This was when I was in Counterstrike, the paramilitary unit where I first trained, and word came down to us that our superiors suspected the hairy hand of Hell. If “Smyler” had come back from the dead, then there was only one explanation, and it had horns and carried a pitchfork. That seemed pretty weird from our end, because the murderer’s M.O. was exactly the same as before, students and other young people. See, normally, if the Opposition have an asset like that they put him or her to work doing something more useful than just random killing. Leo, my old top-kicker, said they might be using Smyler to shake people up, improve the climate for Hell’s other operations, if you get what I’m saying. Like they taught us in Angel Training, the Opposition thrives in chaos, and it was pretty clear that chaos was what this guy was causing. The newspapers persuaded someone on the force to talk about the “SMYLE” tags and soon it was “Graffiti Murderer Returns!” and “Ghost or Copycat?” and all that bullshit. For months it was like Son of Sam had come to Jude. A couple of cruising dumbasses got shot at by scared college girls carrying their daddies’ guns, and half the waterfront tourist business dried up.

I won’t bore you with all the details of how we tracked the guy down. Counterstrike Unit Lyrae, also known as the Harps, have methods the cops don’t even dream of, and that was necessary, because Smyler was no longer a living man. Not that finding him was easy, even for us. Whatever made him into a psychopathic murderer had been refined and polished by Hell, and San Judas was a fuck of a lot bigger and easier to hide in than the little Pacific Coast towns he’d been haunting in the ’70s. He actually killed another one after we started looking for him, a paperboy out on his morning rounds, and that burned all of us in the Harps like fire. Also, he was beginning to spread his net wider now, and the papers picked up on it. It was like the whole city was going mental. We had to deal with him quickly. We got a lucky break, a tip from an informant that put us right on his tail.

It turned out the killer wasn’t even staying in San Judas itself, but in an abandoned junkyard down in Alviso that had been red-tagged by the EPA for toxins and was awaiting Superfund cleanup. What did Smyler care if the place would have killed anyone else? He was already dead. He wasn’t even living in the deserted office; instead, he’d made a burrow for himself in the piles of wrecked autos and discarded appliances, nesting down in the middle like a rat.