The phone rang at eight minutes to midnight, and Elias knew who it was before he looked at the screen.

He was standing at the sterilizer in the dim lab with a tray of forceps in his hands, placing them one by one into the steel rack, each in its slot, each handle aligned with the edge. It was a pointless task. He had already done it twice that night. But it gave his fingers something to do, and kept his mind from the ridge, and from the folded envelope he had handed to the evidence clerk, and from the stairwell. He had been doing it for forty minutes when the phone buzzed against the counter.

He set down the tray and picked it up.

There was no name on the screen, only a number, eleven digits he had never saved. He did not need to. He had read them once, three days ago, on the back of a plain white card that had been set on the edge of his desk with no note, and he had not looked at the card again. He had not needed to do that either.

"Mercer."

"Doctor." The voice was low and level, with no apology in it and no preamble. "Pier 44. I need you."

Elias closed his eyes.

He did not ask what had happened. He did not have to. He had been counting for nine days, and the arithmetic had come due, and somewhere on the far side of the city a fifth man was lying dead in the rain.

"How long?"

"Twenty minutes, if the bridge is clear. Bring your kit." A pause. "It is him, Elias."

It was the first time he had used the name. Elias felt it like the touch of a cold coin against the back of his neck, and stood for a moment with the phone at his ear and the forceps gleaming in their rack.

"I will be there in fifteen," he said.

He drove the old gray Volvo across the river with both hands locked on the wheel. The rain had thickened since evening, a fine slanting drizzle that turned the streetlights into smeared halos and beaded on the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it. The bridge was nearly empty. Below it, the water moved black and slow, carrying the reflections of the city on its back like pieces of broken glass.

Pier 44 lay on the eastern bank, a long, weathered promenade of planks and iron rail that jutted out into the current below the old commercial district. In the daytime it was a place for joggers and tourists, with a coffee stand at the landward end and a row of benches facing the water. At night it was a bare gray strip under a string of sodium lamps, and on this night it was lit from end to end with the red and blue pulse of patrol lights.

Elias parked behind the last cruiser, took his kit from the back seat, and stood for a moment with the car door open and the rain drumming on its roof.

He had done this two hundred times. He knew the drill. He would walk up to the tape, and sign the log, and kneel beside whatever lay on the ground, and do his work with a steady voice and a clear head. He would not look at the faces of the officers. He would not think about anything but the body.

He shut the door and walked toward the lights.

The scene was already well under way. A uniformed sergeant lifted the tape for him, and another officer handed him a clipboard, and beyond them, under the third lamp from the end of the pier, a small knot of people stood in a ring around something on the boards. He could see Tolliver's broad back, and the pale blur of the evidence photographer's flash. There was a young patrolman leaning against the far rail with his head down and one hand pressed over his mouth. As Elias watched, the boy turned abruptly and was sick over the side.

Nobody laughed. Nobody looked. They all had the flat, slightly glazed attention of people who had been standing in the rain for an hour and had seen something they would prefer to forget.

"Doctor."

Harrow was standing at the edge of the circle.

He wore a black waxed canvas jacket with the collar turned up, and the rain beaded and rolled off the shoulders in bright strings. His hair was dark with wet. He held a flashlight in one gloved hand and a notebook in the other, and his face in the harsh white light of the lamp was calm and pale and quite unreadable. He looked like a man who had been standing there for some time and did not mind the wait.

"Captain."

"Thank you for coming."

"You said it was him."

"I did." Harrow stepped aside. "See for yourself."

The man lay on his back on the wet planks, directly under the lamp, with his arms at his sides and his head turned very slightly to the left. He was sixty or thereabouts, heavy-jowled, silver-haired, expensively dressed. A charcoal overcoat, a dark suit, a pair of handmade shoes that had recently been resoled. His tie was still knotted at his throat. His shirt front was soaked through and stained dark from the collar to the waist, and his eyes were open and fixed on the sky.

A single clean line ran across the side of his neck, from just below the left ear to the hollow of the throat.

And on his chest, where the shirt had been neatly parted and folded back on either side, were two shallow cuts in the shape of a V.

Elias knelt.

He did not hurry. He put down his kit, and opened it, and took out a pair of fresh nitrile gloves to go over the leather, and drew them on. He examined the neck first. The incision was perfect, a single deep sweep with no hesitation, no tailing, no second pass. The edges were clean as paper. It had been made with something very sharp, and something very small, by a hand that knew precisely how hard to press and how far to go. He bent closer and studied the angle, and the depth, and the faint upward flick at the end of the stroke.

It was the same. It was identical to the four that had come before. He had read each of them a dozen times in the photographs, and he knew them as he knew the lines on his own palm.

"Who is he?" he asked.

"Warren Kray." Tolliver had come up behind them, heavy-shouldered and gray in the lamplight. "Councilman. Chairs the city's Planning and Zoning Board. Sixty-one years old." He wiped rain from his face. "Found by a patrolman on his rounds at eleven-twenty. Wallet still in his pocket, cash, watch. Nothing of value taken."

"Planning and Zoning," Elias said.

"Yeah. You're thinking Brandt."

"I am thinking that a developer cannot build a thirty-story tower on a flood plain without somebody signing the permits."

"And you'd be right. Kray signed every one." Tolliver's mouth twisted. "He's been on that board eleven years. Half this waterfront went through his office."

Elias looked at the man's face. It was a soft, well-fed, unremarkable face, the face of a person who had eaten at the best restaurants in the city and never once thought about what anyone else ate. There was nothing in it now. Nothing at all. The eyes were glazed and calm, and the mouth had fallen very slightly open, as if he had been on the point of saying something and had changed his mind.

What were you going to say? Elias thought. Who were you going to say it to?

He went through the pockets himself, because it was his habit and because nobody else on the pier would have done it with the right kind of patience. The overcoat first, the left side and then the right. A folded handkerchief, monogrammed. A roll of breath mints. A set of car keys on a silver ring, and a small brass key that might have belonged to a desk drawer or a safe-deposit box. In the breast pocket of the suit jacket lay a slim leather wallet and a pen with a gold clip. He set each item in a bag and labeled it and read the label back aloud.

It was only when he reached the inside pocket of the overcoat, the deep one, sewn into the lining over the heart, that he stopped.

It was empty. But it had not always been. The fabric had a shape to it, a long flat rectangle worn soft by use, the ghost of something carried there every day for years.

"Detective," he said. "Where is his phone?"

Tolliver had been looking at the river. He turned slowly. "What?"

"A man like this does not go out without a phone. He would be welded to it." Elias held up the coat's lining so the light fell on it. "There is an impression here. Something was kept in this pocket, and recently."

"Wife says the same thing." Tolliver's mouth flattened. "We called her at midnight. Said he left the house around eight-thirty for a meeting and had his phone with him when he went. It's not in the car. It's not on the pier. We've got a request in for the carrier, location and call history, but it's going to take till morning."

"The killer took it."

"Maybe. Or he dropped it in the river." Tolliver rubbed his jaw. "Could be nothing. Guys like Kray have three phones."

"Yes," said Elias. "Could be."

He wrote it down. He did not say what he was thinking, which was that a man who cleaned a scene as thoroughly as this one would not have left a wallet and a watch and a pair of handmade shoes and taken only the single object that could say why Warren Kray had walked alone to the end of a pier in the rain.

He laid two fingers against the man's jaw, over the glove, and pressed. The flesh was cool and slightly stiff. Rigor had barely begun. He moved the man's arm, and felt the faint resistance in the elbow. He checked the pooling in the lower back, and the temperature at the core, using the small probe from his kit. He worked quickly and methodically, calling the numbers aloud for the photographer and the log.

"Time of death," he said at last, "between nine and ten o'clock this evening. Probably closer to nine-thirty. The body was not moved. He died here."

"Nine-thirty," Tolliver said. "Three hours before we found him."

"Yes."

"And nobody on this pier heard a thing."

"It is an isolated stretch at night, and the rain would have covered sound." Elias lifted his head. "He came here voluntarily. There are no drag marks. No signs of a struggle. He walked to this spot and stood still, and somebody came up to him and cut his throat before he knew what was happening."

"Or before he had time to scream."

"Or that."

A phone rang. It was a high insistent chirp, loud in the hush of the ring of officers, and everyone stiffened. Harrow looked down at the device in his jacket pocket, and something crossed his face, and was gone.

"Deputy Commissioner," he said quietly. "Excuse me, Doctor."

He stepped away toward the rail. Elias could not hear the conversation, only the low, even cadence of Harrow's voice and, now and then, a faint metallic buzz from the phone at his ear. Rourke was talking fast. Harrow was not. He stood with one hand resting on the iron rail, looking out over the river, and he did not raise his voice or shift his weight or interrupt. When he finally spoke, it was in two brief sentences.

"I understand, sir. You will have a statement by two."

He hung up. He stood for a moment longer, looking at the black water. Then he turned and came back across the planks with his long, unhurried stride, and the ring of officers parted for him without being asked.

"The press is on its way," he said to Tolliver. "Two crews, maybe three. The mayor wants an explanation within two hours. I want the pier cleared of anyone who is not evidence staff, and I want a statement drafted that says nothing we cannot stand behind." He lifted his gaze, and Elias saw with a small shock that he was looking directly at him. "Dr. Mercer."

"Yes."

"I need this one in your hands."

The words were quiet, and something under them was very hard.

"Not Halloran. Not a resident. Not a consulting team from the state capital, which is what Rourke will suggest by morning." His eyes were steady. "I want the man who found the marks on Frank Lowry's wrists to read this body, and I want his conclusion on my desk before anyone else's. Can you do that?"

Elias looked at him.

Rain dripped from the brim of the flashlight. A gull cried somewhere in the dark beyond the pier, thin and lost, and was answered by no one. The patrol lights pulsed red, and then blue, and then red again, turning the wet boards the color of old wine.

It was a strange thing to be asked. Not ordered. Asked. In the flat white light of the lamp, with the dead man at his feet and the whole city watching, Harrow had turned the decision over to him as if it were a thing that could be refused.

"I can do that," said Elias.

"Tonight?"

"Tonight."

He had not meant to say it so quickly. He knew it was unwise. His body had not yet recovered from Frank Lowry, from the cold room and the fall and the long gray drive through the morning. His hands were still stiff. The chill in his bones had not quite left him. A sane man would have asked for a day.

But he thought of the nine-day schedule. He thought of the man on the boards, and the word that had been about to come out of his mouth. He thought of a sentence he had heard only that afternoon, dropped lightly into the air by a man with a mug of coffee. Nobody wanted to look too hard.

There was one way, and only one, to see a face.

"I will take the body to the lab myself," he said. "Have the transport team bring it directly. Nobody touches it between here and there."

"Understood."

He turned back to Kray and began to pack his kit. His hands moved by habit, a practiced economy of small motions, and for a moment he did not look up. So he did not see Harrow watching him, and did not see the faint tightening at the corner of the captain's eyes.

But he felt it.

It lay on him like a hand. The long, quiet, unhurried regard of a man who had stood in a ring of light and looked at a corpse without flinching and was now looking at something else. Elias refused to lift his head. He closed the kit with a click and stood, and straightened his coat, and only then let his gaze drift sideways.

Harrow was standing exactly where he had been, three paces away, his flashlight dimmed. He was not looking at the corpse, or the river, or the officers. He was looking at Elias, and there was in his face an expression that Elias had never seen before and could not name. It was not warmth. It was not concern, precisely. It was something closer to the look of a man who has been waiting a very long time for a train, and has just heard, far down the track, the first faint rumble of its approach.

"Do you need me at the lab?" Harrow asked.

"No."

It came out before the question was finished. It was the answer they had agreed on, in a narrow alcove on the ground floor, three days ago. It was also the answer of a man who, for the first time in years, had to think about what the word meant.

"No," Elias said again, more quietly. "You would only be in the way."

"Of course." Harrow nodded. The faint smile came and went. "Then I will not insist."

He did not move away. He stood with his collar up and the rain running down his face, and for a moment Elias thought that was all. Then he said, in a voice so low that it barely carried over the sound of the drizzle, "But if something happens. If you need anything at all. Call me." He paused. "Any hour, Elias. I will answer."

It was the second time he had said the name. Elias felt it go through him, not sharply this time but slowly, like warmth spreading through cold water.

You have my number, said the captain's eyes. I know you have it.

Elias had the number. He had read it once, on the back of a card. He realized, with a sort of distant dismay, that he knew it by heart.

"I will remember," he said.

While they waited for the van, Elias did something he did not often do. He walked over to the young patrolman at the rail.

The boy was perhaps twenty-three, with a round, freckled face gone the color of putty and a uniform that did not quite fit at the shoulders. He straightened when he saw Elias coming. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, and then, seeming to realize what he had done, wiped the wrist on his trousers.

"Sir. Dr. Mercer. I'm sorry about the..." He gestured helplessly at the water. "I've been on the force eighteen months. I've seen worse than that. I swear I have."

"What is your name?"

"Pell, sir. Jared Pell."

"Officer Pell." Elias kept his hands at his sides and stood a careful distance away, upwind, where the smell of the river would carry the worst of it. "There is nothing to apologize for. The body does what it does. It is the ones who do not react that I worry about."

Pell gave a small, shaky laugh. "It's not even that it was bad, sir. There wasn't much blood, not really. It was just so..." He searched for the word. "Clean. Like somebody had arranged him. I've never seen anything that looked so peaceful that was so wrong."

"That is usually worse."

"Yes, sir." The boy swallowed. "The captain said that, actually. He came over after I threw up the first time. Didn't say anything about it, didn't make a joke. Just told me to breathe through my nose and pick a spot on the lamp and keep my eyes on it until the shaking stopped." He glanced toward the third lamp from the end of the pier, where the light still fell in a white circle on the wet boards. "It worked. I don't know why. But it worked."

Elias looked at the lamp.

It was an ordinary sodium light, old and slightly yellowed, with a moth circling the glass. Somewhere beneath it, a man had knelt in the rain and looked up at the same pale glow and felt his blood go out of him. And somewhere behind Elias, a captain with a black waxed jacket had stood over him with a notebook and told a frightened boy where to rest his eyes.

"He is kind to the young ones," Elias said slowly. It was not quite a question.

"He's the best, sir." Pell said it simply, without any effort. "My first week, I locked my keys in the cruiser in the middle of a blizzard. He came out himself at two in the morning with a slim jim and never told a soul. I'd walk through fire for that man."

Elias nodded. He did not trust himself to say anything else.

He walked back toward the gurney with his kit in his hand, and thought, for no reason he could name, of a dormitory stairwell and a telephone that would not stop ringing. Nobody had ever told him where to rest his eyes. Nobody had ever come out at two in the morning with a slim jim.

It was a strange thing to feel jealous of a frightened boy on a pier.

The transport van arrived a few minutes later. Two attendants in rain slickers unloaded a gurney and a body bag, and the officers cleared a space. Kray was lifted with surprising gentleness. The bag's long zipper closed with a rasp. Elias stood at the foot of the gurney with his kit in his hand and watched the councilman go under, the soft silver hair and the open eyes and the expensive tie, and felt nothing at all. That was the odd part. He had felt something for Frank Lowry. He had felt a great deal. But this man lay on the boards like a coat that had been thrown down, and the only thing he could feel was the hard, empty click of a lock, turning.

He got into the Volvo and followed the van across the bridge.

In the rearview mirror, the pier grew small. The patrol lights pulsed on the wet planks like the heartbeat of some enormous slow animal. A line of figures moved along the railing, dark against the glow. And under the third lamp, alone now, stood a tall man in a black waxed jacket with his hands in his pockets.

He had not moved.

Elias watched him in the mirror for as long as the road allowed. The van ahead of him turned a corner, and then another, and he had to look away to follow it. But in that last glimpse, just before the bend took the pier out of sight, he thought he saw Harrow lift his head and look across the water toward the receding taillights.

He stood perfectly still in the falling rain and looked after them for a very long time. Not like a man watching a vehicle depart. More like a man watching someone being carried away.

Elias told himself that he was imagining it.

He drove on. The rain came down. The bridge was empty, and the river moved under it, black and slow and carrying the lights of the city away toward the sea.