A/N: I recently looked back on this story after urgings to continue from several people. I remembered how I used to love this story. I went back and looked at it…and realized why I had left it. It's become a steaming pile of smut. I didn't think I was capable of wring such graphic sex bits. Right now, I don't know if I can write anything that will be quite as…detailed. So, I interrupt your smut to bring you plot! Yay, plot.

Disclaimer: I don't own Albel…Fayt…Nel…or even Cliff.

Detective Cliff Fittir absently tapped his pencil against a map of town. There were numerous red dots with numbers drawn on the map, each representing the location where a victim of the Clockwork Killer had been found. All the victims had been found in an area within a five mile radius, but there were no leads. No one had seen any suspicious strangers in town. Cliff had gone through all the stores that sold any sort of weapons and thoroughly checked out all the customers that had recently bought weapons. There were just no leads. Cliff suspected that the murderer was a kindly old man that seemed harmless to everyone and had a pickup truck that he used to drop off the bodies somewhere.

Cliff sighed. "Nel, are we getting anywhere?"

Nel glanced away from the computer screen. She had just finished adding the new victims to the list. "Cliff, we won't get anywhere if you just sit around moping."

"But nothing makes sense," Cliff complained. "How's this guy committing all these murders and no one has seen a thing?"

"It's not their fault," Nel said calmly. "It's just that he or she is being extremely cautious about not leaving us any evidence."

"It's a he, Nel. No woman could do this."

'Why not? Women can kill too. They just don't so as often."

"Well, we have a crushed skull, decapitation, strangling. I don't think a woman is physically capable of killing like that."

Nel shrugged and turned back to her computer, scrolling through the list of victims.

"It doesn't make sense," Cliff muttered. "How could such a screwball manage to keep hidden like that? You'd think we'd be able to pick him out."

"Cliff, murderers look like everyone else. If all murderers looked evil, it'd be too easy."

"But this guy is a nut. He kills the victims, disembowels them, and leaves a nice little sympathy card? It's not normal."

"I know, Cliff. Murdering another person is not normal behavior. But even psychos can do a good job of pretending to be normal. You would never know that a person is crazy until they get caught in the act."

Cliff sighed. "So, any connections between the victims so far?"

"Most of them are health care workers, or were health care workers. Perhaps someone lost a loved one and is taking it out on the people he believes let them die?"

"So, that's our motive?"

"So far anyway."

Cliff frowned. "It doesn't explain all the deaths. That one girl, all she ever did was be a sex slave to people. That's not anything to do with health care."

"So, you think that wasn't the killer?"

"No, no. It had to have been him. Otherwise the numbers don't add up. It just doesn't make sense. I wish I knew why he would deviate from the normal," Cliff mused. He tapped his pen against his chin thoughtfully.

"Well, we've got to find that out. We need to come up with a working hypothesis here, Cliff. We need to know when he was where, find out all his habits and track him down. It'll be hard, but we can do it. Did you hit up that stationary shop?"

Cliff snorted. "Yeah, but it's a dead end. Too many people buying paper there. The guy couldn't even begin to trace customers. And we can't trace the handwriting on the notes."

"Well, it matched the note sent in this morning."

"Oh yeah, that one. Now he's sending us riddles. 'You will look for me and never find me. You will find me without even looking. Detective, don't you know? I walk the land where no one will go.' What the hell does that mean? Is he saying he's dead?"

"Cliff, control yourself."

"How can I be calm at a time like this? The newspapers are crucifying us. Listen to this: 'Detective Duo at Dead End.' How come we haven't found anything?"

"Patience, Cliff. He obviously put a great deal of time into his plan so he could catch his victims without being caught. There's a definite pattern. Health care workers…some male, some female. Some from across town, some living within the five-mile crime scene we've got. He had to have known at least some of them. Some of them left their homes willingly, according to relatives. We have to find the one person that they all connect to and then we'll find our killer."

Cliff sighed. "This is going to take a lot of time."

"I know."

"But people are dying, Nel."

"We can't save everyone," Nel said calmly. "We have to think this through carefully. We don't want to let him get away and we don't want to get the wrong guy."

"Well, I guess that means we've just got a lot more work to do."