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By Root 757 0

were large cities. The victims were single, male, between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, tortured and murdered in their homes. While most serial predators stayed within one race, the first victim was black and the second—and presumably the third—were white. The first vic owned his own business and, though divorced, was by all accounts a devoted father. The second vic had never married, but had a rap sheet for minor drug charges, and worked as a mechanic. There was some indication that he had a gambling problem, which delayed the local police from reporting the crime to the national database, mistakenly believing it was payback for an uncollected debt. The hot sheet possibly linking the two had only been sent out last week.

“The deputy coroner just pulled up,” Kamanski said. “Let me clue him in and we’ll be back.”

“Great. The sooner we get the body moved, the better.” Already, decomp had set in from the layers of clothing the dead man wore coupled with the already high late morning temperature.

Kamanski walked away, and Meg frowned at the body. Something else seemed—odd. Because the victim was homeless and had been living on the streets long enough to disappear into the backdrop of Sacramento, his age was indeterminate. His clothes hadn’t been washed in weeks or longer, so his hands stood out.

“Tate,” she called to the new special agent assigned to Squad Eight, the Violent Crimes/Major Offenders Unit of the Sacramento FBI. “Take pictures of his hands.”

“I already photographed the body.” But he squatted next to her and snapped a few shots with the digital camera, then with a film camera.

“They’re clean,” he said, surprised.

“Exactly. Another part of the ritual?” she wondered out loud. “Or had he fought back and scratched his attacker? Maybe scouring the hands was an attempt to get rid of evidence.” She didn’t have the hot sheet in front of her, but she didn’t recall that the killer had cleansed his previous victims. If it was the same killer.

Under normal circumstances, Megan wouldn’t be called out to a local homicide, but this murder matched two recent homicides in Texas and Nevada, prompting the Bureau to send out a nationwide alert about a possible serial murderer. Normally, such rather generic murders wouldn’t have sparked the interest of the FBI, but the killer marked his victims in a very specific manner.

First, slicing the hamstrings to incapacitate the victim. Not fatal, but extremely debilitating and painful.

Next, restraint of some sort. Meg didn’t touch the body because the coroner hadn’t inspected it yet, but there were no obvious marks of restraint. Perhaps the wrists and ankles, which were concealed by his clothing.

Followed by prolonged torture. The hot sheet indicated that the first victim had been tortured for a minimum of two hours, the second victim four hours. But the torture itself was in dispute—there wasn’t a lot of detail as to the method, only that needle marks were found on the victims but no known drugs were present. There was some obvious physical violence—the first victim had his fingers broken with a blunt object, the second victim’s ribs had been cracked and broken from a beating. But no biological evidence had been found yet. The Quantico laboratory was assisting in processing trace evidence.

After the apparent torture, the victim was shot low in the back of the head, a classic and effective method of execution. There was no obvious postmortem ritual.

“It’s as if he plays with them then suddenly shoots them dead.”

“Excuse me?” Tate asked.

“Talking to myself,” she muttered. “And it doesn’t fit with this crime scene. He wasn’t tortured here.” She itched to look under his clothing to see if the needle marks matched up to the photographs she’d seen of one of the previous victims.

“Agent Elliott,” Tate said.

She looked up, not realizing that she’d been staring at the body, trying to make sense of a senseless murder.

Senseless to you, Megan, not to the killer.

“Is the coroner ready?”

“I don’t know. But look.” He pointed to a chain under the victim.

Only three prongs on