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him for an instant and then it was gone like he knew it would be and he was back in the room. Back in the here and the now and the bedroom gallery with the art of the dead.
    He recorded what he saw, took it down in pixilated form and committed it to the memory banks because this one was—
    Him.
    —important.
    Him .
    Jake didn’t need to see any more to know. He already knew . The signature— his signature—was all over this place. That’s what the secondary smell had been back in the living room when he had been talking to Hauser: the stench of familiarity.
    Madame X was at the end of the bed, slopped all over the floor like a water balloon that had let go. She was facedown on the rug, one of her legs bent at the knee, a bloody foot smeared onto the edge of the mattress. There was a lot of blood on the carpet. On the bed. On the floor. The happy zigzag pattern of a weekend butcher at work.
    Him.
    “Did you check the drain? Tub and shower?” Jake asked Hauser, who had moved silently up behind him. “Pull the grilles and the P-traps?”
    It was Conway who answered in a swish of mint. “Ran a swab down the drain, straight into the septic system. No municipal service out here. Didn’t find a thing.”
    Are you sure that it is him? Hope whispered. But there was no mistaking it. Not this close. Not after everything that had happened. Spencer was right, there are no coincidences.
    He squatted down on his haunches and leaned over the body of the woman. He had seen a lot of indignities in his time but the added horror of familiarity somehow made it more visceral, as if it had been meant for him to see.
    Even before he examined her, he knew what he’d find.
    All the skin had been removed from her body. He twisted his head like a cat going through a fence, peeked between the bloody stubs of her toes, bent down, looked into the crook of her arm, examined the base of her skull, and couldn’t find a shred of skin anywhere. She had been peeled and thrown on the floor. Her flesh was etched all over with crescent-shaped incisions left by the tip of the knife. Without meaning to, he said aloud, “She was skinned with a single-edged knife with a recurve tip. Thick blade. Hunting knife, most probably.” He looked at the work, at the technique, and it all came rushing back.
    Him . It was almost a chime in his head now. A choral mantra.
    “Why would he do that?” Hauser asked somewhere between a whisper and no sound at all.
    “Do what?”
    Hauser licked his lips so that his vocal cords would work this time around. “Um, skin her. Was he trying to conceal her identity?”
    Jake shook his head and reminded himself that most people—police included—never get to see something like this. As far as stupid questions went, he had heard a lot worse. “It has nothing to do with that. We have her dental—mostly. And DNA. No, we’ll find out who these people are and he knows it.” Jake looked down at them and realized that he hadn’t answered Hauser’s core question, the big Why? “Some take feet. Some take internal organs. A lot take genitals. This guy likes skin. I don’t know the why yet, only the how . The short answer is simply that it’s his trip, his own little mental toboggan ride, so he sets it up in a way that makes him feel good.” He turned to the woman. “He finds this beautiful.”
    The flesh under her face was puckered and cracked like pudding and her teeth were jagged nubs of white that she had gnashed off on the carpet. Her tongue was a few inches from her face; she had chewed it off and spat it out and it looked like a thick meat slug that had died trying to escape a building on fire.
    He opened the closet and stopped. The hangers were empty. In the bright beam of the task lighting, Jake saw eight small indentations on the carpet. “Get these. With measurements.”
    “Get what?” Conway asked, staring at the rug.
    Jake squatted down, pointed in turn to the eight indentations.
    Conway squinted. “I don’t