‘And it didn’t close off the carotid artery. So Miss Harper didn’t black out or succumb to euphoria.’

‘Transient cerebral hypoxia,’ said Mallory.

‘You do pay attention.’ Dr Slope graced her with a half smile as he unfolded a diagram of the crime scene. ‘Heller assisted on this part. We choreographed the last minutes of her life like a ballet.’ The doctor pointed to the roughly sketched countertop by the kitchen sink. ‘This is where Heller’s forensic team found footprints and partials. Note the distance to the ceiling light.’ His finger moved across the paper to a drawn circle. ‘That’s where she was left hanging, playing dead.’ He looked up at Mallory. ‘Miss Harper was still alive when the killer left the scene. First, she kicked off her sandals. We found them under the body. When she raised her leg, she could just barely reach the counter with one toe. So she pushed off to make her body swing away and back again.’

The doctor laid out photographs of the Formica surface covered with Heller’s black dust. One close-up showed a partial footprint layered over the mark of a toe. ‘Here you’ve got more of the foot,’ said Slope. ‘Her body swings in a wider arc each time she pushes off. Finally, she lands both feet on the countertop. Now her weight is supported at two points – feet on the counter, neck in the noose. See here?’ He pointed to a shot of two full footprints on the Formica beside the sink. ‘Both soles are flat. Now she has the leverage to rotate her body until she’s facing the knot. That gives her an inch of air between her throat and the noose. She worked her chin under the rope. That’s when it snagged on the upper teeth. I can’t tell you how long she hung there.’

Patiently waiting for the cavalry to come and rescue her – just like Sparrow.

‘She couldn’t dislodge the rope or the hair in her mouth,’ said Slope. ‘She could’ve screamed – but no intelligible sounds.’

The neighbors didn’t come. The cops didn’t come.

Dr Slope pushed the photographs aside. ‘I can tell you she died six days ago, but the cause of death wasn’t asphyxiation. It was heart failure.’ He picked up a pharmacy bottle bagged and tagged as crime-scene evidence. ‘I called the prescribing cardiologist. Miss Harper had a congenital heart defect – inoperable. All her life, she’s been living with a time bomb in her chest.’

‘Good practice for a hanging,’ said Mallory.

‘It does explain a lot, doesn’t it? Twisting on the end of a rope, but no panic. And she nearly escaped.’

Mallory thought of the day this woman had walked into a police station with a bloody note staked to her neck. The hanging scenario worked well with that kind of poise. But now she had two victims who were accomplished at playing dead while their hearts were beating a million times a minute. What were the odds against that? She turned to the medical examiner and smiled.

You wouldn’t hold out on me, would you?

The doctor would never volunteer what he could not swear to in court and back up with evidence, but if he thought this was the end of the autopsy, he was dead wrong. She glanced back at the dissected woman on the other side of the room. There was cutting and there was cutting. ‘So I’ve got a perp who can’t tell the living from the dead. That’s it? That’s all you can tell me? The hangman’s just another screw-up who can’t find a pulse?’

Dr Slope hesitated for a moment. He had always fancied himself a great poker player, born with a face of stone that gave up nothing in his hand. Yet Louis Markowitz had beaten him in every bluff, and everything that cop knew about poker and Slope he had passed along to his foster child. Even if she could not read the doctor’s face, she knew what he was thinking: she was an ungrateful brat, and he was going to put her in her place.

The man’s voice was testy, but still in the lecture mode. ‘You assume he believed his victim was dead. Well, J don’t. After he strung her up, she was getting oxygen, but not enough to keep her conscious for long. So I know the killer left the scene immediately. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been time enough or strength enough for Kennedy’s aerial ballet. He didn’t stay to watch her die.’

Just like Sparrow – a pattern.

A few minutes with this medical examiner was worth ten hours with any psychiatrist, for most witch doctors were light years removed from the carnage of murder. She turned her back on Slope and crossed the room to the steel table and the body of Kennedy Harper all sewn up with crude stitches – a Frankenstein scar. Mallory was striving for the sound of boredom when she asked, ‘What else can you tell me? Anything useful?’

The doctor’s poker discipline was shot to hell. His face was now an easy read, waffling between surprise and indignation. He marched up to the table and confronted her across the body, firing off another contradiction. ‘I’d say your man’s not the violent type. That may seem a bit odd – ’

‘Odd?’

‘All right, Kathy – it’s insane. But he didn’t go off on either of the women. He didn’t beat them or – ’

‘He cut off their damn hair.’

‘But no cuts to the flesh, no fractures from a fist. And the other one, Sparrow – she didn’t have a single defensive bruise. I’ve seen every unspeakable act a man can commit on a woman’s body.’ The doctor looked down at the corpse laid out on the table, the woman he so admired. ‘But I don’t see that kind of violence here – no loss of control, no rage.’

This did not square with a note staked to the neck of a living woman, and she was about to tell him that when he held up one hand to forestall any more arguments.

‘I’m out of my depth,’ he said. ‘This man didn’t care if the women lived or died. He’s a walking paradox – a serial killer who’s not all that interested in killing.’

The murder of Kennedy Harper had taken over an entire wall of the Special Crimes incident room. Mallory posted the autopsy pictures next to Heller’s crime-scene diagrams. Sparrow also had a wall to herself. The throwaway whore had become a priority case.

Rows of metal folding chairs were filling up with detectives. Four men gathered around the audio equipment and listened to the Cashtip recording of the killer’s voice, playing again and again, unwilling to believe that it did not offer more. The volume was turned up each time they heard the ambient sound.

Pssst.

One man timed it by the second hand on his watch. Mallory used a natural clock, a quirk of the brain that told her this sound occurred every twenty seconds. It reminded her of Helen Markowitz’s spray starch on ironing day.

She walked to the hangman’s wall and stared at a photograph of the back of a man’s head. The image, crowned with a baseball cap and encircled with dead flies, was as worthless as the lame description of T-shirt and jeans played out in the clothing pinned to the cork.

Pssst.

Janos stood beside her. ‘So what do you think of our scarecrow?’

‘Is that what we’re calling him now?’

‘Yeah.’ He turned to look around the room. ‘Hey, what happened to your partner?’

‘He’ll be back.’ She had kept track of all the passing minutes since Riker had slipped out of the room. After the ambush in front of Peg Baily’s bar, he would not miss an opportunity for a drink today. Each up-close encounter with his ex-wife was a prelude to a binge. Her internal timepiece had moved well past his three-minute walk to a nearby watering hole.

Pssst.

Riker would down his bourbon in no time. Mallory allowed extra minutes for his return trip. He would not walk back here with the same urgent speed. She factored in another minute so he could trade insults with the desk sergeant before climbing the stairs and ambling down the hall to the incident room.

Mallory turned her face to the door, and her partner appeared.