‘Fuck them up,’ said Martin.

‘I’ll do it, Martin, I’ll do all of them.’ Lukanov felt a jerk of excitement. He pulled a switchblade out of the back pocket of his jeans.

‘Turn away! Turn your fucking eyes away!’ shouted Heming, but none of the seven pairs of eyes moved or seemed to understand. They looked like a group of deer staring up at a distant noise. Heming stepped out into the street. ‘Stop fucking looking at me, you fucking Yids.’

Lukanov moved past Heming and started to march across the street. The rising tide of anger was impossible to contain.

Heming strode with confidence towards the group, a step behind Lukanov. One or two started to say something. But they didn’t scatter and that annoyed Heming even more. ‘Cut them, Leo,’ he shouted.

Lukanov flicked open his blade and held it at arm’s reach, pointing towards the seven men. He felt good now, he felt like a hero, ready to clean up his city. He just wanted to cut, wanted to kill. ‘Now, Martin?’

‘Make them run, Leo.’

Leo ran at the sidewalk. The group didn’t wait any longer to find out if this thug was willing to kill. They scattered both ways.

‘Do not stare at me, not in my fucking street. You hear? Not in my fucking street!’ shouted Heming.

He stepped up to the sidewalk. The men were running away in both directions. Leo was breathing heavily. ‘That fucking showed them,’ he panted. ‘They fucking scattered like rabbits. You see them dance?’

‘You did good, Leo. You’re a real rising star.’ Heming was still. His eyes stared with something close to longing. ‘You want to go after that cop, Leo? Call some boys together. You feel ready to lead your own team?’

‘Sure,’ said Lukanov. ‘I’m ready. I’m more than ready.’

Salsa Club, Upper East Side

March 8, 1.30 a.m.

Harper arrived alone at the Dancer Downstairs. The club was closed and shuttered. A sign on the small door at the bottom of a flight of steps expressed sympathy for the family of David Capske and said they were closing for two days. He knocked for several minutes, but no one was there. From the street the club was hardly visible. He took out his watch and started to walk the route that the murder victim, David Capske, and his fiancée, the writer, Lucy Steller, had walked the previous evening.

It took Harper twenty-five minutes to reach Lucy Steller’s apartment building. He headed off again, following the route David Capske had walked to the alleyway before he was killed. It took him just under an hour. It was quite a walk for someone rich and white, traveling into the heart of Harlem at night. Harper knew that Capske had reached the alleyway at 1.43 a.m. The caller in the apartment building said that a shot was heard at 3.30 a.m. If the rain started at 2.41 a.m., then the victim was lying on the ground in that spot for a long time, all wrapped up before he was shot. So between 1.43 a.m. and 2.41 a.m. what happened to Capske was still uncertain. However, after the visit to the morgue, it was clear that the killer had spent some time tattooing something on to David Capske’s chest.

Harper looked around him. Two uniformed patrol cops stood at the alleyway and nodded. He pulled out his shield and waved it towards them. Alleyways in East Harlem were dangerous places. There were limited exit routes for one thing, and victims didn’t stroll into alleyways too easily for another. Would Capske have gone into a darkened alleyway with unknown dealers? How did the killer lure him?

Harper tried to imagine how a man would have been able to wrap another man in barbed wire, unaccompanied. It wouldn’t be easy.

Surely the victim would have to be unconscious in order to allow the killer to start to wrap him. Harper made a mental note to ask the Medical Examiner about head wounds. If a man did this alone, his best bet would have been to knock the subject out, bind him, roll him, then wait until he came round. Harper thought about the timescales. It was possible, wasn’t it?

Perhaps Capske was just unlucky. Perhaps he was on his way to meet a dealer when someone in the alleyway hit him, dragged him unconscious into the dark and wrapped him as he lay flat out. That would explain the marks across the ground. If the body was flat out, the only way to bind him would have been to push the body across the wire. Harper pulled out his sketchbook. There were two places where the body had lain still. The first was halfway up the alley, but the majority of the blood was to the right side of the alley and it was less than the size of an entire body. The second spot was where they found the victim and there was blood the whole length of the body. How did that happen?

But a random attack? It seemed highly unlikely. Capske had been targeted specifically and he had been punished. And furthermore, someone had informed the police and the media.

Harper’s flashlight criss-crossed the alleyway. He’d found something that fitted, something that explained the situation, the strange time-lag and the marks across the ground. Harper let a smile cross his lips.

He thought about Denise Levene. She was back and had already spent the evening tracking racist thugs in Brooklyn. Whatever Mac had put her through, it had given her the confidence to start again.

Some of the guys in Blue Team, earlier in the day, had gone back to a multiple attacker theory. The Captain had lapped it up. Harper was now sure that what they were looking at was something darker. A solitary killer, a night stalker, waiting in an alleyway, ready with his cosh and barbed wire.

What kind of animal hunted like that? A political killer? No, not to his knowledge. Political killers tended to be martyrs who sacrificed themselves. This was someone who liked to kill for the sake of killing. If there was a political issue caught up in this kill, it was not the prime motivation.

He needed to know if the victim had been unconscious. He took out his phone to call the Medical Examiner’s office. He direct-dialed Laura Pense. It was a long shot, but a moment later she answered the phone.

‘You work nights too,’ said Harper.

‘Everyone else decided it’s vacation time. What do you want?’

‘I’m at the Capske crime scene and I’ve got a theory. What I need is a blunt-force trauma to the head and I’ve got a full house. I think he must’ve been knocked unconscious. Do you have that card?’

‘No. There’s no blunt-force trauma to the head. But there was intracranial hemorrhaging, so he got hit somehow. He was probably hit on his jaw. There’s a fracture running across his left side. X-rays just came back. Couldn’t see the bruising because of the tears in his cheek.’

‘That’s useful, thank you,’ said Harper. He suggested she go home to get some sleep and hung up. So that’s what had happened: the killer caught the victim on his jaw hard enough to give him brain damage. While he was knocked out, he taped his hands and ankles, wrapped him in barbed wire up to his chest, then he tattooed him. That was the first resting-point, with blood from the abdomen and legs. Then he waited, rolled his upper torso and head and shot him.

Harper imagined Capske waking up in his steel cage. He could feel the horror, the constriction. He could see the face of the attacker above him. Smiling, laughing? A terrifying end. But why would a killer wait to shoot him? Denise was right. It wasn’t just political. He wanted to hurt and punish Capske. Or maybe there was something else. Harper took out his sketchpad and opened it. He stared at the sketches of the crime scene, the placing of the body.

In his mind, he saw the corpse. There was something there, but he couldn’t bring it to mind. Harper nodded to the patrol still guarding the entrance of the alleyway as he headed out of the darkness.

Now he had the MO, the how and the what, the next thing Harper needed to work out was the why — the motive was everything. And this murder had many potential motives — drugs, politics, anti-Semitism. But none quite accounted for the ritualized kill scene, the sudden, brutal ambush, the waiting game and the execution, except for Denise’s description of some form of deranged narcissism.