“Life’s all bad now for Frank. The wheels are coming off the tracks and he can’t stop the train. In his mind he’s done everything right—except for accidentally killing the missus—and he wants someone to take the blame.”

“Me,” Dixon said.

“You,” Vince said. “You should have trusted him. You should have taken him at his word. You took him off the task force. That’s when things started going wrong. Must be your fault. And here we are.”

Dixon looked at him. “You have all of that going on in your head?”

“All that and a bullet,” Mendez said.

“Frank wasn’t the bogeyman,” Vince said. “He was a guy that was wound too tight and he blew apart. Plain and simple. And I’ll bet I can prove it,” he said, pushing to his feet. “Where did you send Mrs. Farman’s body?”

The bodies had been taken to Orrison Funeral Home: both Farmans, Mr. and Mrs. Vince figured it was a safe bet the funeral home had never had a more macabre tableau laid out in their embalming room.

Sharon Farman’s body bag was opened, and Vince steeled himself against the violence that had been done to her both before and after her death.

“I only want you to look at the cutting wounds,” Vince said. “Look at the placement of the wounds, the length, the depth, the way the edges look.”

He had brought along his Polaroids from the Lisa Warwick autopsy. Also his drawing of the placement of Lisa Warwick’s wounds, and the sketch he had made earlier that evening of Karly Vickers’s identical wounds. Each mark was precisely placed, precisely sized.

Now he made a sketch of Sharon Farman’s wounds on the simple human outline on another one of his forms. When he had finished, he laid out everything on a clean stainless steel embalming table, placing the drawings side by side by side.

None of them spoke as they studied the sketches: two exact matches, one sloppy forgery. The cutting wounds on Sharon Farman varied in length and depth. The placement didn’t match the other victims. The wounds appeared random rather than deliberate.

“Frank Farman didn’t kill those women,” Vince said. “These cuts made on Warwick and Vickers mean something specific to the perpetrator. He makes them where and how he makes them for a reason. Sharon Farman is just hacked up.”

Mendez continued to stare at the sketches, seeing something more than what Vince had seen after staring at them for hours on end. He had looked for some kind of message in the placement of the wounds, in the length of the wounds, in the depth of the wounds. They meant something to their killer, but he still wasn’t sure what.