I put on latex gloves and bent down over the corpse. She did appear to be in her mid- to late teens. The girl’s throat had been slit from ear to ear. Her face was badly slashed. So were the soles of her feet, which seemed odd. She’d been stabbed a dozen or more times in her chest and stomach. I pushed open her legs.

I saw something that made me sick. A metal handle was barely visible between her legs. I was almost sure it was a knife and that it had been driven all the way into her vagina.

Sampson crouched and looked at me. “What are you thinking, Alex? Another one?”

I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe, but she’s an addict, John. Tracks on her arms and legs. Probably behind her knees, under her arms. Our boy doesn’t usually go after addicts. He practices safe sex. The murder’s brutal, though. That fits the style. You see the metal handle?”

Sampson nodded. He didn’t miss much. “Clothes,” he said. “Where the hell did they go to? We need to find the clothes.”

“Somebody in the neighborhood probably stripped them off her already,” said the young uniform. There was a lot of disturbance around the body. Several footprints in the dirt. “That’s how it goes around here. Nobody seems to care.”

“We’re here,” I said to him. “We care. We’re here for all the Jane Does.”

Chapter 3

GEOFFREY SHAFER was so happy he almost couldn’t hide it from his family. He had to keep from laughing out loud as he kissed his wife, Lucy, on the cheek. He caught a whiff of her Chanel No. 5 perfume, then tasted the brittle dryness of her lips as he kissed her again.

They were standing around like statues in the elegant galley hall of the large Georgian house in Kalorama. The children had been summoned to say good-bye to him.

His wife, the former Lucy Rhys-Cousins, was ash-blond, her sparkling green eyes even brighter than the Bulgari and Spark jewelry that she always wore. Slender, still a beauty of sorts at thirty-seven, Lucy had attended Newnham College at Cambridge for two years before they were married. She read useless poetry and literary novels, and spent most of her free time at equally pointless lunches, shopping with her expatriate girlfriends, going to polo matches, or sailing. Occasionally, Shafer sailed with her. He’d been a very good sailor once upon a time.

Lucy had been considered a prize catch, and he supposed that she still would be, for some men. Well, they could have her skinny, bony ass and all the passionless sex they could stomach.