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their truck, saw an old red VW Beetle and a motorcycle with a big-bellied guy – no helmet and little hair – heading for the exit.
    Just her imagination then.
    Like last week in the park opposite their house.
    She waited for relief, but instead she felt jolted, nauseated.
    Dragged sharply back again to last year – not just her imagination that time, because Sam had thought he’d seen him too . . .
    Come on, Grace.
    This had been nothing. Just someone accidentally brushing against her. Another customer or a salesperson walking behind her, maybe even a piece of fabric that had felt like fingers on her neck.
    Standing here now in the rain, she lifted her right hand and rubbed the spot with her own fingers, the place just below the nape of her neck, exposed today, her hair twisted and pinned up.
    The place that Sam often touched that way, kissed.
    Come on .
    No one there. Neither today, nor last week.
    No one.
    Certainly not him.

SEVEN
    April 20
    T he sun was out again.
    And a body had been found.
    Washed up on the sand at 53rd Street Beach.
    Partially decomposed, partially devoured by marine creatures, though they had not been responsible for the large wound in the center of the individual’s chest.
    That had been caused – according to the ME’s preliminary findings – by the amateur surgeon, the butcher , who had carved his or her way into the male victim’s body, then cracked and spread open the ribcage, before cutting out the heart.
    The victim had been African-American, probably in his mid-twenties, and he had been strangled to death with a ligature, taken from behind.
    â€˜Nothing more for you yet,’ Elliot Sanders told Sam and Martinez.
    Not the first time they’d all come together to a beach homicide scene, with all its inherent difficulties; constantly shifting sand and who knew how many members of the public having passed by since the body had washed in.
    â€˜How long before we know if either of the hearts are a match?’
    Sam asked the question, knowing all too well that such things took a whole lot longer than any of them hoped, including Sanders.
    â€˜It’s a priority,’ the ME said, grimly.
    Though whether a match was, or was not, found, they already knew for sure that another sick killer had come to Miami Beach.
    â€˜Was there anything else?’ Grace asked Sam late that night.
    â€˜Such as?’
    They were sitting at their big old oak kitchen table, and Sam had already told her about the John Doe while she’d heated up clam sauce and cooked spaghetti, had kept the details sparse, but she had seen the first heart for herself, and he felt it was only right for her to know.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Anything familiar?’
    Sam took a long look at her.
    It was not like Grace to prevaricate.
    Yet he knew damned well what she was asking, not least because he had asked himself the same thing earlier in the day. Because it came to mind, because of the strangulation with a ligature and the victim being taken from behind and being black.
    Mainly, of course, because both hearts had been placed in dinghies.
    The first tied up to their home mooring.
    â€˜The body wasn’t found in a dinghy or rowboat, and the victim’s skin was not raked,’ he told her, since that was what she wanted to know, because that had been a big part of Jerome Cooper’s MO.
    â€˜Could you tell that for sure?’ Grace asked, knowing about the condition of the body.
    â€˜Yes,’ Sam said. ‘And as to the strangling, you wouldn’t like to know how many people are killed that way every year in the US.’
    Not too many African-American males in Miami-Dade, Grace would bet, but did not say.
    She did, however, share with him yesterday’s experience in the party store.
    Strictly speaking, her non -experience, though it had not felt that way.
    â€˜Just me, I guess, being jumpy,’ she said.