Sam Bourne 4-Book Thriller Collection. Sam Bourne

Baxter’s killers had anaesthetized him first.

      Will clicked back on to the Macrae story. No talk of injections there. Just a frenzied stabbing. He sat back in his chair. Another hunch was evaporating. He had thought he was going to prove these two deaths were somehow connected. Not just by the odd coincidence of the word ‘righteous’ but something physical. A real tie that might suggest a pattern. But it was not there. What had he got? Two deaths which had good-guy victims in common. That was it so far. In one case, Baxter’s, there had been a weird twist: he had been sedated before he was killed. That was not true of Macrae.

      Or rather, Will had no idea if it was true or not. The police had never mentioned it – but he had never asked. He had not seen Macrae’s body; he had not met the coroner. It had not been that kind of story. And if he had not asked, then no one had. After all, the Macrae death had hardly been a big deal. Apart from a few briefs written on the night, no paper had run much on it – until Will’s story in the New York Times, of course.

      Will reached instantly for his cell phone, punching at the internal phonebook. There was only one person who could help. He hit J for Jay Newell.

TWENTY-NINE

       Saturday, 10.26pm, Manhattan

      ‘This is Jay.’

      ‘Jay, thank God I got you.’ Newell was the member of Will’s Columbia set who had taken the least likely career route. He was a fast-tracker at the New York Police Department, leapfrogging over all the old doughnut-munchers on his way to becoming a big city commissioner before he was forty. Jay was as resented by the old guard cops as Will was by the aged newsmen.

      ‘It’s Will. Yeah, I’m fine. Well, I’m in a bit of a jam but I can’t explain it now. I need you to do me a very large favour.’

      ‘OK.’ But the word was drawn out.

      ‘Jay, I need you to check out something. I wrote a piece in the paper this week—’

      ‘About that pimp guy? Saw it. Well done on making the front page, big fella.’

      ‘Yeah, thanks. Look, I never checked autopsy reports or anything. Do you have access to those?’

      ‘It’s the weekend, Will. I’m kind of, you know.’

      Will looked at his watch. It was late on a Saturday night; Jay was a single guy with a lot of girlfriends. Will guessed he had called at a spectacularly inconvenient moment. ‘I know. But I bet you have the authority to see whatever you want, whenever you want.’ The old flattery manoeuvre. Jay would not want to admit that, as it happened, he did not have that kind of access.

      ‘What do you want to know?’

      ‘I want you to see if there were any unusual marks on the victim’s body.’

      ‘I thought the guy was stabbed like a million times.’

      ‘He was, but he was still in one piece. I want you to see if there was anything like a needle mark on him.’

      ‘Some pimp scumball from Brownsville, you kidding? The amount of drugs these guys are whacking into their veins, he probably looked like a pincushion.’

      ‘I don’t think so. None of the people I spoke to said anything about injecting drugs. In fact, no one said he used drugs at all.’

      ‘OK, my man. Whatever you say. I’ll check it out. This the right cell for you?’

      ‘Yeah. And I need whatever you’ve got really fast. Thanks, Jay. I owe you.’

      Suddenly he could hear voices, followed by a burst of laughter. It seemed to be a knot of men, walking in this direction. And then, louder than the others, the unmistakable intonation of Townsend McDougal, talking newsroom talk.

      ‘Can we hold it for twenty-four hours? Do we have this to ourselves?’

      Will had no idea why they would be heading towards this barren part of the third-floor landscape: they had no shortage of meeting rooms at their end. Oh God. Maybe McDougal was looking for Will, coming with a posse of senior executives this time, to begin the inquisition right away.

      He could not risk that, not now. At top speed, with too little time to check what he was doing, Will shoved the essentials – cell phone, notebooks, pen, BlackBerry – off his desk and into his bag, wheeled around and headed away from the McDougal ambush. The only perk of this faraway corner of the office, Will realized at that very moment, was its proximity to the back stairway. He had never used it before, but now was the time.

      Once outside, Will gulped in the Saturday night air. He let his eyes close in relief, leaning backwards against the wall, the Times clock just above his head.

      It was late, and quiet. In normal circumstances, Will liked this vibe. Working at a time when the rest of the city was not; leaving a half-empty office and walking into the Manhattan evening. It was such a contrast with the usual throng that bustled down this street. No one around, save a lonely tourist in sleeveless body-warmer and baseball hat peering into one of the Times display windows, doubtless looking at an antique printing press or a framed photograph of the late Mr Sulzberger shaking hands with Harry Truman or something. He must be cold, standing around outside. But Will was in a hurry to get away. He barely saw him.

THIRTY

       Saturday, 11.02pm, Manhattan

      TC’s room was just how he would have imagined it and, he realized now, he had indeed imagined it. Perhaps a dozen times since his marriage to Beth he had thought about TC not just for a second or two, but in long, extended sessions. Daydreams, really, in which he had brought back to himself her face, her voice, her smell. In these reveries of thought – sometimes staring out of an aeroplane window, sometimes during a night drive while Beth slept in the passenger seat next to him – he had followed TC out of the past they had shared and into the present he could only imagine. He would work hard to conjure her face, four years older. Or to see her at work. Or to picture the man she was with now.

      And in these wonderings, he saw the front door of her apartment opening to afford a view of bookshelves and cream-coloured couches and a neglected, small-screen TV. He would have to push himself – though not too hard, lest the effort break the spell – to update TC’s taste. It was too easy to put her in a grad student’s digs, as if she had stayed frozen in their Columbia winter romance. He wanted to imagine his former girlfriend as she would be now.

      He had done a good job. The room was less bohemian than the studio where he had seen TC the previous night. Much of the furniture was vaguely ethnic – dark wood tables that Will guessed were from India or Thailand; a pair of Moroccan window-shutters in distressed blue wood, not attached to a window but hung on the wall, like a painting. Mementos, Will guessed, from some serious travelling: TC had been a fearless explorer, even when he knew her.

      Still, there were no incense sticks, no batiks flung over couches. Instead the place was uncluttered, almost minimalist in its preference for clean space. He knew that TC had been reluctant to let him in here, but when Will phoned from outside the Times office, she explained that she had grown tired of café-hopping. She needed to shower, to sleep in her own bed – and to hell with the risk. Will, who had earlier fired off a text accusing YY of ‘horseshit games’, knew exactly how she felt. He simply asked for her address and said he would come straight over. He reckoned it was easier on both of them if she had no chance to say no.

      When he came in, she tried to pretend it was no big deal. There was no ceremonial flinging open of the front door, no tour of the apartment. Instead, she let him find her kneeling on the floor in the main room surrounded by yellow Post-it notes. On each one was written a biblical verse. Will recognized them: Chapter 10 of the Book of Proverbs.

      TC was in the middle of them, her sketchbook on her lap, surveying the pattern she had arranged. He crouched