AS EVE HAD SEEN THEIR HOME IN ITS SNOWY landscape as a painting, Roarke saw the crime scene as a play. A dark play with constant movement and great noise, all centered around the single focal character.

The white sheet on the white snow, the white body laid over it, with deep brown hair shining in the hard lights. He thought the wounds stood out against the pale flesh like screams.

And there his wife stood in her long black coat, gloveless, of course. They’d both forgotten her gloves this time around. Hatless and hard-eyed. The stage manager, he thought, and a major player as well. Director and author of this final act.

There would be pity in her, this he knew, and there would be anger, a ribbon of guilt to tie them all together. But that complicated emotional package was tucked deep inside, walled in behind that cool, calculating mind.

He watched her speak to the sweepers, to the uniforms, to the others who walked on and off that winter stage. Then Peabody, the dependable, in her turtle-shell of a coat and colorful scarf, crossed the stage on cue. Together, she and Eve lowered to that lifeless focal point that held the dispassionate spotlight of center stage.

“Not close enough,” McNab said from beside him.

Roarke shifted his attention, very briefly, from the scene to McNab. “What?”

“Just couldn’t get close enough.” McNab’s hands were deep in two of the many pockets of his bright green coat, with the long tails of a boldly striped scarf fluttering down his back. “Moving in on a dozen roads from a dozen damn directions. Moving in, you can feel we’re getting closer. But not close enough to help Gia Rossi. It’s hard. This one hits hard.”

“It does.”

Had he really believed, Roarke wondered, a lifetime ago, had he honestly assumed that the nature of the cop was to feel nothing? He’d learned different since Eve. He’d learned very different. And now, he stood silent, listening to the lines as the players played their parts.

“TOD oh-one-thirty. Early Monday morning,” Peabody said. “She’s been dead a little over twenty-six hours.”

“He kept her for a day.” Eve studied the carving in the torso. Thirty-nine hours, eight minutes, forty-five seconds. “Kept her a day after he was finished. She didn’t last for him. The wounds are less severe, less plentiful than on York. Something went wrong for him this time. He wasn’t able to sustain the work.”

Less severe, yes, Peabody could see that was true. And still the cuts, the burns and bruising spoke of terrible suffering. “Maybe he got impatient this time. Maybe he needed to go for the kill.”

“I don’t think so.” With her sealed fingers, Eve picked up the victim’s arm, turned it to study the ligature marks from the binding. Then turned it back to examine more closely the killing wounds on the wrist. “She didn’t fight like York, not as much damage from the ropes, wrists and ankles. And the killing strokes here? Just as clean and precise as all the others. He’s still in control. And he still wants them to last.”

She laid the arm down again, on the white, white sheet. “It’s a matter of pride in his skill—torture, create the pain, but keep them alive. Increasing the level of pain, fear, injury, all while keeping them breathing. But Rossi, she wound down on him ahead of his schedule, ahead of his goal.”

“Before he’d have been able to see the media bulletins with his image,” Peabody pointed out. “It’s not because he panicked, or took his anger out on her.”

Eve glanced up. “No. But if he had, she’d still be dead. If he had, we still did what we had to do. Put that away. He started on her Saturday morning, finished early Monday. York Friday night. So he had a little celebration, maybe, or just gets a good night’s sleep before he rewinds the clock for Rossi.”

Takes time out to shadow me, Eve thought. Another tried and true torture method. Rest and revisit. Time out again to lure and secure Greenfeld. Need your next vic in the goddamn bullpen.

“Cleans her up, takes his time. No rush, no hurry. Already got the dump spot picked out, already surveyed the area. Set up a canvass.”

From her crouched position, Eve surveyed the area. “This kind of weather, there aren’t going to be a lot of people hanging out in the park. Bides his time,” she continued. “Loads her up, transports her here. Carries her in.”

“Sweepers have a lot of footprints to work with. The snow was pretty fresh and soft. They’ll make the treads, give us a size, a brand.”

“Yeah. But he’s not worried about that. Smart enough, he’s smart enough to wear something oversized, try to throw us off. To wear something common that’s next to impossible to pin. When we get him, we’ll find them, help hang him with them, but they won’t lead us to him.”

As dispassionate now as those harsh crime scene lights, Eve examined the body. “She was strong, in top shape.” Good specimen? she wondered. Had he thought he’d had a prime candidate for his nasty duet? “She struggled, but not as much as York. Not nearly as hard as York, not as long. Gave out, that’s what she did. Physically strong, but something in her shut down. Must’ve been a big disappointment to him.”

“I’m glad she didn’t suffer as much. I know,” Peabody said when Eve lifted her head. “But if we couldn’t save her, I’m glad she didn’t suffer as much.”

“If she could’ve held out longer, maybe we could’ve saved her. And either way you look at it, Peabody, doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”

She straightened as she spotted Morris coming toward them. In his eyes she saw something that was in her, some of what was in Peabody. She would, Eve thought, see that same complicated mix of anger, despair, guilt, and sorrow in the eyes of every cop involved.

“Gia Rossi,” was all Morris said.

“Yes. She’s been dead a little more than twenty-six hours by our gauge. A group of kids cutting through the park found her. Mucked up the scene some, but for the most part then just cut and ran. One of them called it in.

“Something went wrong for him with her.” Eve looked down at the body again. “He didn’t get a lot of time out of her. Maybe she just shut down, or maybe he used something—experimenting—some chemical that shut her down.”

“I’ll flag the tox as priority. She isn’t as damaged as the others.”

“No.”

“Can she be moved yet?”

“I was about to roll her.”

With a nod, he bent to help, and together they rolled the body.

“No injuries on her back,” Morris said.

“Most of them don’t. He likes face-to-face. It has to be personal. It has to be intimate.”

“Some bruising, lacerations, burns, punctures on the back of the shoulders, the calves. Less than the others.” Gently, he brushed the hair aside, examined the back of the neck, the scalp, the ears. “In comparison, I’d say he barely got to stage two in this case. Yes, yes, something went wrong. I’ll take her in now.”

He straightened, met Eve’s eyes. “Will there be family?”

He never asked, or so rarely she’d never registered it. “She has a mother in Queens, a father and stepmother out in Illinois. We’ll be contacting them.”

“Let me know if and when they want to see her. I’ll take them through it personally.”

“All right.”

He looked away, past the lights into the cold dark. “I wish it were spring,” he said.

“Yeah, people still end up dead, but it’s a nicer atmosphere for the rest of us. And, you know, flowers. They’re a nice touch.”

He grinned, and some of the shadows around him seemed to lift. “I like daffodils myself. I always think of the trumpet as a really long mouth, and imagine they chatter away at each other in a language we can’t hear.”

“That’s a little scary,” she decided.

“Then you don’t want to get me started on pansies.”

“Really don’t. I’ll check in with you later. Peabody, get that canvass started.” She left Morris, heard him murmur, All right now, Gia, then stepped up to Roarke.

“I’m nearly done here,” she began. “You should—”

“I won’t be going home,” Roarke told her. “I’ll go in, start working in the war room. I’ll take care of getting myself there.”

“I’ll go on in with you.” McNab looked at Eve. “If that’s all right with you, Lieutenant.”

“Go ahead, and contact the rest of the team. No reason for them to lay around in bed when we’re not. This is a twenty-four/seven op now. I’ll work out subteams, twelve-hour shifts. The clock’s about to start on Ariel Greenfeld. We’re not going to find her like this.”

She looked back. “I’m goddamned if we’re going to find her like this.”

I t was still shy of dawn when she got to Central. Before she went to her office, she walked into the war room. As the lights flicked on she looked around. It was quiet now, empty of people. It wouldn’t be so again, she thought. Not until they’d closed this down.

She was adding more men, more eyes, ears, legs, hands. More to work the streets, flash the killer’s picture, talk to neighbors, street people, cabbies, chemi-heads. More to knock on the doors of the far too numerous buildings Roarke had thus far listed in his search.

More people to push, push, push, to track down every thread no matter how thin and knotted.

Until this was done there was only one investigation, only one killer, only one purpose for her and every cop under her.

She walked to the white board and in her own hand wrote out the time it had taken for Gia Rossi to die after Rossi’s name.

Then she looked down at the next name she’d written. Ariel Greenfeld.

“You hold the hell on. It’s not over, and it’s not going to be over, so you hold the hell on.”

She turned, saw Roarke watching her from the doorway. “You made good time,” he told her. “McNab and I detoured up to EDD, to requisition more equipment. Feeney’s on his way in.”

“Good.”

He crossed over to stand, as she was, in front of the whiteboard. “It depends, on some level, on her now. On you, on us, certainly on him, but on some level, on her.”

“Every hour she holds on, we get closer.”

“And every hour she holds on, is another hour he may move on you. You want that. You’d will it to happen if you could.”

No bullshit, she decided. No evasions. “That’s right.”

“When they killed Marlena, all those years ago, broke her to pieces to prove a point to me, I wanted them to come at me.”

Eve thought of Summerset’s daughter, how she’d been taken, tortured, and killed by rivals of the young, enterprising criminal Roarke had been. “If they had, the whole of them, you’d have ended up in the ground with her.”

“That may be. That very likely may be.” He shifted his gaze from the board to meet hers. “But I wanted it, and would have willed it if I could have. But since that wasn’t to be, I found another way to end every one of them.”

“He’s only one man. And there may not be another way.”

Thinking of those who were lost, he looked at the board again. Only one man, and perhaps only one way. “That’s all very true. Here’s what I know, here’s what I understood out there in the cold and the dark with you tending to what he’d made of Gia Rossi. He thinks he knows you.”

He turned his head now, and those brilliant blue eyes fired into hers. “He thinks he understands what you are, knows who you are. But he’s wrong. He doesn’t know or understand the likes of you. If it comes to the two of you, even for a moment, if it comes to the two of you, he may get a glimmer of who and what you are. And if he does, he’ll know something of fear.”

“Well.” A little shaken, a little mystified, she blew out a breath. “That’s not what I was expecting out of you.”

“When I looked at her, at what he’d done to her, I thought I would envision you there. Your face with her face, as it is on your board.”

“Roarke—”

“But I didn’t,” he continued, and lifted her hand to brush his fingers to her cheek. “Couldn’t. Not, I think, because it was more than I could stand. Not because of that, but because he’ll never have that power or control over you. You won’t allow it. And that, Darling Eve, is of considerable comfort to me.”

“It’s a nice bolster for me, too.” She aimed a glance toward the door, just to make sure they were still alone. Then she leaned in, kissed him. “Thanks. I’ve got to go.”

“And if he kills you,” Roarke added as she strode to the door, “I’m going to be extremely pissed off.”

“Who could blame you?”

She started back to her office, stopped when Peabody hailed her. “Baxter and Trueheart are notifying the mother, as ordered. I just spoke with the father.”

“All right. When Baxter reports in, we’ll clear it for her name to be released to the media.”

“Speaking of the media, I poked into your office in case you were there. There’s about a half a million messages from various reporters.”

“I’ll take care of it. Let me know when everyone’s in the house. We’ll do the briefing asap.”

“Will do. Dallas, do you want me to update the boards?”

“I’ve already done it.” She turned away to go to her office.

She flicked through t............