“Maybe your depression stems from guilt, which should be expected after murdering an innocent woman.”

“Andy,” he said, his voice brightening, a sign that he’d changed the subject. “I wanna tell you something that struck me when I read your first novel, which was good, by the way. They don’t deserve the criticism they get. They’re much deeper than slasher stories. Anyway, when I finished The Killer and His Weapon, I realized that we do the same thing.”

“No. I write; you kill.”

“We both murder people, Andy. Because you do it with words on a page, that doesn’t exonerate what’s in your heart.”

“People happen to like the way I tell crime stories,” I said. “If I had the chops to write literary fiction, I’d do that.”

“No, there’s something about murder, about rage, that intrigues you. You embrace that obsession through writing. I embrace it through the act itself. Which of us is living according to his true nature?”

“There’s a world of difference between how our obsessions manifest themselves,” I said.

“So you admit you’re obsessed with murder?”

“For the sake of argument. But my books don’t hurt anyone.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“How do my books kill?”

“When I read The Killer and His Weapon, I didn’t feel alone anymore. Andy, you know how killers think. Why they kill. When it came out ten years ago, I was confused and terrified of what was happening in my mind. I was homeless then, spending my days at a library. I hadn’t acted on anything, but the burning had begun.”

“Where were you?”

He shook his head. “City X. I’ll tell you nothing about my past. But every word in that book validated the urges I was having. Especially my anger. I mean, to write that protagonist, you had to have an intimate knowledge of the rage I lived with. And of course you did—” he smiled—“my twin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tool of writing to channel that rage, so people had to die. But your book …it was inspiring. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We both have the same disease, only yours makes you rich and famous, and mine makes me a serial murderer.”

“Tell me something,” I said, and he sat up on one arm. “When did this start?”

He hesitated, rolling the idea around in his head. “Eight years ago. Winter of nineteen-eighty-eight. We were twenty-six, and it was the last year I was homeless. I usually slept outside, because I didn’t leave the library until nine, when it closed, and by then the shelters were full.

“If you wanted to survive a cold night on the street, you had to go where the fires were—the industrial district, near these railroad tracks. It was an unloading zone, so there was plenty of scrap wood lying around. The homeless would pile the wood in oil drums and feed the fires until morning, when libraries and doughnut shops reopened.