Lorenzo had certainly installed some very wide couches in his dome. One of them had red laser warning tape around it, glowing bright red. The cop who’d pulled the lunar duty gave Alik a respectful nod and said: “Stay at least two meters from the body, sir. The hazard disposal team is due in twenty minutes.”

First guess on the corpse gave Alik an Italian American, or at least some kind of Mediterranean family heritage. His face was perfectly intact, as were his legs and hips. The chest was fuzzed by what appeared to be a thin gray mist. Underneath that, his torso was just a pile of so much red pulp. The blood pool on and around the couch was impressively big and congealing nicely. His arms were interesting; the buzz shot had taken them clean off his torso at the shoulder. One was on the couch, holding a custom-made stub-barrel auto-pump-action shotgun—which, judging from the eight-centimeter barrel diameter, Alik took to be the one used to take out the woman in the Central Park West room. A reasonable assumption, because this victim’s second arm was lying on the floor, a scalp still gripped in its fingers, the blond hair sponging up blood.

“Buzz gun,” Alik said. The gun itself was nothing special, just an electromagnetic barrel to ensure the projectile accelerated smoothly. But the buzz rounds it fired were mildly unstable. They were made from incredibly tightly wound coils of monomolecule filament, which expanded outward on impact, so the target got to experience what it was like being sliced apart by ten thousand razor blades all traveling in different directions.

That indistinct fog lingering on the victim’s chest was the cloud of filament. Alik knew that if he’d stuck his hand in it, his flesh would have been diced like gourmet burger meat. He couldn’t help glancing around nervously. If there were any breakaway strands drifting through the air—not unknown—inhaling one meant a slow, excruciating, and unstoppable death.