No, no, he wasn’t going to take her. She’d rip his precious skin off with her teeth before he got close. Never.

With a fast sweep, down came the denim.

She tensed, ready to attack.

But he didn’t touch her there. He brushed the smooth flesh of her thighs. He was interested only in finding an appropriate part of her body on which to tattoo his deadly message, it seemed.

‘Nice, nice …’

Pam recalled Amelia talking about the code the killer was tattooing onto his victims. And she wondered what message he was going to leave on her body.

He picked up the gun and turned it on.

Bzzzz.

He touched it to her skin. The sensation was a tickle.

Then came the pain.

CHAPTER 70

The point of the American Families First Council attack was now clear.

Among the documents in the dead unsub’s pocket, in addition to the name of the Stantons’ hotel, Sachs had found a rambling letter.

It reminded Rhyme of the Unabomber’s manifesto – a diatribe against modern society. The difference, though, was that the unsub’s screed didn’t offer up the AFFC’s own racist and fundamentalist views; just the opposite, in fact. The document, intended to be found by the police after the citywide poisoning, purported to be written by the enemy – some unnamed coalition of black and Latino activists, affiliated with Muslim fundamentalists, all of whom were taking credit for the poisoning of New York City to get even with the white capitalist oppressors. The statement called for an uprising against them, proclaiming that the poison attack was just the start.

Characterizing the attack in this way was rather clever, Rhyme decided. It would take suspicion off the AFFC and would galvanize sentiment against the council’s enemies. It would also cause immeasurable damage to the Sodom of New York City, bastion of globalization, mixed races and liberalism.

Rhyme suspected there was more at work as well. ‘Power play within the militia movement? If word gets around that AFFC pulled this off, their stock would rise through the roof.’

A call came in from the federal building in Manhattan.

‘The Stantons are not doin’ the talkie-talkie, Lincoln,’ said Fred Dellray, the FBI agent who was running the federal side of the attempted attack. The couple and their son were now in federal custody but apparently not – to translate Dellray’s distinctive lingo – cooperating at all.

‘Well, sweat ’em or something, Fred. I want to know who the hell our unsub was. Prints came back negative and he wasn’t in CODIS.’

‘I saw those pictures of your boy in the tunnel, after the run-in with the H two Oh. My, my, that was a Breaking Bad moment, no? How fast they think that water was going?’