Her back to Pulaski, Sachs nodded. But she really wasn’t paying much attention to this information; it wasn’t useful to her at the moment. She was about to search the scene and was trying to clear her thoughts of distractions. Despite the fact that by definition crime scene work involves inanimate objects, there’s a curious intimacy to the job; to be effective, CS cops have to mentally and emotionally become the perps. The whole horrific scenario plays itself out in their imaginations: what the killer was thinking, where he stood when he lifted the gun or club or knife, how he adjusted his stance, whether he lingered to watch the victim’s death throes or fled immediately, what caught his attention at the scene, what tempted and repulsed him, what was his escape route. This wasn’t psychological profiling—that occasionally helpful, media-chic portrait-painting of suspects; this was the art of mining the huge clutter at crime scenes for those few important nuggets that could lead to a suspect’s door.

Sachs was now doing this, becoming someone else—the killer who’d engineered this terrible end to another human being.

Eyes scanning the scene, up and down, sideways: the cobblestones, the walls, the body, the iron weight . . .

I’m him. . . . I’m him. . . . What do I have in mind? Why did I want to kill these vics? Why in these ways? Why on the pier, why here?

But the cause of death was so unusual, the killer’s mind so removed from hers, that she had no answers to these questions, not yet. She pulled on her headset. “Rhyme, you there?”

“And where else would I be?” he asked, sounding amused. “I’ve been waiting. Where are you? The second scene?”

“Yes.”

“What are you seeing, Sachs?”

I’m him. . . .

“Alleyway, Rhyme,” she said into the stalk mike. “It’s a cul-de-sac for deliveries. It doesn’t go through. The vic’s close to the street.”

“How close?”

“Fifteen feet out of a hundred-foot alley.”

“How’d he get there?”

“No sign of tread marks but he was definitely dragged to the place he was killed; there’s salt and crud on the bottom of his jacket and pants.”

“Are there doors near the body?”

“Yes. He’s pretty much in front of one.”

“Did he work in the building?”

“No. I’ve got his business cards. He’s a freelance writer. His work address is the same as his apartment.”

“He might’ve had a client there or in one of the other buildings.”

“Lon’s checking now.”

“Good. The door that’s closest? Would that’ve been someplace the perp could have waited for him?”

“Yeah,” she replied.

“Have a guard open it up and I want you to search what’s on the other side.”

Lon Sellitto called from the perimeter of the scene, “No witnesses. Everybody’s fucking blind. Oh, and deaf too . . . And there must be forty or fifty different offices in the buildings around the alley. If anybody knew him, it may take a while to find out.”