Korsak hung over Maura's desk, engrossed in several activities at once: He was eating his breakfast burrito, drinking café con leche, and reading the Boston Globe, which he had spread across her files. Jane was talking into her cell phone. They both turned to her as the door opened.

Korsak looked up from breakfast and smiled. "Hi, Maura. How are you? You gave us quite a scare back there."

Jane looked at Maura and ended their conversation. "I'll see you later. The DA just got back from court." She hung up and eyed her. She looked seriously concerned.

"Where have you been? We were worried you might have eloped." She and Maura had been friends for some time, that friendship had crept in over the late nights the detective and the lawyer had worked together.

Korsak held out a paper cup of hot coffee to Maura. The scent of pure, liquid caffeine alone caused hair to grow on her chest. "Café con leche? I brought you an extra one. And a pastelito with guava jam." He slid her a Cuban cupcake with pink filling. "Oh, by the way," he said between bites into his burrito, "I've got some of Prado's autopsy photos here; you might want to eat before you look at them."

Maura slammed the briefcase down on a cabinet. "How did you guys get in here?"

"Your secretary Cara let us in," Korsak explained, wiping egg yolk and sauce from his beard. "Hey, could you maybe introduce me to her?"

Maura's opinion of Vince Korsak, who had hitherto stood high in her esteem as a detective, sank into the bottomless pit. She ignored his question.

"So, what was going on with you in the courtroom?" wanted Jane to know, trying not to look too sympathetic. "Why did he upset you like that?"

"What a stupid motherfucker," Korsak interrupted. "Did he really think he was going to get out on bail! That the judge wouldn't send him straight to jail for driving around with a dead girl in his trunk. Don't pass go, friend; don't collect four thousand dollars. I can still hear him screeching, over there in the den, like a girl." Korsak disguised his voice: "No! Not to jail! Not me, I can't stand it! This is a mistake! I didn't mean to cut her heart out, Your Honor, the knife just slipped out of my hand and into her chest!" He finished his burrito and continued. "Well, he'll be surprised when he meets his new best friend Bubba over at the state pen later. He'll have a real reason to cry then."

Jane still had her eyes fixed on Maura. Korsak's little speech hadn't distracted her from her question. "I'm sure he's a psycho. But I didn't think he'd flip out like that." Jane had stood up and tried to look Maura in the eye. "Then again, you've seen a lot of psychos in your life, Maura, and I didn't think you'd freak out either."

Maura avoided her and stared instead at Korsak's mess on her desk. She hoped her voice sounded normal now. "True, he threw me for a moment. I didn't expect him to yell like that." Then she changed the subject. "How was the ME's office this morning?" She looked at the spread-out newspaper. On the front page of the Boston Globe, passport photos of all ten victims were lined up dramatically. Below them was a large snapshot of Bantling's black Jaguar, surrounded by squad cars on Interstate. Next to it was the cool, handsome Bill Bantling, smiling, in swimming trunks with a can of beer in his hand. Obviously not the photo for the mug shot. Above this colorful collage, the bold headline screamed: Boogeyman suspect arrested! The mutilated body of the tenth victim was discovered in the trunk!

Korsak wiped the crumbs from the muckraking newspaper. "Neilson says Prado had been dead fourteen, fifteen hours at the most, probably closer to ten. He thinks the body had only been in the trunk two or three hours before we found it. Cause of death: the severing of the aorta. From the amount of oxygen in the lungs, the doctor concludes she was still alive when her heart was cut out."

Joe Neilson was the Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was good and held in high regard by the District Attorney's Office. Maura took a deep breath and looked at the row of beautiful, dead girls. „Is it the same perpetrator, or are we dealing with a copycat?"

Jane opened the box on the floor and pulled ten photos from a folder. "The wounds are identical. First a vertical cut along the sternum, with a sharp instrument, probably a scalpel. Then the horizontal cut underneath. The same cuts on the aorta. It certainly wasn't a botched job."

"Can he tell if the cuts came from the same knife?" Anna Prado's ashen face stared back at Maura from the photo. Platinum blond hair slicked back on the steel table. Close-ups showed the two-deep cross-shaped incisions, the broken ribs, and the yawning hole where her heart should have been. The cuts were smooth, like the others. Not like Maura's own jagged scars.

"Probably," Korsak said, "he's not through with the autopsy yet, but he found something else interesting. Looks like Prado may have had a drug in her blood. So did Nicolette Torrence, the body we found in the crack house in the attic last October. She had only been there a few days."

"Neilson said the weight of her lungs suggests she had some kind of narcotic in her system. But we won't know anything for sure until the tox screens are in," Jane added.

Maura nodded slowly. "What about sexual abuse?"

"Yes, she was raped with a blunt instrument, both vaginally and anally," Jane said slowly. Maura sensed that it was these details that bothered the Italian the most. "Severe injuries to the cervix and uterus. Neilson assumes he used more than one object, hence the various cuts and abrasions on the uterine wall. There were no traces of semen. But he's still taking samples of everything. And he's taking pictures of every inch of her body in case we miss anything and need it again later."

"What about the fingernails?" It was well known that victims often scratched their attacker when trying to fend off an attack, and the attacker often unwillingly revealed a tiny bit of himself, even if only microscopic skin flakes. In doing so, he left a genetic calling card, his DNA, that could lead directly to his front door if investigators got a sample for comparison.

"Nothing. Nothing like that this time either, as far as Neilson can see." In this case, it was the other way around: they now had the comparison pattern, but no biological trace on the victim.

"I'll put in the request to get hair and mucus samples from Bantling. You never know. Maybe he goofed this time. Or maybe we missed something with the others." Maura shrugged, already tucking her hair behind her ear again. "The drug information is valuable. It might connect us to at least one other victim. I'll call Neilson this afternoon to see if anything more came out of the autopsy. Jane, did you request the full file? Is there anything on Bantling in NCIC?" NCIC stood for National Crime Information Center. That's where all police files were compiled at the federal level, and that's where they would find out if Bantling had a record in another state. Maura noticed her voice rising involuntarily as she asked the last question.

"No. As far as we can tell, he's completely clean."

"I want to know everything about this guy. I'll also need an AutoTrackback, if possible, later this afternoon. And look at his passport, please. I want to know all the places he's been."

"I'll tell Jannie she's feeding his name in everywhere. I think Korsak has already asked her to check with Interpol to see if there's anything on him outside the country, he's supposed to be the super-duper buyer at Tommy Tan's. We already have the AutoTrackback. The man moved all the time. I'll make you a copy today."

Suddenly, Maura stood up and ended the meeting. "I have a few things to do today, so I'm leaving already. I'll call you later, Jane, and see what else turns up about him." She walked them both to the door. Cara stood across the hall with the other secretaries. She smiled when she saw Korsak. Then she licked her glossy lips coquettishly. Maura just barely managed to restrain herself from slamming the door. Korsak started to move.

Jane had stayed in the office, and now she closed the door once more. She leaned back against it and looked at Maura, her dark brown eyes serious and haunting. She had showered before driving to court, and smelled fresh, like soap. Her hair was even wilder than usual as if she hadn't had time to comb it. "What's wrong with you? Is everything okay?"

"I'm fine, Jane, Really, I'm fine." Maura lowered her head, avoiding the detective's gaze. She sounded tired and depressed.

"It didn't look like it in the courtroom today, though, and that's not like you, Maura." Jane gently touched her hand, which still rested on the doorknob. Her fingers were rough, calloused; but the touch was gentle and sincere. "You don't look like you're doing well now, either."

Maura lifted her head and looked into Jane's serious eyes. She had to gather all her strength to lie to her girlfriend. A few critical seconds passed, then she said softly, "I'm fine, honestly. I'm just tired, you know, I didn't get much sleep last night, all the paperwork and the judge and getting ready for the hearing." She took a deep breath. "He just threw me for a moment in court. I didn't expect that kind of reaction." She would have preferred to cry, but she bit the inside of her cheek and held back tears.

Jane looked for signs of whether she was telling the truth, and her rough hand now touched Maura's face. The lawyer flinched. Jane lowered her hand. "I think there's more to it than that. There's something you're not telling me." She turned and opened the door. "I'll get you the AutoTrackback as soon as we're through with Bantling's house," she was still saying as she walked down the hall with her back to Maura.

It was clear the detective was seriously worried.

Hell, so was Maura.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The two-story white house with the neat dark green awnings and glass blocks on the front stood slightly back from the street. Red bricks marked the path to the dark-stained oak door. A high white wall with a cast-iron gate blocked the view into the lush garden behind the house. Behind it towered a mighty cypress tree, and a fan palm close to twenty feet tall bent majestically over. It was a pretty house in a pretty residential neighborhood. Before the press hordes had invaded at 8 a.m. this morning, the residents, well-mannered upper-middle-class citizens, had probably never given a second thought to their handsome, always well-dressed neighbor. Now he was suddenly the prime suspect in the hottest manhunt in Massachusetts.

Uniformed police officers swarmed all over the house like ants. Parked in the driveway were the two white box vans of the forensic team. With Korsak in tow, Jane walked up neat garden paths, past tubs of brightly blooming bougainvillea. A young, twenty-something Boston cop stood nervously guard at the front door; probably aware that his every move was being recorded and analyzed live by the two dozen or more TV crews who had taken up position across the street behind the police tapes. CNN carried a live feed, as did MSNBC and Fox News. Jane showed the cop her badge and imagined the live news subtitle that was probably playing across million TV screens at that very moment: Task Force officers approach suspected killer's home in unpleasant search for body parts and other evidence.

Inside the house, technicians swarmed in search of clues, latex-gloved fingers scanning every square inch of Bantling's living space, collecting and storing forensic samples of the most mundane items in a case that was now truly anything but. Every single item was potential evidence, and a piece of every inch of the household was seized, sealed, and sent to the lab for examination.

Flashes of lightning flared as forensic photographers photographed every room of the house from every conceivable angle. Fine black powder covered every surface where a fingerprint might be found and even somewhere it was impossible. In the living room, a large piece had already been cut from the expensive-looking Berber rug, and a chunk was being sawed out of the mustard-yellow, sponge-washed wall. The oriental rug from the entryway and the Turkish runner in the hallway had already been rolled up and bagged as evidence the morning the first investigators arrived.

The contents of every trash can in the house, vacuum cleaner bags, brooms and mops, feather dusters, the lint screen from the dryer, all were carefully packed into the clear plastic evidence bags and collected in the front hallway, from where they were taken to the box trucks.

In the kitchen, the technicians worked to remove the sink's trap, and they would subsequently do that to every sink in the house.

Boston Police detectives were packing frozen meat from the freezer into transparent evidence bags. An entire set of razor-sharp kitchen knives and steak knives had been individually wrapped and sealed. In the lab, the siphons would be examined for traces of blood and tissue that someone might have tried to wash off. The meat would be thawed and analyzed to rule out the possibility that it was human flesh. The knives would be examined to see if they could have caused the cuts in Anna Prado's chest.

Upstairs, every bed had already been stripped and the bedding had been assorted, linens and towels from the closets had been neatly placed in large black plastic bags that were now lined up in the hallway. The unpleasant pungent smell of Luminol came from the closed door of the guest room, where the experts had just sprayed the chemical on the rustic plastered walls and the precious wood floorboards, looking for microscopic traces of blood. Luminol made otherwise invisible bloodstains glow in the dark, traces that water and soap couldn't wash off and that, once the lights were off, told an entire novel.

In the second guest room, technicians were vacuuming the carpet with a special germ-free steel cylinder that picked up every last fiber, every scale, every hair. The curtains were retrieved from the curtain rods and also bagged as evidence.

Jane found Detective Eddie Bowman and Detective Chris Masterson on the floor in Bantling's bedroom, going through DVD s they had found in stacks in a large decorative basket chest. Both detectives had been with the task force since its inception. A big-screen TV was playing at full volume in the massive oak cabinet against the wall. "Hey, Bowman. How's the house search going? You guys find anything?!"

Eddie Bowman looked up from his stack of DVDs. "Hello, Rizzoli. Fulton tried to call you. He's down in the shed."

"Yeah, I just talked to him. I'll go see him in a minute."

On the television just then was a buxom redhead in the kilt of a Catholic school uniform and suspenders over the knees of a naked man whose head was cut off from the edge of the screen. Jane noted that the school uniform was plenty skimpy. Especially for a church school. The redhead's bare bottom stretched far into the air and was being spanked by the guy with a steel rod. The girl screamed. It wasn't apparent whether in pain or pleasure.

"How was court?" asked Eddie, seemingly unmoved by the noise.

"Fine. The judge found suspicion of the crime and denied bail." Jane stared at the woman on the video. Then she glanced at the basket chest. There were at least a hundred DVD s still lying there. She could read the label on one: Blonde Lolita.

Now Korsak had also arrived, still quite out of breath from the stairs and the short walk down the hall. " Jane, you always leave out the best part. You have no sense of humor at all, huh?" He leaned against the oak cabinet, took a breath, and turned to Eddie Bowman. "Bantling's gone completely off the deep end. He was bawling like a girl in front of the judge, 'Not jail, O no, please don't.'" He chuckled. "Such a crybaby." A few seconds passed before Korsak noticed the picture on the TV the others were staring at. "What the hell are you watching, Bowman?" He sounded genuinely disgusted.

"Is that why you're rattling like that, Vince?" returned Bowman.

"Dumbass." Then Korsak looked back at the screen and wrinkled his nose. "What kind of sick stuff is this, Bowman, that I have to watch here? That's not your wife, is it?"

Eddie ignored the remark. "This is the stuff Mr. Bantling likes to get into. Not really PG. He obviously has stacks of home movies like that. I'm not a prude, but some of the stuff Chris and I saw today is really gross. It looks like they're both okay with it, but who knows."

Bantling's masculine-looking bedroom was dominated by a large oak bed with a huge chocolate-colored leather headboard. The bed had been confiscated down to the wooden frame. Other than the bed, the chest and wardrobe were the only pieces of furniture here.

A pointed scream now came from the TV. The redhead by now seemed completely in tears and was shouting something in Spanish.

"Korsak, what's she saying?" asked Jane.

"Stop it, please. I'm being good, please stop. It hurts so much. That's disgusting, Bowman."

"I didn't shoot it, Vince. I just found it!"

The headless man didn't respond to his victim. The rod slapped loudly on her skin, which by now was red and covered in bloody welts.

Jane watched the disturbing image on the screen. "How much of this stuff have you watched, Eddie?"

"Only three DVD s so far. But there must be hundreds of videos."

"Have you seen any of the girls from our 'wall'?"

"No, I haven't had that kind of luck. Not yet, anyway. Some have stickers with the date, others just the name, and many aren't labeled at all. Chris also found a collection of ordinary films down in the closet. Another fifty or more, too."

"Wrap them up. Maybe he taped over Kiss the Girls with his own version. We'll have to watch them all. We may be able to track down some of the stars on the home movies." The clapping of blows continued, as did the girl's crying. Jane looked at the TV again. "Is that Bantling with the steel rod?"

"I don't know. He doesn't say much, and I didn't recognize any of the rooms here on the videos. I probably do, though I've never seen Bantling naked."

"What's on the other three DVD s?" asked Jane.

"The same disgusting stuff. Totally sadistic, but it could be with consent. It's hard to tell. He's into young girls, but I think the girls are of age. No way to know either. Maybe it's the same guy in each video, but his face is never seen, so it's hard to tell. We're hoping for the bull's-eye, of course, that we find one where he's banging one of the dead girls."

"You're really sick, Bowman." Korsak was now standing in front of the walk-in closet. "Say, haven't you guys searched this closet yet?"

"No. Forensics took pictures, filmed, and vacuumed. Chris is assembling the closet and shoes when we finish inventorying the videos. Then they'll go over it tonight here and in the bathroom with Luminol."

"Man, Mr. Psycho has some nice designer clothes here," Korsak called out from the closet. "Check it out: Armani, Hugo Boss suits, Versace shirts. Why the hell did I become a cop, idiot?"

"He's a buyer for some gay costumer," Eddie Bowman corrected, "just the buyer. Now imagine his boss's wardrobe."

"Great. That makes me feel a lot better, Bowman. I should have been a buyer. Do they really make that much money, or did the psycho here make a little extra?"

Jane entered Bantling's bathroom, which led directly off the bedroom. Italian marble everywhere, the floor, two sinks, the shower. Fine black dust covered every surface, causing the milk-coffee brown marble to look terribly dirty. Jane called back to the bedroom, "Tommy Tan, his boss, says he made a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars last year on commission alone. No kids, no wife, all play money."

"No kids, no ex-wives, you mean. They're the ones that eat the hair off your head every month." He spoke from experience: Korsak had three divorcées to support. "Jesus! He's got at least ten suits that each cost as much as I make in a month! And everything is so neat." He stuck his head out the closet door again. "Bowman, look at this, he's got his shirts arranged by color, and there's a matching tie on each shirt. What a freak."

"Yeah, go figure, Vince. A guy with elegant ties. Highly suspicious." Bowman didn't move from his spot in front of the TV.

Jane pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pants pocket and opened the doors of the wooden cabinet under the sink. Neatly lined up shampoo and conditioner, a whole pallet of soap, rolls of toilet paper, a hairdryer. Next to it in a basket combs and brushes, more toilet paper, and a pack of condoms. "Hey, Eddie, Chris," she called out. "What did Forensics do in the bathroom so far? They haven't bagged anything yet, have they?"

Chris Masterson called back, "Just fingerprints. After the DVD s, I wanted to take a look at the closet and bathroom. Fulton said he'd come up after the shed to help us, but I haven't heard from him in a while."

Korsak stuck his head out toward the closet again. "You two lazy bastards! We slaved all day to put that maniac behind bars, and you're squatting here watching porn. Do you really have to document the videos together, or maybe one of you could do it while the other one gets on to something else while you wait for Fulton?"

"Give me a break, Korsak," Bowman countered. "We took a little commercial break on our special program and watched the hearing live on TV, we know it only lasted twenty minutes.

You've probably been sitting in the Pickle Barrel for the last hour and a half, drinking café con leche and trying to get Mrs. Alvarez's number out."

"Boys, stop fighting," Jane called from the bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet. Vials of aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen stood neatly next to a can of Vick Vaporub, a tube of K-Y lubricant, and a bottle of Maalox. In the next compartment, tweezers, toothbrush, mouthwash, dental floss, shaving cream, and blades. All labels were turned to the front, all containers were absolutely straight and accurate in their place like in a pharmacy. Two narrow brown tubes of medicine. However, nothing of interest. One contained the antibiotic Amoxicillin. The other medicine was for a cold.

Jane pulled out the drawers of the cabinet. Next to an array of cleansers and moisturizers was a basket of cotton balls. Neatly folded washcloths in cream and black stacks at the end of the drawer. Jane reached behind the washcloths and pulled them out. Far in the back, she found another translucent brown container. It was still more than half full.

"Bull's-eye," Jane whispered as she looked at the vial of William Rupert Bantling's prescription Haloperidol in her hand.