FOUR

      “Meester Ryder? Room service. I brought breakfas’.”

      The Spanish-accented voice and knocking seemed too close. I felt something hard against my nose, something gritty pressing my cheek.

      “Meester Ryder?”

      My eyes popped open. I was on the floor by the door, nose against the wood, cheek on the carpet. I’d been dreaming.

      “Just a minute,” I mumbled, staggering upright. “Be right there.”

      I saw covers, sheet and pillows trailing from the bed to the door. Having dreams so disturbing I’d try to crawl away from them happened several times a year. The imagery was consistent: moaning shadows, faces comprised solely of teeth, a house where all windows faced inward …dreams generated during childhood.

      I scooped the bedclothes up, threw the pillows and covers on the bed, wrapped the sheet around my naked body to answer the door. If the room service lady thought it unusual to find guests in ad hoc togas, her face didn’t let on. In fact, she beamed with recognition, and grabbed a newspaper from her cart. The woman waved the paper in my face, said, “Ees chew.”

      “No thanks.” I thought she was offering me the paper. “Ees chew,” she repeated, snapping the paper open and pushing it to my face again. “Chew ees famous.”

      I pushed it aside to look at her. “Pardon?”

      “Aqui,” she said, tapping the third page with her finger. I saw a photo of Waltz and me. Beside the photo was a brief article.

      Savagery in SoHo

      New York’s Finest are close-lipped about a woman found with her abdomen sliced open in a vacant SoHo property. Perhaps the gruesome crime scene explains the look on the face of renowned Detective Sheldon Waltz, here conferring with an unnamed colleague …

      At the housekeeper’s request – “Chew so famous!” – I autographed the article and took my breakfast tray inside. Naked on the bed with plate in one hand, fork in the other, I displaced the bad-dream bilge in my stomach with overcooked eggs and undercooked bacon and yearned for cheese grits with andouille. I showered for fifteen minutes, wishing I were at home on Dauphin Island, a hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico, cool at this time of year, invigorating.

      I dressed and walked to the cop shop, finding it kin to every station house in the civilized world: agitated bodies and loud voices, the smell of burnt coffee and all-nighter sweat, phones ringing, jammed-together desks piled with files. Waltz was in a glass-windowed office along the far wall. When I entered his office, he held up a copy of the New York Watcher turned to our photo.

      “Must not have been any celebrity malfunctions overnight. You take a better picture than me. Have a seat.”

      I sat. Waltz fixed me with a despondent gaze. “The techs are at their wits’ end, Detective. The hair you noticed on the floor at the scenes? It’s from hundreds of people. Men’s hair, women’s, different races. Plus dozens of fiber types, all mixed together.”

      “What?”

      “They did some tests, figure the killer collected hair from barber shops and beauty salons, fibers from anything. It’s an evidentiary nightmare.”

      “Jeez, Shelly, even if you found something in the room that ID’d the guy …”

      “The evidence would be polluted,” Waltz finished. “No sane DA would bring it to trial. It’s brilliant. How many madmen could figure out a ploy like this?”

      I know one who could, I thought. But to everyone’s good fortune, my brother was in the fortress called the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, locked up tight and forever.

      Waltz pushed aside files on his desk to make a place for his elbows and flicked a paper at me, Office of the Medical Examiner on the letterhead.

      “The prelims on the autopsies. Both were done last night and side-by-side. Folger and I pushed it through.”

      I grimaced at the bullet-pointed information. “The womb was taken?”

      “Basically, the victims received amateur hysterectomies. I attended the post mortem. The pathologist told me it was like an angry monkey hacking away with a knife. When all that was over, the head was pushed into the wound.”

      The picture that came to my mind was so ugly I shut it off.

      “Jesus. Forensics find anything useful?”

      “We’re screwed by the hairs and fibers on the scene. But we did ID the victim. Dora Anderson, thirty-six years of age. She works for the realtor. She went there to meet a prospective buyer.”

      “Alone? At night?”

      “It’s a fairly upscale neighborhood. The guy must have presented himself benignly on the phone. She felt safe in his presence, obviously.”

      A man who could tear another person apart and still present a perfectly normal appearance and demeanor was a total psychopath, a human chameleon. I shivered involuntarily and tossed the prelim on Shelly’s desk. It felt greasy in my hands, like the vileness of the murder had tainted the paper.

      “You realize our perp hates women, right? More than anything?”

      He nodded. “By removing the womb, he castrated her. I’ve seen my share of gender kills, though nothing quite that extreme.”

      “Shelly, you’ve got a real nightmare brewing out there.”

      Waltz’s phone rang. He grabbed it up. I turned my eyes away and pretended not to listen but, like everyone in the world, cops especially, kept an ear tuned to his voice.

      “I’m in the middle of a …She’s in town? The Chief wants me specifically? No, I can do it. I’ve got to do it, right? Listen, we have a guy here, a specialist in, uh,