The front door had been jimmied a hundred times, so it just swung open for us. The building smelled of fire, garbage, water damage. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling from a burst steam pipe. It was so wrong for Nina to have ended up in this sad, abominable place.

For over a year I had been unofficially investigating unsolved murders in Southeast, many of them Jane Does. My count was well over a hundred, but no one else in the department was willing to agree to that number, or anything close to it. Several of the murdered women were drug abusers or prostitutes. But not Nina.

We carefully descended a circular stairwell that had a shaky, well-worn wooden railing that neither of us would touch. I could see flashlights shining up ahead, and I already had my Maglite turned on.

Nina was deep in the basement of the abandoned building. At least somebody had bothered to tape off the perimeter to protect the crime scene.

I saw Nina’s body — and I had to look away.

It wasn’t just that she was dead; it was how she’d been killed. I tried to put my mind and eyes somewhere else until I regained some composure.

Jerome Thurman was there with the EMS team. So was a single patrol officer, probably the one who had identified Nina. No M.E. was present. It wasn’t unusual for a medical examiner not to show up for homicides in Southeast.

There were dead flowers on the floor near the body. I focused on the flowers, still not able to look at Nina again. It didn’t fit with the other Jane Does, but the killer didn’t have a strict pattern. That was one of the problems I was having. It might mean that his fantasy was still evolving — and that he hadn’t finished making up his gruesome story yet.

I noted shreds of foil and cellophane wrappers lying everywhere on the floor. Rats are attracted to shiny things and often bring them back to their nests. Thick cobwebs weaved from one end of the basement to the other.

I had to look at Nina again. I needed to look closely.

“I’m Detective Alex Cross. Let me take a look at her, please,” I finally said to the EMS team, a man and a woman in their twenties. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes, then I’ll get out of your way.”

“The other detectives already released the body,” the male EMS worker said. He was rail-thin, with long dirty-blond hair. He didn’t bother to look up at me. “Let us finish our job and get the hell out of this cesspool. Whole area is highly infectious — smells like shit.”

“Just back away,” Sampson barked. “Get up, before I pull your skinny ass up.”