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dead. One of them had a broken leg: the first blow with the bar or whatever weapon had been used had missed the head. There was very little head left. After the blow that crippled it, it had been beaten to death in a frenzy. There was a sign in English and Chinese on the compound that read MR. AND MRS. SHEEP AND FAMILY . The family was a single lamb that had had its throat cut. Along the path that led away from the compound there were two dead rabbits and, crushed and twisted around the base of the trunk, a guinea fowl.
    In the bird section, all the cages had been broken open and whatever lived inside there beaten to a pulp where they roosted.
    It had happened at night, in the rain: whatever lived in all the cages had been asleep, safe, sheltering, bunched-up together.
    There was a Chinese ring-necked pheasant a little way up the wooden path, its wings spread out in an attitude of a stiff, silent glide. It had been gutted. As he turned it over with his hand, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer drew in his breath. Feiffer said softly, "God in Heaven—" He stood up from the bird and looked across to where Constables Yan and Lee were also with the dead animals. He saw Lee stand up and shake his head.
    Yat's Animal and Bird Life Park and Children's Zoo covered a little over three acres, set up in a series of meandering circular paths that took in all the cages and compounds arranged around them and then traveled off onto steps and little picnic areas.
    All the animals and birds had had names. Benny . On the sign wired to a cage past the pheasant there was a cartoon of a yellow-billed macaw leaning down from a tree reading a newspaper. The newspaper said in Chinese, MACAWS VOTED ZOO'S MOST POPULAR PET. It was dead. One of its clipped wings had been severed at the root and it lay dead and ugly and misshapen at the bottom of its cage in its own dung.
    A little farther up the path, the kangaroo enclosure had been hit. Feiffer read the sign. They were not even kangaroos, they were wallabies, less than four feet high. There had been four of them. He had come to see them once with his own son. When he had seen them it was a warm day and they had all been lying around on the grass picking at their fur with their front paws waiting to be let out into the picnic area at lunchtime to see what they could mooch.
    Everything, everything was dead. Everything.
    In the night, in the rain something awful had come by this way and in the night, in the silence—dark and silent itself—methodically, maybe even in some mad order, it had climbed all the fences or broken into all of the cages or merely caught hold of anything that was free and harmless on the paths or at the base of the trees, and it had slaughtered them.
    There had been what looked like a bite mark on the neck of the pheasant.
    Feiffer took out a cigarette and lit it.
    Ting . It was the name of a tiny spider monkey that hung down from its parrotlike perch and wooden box by a litter bin. There was a cartoon on the perch: if you handed Ting your small piece of litter—your candy bar wrapper or tissue or even something you brought with you for the occasion—he would toss it into the litter bin for you. Hanging from one leg by the silver chain that tethered it to its pole, it looked with its stiffened fingers like a dead child.
    Feiffer must have dropped the cigarette without noticing. He put his hands together and rubbed at his palms and the cigarette was gone.
    Across the picnic area, Constable Yan yelled out in a strange voice to Constable Lee coming toward him, "How many?" and Lee called back in the same, stilled, ghastly tone, "Sixty-four."
    Everything was dead.
    Before it had stopped at dawn, the rain had washed anything out that might have helped: a single footprint—anything.
    Everything was dead.
    There was a large colored sign with a cartoon of what looked like a cross between a Chinese junk and a giant wooden barge full of animals stuck into the ground ahead of him with