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surmise the same instruments were used but cleaned up in between. I understand, by the way, that the drain checks were negative for blood in both apartments."
    Janek looked at him. The man was obviously upset. "You discovered the switch, didn't you?"
    Yoshiro nodded. "I was working on the Ireland cadaver and right away I realized the two pieces didn't fit." He shook his head. "We've had decapitations in here before but never with the heads placed back on. I want to emphasize the oddity of that. The heads were not placed atop the bodies casually. They were literally pressed into the bodies as if an attempt was being made to recombine the heads and bodies in a way the killer preferred."
    "Yes," said Janek . "I see. That does seem very odd."
    Yoshiro looked at him. Suddenly he swept off his glasses. "I am a forensic pathologist, not a psychologist, Lieutenant. But I would say, based on my understanding of human nature, which comes from personal observation, the reading of poetry and literature, and some courses I took at Cornell Medical School..."
    "Yes?"
    "I would have to say that it seems to me that this man was trying to create people as much as to destroy them. Do you see what I mean?" Dr. Yoshiro snatched up his glasses and put them on again. "He killed them, certainly. But to use the parts his own way. So in a sense we could say he was a creator. Destroyer and also creator. Both. It's a difficult concept, I know. I've had some difficulty even thinking about it. I can't seem to deal with it, which is strange considering the sort of work I do. Normally I am quite imperturbable. Taking apart bodies, performing autopsies—none of that disturbs me at all. But I am confused by this case. It disturbs me very much. I sense a man here who has presumed to create new human beings, who has presumed to play at being God. And now please excuse me. I have a terrible headache. I must take some aspirins and lie down. You will get a complete report, of course, as soon as we finish up. Excuse me now." He rose and bowed slightly from the waist.
    Janek nodded and withdrew. A strange little man, he thought, with a strange and sensitive reaction. A scientific man, assured and confident, until he begins to ponder the meaning of the crime and then his head aches and he becomes confused. He senses mystery, creation and destruction, vectors he cannot reconcile. And such irreconcilability strikes hard at a man who slits open bodies and weighs organs and deals daily with the gross carnality of human beings.
    It was also striking at himself, Janek thought, as he drove over to the precinct house. There was something here that transcended a brutal homicide. Something awful, evil, and fascinating too.
    Sixth Precinct headquarters was one of those new police buildings that had grown old very fast. Built a dozen years before to be as indestructible as a public school, it had quickly acquired a patina of grime and the stench of all precinct stations: stale cigarette smoke, stale sweat and the effluvia of human distress.
    Aaron Rosenthal had already organized the special squad office on the second floor in back. Desks, telephones, filing cabinets, a map, and a wall-size cork bulletin board to which he'd tacked the crime-scene photographs. The Ireland photos were on the right, the Beard photos on the left. Between them was a diagram showing the various routes between the two apartments. There was plenty of room left for any new documentation that might later come along.
    Aaron was a superb detective, a fine tracker, excellent at interrogation and brilliant on the phone. He was a forty-three-year-old detective second grade, equivalent to a sergeant, balding, paunchy, bespectacled, with hideous mutton chop sideburns, a quick smile, a lovely wife, four gorgeous daughters, and a hard-edged New York cynicism which Janek greatly enjoyed. Occasionally he wore a yarmulke to work, a mystery to his colleagues, since there was no correspondence between this action and