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The overhead camera shows her face in close-up. It is motionless.

Spider puts his hands tenderly on either side of the monitor, like a lover would hold a dying partner’s face. He stares intently into Lu’s eyes.

Glazed and glassy, like the marbles children play with. Look how the orbits of her eyes are all sunken. See how her cheeks are hollowing out so nicely, so beautifully. And her skin – isn’t it gorgeous? So white, so beautifully pallid. Your mother would approve of her, Spider. Your mother would have picked this one too.

Spider strokes her face with his damaged hand and then presses his cheek against hers. He holds the monitor for almost half a minute, feeling close to her, connected to her last moments.

Beautiful, so amazingly beautiful.

The body hangs limp on the table. He longs to remove the shackles from her arms and legs. He aches to wash her, to powder her all over and to dress her properly. And then he feels saddened. Saddened that the plan he has for her, the scheme he’s nurtured her for, is going to prevent him keeping her, and exploring her.

Time was always a problem. Putrefaction: his least favourite word.

Spider has kept diaries on what happened to the other Sugars and knows that within an hour from now those vivid blue eyes of hers will start to change as the blood vessels become lumpy and patchy and the red blood cells begin to clump together. Within two days, strange yellow, triangular spots will appear on her corneas and will then fade to brown and black. Spider has set the basement temperature at thirty-seven degrees, the same as body temperature, so he hopes to slow down the natural cooling process of her corpse but knows that this will prolong the state of rigor mortis to probably about forty-eight hours after her death. He also knows that there is nothing he can do to stop the gravitational slump of blood and other body fluids. They will flatten and settle against her back, shoulders and buttocks as she lies on the leather table and will leave ugly reddish-purple lividity marks that he will have to cover with concealment creams and powder.

Adjust the plan. Find a way to spend time with her.

Spider sits and fantasizes. He’s been lonely for so long and he yearns to have someone new by his side. If he could, he’d stay with her night and day, holding her, talking to her, sharing intimate moments with her, sleeping with her and waking with her. It could be perfect. But that’s not the plan.

And then something on the screen catches his attention.

Lu’s left hand twitches.

Is it a cadaveric spasm, simply a dead muscle jerking as the body settles?

Or is the little bitch really still alive?

61

West Village, SoHo, New York

Jack never made it to bed.

After drinking a few beers and popping an Ambien, he fell into a sleep that was so deep and intense it could better be classified as a coma. Howie had thought about trying to shift him from the couch to the guest bedroom but then decided it was easier to shift the bedroom to him. He tucked a pillow under Jack’s head, threw a light blanket over him and turned in himself.

Carrie was propped against pillows watching the end of Law and Order on TV, the last thing he wanted to see. He cleaned up in the bathroom and slipped into bed next to her, noticing how she seemed to look thinner every day.

Okay, so she’d got the diet thing cracked, which was something he couldn’t do, but, man, all those creams and shit that she put on her face every night kind of defeated the whole point of losing the weight. The way Howie figured it, women lost weight and stayed trim to look more attractive for the guys in their lives. If that was right, then what the hell was the point of buttering your face with some snow-white poodle-crap cream and lying in bed in nightwear that wouldn’t give a mac-flasher from Riker’s Island a twitch in his pants? Unless of course, she’s screwing someone else. The penny dropped like a grand piano from the roof of the