‘Detective Harper, it’s Captain Lafayette. I need to speak to you. It’s urgent.’

‘Keep quiet, Captain.’

‘What?’

‘I said - keep your voice down.’

Tom had caught sight of a warbler edging forward from behind a rock, a flash of yellow and black, and then it appeared, its quick head turning from side to side.

‘Tom, I just need a few minutes of your time.’

‘Quiet!’

‘For fuck’s sake, Harper, stop shitting me here!’ shouted Lafayette. The voice rattled through the woods and the nervous little warbler darted a look towards them, lifted off and flew away downstream.

Harper let his binoculars drop to his side and turned to Lafayette. He glared across. ‘Leave me the hell alone.’ He strode off through the undergrowth, following the flight of the bird.

‘Harper, wait up. I just want a word. We need your help.’

‘Well, I’m suspended right now. You not noticed that, Captain?’

‘Detective, I know you better than that. I want to make you an offer.’

‘I don’t need anything from you.’

‘You heard about the case?’

‘I’ve seen the girl’s picture just like everyone else. You’ve got a serious killer on the loose and Williamson hasn’t got a clue. You’re getting pistol-whipped at One PP, so you came to see me.’

‘Give me one minute of your time, Harper. Come on.’

‘I can’t help you, Captain. It’s time for me to move on.’

Lafayette paused. He had to get the timing just right. He caught Harper’s eyes. ‘They found a second body this morning. Same killer, we think.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Harper.

‘She was walking home last night and disappeared. Probably abducted.’

‘I don’t need to know the details, Captain. It’s not my case.’

‘Look, Harper, these girls were raped and strangled. Same ligature.’

Harper looked into the trees, the details playing on his mind. ‘As you know, I’m not available for duty.’

Lafayette moved in close. He took a photograph from his inside pocket and tossed it on to a white rock. ‘Take a look. The unknown subject is a mean bastard. After he killed Mary-Jane, he scattered flower petals all over her body like in some ritual.’

Harper looked down at the crime scene shot of a bloody corpse. ‘He cut her?’

‘Tortured her with shallow cuts, yeah. Likes to watch them bleed.’

‘The papers didn’t say.’

‘We keep the real grim stuff to ourselves, you know that.’

‘I’m sorry for these girls, Captain, but I can’t go back now. I broke Jarvis’s jaw. You know what that means as well as I do. There’s a big door and it’s shut in my face. My own stupid fault, I know that. I’m not looking for sympathy. I deserve whatever I get.’

‘You were provoked, Tom. Everyone knows how you feel about Lisa. Jarvis was a fool, but he’s just one stupid cop who tried to get himself a name by getting a rise out of the big guy.’

‘Well, you tell him it worked. I’m riled. Lisa wanted out, that’s one nightmare, but I don’t need some failed detective telling me she’s screwing around.’

Captain Lafayette looked at Harper. He was thinner than before, leaner, with a thin line of red around his eyes. Three months earlier, Harper’s wife, Lisa Vincenti, had decided that enough was enough. There’d been one lonely night too many and she’d moved out while Tom was working all hours closing the Romario case. Jarvis was a smart-ass lieutenant and a local precinct bully who thought it was worth making a joke out of, and he’d gone in hard. It was a mistake. Harper had been in no mood for jokes.

‘Will you listen to my offer?’ said Lafayette.

‘I need to start over,’ said Harper. ‘I need new ground under my feet. I need to get a job somewhere else. That’s my feeling.’

‘What as? A birdwatcher? You know no police department in the country will touch you. You’ve got a charge over your head. You assaulted a senior officer. Listen, Ged Rainer will have you out by the end of the week. What you going to do then?’

‘I’ll find work.’

‘But I can make the Charges and Specs go away, Tom.’

‘How?’

‘We’ve got a killer out there and the department needs you. Hell, I need you. They’ll wipe the slate if you come on board.’

Harper paused and stared at Lafayette. ‘I can’t go back. End of story. Sorry.’ He started to walk down the valley, fast.

Lafayette struggled behind him and pulled to a standstill. He couldn’t keep up any more. He stared at Harper’s back and shook his head. ‘What you going to do? Pity yourself the rest of your life? Everyone loses someone, Tom. Get off the fucking canvas.’

Fifty yards ahead, Tom Harper stopped in his tracks. The words got him cold. He counted to ten real slow, keeping his anger from getting out of control, and then he walked on without turning his head.

‘He’s taking trophies, Tom,’ shouted Lafayette. ‘He took the kid’s eyes out of her head. Try to imagine that while you’re out here watching the birds.’

Chapter Three

East Harlem

November 15, 6.14 p.m.

Harper felt the air cool around his neck. Dusk had fallen quickly and any hope of continuing his hunt for the last of the winter migrants had seeped away in the sudden thump of Captain Lafayette’s parting words. Tom walked back through the park feeling like someone had hit him hard in the gut. Lisa Vincenti wasn’t a weak spot so much as a great big hole in his life. Walk too close and he’d fall right back in and start the whole process of slow-motion drowning all over again.

Lafayette’s words continued to rattle around in Tom’s head as he walked back to the rented one-bedroom apartment he still called home. The apartment was on the second floor of a decaying four-storey block, in what the realtors liked to call a transitional area. That meant that the poverty was still real enough, but the condos and multi-million-dollar developments were only a stride or two away. Transitional - just another fancy word for unfair.

He’d lived along East Harlem’s southern edge ever since he and Lisa decided they were a long-term proposition. They’d honeymooned in the two small rooms above the fish market on 110th and Third, eating romantic hot dogs looking out across the Harlem River with their legs dangling through the steel walkway crossing FDR Drive.

Tom Harper and Lisa Vincenti went back twelve years. They’d met as optimistic twenty-two year olds. They connected in the deeps and in the shallows. But after Tom was made a homicide detective, things got difficult. The pattern killer cases absorbed him and Lisa must’ve got sick of waiting for her husband to come home. She wanted the man she married, not this obsessive guy with monsters in his head.

She had packed up and left. Harper now wanted to leave, just like she had. The apartment and the whole of Manhattan felt like the setting for a story that was no longer his. She’d taken the heart out of it all.

Tom wandered across to the window. His hand rose to his face and felt the stubble. If Lisa walked into the room right now and saw his hangdog look and the shit all over the apartment, she’d blow a fuse. He loved her still and missed her even more, it was that simple. He missed the smell of her skin, the look in her eye, the way she could talk until everything seemed right again. She believed in things, too. She had faith. Not many people did any more; he missed that. He missed the rhythm of being two. Beating a drum with one stick had no rhythm at all.

Tom walked back to the armchair that sat staring at a blank TV screen. Another long night lay ahead of him. Another night of slowly letting the whisky close off the different switches in his brain until he was numb to the whole wide world.

He closed his eyes, but for the first time in months it wasn’t Lisa’s image that formed in his mind as he lay back in his decrepit old armchair. It was the photograph of a pale and bloody body lying dead in some rich folks’ apartment.