Precious Blood is set in New York City, a couple of years after 9/11. The story opens with the discovery of the brutal murder of a Hutchins College law student. The hero, Edward Jenner, is a medical examiner who has withdrawn from forensics — and from the world — burnt out after 9/11. But the victim is the roommate of Ana DeJong, his friend's niece, and Jenner is dragged out of retirement to investigate her death. Almost a year after he last examined a body, Jenner waits to enter the crime scene...

They had found her in the East Village, nailed to the wall of a railroad flat in a townhouse on Tompkins Square Park.

Jenner waited on a bench in the park, a six-block expanse of grass, trees, walkways and basketball courts. Despite the cold, a few Brazilians were kicking a soccer ball around on the paved area in front of him.

The park was much better kept than it used to be. Although his loft was barely fifteen minutes walk away, he was surprised by how polished the neighborhood had become since he’d been out of circulation. Back when he’d first started at the medical examiner’s office, another murder in the Ninth Precinct would have raised few eyebrows, but everything was changing so quickly.

The punks and neo-hippies had been shoehorned out of their squats, replaced by a cheery wave of young families, students, models, and trendy Japanese kids who, like everyone else in the East Village, had escaped to New York to reinvent themselves. The punks and neo-hippies now panhandled sullenly on the edges of the park, usually with a bandana’d half-pit-bull puppy at their feet to amp up compassion. Occasionally, a grimy anarchist, unable to accept that his territory had long since been overrun by McLaren strollers and yoga mats, would provoke a "confrontation" with a patrol cop, and a mini-demonstration would erupt among the street kids, only to fall casualty to sunshine, talls of St. Ides' Malt Liquor and general ambivalence.

Across the street, a young officer, beefy in Kevlar vest and winter coat, stood by the yellow crime scene tape in front of the townhouse, talking with a woman holding a laundry bag. Lieutenant Rad Garcia of the Manhattan South Homicide squad stuck his head out of the front door, spoke to the officer, then motioned Jenner over.

Jenner stood and stretched stiffly. The ball bounced towards him; he trapped it neatly, then kicked it to one of the Brazilians – rudimentary soccer skills, one of the vestiges of a junior year at the University of London. He crossed Seventh to the townhouse. The officer nodded at him, lifting the tape to let him in.

Three seventy-seven East Seventh Street was one of the nicer buildings, a two family brick townhouse with blue window boxes and a low front wall separating the small concrete front yard from the sidewalk.

Andrea Delore lived - had lived – in the top floor-through. Walking up the steps, Jenner noticed a dark brown smear just below the knob of the front door; he was struck by how blood always stood out. Above the buzzer was a small rectangular frame, with the words "DELORE/JONG" written in neat capitals. Broad smudges of black fingerprint powder bloomed around the buzzer and door frame; pushing the door open, Jenner saw the smudging carried over onto the inside frame.

The hallway air was stiflingly hot and thick, almost sticky with the smell of death. He paused in the open doorway and looked back down the front steps. Behind him, the cop was waving back the first of the sightseers. Jenner watched him return to chatting up the woman with the laundry, and then realized he was stalling, avoiding going in.

The stairwell was long and narrow, the yellowing floor a honeycomb mosaic of small cream and black tiles, black wainscoting on the walls. The stairwell had been decorated with arty, black-framed photographs, black and white, some close-ups of tribal-style tattoos, some female nudes, and some female nudes with tribal-style tattoos. On the first landing he saw a Russian-looking religious triptych in a gilt frame that looked as if it had been stolen from a church.

Lieutenant Garcia was waiting for him, leaning on the balustrade on the third floor landing. Black hair slicked back, moustache neatly trimmed, the smell of Aramis rising off him in waves, Garcia looked sleeker and better groomed than Jenner remembered; the homicide squad was suiting him nicely. Garcia had always been a popular cop, a man who could drink with the uniforms, flirt with the support staff and joke with the bosses. He’d quickly risen from detective to sergeant and now lieutenant, quickly borne aloft on the post-9/11 retirements.

He straightened, and they shook hands warmly. “Hey, Jenner. Good to see you.” He gestured behind him. “Joey Roggetti from the Ninth is the lead – bit of a hotshot, but he’s basically an okay guy. Crime Scene’s nearly finished. Whittaker left the body up.”

He paused for a second, then put a hand on Jenner’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Listen: it’s pretty ugly in there. You don’t need to go in – I can just bring the scene photos by. You sure you want to do this?”

Jenner flushed. “Her family isn’t paying me to sit around looking at pictures. Besides, it’s not like I haven’t done this before – I’m fine, Rad.”

He looked down the hall, past Garcia. Two crime scene detectives were dusting for latent prints. The older one, Mike Seeley, saw Jenner's reflection in the oval stand mirror he was processing, turned and gestured with a nod of his head.

"Hey, Doc. She's in there."

The directions were unnecessary; dazzling white light flooded the hall from the room just ahead to his right, and Jenner could hear the repeated click of a camera shutter.

The room was large, enormous for the neighborhood, with high ceilings. The broad archway of the entrance reminded Jenner of a music hall stage, the theatrical feel enhanced by two high-wattage stand lamps set up by Crime Scene.

At first, he couldn't see her body through all the cops. A meaty guy in his thirties, in a dark olive suit, tie limp around his thick neck, was talking with two criminalists and a uniformed cop. Joey Roggetti, Jenner assumed. They were standing in an arc in front of the body, intensely lit by the Crime Scene lamps; it reminded Jenner a bit of one of those life-sized nativity scenes. They parted as he walked towards them, and Jenner saw the girl's body.

He could feel Garcia watching him as he walked towards her, the tension filling his chest with every step, the smell of her blood thickening in his nostrils. It had been a long time.
But as he drew close, he felt no difference, no dramatic change. There was no blood rushing in his ears, his heart didn’t shudder in his chest the way it did in a panic attack.

Did this mean he finally alright? He’d been gone almost a year, months on the couch waiting to feel normal again, watching Jerry Springer as his cat nudged at the ice cream container on his chest. And now he was right back there, and he hadn’t changed at all. The smell of blood, the smoke of burning dust rising from the lamps, Christ, even the way he’d just walked up and been ushered into the fucking building, it was all the same.

And when he saw the body, the little wash of revulsion that passed through him wasn’t about the girl at all: it was about him. He felt himself encysting, like some kind of parasite secreting a protective shell around itself as it burrowed deep into the flesh. The girl didn’t make him feel anything; it was just another body, not a girl any more. A case.

The man had nailed her to the wall, and then rearranged the lamps in the room to illuminate her as she hung there. A white couch had been dragged opposite her, a comfortable place for him to sit and admire his handiwork; the fabric had smeared blood from where he’d sat.

And there was something odd, too: in front of her pinned, outstretched left arm, a muted TV set pumped a barrage of fast cut images, the MTV logo floating in the corner. Had he put her up, and then just sat down and watched TV?

Jenner looked at her, hanging like a horror show waxwork, naked, spread-eagled, upside down, her body a pale X caked with blood. Hardware store-shiny bolts nailed her feet to the wall. Red wheals criss-crossed her body, the skin broken along curving lines.

He needed to take her down, get her down fast. She’d hung there long enough, stared at, exposed, vulnerable. Dead.

He turned to Detective Roggetti, muttered an introduction, and asked for gloves.

"Sorry, Doc. I could ask the uniforms outside, they probably do."

Detective Seeley called, "We got some, Doc. Large do you?"

Jenner nodded, then caught the packet Seeley tossed his way. He looked for somewhere to put his overcoat; Roggetti said, "Just give it here, I'll hold it for you."

Jenner, now in shirt sleeves, tore open the packet and put on the gloves: thick rubber gloves, 9 1/2’s, textured fingers, kitchen-bright sink'n'dishes yellow. No matter how many times he'd gone through this ritual, the gloves always seemed out of place, a jolt of cheery normality inside the charnel house.

He looked at her again, unaware that the detectives were watching him. She’d bled heavily from her nose and mouth, but there was no obvious lethal injury. The body was threatening to slide from the wall, the head and neck kinked against the floor. Flicked across the white wall by her legs and trunk were twisting and curving spatters of drying blood, spatter cast-off from whatever he’d used to whip her.

Two bolts pinned her left foot to the wall, and another pierced the right, just by a small ankh tattoo.

Jenner turned. “Hey, Mikey – any trash bags over there?”

Seeley rummaged under the kitchen sink, pulled out a large black leaf bag and handed it to him. Jenner briefly scanned the floor, trying to catch patterns in the bloodstaining. He could make out nothing but pooling, fluid purge from her nose and mouth, worse because he’d nailed her up upside down.

“You guys finished processing here?”

Seeley nodded. “Photographed, swabbed, a once-over for trace – the white glove treatment, doc. Whittaker was bitching because we weren’t done by the time he got here. He didn’t want to wait for us to take her down. She’s all yours.”

Jenner nodded, then unfolded the plastic bag and laid it on the floor in front of the girl to protect himself from any invisible blood soaked into the carpet. He knelt on the bag, and began. He worked without effort, almost without thought, experienced hands moving fluidly, sliding methodically over her trunk, feeling for broken ribs, carefully moving the breasts to rule out hidden wounds.

He found a row of three identical oblongs of adhesive residue on one arm, each about the size of a poker chip; he waited while Seeley photographed them. He was calm. He was OK. He could do this.

He gently tilted her head to expose her neck. He rolled her lip down; the inner surface was split and bruised, the teeth intact. He looked at her eyes, the bright blue-green irides vivid against the hemorrhage in the whites. Her face was purple and congested, with countless tiny red dots in the skin; strangulation could cause blood vessels to pop like this, but so could the body position after death. Since there were no neck marks, and she was upside down, positional asphyxia was a real possibility.

He lifted her hair, draped wetly over the back of his hand, like a curtain on each side, and saw that her left earlobe was bloody and split, probably from a ripped-out earring. The right was torn too: probably deliberate.

He’d driven two bolts into each wrist, crushing through the small bones. Her yellow plastic Magilla Gorilla watch was still working.

“Anyone got a flashlight?”

He took Garcia’s Maglite, leaned forward again, and shone the beam over her mouth and cheeks. There was a faint tracery of whitish-gray particles on the cheeks, probably from a duct tape gag. What did he do with her hands? Was she conscious when he nailed her up?

He stood. “I need to get her down. Can I get a hand?”

Rad Garcia stepped up. “Let’s do it.”

The two knelt in front of her, awkwardly supporting her shoulders and head as Seeley tugged at the loosened bolts at her ankles. They went slowly, lifting her away from the wall so she didn’t fall; in the heat of the lights, Jenner could feel the sweat plastering his shirt against his skin. As the ankle bolts came out, her body lurched forward, and Jenner braced her bare hip against the wall with his shoulder as Seeley struggled to control her calves.

“Gently…”

Seeley guided her legs as they moved her carefully out onto the carpet and laid her out. Garcia and Seeley stood, slightly out of breath; Jenner squatted by her body, rolling her onto her side; he could see no wounds on her back.