Eddie nodded and walked across to a heap of trash sacks. ‘I’ll set it up. Hey, Harper, have a look at these trash bags. Might just be some hobo, but it looks like someone’s been sitting here.’

Harper looked around. ‘Sitting and watching, maybe. Why? Torture? Punishment?’ He let the thoughts move around his mind. Felt something come to the surface. ‘It’s like a body-cage, isn’t it? Close containment, right?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Once the vic is wrapped in wire, he’s absolutely powerless. Our killer or killers might have enjoyed the complete control. Enjoyed watching the victim suffer. Sitting there, shining a light, maybe, waiting until he bled out.’

Harper found a patch of skin close to the temple that was not covered with blood. ‘Whoever it is, they’re Caucasian,’ he said. ‘I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.’

Harper’s sight wasn’t great, with his bruised eye, but he slowly moved his good eye over the barbed wire, seeing if there was anything more he could detect. He was looking for the gunshot. At the forehead, he stopped.

‘The wire’s broken here. It’s pretty blackened but I think I’ve found an entrance wound. Small caliber. Maybe nine millimeters.’ Harper looked at the hole. Something wasn’t quite right about it. ‘Very clean wound,’ he said. ‘Lots of gas burn. The barrel was pretty tight to his head.’

Eddie came across and leaned over Harper’s shoulder. ‘What’s your story so far?’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘No question about whether the vic was killed here. The killer rolled the body, kicked it about, watched the vic die slowly, waited for the blood loss to take him to the very edge, then shot him to make sure. That’s how it looks to me.’

Harper looked around. The ground was marked with the scrapings of metal on asphalt. ‘We could probably get some sense of what happened if we tracked these scratches and blood smears. Looks like he rolled the body the whole way down the alley. He starts bleeding about a third of the way in and with each roll, more of the barbs dig in.’

As Harper knelt again and cast his eyes up the alleyway, Swanson walked across. ‘Never seen nothing like this before, Harper.’

‘Me neither. He might have taken the victim out of the trunk of a car, but he rolled him in the alley. You can see the marks left by the barbs. Some business, that.’

‘Soles of his shoes will be cut up, right? He can’t have been using his hands, can he?’

‘Right. Eddie also thinks that he was sitting on the trash bags.’

‘Cold bastards,’ said Swanson. ‘One guy couldn’t do this. This is a two- or three-man job.’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘Could be, but I got a single gunshot wound to the forehead. My take is that the killer sat waiting, watching his victim cry out in pain, then, at some point, executed him.’

‘Killers, don’t you mean?’

‘I don’t see any evidence of multiple killers but I’m not ruling anything out.’

‘To roll a man in barbed wire would take a team of men.’

Harper scanned the scene. ‘You could be right. Let’s see what Crime Scene can tell us.’

‘Shit,’ said Eddie. ‘I hate it when you get all mystical. Is Swanson right or not?’

‘This is the thing,’ said Harper. He took a moment, as if allowing his thoughts to settle into some kind of order. ‘It could be a hit, it could be a drug shooting or it could be some political revenge. There’s a lot of overkill. There’s passion and hatred here.’ He tried to imagine the killer, working at night, a roll of barbed wire at his side, a man screaming in pain, a maniac sitting on some wet sacks watching.

‘Drug wars? Some kind of revenge gang kill? Trying to make out they’re fearless?’ asked Swanson. ‘You know how it goes, building a reputation.’

‘Maybe, but the body’s white, there’s drugs left all over the ground, and look at those hands, too. Not someone who’s done much manual work.’ Harper leaned further down and looked at the four fingers of the right hand. He lifted them and then looked up. ‘Index finger shorter than the ring finger. Probably a male victim. Whoever did it is a sadist, for one thing. He’s theatrical, for another. And this isn’t his first kill.’ Harper sniffed. ‘I don’t think he or they are finished, do you?’

He put his hand under the corpse. The ground was dry. Harper started to calculate. The dry ground and wet clothes gave them a timeframe. It depended on when the rain started. ‘We need to officially ID this body,’ he said. ‘Check that Crime Scene have finished, Eddie, and get some wire cutters.’ Eddie moved off down the alleyway, leaving Harper and Swanson.

Harper kept re-telling the story from different angles. But every time, there was something missing. It was Harper’s way — you tell the best story you can, then you pull the story to pieces. Then you start again. Over and over until some threads remained.

Eddie reappeared with wire cutters, the Deputy Coroner with him. The latter shook his head. ‘Some business.’ He knelt down. ‘CSU have cleared the scene. If you want to find out his ID, we need to cut this wire.’

‘We’d appreciate it,’ said Harper. ‘Press have already been given a name.’

They watched as the DC snapped at the wire around the head of the corpse. With each cut, he carefully pulled back the wire. After a few minutes he’d exposed a blackened and bloody face. ‘It’s a guy,’ he said.

The men stared in silence, an acknowledgment of the pain etched on the young man’s face. The DC cut a line down to the chest. He pulled back the wires and reached into the jacket pocket. He fished out a wallet. ‘We’ve got something here,’ he said and passed it to Harper.

Harper opened up the wallet, which held one thousand dollars in fifties. He picked out a driver’s license. The photograph showed a cheerful face surrounded by a mop of black curly hair. Then he saw the name.

‘Okay,’ said Harper. ‘It’s David Capske, which means that we have got to work fast. This has been labeled political so the Feds and Counter-Terrorism will already be applying pressure at Headquarters trying to pull this from us. Everyone’s going to want to know what happened here and why.’

‘What do you need from me?’ asked the DC.

‘Can you give this top priority for me? I want the autopsy within the next few hours. I need that bullet and anything else you can tell me.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the DC. ‘Dr Pense will handle it.’

Harper looked at the black curly hair sticking out between strands of barbed wire. ‘Someone’s tortured and executed the son of a judge and they’re very proud of themselves. It’s not going to end here.’

East New York

March 7, 10.22 a.m.

The drive took forty-five minutes in all. Denise sat in silence, ignoring the ramblings of the cab driver. She was unable to explain why she was still feeling so scared. Her therapy wasn’t giving her what she wanted. Tom Harper had made the suggestion about Mac right after her ordeal. It had seemed stupid at the time. It had made her angry. Three months later, still terrified by people at her own apartment and unable to answer her own door, Denise needed to move on.

Tom had wanted to help, not with fancy theories but in a practical way. Denise stared ahead as the cab turned off the street. The out-of-town warehouse in the timber yard was at the end of a pitted road. The car rocked from side to side.

The cab pulled over. The whole place was deserted. There was no sign over the door and no indication of what this place was. ‘This is the address you gave. You sure this is where you want to go?’

Denise pushed a twenty through the glass and nodded. She got out of the car and stood on the rough ground. As soon as she was out, the cab driver put his car into gear and drove away.

Denise watched the car’s brake lights as it slowed at the junction and then headed into the distance. She breathed as she’d taught herself and looked around. It was an open space in the middle of unfamiliar and run-down buildings. She didn’t feel good at all. And there was only one way out — through the unmarked black door. The cab had gone, there was nowhere else to go.