‘Did he poison me?’

‘Doesn’t look like it.’

One of the medics asked a series of questions about possible symptoms. They jotted the young man’s responses. The EMT said, ‘All right, sir. We’ll have the lab run your blood but it’s looking like he just got some sedative into you. We’ll get you into the ER and run a few more tests, but I think you’re good.’

Sachs: ‘Can I ask him a few questions?’

‘Sure.’

Sachs donned gloves, helped him sit up and removed the handcuffs. Wincing, Seth lowered his arms and rubbed his wrists. ‘Man, that hurts.’

‘Can you walk?’ The scene down here was already badly contaminated, but she wanted to preserve as much as she could. ‘I’d like to get you upstairs into the hallway.’

‘I guess. Maybe with some help.’

She eased him up. With her arm around his waist, he staggered through the basement and up the stairs. In the front hallway they sat on the stairs leading to the second story.

The front door opened once more and Sachs greeted the Crime Scene team from Queens. The detective running the detail was an attractive young officer named Cheyenne Edwards, one of the stars of the department. Her specialty was chemical analysis. If a perp had a molecule of controlled substance or gunshot residue on his body, Edwards could find it. She also had a rep, as in reputation, as in gold.

As in don’t fuck with her.

Once, she and her partner had been confronted by a perp who’d returned to a scene to collect the loot he’d left behind. The killer, surprised by the cops, had turned his weapon first on the older, broad-shouldered CS officer, assuming the pretty young woman would be less of a threat – only to find out the hard way that this wasn’t quite the case. Edwards had reached into her pocket, where her Taurus .38 backup rested, and fired through the cloth, parking three slugs in his chest. (‘Looks like, we just solved the case,’ she’d noted but continued to search the scene expertly, because that was just what you did.)

‘Chey, you run the scene, okay?’ Sachs asked.

‘You got it.’

Then to Seth: ‘So, tell me what happened.’

The man told Sachs about the initial assault, which they’d heard part of on the phone. A man in mask and gloves had broken the patio door and lunged as Seth stood in the living room. They’d fought but, gripping Seth around the chest with one arm, the perp had jabbed a needle into his neck. He passed out and came to in the basement. The man was getting a portable tattoo gun from a backpack.

Sachs displayed a picture of an American Eagle tattoo machine.