The man who claimed to be the dead man's buddy knew his rights, and he was not willing to give his particulars, and the name of the murdered man wouldn't come to his mind.

"Are we going to solve your friend's murder or not?" asked Elizabeth impatiently. "Because if you keep acting stupid, it's going to be damn hard."

"We're against this bullshit system," said the man who called himself Snake, whose last shower was probably not days ago but weeks.

"Black bloc?" asked Jane, arms crossed and eyebrows drew together. "You guys are against everything, but you don't have a solution?"

"No," Snake replied, "we're against the system but peaceful."

"And I am Donald Duck," Jane replied.

Elizabeth saw Nick surreptitiously activate the recording function on his smartphone.

"My friend called himself Rat," Snake explained. "Because he could survive in the worst dirt. Well, until now, anyway."

"The way he looks now, he's going to have a hard time surviving indeed." Jane turned her head and looked toward the basement entrance.

From Snake's eyes, Elizabeth could tell he'd probably like to see the body. "Have they told you what it looks like? The body, I mean," she asked.

"Only that the body is dead." Snake rolled a cigarette with trembling fingers. Elizabeth noticed that he had taped the tobacco company's brand name on the package with black tape. He probably didn't want to advertise the pig system.

"That's what dead bodies do," she said. "So, real quick. Your friend had his skull crushed with a rock or some other object. And from the looks of it, his heart was cut out while he was still alive. After that, several other organs. Oh yes, and his arms and legs were also cut off." The detective concealed the fact that the latter had been done after death had occurred.

Snake turned pale and forgot to roll his cigarette. The shock therapy had worked. "And where are the arms and legs?" he asked.

"Gone. So are the heart and organs."

"Okaaaay --," Snake said, stretched. "So that means the guy who did this is... Is --"

"... a tremendously unpleasant person," Jane finished the sentence. "He doesn't just throw rocks; he does stuff like this, skull crushed, heart out, arms off, legs off, organs out --"

Elizabeth pursed her lips and nodded slowly. That she was having difficulty equating the brutality of the murder, on the one hand, and the surgical efficiency of the amputation, on the other, was a topic for discussion later with Katherine. Here, for now, it was a matter of scaring this Snake a little and thus loosening his tongue. "Why did your friend have to die? Why Rat?" she asked, "Who would do such a thing to him?"

Snake shrugged. "A dealer, maybe? Rat's been taking Crystal before demos lately."

"Crystal Meth?" The detective raised her eyebrows.

The stuff was the devil's own. A synthetic drug, also called amphetamine or methamphetamine, in the trade. You could make it yourself at home in the kitchen from substances found in ordinary cold remedies. The profits were immense, and production was a breeze.

The stuff could be produced anywhere. Boston Customs Control had seized nearly 3.3 pounds in the past three days. Crystal meth was available virtually everywhere, was instantly addictive, and changed a person within days.

Even managers were turning to the drug with increasing frequency. Five grams replaced a week of sleep. The stuff was pure poison. It affected the so-called sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system and made people wide awake, euphoric, and reliably addicted.

Meanwhile, not only junkies in the regions bordering Central America consumed the stuff to forget about their unemployment; it was in all strata of the social classes where cocaine was too expensive, hashish too dull, and LSD too colorful. The only difference was that the managers who were getting high were less conspicuous than the people on the street since there was no acquisitive crime among managers; they were much more likely to have the money for the stuff than junkies, who often had only prostitution left to pay for it. But that didn't change the fact that the effects were worse for them than for other drugs: depression, tooth loss, and neglect. Even heroin users often remained at least partially integrated, as did cocaine junkies, but crystal meth caused personality and relationships to break down. A typical working life was no longer possible.

But working probably hadn't happened to Rat, as his buddy called him, anyway.

"Exactly," Snake said now. "Crystal meth. Got it somewhere on the border. He couldn't sleep for three days straight, sometimes after that. Got kicked out of two apartments for listening to music all night. The Exploited, Stooges."

Jane looked at the man long and hard. "Now, what about Rat? Or was it better?"

"Well, Rat," Snake said. By now, he's living on the streets. Better said, lived. His face has been looking funny. Like in World War Z. You know, that movie. With Brad Pitt and the zombies?"

"We've seen it," Jane said curtly. "Which his face looks even funnier."

Elizabeth looked at her mother punitively. "Then maybe it was a dealer trying to get one over on him?"

"It's possible."

"Could it also be that the guy was driving a huge SUV?"

Snake shrugged. "I didn't see him. But there's supposed to be where some big-ass Nazi car was driving around. Like a tank. A car like that. The imperialist pigs are driving. Didn't the others see anything?"

We need to know who's driving this car, the detective thought.

Jane took a deep breath. "Well, the others. "The officers interviewed some more witnesses. Three men in Rat's entourage are badly hurt, and one probably won't survive. Two had their lower jaws broken, and the third, whose condition is very critical, had his ribs kicked into his lungs."

Snake turned even paler.

"Aren't you sure you don't want to come out with your friends' names after all? Maybe the killer is hunting down people from the black bloc."

"Some Nazi?"

"Who knows."

Snake stared dully ahead for a while. "I --" he finally said, "I don't do anything forbidden."

Jane looked at him for a long time, and her expression darkened. "Is that so? Are you sure you always act law-abiding and non-violent? No one from the de-escalation team has to fish you out of the crowd at a protest because you threw some rocks again?" Her face approached Snake's to within a few inches. "Because your buddy Rat got his face smashed with one of those rocks you usually like to throw."

Snake swallowed hard. But his self-confidence kept the upper hand. "Shit, man, we don't throw rocks! We think capitalism sucks, but we're protesting peacefully!"

Jane took a deep breath and nodded slowly. "All right. Then we can assume that your possible enemies will behave just as peacefully." She looked demonstratively toward the basement stairs once more. "You just think about talking to us, okay? The man who turned Rat into bloody mincemeat is still on the loose. And you heard what he did to the other three." Jane smiled motherly at Snake and patted him on the shoulder. "But you're peaceful, so you have nothing to worry about. If you do think of something else why we should put you under police protection, just get back to us. Here's my card."

xxx

Aaron Wolfsen was already waiting in one of the interrogation rooms at the BPD. Two officers joined him right after Katherine saw the arm on the operating table at Medic Research. Now the two men were monitoring his every move. Above all, they wanted to prevent Wolfsen from getting into his office and destroying any documents or deleting any files.

Elizabeth had talked to Jane on the way back from the crime scene about how to proceed.

Jane also wanted Wolfsen's information as soon as possible. Perhaps this would lead to the origin of the body parts and thus to the trail of the killer they were hunting. So haste was the order of the day.

Besides, a call had come in earlier from Maggie in the basement. The arm and the body obviously belonged together. The wound edges matched perfectly. Of course, DNA analysis would still be done to prove it. Elizabeth had expected nothing less. It might seem like a coincidence, but she knew that fate didn't care about coincidence if it was cruel enough. Nick and his IT team were currently combing through the registrar's reports. While there were a lot of SUVs in Boston, none so far matched the witness description from South End. Was the car not registered?

Now Nick and Elizabeth would take over the interrogation.

"What's this guy?" wanted Elizabeth to know from her sister as she and Nick prepared for the interrogation.

"He's in charge of new surgical instruments at Medic Research. Such instruments are often tried on bodys, and Wolfsen is responsible for obtaining them."

"Apparently, the bodys ain't always obtained legally," Nick replied with a frown, a thick file about Wolfsen lying on the desk in front of him. "But he was obviously born with it. If I understand this file here correctly, he lost his surgeon's license for performing lobotomies on the mentally retarded. It all got past the hospital administration back in the day at Benjamin Franklin Hospital."

"Lobotomies?" asked Elizabeth. "So it's really true? This procedure where something is cut out in the brain?" She looked at her sister.

Katherine raised her eyebrows briefly and took a deep breath. "Unfortunately, yes. It's a pretty antediluvian technique. The first person to do such a procedure was Walter Freeman, in the late forties. It involved inserting an inch-long needle, like an ice pick but with a sharp point, into the patient's eye socket just above the eyeball."

"Yikes," Elizabeth said, making a face. "And then the patients were blind?"

"No, the eyeball wasn't affected at all. The needle went over it into the inside of the skull. When the doctor hit the bone of the skull with the needle, he took a small hammer, and after a few blows, the bone gave way." Katherine clarified what she meant with hand motions. "The orbital wall is fragile, and you can pierce it quickly with a needle. And then the needle is in the brain. The doctor pushes it into the brain matter, circles the needle, and destroys the nerve tissue at that point. When you're done, he goes for the other eye or, better, the other brain region."

Nick and Elizabeth stared at her, and their faces revealed that they had just imagined the procedure.

"And why do you do shit like that?" asked Nick with furrowed brows. That was precisely the question Elizabeth wanted to ask, too.

"Well." Katherine raised her shoulders. "It was supposed to cure depression, Schizophrenia, psychosis, and even alcoholism. But most patients woke up after surgery with the mind of a toddler, and they no longer had their own personality, couldn't speak or walk."

"What bullshit!" Nick shook his head, uncomprehending.

Katherine took a long look at her husband and pressed her lips together. "Didn't seem to interest anyone. Anyway, the patients gave Freeman a run for his money back then. Because it was so convenient. After surgery, patients could usually go home. There was just some bruising around the eyes, except for the fact that there were a few deaths, too. But Freeman didn't care about that. The surgery was short and convenient and, therefore, popular. Freeman even envisioned a lunchtime surgery, after which you could go back to work."

"Or to the loony bin," Nick retorted. "And that's what your buddy did?" He looked at the psychiatrist with wide eyes.

"He's not exactly a buddy," Katherine said, shrugging again. "He's a former classmate. But yeah, he did that too. With mentally challenged people, therapy didn't work on them, even more so."

"Well, that's a lovely fellow," Nick grumbled, looking at his sister-in-law. "We'll talk to him some time; what do you say? Heard he brought his lawyer right along, though."

Elizabeth nodded slowly and got up from her chair. "We'll think of something."