She jumped to her feet. Blood was everywhere. The form was soaked in it. It pooled on the floor, a viscous jam, shiny in the flashlight beam. She opened her purse, snapped up her spray can of herbal mace, and held it out, index finger on the nozzle.

“Are you okay?” she asked in a tiny voice.

It sounded stupid even as she said it. There was no way someone could bleed that much and still be alive. Don’t look under the sheet. She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She held the flashlight overhead, an ad hoc bludgeoning instrument, and, grimacing, used the spray can of mace to ease the sheet back.

She took his face in all at once—a flash of eyebrows and acne scars, a slender nose, round face, and soft chin, all the details ordering in her brain to form a face, a young man, a guy her age. For a split second, she thought he was okay, that he’d start laughing, that it was all some stupid joke. He was wearing one of those silly hospital scrub caps, for Christ’s sake, a purple one with cartoon elephants on it, like he was in some sort of costume. And his eyes were open. She let the breath she’d been holding escape in a gasp. Then her brain caught up with her.

The eyes weren’t right. The lids were pulled back too far, his fixed stare barely visible under a cataract-like white glaze.

She jerked back, and her flashlight beam momentarily angled up, cutting a path to the opposite wall. For a second Susan thought she was seeing things. She angled the flashlight up again, the beam trembling with her hand. The yellow ball of light slid across the wall, and Susan wanted to turn it off, wanted it to be dark, because even scary pitch-black would be better than this.

The wall had been painted white. But it had been decorated. Someone had covered the surface, almost every inch of it, with hundreds and hundreds of hand-drawn red hearts.

Get out of the house, her little voice screamed. But Susan didn’t move. There was no fucking way she was going back into that basement.

She reached into her purse and felt around for her phone.

She called the paper first, and 911 second.

C H A P T E R 12

Henry stood in the rain on the hillside with Detective Martin Ngyun, staring down at the leathery head in the mud. The ferns and brush around the head were charred and the entire area was dusted with foam from a fire extinguisher. Henry could see a soot-blackened cigarette that had been stamped deeply into the dirt.

Henry peered up the hillside. The whole task force had responded. A busload of Beauty Killer tourists were standing at the top of the hill behind the crime-scene tape taking pictures. No keeping this one under wraps. They were probably tweeting as he stood there. “Who put out the fire?” Henry asked Ngyun.