he doorbell rang. Detective Dane Hollister opened one eye, glanced at the clock, then closed it again with a muttered curse. It was seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, his first weekend off in a month, and some idiot was leaning on his doorbell. Maybe whoever it was would go away.

The bell rang again, and was followed by two hammering knocks on the door. Muttering again, Dane threw aside the tangled sheet and swung naked out of bed. He grabbed the wrinkled pants he had discarded the night before and jerked them on, zipping but not fastening. Out of habit, a habit so ingrained that he never even thought about it, he picked up his 9mm Beretta from the bedside table. He never answered the door unarmed. For that matter, he didn’t even collect his mail unarmed. His last girlfriend, whose tenure had been brief because she couldn’t handle a cop’s erratic hours, had said caustically that he was the only man she knew who carried a weapon into the bathroom with him.

She hadn’t had much of a sense of humor, so Dane had refrained from making a smart-ass remark about male weapons. Except for missing the sex, it had been a relief when she had called it quits.

He lifted one slat of the blinds to peer out, and with another curse he clicked the locks and opened the door. His friend and partner, Alejandro Trammell, stood on the small porch. Trammell lifted elegant black brows as he studied Dane’s wrinkled cotton slacks. “Nice jammies,” Trammell said.

“Do you know what the hell time it is?” Dane barked.

Trammell consulted his wristwatch, a wafer-thin Piaget. “Seven oh two. Why?” He strolled inside. Dane slammed the door with a resounding bang.

Trammell halted, belatedly asking, “Do you have company?”

Dane ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his face, hearing the rasp of beard against his callused palm. “No, I’m alone.” He yawned, then surveyed his partner. Trammell was perfectly groomed, as usual, but his eyes were dark-circled.

Dane yawned again. “Is this a very late night, or an early morning?”

“A little bit of both. It was just a bad night, couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come over for coffee and breakfast.”

“Generous of you, to share your insomnia with me,” Dane muttered, but he was already on his way to the kitchen. He had his own share of bad nights, so he understood the need for company. Trammell had never turned him away on those occasions. “I’ll put on the coffee, then you’re on your own while I shower and shave.”

“Forget it,” Trammell said. “I’ll put on the coffee. I want to be able to drink it.”

Dane didn’t argue. He could drink his own coffee, but so far no one else could. He didn’t much care for the taste of it himself, but since the caffeine kick was what he was after, the taste was secondary.

He left Trammell to the coffee and sleepily returned to the bedroom, where he stripped off his pants, leaving them in their original location on the floor. Ten minutes in the shower, leaning with one hand propped on the tile while the water beat down on his head, made waking up seem possible; shaving made it seem desirable, but it took a nick on his jaw to convince him. Muttering again, he dabbed at the blood. He had a theory that any day that started with a shaving nick was shit from start to finish. Unfortunately, on any given day his face was likely to sport a small cut. He didn’t deal well with shaving. Trammell had once lazily advised him to switch to an electric shaver, but he hated the idea of letting a razor get the best of him, so he kept at it, shedding his blood on the altar of stubbornness.

Dressing, at least, was easy. Dane simply put on whatever came to hand first. Because he sometimes forgot to put on a tie, he always kept one in his car; it might clash with whatever he was wearing, but he figured a tie was a tie, and it was the spirit rather than the style that mattered. The chief wanted detectives to wear ties, so Dane wore a tie. Trammell sometimes looked horrified, but Trammell was a clothes-horse who tended toward Italian silk suits, so Dane didn’t take it to heart.

If any other cop had dressed the way Trammell did, or drove a car like Trammell’s, Internal Affairs would have been all over him like stink on shit, which was an appropriate way to describe IA. But Trammell was independently wealthy, having inherited a nice little bundle from his Cuban mother as well as several successful concerns from his father, a New England businessman who had fallen in love while on a vacation in Miami and remained in Florida for the rest of his life. Trammell’s house had cost a cool million, easy, and he never made any effort to tone down his way of living. His partner was such an enigmatic son of a bitch that Dane couldn’t decide if Trammell lived as luxuriously as he did simply because he liked the life-style and had the means, or if he did it to piss off the bastards in IA. Dane suspected the latter. He approved.

He and Trammell were opposites in a lot of ways. Trammell was whipcord-lean, and as aloof as a cat. No matter what the circumstances, he always looked elegant and cultured, his clothes hanging perfectly. He liked— actually liked—opera and ballet. Dane was the exact opposite: he could wear the most expensive silk suit made, perfectly tailored to fit his muscled, athletic frame, and he would still look subtly unkempt. He liked sports and country music. If they had been vehicles, Trammell would have been a Jaguar, while Dane would have been a pickup truck. Four-wheel drive.

On the other hand, Dane thought as he wandered back out to the kitchen, nature had balanced itself out in their faces, in a kind of backwards way. In person, Trammell was smoothly handsome, but in photographs his face took on a sinister cast. Dane figured his own face would frighten children and small animals, assuming there was any difference between the two, but the camera loved him. All those angles, Trammell had explained. Trammell was a camera buff and took a lot of photos; he was never without his camera. Dane, being his partner and constantly in his company, was naturally in a lot of the photos. On film, the brutal lines of high, prominent cheekbones, the deep-set eyes and cleft chin, all became brooding and intriguing instead of merely brutish. Even the broken nose somehow looked right in a photograph. In person, he looked grim, his face battered, his eyes a cop’s eyes, watchful and too old.

Dane got himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. Trammell was still cooking, and whatever it was smelled good.

“What’s for breakfast?” he asked.

“Whole wheat waffles with fresh strawberries.”

Dane snorted. “There’s never been any whole wheat flour in my house.”

“I know. That’s why I brought it with me.”

Healthy stuff. Dane didn’t mind. He could be pretty damn affable when someone else was doing the cooking. When they were working they mostly lived on junk, whatever was fast and easy, so he didn’t mind balancing it with low-fat, nutritious shit whenever they had the time. Hell, he’d even learned to like sprouts. They tasted like green peanuts, fresh out of the ground and not quite developed, with the hulls still soft. He’d eaten a lot of green peanuts when he was a kid, preferring them over the fully formed ones that had to be shelled.

“So what kept you awake last night?” he asked Trammell. “Anything in particular?”

“No, just one of those nights when a weird dream starts every time you doze off.”

It was funny how the dreams came and went. All cops had dreams, but he and Trammell had gone through a rough patch a few years back, just after the shootout; the dreams had come every night for a while. Most cops went through their entire careers without ever firing their weapons on the job, but Dane and Trammell hadn’t been that lucky.

They had been trying to find a suspect for questioning in a shooting and had been led, by the suspect’s pissed-off girlfriend, right into the middle of a big-time drug operation, operated by none other than the suspect himself. That was usually the way the bad guys went down; they weren’t caught by sharp detective work most of the time, but by someone dropping the dime on them.

That particular time, instead of bailing out any available window and disappearing down rat holes, the bad guys had come up with lead flying. Dane and Trammell had hit the floor, diving into another room, and for five of the longest minutes in history they had been cornered in that room. By the time backup had arrived, in the form of every cop in the vicinity, uniformed and otherwise, who had heard Dane’s radio call of “officer under fire,” three of the bad guys and the girlfriend were down. The girl and one of the men were dead. A slug had ricocheted, splintered, and part of it had hit Dane in the back, just missing his spine. It had still packed enough punch that it had broken a rib and torn a hole in his right lung. Things had gotten a little fuzzy there, but the one clear memory he had was of Trammell kneeling beside him and cussing a blue streak while he tried to stop the bleeding. Three days in intensive care, fifteen days total in the hospital, nine weeks before he’d been able to return to the job. Yeah, they’d both had a lot of bad dreams for a while after that.

Just as Trammell served up the waffles, the phone rang. Dane stretched to pick up the receiver, and at the same time Trammell’s beeper went off. “Shit!” they both said, staring at each other.

“It’s Saturday, damn it!” Dane barked into the receiver. “We’re off today.”

He listened while he watched Trammell hurriedly gulp a cup of coffee, then sighed. “Yeah, okay. Trammell’s here. We’re on our way.”

“What canceled our day off?” Trammell wanted to know as they went out the door.

“Stroud and Keegan are already working another scene. Worley called in sick this morning. Freddie’s in the dentist’s office with an abscessed tooth.” Things happened; no sense getting hot about it. “I’ll drive.”

“So where are we going?”

Dane gave him the address as they got into his car, and Trammell wrote it down. “A man called in and said his wife was hurt. An EMT was dispatched, but a patrol officer got there first. He took one look and canceled the EMT, and called Homicide instead.”

It took them about ten minutes to reach the address, but there was no mistaking the house. The street was almost blocked with patrol cars, a paramedics van, and various other official-capacity vehicles. Uniformed officers stood around on the small lawn, while neighbors gathered in small bunches, some of the onlookers still in their nightclothes. Dane automatically studied the onlookers, looking for something that didn’t fit, someone who didn’t seem to belong or who was maybe just a little bit too interested. It was amazing how often a murderer would hang around.

He shrugged into a navy jacket and grabbed the spare tie out of the backseat, loosely knotting it around his neck. Somehow, he noticed, Trammell had managed to impeccably tie his own tie in the car. He looked again. Damn, he didn’t believe it! The dapper bastard had chosen a double-breasted Italian suit to wear on his day off. He’d simply slipped into the suit jacket as they’d left the house.

Sometimes he worried about Trammell.

They showed their badges to the policeman at the door, and he stood aside to let them enter.

“Sheeit,” Dane said in an undertone as he got a good look.

“And all the other bodily excretions,” Trammell replied in the same disbelieving tone.

Murder scenes were nothing new. After a while, cops reached the point where violent crimes were pretty routine, in their own way. Stabbings and shootings were a dime a dozen. If anyone had asked him half an hour earlier, Dane would have said that he and Trammell had been detectives long enough that, for the most part, they were unshockable.

But this was different.

Blood was everywhere. It was splattered on the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. He could see into the kitchen, and the bloody path wound from there through the living room, then into a small hallway and out of sight. He tried to imagine the kind of struggle that would have sprayed blood so extensively.

Dane turned to the uniformed policeman who was guarding the door. “Have the crime lab guys showed up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Shit,” he said again. The longer it took the crime lab, or forensics, team to arrive, the more the crime scene would be compromised. Some disturbance was unavoidable, unless the forensics boys were the ones to discover the victim and immediately secured the area. But forensics wasn’t here, and the house was crowded with both uniformed and plainclothes policemen, milling around and inevitably muddying the evidential waters.

“Don’t let anybody else in except for Ivan’s guys,” he told the officer. Ivan Schaffer was head of the crime lab team. He was going to be really pissed off about this.

“Lieutenant Bonness is on the way.”

“You can let him in, too,” Dane replied, his mouth quirking.

The house was middle-class, nothing out of the ordinary. The living room was furnished with a couch and matching chair, the required coffee table and matching lamp tables of genuine wood veneer, while a big brown recliner had the best spot in front of the television. The recliner was occupied now by a dazed-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, probably the victim’s husband. He was giving monosyllabic answers to the questions put to him by another uniformed officer.

The victim was in the bedroom. Dane and Trammell forced their way through the crowd and into the small room. The photographer had already arrived and was doing his job, but for once was noticeably lacking in his usual nonchalance.

The nude woman lay jammed in the cramped space between the bedside table and the wall. She had been stabbed repeatedly—hacked was a better description. She had tried to run, and when she had been cornered in the bedroom she had tried to fight, as evidenced by the deep defensive wounds on her arms. She had been nearly decapitated, her breasts mutilated by the sheer number of wounds, and all of her fingers had been severed. Dane looked around the room, but he didn’t see the missing digits. The bed was still neatly made, though splattered with blood.

“Has the weapon been found?” Dane asked.

A patrolman nodded. “It was right beside the body. A Ginsu knife from the kitchen. She had a whole set. It looks like they really do what the ads say; I think I’ll get my wife some.”

Another patrolman snorted. “I’d rethink that idea if I was you, Scanlon.”

Dane ignored the black humor, which all cops used to help them handle the ugliness they saw on a daily basis. “What about her fingers?”

“Nope. No sign of ‘em.”

Trammell signed. “I think we’d better go talk to the husband.”

It was a fact that most homicides, except for the random gang drive-bys, were committed by someone who knew the victim: a friend, a neighbor, co-worker, or relative. When the victim was a woman, the usual list of suspects was narrowed down even more, because the murderer was almost invariably her husband or boyfriend. A lot of times, the murderer was the one who “discovered” the body and reported the crime.

They went back to the living room, and Dane caught the eye of the officer who was talking to the husband. The officer came over to them.

“Has he said anything?” Dane asked.

The officer shook his head. “Most of the time he won’t answer the questions. He did say that his wife’s name is Nadine, and his name is Vinick, Ansel Vinick. They’ve lived here twenty-three years. Beyond that, he ain’t talking.”

“Is he the one who called it in?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We’ll take it now.”

He and Trammell went over to Mr. Vinick. Dane sat down on the couch, and Trammell moved the other chair closer before sitting down, effectively sandwiching Mr. Vinick between them.

“Mr. Vinick, I’m Detective Hollister and this is Detective Trammell. We’d like to talk to you, ask you a few questions.”

Mr. Vinick was staring at the floor. His big hands hung loosely over the padded arms of the recliner. “Sure,” he said dully.

“Are you the one who found your wife?”

He didn’t answer, just continued to stare at the floor.

Trammell stepped in. “Mr. Vinick, I know it’s tough, but we need your cooperation. Are you the person who called the police?”

Slowly he shook his head. “I didn’t call no police. I called 911.”

“What time did you call?” Dane asked. The time would be on record, but liars often tripped themselves up on the simplest details. Right now, Vinick was a suspect by virtue of being married to the victim.

“Dunno,” Vinick muttered. He took a deep breath and seemed to make an effort to concentrate. “Seven-thirty or thereabouts, I guess.” He rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “I got off work at seven. It takes about twenty, twenty-five minutes to drive home.”

Dane caught Trammell’s glance. They had seen enough death to know that Mrs. Vinick had been dead for several hours, not half an hour or so. The medical examiner would establish the time of death, and if Mr. Vinick had been at work during that time, if witnesses could reliably state that he hadn’t left, then they’d have to start looking at other possibilities. Maybe she’d had a boyfriend; maybe someone had been keeping Mr. Vinick’s bed warm for him while he worked third shift.

“Where do you work?”

There was no answer. Dane tried again. “Mr. Vinick, where do you work?”

Vinick stirred and named a local trucking company.

“Do you normally work third shift?”

“Yeah. I work on the dock, loading and unloading trailers. Most freight comes in at night, see, for delivery during the day.”

“What time did you leave to go to work last night?”

“Usual time. Around ten.”

They were on a roll, finally getting some answers. “Do you punch a time card?” Trammell asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you punch in as soon as you get there, or wait until time for your shift to start?”

“As soon as I get there. The shift starts at ten-thirty. We have half an hour to eat, and get off at seven.”

“Do you have to clock in and out for lunch?”

“Yeah.”

It looked like Mr. Vinick’s night would be pretty much accounted for. They would check out everything he’d told them, of course, but that wouldn’t be any problem.

“Did you notice anything unusual this morning?” Dane asked. “Before you came in the house, I mean.”

“No. Well, the door was locked. Nadine usually gets up and unlocks it for me, then starts cooking breakfast.”

“Do you usually come in the front door or the back door?”

“Back.”

“What did you see when you opened the door?”

Mr. Vinick’s chin trembled. “Nothing, at first. The shades were pulled and the lights weren’t on. It was dark. I figured Nadine had overslept.”

“What did you do?”

“Turned on the light in the kitchen.”

“What did you see then?”

Mr. Vinick swallowed. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He put his hand to his eyes. “B-Blood,” he managed. “All—all over the place. Except—it looked like ketchup, at first. I thought she’d dropped a bottle of ketchup and broken it, the way it was splattered. Then—then I knew what it was. It scared me. I thought she must have cut herself, real bad. I yelled her name and ran to the bedroom, looking for her.” He stopped, unable to carry the tale any further. He began to shake, and didn’t notice when Dane and Trammell got up and stepped away, leaving him alone with his grief and horror.

Ivan Schaffer and an assistant arrived with their bags and disappeared into the bedroom to gather what evidence they could salvage from the carnage. Lieutenant Gordon Bonness arrived practically on their heels. He skidded to a stop just inside the door, his expression one of shock. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

“That seems to be the consensus,” Trammell said in an aside to Dane as they joined the lieutenant.

Bonness wasn’t a bad sort, even if he was from California and could come up with some pretty weird ideas on things. He was as fair as possible in the way he ran the unit, which Dane considered a pretty good recommendation, and he was tolerant of the different quirks and work habits of the detectives under him.

“What have you got so far?” Bonness asked.

“We have a lady who was hacked to pieces, and a husband who was at work. We’ll check out his alibi, but my gut says he’s in the clear,” Dane answered.

Bonness sighed. “Maybe a boyfriend?”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“Okay. Let’s move fast on this one. Jesus, look at these walls.”

They went into the bedroom, and the lieutenant blanched. “Holy shit,” he said again. “This is sick!”

Dane gave him a thoughtful look, and his stomach tightened. A feeling of dread went up his spine. Sick. Yeah, this was sick. And he was suddenly a lot more worried than he had been before.

He squatted beside Ivan as the tall, lanky man painstakingly searched for fibers, hair, anything that could be analyzed into giving up its secrets. “Found anything?”

“Won’t know until I get it to the lab.” Ivan looked around. “It would help if we could find her fingers. Maybe there’d be some skin under the nails. I’ve got people going through the trash in the neighborhood. No garbage disposal here, so that’s out.”

“Was she raped?”

“Don’t know. There’s no obvious semen.”

Dane’s feeling of dread was growing stronger. What had seemed like a fairly simple, if gruesome, murder was getting complicated. His gut feeling was seldom wrong, and he had alarm signals going off like an entire brass section.

He followed the gory trail back to its beginning, in the kitchen. Trammell came with him, and they both stood in the small, homey room, looking around. Nadine Vinick had evidently liked to cook; the kitchen was more modern than the rest of the house, with gleaming appliances, a small cooking island, and a variety of shiny but well-used pots and pans hanging over the island. A butcher’s block stood at one end of the counter, and a set of Ginsu knives, with one knife missing, was arranged in a rack on top of the butcher’s block.

“How did the son of a bitch get in?” Dane muttered. “Has anyone even looked for signs of forced entry, or did they just play the odds that the husband was the one who did her?”

Trammell had worked with him long enough to read him. “You getting a feeling about this?”

“Yeah. A bad one.”

“You don’t think maybe she had a boyfriend?”

Dane shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It was just something the lieutenant said, about this being sick. It is. And that makes me real uneasy. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out how he got in.”

It didn’t take long. There was a small cut at the bottom of the screen on the window in the spare bedroom. The screen was in place but unfastened, and the latch on the window was open, not that it would have kept out even a determined ten-year-old. “I’ll get Ivan,” Trammell said. “Maybe he can lift a print, or find a couple of stray threads.”

Dane’s gut feeling was getting worse. A forced entry put a different slant on the situation, indicating a stranger. This didn’t feel like a burglary that had escalated into violence when the intruder had been suddenly confronted by Mrs. Vinick. The ordinary burglar would have been more likely to run, and even if he had attacked, it would have been quick. The attack on Mrs. Vinick had been both vicious and prolonged. Sick.

He walked back into the kitchen. Had the first confrontation taken place here, or had Mrs. Vinick seen the intruder and tried to run out the back door, getting as far as the kitchen before he caught her? Dane stared at the appliances as if they could tell tales. A small frown knit his brows and he went over to the automatic coffee maker, the kind that was installed under the upper cabinets so it didn’t take up counter space. The carafe held about five cups of coffee. Using the backs of his fingers, he touched the glass. It was cold. The coffee maker was the kind with the automatic switch that turned off the warming plate after two hours. A coffee mug, filled almost to the rim with coffee, sat on the counter. It didn’t look as if it had been touched since the coffee had been poured into it. He stuck his finger into the dark liquid. Cold.

He pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of his pocket and put them on. Carefully touching only the wooden rim of the cabinet doors rather than the metal handles, he began opening them. The second door revealed a canister of decaffeinated coffee. Mrs. Vinick could drink it late at night without worrying about her sleep being disturbed.

She had made a pot of coffee and she had been in here, in the kitchen. She had just poured the first cup and replaced the carafe on the warming plate. The door from the living room was behind her and to the right. Dane went through the motions as if he had just poured the coffee himself, standing where she would have stood. According to the placement of the cup on the counter, she would have been standing slightly to the left of the coffee maker. That was when she had seen the intruder, just as she had set the carafe in place. The coffee maker had a dark, shiny surface, almost mirror like, behind the hands of the built-in clock. Dane bent his knees, trying to lower himself to Mrs. Vinick’s general height. The open doorway was reflected in the surface of the coffee maker.

She had never even picked up her cup of fresh coffee. She had seen the intruder’s reflection and turned, perhaps thinking, in that first moment, that her husband had forgotten something and returned home to get it. By the time she had realized her mistake, he had been on her.

She probably hadn’t been standing naked in her kitchen, though Dane had been a cop long enough to know that anything was possible. It was just another gut feeling. But she had been naked when the killer had finished with her, and probably naked when he had started.

The odds were that she had been raped at knife point, right here in the kitchen. The lack of obvious semen didn’t mean anything; after so many hours, and with the struggle that had gone on, it would take a medical examiner to make a judgment. And a lot of times, rapists didn’t climax anyway. Orgasm wasn’t the point of rape.

After the rape, he had started work with the knife. Until then, she had been terrified but hoping, probably, that when he was finished he would just go away. When he started cutting her, she had known that he intended to kill her and she had started fighting for her life. She had escaped from him, or maybe he had let her escape, like a cat toying with a mouse, letting her think she had gotten away before easily catching her again. How many times had he played his sick little game before finally cornering her in the bedroom?

What had she been wearing? Had the killer taken her clothing with him as a souvenir or trophy?

“What?” Trammell asked quietly from the doorway, his dark eyes intent as he watched his partner.

Dane looked up. “Where are her clothes?” he asked. “What was she wearing?”

“Maybe Mr. Vinick knows.” Trammell disappeared, and returned in less than a minute. “She had already changed into her nightgown when he left for work. He said it was white, with little blue things on it.”

They began looking for the missing garment. It was startlingly easy to find. Trammell opened the folding doors that hid the washer and dryer, and there it was, neatly placed on top of the pile of clothing in the laundry basket that sat on top of the dryer. The garment was splattered with blood, but certainly not soaked. No, she hadn’t been wearing it when the knife attack had begun. Probably it had been lying on the floor, thrown aside, and the blood had splattered on it later.

Dane stared at it. “After raping and killing her, the son of a bitch put her nightgown in the laundry?”

“Rape?” Trammell queried.

“Bet on it.”

“I didn’t touch the handle. Maybe Ivan can get a print; he came up empty in the second bedroom.”

Dane had another gut feeling, one he liked even less than the others. “I’m afraid we’re going to come up empty all the way around,” he said bleakly.