He looked across to Jimmy and Johnny. Arch-morons of the modern world. Keeping up the illusion that we were all safe. He smiled at the waitress and nodded as she held up the coffee pot. He pressed send.

He sat and waited, the murder weapon still in his pocket like a memento of the kill. He remembered the feeling. He wanted to have that high again. But he couldn’t, not yet. He knew that he must remain hidden. His task was not to bathe in glory but to conquer the inferior. His task was to carry out orders.

He let the emails sail through space and time, hunting out their electronic destinations, and watched as they disappeared from the outbox.

He waited a good fifteen minutes, and then he put the phone to his ear and called 911. The tone clicked. The voice seemed small and distant. Not what you want in an emergency.

‘911, which service please?’ said the wheezy voice.

‘Police.’

‘What seems to be the problem, sir?’

‘There’s a dead body on East 112th Street, in an alleyway at Jenson House.’ He hung up, took the battery out of the cell phone and tossed it on to the floor. The phone would be wiped clean, smashed and deposited in a trash can on his walk to work.

He looked at his stopwatch and smiled at the number. His victim had taken seventy-nine minutes to die. There had been a lot of pain. That’s what he enjoyed. Pain.

He walked out past Jimmy and Johnny. ‘Hi there, fellas,’ he said, his right hand wrapped around the plastic grip of his gun, feeling the dirty excitement of flaunting it. They both looked up and nodded.

As he left, he guessed that the police dispatch would be chirping on the police radio for some squad car to go take a look. He waited in the street and, sure enough, the nearest cop car belonged to Jimmy and Johnny. They ambled out of the diner, fat and stupid, in no hurry whatsoever, and already about five hours too late.

He wanted to follow the dumb cops to observe them as they came across the corpse, to see their reaction to what he had done. He would’ve liked to have gone back to see the corpse and to take some pictures. But that was foolish. The cops would scan the scene. He couldn’t afford to be noticed.

He felt restless as he walked up the street, almost as if he’d set up a party that he wasn’t allowed to attend himself. Most of all he felt hungry for more blood. He only just realized what it was, the sudden feeling, almost unrecognized because it was unexpected.

He stared across the street. People were walking to work or to school. Then he felt it again. He thought it might have been some leftover excitement from the murder. Maybe the remembering, the sending of death messages, maybe all of the paraphernalia of the morning-after was tripping him up.

He was standing still, wearing a leather coat, a little unshaven, already late for work, his stomach warm from coffee, the blood of the dead man smeared across his chest and left to dry. He repeated the eighty-eight words as if a prayer.

If anyone wanted to know, if anyone asked now, who had killed that guy at Jensen House, he’d fucking scream from the rooftops: ‘I did, you fuckers! I did.’

He smiled at a woman approaching. He felt invulnerable, like a man on something. A blood-high, he called it, the freedom that comes from a kill.

He decided that what he was feeling could be called happiness. He hadn’t been happy his whole life long, but now… yes, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? That buzz of self-confidence, a sense of freedom, of optimism, of potency, of shamelessness — that was happiness, right there, sitting right there in his own heart and mind.

It was 8.22 a.m. on the streets of New York, the morning after the murder, and it came to him that he already wanted to kill again.

At first it was months before the intoxicating need filled his head, then weeks… now just a day. There was a feeling in his head like a ticking. Sometimes it went on for hours, like a roulette wheel slowed down. And when it stopped, then the order came.

It was ticking again.

He saw the world like never before, as if he was the central figure in his own movie and that movie had meaning. And its meaning was right there — blood on the streets, happiness, the urge to kill and a man nearly dancing with delight.

Apartment, Lower Manhattan

March 7, 8.28 a.m.

Inside her apartment, Denise seated the two Missing Persons detectives in the living room. She left them for a moment and came back in clean sweatpants and a fresh top. She noticed the way Munroe stared at her. What was it? A chance to gawp or was he suspicious in some way? Difficult to tell.

Denise moved to the kitchen and poured a glass of orange juice. She didn’t offer the two detectives a drink and she didn’t sit down, either. She stood in the center of the room and looked at one then the other. She felt her nerves rising and falling, but tried to keep it hidden.

‘Nice place,’ said Sarah Gauge. ‘I like your things. All sleek and modern. I like a modern style.’ She gestured at the Italian sofa and then two angular aluminum candlesticks.

‘Can you get to the point?’ said Denise.

The two detectives sat on the sofa and Denise watched them, then leaned against the wall. Munroe took a white envelope out of his pocket and pulled out a photograph.

‘This is Abby,’ he said. ‘This is the most recent shot we’ve got of her. Red highlights included, although she was brunette when she disappeared.’

Denise stared across at Abby. She was a striking-looking girl. ‘What is she? Tenth or eleventh grade?’

‘Senior,’ said Munroe. ‘She’s just turned sixteen. She’s a Queens girl — Forest Park area. Parents divorced. Lives alone with her father. Mother lives in New Jersey with a new family.’

‘The girl is Jewish?’

‘Yeah, she’s Jewish. Her father’s keen on his Jewish heritage, if you know what I mean.’

‘Before you jump in with your locker-room anti-Semitism, you do know I’m also Jewish?’ said Denise. She glared down hard at Munroe.

‘I didn’t mean anything wrong by it,’ said Munroe. ‘It’s just that he’s a specialist. An academic. He curates exhibitions about the Holocaust. That’s all I meant.’

‘Where does he work?’

‘He lectures at Columbia and curates at the Museum of Tolerance.’

‘Goldenberg, you said? Thought I recognized it from when I used to work at Columbia.’

‘Well, he knows you too, Dr Levene. Only by reputation.’

Denise began to search her memory for the name. ‘What’s his first name?’

‘It’s Aaron. Dr Aaron Goldenberg.’

Denise felt her heart pump. Any link just brought the tragedy closer. She paused and turned from the two cops, looking out of the window. ‘I never knew him well. We probably met at an event. I don’t think I ever met his daughter.’

‘We know that.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘Truth is, this investigation is drying up fast. We’ve exhausted all avenues and Dr Goldenberg knows it. He’s a very persuasive man, Dr Goldenberg. He wanted us to go one more round. He wrote a list. We always ask for a list. All the people who his daughter might have known, wanted to know or had been influenced by. If she’s a runaway, she might go for someone she barely knows.’

‘And?’

‘You were on that list.’

‘In which category?’

‘She admired you, apparently.’

‘Me? She didn’t know me.’

‘She wanted to major in Psychology. Her father took her to one of your lectures. When you left Columbia for the NYPD, she thought that was cool.’

‘Cool?’

‘Packing in academia for a real career.’ Munroe tried a smile. Denise didn’t respond. ‘One in the eye for her old man, I expect.’

Detective Gauge stood. ‘We’ve got her diaries. She mentioned you in there too. Not so much about the Psychology. She seemed to like your style, the way girls do. Thought you looked beautiful and confident. That’s what she wrote.’