Body Language by James W. Hall

From the Publisher

Alexandra Rafferty works nights for the Miami PD, capturing all the grisly details of crimes scenes on film. She lives with her father, an ex-cop who is slipping into senility, and her louse of a husband, who spends his days dreaming about the perfect crime, and his nights with his mistress.

A serial killer is leaving the bodies of young women twisted into strange symbols. Juggling crime photos, Alexandra realizes that the symbols are, in reality, letters of the alphabet -- and that they spell out her name. She suddenly finds herself dealing with her chaotic present and coming to terms with her long-buried past in a dangerous roller coaster ride that takes her from the mean streets of Miami to the Florida panhandle -- and straight into the hands of a killer.

USA Today - Michael Connell

Body Language is James Hall showing all his best stuff. Complex and edgy, engrossing and masterful.

Publishers Weekly

Hall's first novel is reissued as a trade paperback in conjunction with the mass market release of his latest, a thriller that PW said "will slice readers' sleep into slivers." (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Following last year's downcast Red Sky at Night, which left beachcomber-hero Thorn in a wheelchair, Hall bounces back with a new protagonist, Alexandra Rafferty, an appealing fourth-degree blackbelt, crime-scene photographer and all-around Miami PD femme Nikita. Shadowed by 18 years of guilt from the grisly aftermath of her rape at age 11, Alex is the loving caregiver to her father, an ex-cop befuddled by senility. Caught up in a series of serial killings of young women whose bodies are left in bizarre postures, Alex is unaware that her cretinoid husband, Stan, an armored car driver, is planning the perfect robbery. All hell breaks loose when a sexy pool-cleaner/ burglar (who keeps a pet cockroach in her pocket) chances on the scene and sees Stan's airhead mistress make off with two bags worth a cool million. When Alex's pixilated dad steals back the loot, most of the major elements of this whimsical action-packed plot are in place. The ensuing 600-mile chase takes Alex and dad to Seaside, the well-known planned community on the sugary beaches of the Florida panhandle. Forgiving the distracting, superfluous plot threads, Hall fans will be more than reimbursed by his poetic imagery in the landscapes and love scenes. Alex is a heroine with enough endearing attributes to sustain yet another long-running character series. $200,000 ad/promo; audio to Brilliance; author tour. Agent, Richard Pine; editor, Jenifer Weis. (Sept.) FYI: Seaside, Fla., was the location for the new Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show.

Library Journal

Miami police photographer Alexandra Collins Rafferty has a few problems. Her marriage is falling apart, her father has Alzheimer's, she is attracted to one of her fellow karate students but is unsure about her feelings for him, and a rapist-murderer is terrorizing the city. Then Stan, her crime-obsessed husband, an armored-car driver, thinks he has pulled off the perfect robbery and plans to run off with his young mistress. But the theft is witnessed by a ruthless woman who, with her hulking partner, is determined to find the loot. A deadly chase to a Gulf Coast resort ensues. The serial killer plot seems peripheral until a shocking revelation near the end. Hall (Buzz Cut, Audio Reviews, LJ 8/96) tries to embellish the plot by having the characters engage in colorful dialog about all manner of subjects, but he is not in the same league as Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, despite reader Laural(OK) Merlington's best efforts to convey the humor. Recommended for public libraries.--Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr., New York

Library Journal

Nineteen years after the death of his parents, a troubled teenager avenges them by causing the death of the drunk driver responsible. Now thirty-nine and emotionally scarred, Thorn still lives in Key Largo, selling hand-tied fish flies. His adoptive mother, Kate Truman, a sturdy, outspoken fisherwoman, leads local battles against land developmentthe most recent of which results in her rape/murder. Thorn's hunt for the culprit(s) increasingly involves new lady friend Sarah Ryan, Kate's lawyer buddy, sometime dope-smuggling partner, and (secretly) daughter of the dead drunk driver come to spy on his ``killer.'' Hard-hitting, nuts-and-bolts prose, effectively picturesque characterization, periodic sex and violence, and a wonderful, cinematic climax embellish a largely realistic plot. A great first novel and necessary purchase. Rex E. Klett, Anson Cty. Lib., Wadesboro, N . C.

Chicago Tribune

The best.

BookList

More than any of his Floridian peers, Hall had avoided repetition.... Hall effectively combines Ridley Person-like suspense and forensic detail with a near-flawless grasp of character; his Floridian loonies are as loony as Hiaasen's, but they go well beyond caricature: loonies with heart.

New York Times Book Review

James Hall's prose runs as clean and fast as Gulf Stream waters.

William Plummer

The Florida crime novel, whose characters are bent on wacky schemes, their brains fried by the sun and land's-end desperation, is a genre unto itself....Hall shows himself to be an ingenious plotter and anything but a plodder with language. --People Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Key West chronicler Hall gives rugged adventurer Dick Thorn (Red Sky at Night, 1997, etc.) a well-earned rest as the author heads north to Miami to follow the fortunes of a police photographer, a lethal serial rapist, and two very large bags full of money. As the technician charged with photographing the 'Bloody Rapist's' victims, Alexandra Rafferty would have her hands full with one way or the other. Though the rapist has obligingly left buckets of his blood and dozens of his fingerprints at each of five crime scenes so far, the cops have no leads, and it looks like the rapist would be providing Alexandra steady work even if she didn't have troubles closer to home. But her life with armored-car driver husband Stan and with Lawton Collins, the ex-cop father who years ago covered up Alexandra's own killing of Darnel Flint, the teenaged rapist next door, is about to take a steep downward turn. Smarty-pants Stan, who thinks he's as cunning as can be, masterminds a $2 million heist from his own armored car. When Alexandra finds the money in the guest-room closet of his empty-headed, giddily amoral lover and confronts him, Stan threatens to tell the police about her own murder, casually revealed to him just a few weeks ago by Lawton, an Alzheimer's sufferer. Meantime, a couple of operators toting more guns than scruples have decided to cut themselves in on Stan's caper, and they're following the money trail right to Alexandra and Lawton.

The cast of felons and wannabes provides a field day for Hall's well-known eye for grotesques (check out especially Lawton's blackly comic ramblings, presented with affection and respect but without blinkers, and the remorseless thief who keeps a pet roach named Amy), but the novelist never gets so distracted by all the murderous monkeyshines that he loses track of the 'Bloody Rapist', four counties back but closing fast. A double-barreled actioner set apart from the pack by Hall's virtuoso control of tone, which can shift you from giggles to gasps with a single well-trimmed phrase.

What People Are Saying

Elmore Leonard
This book is a beauty...the plot, the action, the marvelous sense of place, are enough to keep anyone reading.

James Crumley
A beautifully deceptive novel...I haven't enjoyed a novel quite so much in a long time.

Clive Cussler
Hall nails you to the page until the suspense-laden climax.

Elmore Leonard
Highly original and entertaining.

James Ellroy
...smart, observant, richly grotesque.

James Patterson
Body Language seduces you, then grabs you, and it never lets you go. This is a first-rate by a masterful writer. -- Author of Kiss the Girls and Cat and Mouse

Dean Koontz
...astringent, penetrating, and unfailingly gripping...

Michael Connelly
Body Language is James Hall showing all his best stuff. Complex and edgy, engrossing and masterful. I've been reading and learning from Hall for a long time but this book's a cut above the rest. It's his very best.

Stephen Coonts
Body Language is a sizzling tale of sex, blood, and obsession. James Hall just gets better and better.

Sue Grafton
Alexandra Rafferty is a fabulous addition to the ranks of law enforcement.

James Patterson
This is a first-rate thriller by a masterful writer. -- Author of Cat and Mouse and Kiss the Girls

Product Details

• ISBN: 0312969120
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312969127
• Format: Mass Market Paperback, 384pp
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Pub. Date: August 1999
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 65,398
• Series: Thorn Mysteries Ser.

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

She got a wide-angle shot of the cars. You never knew when a perp might leave his vehicle behind. Car trouble, panic, even arrogance. A year earlier, after studying hundreds of photos of two different murder scenes, Alexandra had spotted the same car parked at both, a fact that broke the case.

It took her four shots to get all the cars near the apartment. The Minolta 700 SI she was using was motor-driven, had an autofocus, auto everything. Nearly impossible to make a mistake.

Alexandra Rafferty was an ID tech with the Miami PD, photographic specialist. Not being a sworn police officer meant, among other things, that she wasn't authorized to carry a gun. Which was fine by her. She'd had more than enough of guns. Her only weapon was the telescoping baton she carried on her belt. Her counterparts with Metro-Dade, the county ID techs, were sworn officers, and they were paid even more than the detectives. They carried the latest Glocks, ran the crime scene, bossed the homicide guys around. But not the City of Miami PD. Exactly the same job, only Alexandra and her colleagues were considered technicians, bottom of the totem.

Night after night, she ghosted through rooms, took her shots, and when she was finished, she moved on to the next scene. Hardly noticed. Which was fine. She had no aspiration to run things. That wasn't her. She had her attitude, her opinion. Had no problem speaking up if one of the homicide guys missed something or asked for her view. But she didn't aspire to run the show or get involved with the daily dick measuring that went on all around her. She took her rolls of film, sent them to processing, got them back, arranged them, put together her files, and then moved on, and moved on again.

Her B.A. was from the local state university, criminal justice, psychology minor, 3.8 average, her only Bs a couple of painting courses she'd attempted. Some of her college friends were horrified at her career choice. But she wouldn't be anywhere else. In a cheap blue shirt and matching trousers, a uniform shabbier than the ones the inmates got, working impossible hours at insultingly low pay. But none of that mattered. She liked her job. It made a difference in the world, a modest one perhaps, but essential. And the job kept her alert, focused, living close to the bone. And she liked using the camera, being a photographer who never had to tell her subjects to hold still, never got a complaint about unflattering angles.

Alexandra was twenty-nine and had been doing this work for eight years. It still felt new. Every night, every scene, something different, something human and extreme. From eleven till seven, alert for eight hours. Wired. Just after dawn, she'd take her run on the beach, then go home, still pumped from the night before, and make breakfast for Stan and her father. She'd ride that high most of the morning. Just steal a few hours of sleep in the afternoon while Stan was at work and her dad was doing basket weaving at Harbor House, four or five hours at the most; then by eleven the next night, she was ready to go again.

It was a little before midnight, Wednesday, October the seventh. No traffic on Tigertail Avenue. No human noises. Only the jittery fizz of the sulfurous streetlights. She lowered her camera, stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape, walked forward five paces, raised the Minolta again, and took half a dozen medium-distance flash shots of bloodstains on the asphalt parking lot. Several drops gleamed near the rear bumper of a Corvette with dark windows and a bad boy logo. She got a shot of the Vette, its license plate. A wide-angle shot of the other four cars parked beside it. Then she knelt down for a few close-ups of the blood. It was dry now but still gleamed in the yellow streetlights.

She got back to her feet and scanned the pavement with her Maglite. She worked between the cars, found more blood near the sidewalk, a bloody footprint. She took one establishing shot of the footprint from five feet out, then placed her ruler down next to the print for accurate perspective and took one shot, then another just to be sure she had something.

Eyes neutral. No personality, no throb of self. The flat, disinterested perspective of an android whose assignment was simply to see and document. No Alexandra, no daughter, no wife, no bundle of dreams and wishes and memories. Nothing but the viewfinder, the square frame, the footprints. Step by step, moving closer to the heart of the crime.

On the sidewalk in front of the apartment, she popped out the used film, marked it, and threaded a new roll into the Minolta. Kodak Plus 200. From the window of the bottom apartment, a cat watched her. It was a gold tabby with a bell on its collar. As she came near, the cat stood up on the inside windowsill and stretched itself, then slid away into the dark apartment as if it had witnessed its quota of misery for one night.

Alexandra took another flash shot at the bottom of the stairway. More speckles of blood and more footprints. She found the bloody outline of a hand on the wood rail and got a medium shot and a five-inch close-up of it. Clear enough to blow up later and use the fluorescent-light enhancement to get a usable print. She took one more shot as she was going up the stairs. The bottom of the bleeder's shoes had deep waffle patterns. The same size ten Nikes he'd worn on the four previous occasions.

The killer had walked down the stairway, dripping blood in front of him, then stepping into the spatters he'd made. His fifth assault in as many months, identical MO as the others. Lots of theories were circulating about why a guy who'd just raped and murdered took such care to leave his bloody prints behind. A taunt, perhaps. A wish to be caught. Or some ritualistic fantasy he was dramatizing. The Miami Herald and one of the TV stations had dubbed him "the Bloody Rapist" and theorized that he was trying to show the incompetence of law enforcement. A former cop perhaps thumbing his nose at his old colleagues. Here're my fingerprints all over the place, my DNA, my shoe prints, and you idiots still can't catch me.

But Alex didn't buy the profile. As usual, the media jocks assumed everyone else wanted what they themselves hungered so deeply for: publicity, high ratings. But this guy didn't strike her that way at all. No headline hound. His whole scenario was too intense, too private for that. To Alex, that blood seemed fiercely primal, like the spoor of some fatally wounded animal, a beast too blinded by its hurt to care about the trail it was leaving.

Higher up the wooden railing was another bloody handprint. Alexandra got an establishing shot from five feet away, then two close-in shots. Good clear prints. She moved slowly, warily, eyes roaming in precise concentric circles, five feet out, ten feet, farther. As she'd been trained to look. Second nature now.

Down the hallway, Dan Romano was smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the night sky. Heavy guy with white hair swept back. Thirty years on the force. Homicide lieutenant who was running the Bloody Rapist investigation. Dan was due to retire any day now. Getting philosophical these last few months on the job, bugging everyone with big unanswerable questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does the ivy twine?

"Place is pretty quiet," she said. "You run everybody off, Dan? Your charisma on the fritz again?"

Dan flicked his cigarette out into the night, turned to look at her.

"ME's getting his pants on; everybody else is rolling. Be here momentarily."

"What do we have?"

Dan gave her a wan smile.

"Your guy's been naughty again."

Alexandra shook her head.

"You can drop that crap. It's not funny anymore."

"Hey, I'm not the only one to notice. Folks are starting to talk."

"He's not mine any more than he's yours or anybody else's, so cut the shit."

Alexandra checked the settings on the Minolta.

"Like right now, Alex. How tightened up you are. Stiff-jointed. That thing happening with your eye."

She stared at him.

"Yeah? And what thing is that?"

"That twitch, right there in the corner of your left eye. I'm not the only one to notice it. You got a reaction going on, Alex. This guy's hit a nerve."

"I was winking at you, Dan. Flirting. You couldn't tell?"

He gazed at her for a few seconds and his voice softened.

"I don't think so, Alex. I think this is getting to you. I think you need to talk about this to somebody with some training."

She shook her head, lowered her camera.

"Come on, Dan. All the shit we wade through every day, I guess I'm entitled to a goddamn eye twitch now and then, don't you think?"

He kept staring at her for a moment or two; then he sighed and his eyes drifted off to the horizon. He lit another cigarette, took a hungry pull.

She said, "I'm finished shooting out here. You want to show me around inside? Or just do it on my own?"

Dan blew out a cloud of smoke and didn't move. His eyes were scanning the dark heavens.

"Tell me something, Alex. I been meaning to ask you." His voice with that dreamy edge.

"Oh, brother, here it comes."

He drew in another hit and let the smoke drift out with his words.

"Why do you do this shit? You're a smart, good-looking woman. You got skills, a college diploma; you could do anything. What the hell motivates you?"

He brought his eyes back from the dark and peered at her.

"It was either this or a nunnery." She gave him a light smile, but he didn't notice.

"I'd hate to see you wind up like me. Because you know what I'm starting to think, Alex? I'm starting to think I fucking wasted my life. That's where I am these days. Standing here, on the goddamn threshold of my golden years, I been running these same laps three decades now, and I ask myself what it's all added up to. And the answer keeps coming up the same. Not a hill of shit."

"What do you want, Dan? Want me to try to cheer you up?"

He looked down at the sprinkle of blood near his feet.

"It won't work. I'm inconsolable." He cocked his head and smiled. "I pronounce that right? Inconsolable?"

"Sounded right to me."

"I'm working on my vocabulary. One of my new hobbies, getting ready for retirement. Hell, I never needed a fucking vocabulary on this job."

"Well," Alex said. "Inconsolable seems like a pretty good place to start."

Dan tilted his head back, stared up at the sky, getting that look again.

Alexandra stepped into the apartment.

The sectional couch was shaped into a U and took up most of the room. It was a green-and-white tropical print. On the glass coffee table was the same bottle of Lucere, a Napa Valley chardonnay that had been at all the other scenes. A high-end grocery store wine, but not rare enough to be helpful.

Sprawled on the beige rug in the center of the U was a pretty woman in her late twenties with short black hair. She was naked and her slender body had been rearranged. The killer had laid her out flat on her back with her arms hugging her belly as if she'd been kicked in the gut and was fighting for air.

"Same as number one," Dan said from the door. "Like maybe he's run out of poses and he's starting the cycle again."

"Maybe."

There was a deep cut at her throat, like the others. She was slender and her eyes were open-dark and disconnected.

"Landlord found her. A week late on her rent. He knocked, walked in. I'm guessing she's been dead more than twenty-four, less than thirty-six."

"Seems about right," Alex said.

The other four women had been naked, as well. All the bodies were laid out in different positions, each one portraying another violent drama. The homicide guys had given each a name. Number one, like this one, was known as "Gasper." Number two was found lying on her side bent at the waist with her hands covering her ears as if she were trying to shut out some gruesome noise. "Hear No Evil" the detectives called her. Number three had given the namers the most trouble. Like two, she'd been placed on her left side with her legs forward, but this one's arms had been extended in front of her, one at chest level, one arm stretching out from beneath her head, a flailing motion as if she were trying to fight off a swarm of bees. They called her "The Swatter." And then about a month ago, they'd found the fourth victim badly decomposed in her Little Havana apartment. Her nude body was lying face up with arms and legs spread as if she were floating tranquilly on the quiet surface of a lake. So "Floater" it was.

The FBI examined the photos and found no matches with any other signature killings around the country in the last ten years. Their profilers theorized the Bloody Rapist was creating particular scenarios from his past, trying to reconstruct moments of abuse he'd witnessed as a child-probably acts of violence against his mother he was helpless to prevent.

But that was far too neat an explanation for Alexandra, too off-the-rack. Just as likely the killer had repositioned the women according to the twisted commandments of some crazed inner voice. But these days everyone wanted a formula, a nifty explanation for guys like this. As if his actions might make a kind of sense, raping women, slashing their throats, repositioning them, then leaving a trail of blood leading away from the scene. Like sure, of course, he must have seen his father beat his mother, then leave her in these exact positions on the living room floor, and he'd walked away bleeding from the scratch marks she'd given him, so now the grown-up boy, that poor, twisted son of a bitch, is compelled to re-enact endlessly those traumatic episodes, laying the dead women out like sacrificial offerings to his past.

Alex hated it, the way the forensic-psychology hotshots had taken over, explaining it all, giving every crime a cute Freudian cause and effect. She hated it because the explanations were always more than explanations. Behind each of their clever scenarios was the same suggestion-that there was logic to evil, a reasonable justification for every fucking horror under the sun.

The media wasn't onto the weird arrangements yet, because so far, everyone working the case had been stonewalling, keeping the reporters beyond the crime-scene tape. If the killer was indeed hungry for newsprint, it wasn't their job to feed him. And, of course, the second the word got out about those eerie poses, there'd be tabloid crews elbowing their way to the front of the pack, making good police work a hundred times harder.

Slowly, she began to work her way around the perimeter of the room, a full 360 degrees. The light was good. Dan had turned everything on, overhead, table lamps, fluorescent kitchen lights. She had to change film again. Marking it, slipping the used film into her waist pouch. Continuing around the edge of the room to get the complete perspective. Then zooming in for the victim. Pretty woman, athletic. That one-inch incision in her throat, a few quarts of her blood spreading into the beige carpet. Alexandra got close-ups of the wound, the stained carpet.

Across from the flowery couch was a leather wing-back chair, a matching ottoman. Something from a lawyer's study. Two cheap oils on the walls, sad-eyed clowns and a pelican nesting on a piling-tourist shop trash. But behind the couch was a large black-and-white photograph, a misty Everglades glen cluttered with ferns and alligators lurking beneath the still waters. A guy's work she'd admired for years. Clyde Butcher.

She'd read about him, how he slogged with his huge camera and a hundred pounds of equipment out into the middle of the soupy Glades. Then he set up his tripod, hefted the camera onto it. Two hours to set up for one shot-all so he could make these huge photographs full of intricate detail. Butcher did magical things with black and white. Made herons and ibises into angels. Put an enchanted sheen on the palm fronds and the saw grass that exposed the sinister grace of that river of grass. Its silence and danger, its holiness.

Nothing at all like the stuff she did-just one color shot after another, stark and standard. Keeping herself out of it. Keeping her mood, her values, her interpretation buried away.

She would snap somewhere around three hundred shots of that particular crime scene alone. Probably over a thousand photos before the night was done. And none of them would be art. That was the skill of the job. Keep it dull. Plain and simple and honest and straight. No spin, no subjectivity. Nothing for defense lawyers to argue about. That was what she did five nights a week. She kept herself out of it. Walked through these rooms with the scrupulous dispassion of a Buddhist priest. Not playing with shadows and perspectives, not stalking, like Clyde Butcher did, that perfect moment when sunlight and shadow and the ripples on the water's surface were in perfect alignment.

Her job was the opposite of art. Pornographic reality. If she had a gift, it was a talent for watchful emptiness. Standing back, seeing, then getting it all down on her negative-the disinterested purity of fact.

"You like that?" Dan said from the doorway. "That photograph?"

"I like it. Sure."

"So take it with you. I'll help you get it down."

She looked over at him.

"Who's going to know, Alex?"

"What're you, cracking up? I'm not taking that thing."

"Why not?"

Alexandra took another look at the photograph and heaved out a breath.

"Well, for one thing, it wouldn't fit in my place," she said. "It's too beautiful. I'd have to take down all the other crap I got on my walls. Or else move to a better house."

Standing in the doorway, he shook his head, stripped a stick of gum.

"You know, Rafferty, I'm developing a new theory about this blood thing he does."

"I don't like the jokes, okay? Not about this guy. Spare me."

"It's not a joke," he said. "What I think is, cutting himself like he does is how the guy gets off. Like a sperm substitute."

"He doesn't have any trouble ejaculating," she said. "There's plenty of seminal fluid."

"Maybe this is like some kind of bigger, better orgasm. He blows his load, kills the woman, then slashes himself. And there's blood flowing and sperm leaking out, and the goddamn freak is flying off into orbit. All the bells ringing, whistles shrieking, lights going full blast, the guy's soaring out there into interplanetary nothingness."
She stared at him.

"Dan, maybe it is time for you to retire."

"Pathology boys are saying it's glass he cuts them with, not a blade."

"Glass?"

"Yeah, figure that out. Some kind of special glass."

"Special? How?"

The big man shrugged. "I haven't read the report yet. Just glanced at it on the way over here."

"Let me get this straight. The guy holds a chunk of glass in his bare hand, and when he cuts their throats, he winds up slicing himself in the process. Like either he's totally stupid or for some reason he enjoys the pain."

Romano shrugged again. "Well, I think we can rule out stupid."

"Oh boy, the psychobabblers ought to have fun with that."

She shot the sprinkling of blood on the beige carpet. Got close-ups of the woman's throat. Just like the four others, a gash with a little wrist flick, like the letter C. But that was for the ME to figure out, the pathology guys, the blood-spatter techs. Alexandra was just a photographer-cold, neutral eyes.

They'd send the blood and sperm specimens, tissue samples, hair and fiber off to the FBI lab, the FDLE, have them run their blue-ribbon tests. And it would all be futile. This asshole wasn't leaving behind anything he didn't want them to find. They already knew his fingerprints weren't on file in the AFIS database or with the FBI. The DNA was worthless unless they already had the guy in custody.

From the autopsies and blood-spatter patterns, they could tell the guy was highly organized, under strict control. The whole event had the feel of a finely tuned script, a lockstep ritual. Same white wine at every scene. Even the same amount of chardonnay left in the bottle each time.

No witnesses ever remembered seeing him arrive. No one saw him depart. Apparently, the guy was a charmer of lonely hearts. All the women he'd chosen were loners, vulnerable women, recently divorced or separated. Awkward and unsure, back on the market after some wrenching failure. Easy prey.

After two sips of wine, a few hors d'oeuvres, he punched them in the face, slammed them to the floor. He was strong and quick, and once he got started, he was ruthless. Somewhere during the act itself, he reached back for his weapon and plunged it into their throats, stayed mounted until he'd ejaculated, then climbed off their cooling bodies. The ME had come up with that opinion, comparing the temperature of sperm with the temp of the body. Nothing high-tech about it.

Then a few minutes postmortem, most likely after he'd dressed and recovered, the killer arranged his victims into the pose he'd selected, and a minute or two later, he began to dribble that trail of blood away from the scene.

Though the sequence was identical every time, the women were all different. No regularity to body types or hair color or socioeconomic background. Either the killer wasn't that particular or his fantasizing capabilities were so powerful that he could incorporate a lot of different types into his horror show. The only similarity among the women was their ages. They were all in their late twenties.

Based on the very limited evidence he was leaving behind, Alex doubted he'd be caught from police work alone. Probably their best hope was that the killings would someday stop gratifying the guy and his passions would grow so pressurized inside the locked chambers of his heart that the walls would rupture and he'd blow wide open and do something out of character, wild, stupid, clumsy. Or better yet, there was the outside chance he would meet a woman who outmatched him, someone who could block that first punch and answer it with a high-caliber counterpunch-someone with a quick draw and a fast trigger, who'd make him spill his blood in earnest.

Alex only hoped it happened on her shift, so she could take a roll or two of the asshole's corpse.

The apartment was crowded with cops by the time she was leaving. Media trucks in the parking lot, halogen lights blazing, helicopters fanning the moonlight. Alexandra Rafferty got in her van and moved on to a quiet neighborhood in the Grove, a home invasion with a husband and a wife pistol-whipped but alive. After that, she did a convenience-store robbery on Biscayne Boulevard, the clerk shot twice in the face for sixty-three dollars and two six-packs of Colt 45. As the sun was coming up, she did a domestic-abuse case in Little Havana. A Latin man in his sixties who'd stabbed his teenage boyfriend twenty-five times in the genitals. The old man had to be sedated before he would let go of the mutilated body of his lover.

Copyright (c) 1998 by James W. Hall.