The evening had fallen. They sat in Jane's office, gathered around the Chief of Detectives' desk. Sylvia gave Williams and Brooks a few minutes tour of the BPD to show them the premises. Jane herself sat at the desk, playing with her hands that were on the desktop, listening intently.

"It all fits," Nick said. "The DNA from the body broker was also at the crime scene in South End. And everywhere else in his lab. There was quite a bit of it on the body parts delivered to Medic Research, though."

"He was probably overly cautious there, cleaning the bodies beforehand and wearing gloves," Elizabeth said with furrowed brows. "Still, that's good news."

"Oh, yes. Because we haven't had another murder here with us," Nick said. "So it could be that our Body Broker is also the Angel of Death after all."

Katherine frowned deeply. "Could be, but I'm not sure about that, and I'm still of the opinion. There are too many differences between the murders to be perpetrated by the same perpetrator."

Elizabeth had to admit that her sister was right. Maggie's DNA analysis was probably positive tomorrow anyway, throwing the whole theory out of their hands. And that the Angel of Death was indeed still on the loose.

But it could also be the case that the sample was negative. In that case, they were again faced with a riddle. Then there would be two murderers with a very similar modus operandi. Perhaps also a copycat.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "Did he confess to everything?"

Nick nodded slowly.

"And how did he kill them?" wanted Katherine to know. "Was it Burking?"

Nick nodded again. "Yes. The charge will be murder. We have all aspects of murder. Insidiousness? Yes. Anyone who gets homeless people drunk and then kills them is insidious. Cruel? You bet it is. Look at the bodies. Base motives? Well, he murdered to enrich himself." He looked at everyone. "Any questions?"

Elizabeth knew the murder characteristics, and two of those characteristics were already enough to go to jail for twenty-five years. Here it was all three characteristics at once.

Jane spoke up for the first time. "What do you think? The killer, is it one and the same? One or two? Who is it anyway?"

"He's definitely the one who brought the bodies to Medic Research," Elizabeth replied with furrowed brows.

"Yes. That's why he wants the bodies in good condition for resale," Katherine explained. "But then why does he crush this stone thrower's skull first? It brings him much less if he delivers a body in that condition. Or if he can only deliver it in pieces, as he did here. After all, he left the head and the torso at the scene. But the record says the Body Broker sometimes even sold the meat and bones separately. He's a real cadaver tinkerer who wants to make as much as possible from his wares with as little effort. In money, of course. A guy like that wouldn't bash in a skull and make his merchandise worthless."

Jane looked closely at her younger daughter and took a deep breath, but it was evident that she would prefer to consider the case closed and file it away. "Maybe he was trying to incapacitate the victim."

"Come on, Ma," Elizabeth retorted. "You don't have to be a forensic scientist to see that; that's where a punch comes in. He still shattered his cheekbone and jaw, and that's cruel, but it doesn't kill."

Jane nodded slowly and took another deep breath. "There's something to that. Is there anything else?"

Katherine nodded as well. "The incision patterns are different for the victims. Maggie has noticed that, too. At one time, they are crude and brutal; at another time, like a surgeon, they are efficient and precise. We also have differences in modus operandi. Our colleagues from New York and Quantico see it the same way, by the way. Cedric Miller poured alcohol on the homeless. As soon as they could hardly resist, he knelt on their upper bodies and killed them by burking. This one," she pointed her chin outside as if the killer was walking around there somewhere, "this one brutally beat Foreman and Wilkins to death. Cedric Miller, the Body Broker, is cowardly, while the Angel of Death is completely fearless, not to mention extremely reckless. It's like he has no instinct for self-preservation." She tapped the pictures. "The killer must be very strong, but Cedric Miller is not. That gnome would never be a match for a guy like Stephen Foreman. A fortiori, he couldn't kill him with his bare hands. No, he does it stealthily and insidiously. The idea that Miller could defeat a man like Foreman and his attack dog in direct confrontation is ludicrous."

"Can we get anything out of this man? Did he say anything else?"

Nick looked at his notes. "He saw someone who took off quickly when he entered the courtyard."

Elizabeth's eyebrows shot up. "Oh. And what did he look like?"

"He can't remember. Apparently, a large man."

Katherine and Elizabeth glanced at each other. "Great," said the detective, "to have this information come so soon."

"The information will come when it comes," Nick defended himself, "and it's not like it's precious. Or should we put out an APB 'We're looking for a big guy'?"

Jane raised a hand. "No argument here, guys. Can we do any more investigation with the Body Broker? To find out any more of what he might know?"

"You mean those tests where you hook up a blood pressure sensor to their penis and then play violent porn to its owner?" asked Katherine with furrowed brows.

Jane pulled the corners of her mouth down and shrugged. "For example."

"Well, we can't do anything that would be legal," Katherine replied. "And it wouldn't do much good, either." She looked at her sister. "We just have the problem here ... How do we phrase it?"

"Cedric Miller has killed people," Elizabeth replied. "Clearly. But the crime, the murder of Cody Wilkins that we caught him over, he probably didn't commit that murder."

"We caught him over a murder he didn't commit?" asked Jane, confused.

Katherine smiled tightly. "Looks like it. Let's discuss everything else with Brooks and Williams when they return from their walkabout. And then we'll have to move on to Bell." She looked at her mother. "What do you say?"

Jane took another deep breath and shrugged. "Whatever you say." She glanced at her wristwatch. "It's getting late. Time to go home."

xxx

Jane, Elizabeth, and Katherine retook their seats in the BPD conference room, where Brooks and Williams were already waiting. Sylvia dropped them off there after the BPD tour and called it a day.

Jane leaned against the door and pressed her smartphone

Katherine had already explained the facts of the case to both guests succinctly, especially Cedric Miller's confession.

"What may be related in both cases," Williams said, looking at his former student, "is the cannibalistic streak of the killer who killed that biker boss. Does Cedric Miller have any cannibalistic tendencies?"

Elizabeth raised her shoulders. "We didn't see anything about that. Do you really think the Angel of Death is a cannibal?"

"In L.A., he used to cut his victims' hearts out, too," Brooks said, giving Katherine an unreadable look. "Even though we didn't know what he did with them. Just like in New York." He laid a picture on the table. "But the David Calitri thing speaks volumes."

Elizabeth examined the picture taken so many years ago in Los Angeles. The heart. The napkin. And the macabre inscription Enjoy it d(e)ad.

Enjoy it dead. Enjoy it dad.

The heart of the son as a meal for the father.

"But here, he didn't eat the heart himself; he gave it to the father, didn't he?"

"Yes," Books said with a nod, "but only in this one case, did he leave the heart at the scene. In all the other nine cases, he took it with him."

Nick, sitting next to his wife, spoke up. "We have cases in Boston sometimes where people ... how do I put it? Where people want to be eaten by choice. And where the others will only eat if the person being eaten agrees to it."

"Aren't there even more people who want to be eaten than people who want to eat?" added Jane.

Katherine's eyebrows twitched upward briefly. "That's true, and it may be good for overpopulation with a simultaneous food shortage. If it were the other way around, we'd have a problem."

Her mother, as well as her husband and sister, looked at her punitively.

Williams cleared her throat after a few seconds. "That would be endocannibalism. There are three major dimensions in cannibalism, especially endocannibalism." He raised his index finger. "First of all, the dimension of pleasure. These people find arousal from eating someone else or from being eaten." He raised his middle finger. "Then the reproductive dimension. Just as you bring children into the world so that a part of you lives on, those who want to be eaten want to live on in another person. And then there's the relationship or syndyastic dimension, the importance of fulfilling basic psychosocial needs for acceptance, closeness, safety, and security."

"I feel safe because I become a part of someone else eating me?" asked Katherine with her eyebrows drawn together. "It's mostly men, very few women, who are active in the forum."

"Our killer also prefers men as victims," Brooks said.

"Yes." Katherine nodded slowly. "Anyway, here the two were named Cator and Franky. Cator was the victim, Franky was the cannibal."

"And they both wanted closeness, safety, security?" wanted Williams to know.

Katherine looked at him for a long time and sighed. "Something like that, although that does indeed sound weird. Franky wanted to have a man inside him by eating him so he could finally feel the experiential depth of a real bond he always missed as a child. He wanted to have someone inside him and thus be less alone. It's a trauma from losing or not having a parent."

"Our whole culture is anchored to eating," Williams explained, looking at Katherine with a frown. "From the childish bedtime gesture for food and handshakes. From clinging to maternal fur, the hug. From mouth feeding, to the kiss. Love is a child of aggression and out of brood care."

Katherine smiled a little. "And that only exists in mammals, but not in reptiles. There, dominance and submission rule."

"Then you could say our killer is more primitive in nature than a normal human. More like a reptile or other primitive creature," Elizabeth said, with the shark's bold in front of her.

"In any case, he wasn't looking for affection or closeness. He wants to be the strongest." Katherine swayed her head back and forth. "That's my guess, anyway. Unlike this victim of Franky's that wanted to be eaten."

Williams looked at her for a long moment. It seemed he had missed such or similar conversations with his student. "With that one, the need probably wasn't fulfilled until someone worked on his flesh, chopped it up, and finally consumed it."

"Yes, Franky, the cannibal didn't want to be so lonely anymore by taking someone inside him. And the victim wanted to be eaten alive."

"And how was that supposed to happen?"

"Franky was supposed to bite off his penis first."

Jane looked at the profiler closely and said succinctly. "That might be difficult, at least in its raw state."

Katherine's face contorted as her mother put it that way. "That's the way it was. Cator, on the other hand, quite fancied being eaten alive. Of course, that didn't work either because the human jaw can't bite the meat at all. So there was no luscious result."

Nick also made a face and ran a hand over his mouth in disgust. "What a surprise. What happened next?"

"Franky cut his penis off with a knife."

Nick unconsciously placed a hand in his crotch, and Jane closed her eyes for a second with clenched teeth.

Elizabeth looked at her mother and brother-in-law and furrowed her brows, ignoring their short-lived reactions. "It was similar to our killer," she said, gazing at Brooks and Williams. "He bit into Foreman's heart at the crime scene and found out that you can't eat a raw heart. That's why he took it home and possibly prepared it at home. Is that what happened in New York and Los Angeles, then?"

"Yes and no," Brooks replied. "That pervy son of a bitch took all the hearts, and God knows what he did to them. But we didn't find traces like yours on the floor, carpet, or wherever. Except for that strange serving dish at the chief's son's house."

"With our killer, it's dominance," Katherine said, frowning a little. "With Cator, it was more submissiveness, wasn't it?"

Williams nodded slowly. "As strange as it sounds, that's precisely what it is, and it's a form of submissiveness that creates sexual gratification. We find something like this in the sadomaso scene. There are the tops, who call the shots, and the bottoms. A save word, for example, mayday or stop, decides when it's too much for the bottom. And then it stops. The participants take on different roles. The mistress, the maid, the nurse."

Brooks pointed to a picture of the cuts. "These cuts here," he said. "We thought at the time the killer was in the cutting scene. There's probably that all over the world. People who want to be cut, with knives or needles."

"Knives or needles?" asked Jane with her eyebrows drawn together. "One of those or both?"

"Both. Needles are more common in the sadomaso scene; knives are more common in the cutting scene."

"Bleeding from a voluntary cut," Williams said, "is a sign of sadness. But also of a need for closeness and understanding." He tugged at his short beard. "To shed one's blood in a voluntary cut is, for these people, the ultimate form of weeping or shedding tears. There's that. Surrendering, submitting. This increases the feeling of fear. But it also ensures that endorphins are released. It's similar to the flagellates in the Middle Ages who whipped themselves to ecstasy. That still happens today. Then there are chains, weights, hot wax, and needles. And knives. Cutting. There's cutting into the skin with knives, scalpels, or razor blades."

"I've been looking at these cutting forums," Nick said with furrowed brows. Elizabeth silently wondered what else her brother-in-law did when he was bored. "There are real tactics for going about it, so the cuts aren't noticeable. For example, by always getting cut in the same places to keep the scars to a minimum. One woman even wanted to be cut, quote, "while being fucked."

"My God," Elizabeth sighed, shaking her head.

"But it's all done willingly," Katherine said with furrowed brows. "Is our killer a hardcore SM guy? I don't know. The other guy, the victim, isn't playing along, is he? Or do you think Stephen Foreman would willingly let himself be cut? And I don't see the sexual component here at all."

Williams pursed his lips and nodded slowly. "No, it's different here."

"Namely?"

"As far as cannibalism is concerned, friendly cannibalism is called endocannibalism, as I said before. What we have here is what is called exocannibalism. The eating of enemies." He flipped through his papers. "There's just one problem?"

Katherine straightened up and looked at him closely. "And what is that?"

"The lines are blurred. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, The Cannibal of Milwaukee. You all know him."

Katherine nodded in agreement.

"Not personally, thankfully," Elizabeth murmured.

The psychiatrist looked at her sister. "You can't do that anymore, either. He's dead, thank God. I understand he was killed in prison, a fellow inmate put a broomstick through his eye into his brain."

Williams nodded again. "That's right. Robert Ressler did a few more interviews with him. Dahmer ate parts of the bodies and boiled the rest. He then painted the skulls to make them look more uniform because some weren't as white as others. Thanks to the paint, they then all looked the same."

"Depersonalization?"

"Yes. Dahmer dreamed of his victims being available to him as sex slaves. So he drugged his victims and dripped acid into their brains to render them willless. They didn't survive, of course. But Dahmer desperately wanted a sex slave, preferably alive, of course. But if there was no other way, even a dead one. In this life or another."

Katherine looked at him for a long moment. "And what were the alternatives for Dahmer? If it didn't work out that way with the victims? If he couldn't get sex slaves?"

Williams took a deep breath and shrugged. "If it didn't work, with the sex slaves or sex zombies, Dahmer explained later, then nothing works. No partners, no sex. Celibate living. Pornography at most. It was with him the same binary choices we often find with psychopaths. All or nothing. Victory or death. Either undead sex slaves or no desire, no urges nothing at all. Like a priest. Dahmer used to go to church a lot with his grandmother."

Jane snorted contemptuously. "A model Christian and citizen."

"Dahmer, at any rate," Williams continued, "wanted to know people as little as possible. He wanted them to look like an inanimate object. After all, he cooked and ate parts of them, and much of it was found in his fridge. He cut off the calluses on the feet of the bodys to give more surface area to the acid he needed to loosen the flesh from the bones. The underside of the feet was very tough, Dahmer used to say."

"If only they'd gone to the pedicure more often," Jane muttered.

Elizabeth was once again puzzled by her mother's tasteless comments. But Williams didn't seem to have heard or understood, for he was already continuing to speak.

"Dahmer had to depersonalize his victims so that he could accept them as faceless slaves or even as food. But he was always aware that what he was doing was wrong, so he felt guilty."

"And that means?"

"It wasn't pure enemy cannibalism with Dahmer. He desired the victims. And he felt bad about killing them and boiling the bodies."

"A thoroughly good man, actually," Jane sneered with a frown. "Did he have moral motivations, perhaps? After all, some weirdos think their actions make the world a better place."

"Better is relative," Williams agreed with the chief. "But no. With Dahmer, there were no moral issues. Here, with our killer, maybe. With Dahmer, no. On the other hand, a psychiatrist who examined Dahmer said Dahmer did these horrible things to rid the world of bad people. Just as Hannibal Lecter ate rude people in the movie. In Dahmer's case, it was gays, hustlers, and drug addicts who fit his prey pattern. But Dahmer didn't want that. And he didn't feel that way either."

"But in a way, the bodies here are uniform," Elizabeth said. "Dahmer painted all the skulls. Our killer cuts the heart out of everything."

Williams pursed his lips again and nodded. "Uniform the bodies here already are. At least if you compare the ones in Los Angeles, New York, and the one victim here in Boston. This runaway in the basement, this stone thrower, let's ignore him. Probably this victim wasn't even planned. But it's true: The killer cuts out the heart of each of his victims. But the motive is more like exocannibalism. It reminds me of the headhunters. They become partakers of another person's power by capturing their head. This is the origin of all skeleton and skull cults. The belief that the spirit of the dead remains in the skull."

"The staff idiots even call themselves headhunters," Brooks snorted.

"You see? There you go," Williams replied, as if proud of his partner.

"We've been talking about the head so far," Elizabeth said with furrowed brows. "What about the heart?"

"In the heart is the power. The strength. The Incas cut out the hearts of their enemies and sacrificed them to their gods. Even in the Catholic doctrine of salvation, we find cannibalism strong," Williams said. "Cannibalism that endangers people has been transformed into a ritual form with the body of Christ, where Jesus says, 'Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.' Just as an infant receives its nourishment from its mother's womb, so the mother becomes its nourishment, so the Christian in the Lord's Supper receives the power of God through the body of Christ."

"Anyway, the knife always has a phallic quality," Williams said. "Some killers also penetrate twice, rape their victim, and stab the victim again with a knife. The stabbing with the knife is the second and final penetration, and the blood that spurts from the wound is a kind of second ejaculation. There's only one thing strange about our killer."

Jane looked at the older man long and hard. "And that would be?"

"If you look at the statistics, it's shot in the United States."

"That means it's unusual for the killer not to use a firearm?" wanted Jane to know, confused.

Brooks nodded slowly. "In the earlier cases, the Angel of Death shot people a few times. But the final cut, the carvings, those were knives. He always cut the heart out with a knife, too. And it always worked."

"Apparently. And there's the problem."

"Why?"

"For most murderers," Williams said, "reality is the problem. The murder is never as good as it was before in their imagination. The fantasy is better every time. And it gets better and better as such wishful thinking becomes more and more fueled by reality. More and more neurons are stimulated, and the fantasy is always one step ahead of the real murder. And often, the disappointment is great. Then desire turns to anger."

"Like Franky's victim?" interjected Katherine. "He wanted to be eaten alive, and that didn't work."

"For example." Williams flipped through his files. "Our killer seems to succeed at everything, though. He imagines what it would be like to kill strong people, and he succeeds. And as long as he succeeds, he continues."

"The final disappointment, what that would be?" asked Jane with furrowed brows.

"If his opponent were stronger than him. At that moment, he would be dead."

There was a knock at the door. Mrs. Davila poked her head into the room. Elizabeth felt a pang in her stomach. Linda Davila was the secretary to Chief of Police Michael Bell, her boss. The lady had to work overtime again today.

"Chief Bell, Detective Rizzoli, wants to see you right away. In his office." There was deliberately no mention of Williams or Brooks.

"Excuse us." Jane rose from her chair and gave her older daughter a long look. "This is a bit of a holdup, but we need to get to our boss quickly."