“Can your man get at them?”

Lance got up and walked back toward the office. “I’ll ask him to try.”

Stone got up and followed him. “There’s something else I’d like to know from New Haven.”

47

HOLLY CAME SLOWLY out of sleep, but being awake wasn’t much different. She wondered if he was giving her something to make her sleep; she seemed to be doing an awful lot of it. Not that she had anything else to do.

He was giving her precious little sensory input. He came in four or five times a day, she thought. He emptied her, fed her another candy bar and gave her water. Maybe something in the water? She certainly had not felt wide-awake since the first day. How many days was it? Two? Three? Four? She couldn’t tell. The tape over her eyes kept her from knowing whether it was day or night, and the earplugs muffled most sound.

He didn’t seem interested in sex; he hadn’t touched her in any way, except to pull her clothing down for the bedpan. He hadn’t found her gun, either, since the sweatshirt covered it, even when she was using the bedpan. If she could just get a hand free. She tried again, but it only hurt worse. Her wrists felt bruised and chafed from trying to get loose.

Why would he keep her, hour after hour, day after day? What use would he make of her? If he wanted her dead, she’d already be dead; if he wanted sex, she’d have already been raped. It didn’t make any sense at all. She yawned and dozed off again.

LANCE CAME OUT OF Dick’s little office with a sheet of paper. “The FBI has come to life,” he said. “They’ve given us a profile, done by their experts.”

Sergeant Young, who had seemed almost asleep, came to life. “I want to hear this.”

“He’s between twenty-five and forty,” Lance read, “lives with his mother, is employed as a skilled laborer or as a white-collar worker with considerable responsibility. His father is dead or was divorced from his mother when he was a child. He’s uncomfortable around women, especially those who dress in an overtly sexual manner. People who know him think of him as quiet and pleasant. He’s not married, nor does he have a regular sex life.”

“The dress code doesn’t sound like any of our victims,” Young said, “except Janey Harris, who wore the kind of clothes teenaged girls wear these days: you know, bare bellies almost to the crotch, tight T-shirts, that sort of thing. It certainly doesn’t fit the two housewives.”

“It doesn’t fit Holly, either,” Stone said. “Any more of the profile?”

Lance shook his head. “They make the usual disclaimers about the accuracy of the profile, and they say they need more to go on.”