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on New Year’s Day would be just as dead on January second. But Kovac had pressed for an exception. It was important to ID their Jane Doe as soon as possible, for the sake of any family who might have been looking for her and for the sake of the case. Ulf Möller hadn’t hesitated to say yes to Kovac’s request, giving up his holiday afternoon with his wife, Eva, and their two daughters.
    Tall and lean, Möller had a European elegance about him right down to the way he held his smoke, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He was wrapped in a handsome black leather trench coat, a plaid cashmere scarf wound artfully around his neck. Despite the cold, he wore no hat. The icy breeze teased the ends of his fine sandy hair, though not a strand strayed out of place. He watched Sam approach with a wry expression.
    “I appreciate this, Doc,” Kovac said.
    Möller sketched a brow ever so slightly upward, a certain kind of amusement lighting his eyes. “How could I resist? It isn’t every day I get to autopsy a zombie. Maggie is going to be jealous, I think.”
    ME humor: every bit as dark and inappropriate as cop humor. Civilians would have been offended to hear it, but it was a necessary vice for people who dealt in death and depravity on a daily basis.
    “She got the vampire on Halloween,” Kovac reminded him. “And that Santa Claus burglar who died inside that chimney.”
    “Greedy bitch,” Möller said mildly. He took a long pull on the cigarette and exhaled a jet stream of smoke.
    Head honcho Maggie Stone, who had performed the autopsy on Rose Reiser a year ago, had gone to Vegas for New Year’s with the latest of her slightly shady boyfriends. Möller, who had spent the last New Year’s holiday visiting family in Germany, had done the autopsy on the Fourth of July vic—Independence Doe.
    “What do you think, Sam? Is this the work of our serial killer?”
    Kovac shrugged. “You’ll have to tell me. I don’t like the coincidences: holiday, dumped on the road, stabbed, disfigured . . . I don’t want to think there are a lot of guys running around doing shit like that.”
    “Any prospects for an ID of the victim?”
    “No local missing persons matching her description. At least, not yet. Someone goes missing New Year’s Eve, it might take a day or two for anyone to sound the alarm,” Kovac said. “I pulled a few sheets for missing females in a five-state area. Whoever she is, I hope to God she has a record and we can ID her from her fingerprints. That face is nothing to work with. Have you had a look at her yet?”
    “And start the party without you and your lovely partner?” Möller said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Cigarette?”
    Kovac took the offer automatically, as a matter of male bonding. He had officially quit the rotten habit about thirty-two times—had quit entirely when he had been seeing Carey Moore and spending time around her little girl, Lucy.
    Intellectually, he knew smoking was a stupid thing to do. And Liska kicked his ass for it every time she caught him doing it. Emotionally, he didn’t always care. In his darker moods, he did it deliberately, daring the universe to kill him. Who would give a shit anyway? Today was one of those days.
    Möller shared his lighter. They both lit up and stood there in the freezing cold, tarring up their lungs like a couple of fucking idiots. Kovac felt perversely pleased with himself. He reminded himself how much he liked smoking, how soothing the ritual of it was; how a cigarette was like an old friend you called up every time the world kicked you in the teeth, and you went out and got drunk together and felt like shit afterward.
    Liska pulled up to the curb then and parked her car in a loading zone. She got out wearing her don’t-fuck-with-me face and stomped up to them.
    “You’re a couple of damned fools, and when you die slow, lingering, horrible deaths, don’t come crying to me.”
    Möller arched a brow. “Lovely to see you, as well,