Rhymes With Prey by Jeffery Deaver

metal sheets and bars and rods, welded or soldered or bolted together. Bronze mostly, but some iron and steel and copper. It was as if he couldn’t bear to have a space in his studio not presided over by one of his ladies.
    And ladies in extremis.
    Though the works were impressionistic, there was no doubt what each one depicted, a woman in pain, just as horrific as Lucas Davenport had described. Bent over backward, on all fours, tied down on their backs, crying in agony, pleading. Some were pierced by lengths of rebar reinforcing rods.
    She forced herself to look past the disturbing sculptures and get to work. Just because Verlaine apparently killed himself, Amelia didn’t search any less carefully. After all, suicide is technically a homicide. That the perp and the vic are the same simply means the investigators don’t have to hump as hard as in murder. But they still have to hump.
    And in this case, of course, there was a lot at stake, even after Verlaine’s death. She was well aware that the sculptor might’ve kidnapped and stashed another victim somewhere else, chained underground, with only a few days to live before she died of thirst or bled out—if he’d been having some of his sick fun with her.
    Amelia searched the hell out of the scene.
    First, she processed the body, photographing and filming, then clearing and bagging the Glock he’d used, collecting the one spent nine-millimeter shell, swabbing his hands for gunshot residue and wrapping them in plastic bags as well.
    She bagged his Dell laptop, along with the phone and iPad, noting that there’d been no hard copy or e-version suicide notes. She’d just run a case where a man’s farewell before leaping off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge had been tweeted.
    Amelia searched the way she always did, walking the grid. This involved pacing step by step in a straight line from one end of the scene to the other and then turning around, moving slightly to the side, and returning. And then, when she was done with that, she covered the same ground again, perpendicular to the first search.
    For an hour she walked the grid, taking samples of trace. She collected the necklaces and crosses in the alcove. Seeing them up close, Amelia realized that several of them looked familiar—and finally she knew why. In the pictures Verlaine had shown to her and Lily in the bar, the women he was playing his S&M games with had all been wearing necklaces like these. Yes, Lucas was right, they were trophies. Trophies not of the murder victims, but of his sexual conquests.
    Then she turned to the steel door Lucas had told them about, the one leading to the basement. It had been unlocked when the team entered and she and Lily had cleared it fast. Now she searched it from the point of view of a forensic cop. The small underground chamber was brick-lined and had a raw concrete floor. The smells were of heating oil, mold, standing water, and sweat. Maybe that last scent was her imagination but she thought not.
    She looked at the hooks protruding from the walls, the stains on the floor. Amelia walked down a set of rickety stairs into the thoroughly creepy place. She ran a fast fluorescein test on several of the dark patches; the results confirmed her initial hypothesis of blood. And there was no doubt about the bits of dark, elastic curls she popped into evidence bags. She knew dried flesh when she saw it.
    Her gloved finger hit TRANSMIT and a moment later she heard Lincoln’s impatient voice. “Sachs. Where the hell are you?”
    â€œOn the other side of the steel door. In Verlaine’s basement.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œIt’s almost a home run.”
    â€œThat’s like being nearly pregnant. But I’ll forgive the sloppy metaphor just this once. Get the evidence back ASAP.”
    He disconnected without a good-bye.

    LUCAS WAS STAYING AT THE Four Seasons on Fifty-seventh Street. He was lying in bed with his toenails