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destroyed, ribs cracked. The victims were all women of about fifty.
    All—at least those who could speak—told the same story. As they were walking home from a store or from work at dusk, four or five young men had appeared from nowhere and dragged them behind a nearby building or into a hallway. First they beat the women. Then they raped them, robbed them, and left them to be discovered, their clothes ripped, their bodies torn.
    Tkach felt sick with rage, especially after talking to the third victim, who reminded him of his wife Maya. Tkach and Maya had been married less than a year, and he worried about her. Moscow was not plagued by gangs and random violence, but such things happened. As a policeman he knew this far better than the citizens, who were given the impression that crime was almost nonexistent in the Soviet Union.
    This victim even had Maya’s Ukrainian accent. Tkach nervously ran his hand through his blond hair throughout the interview, and by the end of it, he had abandoned all professional detachment. It had happened to him before. Maya had warned him not to become personally involved in a case. So had Chief Inspector Rostnikov. But it was not something Tkach could control.
    He had prepared maps of the area where the muggings occurred, charted the times of day, pieced together descriptions of the assailants. He kept all this in a file in the desk he shared with a hulking police officer named Zelach. Though he had other cases, the muggings occupied Sasha’s mind. His great fear was that he would be placed on a new case and told to forget this one for a while. He would not forget.
    It was only this morning that he began to see a possible pattern. Yes, the time of day was about the same, but the locations were strange—not in a cluster but back and forth along a line, an almost straight line but on different streets. It had struck him in the morning as he rode the metro. Yes, the metro was a series of straight intersecting lines except for the Koltsevaya Line, which circled the inner city.
    Now he sat at his desk, a metro map in front of him with the list of locations of the muggings. It was true. Each mugging and rape had taken place within walking distance of a stop on the green line. No two had taken place near the same station.
    He marked them off with a pencil by date. The first attack had been a month ago near the Volkovskaya station. The next was a short walk from the Sokol station. The pattern was clear. The muggers were using this line and moving closer to central Moscow. If the pattern held, the next attack would take place near Pushkin Square.
    But there was something wrong. There was no mugging near the Byelorusskaya station. Why would they skip that station, if indeed they were working along the line and using it to escape? The most obvious answer was that Byelorusskaya was their home station, where they worked from and where they might be recognized. It made sense. So, what was next? Why did these muggings take place early in the evening? Wouldn’t it be better for the criminals to wait till total darkness? The answer was almost laughable. They committed these crimes after work; they left their jobs, went out and beat and raped women, and then promptly went home.
    Tkach could wait at the Pushkin Square metro station shortly before dark in the hope of seeing a gang of young men who fit the description of the criminals, but miss them in the crowds. Or they might change their pattern.
    No, it would be better to watch the Byelorusskaya station and painstakingly follow any suspicious group. But that, too, might take days, weeks, months. The great open square near the station was especially crowded in the evening.
    At that moment he put it together. One of the victims had told him that she thought she’d recognized one of the muggers. He was a dark young man who had sold her a drink near the statue in Gorky Square.
    Twenty minutes after the idea came to him, Sasha Tkach was