The boy was getting real frightened now. She needed to shut the fuck up and stop moving. If he got caught, that was the end of everything. He pushed harder and harder against her throat, pushing with every muscle on to her chest. Chloe thrashed and kicked more. Then she was still.

He looked down at her, his forehead creased in concentration. Chloe’s eyes took on a look he’d only seen in animals before, like when a cow was about to be slaughtered and its eyes grew big and white. They called it ‘crazy eye’ on the farm. The boy stared. Chloe had gone crazy eye and her arms and legs had stopped moving.

It was hardest to kill the ones you loved. But that’s what the devil wanted - he didn’t want you killing cheap. This was much more than murder - this was a rite of passage. The devil had been at the boy’s ear for years, whispering and telling him things he couldn’t have imagined.

The boy was alone in the silent pink bedroom. The devil had delivered as he promised he would. He was finally alone with the girl he loved. And there was so much that he still wanted to do with her. This had been in his head a long, long time.

PART ONE

November 15-21

‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Chapter One

Police Headquarters, New York City

November 15, 1.52 p.m.

The deputy commissioner’s office at One Police Plaza was just across from City Hall in downtown New York. Eight minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin, Lenny Elwood crossed his office and stopped at the view over Brooklyn Bridge.

His eyes followed the taut steel ropes across the East River. People died all the time, he thought. It was the nature of life. Forty or more people died building the very bridge in front of his eyes. But death these days was unacceptable: unpolitical even. People had the right to live. Especially young people.

At the best of times, Lenny Elwood was a man in a hurry for things to happen, but this wasn’t the best of times and he could feel his blood vessels constricting. He breathed deeply and reached to his inside pocket for his statins. On his dark mahogany desk, the week’s newspapers were laid out. Each headline jumped up at him as if it wanted to scream the words in his ear. But even they seemed muted next to the picture.

Christ, thought Lenny, there was no need for a headline at all. The photograph did all the talking. His hand moved across the thick black letters and rested on the grainy shot of a bright, childish face. The girl had a ribbon in her long blond hair, large blue eyes and the shine of gloss on her smiling lips. A face that said everything was all right. Except it wasn’t.

Mary-Jane Samuelson was a girl with so much life ahead of her. Her expression was full of optimism and innocence. And now that she was dead, hers was the kind of face that sold papers and made America stand up and take notice.

A week earlier, the beautiful debutante had been brutally strangled inside her family’s Upper East Side apartment. Mary-Jane Samuelson was just fifteen years old. The attacker had raped and tortured her before killing her with her own pantyhose.

But Elwood knew that things were about to get a whole lot worse. An hour earlier, the dispatcher had called through a second female body with ligature marks round the neck. They now had a potential serial killer on their hands, and Lenny wasn’t going to stand for it.

At 1.58 p.m., he opened the door to his office, glared at the two police chiefs in their smart black uniforms and waved them in with a rapid flutter of his right hand.

He watched each of them pull out a chair, sit down, shuffle a little and place his forearms on the table in silence. He sensed their fear and liked how it felt. They knew they had to move things along rapidly or someone would be cut off at the knees.

The men waited in silence around the large polished table. It sat between them like a still pond, all their reflections upside down. The weekly crime meeting early that week had not gone well. High-profile murder cases were bad for the city and girls like Mary-Jane were about as high profile as you got. Lenny had told them that he wanted this sorted immediately and now there was another body. The two chiefs knew this meeting was coming. It was how the NYPD worked these days. Accountability, they called it. But it was nothing more than an old-fashioned back-alley shakedown.

They waited a moment as the tight-lipped PA shuffled her satin blouse around the deputy commissioner’s shoulder and laid a beige file in front of him. She licked her thumb, leaned forward and opened it for him.

Elwood looked at the report. ‘Okay, gentlemen, let’s get down to business.’ His lip twitched with eagerness. ‘Why the hell are you letting this maniac kill these girls? We’re two down and I’ve got a handful of shit from you. A handful of shit.’ Elwood looked down at his open palms and eyed each man in turn. ‘He’s cut up two girls in the most populated piece of rock on the planet and you’ve got jackshit. This is unacceptable, gentlemen. Give me some answers, right now.’

He looked round the table, giving both men a chance to speak up. ‘You’ve got nothing? Nothing at all? The police commissioner told me this morning that he wants this sealed, solved and off the books. You must have something for me, gentlemen.’

The chief of detectives, Bureau Chief Ged Rainer, swivelled on his seat and threw a sarcastic smile to the head of the table. ‘Well, if it’s coming straight from the police commissioner, why don’t we start doing something rather than sitting on our butts all day long? Who’d think he’d never served as a police officer?’

‘You think this is worthy of a comedy routine, Rainer? Listen to me and listen good - if Commissioner Garry’s reputation is on the line, then so is yours, get it? And he’s asked me to come in here and shoot one of the horses. Now I’ve got two horses sitting here and I’ve got one bullet. Is it going to be you, Rainer, you fucking comedian?’ Ged Rainer looked down at the table, his ears burning. ‘Now who’s going to tell me the whole story?’

The chief of the homicide bureau, Jim Stanton, finally spoke. ‘I got Captain Lafayette outside,’ he offered. ‘He heads up North Manhattan Homicide. I thought you might want to hear it from the guy leading the team on the street.’

‘Sure, bring him in if neither of you have a fucking word to say for yourselves.’

Outside the deputy commissioner’s office, Frank Lafayette sat in a brown leather chair. He’d been made to wait too long already. He had better things to do with his time than shine his ass. He had a killer on the loose who liked to cut his bodies open and pose them. He wanted his best man on the job, a specialist - but that wasn’t going to be easy. He’d already asked, but Ged Rainer had slammed the door in his face each time. The PA appeared silently at his side like some slinking cobra and showed him into the room.

‘Welcome, Lafayette. Take a seat,’ said Elwood with a smile that looked more like a sneer.

‘Prefer to stand, if I may.’

‘Stand, sit, I don’t give a damn,’ said the deputy commissioner. ‘What is it with the detective bureau? You know everyone here, Captain?’

Lafayette nodded respectfully.

‘So, Captain, how does it look?’ Elwood leaned in, staring fiercely.

‘We got nothing at the present time, sir. That’s the plain truth. No bullshit. We’re nowhere. Detective Nate Williamson is leading the team. He’s a veteran and he’s got nothing to follow. This killer is clean.’

Leonard Elwood scratched the shaved hair at the back of his head. ‘I want more, Captain. Honest to fucking God, it’s not enough. How many detectives you got on the case?’