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bed. He wasn’t a neatnik, but his home did remain pristine. He didn’t spend much time here. Since setting foot on American soil a year earlier he’d been kept busy. He liked to be busy.
    But a busy mind was not always favorable. Distilling, releasing the outside world upon arrival home, was always important.
    A shower felt necessary after picking through the Creed woman’s home. How one person could collect so much material stuff and jam it all into the small loft was beyond him. Though it had been an interesting collection of things. The artifacts and books had clashed oddly with the baseball team pendants and pink ruffled pillows.
    Inspecting the shine on his loafers he inadvertently noticed a streak of peanut butter on one of his shirt cuffs. He rubbed at it but it smeared. He should tend it with an ice cube and some spot cleaner. The dry cleaner never pressed his shirts the way he preferred, with the collars creased.
    Unhooking his cuff links, he then unbuttoned the crisp white shirt and discarded it on the suit coat. Unbuttoning his pants, he let them hang loosely at his hips. Starting for the shower, he remembered, and swung around to probe the inner pocket of his coat.
    He drew out the biopsy tool and inspected the bloodied tip. The stainless-steel blade was curved, curled the length much like the large cheese corer he’d used as a child. A bone extractor. A tool of his trade.
    The contents—skin, blood and bone—were still intact.
    Foregoing a shower, he pushed open the closet door—the only door in his small apartment beyond the front entrance—and padded inside. Groping through the darkness, his fingers snagged a hanging chain and tugged. A fluorescent light beamed across the interior. The closet was as large as the bedroom. Two suits hung from the bar just inside to the right.
    The walls were paneled in bamboo. A sisal mat stretched before a small dark wood shrine, bare right now.
    At the far side of the room a stainless-steel counter stretched three feet along the wall. Above it a glass shelf held many vials, syringes and jars. His work area.
    On the topmost shelf he kept a small library of grimoires and herbal references. It had cost a pretty penny to have these precious items shipped overseas. Yet shipping expenses had been covered. Not exactly a perk of his job, more like a necessary evil.
    Touching a flat switch set above the counter focused a spotlight on the table. Thumbing a box of small waxed papers, he drew one out. The snick of paper leaving cardboard pleased him.
    Serge tapped the blade handle against the steel counter. The tiny bit of Annja Creed dislodged and landed on the small rectangle of waxed paper.
    Using surgical tweezers and looking through a magnifying lens, Serge separated flesh and muscle from bone. He used his forefinger to swipe away the blood and marrow from the bone. It was a good sample. It didn’t crumble as some did. Sickness, age and addiction tended to weaken human bone, which was made of minerals, collagen and water.
    “Strong bone structure.”
    He was impressed. In his experience, women generally had honeycomblike bones, especially those living in the United States. The American female’s diet was atrocious. Copious sugar and caffeine, and never enough calcium. Of course, this woman was still young and, judging from her physical skills—and ignoring her kitchen inventory—took good care of her body.
    He tapped a few drops of alcohol onto the pencil-eraser-size sample to clean it. It wasn’t necessary to sanitize it. He just needed the bone clean. A small wet tissue cleared away the remaining flesh and blood. He would deposit the bone in a mortar and crush it—
    The cell phone vibrating in his pants pocket disturbed his concentration. Serge reached for a glass vial and coaxed the bone into it. A rubber stopper closed it securely.
    He answered on the fourth ring. He did not say his name. Only one person in the city—the entire country—had this