Then her feet were actually lifted off the floor, sandwiched between two sweating bodies—a big man in a bloody Izod shirt, holding a sobbing young boy above his head, and a woman who seemed to have passed out. The screams grew louder, children's and adults' mixed, and fueled the panic. Heat enveloped her and soon it was nearly impossible to breathe. The pressure on her chest threatened to crush her heart to silence. Claustrophobia—Amelia Sachs's one big fear—now wrapped its tight arms around her and she felt herself swallowed up by an unbearable sensation of confinement.

When you move they can't getcha . . .

But she wasn't moving anywhere. She was held tight by a suffocating mass of powerful, damp bodies, not even human now, a collection of muscles and sweat and fists and spit and feet pressing harder and harder into itself.

Please, no! Please, let me move! Let me get one hand free. Let me take one breath of air.

She thought she saw blood. She thought she saw torn flesh.

Maybe they were hers.

From terror as much as from the pain and the suffocation, Amelia Sachs felt herself start to black out.

No! Don't fall under their feet. Don't fall!

Please!

She couldn't breathe. Not a cubic inch of air entered her lungs. Then she saw a knee inches from her face. It slammed into her cheek and stayed rooted there.

She could smell dirty jeans, saw a scuffed boot in front of her eyes, inches away.

Please don't let me fall!

Then she realized that maybe she already had.

Chapter Thirty-one

Wearing a bellhop's uniform that closely matched those worn by the staff at the Lanham Arms Hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Malerick walked along the fifteenth-floor hallway of the hotel. He carried a heavy room-service tray on which was a domed plate cover and a vase containing a huge red tulip.

Everything about him was in harmony with his surroundings so as not to arouse suspicion. Malerick himself was the model of a deferential, pleasant bellhop.

The averted eyes, the half smile, the unobtrusive walk, the spotless tray.

Only one thing set him apart from the other bellhops here at the Lanham: under the metal warming dome on the tray was not a plate of eggs Benedict or a club sandwich but a loaded Beretta automatic pistol, equipped with a sausage-thick sound suppressor, and a leather pouch of lock-picking and other tools.

"Enjoying your stay?" he asked one couple.

Yes, they were, and they wished him a good afternoon.

He continued to nod and smile at the guests returning to their rooms after Sunday brunch or on their way to sightsee on this fine spring afternoon.

He passed a window, in which he could see a bit of green—a portion of Central Park. He wondered what sort of excitement was unfolding there at the moment, inside the white tent of the Cirque Fantastique—the place to which he'd spent the past few days directing the police with the clues he'd left at the sites of the murders.