Vincent recovered fast. "So? That doesn't matter to me."

"If you'd done what you had in mind you'd be in cuffs now. Or shot dead."

"Had in mind?" Vincent asked, trying to sound innocent. "I don't know what you're talking about."

The stranger only smiled, motioning Vincent up the street. "Do you live here?"

A pause then Vincent answered, "New Jersey."

"You work in the city?"

"Yeah."

"You know Manhattan well?"

"Pretty good."

The man nodded, looking Vincent up and down. He identified himself as Gerald Duncan and suggested they go someplace warm to talk. They walked three blocks to a diner and Duncan had coffee and Vincent had another piece of cake and a soda.

They talked about the weather, the city budget, downtown Manhattan at midnight.

Then Duncan said, "Just a thought, Vincent. If you're interested in a little work I could use somebody who isn't overly concerned with the law. And it might let you practice your…hobby." He nodded back in the direction of the alley.

"Collecting sitcoms from the seventies?" asked Clever Vincent.

Duncan smiled again and Vincent decided he liked the man.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I've only been to New York a few times. I need a man who knows the streets, the subways, traffic patterns, neighborhoods…who knows something about the way police work. The details, I'll save for later."

Hmm.

"What line are you in?" Vincent had asked.

"Businessman. We'll let it go at that."

Hmm.

Vincent told himself to leave. But he felt the lure of the man's comment-about practicing his hobby. Anything that might help him feed the hunger was worth considering, even if it was risky. They continued to talk for a half hour, sharing some information, withholding some. Duncan explained that his hobby was collecting antique watches, which he repaired himself. He'd even built a few from scratch.

As he'd finished his fourth dessert of the day Vincent asked, "How did you know she was a cop?"

Duncan seemed to debate for a moment. Then he said. "I've been checking out somebody at the diner. The man at the end of the counter. Remember him? He was in the dark suit."

Vincent nodded.

"I've been following him for the past month. I'm going to kill him."

Vincent smiled. "You're kidding."

"I don't really kid."

And Vincent had learned that was true. There was no Clever Gerald. Or Hungry Gerald. There was just one: Calm and Meticulous Gerald, who expressed his intention that night to kill the man in the diner-Walter somebody-in the same matter-of-fact way that he'd made good on that promise by cutting the son of a bitch's wrists and watching him struggle until he fell from a pier into the freezing brown water of the Hudson River.

The Watchmaker had gone on to tell Vincent that he was in town to kill other people too. Among them were some women. As long as Vincent was careful and didn't spend more than twenty or thirty minutes, he could have their bodies after they were dead-to do what he wished. In exchange, Vincent would help him-as a guide to the city and its roads and transportation system, and to stand guard and sometimes drive the getaway car.

"So. You interested?"

"I guess," Vincent said, though his private response was a lot more enthusiastic than that.

And Vincent was now hard at work on this job, following the third victim: Joanne Harper, their flower girl, Clever Vincent had dubbed her. He watched her take out a key and disappear through the service door to her workshop. He eased to a stop, ate a candy bar and leaned against a lamp pole, looking through the shop's grimy window.

His hand touched the bulge at his waistband, where the Buck knife rested. Staring at the vague form of Joanne, turning on lights, taking her coat off, moving around the workshop. She was alone.

Gripping the knife.

He wondered if she had freckles, he wondered what her perfume smelled like. He wondered if she whimpered when she was in pain. Did she-

But, no, he shouldn't think like this! He was here only to get information. He couldn't break the rules, couldn't disappoint Gerald Duncan. Vincent inhaled the painfully cold air. He should wait.

But then Joanne walked near the window. He got a good look at her. Oh, she's pretty…

Vincent's palms began to sweat. Of course, he could simply take her now and leave her tied up for Duncan to kill later. That would be something that a friend would understand. They'd both get what they wanted.

After all, sometimes you just can't wait.

The hunger does that to you…

Next time, pack warm. What were you thinking?

Riding in a pungent cab, thirty-something Kathryn Dance held her hands out in front of a backseat heater exhaling air that wasn't hot, wasn't even warm; at best, she decided, it was uncold. She rubbed together her fingers, tipped in dark red nails, and then gave her black-stockinged knees a chance at the air.

Dance came from a locale where the temperature was seventy-five, give or take, all year-round and you had to drive up Carmel Valley Road a long, long way to find enough sledding snow to keep your son and daughter happy. In her last-minute packing for the seminar here in New York, somehow she'd forgotten that the Northeast plus December equals the Himalayas.

She was reflecting: Here I can't drop the last five pounds of what I gained in Mexico last month (where she'd done nothing but sit in a smoky room, interrogating a suspected kidnapper). If I can't lose it, at least the extra weight ought to do its duty as insulation. Ain't fair…She pulled her thin coat more tightly around her.

Kathryn Dance was a special agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, based in Monterey. She was one of the nation's preeminent experts in interrogation and kinesics-the science of observing and analyzing the body language and verbal behavior of witnesses and suspects. She'd been in New York for the past three days presenting her kinesics seminar to local law enforcement agencies.

Kinesics is a rare specialty in police work, but to Kathryn Dance there was nothing like it. She was a people addict. They fascinated her, they electrified her. Confounded and challenged her too. These billions of odd creatures moving through the world, saying the strangest and most wonderful and terrible things…She felt what they felt, she feared what scared them, she got pleasure from their joy.

Dance had been a reporter after college: journalism, that profession tailor-made for the aimless with insatiable curiosities. She ended up on the crime beat and spent hours in courtrooms, observing lawyers and suspects and jurors. She realized something about herself: She could look at a witness, listen to his words and get an immediate sense of when he was telling the truth and when he wasn't. She could look at jurors and see when they were bored or lost or angry or shocked, when they believed the suspect, when they didn't. She could tell which lawyers were ill-suited to the bar and which were going to shine.

She could spot the cops whose whole heart was in their jobs and the ones who were only biding their time. (One of the former in particular caught her eye: a prematurely silver-haired FBI agent out of the San Jose field office, testifying with humor and panache in a gang trial she was covering. She finagled an exclusive interview with him after the guilty verdicts, and he finagled a date. Eight months later she and William Swenson were married.)

Eventually bored with the reporter's life, Kathryn Dance decided on a career change. Life turned crazy for a time as she juggled her roles as mother of two small children and wife and grad student, but she managed to graduate from UC-Santa Cruz with a joint master's in psych and communications. She opened a jury consulting business, advising attorneys which jurors to choose and which to avoid during voir dire jury selection. She was talented and made very good money. But six years ago, she decided to change course once again. With the help of a supportive, tireless husband and her mother and father, who lived in nearby Carmel, she headed back to school once more: the California State Bureau of Investigation training academy in Sacramento.