“Easy, mate,” a voice growled.

Tucker raised his head to look around. There were two other men in the boat. Both were badly wounded. One in the chest. The other—the one who had rescued Tucker—was a young blond giant with a nasty head wound.

Tucker realized that he himself was bleeding. His blood was turning the water sloshing around the bottom of the dinghy a deepening red. He raised a hand to touch his head, probing for damage.

He was frightened by what he felt.

He heard the persistent drone of aircraft and knew the Stukas were returning. Would they sink the fishing boat? Would they consider the dinghy too small and unimportant to strafe? A waste of ammunition?

Of course it is! Of course! It’s nothing but a bleeding rowboat!

The drone of the engines grew to a roar. Changed tone as the planes dropped lower and flattened out their trajectory.

Tucker carefully raised his head again and saw an aircraft approaching alarmingly low over the water. Coming straight at the dinghy.

His breath swelled cold in his chest and he prepared to die.

But there was something different about this aircraft. It didn’t have the awkward gull-like wings of the Stukas and, unlike the Stukas, its landing gear was retracted.

The plane waggled its wings and Tucker now clearly saw its markings—RAF markings. As it flashed overhead, the craft assumed the familiar silhouette of a British Hurricane fighter plane. Off in the distance, dark specks circled and climbed and dived in the sky. The Hurricanes had engaged the Stukas. The German planes were dive bombers and not fighter planes. Tucker felt some satisfaction in thinking they wouldn’t escape the Hurricanes. Not all of them.

One of the other two men in the dinghy began to shout, then stood to cheer. It was the blond giant. Tucker could see the inside of his skull behind his left ear. The other man remained unmoving and silent.

Within a few minutes the sky was clear of all but one Hurricane, which circled protectively over the dinghy.

The water around the tiny dinghy was unbroken. There wasn’t even debris floating to show where the Sondra had sunk.

The silent man in the dinghy’s bow looked dead to Tucker. The blond giant who’d cheered and shouted was still excited. He stared at Tucker with unnaturally bright blue eyes and said, “We gotta row, mate. We row and we’ll make it.”

“Don’t be crazy,” Tucker said. “We’ll never make it all the way to England. If we just drift, one of the other boats might pick us up. That Hurricane’s marking our location.”

“It’ll run low on fuel and have to leave,” the man said.

Tucker hadn’t thought of that. It was a possibility.

As if its pilot had overheard their conversation, the Hurricane waggled its wings again, then flew away toward the direction of England.

“Pick up a bloody oar and row!” the blond man in the boat said.

Tucker figured he should do that. The man was twice his size and might throw him overboard if he didn’t comply.

He worked his way up to a sitting position, and was behind the big man and couldn’t take his eyes off the back of his head. It was a wonder he could even sit up, considering the terrible wound that he seemed not to know about.

Tucker sat facing France and rowed in the direction the Hurricane had gone, toward England, praying his head wound wasn’t as bad as the one he was looking at.

Far away, to the north, it was clouding up as if a storm was brewing.

11

New York, the present

Quinn dreamed again of Maine, of a dark and ominous shadow shape that blocked what slanted sunlight lanced between the planks of the rickety dock. Beneath the dock as he was, he could smell the dank scent of the rotted wood at the waterline, the decaying life-and-death cycle of the lake. The almost casual slow footfalls of the dangerous thing above him, plotting his death. Quinn shuddered in his sleep. Death was so near. The long gun the killer carried might as well have been a scythe.

The lake began moving with a private tide. The dock began to creak. Water lapped at wood. One by one the thick cross planks were lifted and flung away, like boxes being opened and their lids tossed aside.

And when the box containing Quinn was opened, the killer would smile down at him. And death would—

Quinn was awake. All the way back in the real world. It seemed a magician’s trick. He was no longer about to scream in pain despite his efforts to be silent. Hiding, fearing.

Pearl lay sleeping beside him, covered with a light sheet. The curvature of her form beneath the thin material, the rhythm of her breathing, reassured Quinn that he wasn’t at the lake in Maine. He was on the West Side of New York, and no one was stalking him with a rifle.

He glanced at the glowing numerals of the alarm clock beside the bed. Only 3:00 A.M.

Faint recognizable sounds made their way into the bedroom from beyond the tall windows. Some of them were barely loud enough to hear. The city that never slept, resting. Human sounds. Death seemed far away.

Reassured, Quinn rolled over and felt himself drifting again toward sleep.

He dreamed again of Maine.

When Quinn was alone in the office, Helen Iman, the NYPD profiler, came in.

“One fun day after another,” she said, observing that he must not have gotten much sleep last night. “Except for the occasional disembowelment.”

Quinn wasn’t surprised to see her. All six foot plus of her. Helen, with her short cropped red hair, lanky build, and minimal makeup, put Quinn in mind of a women’s basketball coach. She seemed always to have a slight sheen of perspiration on her freckled flesh, as if she’d just come from a strenuous workout. In fact, she had more intellectual than athletic ability or desire. And she had that essential that so many profilers lacked—a track record. Helen had provided the psychological insight that had helped Quinn mold his own reputation. She was the only profiler he believed in.

Renz had sent her around, not as a spy, but because he, like Quinn, appreciated her abilities and knew her history.

“I hear you’re working on the big one,” Helen said. She stood near Pearl’s desk and crossed her arms. “Six victims.”

“So far.”

Each knew the other was sure the killer would try to take more victims. Otherwise, Helen wouldn’t be here.

“I don’t think he’s a mass murderer on purpose,” Helen said. “Mass murder wasn’t his plan when he entered the hotel.”

Quinn leaned back in his desk chair and smiled at her. “Go ahead,” he said, “See if we read it the same way.”

Helen moved farther into the office and perched with her haunches on the front edge of Pearl’s desk. She was wearing blue-and-white running shoes with her jeans. The jeans looked a little baggy on her, and were an inch or so too short for her long legs, so her rolled white exercise socks showed.

“My guess is that he didn’t realize the schoolgirls and Andria Bell were all staying in one interconnected suite,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to be alone after putting up with a gaggle of young girls most of the day? When he knocked on the door and Andria opened it, he assumed they were alone together. His mental scenario pictured two adults.”

Quinn knew what she meant by “mental scenario.” Serial killers had two plans to deal with two possibilities: victim cooperating or victim resisting. Those plans weren’t the same when more than one victim was involved.

“That’s how I see it,” Quinn said. He absently reached for the desk drawer where he kept his Cuban cigars, then drew back his hand. Helen would rat him out to Pearl. “Of course we might be wrong. He might have planned on killing six women even before entering the hotel.”