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hum into his ribs for a few more seconds. “In the past six weeks, two other prostitutes were found in Massachusetts, strangled with eighth-of-an-inch holes drilled through their heads,” hesaid, retrieving a folder from his briefcase. “Both of them had what’s been described as needle tracts into the center of their brains. I’ve got pictures from their autopsies if you want to see them.”
    Himmel greedily grabbed the photomicrographs and began to pore over them just as the afternoon session broke and his colleagues started pouring from the ballroom. One man walked an arthritic line to their table and sat down without invitation. He was about the same age as Himmel, thinner, a pinched face, another gray-haired relic nearing retirement. “Aren’t you going to get coffee?” Himmel asked him.
    The other man reached for one of Himmel’s cookies. “Is Stanley Minot still at the Boston office?”
    “He’s our boss,” Cyrus replied.
    “Tell him Lennie Adler said hello.”
    Himmel said to the agents, “I told him the FBI was going to visit me. He’s already introduced himself in his maladroit way. I’m embarrassed to say he’s my oldest friend. I’m in charge of Merrimack County. Lennie does Rockingham County. Get your own cookies, Lennie.”
    Adler ignored him and looked at the scattered photos on the table. “What are these?”
    Himmel grinned, showing large coffee-stained teeth. “It looks like I’m in the middle of a very interesting serial killing case,” he bragged. “I got my victim on Friday. These are from the other cases in Massachusetts. Are you jealous?”
    Adler snorted, picked up one of the glossies and dug for his reading glasses. He studied a blown-up microscopic view of the cross section of a long slender needle tract plunging through the straw-yellow substance of a human brain. When he tossed the photo down he said, “Tell me there wasn’t a hole drilled through the parietal bone.”
    Cyrus stiffened. He felt weirdly disoriented, as if he were the target of a cunning parlor trick. “How could you know that?”
    “Because two months ago I had a case just like this.”
    “What? A strangled hooker?” Avakian asked, equally startled.
    “No, no. It was a young man with a fractured skull, a male nurse. He was found off of I-95, just over the state line. The Seabrook police have nothing. Bupkis.” Adler stole another cookie and smugly looked around the table at the slack mouths. “It looks like you fellows might be interested.”
    Cyrus’s phone started buzzing again. He fished it out, glanced at the caller ID and saw it was a repeat from Marian. He thought better of ignoring her for a second time and announced to the table, “Hang on. I’ve got to take this.”
    As he listened to her, his breathing got faster, his throat constricted. “Why didn’t you call me when it happened?” Then, an existential
“Damn it.”
Then, “I’m an hour away. I’m coming.”

Six
    Cyrus automatically made his way through the twisty corridors like a lab rat that had mastered a complex maze. At the Neurology Ward on the ninth floor he was immediately recognized at the nurse’s station from past visits. He felt his stomach knot, sickened by the all-too-familiar smell of body fluids masked by lemony disinfectants. “Where is she?” he asked.
    The nurse wasn’t put off by his brusqueness; she understood and just said, “Nine nineteen.”
    Outside her door he recognized it as one of the isolation rooms; in fact, he vividly recalled she’d been in that exact room several months ago. There was a sealed anteroom where one could hang a coat and don a mask, gloves, shoe covers and a paper gown. He began the ritual and tried to sneak a wave through the glass but a gowned woman blocked the head of the bed. The woman was too slight to be Marian—just another in an endless stream of doctors, nurses, med school students.
    The woman finished whatever she was doing and when she left Tara’s bedside, the