I had finally found her. My soul mate. My completing half. My Iele. My angelic, beauteous, bewitching Iele.

  “Can I see that map you were working on?”

  Brayman fished the map out from beside his seat and handed it to Walter.

  Walter smoothed out the creases. The sun was starting to set, and deep shadows reached across the dashboard toward the paper. “How far into that notebook did you get?”

  “A little over halfway. He starts off with a few notes on George Grendal. Then there’s nothing but locations, dates, and initials with the occasional drawing.”

  Brayman had plotted each point with a red marker and written the date next to each dot in small, neat script. Some were connected by lines. “These go all over—Detroit to New York, to Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, New Mexico, Vegas, Los Angeles, Philly—East Coast to West, then back again, hitting the northern cities, west after that, then through the south, like big loops.”

  Brayman took out the notebook and started flipping through the pages. “The amount of time in each location varies. Some seem to be as short as a few days, and it looks like he holed up in other places for months. But not a single repeat, except for Detroit.” He paused for a moment. “Here’s the thing—even if he was still following that girl, she’d be what? Sixty-three? Sixty-four now? That’s not our girl. This could just as easily be Golston logging his own travels. Maybe he got tired and walked away from the job. Just hit the road.”

  “Collecting hair, nails, and teeth?” Walter pointed out. “Don’t forget what we found in his apartment. Have you heard from the fire marshal? Some of that may have survived.”

  Before Brayman could respond, the radio chirped.

  “Four-one-nine-seven, come in.”

  Brayman picked up the microphone and pressed the Transmit button. “Four-one-nine-seven, copy.”

  “The ME called. They have an ID on the vic from the bus depot. Want me to patch you in?”

  “No. We’re not far. Tell Ackerman we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Chapter

  45

  “Her name’s Aneta Kostenko.” Jane Ackerman moved fast as she led them through the double doors into cold storage.

  “Kostenko?” Walter gave Brayman a narrow-eyed glance. “Hmm. That sounds Russian.”

  Ackerman tugged open a drawer on the right and gently folded down the teal sheet from the body, revealing the top half of the woman from the bus depot.

  “It’s a Ukrainian name,” Ackerman told them. “Part of the Soviet Union but not quite the same thing. Her ID was tricky. Luckily for us, she had those breast implants. I matched the serial number to a doctor in New Jersey who recently got himself busted by the feds for working on illegals, prepping them for sex trafficking. Bad dude, but he kept good records. The serial number gave me her name. That all tied back to her file with Interpol, where I learned a little more. She’s from a small town called Pripyat. She went missing at twenty-four. Four years ago.”

  “If you decide you’d like to be a detective, call me,” Brayman told her. “The ones coming up nowadays can’t find their own ass.”

  Walter ignored the jab and whistled down at the woman’s body. “Man, that’s a hard twenty-eight. She could be a hundred.”

  Although it had only been two days, Aneta’s skin had taken on a severely dry appearance on her face, neck, and arms and was a deep gray yet nearly translucent, like a thin plastic bag holding her internal organs together.

  “The degeneration appears to be accelerating,” Ackerman agreed. “The man you brought in from the Edison is worse. We froze him to preserve what’s left. We’ll have to freeze her, too, pending the outcome of all this. If we don’t, there might not be much left in a few more days. From what I can determine, the moisture from the body seems to be seeping from the head and extremities and pooling at center mass.”

  Brayman reached out and gently touched the woman’s face, running his index finger along the wrinkles surrounding her eyes and the corner of her mouth. “Could this be progeria?”

  “I considered progeria when they brought in the man from the Edison.” She nodded down at the woman. “I gave it serious thought when she came in, so I sent some samples to the lab at Hopkins. I haven’t received the results yet. The CDC wants to fly in a specialist out of Atlanta.”

  “What’s progeria?” Walter asked.

  Ackerman said, “Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, HGPS. It’s a rare genetic condition that causes children to age rapidly. Most don’t live past twelve or thirteen. Their cells degenerate and they die of complications usually not seen outside the elderly.”

  “Like multiple forms of cancer all presenting at once,” Brayman added.

  Ackerman nodded. “Progeria usually presents at a very early age, but in some rare instances we see it later—early adolescence or young adults—fifteen to maybe twenty at most. Even then, there are precursors—shorter than average height, thinning and gray hair, age spots on the skin, voice changes. Sometimes even facial tics or weak arms and legs, nonresponsive muscles…similar to stroke victims. This woman is twenty-eight. The man from the Edison was maybe mid-thirties. Both are too old for progeria, at least the way we understand it. We haven’t ruled it out, but it’s unlikely. The working theory is that this is a mutation.”

  Walter scratched the side of his head. “You said genetic, right? So whatever killed them, it’s not contagious?”

  “Not contagious in any way. The odds of two people presenting with it in such close proximity, particularly when you take in the diversity of their backgrounds, are slim to none. That’s the biggest concern right now.” She folded the sheet back up over the woman, slid the drawer back into the wall, and closed the door. “That brings me to something else I wanted to show you. We might have one more.”

  Walter’s heart thumped.

  The heart attack from the train station. The one she had touched. Had to be.

  Ackerman crossed the room to another bank of freezers and opened the third drawer from the left, pulled out the sliding gurney. This body was also covered in a teal sheet. She folded it back with the same care she had the sheet covering the woman. “No missing fingers this time, but signs of the same degeneration.”

  Not the heart attack victim.

  This body was male and hadn’t been autopsied yet. His skin was deeply wrinkled, and he was bald except for a small tuft of thin gray hair surrounded by dark age spots stretched over his scalp and temples. His mouth was open slightly, and several teeth were missing. His fingernails were cracked and yellow.

  “He came in about an hour ago,” Ackerman said. “His wife said he hasn’t been feeling well for the past few days, wouldn’t get out of bed. He actually locked her out of the bedroom and wouldn’t let her in. When he finally did, she panicked and called 911. She was hysterical, a complete mess. Understandably so. He’s only thirty-four. He died en route to the hospital—massive coronary.” She took a business card from her pocket and handed it to Brayman. “He had this on him. His wife told the paramedics he’d been mugged recently, said she thought it was connected.”

  Walter only heard part of this exchange. His eyes were fixed on the man’s bruised knuckles. “Holy shit.”

  Chapter

  46

  Brayman’s face twisted into a scowl as he held up the business card.

  Walter’s business card.

  Although the room hovered just above freezing, sweat broke out on the back of Walter’s neck, between his shoulders.

  “I’m done cutting you breaks.” Brayman took a step closer. “You know something, spill it. All of it. Right now.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “I think we’re well beyond all that, don’t you?”

  Ackerman looked away, fidgeted with a temperature gauge, like she was embarrassed for him.

  “That’s Michael Driscoll,” Walter said softly. He reached up and touched the faded bruise near his eye, the healing cut under his chin. “He lied to his wife. He wasn’t mugged. He’s…he’s the guy who hit me.”

  Brayman shoved the card into his pocket. “And why exactly did he hit you?”

  “I saw him…with Amy Archer.” Walter wanted to sound convincing as he said this, but he knew he hadn’t. The name trailed off as it left his lips.

  The look on Brayman’s face was enough to tell him he didn’t believe him, didn’t want to hear this.

  “Let’s be clear. You saw him with someone who looks like Amy Archer.”

  “No.” Walter shook his head. “I saw him with Amy Archer. I’m sure it was her. When I confronted him, them, he hit me. Knocked me out. But it was her. No doubt.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  Walter didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “It was the night of my party at Mig’s Tavern.” He raised both hands defensively. “But I know what I saw, and it was her.”

  “You need help,” Brayman said flatly, shaking his head.

  “It was her!”

  “It’s a wonder you passed the psych eval.”

  “She told him her name was Amelia Dyer. The name’s bogus. No record in DMV, birth, I couldn’t find it anywhere. But I tracked her down. She’s working for Elite Escorts.”

  “So that’s how you got onto Sergei Turgenev? You’ve been chasing all this? Chasing some girl who gave you the slip six years ago?”

  Walter nodded reluctantly.

  Both of them went quiet for a long while, Ackerman standing there worrying the pocket of her lab coat.

  When Brayman finally spoke, he tried to keep his anger in check. “The two of us are going directly to the precinct, and you’re going to tell Hazlett all of this.”

  “He won’t see the facts. He’ll say I’m chasing a ghost and fire me.”

  “He should.”

  Walter glanced at a clock on the wall. It was almost eight o’clock. “He won’t be there this late, you know that. Give me until morning to get some proof.”

  Brayman snorted and shook his head. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. We’ll call him at home, go to his house, whatever we need to do. I’m not going to be responsible for you. You’re his problem, not mine.”

  Hazlett will take my badge for sure.

  He might lock him up. Hell, Brayman might back him up on that. And if Nadler weighed in, weighed in officially…

  Walter’s skin crawled, anxiety burning beneath the surface. He turned back to Ackerman. “What did you find with the black light?”

  Rather than answer, she looked nervously at Brayman. Finally, he gave her a nod.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look yet. Give me a second.” She pushed back through the aluminum doors and disappeared down the hallway.

  When they were alone, neither Walter nor Brayman spoke. Walter stared at Driscoll’s withered body. Brayman faced the floor, his left hand tapping on his thigh.

  Ackerman returned with the portable black light in hand. “Turn off the lights?” she said to Brayman, who moved to the switch on the wall and flicked it off.

  The room went dark, but not completely. The backlit thermostats on each freezer drawer cast the room in a faint yellow.

  Ackerman switched on the black light and brought it close to Michael Driscoll’s head. “Whoa.”

  They all saw it.

  His lips glowed bright. Not just his lips. There were also marks on his cheeks and several on his neck.

  “She kissed him,” Walter said in a muted voice. “I saw her kiss him several times.”

  “That doesn’t mean…” Brayman started to speak, but he went quiet before completing the thought. His mind was clearly reeling.

  There were no marks on Driscoll’s chest, only his face and neck.

  Walter pointed toward Driscoll’s groin. “She also…you know.”

  Giving Brayman another glance, Ackerman slowly pulled back the sheet and drew the black light down Driscoll’s torso, over both arms, past his abdomen. “Oh, my.”

  Michael Driscoll’s penis and the area surrounding it glowed with dozens of marks.

  Minutes ticked by, and the three of them stood there in silence.

  When Brayman spoke, it was to Ackerman. “Does he have cancer, like the others?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to biopsy. Like I said, he just came in. But these spots on his head, his arms, and here on his shoulders, they look like melanoma. That would be consistent with your John Doe from the Edison and Aneta Kostenko. Hold on…”

  From a table on her right, she selected a scalpel and made a small incision in the upper part of Driscoll’s abdomen, about a quarter inch in length. She then took a needle and inserted it into the opening, maneuvered the plunger with her thumb, and removed it.

  “Liver?” Brayman asked.

  She nodded and carried the needle over to another table with a microscope and placed the sample on a slide, placed the slide on the microscope, then made several adjustments to the various knobs and controllers.

  Ackerman sighed, then stepped aside and motioned for Brayman to take a look.

  He studied the sample for nearly twenty seconds, then, without looking up, said, “Did you find any cancer in the man from the Four Seasons? Earl Golston?”

  Ackerman shook her head. “Only the aneurysm. Directly below the mark I showed you back at the hotel.”

  “Could those marks be some type of injection sight reaction?”

  “I looked for needle marks. There aren’t any.”

  “She’s not using needles,” Walter said quietly.

  They both continued to ignore him. He didn’t blame them. What he was suggesting wasn’t possible. He was suggesting that somehow Amy Archer killed these people with only her touch.

  Not just killed them, drained them, his mind muttered. Some slow, some fast, but took the life all the same.

  When Brayman finally looked up, he nodded toward the drawer holding Aneta Kostenko. “You said she was involved in sex trafficking. Did you get that from her jacket?”

  Ackerman nodded and went to a desk in the corner of the room. She thumbed through the contents of a folder already open on top. Handed Brayman and Walter several mug shots of a beautiful woman in her early twenties. Couldn’t possibly be the same woman, but Walter knew it was.

  She went back to the folder and skimmed one of the reports with the tip of her finger. “This doesn’t say anything about Turgenev, but that doesn’t mean he’s not connected. She was arrested twice. The second time she had a stack of business cards in her purse. No business name printed on them, only a phone number. Somebody set her up with a high-priced attorney; he wouldn’t let her talk. Got her off with a slap on the wrist.”

  Walter quickly said, “Were the cards black with red lettering?”

  “Ah.” She skimmed one of the reports. “Yeah. Black card stock, red print.”

  “That’s Elite Escorts.”

  Brayman crossed the room and stared at the drawer holding Aneta Kostenko’s body. Finally, he looked over at Walter, the expression on his face unreadable. “Take me there.”

  He started for the door but Ackerman stopped him. “Wes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s something else you should know.” She was holding a sheet of paper. She eyed Walter nervously. “I got a call from Lynn Crowley in Evidence the other day. She was trying to track down some information on an old case. Autopsy results…for your partner.”

  He glared at Walter. “Whose autopsy?”

  “Two bodies found in a freezer in Alvin Schalk’s basement. The…Amy Archer case.”

  Walter reached for the paper but Brayman snatched it first. His eyes were flying over the text when Ackerman said, “Both bodies were male, heavily decomposed, cancerous. All their fingers were missing.”

  Chapter

  47

  Even though Walter told Brayman the people running Elite were well aware they were under surveillance and that the arrival of a Detroit Metro car, even unmarked, would be a surprise to no one, Brayman parked the Crown Vic a block off Franklin and the two of them walked back in the direction of the brownstone.

  “They’ve got eyes all over this block, far more extensive than ours.” Walter’s hands were in his pockets, and he looked down at the sidewalk. “I’m not sure if they’re using cameras or people positioned in the windows, but I can guarantee they’re already watching us. Probably made us before you killed the motor.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s okay to pull up in an unmarked and park under their nose. I don’t want to kick the hornet’s nest; I just want to get a look around.”

  “You’re not gonna spook these guys.” Without looking up, Walter told him, “That’s it up on the left. The brownstone with the yellow potted plant out front, number 415.”

  The white van was parked in the same space. Walter wondered if anyone bothered to move it or if the surveillance van was just a permanent fixture on the street with a rotating string of detectives climbing in and out. With parking at a premium, they probably didn’t want to risk losing the space.

  The back door swung open before either of them had a chance to knock.

  Detective Buncy hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he had dark circles under his eyes. “Homicide’s back,” he told Wilson, who was in the same seat as last time, facing the bank of monitors. “Brought a date this time.” He nodded over his shoulder. “Get in here, hurry up. We got weirdness going on up in there.”

  Brayman climbed up into the van first, Walter behind him, tugging the door shut.

  Wilson, headphones on, gave them both a quick nod, then went back to the monitors. There were at least a dozen empty cans of Jolt scattered about, some on the table, others on the floor, one in Wilson’s free hand.

  Buncy studied Brayman. “You’re Wes Brayman, right? We worked together maybe ten years back. I don’t know if you remember.”

  “Lou Buncy, I remember. The girl we pulled out of Lake St. Clair. You were with the Twenty-Third.”