Eagleston said, ‘Will do, Amelia.’ She nodded and Sachs went to the back of the CS vehicle to suit up in the Tyvek, booties, hood and gloves. The N95 respirator too. Remembering that, whatever happened, she should leave it in place.

Rust …

Goggles this time.

As she was stepping into the legs of the coveralls, she happened to glance up the street. On the corner, the same side of the street as the restaurant, was a man in a dark jacket that was similar to what the unsub had worn at the hospital for the attempted assault on Harriet Stanton – though he was in a baseball cap, not a stocking. He was on a phone and paying only moderate attention to the scene. Still, there was something artificial about his pose.

Could it be the unsub, back again, as he’d done in SoHo?

She looked away quickly and continued to gown herself, trying to act casual.

It wasn’t common for a perp to return to the scene of the crime – that was a cliché helpful only in bad murder mysteries and made for TV movies – but it did happen sometimes. Particularly perps who weren’t professional criminals but psychopaths, whose motives for murder were rooted in mental or emotional disturbance, which pretty much described Unsub 11 5.

On the pretext of getting a new pair of gloves from the far side of the bus, Sachs eased up to a detective she knew, a sharp, streetwise officer who’d recently been assigned to Midtown North. Nancy Simpson was handling crowd control detail and directing diners out of the immediate scene as they exited the restaurant.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘Nancy.’

‘This guy again?’ the woman muttered. She was in an NYPD windbreaker, collar pulled high against the weather. Sachs liked the stylish beret, in dark green.

‘Looks like it.’

‘Got people scared all over town,’ Simpson told her. ‘Reports of intruders in basements’re up a hundred percent. None of ’em pan out, but we send Patrol anyway. Tying up everything.’ She added with a wink. ‘And nobody’s washing their clothes. Afraid of the laundry room.’

‘We may have a situation, Nancy.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Don’t look behind you.’

‘I won’t. Why?’

‘We’ve got a fish I’m interested in. A guy on the corner. This block. He’s in a jacket, baseball cap. I want you to get close but don’t see him. You know what I mean?’

‘Sure. I saw somebody. Peripheral. Wondered.’

‘Get close. And then stop him. Keep your weapon ready. There’s an off chance it might be the perp.’

‘Who did this ?’

‘Who did this. Not likely, I’m saying. But maybe.’

‘How should I get close?’

‘You’re checking traffic, you’re on your phone, pretending you’re on your phone, I mean.’

‘Arrest?’

‘Just ID at this point. I’ll come up behind. I’ll have my weapon drawn.’

‘Fish. I’m bait.’

Sachs glanced to the side. ‘Oh, hell. He’s gone.’

The unsub, or whoever he was, had disappeared around the corner of a glass and chrome building, about ten stories high, next to the restaurant where Samantha Levine had been dining – before the fateful trip to the restroom.

‘I’m on it,’ Simpson said. She sprinted in the direction the man had gone.

Sachs ran to the command post and told Bo Haumann there was a possible suspect. Instantly he marshaled a half dozen ESU and other officers. She glanced toward Simpson. From the way she paused and looked around, Sachs deduced the suspect had vanished.

The detective turned and trotted back to Sachs and Haumann.

‘Sorry, Amelia. He’s gone. Maybe ducked into that building – the fancy one on the corner – or took off in a car.’

Haumann said, ‘We’ll follow up. We have a picture of your unsub from the homicide yesterday, the Identi Kit image.’

She pictured the surly, Slavic looking face, the weirdly light eyes.

The ESU leader said to the men he’d called around him, ‘Deploy. Go find him. And somebody call it in to Midtown South. I want a team moving west down Fifty two Street. We’ll hem him in, if we can.’

‘Yessir.’

They trotted off.

As much as she wanted to go with them – she considered handing off the crime scene – Sachs finished dressing for the grid.

When she was gowned, bootied and hooded, she grabbed the collection kit and, with a glance back at the street down which the fish had swum away, Sachs started for the door of the restaurant.

Sachs was grateful that, as at the previous scene, she didn’t have to lug the heavy halogen spots down to the murder site; they were already set up and burning brightly.

Thank you, first responders.

She glanced at the diagram from Rhyme’s database of underground New York to orient herself.

There were some similarities to the prior scene: the waterpipe, the utility conduits, the yellow boxes marked IFON . But there was a major difference too. This space was much bigger. And she could climb directly into it through the access doorway in the bathroom. No circular coffin breadbaskets.

Thank you …

From the ancient wooden pens surrounding the dirt floor, she deduced that it had been part of a passageway to move animals to and from one of the stockyards that used to operate near here, in Hell’s Kitchen. She remembered that the perp seemed to be influenced by the Bone Collector; that killer too had used a former slaughterhouse as a place to stash one of his victims – and staked her down, bloody, so she would be devoured alive by rats.

Unsub 11 5 certainly had learned at the feet of a master.

The access door in the restroom opened into a large octagon, from which three tunnels disappeared into the darkness.

Sachs clicked on the video and audio feed. ‘Rhyme? You there?’

‘Ah, Sachs. I was wondering.’

‘He might’ve come back again. Like on Elizabeth Street.’

‘Returned to the scene?’

‘Or never left. I saw someone on the street, matching. Bo Haumann’s got officers checking it out.’

‘Anything?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why’s he coming back?’ Rhyme mused. Not expecting an answer.

The camera was pointed in the direction she was looking – toward the dimness of a tunnel’s end. Before turning to the body, though, she slipped rubber bands over her booties and tracked along the unsub’s footprints, also muted by protective plastic, which led down one of the tunnels.

‘That’s how he got in? I can’t see clearly.’

‘Looks that way, Rhyme. I see some lights up ahead.’

The perp hadn’t used a manhole to gain access. This tunnel, one of three, opened onto a train track – the line running north from Penn Station. The opening was largely obscured by a pile of debris but there was plenty of room for a person to climb over it. The unsub had simply walked up or down the tracks, from a spot near the West Side Highway, and then scaled the rubble and made his way to the octagon shaped space where Samantha had died. She radioed Jean Eagleston and told her about the secondary crime scene – the entrance/exit route.

Then Sachs returned to the center of the octagon, where the victim lay. She looked up and shielded her eyes from the brilliant halogens the medics had set up. ‘Another flashlight, Rhyme. He sure wants to be certain nobody misses the vic.’

Messages from our sponsor …

Like Chloe, Samantha was handcuffed and her ankles duct taped. She’d also been partially disrobed – but only to expose her abdomen, where the unsub had inked her. A fast examination revealed no apparent sexual contact here either. Indeed, there was something oddly chaste about the way he’d left both victims. This was, she reflected, eerier than a straight up sex crime – since it suggested the underlying mystery of the case: Why was he doing this? Rape, at least, was categorical. This?

She gazed down at the tattoo.

Rhyme’s voice intruded on the quiet. ‘“forty”. Lowercase again. Part of the phrase. Cardinal number this time, not the ordinal “fortieth”. Why?’ Testily he added, ‘Well, no time to speculate. Let’s get going.’