With the phantom smell of morgue still in his nose, he took another shower and made a pot of bad coffee in the little machine on the bathroom counter. Breathing deep the scents of coffee and soap in the steamy bathroom, he wiped off a section of mirror and took his daily inventory.

He had looked worse. He had looked better. If he had been a woman, he at least could have improved himself with makeup.

“You’d be a hell of an ugly woman, Vince,” he said, finding a chuckle in that.

He made a mental note to look into visiting a tanning parlor to get some of the gray out of his skin. He was in California, after all. Cali fornians loved their tans. He had no doubt that he would feel like an idiot doing it, but if it kept people from thinking he had one foot in the grave, it was probably worth it.

Room service brought a basket of muffins and toast. He ate what he could just to put a layer of something in his stomach before the first round of pills. The brown prescription bottles were arrayed on the dresser. Painkillers, antiseizure medication, antinausea medication, antipsychotic meds to ward off the paranoia sometimes brought on by pressure against some crucial part of his brain of which he couldn’t remember the name.

He had yet to take that one. So far he had managed to fend off the anxiety himself. He looked at the prescription bottle and wondered if he really needed it, would he be sane enough to take it.

As he picked at the food, he listened to his tape of the conversation in the car from the night before. Mendez had given him an overview of what had happened so far. Three probable victims and one woman missing. He made notes as he listened and mulled over the notes when the tape clicked off. He studied the Polaroids he had taken at the autopsy, particularly intrigued by the cutting wounds that seemed so deliberate and symmetrically placed on the limbs—where there was a vertical cut on one arm there was a corresponding cut in exactly the same place on the other arm. The same with the legs.

He pulled a paper from his briefcase that depicted a simple line drawing of the female human form, front and back, and drew in the marks on Lisa Warwick’s body. He would fax the form to Quantico later to find out if anyone in ISU had come across this pattern before.

He would go in to the sheriff’s office this morning and go over the particulars of all three cases, with a particular eye out for any similar marks on the previous victims, and begin work on the profile in earnest.