"Damn, it was that bastard!" said Brooks, baring his teeth and tapping the image of Al Zaid's corpse with his index finger as if to puncture it. "That's exactly how that son of a bitch does it! It's unbelievable!"

Williams sat next to him and nodded. "What a massacre," he said. "He doesn't know fear at all, and it's like they cut out his amygdala."

The amygdala is the organ in the brain's limbic system that assesses danger. If the amygdala was damaged, the affected person has virtually no fear and shows little emotion, tending instead toward overreaction and suicidal courage.

Williams looked at the images from the morgue. "Were these marks cut perimortem?" he asked.

Katherine nodded slowly. "Looks like it. Some are underbled; some are not. He cut three of those arrow-like runes into his flesh before cutting out his heart. By the third rune, the heart was already out. Maggie refers to it as 'gauzy under bleeding of the wound edges'.'"

"Sounds almost like something out of a candy commercial," Jane said with furrowed brows.

"Underbleeding of the wound edges?" spoke up Williams. "As I understand it, that happens when death occurs immediately after the wound is inflicted."

Katherine gave him a long look and raised her eyebrows briefly. "That's right. First, the injuries to the vessels cause bleeding, and then the circulation stops, and that's when death occurs. That's why we only have this gauzy under bleeding of the wound edges, to quote Maggie."

Nick joined the others. "Good news," he said.

"In this case, there's some good news?" asked Brooks.

"Looks like it. Al Zaid had a surveillance camera in his bedroom, and he was probably into filming his sex games and watching them again later. Or it was a security camera to protect against burglars, and it was accidentally still on."

Elizabeth sat up and looked at her brother-in-law with wide eyes. "Don't tell me it's got the killer on it?"

Nick took a deep breath and shrugged. "Dimly, unfortunately. He took out the security camera pretty quickly and didn't get to the hard drive with the stored video files, though. We have that now."

"Seems like a real pro," Jane commented. Then her cell phone rang, and she left the room and answered the call.

"The chief is right," Brooks said with a frown. "This is professional and reminds me of an assassin or something. The good thing about people like that is they usually get out of the business sooner or later."

"That's none of our victims' business now," Elizabeth retorted.

"True. Who knows when this one will end his career."

"So," Elizabeth said to Nick, frowning deeply, "we have the hard drive with the images from the surveillance camera, but we don't have a real picture of the killer?"

"Only in silhouettes," Nick replied. "Not big enough to make any difference in court, but at least clear enough that we can match him up with other footage."

"Was there any surveillance camera footage looked for at Stephen Foreman's house?" inquired Elizabeth.

Nick took a deep breath. "I'm looking into it."

"And that former slaughterhouse in South End --" She looked at him expectantly. "Maybe there was a surveillance camera there, too."

"We'll check it out. Maybe we can get a usable shot of the perp and match it somehow." Nick looked to Brooks and Williams. "Maybe with what your investigators have on file, too."

Williams nodded instantly. "That's not going to be easy, but let's try."

"Anything new yet on the car he was allegedly driving?" wanted Elizabeth to know.

Nick pressed his lips together and shook his head. "Not really, they wouldn't have a real license plate either, and that would stand out."

Jane returned, cell phone still in hand. "Just got a call from Bell," she said, "about Cedric Miller again, the Body Broker."

Katherine's eyebrows drew together, and she glared at her mother. "Is Bell still believing that the Body Broker continues to murder? From custody, as Liz so nicely put it?"

"No, but he has an angle that I have to agree with him on for once," the chief replied. "The Body Broker was on the bodies that our killer was on. So there's a good chance the Body Broker may have seen him after all. In other words," she ran a hand through her graying hair, "if anyone saw him at a crime scene and is still alive, it's the Body Broker."

Elizabeth leaned back in her chair and looked closely at her mother. "So that means we're going to take another look at Cedric Miller?"

Jane blinked a few times and nodded slowly. "That's right."

xxx

Cedric Miller, the body broker, sat in shackles in front of Elizabeth and Katherine. The last time the two women had been in this prison was to seek out an unusual murderer who called himself Guardian of the Death. But there wasn't much left to seek out then because the man had hanged himself from his cell bed with a strip of cloth.

The Body Broker, on the other hand, was still alive. Still, he was almost as tricky to get to as a dead man. But there were several ways to question a mentally disturbed like Cedric Miller. You could do psych tests with them; for example, you could show them 'inkblots until the moon turns pink,' as Jane liked to say mockingly, but Elizabeth and her sister wanted to go a different route. They had worked it out with Maura that Cedric Miller would have the prospect of a reduced sentence if he cooperated with the authorities. Quid pro quo.

They told him they were on the trail of an extremely dangerous killer that he, Miller, might have seen. And that, as far as his sentence was concerned, it wasn't the most prudent thing for him to tell the authorities as much as possible about it.

"Yeah," said Miller, wearing ankle shackles as he sat at a table with Elizabeth and Katherine. At the same time, a pot-bellied guard with a large set of keys stood behind him in the corner of the room, watching the conversation closely. "Yeah, I think there was this big guy. I was under the impression that I ... uh --" He seemed to be searching for words and smacked his head a few times. "That I disturbed him."

"With what?" wanted Elizabeth to know.

"With the body, I guess." Miller licked his lips frantically with his tongue. "It was still there, the body."

"Was it the man who bashed in the stone thrower's head and cut out his heart?" asked Katherine cautiously, her brow furrowed.

"Yes!" exclaimed Miller. "I told you right away it wasn't me! Finally, finally, you guys get it too!"

Katherine smiled a little. "Better late than never, huh? We're only human, too. But you cut off the arms and legs of the corpse and took out the rest of the organs, didn't you?"

Miller squirmed for a moment. "Well ... I guess that's how it was." He raised his index finger. "But it's all for medicine and all for the good of humanity."

"Too kind," Elizabeth replied. "And that man? Did he disappear when you showed up?"

The Body Broker gave an exaggerated shrug. "I don't know if he saw me because I can be quick, fast, and invisible." He nodded eagerly in confirmation of his own words. "He may not have seen me. But I saw him!"

Elizabeth looked at him with furrowed brows. "What exactly did you see?"

"A huge guy."

"The face, too?"

Miller squirmed again. Perhaps he was thinking of what would happen if the giant found out that he, Miller, had ratted him out. A richly paranoid notion, but one never knew what went on in the minds of people like the Body Broker. On the other hand, Elizabeth trusted the killer to break into a prison and eliminate Miller. However, Cedric Miller so didn't fit the killer's prey pattern.

"Could be," Miller finally replied, nodding abruptly again.

Katherine looked at the man for a long moment. "If we send a sketch artist over, could you help him draw a picture of this giant's face?"

"Maybe," Miller said, stretched. "But what do I get out of it?"

"You cooperate with the investigating authorities," Elizabeth said after a brief pause. "First of all, that's your civic duty. And we may reciprocate as far as your sentence is concerned."

"We'll make a deal?" Miller's eyes lit up.

"We don't make deals," the detective replied. "We're helping each other."

"Same thing." Miller showed his crooked teeth.

"So we can send the sketch artist over?" asked Katherine with a hint of a smile.

Now Miller was beaming, though Elizabeth and Katherine didn't know for what reason. "You can," he said.

Elizabeth frowned again and signaled the guard. "Thank you for your cooperation," she said to Miller while Katherine gave the man a quick nod.

The two women turned their cell phones back on in the parking lot.

No sooner had Elizabeth activated her device it rang, and it was Nick's number. She rolled her eyes and answered the call. "What's up, Nick."

"Maggie did an initial match on the DNA from the Al-Zaid crime scene with the DNA from Quantico," Nick said, pausing briefly. "They match."

Elizabeth put her head back and closed her eyes briefly. "I would have been surprised at anything else. Anything else?"

"Yes," Nick continued. "We did another search of Foreman's apartment, and there's a surveillance camera there, but it seems to be disabled."

"Great." Elizabeth's expression darkened as she looked up at the facade of the prison's protective wall and barbed wire.

Nick paused again. "There's something else. There's a computer company with a small customer parking lot not far from the basement where we found Cody Wilkins' body. There's a surveillance camera there that films the courtyard of the building. The whole thing is erased after a week. But the recording from Tuesday still exists. It was only two days ago, after all."

"And?"

"The footage shows a hunky guy dragging another guy in a hoodie into the building."

"Could the man this hulk is dragging behind him be Cody Wilkins, also known as Rat?"

"Possible. From the video, it looks like he's already pretty much unconscious."

"And the giant? Do the outlines match the images from Al Zaid's surveillance camera?"

"Yes, they match. There's a boundary post there. Based on that comparison scale, the man is almost 6'6" tall. If we could make out his face, we could get a pretty accurate profile based on the reconstruction of the facial features and countenance."

Elizabeth knew the procedure. Based on the spacing of the bridge of the nose, the eyes, the ears, the height of the forehead, and other features, a person's countenance could be figured out almost unambiguously. How far apart were the eyes? How did the nose look compared to the rest of the face? The Pythagorean theorem also helped to assign specific proportions. This was also done with bank robbers. There were still gangsters who were stupid enough to rob a bank, even though time locks secured everything, and the employees could no longer get at the money even if they wanted to.

The video recordings were then mainly used to find corresponding pictures of these people on social media, and they knew pretty quickly who the people in question were. This was also the case with child porn. Even if someone masked themselves, it was possible to find out who was in the video by looking at the contours of the body.

Elizabeth was now rubbing the bridge of her nose with her eyes closed. A headache was slowly but surely announcing itself. "So what do Williams and Brooks say about the killer's height? Does that add up?"

"I just showed Brooks the pictures," Nick replied. "He doesn't know the man's face either. But from the height, it does seem to add up. I would have been surprised if there had been a gnome in the picture."

"Maybe we're getting somewhere with the face, too," Elizabeth said.

"Why?"

"The Body Broker does seem to remember," she said, taking a deep breath. "We're about to send a sketch artist over to him. Maybe then we'll finally have something. Unfortunately, the perpetrator's DNA isn't stored anywhere, even though it shows up at all the crime scenes."

"That's the way it is now," Nick replied after a few seconds. "Everywhere and nowhere. Are you and Kate coming back to BPD now?"

Elizabeth looked at her sister and raised her shoulders. "What else. We don't have another bright idea, I'm afraid." She ended the call and unlocked her unmarked car.

Katherine climbed into the passenger seat as her cell phone vibrated. She read the text and screwed up her face.

Elizabeth started the engine and furrowed her brows before looking at her sister. "What's happened?"

Katherine made another face and held her phone up to the detective's eyes. "Mom. She's inviting us to family dinner tonight."

Elizabeth paused for a moment and then narrowed her eyes. "Today? But it's Friday." She killed the engine one more time while thinking hard. "How many family dinners have we missed lately, Kate?"

Katherine opened and closed her mouth again, frowning deeply as she also thought hard. "I don't know. Way too many, I guess."

"Oh damn," Elizabeth growled, slumping her shoulders guiltily.

Katherine surveyed her sister closely and furrowed her brows. "Do you want me to say yes to Mom for tonight?"

"Of course," the detective muttered as she restarted the engine and put it in reverse.

Katherine started typing a reply to Maura and chuckled all at once. "Shit, are we lousy daughters."

Elizabeth pulled out of the prison parking lot and chuckled as well. "When you're right, you're right, sis."