Present ...

The once handsome faces now stared back at her with dead, empty eyes. Sea-green and smoky violet-blue lifeless eyes gazed bleakly into nothingness, the long lashes sometimes still mascaraed black. Eyes whose last sight had been incomprehensible horror. Made-up mouths that were now only distorted black holes. Frozen in an eternal silent scream.

Detective Jane Rizzoli of Boston Homicide, sat alone in the task force conference room, gazing at the photomontage on the 'wall'. Resting her head on her hands, she gently rubbed her temples with her index fingers, which throbbed painfully under the ever-growing pressure. Police reports, folders containing investigative reports, newspaper clippings, and interrogation transcripts were scattered along the length of the conference table. In the background, in a corner of the packed room, a television screen showed snow flurries after the recording ended with the grisly video. Glaring neon lights on the ceiling illuminated the five new crudely screened photographs that lay on the table in front of her. A new one for "The Wall."

The families of the eleven missing young women had each been asked to drop off a recent photo of the girls for identification purposes. Pictures from prom, high school, and college parties, yearbook photos, and job application photos smiled down from the glass board, somberly dubbed "the wall" by members of the task force. More often than not, more photos than necessary were delivered, three, five, even ten in one case. From years of experience in homicide, Jane knew that it was inhumane to let someone choose just one picture as a summary of their child's or sister's entire life. It would be almost cynical to ask for such a thing. So the most helpful photos of each girl ended up on the "wall" and the rest were silently filed away. The pretty faces were pinned to the glass board in chronological order, starting from the date of their disappearance, not the one when their bodies were finally discovered.

Below the cheerful snapshots hung, in disturbing contrast, pictures of the naked and broken bodies of nine of the missing women, the very last photos that would ever be taken of them. Neon-colored tapes held the collages of five crime scenes and autopsy photos each to the wall that by now took up almost the entire length of the conference room. A ghostly album of before and after images.

Sandwiched between the life and death photos were neatly printed index cards with the woman's name, age, and a brief description, date, and place of her disappearance. The last line gave the date and place of discovery of the body and the time of death estimated by the Medical Examiner. It was superfluous to state the cause of death. The glossy photos on the "wall" documented it all too obvious.

Jane took a sip of cold Starbucks coffee and contemplated, as she had hundreds of times before, each girl's harrowing face, her once trusting eyes widened in fear at death. What had they had to see in the last moments of their short lives before it went black around them and they were redeemed?

They were all so young. Most in their early twenties, three had not even been lucky enough to live to that age. The youngest was barely eighteen, the oldest twenty-five. Photos from their lifetimes showed teasing pouts, beaming inviting smiles. Blonde locks curled down to their shoulders; another wore her platinum blonde hair short and tousled, and yet another had a sleek honey blonde mane that fell down her back. All had been blond and had been very beautiful when they were alive. So beautiful, in fact, that six of the girls had their modeling agencies' set cards hanging on the "wall."

In the last eighteen months, eleven women had disappeared into the tropical Boston night, lost in crowded nightclubs and trendy hangouts in South Boston, Little Italy, and West End, where the rich, beautiful, and famous danced and partied. Weeks, sometimes months, after their disappearances, the mutilated nude bodies of nine of the women had been discovered, in remote, abandoned locations across the state of Massachusetts. The sites were widely scattered and unpredictable: an old sugar refinery, a crack house closed by police, an abandoned supermarket.

The killer, however, had not tried to hide the bodies or cover up his crimes; rather, he had properly staged them for their final discovery. And it was obvious that he arranged each woman's death as systematically as he arranged her disappearance, with a ferocity that would turn the stomach of even the most thick-skinned investigator.

All these raped corpses bore the grisly, sick signature of a serial killer. Someone who picked his human prey seemingly at random from the crowd, for reasons only his twisted brain could understand. A devil so hardened that he deliberately chose his victims in front of hundreds of witnesses; who preyed on them so barbarically that his brutality had earned him the macabre nickname Boogeyman.

Each of the women had been slashed in the truest sense of the word: once vertically from throat to belly and once horizontally along under the breasts. Then, with an unknown object, their chests had been pried open and their ribs broken, even smashed. And finally, the victims' hearts had been cut out of their chests. They had remained missing until today. Boogeyman had left the destroyed breast open; where the heart had been, a bloody hole yawned. Each of the young women had been found naked, in a final obscene position, and each had been sexually abused before her death, both vaginally and anally, with one or more unknown objects. Some even after their deaths.

Twelve officers and investigators had now been assigned full time to the task force Boogeyman: They came from police departments from across Massachusetts. At the behest of Governor Bush, the BPD Homicide Division had converted the conference room in their Operations Center to serve as the headquarters for the task force. They had also donated the services of a profiler and a part-time secretary, a fax machine, and a copier. Investigators had then installed the glass wall on the wall of the new headquarters. Then, after ten months, six missing women, three dead bodies, and not a single lead, the BPD had also provided the services of detective Jane Rizzoli. Jane's first order of business had been to acquire a larger glass wall.

Two cheap wooden shelves and a filing cabinet had been shoved into the corners to make room for the copier, three computers, and the many cardboard boxes piled against the walls. The mementos and medals, trophies, awards, and photos previously hung there had given way to the "wall" and now lay in a messy pile on top of the filing cabinet. Cardboard boxes were piled high with green folders containing investigation reports, missing person reports, police reports, tips, and interrogation protocols. Material that detailed everything of the last months, days, and minutes of the young women's lives. Another stack of boxes contained the victims' bank statements, their diaries, calendars, letters, photo albums, and emails. Their most personal and intimate possessions, their most secret thoughts, facts, and details, they had forever become a part of the Massachusetts state archives.

With neon pink tape, she slowly pinned five photos to the glass wall, under the index card labeled MARILYN SIBAN, 19.

Without those cards, it would be next to impossible to match the lost-and-found photos with the correct portrait of the victim. The once flawless faces were puffy and bloated; peach-colored skin was now ashen, leaden gray, or worse, a rotting, oozing black. Where a white smile shone before, maggots now writhed on a swollen bluish tongue. Once golden locks or platinum blonde manes were encrusted with black blood. In Boston's currently hot and humid climate, decomposition proceeded apace. Often the corpses were virtually unrecognizable; they could only be identified by their dentition imprint.

Jane's gaze wandered over the wall, searching for something that wasn't visible. Nicolette Torrence, twenty-three; Andrea Gallagher, twenty-five; Hannah Cordova, twenty-two; Krystal Pierce, eighteen; Cyndi Sorenson, twenty-four; Janet Gleeder, twenty; Trisha McAllister, eighteen; Lydia Bronton, twenty-one. Marilyn Siban, nineteen. Two more portrait photographs smiled down at her from the end of the "wall," their index cards not yet fully completed.

Morgan Weber, twenty-one, was last seen May 20th at the Clevelander Bar in Boston, and Anna Prado, twenty-four, was last seen Sept. 1 at a nightclub called Level in Sea Port District. Two more missing persons. All both were presumed dead.

Jane took one last sip from her paper cup before throwing it into a trash can. Actually, she had firmly resolved to cut down on caffeine, but since Cyndi Sorenson and Lydia Bronton had been found within a week of each other last month, she had become rather inconsistent. She looked out the small window. In the light of the streetlights, the barbed wire fence around the evidence hall across the street cast jagged shadows across the empty BPD parking lot. The people who worked there had long since called it a day, and it was pitch black outside. On the conference table was a thick brown folder, its contents scattered among the police reports and notepads. The folder was brand new.

Because of the advanced stage of decomposition of Marilyn's Stanton's body, the medical examiner had been unable to settle on an exact time of death. He estimated that death had occurred sometime within the last four to two weeks. This meant that Boogeyman had held her captive for at least two weeks before finally allowing her to die. Scrawled in the upper right corner of the folder was the number 44 with a circle around it, the number of autopsy and lost and found photos. Jane had pinned five of them to the "wall."

Just two days ago, BPD officers had found the nineteen-year-old girl's body during special weapons SWAT training at an abandoned military facility, in an abandoned missile silo and weapons storage facility owned by the U.S. Navy. When the training unit kicked open the silo's metal door during a raid exercise, officers were met with the unmistakable stench of decay. In one corner of the abandoned facility, someone had partitioned off with a few old sheets and blankets that formed a makeshift tent with the help of a tightly stretched nylon cord. At first, the officers thought it was a homeless man's camp, or perhaps children had broken into the old building and built a fort; the stench was probably coming from a dead animal. Until they pulled back the covers and discovered the remains of the former model.

Marilyn's naked body had been placed on the dirty cement floor, her head leaning unnaturally upright against a rusty oil drum. Her long, ash blonde hair was tied in a tight ponytail, which the perpetrator had taped to the lid of the barrel so that her head was pulled upward with her neck stretched through it. Her mouth and eyes were open. Most of the skin on her body was rotting and blistering in the heat, some of it falling off to expose decaying tissue and muscle fibers. The legs were dislocated from the hips and spread wide, forced into a grotesque split, the arms hanging down, the bones left from the fingers stuck in the pubic. And as with all the victims, Boogeyman had left his signature. The chest had been cut open, and a hole yawned where the sternum had broken open. The large amount of blood on the cement under her body and the pattern of blood splatter on the sheets indicated that she had been killed on the spot. The cause of death was determined to be severing of the aorta and removal of the heart muscle. The ME couldn't say whether Marilyn had been conscious, but in any case, she had been alive when her heart was cut from her chest.

She had disappeared from the Liquid Club in South Boston on a Friday night about two months ago. The four friends with whom she had frequented the crowded nightclub had testified that she had only gone to the bar to get a drink, but she never returned. Her clique had assumed that she had met someone with whom she had then left, and so Marilyn wasn't reported missing to the Boston Police Department until two days later when she failed to show up for her shift at the restaurant where she waitressed on the side. The photo her parents had given to the police was from her last shoot for a thrift store, just two days before she disappeared.

Forensics would spend the next five days turning over every inch of the silo, warehouse, and surrounding area, but Jane wasn't getting her hopes up too high.

If this location was anything like the other eight sites, there would be no footprints, no semen, no hair, no foreign DNA, nothing. The BPD forensic team had spent the last forty-eight hours searching the immediate area for tire prints, footprints, cigarette butts, clothing, or any weapons, to no avail. The former military complex was far from any passable road or possible witnesses. The nearest gas station was nearly ten miles away. The compound was secured only by a chain-link fence and numerous signs forbidding entry; a padlock hung from the gate that even a two-year-old child could have picked.

The whole thing was so damn frustrating. After eight months of special investigation, they were still no closer to finding the killer. Or the killers. And the frequency of the cases was accelerating. The alarming violence inflicted on each body was becoming more extreme, and yet the killer's approach remained strangely systematic and controlled. But he was becoming more hardened, more confident. He challenged the police. Some victims he had killed on the spot, others he had first tortured and murdered and only then brought and provocatively staged the bodies to the place where they would eventually have to be found. Why did he deal with some in this way and with some differently? The places where the bodies were found were carefully constructed and deliberately chosen. Why? What was the message behind it? Two of the earlier victims, Nicolette Torrence and Hannah Cordova, had been found, by the coroner's estimate, only days after their deaths. And they had both been reported missing the week before their discovery. Meanwhile, Boogeyman was apparently allowing himself more time with his victims; he seemed to be experimenting. For months passed between the disappearance of a woman and the discovery of her body.

The serial killer was constantly and mercilessly reported in the media. At each scene where the body was found, the press put on a giant circus with their OB vans, live reports, and flashbulbs. News stations from all over the country, indeed the world, had set up camp in Boston to report on the "countless bestial murders" that "completely overwhelmed the police." Audacious, ambitious reporters scrambled to be first in front of the body bags. Then, on the national broadcast, they struggled to mask their excitement that another Boogeyman victim had been found. Now, back to the studio.

Jane ran a hand through her curly black hair and heaved a sigh. She had barely slept four hours in the last two days. She tugged thoughtfully at her lower lip and furrowed her eyebrows. Even though she looked quite well, at least dressed, inside she felt with each passing year that the burden she was carrying was getting heavier. It was the job, and cases like that. They sucked any life force out of her, no matter how hard she tried to keep everything at a distance. In each of the young, pretty, fresh faces she saw a daughter, a friend, a sister. She had worked homicide for years. Every year she swore this would be the last case, took it upon herself to apply for a transfer to the fraud squad, where it was always so quiet that everyone called it a day at 5 p.m. She was so happy to be there. But the years came and went, and here she was, still agonizing over dead bodies and with search warrants at 3 a.m. For some strange reason, she felt she couldn't help it. She would find no peace until the last killer was caught, the last victim atoned for. And that, unfortunately, would probably never happen.

Jane knew that every criminal made mistakes. Every single one. And even serial killers left a calling card. She had worked four serial killings in her career, including Charles Hoyt and the Boston Strangler copycat. Looking again at the crime scenes of notorious serial killers who had been caught, their mistakes, from a historical perspective, so to speak, were quite obvious. You just had to know where to look. Son of Sam, the real Boston Strangler, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer.

You just had to know where to look.

She looked at the "wall" trying to find the missing link that no one saw. On the opposite wall hung aerial photos of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, peppered with red and blue stickers. The red dots were concentrated in South Boston. They marked the places where victims had disappeared.

The blue ones, on the other hand, were spread all over the perimeter of Boston.

It was 9 p.m. In the glow of the neon lights, Jane reached for a folder and reread the interview of Shelly Hodges, one of the last people to see her friend Marilyn Siban alive. "It was too crowded to order from the waitress. They just took forever. Marilyn said she saw some people she knew at the bar and wanted to get a Martini there. That was the last time I saw her."

A few people she knew. Plural. Could there really be more than one perpetrator? Usually, serial killers worked alone, but there were memorable exceptions, the Hillside Strangler, for example, two murdering cousins from California. Just assuming there was more than one, Marilyn must have known her killers or at least trusted them enough to voluntarily leave the premises with them. For a while, they had suspected that all the victims had known their killer. Why else would they have voluntarily just left their friends in crowded bars? But in that case, they should have been able to find a link between the circles of people around at least some of the victims. But as far as they had determined, neither of thae victims knew each other, nor did they have any mutual acquaintances. No two of the girls had modeled for the same client or agency. They had been unable to find any connection at all. Jane's thoughts went in circles, and she looked at the glass wall again.

All one had to do was know where to look.

It was time to go home. There was nothing left to do tonight, and there was no one left to do it. Jane gathered the reports from the table and put them back in the new brown folder. She closed the video of Siban's crime scene on the TV screen and flipped her laptop shut. At that moment, her cell phone rang. "Rizzoli."

"Detective Rizzoli, this is Officer Lou Ribero. Listen, I think we have some good news for you and your fellow detectives. It looks like we caught your boogeyman. And he's got his latest victim with him, too."