The girl was a genuine blonde, he could tell. The roots always gave it away. And whatever psycho had scalped her had left some roots. At least her head was still on her neck, because there wasn’t much left of her limbs. Alik studied the wall behind her, which was now a sick mural of thick blood splatter with gobs of flesh embedded in the blast craters. While the victim was standing, someone had used a bulled-up shotgun to take her down. His educated guess was that they blew her arms off first, then followed up with her lower legs. The scalping was last. She might have been alive for it, but blood loss and shock would have rendered her unconscious by that time. Thankfully.

“Je-zus fuck.” Alik turned back to Detective Salovitz.

The cop’s face was the color of a dead fish, but Alik preferred that to looking at the murdered blonde.

“I warned you,” Salovitz said. “The others aren’t much better.”

“She’s the only one in here, right?” Alik had arrived thirty minutes after the NYPD had crashed into the apartment, following all sorts of alarms—neighboring apartments and home security sensors screaming out that gunfire had been detected. He didn’t care about that; he’d been asked to check out a specific digital problem originating in the apartment. However, the multiple homicides gave him a legitimate reason to observe and assist the NYPD. His cover, not that anyone would have the balls to query it, was to provide cross-jurisdictional authority, which was highly credible given the nature of the homeowner’s apartment.

“Yeah,” Salovitz agreed. “The rest are all over the place.”

Alik took a proper look around the room. It was a big space, with a classy art-deco layout; walking into it was a time-step back into the 1920s. The ostentatious genuine period furniture was all arranged to make you look in one direction. That was understandable; he was on the seventeenth floor of a typical Central Park West block. One wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, providing a billionaire’s view out across the park, all snug under its thick, fluffy snow blanket. He went over to check it out. The glass was programmable, allowing it to flow open onto the narrow balcony outside.

When he looked through, he could see footprints in the snow. “Come take a look at this,” he called to Salovitz.

Salovitz pressed his face against the glass, leaving faint mist streamers on the cold surface below his nostrils. “So?”

“Footprints. Three, maybe four, sets.”

“Yeah. Nobody went over, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’d have found the body on the street when we came in.”