He tried to see Dawn as her parents would remember her, if they got lucky. Not as this emptiness with its faint tinge of decay, but as she’d been: blonde, pretty, with high cheeks and eyes of speedwell blue.

“Talk me through the injuries,” said Raf, folding the modesty cloth into a strip and positioning it carefully. His attempt not to offend Kamila more than circumstances required. “How much preliminary work have you done?”

“None,” the pathologist said flatly, “apart from X-rays. Those were your orders, apparently . . . Hold everything until you were here in person.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry . . .”

Not the response Kamila had been expecting but then, in part, that was Raf’s intention. The fox had a tag from Machiavelli covering emotional sleight of hand, but unfortunately the fox was missing, assumed dead.

“Well,” said Kamila, more embarrassed than mollified, “you’re here now.”

“True enough,” Raf said and wondered why he shivered. Then he remembered that he’d thought a lot about such places when he was a child, around the time he got his second kidney replacement.

Speed had been essential according to his doctor. And it had been this time constraint that made the clinic go through an organ broker. Searching for a matching kidney from someone dying or freshly dead. Of course, going this route was cheaper than growing a new one, but they’d assured his mother that wasn’t an issue.

Raf had given up trying to remember which bits of him were retreads. Although, occasionally, he’d catch a slight seam of scar where he didn’t expect to see one. Across his ribs or down one arm, and think, what’s that?

Shadow memories.

“You all right?”

Raf glanced up to find Kamila staring at him, eyes anxious.

“I’m Iskandryia’s new can carrier,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t,” said Kamila. “I’m not that stupid.” Reaching into her pocket, she produced a floating camera, which she tossed into the air, waiting while it ran self-diagnostics.

“Friday, 22nd October, 2:38P .M.,” she announced once a diode lit green. “I am Kamila bint-Abdullah, city pathologist, second grade.” Kamila’s tone made clear what she thought about that. “Also present at the autopsy is His Excellency, Ashraf . . .” She cleared her throat. “Delete that . . . is His Excellency, the Governor of El Iskandryia.

“This is case number 49–3957, Jane Doe . . .” Kamila’s smile was almost apologetic and Raf realized she’d need a formal identification before the corpse earned itself a name. “The body is that of an apparently healthy, well-nourished female, Caucasian, late teens/early twenties. The body is sixty-four inches long and in total, but minus lungs and heart, weighs . . .”

Taking a readout from the autopsy table and the bucket that held the girl’s intestines, Kamila added the two figures together in her head. “. . . 115 pounds. Blonde hair, blue eyes . . . The skin is of normal texture. There are no scars, moles, subdermal chips or tattoos.

“Preliminary X-rays and scans reveal no bone fragments, fractures, bullet tracks, knife wounds, needles or objects embedded beyond point of entry. No foreign objects in throat, anus or vagina.”

Kamila lifted Dawn Hauger’s right hand and examined each finger. “Nails painted, neatly filed and unbroken, no indication of embedded foreign material. No defensive cuts to palm, dorsal side of arm, no damage to webbing between fingers . . .

“Which should suggest suicide,” Kamila tossed the comment over her shoulder. “At least it should according to the textbooks.” Her voice was darkly ironic, animosity briefly forgotten. She was good at the job, Raf realized. Her manner professional and assured.

“Initials H.Q. inscribed on inside of left wrist,” Kamila announced, finishing up the other hand.

A quick sweep with a UV rod produced no significant areas of flare, though Kamila still took swabs from one corner of the dead girl’s mouth, her nasal area and just outside the vagina. She also swept the pubic area for foreign body hair, despite the fact this had already been done once at the crime scene.

Using a plastic ruler, Kamila began to measure the wounds, her voice emotionless. The longest cut ran from throat to pubis, the second longest traversed the ribs, just below heavy breasts. Together the gashes formed a cross potent. And it was a cross potent rather than a mere cross, because once again wounds showed short lines cut at either end of each slash. The top one conveniently opened the girl’s throat and the bottom one bisected her pudenda, the other two scored down both sides of her ribs. Though the terms Kamila used to describe their position were cephalic,caudal and lateral.

“This is too neat,” Kamila said. “Much too neat . . .” The pause that followed was to let Raf ask a question.

“I had a look at the crime-scene report,” she added into his silence.

“How did . . . ?” Of course, her father, sat at his front desk, proud of how well his only daughter was doing. “What did it tell you?”

Kamila hesitated, replying with a question of her own. “Wouldn’t you expect increased disorganization?”

“Expect what?”

Kamila shrugged. “This is the third death. Personally, at this point, I’d be looking for proof of greater risks run, not enough time allowed, less safe crime scenes, fewer escape routes . . .” She ticked the points off in her head. “Yet, if anything, this killing is more meticulous than the last, which had inherent differences in MO to the one before.”

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“Sure.” Kamila nodded. “I pulled out all the files,” she said, pointing to a distant wall screen. “Examined the earlier crime shots. Identical wounds, different MOs. The discrepancy just didn’t get logged.”

“Why not?”

Her shrug was expressive. In it was everything Kamila felt about her opposite number at the polizia touristica. But what she said was, “Maybe he’s overworked . . .”

On average 1 percent of a city dies each year. Iskandryia had 4 million people. Which meant forty thousand deaths, a quarter of which might merit investigation. Setting aside the poor and the unimportant reduced that figure to three thousand, the vast majority of whom had to be buried by noon (if they died in the previous twenty-four hours), or by the following noon (if they died at noon or after).

So far this year polizia touristica had dealt with seven bodies. Four drownings and the three butchered tourists, on the last of which she was doing the work for them.

“My unofficial opinion,” Kamila said hesitantly, “based on observation and on having sight of the autopsy reports of the earlier killings . . .” She was picking her words with care. “Despite obvious similarities, my unofficial belief is that victim three was not killed by the same person as victim two, because, in the case I’ve examined, the positioning of each cut is more, not less, precise.”

Kamila nodded to the dead girl’s opened throat, then indicated the matching cross wound at the other end of the upright. “Exact,” she said, reaching for her ruler. “Exactly halfway between chin and breast bone, exactly halfway down the length of the genitals. And again, the ribs . . . Identical length of cut, identical positioning. Of course,” she said, “I’m not in a position to refute that murders one and two were committed by the same killer.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Raf asked; it seemed a fair enough question.

“On the record,” said Kamila, “I’m highlighting disquieting aspects of a crime. More than that it’s impossible to say without further work.” Her smile was bleak. “Off the record, I reckon Dawn Hauger was bled to death, then mutilated by someone who lacked the nerve required to butcher her while alive . . .”

“You’re saying,” said Raf, “that we’ve got a series of copycat killings . . .”

Kamila looked at him. “You disagree?”