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Environments—something of thespider's perspective remained. Marylin couldn't shake the feeling that she was a mosquito swooping low to partake in a bloody feast.
    The nickname was partly responsible for that feeling, she thought. The word “spider” conjured an image of tiny multiple eyes and a compact body, when in fact the forensic robot was a boxy, plastic machine with a reach of almost fifteen metres.
    As the visual field she shared with Odi Whitesmith and Jago Trevaskis floated over the body, dozens of white and yellow icons appeared like arcane markers designed to keep evil spirits at bay.
    â€œThis is only a preliminary assessment,” Whitesmith said, speaking aloud rather than using the prevocal options that parallel Virtual TeleConference allowed. His tone was weary, bordering on terse. “We've highlighted probable ligature marks, defensive injuries, postmortem cuts, bruises, amputations—the usual. Where we can tell in which direction a severing wound occurred, we've marked that, too.”
    â€œHave you put her back together yet?” Trevaskis asked. In contrast to Whitesmith, he spoke casually, as though discussing a jigsaw puzzle rather than the remains of a human being.
    â€œMore or less.” The pieces took on a life of their own as Whitesmith instructed the software to join corresponding yellow markers. When the severed body parts had finished moving, a human body lay on the floor of the virtual d-mat booth, cleaned of dried blood, only a few pieces of torso and internal organs remaining to be fitted together. The body's sex and the marks where the killer had tied the woman prior to dismemberment were more visible this way.
    Marylin winced at the sight. Body parts were just bits of disconnected meat, hard to relate to or empathise with. The faceless corpse revealed before her, however, could have been her own.
    Studying it, she felt the familiar sense of injustice, and asked the same rhetorical question of no deity in particular: How could anybody do this? She wasn't like Whitesmith, hadn't yet learned to anaesthetiseherself to the horrors they were encountering regularly during the Twinmaker investigation. Part of her was glad that she had not.
    â€œWe haven't performed a full autopsy yet,” he went on, “so we have several candidates for cause of death. There's a mark around her neck suggesting asphyxiation—a bag tied over her head or something similar—but not strangulation. Also, we have numerous shallow puncture wounds to her stomach and chest, probably caused by an ice-pick—”
    â€œHow many wounds, exactly?” Trevaskis asked.
    â€œOne hundred and forty-two. We don't know for sure if they killed her; some of them were certainly made after death. Both the asphyxiation and the ice-pick wounds could have been torture, though, rather than an attempt to finish her off. The third possibility is dehydration; all tissue and blood samples subjected to on-site analysis were crawling with repair agents, and Marylin found hints of wounds that had almost healed over. He was obviously busy with her for some time before letting her die. Maybe he got an extra kick from not knowing exactly when she would succumb.”
    â€œTfu. ” The exclamation sounded more vile than any curse Trevaskis could have uttered. “I didn't think this jebaniec could get any sicker. Obviously I was wrong.”
    Marylin stirred.
    â€œActually, sir, I think he's getting bored,” she said.
    â€œOh?”
    â€œThis is the sixteenth body in as many months, in which time his modus operandi has hardly changed. It's becoming routine, too easy. We've seen escalation of signature violence in the last couple of cases; this may be the first time it has fully manifested. He's trying to recapture the thrill.”
    â€œPlausible.” Trevaskis was silent for a moment. “The scars you say you saw are marked, but I can't see them. Why is that?”
    She took a