As soon as he could, Jack stepped over to the table where the newcomers had grouped. By that time there was no more laughter.

“You’re telling me this boy was crucified?” Laurie asked. She was holding up the corpse’s right hand. Jack could see a large sixteen-penny spike protruding from the palm.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Lou said. “And that was just the start. They’d nailed a cross to a telephone pole and then nailed the kid to it.”

“Good grief,” Laurie said.

“Then they tried to skin him,” Lou said. “At least the front of him.”

“How awful,” Laurie said.

“Do you think he was alive when they were doing that?” Gordon asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Laurie said. “You can see by the amount of bleeding involved. There’s no doubt he was alive.”

Jack stepped closer with the intention of getting Laurie’s attention for a quick chat, but then he caught sight of the body. As jaded as he thought he’d become to the image of death, Brad Cassidy’s corpse made Jack catch his breath. The young man had been crucified, partially skinned, his eyes gouged, and his genitals cut off. There were multiple superficial stab wounds all over his body. The skin of the thorax that had been removed was draped over his legs. On it was a large tattoo of a Viking. A small Nazi swastika was tattooed in the center of his forehead.

“Why a Viking?” Jack asked.

“Hello, Jack, dear,” Laurie said brightly. “Have you finished your first case already? Have you met Agent Gordon Tyrrell? How was your ride in this morning?”

“Just fine,” Jack said. Since the questions had come so quickly he only responded to the last.

“Jack insists on riding a bike around the city,” Laurie explained. “He says it clears his mind.”

“I wouldn’t think that would be particularly safe,” Gordon said.

“It’s not,” Lou agreed. “Yet with the crosstown traffic, there are times I wish I had a bike myself.”

“Oh, come on, Lou!” Laurie exclaimed. “You can’t be serious.”

Jack experienced a distinct feeling of unreality as the conversation continued. It seemed absurd to be engaging in social banter dressed up in biocontainment moon suits in front of a mutilated corpse. Jack interrupted the discussion about bicycling by returning to his initial question about the Viking tattoo.

“It’s from the Aryan myth,” Gordon explained. “Like the style of the clothing and the boots, the Viking image is borrowed from the skinhead movement in England, where the whole thing started.”

“But why specifically a Viking?” Jack repeated. “I thought they were into all the Nazi emblems.”

“Their interest in the Vikings comes from a very revisionist view of history,” Gordon said. “The skinheads think the marauding, murderous Vikings epitomized self-reliant masculine honor.”

“That’s why Gordon thinks he got skinned,” Lou said. “Whoever killed him didn’t think he deserved to die with an image of a Viking still attached.”

“I thought this kind of torture went out with the Middle Ages,” Jack said.