She hated teaching: grading papers, the students who didn’t care what she talked about, the university politics. Also, although she didn’t like to admit it in a room filled with those of a right-wing persuasion, being mom twenty-four hours a day was tedious. A quarter of that time would have been perfect. In reality, she did love her daughter. And Tony was great; she faked her orgasms less than 50 percent of the time, which she knew was a huge positive when it came to most marriages, never mind what Dr. Phil thought.

It was just that she never seemed to have any fun anymore.

That was who and where she was when the call came.

John Douglas’s offspring had read her thesis. They thought she was loose with her conclusions but they were nevertheless intrigued. Apparently they had been running into a few too many messiah-driven killers lately. The bastards had come out of the woodwork after the millennium. The bright boys at the FBI wanted to know if she would like to be a part-time consultant. Someone they could call when it came to cases where the murderers were fans of Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Socrates. They invited her to Quantico to talk. Kelly said sure, why not. She had only seen the place in the movies.

She left Tony and Anna at home. That in itself might have been a mistake.

They took her into an office buried deep inside the academy and threw a test file at her about a serial killer who was going after handsome males between the ages of twenty and thirty. He was chopping them into tiny pieces and sinking their remains in rivers. He was also leaving behind what looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics written in blood at the places where he cut up his victims. The FBI boys wanted to know where the guy was coming from.

Obviously, she thought, they knew nothing about mythology.

She explained the myths surrounding Isis, her husband Osiris, and their evil half brother Set. The latter had cut Osiris into tiny pieces and taken him to the underworld. The reason the killer dumped the remains in a river, she said, was because it symbolized to him the River Styx, which was associated with the underworld in Egyptian mythology. In other words, she thought the guy saw himself as Set. Plus there were a few Egyptian texts that hinted that Set had a crush on Isis. Chances were that all the victims had known a certain woman that the killer was in turn obsessed with. Find that woman and they would find the killer.

The FBI boys clapped. They had been humoring her. They had solved the case a month earlier by making the same Isis-Osiris-Set connection. But they admitted that it had taken them five months, and she had done it in five minutes.