Elizabeth had gotten to BPD a little later than usual. Perhaps it had been just as well. Because a package had been left at the entrance of the BPD early that morning. The package had only passed through bomb control. No traces of explosives, no smell of almonds, no letter bomb. Then, they carefully opened the container from the package in forensics.

Katherine and Nick were sitting in Jane's office when Elizabeth walked in the door.

On the small conference table were pictures. Pictures of the package. And of what was in the package. Elizabeth had already guessed what it might be while Katherine was talking. At the same time, she stared at the picture. While she was processing what she was seeing - she had already had the image in front of her.

"Her head," Katherine said.

Decapitated, Elizabeth thought. The image of the severed head transformed the likeness of the person into the effigy of their extinction.

The ancient Romans had discouraged the Celts from beheading since the Ancient Romans were only allowed to become venerable persons. The ordinary people had their bellies slit open, and they were crucified.

"The murderer cut off Alexis Beasley's head," Katherine said with a tense look on her face. "The package must have been left at the reception desk early this morning. The bearer is unknown, probably another one of the junkies."

Twelve seconds. Some supposedly lived on for another twelve seconds without a head. Or rather, the head lived. The head was thus also the only part of the corpse that was considered a corpse even on its own. A head without a body was also legally defined as a corpse. So was a headless torso.

Elizabeth looked at the picture. The head that somehow didn't look like Alexis Beasley at all, but somehow then did.

She, who yesterday, equipped with GPS trackers and full of optimism, had driven north with the emergency services. Last night, before darkness struck.

"The head was severed post mortem," Katherine said with a deeply furrowed brow, handing her sister the other pictures.

The detective said nothing.

"Alexis and her significant other wanted children. One or two. Next year." Nick shook his head.

Decapitated ... Thoughts drifted through Elizabeth's mind that were unnecessary and excessive but which she could not suppress. Perhaps this was her brain's way of coping with horror? Until the invention of the guillotine, it sometimes took up to ten strokes of the axe to decapitate people. In Saudi Arabia, people sentenced to death are beheaded after Friday prayers. The executioners there manage it with one blow. You could see that on YouTube. So was the beheading of Wall Street Journal editor Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded on camera in Pakistan.

And now the horror was here at their place in Boston.

Elizabeth shook her head slowly. It was a certainty. Alexis Beasley was not kidnapped, was not missing, was not gone. She was dead.

And Elizabeth? She didn't have any time or energy left to be surprised. Or shocked.

Maybe she was burned out or had cried herself out. Probably both.

The office door flew open.

Jane came in with quick strides, tossing a thick file onto her desk.

"Good morning," Nick murmured.

Jane looked at him long and hard with a somber expression. "Good morning? What are you doing here?" She was in a horrible mood.

"We thought we should talk," he replied.

Jane's eyebrows drew together. "Should? We need to talk! But most of all, we need to act finally! I'm beside myself that we haven't caught this son of a bitch yet. I'm already thinking about having the FBI take over the case. The media is already on my toes, too. And the fact that I now have to explain the death of an RRT officer, which can be indirectly blamed on us, doesn't make things any better. And the fact that so far, we only have the head and not the body, even less so. Neither does the fact that we're getting nowhere with the research." She looked in depth at her son-in-law. "Anything yet on the car or investors in London?" she growled.

Nick took a deep breath and licked his lips. "Nothing yet on the car, and the investors are sending us a list of their subcontractors. If we're lucky, it's on it, though."

"What do you mean, if we're lucky?"

"Because many of the janitors and facility managers there are probably moonlighting. So there's nothing on record there; there's no list."

"And officially, then the employee doesn't exist either?"

Nick nodded slowly. "Right. Could be."

"Maybe we should put the IRS on the case," Jane growled. "After all, that seems to be the only agency still functioning now."

Now Nick's eyebrows drew together. "Well, so are we."

"You call that working, Nick?"

"We've got it covered."

"I don't want to know what it looks like when you don't have it under control," Jane growled dangerously. "Anyway, a cop is dead. And the psycho is still on the loose!"

Nick crossed his arms. "Do you think I love that we still haven't caught this pervert? But what are you going to do?"

"I'd know what?" said Katherine almost placatingly.

Jane turned to her younger daughter. "Well, out with it."

"We've got one good news and one bad news in this whole affair."

Jane raised her brows. "A good news story?"

Elizabeth couldn't find much good either.

Katherine took a deep breath. "The bad news is clear. The guy has killed two women and two girls by now. If not more. And a cop. We still haven't caught him, although he's most likely active in the Boston area so that we can narrow down his radius of action, which hasn't helped us so far. So he can afford to lead us around by the nose and send one of his packages to BPD this time."

Jane ran her fingertips over her left brow. "Yes, unfortunately. And the good news?"

Katherine looked at her mother long and hard. "He's looking to contact us. Feels challenged. That's when killers get cocky. That's what we're seeing here: He dares just to dump the head of a victim, who was also a cop, right here on BPD's doorstep. The famous hubris of serial killers has landed them in jail so many times. And that's what we need to exploit."

Jane looked at the psychiatrist closely. "And how?"

"We've got to return to the drawing board and get all the results. And then we need what you're determined to prevent?"

"And what is that?"

"The media."

"The media?"

"I'll explain in a minute! I need to get a few things ready for that."

"How long will it take you?"

"An hour."

Jane took a deep breath and sat down behind her desk. "Okay, you heard it! Everyone, bring your current state of the investigation. Let's meet again in an hour.

xxx

An hour later, all the investigators were seated back in Jane's office.

Katherine began by addressing Jane first. "We all have concerns about the media."

Jane nodded slowly. "Indeed."

"We don't have to have those. The killer, on the other hand, does." Katherine looked at everyone. "Because that's exactly the media we're going to turn on."

Jane raised her head in surprise. "Excuse me?" Astonishment was also evident on Elizabeth's face. What was her sister up to?

Jane lowered her brows and took a deep breath. "And how?"

Katherine licked her lips. "By drawing him out."

"And how's that?" The chief still couldn't seem to wrap her head around that.

"We're doing a TV series. About famous Boston serial killers."

"Boston, your serial killers --" muttered Jane. "That would be a first-rate title, wouldn't it?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "Something like that, yes."

Nick's brows drew together. "Murderers we've already hunted?"

She pulled the corners of her mouth down. "Why not? We can't make it look like we're doing the shows just for the BodyCounter."

"And then what? How do you want it to go down then?"

"Then we'll have some of our past serial killers come in first, and one of us will introduce them."

Elizabeth looked at her sister for a long moment. "And who, for example, is going to introduce them?"

Katherine paused for a few seconds and gave her sister a long look. "You, for one."

Elizabeth tucked her chin in, almost surprised. "Why me?"

"Because people like to see and hear women occasionally. There are far too many men in our job. The investigators are mostly men and the perpetrators anyway."

Jane couldn't help but grin. "Women's quota."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "Very funny." She couldn't take much from that. "And what do I do, exactly? Do I tell people about the killers we've already caught?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "That's right."

"From all of them in a row? Of the Werewolf? And then from the others?"

Katherine nodded with a frown. "The Werewolf, the Nameless One, Legion, the Guardian of the Death --" She pushed two papers toward the detective. "And all this we have here then leads to him. The BodyCounter!" Both printouts were the phantom drawings of the BodyCounter. One from the BPD, based on the testimony of the noble hooker Viola, and the other from Philadelphia, showing the mysterious sanitation worker Samantha had seen shortly after Nada had been abducted. "Both drawings look very similar.

Both drawings showed a man with a round face and big, thick glasses. At the same time, the glasses could also be a disguise.

"And those," Katherine said, "we'll show to the media as well."

Jane looked into the group of investigators. "Do we have any news on the Audi80 at all?"

Nick gritted his teeth and shook his head. "You just asked. My laptop is already running hot. Asking questions won't speed up the search. It's not like we can rule out the possibility that he's not registered in Boston, so we'll have to make the big round through Massachusetts and surrounding areas occasionally, too."

"Well, add more laptops if that makes it go faster," Jane barked, then turned to Katherine and Elizabeth. "So, got it. We'll talk to the media about our killers already caught and also about the BodyCounter and show the sketch drawings." She frowned very profoundly."

Katherine took a deep breath. "We don't just ask the public for clues. We're also drawing the perpetrator out."

Elizabeth furrowed her brows. "With false information?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "With false information that shatters and hurts him at his core. Where he rebels in his hubris to set it right."

"And how?"

"By analyzing his behavior and isolating the weak points as precisely as possible. And confronting him about it. When he's weakened or humiliated, the little child in him that was hurt at the time wakes up. And we have to grab that child in him. Then, he becomes vulnerable. And he makes mistakes." Katherine pointed to the picture of Christy. "What behavior did we have here?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath and gritted her teeth. "Submission. And a victim to be subdued as well. After all, she didn't just call herself Angeldust666; she called herself LikesitHard."

Katherine licked her lips and leaned back in her chair. "Right. She was submissive and also driven by a certain self-loathing, hanging out on scoring and suicide forums and looking for sedatives, most likely to kill herself with an overdose. Being humiliated was just punishment for her. Which was also much more effective if it came from someone else inflicting pain, and she wasn't just cutting herself." She sorted through her papers. "In addition, her second job as a young prostitute gave her back the control over men she had lost when her pedophile father abused her."

Jane stood up from her desk chair. "But doesn't it turn a dominant killer on even more if his victim isn't submissive by choice but endures the whole thing involuntarily against their will?"

Katherine raised her brows briefly. "That's right, like the old joke about the sadist and the masochist. The masochist says, Torture me. The sadist says, No. The masochist says, Thank you!" She paused for a moment. "It may be, however, that Christy faked submission as involuntary and enjoyed it as wanted. I suppose she knew how to wrap others around her finger."

Jane sat down on the edge of her desk. "But that's what went wrong in the end. Her feet were amputated. She's very likely dead. Didn't work out, after all, I guess."

Katherine scratched her chin. "Yes, because the death of the victim is an elemental part of the killer's game. And she, Christy, probably didn't anticipate it becoming so serious. But it did. Because only when the victim is dead is he done with the game. No matter how much acting the victim does, faking your own life is difficult when someone kills you. Death can't be faked, after all." She paused another time. "The whole thing with these killers follows a meticulously timed inner script that he has to stick to to get his fulfillment. This urge to ultimately kill the victim is like a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster, and the killer can't get off of it. Unless, at some point, his gondola breaks, and he falls crashing somewhere into the crowd. Without us knowing where he hits. And where the gondola will hit."

"But he planned it all very carefully," Nick said with furrowed brows. "That doesn't look like a completely affect-driven killer to me."

"It's not a contradiction either," Katherine replied. "The careful way he prepares his rooms like this Red Room in North End, rooms where he can even let others share in his kinkiness, are a clear indication of a typical organized serial killer. He wants to be in control. And he wants to show that to the world."

Jane frowned profoundly and closed her eyes briefly. She could already feel the headache coming on. "That means he wants control, and he wants to be perceived the way he wants to be perceived, not the way others might perceive him. So, if we tell the world something different about him, it will make him angry and draw him out?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "That's to be assumed. Self-image and other image don't match in his case. That is, inside himself, the killer knows they don't match. He doesn't want to be reminded of it, though. Especially if we tell something he knows is true but doesn't want anyone to hear."

Jane looked closely at her daughter. "Then we'll just have to hope someone tunes in and watches."

"We'll just have to air the show a few times and do it on different TV stations. Plus, we'll still store it for retrieval in the stations' media libraries."

Jane licked her lips. "Do we call it BodyCounter?"

Katherine pressed her lips together hesitantly and nodded. "Yes, BodyCounter. That's what the junkie called him, and he must have been on his mission. Besides, that's the only name we have."

Elizabeth made a face and raised her right hand to affirm her confusion. "Okay. Let's go back to the other victims," she said with her eyebrows drawn together. "Does that apply to the other two girls? This perpetrator-victim behavior? I mean, the story we're telling should be consistent, right?"

Katherine paused for a moment. "Similarly, it's true of Lisa and Nada, although we don't yet have as detailed a psychogram of them as Christy, simply because there was less on the Internet." She looked at her husband. "Or do we have something new?"

Nick shook his head with the corners of his mouth pulled down. "Nothing groundbreaking, anyway. Lisa's also been interested in live cooking and shabby chic furniture, but I don't think that will help us much. Nada is still too much in shock for us to question her purposefully yet. And we can't wait that long."

Katherine sighed loudly. "No."

Elizabeth got up from her chair and paced her mother's office with a furrowed brow. "So if we're going to tease him, yes, we need to know how he got to be who he is today. And we have to put that into the story in an appropriately false or provocative way."

"Wrong doesn't quite capture it. It has to be just right; only then can it hurt."

"So just provocative."

"Exactly. Presenting the right thing provocatively. It is so obvious that it has pornographic quality because it just shows everything. If there's one thing this monster doesn't want to see, it's the uncut truth about himself. And for that, we must indeed look into its history. We have to imagine what such a type of murderer has done to become what he is."

Jane looked closely at her daughter. "And what might that be?"

"These murderers usually start by torturing and killing animals. Men who kill women, for example, prefer to kill cats because cats remind them of women. Interestingly, some of them also start killing animals again later, when they have already killed people."

"They go back to killing cats then?" asked Nick with furrowed brows.

Katherine looked at him for a long time and raised her brows to answer the question.

"If they want to kill women, yes. After all, it's easier to kill an animal when there's no man to grab at the moment."

Elizabeth's cell phone on the conference table suddenly started to buzz, and the detective read the incoming message with her brows drawn together.

Jane looked at her daughter long and hard, and her gaze darkened at the assumption that more of Alexis Beasley's body parts had appeared. "Is everything okay?"

Elizabeth blinked a few times and slowly looked at her mother. "What? Yeah, it's just ... Maggie's being discharged from the hospital."

Jane pushed her papers together and got up from her chair. "We're going to take a break. We'll meet back here in two hours."

Elizabeth got up from her chair without questioning her mother's decision, as she usually would on a case like this, and hurried out of Jane's office without a word.