toward the door, as the axe came down again, and again. Mallory followed her victim the length of the floor, bringing the axe down with a rhythm as she walked.

How had Aubry managed that? She was choking on her own blood, every wound was a mortal wound.

“Why don’t you die?” Mallory said, as she raised the axe again.

“She thinks help is on the way,” said Markowitz, standing off to the side of her mind, watching his own child hacking up the dancer as though he were supervising Mallory’s school homework assignment.

Mallory brought down the axe to strike the blow to Aubry’s head. Bits of the dancer’s brains leaked to the floor, near the door where the skull fragments were found.

At last, Aubry stopped her struggles and lay dead. Mallory reached down and picked up the phantom dancer under the arms and dragged her body along the floor as though the imaginary Aubry had real weight. When she reached the body parts of Peter Ariel, she set down Aubry’s body a few feet away, where the second set of slices still marred the floor.

Here she inflicted one last stroke to the dead body of Aubry, the only assault wound made after death. It was a listless stroke, only a drag of the axe across the body as a final token wound. And this might be more evidence of a conspirator in the room, a more withdrawn, not at all enraged conspirator.

Then she began the work of cutting up the dancer’s body in a more businesslike fashion, the same sure strokes, the same rest periods. She pulled off the ripped clothing. The shreds came away easily, so she allotted only a small amount of time to this task.

Now she was ready to create the sculpture of body parts. She skewered the severed head of Peter Ariel on one of the rusted upright rods. The crushed car was the level of a bench. She seated the lower male torso on the metal and bound it to the long spike with the wire which had been taken from the gallery’s storeroom. She completed this torso with the upper half of Aubry’s body, carefully binding it in place to create one body of the male’s head spiked above female breasts, and a penis below. It was close to the old Egyptian model of a god.

She moved on to the work of the second mismatched torso, skewering Aubry’s head to the second rod. The male chest was set above the female nether regions. She mismatched the legs which required no wire, but only needed to be settled in place on the bench and then intertwined. The feet of Peter were set below the bloody stumps of Aubry’s well-muscled legs. Her dancer’s feet now supported the hairy legs of the artist. The arms were more difficult, placing them into bloody proximity of open wound sockets and forcing them to intertwine, then reinforcing positions with wire, which cut into the bloody skin. At last, she bound the woman’s hands to the man’s arms, and his to hers. Their heads faced forward, eyes open, staring at the artist turned spectator, Mallory.

She stepped back in her mind to admire her artwork, the ghastly embrace of two crimes against nature. It was a hundredfold more intimate than sexual intercourse. Blood was everywhere, and she layered the stench of mingling body fluids and feces over this.

It was sensational, the crime of crimes, the mother of all horrors. And yes, there was dark genius here. Koozeman might as well have signed it.

Her next thought was that this was the kind of thing guaranteed to sell a million newspapers. Publicity savvy was Koozeman’s other signature.

She looked down at her watch. Quinn would have shown up at the gallery to discover the murder an hour ago. So the time frame didn’t work, unless two people were working on the bodies. One person working alone could not have done it all in time. She turned around to look at the shadowy faceless one who had dragged Aubry back into the gallery. Now this one took the form and face of Dean Starr.

She allowed time for another pair of helping hands, and turned back her watch, leaving time to clean up and get behind the door in the wall. The time was still tight. Could there have been more than two of them? She looked back to the door. Time for Quinn to show up.

In a grisly stage direction, she brought her last known player onto the scene. She had Quinn enter slowly.

“Kathy, ”said Markowitz, in a cautioning reminder.

“Right.” Quinn was running late. He would be anxious to see that his niece was all right.

She backed up the watch and made her phantom art critic enter the gallery, not running, but moving quickly. She had him freeze as he took in the horror of the back wall.

She watched him for a moment more.

“Quinn, do you know what you’re looking at?” she whispered.

There was so much blood, he would not immediately recognize his niece from this distance. Mallory let him come closer, stepping slowly, disbelieving, and finally recognizing the head on the right-hand post as his niece. And now there is blood on his shoes.

She stood up and walked over to him. “What are you thinking?” She stood beside him, watching the sudden lift of his chin, the awful realization that he was late, that if he had only come in time-

He couldn’t know that his niece had come early to the gallery. The medical examiner would have to tell him that later.

Mallory came back to the most nagging puzzle. It had taken a long time to kill the dancer. What had kept Aubry alive so long after the first stroke of the axe?

“She was waiting for the cavalry,” said Markowitz.

Mallory nodded. There might be something to that. Aubry had been a protected child. She must have been thinking that rescue would come, it would surely come. Quinn would be there any minute. A child raised on the street would have given up her life much sooner, knowing that the cavalry never came.

Minutes ticked by on her pocket watch as Quinn took in the total horror. Finally his eyes bludgeoned his brain to accept it. Now what? Would he fall to his knees? No. According to the old reports, there had only been blood on his shoes. He remained standing. Though he had been mortally wounded in his mind, he could not fall down and die. There was no escape from this.

“So much pain.” She bowed her head.

Markowitz, standing in the blood and the stench of murder, was smiling. For this had been Mallory’s longest lesson, and she had finally made the breakthrough to empathy.

The room was so quiet, she could hear the tick of Markowitz’s pocket watch, steady as a heartbeat. Five minutes had gone by since Quinn’s arrival. In another twenty-five minutes, Quinn would call the police. What did he do with the time?

She moved in front of him and looked deep into his eyes. “Did you cry?” she whispered.

Hard to imagine those eyes with any emotion in them. She let him stand there, knowing that this was wrong. What did he do with the time? It might have been different if there was someone else in the gallery. Then there would be conversation, planning, questions asked, plans laid.

But he had told Markowitz that he came alone.

“Well, that wouldn’t be your only lie, would it, Quinn?”

And now she created a shadowy figure to stand beside him. But who could it have been, and why would Quinn shield this player who had accompanied him to the gallery? She stared at this second dark form, the one made wholly of shadow. Who was it?

And then she knew.

She stood before the shadow figure. “I’ve seen your face before, haven’t I?”

Now the shadow wore Sabra’s face as Mallory had constructed it on her computer.

Suppose the brother and sister had both visited their mother that night, and both had come to the gallery. So this was what sent Sabra over the top of her mind-not just the news that her only child had died horribly, but the sight of Aubry in this horrific work of art. Perhaps it had been Sabra’s fault that they were late getting to the gallery. That would have bent her mind even more. If they had come in Sabra’s car, and if she had left by herself, then Quinn’s story about the subway would have a reason.