Free Drakon by S.M. Stirling

collar.
    "How long did you know Mr. Fischer?" he asked, when the sobs subsided.
    "About two years. I didn't really know him. He . . . well, he was on the Equities desk, you know, and I'm in Analysis. I passed him every day coming in, talked a little, we went to lunch with some mutual friends occasionally."
    "Did you know his ex-wife?"
    "We met at the office Hanukkah party once. She was a lawyer—that's why they split up."
    Carmaggio raised his eyebrows.
    "Well, they both had seventy-hour weeks or worse," Jennifer went on. "We all do, but she was with Mikaels, Sung, Lawson & Finkelstein. She got involved with someone at her firm. Said she'd at least see him sometimes."
    "Mr. Fischer wasn't, mmm, involved with anyone here? Anyone that you knew of?"
    "Steve?" She blew her nose. "No, he wasn't the type. I think."
    "No business problems that you knew of, enemies?"
    She looked at him, surprise in her red-rimmed eyes. "In Equities? God, no, they don't deal with the public."
    "Promotion?"
    "Nothing special. His people over in Equities—"
    "—would know more, yes."
    "It has to be some awful psychopath, like that Dahmer or whatever his name was." She burst into fresh tears. "In the fridge, God."
    Carmaggio sighed; for once he more or less agreed with the amateur's take on it. This was going nowhere, although you had to cover all the bases. It was a good thing that the office here didn't have all the details, or they'd be even more hysterical.

    "Thank you again, Ms. Feinberg," he said. "Here's my number. If anything occurs to you, anything at all . . ."
    She nodded, wiping her nose and taking the card. Carmaggio shrugged into his overcoat and left.
    " De nada " Jesus said in the corridor, holding up his notebook. Carmaggio nodded. They were working their way steadily through everyone who'd known the victim, and accomplishing squat.
    "This isn't an ex-girlfriend or the guy he beat out for the promotion," he said quietly. "Stephen Fischer just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
    "At least we've got a make."
    Tall redhead in a black pantsuit, carrying a duffel bag, no positive ID on race—hell, it could be a fucking transie."
    Not according to the DNA, but that had gone crazy anyhow, and he found it even more difficult to believe in a woman doing what this perp had done. And he didn't believe a man could have done it, in the first place.
    He looked out the window at the driving snow, falling gray-white into the canyons of New York.
    Out there in his city was someone who pulled machinery apart to see how it worked, and sat at a computer running up Panix.com bills and eating egg foo yung while a body slowly rotted in the refrigerator.
    Someone who killed human beings with the casual precision of a leopard in a flock of sheep.
    She'd kill again, and again, until she was stopped. Henry Carmaggio hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat.
    "Let's get going."

CHAPTER FOUR
    "No, don't turn around," Gwen said quietly.
    The man hissed in pain as her fingers clenched on his upper arm. She walked behind him and to the right, down the crowded street. Neon blinked on the wet sidewalks, on the pedestrians in bulky clothing and on the umbrellas many of them carried. She was wearing . . . what was the word? A tracksuit. What the advertisement called the World's Finest Cold-Weather Athletic Clothing, with high-laced sports shoes. The clothes were far warmer than she needed, but the jacket had a hood that concealed most of her face, and they were baggy enough to let her body vanish inside.
    Few of the crowd looked at her, or at each other. They walked with a hurried, nervous determination that seemed characteristic here; heads slightly bowed, refusing to meet each other's eyes.
    Wafts of warmer air gusted up out of the subway stations, with a gagging reek of wastes and ozone. Cars splashed rooster-tail fans of dirty water onto the edges of the sidewalks, and sometimes beyond onto the legs of the