In the corner across from him was an armchair, covered with a shawl. Hard to his right, doubling back and paralleling the kitchen, was a tiny bathroom, and just beyond its open door was a wooden crate, also draped, supporting a small, ancient television set. A little incongruously, given the cool temperature, there was a plastic electric fan balanced on top of the set.

On the far side of the living room was another open door.

He studied the gore and debris spread across the couch and the floor before it-the bodily fluids showing black, and the gloves and other discarded medical paraphernalia looking like bits of bleached wreckage in the gloom. Overlying it all, quivering and moving with a barely perceptible clicking, a carpet of cockroaches was feasting.

His heart rate didn't increase, he made no gesture or comment, he showed no emotion whatsoever as he recreated in his head the scene that had left such a signature. He could almost see Mary's body sprawled across the couch, and the paramedics doing whatever they routinely did to bodies they had no real intention of reviving.

He'd seen too much of this kind of thing to do anything other than look at it clinically.

He crossed over to the last room in the apartment, noticing as he did that the window overlooked a fire escape and a dark alleyway below, and that the light seeping through it came from an assortment of apartments across the way.

He was now looking into a small bedroom, the darkest corner yet, especially with him filling the doorway. Its one narrow window had been blocked with a colorful poster and jammed shut with a wad of old subway Metro cards. But the lingering odor in here, even tainted by what was behind him, was fresher, cleaner, and faintly scented by intimate memories of a bright-eyed, smiling, happy young woman.