After three rings, Nick answered. Elizabeth briefly explained her question to him.

"Yeah, I've seen it before," Nick said while holding Jalen in his arms and rocking reassuringly. He looked at his shoulder bag and frowned a little. "Okay, I'll take my protected laptop."

Elizabeth heard her nephew being put in the playpen and looked at her sister, who was sipping her wine with relish. She was sure this evening was a reckoning for something Nick had said or done while they had finally found time to relax. She heard him typing on the keyboard of his laptop. "Better safe than sorry. It's easy to get on these cannibalism forums, but --"

"How?" Elizabeth interrupted him.

"Simple, by typing cannibalism forum into Google. Two more clicks, and you're in. Those forums are full of malware and Trojans, though. You need an excellent firewall. The nasty stuff can only be found in the Deep Web anyway, and that's not so easy, but for now ... Ah, here we go."

Elizabeth turned on the speaker on her smartphone. Her sister stretched her neck.

"Here's some Longpigs on the side."

The detective's eyebrows furrowed. "Longpigs?"

"Longpigs. That's what they call people in the scene who want to be eaten. Please don't ask me why they're called that. It may have to do with shipping. In earlier times, live pigs were taken to sea, and there were no refrigerators then. And I guess they were called longpigs."

"And what are these Longpigs doing on the Internet?"

"They talk to the so-called Chefs here in the forums. The Chefss are the ones who cook and eat. A bit like yin and yang. What do we have here?" He scrolled through the text. Then he read aloud. "Would like to be grilled alive. On the grill or a spit, I don't care."

"Just as long as he's well done," Katherine muttered.

Elizabeth gave her a punishing look, and the psychiatrist raised her shoulders.

"Any other forums?" the detective asked.

"Looks like it," Nick replied. "Looking for anything in particular?"

Elizabeth looked at her younger sister. She shook her head. "Not for now, Nick. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much. See you tomorrow." She ended the call. "I don't think," she said then, "that we're going to find our killer in forums like this."

"I'd be surprised, too," Katherine replied. "If he prefers physically strong victims, like this Foreman, surely it is just important to him that they resist and don't want to be eaten. The modus operandi is different." She pulled a file from her shoulder bag and placed it on the desk in front of her sister. "But now look here," she said as she opened the file. She pointed to a picture with a deep frown. "I found some things. This."

Elizabeth looked at the picture, which looked familiar but couldn't connect to. "This is from our crime scene. Very pale, though. How come?" The picture showed the cuts the killer had inflicted on the biker boss. But the photo looked worn, as if it were years old or as if Katherine had been holding it repeatedly for days.

Katherine looked at the picture and was silent for a moment while she swallowed hard, gritting her teeth. "Because it's a different picture."

Elizabeth looked at the other woman long and hard. "Excuse me?"

Katherine continued monotonously. "And because it's not our biker boss."

The detective blinked a few times in confusion. "Not our biker boss? But the cuts are the same, aren't they? What's the shot?"

Katherine closed her eyes briefly and licked her lips, kneading her hands. "This picture and a few others are more than five years old. And they're from L.A. and New York."

Elizabeth frowned very profoundly. "Excuse me?"

Katherine seemed suddenly stuck in a past she had considered closed back when she had let Nick into her life. "I looked at this case back at Quantico and was allowed to make some prints of it.

The time at Quantico, Elizabeth thought. Katherine had lost her fiancé, Nathan, chasing a monster during that time.

Things get taken away from you, Elizabeth thought. In life and on the job. There she was constantly dealing with abominations who took the lives of others and, in that way, robbed others of their spouses, children, parents, or friends.

She detached herself from the thought. "And you hunted down this murderer?" she asked, pointing to the picture.

Katherine blinked a few times and licked her lips again. "Not directly at first as you very well know. The FBI's Behavioral Science Division was assisting the LAPD at the time. One of my mentors, Ted Williams, worked directly for the FBI at Quantico and provided the LAPD detective in charge with a series of analyses of the killer's psyche. California has always been the land of dreams and nightmares." She looked at the picture again. "The resemblance is striking, isn't it?"

Indeed it was. The exact rune-like engraving.

Katherine blinked a few times again, frowning more deeply as she lifted her gaze. "They called him the Angel of Death back then. You know, the Angel of Death in the Old Testament who killed Pharaoh's firstborn. To ward him off, the Israelites had to smear lamb's blood on the doorstep."

Elizabeth had stopped breathing; she was very well aware of the alias and the actual name of the murderer. She looked at her sister for a long time, sincerely frowning again. "Kenneth Baldwin? But that bastard was locked up, and the key to his cell was thrown into a bottomless abyss. And besides, our killer doesn't do that."

Katherine nodded slowly and pressed her lips together. "That's true. But he did it in L.A. and New York. Maybe he's doing it here, too; we haven't seen it yet."

"Are you saying that Kenneth Baldwin might not have been the Angel of Death or that he might have a partner who's now up to his old tricks in Boston?"

Katherine abruptly got up from the couch and paced, running a hand through her hair. It seemed like an old wound had reopened, over which a thick scab had only formed over all these years, waiting to break open anew. "I don't know, Liz. But you know yourself, L.A. is a city made for serial killers, just like New York. The Manson Family did the Sharon Tate massacre in Bel Air. And it's where the infamous snuff movies were supposedly invented."

Elizabeth followed her sister with her eyes. "Jesus. Do you realize what you're saying?"

"I don't think Jesus has anything to do with it," Katherine replied, her eyes wide. "This freedom thinking, the hippie cult, it's all pretty close to bondage. It's already that way with the works of the Marquis de Sade, which were born out of the spirit of enlightenment. But here, culture becomes enslavement. I don't think this is an exception; this is cause and effect. Even Helter Skelter in 1969, the thing with the Manson Family and Sharon Tate, was not an outlier in the otherwise peaceful hippie ideology. It was a part of it. And the serial killers of the nineties were the descendants of the hippie from the sixties. Exploitations, as they're called. Adorno once wrote about how the Enlightenment had the opposite effect, and freedom of thought had the opposite effect. That the freedom of thought often contains the germ of that regression which can abolish this freedom again. The murders in Los Angeles and New York have been about dominance, exploitation, and control. Those at the bottom draw the attack all the more."

Elizabeth blinked several times after realizing her sister hadn't addressed her question, but that would have to wait for a moment. "Explain it to me in more detail, please."

Katherine dropped her hands to her sides. "It's like those people who give bums money to beat each other up. There are plenty of videos on YouTube about that. Or the people who beat up or set fire to the bums immediately. They have the most fun humiliating people who are already in a shitty situation. To quote Adorno again: To inflict humiliation gives the greatest pleasure where misfortune has already struck people beforehand." She made a face. "The less danger to him who lies above, the greater his pleasure in the agony of him who lies below." She paused a moment. "It's exactly different with our murderer. Just like with the killer back in Los Angeles and New York. The Angel of Death also chose physically strong people to defeat in confrontation."

"And the Angel of Death also cut out the hearts and took them away," Elizabeth murmured as she kept her eyes on her sister.

Katherine briefly glanced at her smartwatch and pulled out her phone. "Tomorrow I can reach Ted Williams at his office."

Elizabeth folded her hands in front of her mouth before repeating her outstanding question from earlier. "Kate, do you realize what you're saying?"

Katherine chewed on her lower lip, lost in thought, as she typed a text into her cell phone.

The detective knew her sister was deliberately avoiding. "Kate?"

"What?" the doctor asked after a few seconds without looking up from the device in her hand.

"Do you realize what you implied?"

Katherine took a long, wide-eyed look at her sister. She looked as if a specter from her past had resurfaced. "Of course, I know what I said," she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. "Either the man you, Ma, and I blamed for several murders in New York, including Nathan's, isn't the monster we thought he is, and he's wrongfully in jail. Or this son of a bitch has an accomplice continuing his work here in Boston. And I don't like either of those possibilities because it would mean we failed in every way."

Elizabeth opened her mouth and exhaled loudly. "Kate" was the only thing she managed to produce.

Katherine raised her hand and pressed her lips together, shaking her head before continuing to type into her phone.