Even though she was seated, Jessica determined that the girl was about five-three, less than a hundred pounds. She sniffed the girl’s hair. It smelled of mint. It had been recently shampooed.

Nicci Malone stepped onto the roof, saw Jessica.

“We’ve got an ID,” Nicci said.

She handed Jessica an FBI printout. The girl’s name was Katja Dovic. She was seventeen. She had last been seen at her house in New Canaan, Connecticut, on June twenty-sixth.

Dr. Tom Weyrich approached.

“I take it this is not the primary scene,” Jessica said.

Weyrich shook his head. “No. Wherever she was killed she bled out, and was cleaned up. The hearts stops, that’s it. The dead don’t bleed.” He paused for a moment. Jessica knew him to be a man not given to hyperbole or arch comment. “And, as bad as that is, it gets worse.” He pointed to one of the slices in the girl’s sweater. “It looks like she was run through with these swords at the primary scene, they were removed, and reinserted here. This guy re-created the murder on this rooftop.”

Jessica tried to wrap her mind around the image of someone stabbing this girl with seven swords, removing them, transporting the body, and doing it all over again.

While Nicci went off to advise the other investigators on the ID, Byrne sidled silently next to Jessica. They stood this way while the mechanics of a murder investigation swirled around them.

“Why is he doing this, Kevin?”

“There’s a reason,” Byrne said. “There’s a pattern. It looks random, but it isn’t. We’ll find it, and we’ll fucking put him down.”

“Now there’s three girls. Three methods. Three different dump sites.”

“All in the Badlands, though. All runaways.”

Jessica shook her head. “How do we warn these kids when they don’t want to be found?”

There was no answer.

FORTY-SEVEN

LILLY HAD STARTED talking and she just couldn’t seem to stop herself. When she stopped, she felt five pounds lighter. She also felt like crying. She probably did. She couldn’t remember. It was kind of a fog.

Lilly had expected one of two reactions from the man. She expected him either to turn on his heels and walk away from her, or call the police.

He did neither. Instead, he was silent for a few moments.

He said he would help her, but only if this was something she really wanted to do. He told her to sleep on it, but only for one night. He said the best decisions in life are made after waiting twenty-four hours, never longer. He then gave her one hundred dollars and his phone number. She promised to call him one way or another. She never broke a promise.

She went back to the hostel. It was as good a place as any.

Despite the early hour, despite the insanity of her day, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she put her head down on a pillow and fell fast asleep.

FORTY-EIGHT

JESSICA STOOD OUTSIDE Eve Galvez’s apartment. It was a small suite on the third floor of a nondescript, blocky brick building on Bustleton Avenue.

She stepped inside, and almost turned the lights on. But then she thought that doing so might be disrespectful. The last time Eve left these rooms she had every intention of returning.

Jessica danced the beam of the flashlight around the space. There was a card table in the dining area, one folding chair, a loveseat in the living room, a pair of end tables. There were no prints or framed posters on the wall, no houseplants, no area rugs. Black fingerprint powder claimed every surface.

She stepped into the bedroom. There was a double bed on a frame, no footboard or headboard. There was a dresser, but no mirror. Jimmy Valentine was right. Eve was a Spartan. The nightstand next to the bed held a cheap lamp and what looked like a photo cube. Jessica glanced in the closet: a pair of dresses, a pair of skirts. Black and navy blue. A pair of white blouses. They’d all been taken off the hangers, searched, and carelessly replaced. Jessica reached inside, smoothed the clothing, more out of habit than anything else.

The entire apartment was tidy, almost sterile. It seemed that Eve Galvez didn’t so much live here as stay here.

Jessica crossed the bedroom, picked up the photo cube. There were pictures on all six sides. One photo showed a picture of Eve at five or so, standing next to her brother on a beach. There was another that had to be Eve’s mother. They had the same eyes, the same cheekbones. One looked like Eve in, perhaps, eleventh grade. She was heavier in this snapshot than the others. Jessica turned it over, looked again at all sides. There were no photographs of Eve’s father.

Out of habit, or training, or just nosiness that had at least something to do with her becoming a police officer to begin with, Jessica shook the cube. Something inside rattled. She shook it again. The rattle was louder. There was something inside.

It took a few moments, but she found the way to open it. Inside was a ball of tissue and a plastic object, perhaps two inches long by a half inch wide. Jessica put her flashlight beam on it.

It was a USB flash drive, the kind that plugs into a port on a computer. It was not labeled or marked in any way. Jessica saw the print powder on the cube, so she knew someone at CSU had touched this. She looked inside the cube again. The flash drive had been wrapped in the tissue. Jessica understood. Eve had hidden it in there and put in the tissue so it would not rattle. She had done this for the possibility of a moment just such as this.

Against her better judgment—in fact, against all the judgment she had—she slipped the flash drive into her pocket, and clicked off her flashlight.

Five minutes later, leaving the apartment virtually the way she had found it, she headed home.

AN HOUR LATER Jessica sat in the bathtub.

It was Saturday. Vincent had two days off. He had taken Sophie to visit his parents. They would be back Sunday afternoon.

The house had been ghostly quiet, so she had taken her iPod into the tub. When she’d gotten home she’d plugged Eve’s flash drive into her desktop computer, and found that there were a few dozen mp3s on it, mostly songs by artists of whom Jessica had never heard. She added some them to her iTunes library.

Her Glock sat on the edge of the sink, right next to the tumbler containing three inches of Wild Turkey.

Jessica turned the hot water on again. It was already almost scalding in the tub, but she couldn’t seem to get it hot enough. She wanted the memory of Katja Dovic, and Monica Renzi, and Caitlin O’Riordan to wash off. She felt as if she would never be clean again.

EVE GALVEZ’S MUSIC was a mix of pop, salsa, tejano, danzón—a sort of old-time formal Cuban dance music—and something called huayño. Good stuff. New stuff. Different stuff. Jessica listened to a few songs by someone named Marisa Monte. She decided to add the rest of the songs to her iPod.

She got out of the tub, threw on her big fluffy robe and went into the small room off the kitchen they used as a computer room. And it was small. Room enough for a table, chair, and a G5 computer. She poured herself another inch, sat down, selected the flash drive. It was then that she noticed a folder she hadn’t seen, a folder labeled vademecum. She double-clicked it.

A few moments later, the screen displayed more than two hundred files. These were not system files, nor were they music files. They were Eve Galvez’s personal files. Jessica looked at the extensions. All of them were .jpg files. Graphics.

None of the files were named, just numbered, starting with one hundred.

Jessica clicked on the first file. She found that she was holding her breath as the hard drive turned, launching Preview, the default graphic display program she used on her computer. This was, after all, a picture of some kind, and she wasn’t all that sure it was something she wanted to see. Or should see.