The master bedroom was in San Francisco, somewhere on Presidio Heights, looking down on the Golden Gate Bridge in the far distance. San Francisco was three hours behind New York, so the streetlights of that fine town were blazing bright into the night while the citizens headed for the Marina and Mission districts to start their revels. Looking at the bed, Alik started to appreciate Kravis and Rose Lorenzo’s privacy dogma. It was a broad circle with a black leather base, the gelfoam mattress covered in a sheet of royal-purple silk. The four posts were also leather clad, with several insect-eye cameras clustered around them like crystal tumors erupting through the padding. The ceiling above had a circular screen practically the same size as the mattress—that is, before a shotgun blast had reduced it to a rosette of glass daggers and a snow of shattered crystal across the sheets—and the wall behind the headboard (also black leather) sported a broad screen.

Both the duty cops had opened the nightstand drawers to smirk at the pharmacological and electrical aids the Lorenzos took to their marital bed. When Alik and Salovitz came in, they quickly stood upright and studiously ignored the kinky treasure.

Salovitz gestured, and the coroner’s sheet was pulled back. Body number four was another male, African, who had been hacked to death; the coup de grâce was a horizontal blow to the mouth, leaving the jaw hanging by a thin strip of skin. Judging from the size and depth of the wounds, Alik reckoned it was done by an axe rather than a machete, like a Viking on the rampage. There was another of the big shotguns beside him, identical to the one on the Moon.

“So Hacked Off here was in the same crew as Mr. Shotgun,” Alik said. “And the boss is badging his guys with these bulled-up shotguns. Anyone like that operating out of New York?” Even as he asked, Shango was searching the FBI database for gangs who had adopted the model. Plenty of crews used them, but it wasn’t standard issue, more a symbol that you were no longer a foot soldier. The higher up the shitheap you crawled, the bigger your gun.

“No,” Salovitz said.

“But you’ve got to have a decent fabricator to produce one of these,” Alik continued. “For a start, the barrel will need forty-one, fifty ordnance steel at least.”

“I know where you’re going,” Salovitz said. “And you can stop right there. New York doesn’t have fabrication substance permits outside of hazardous or toxic compounds.”

Alik exhaled a martyred sigh. “The Twenty-Eighth?”

“Yeah. It’s coming, and we’re ready for it like the progressives we truly are.”