Finally, John stepped out of his van. In the quiet of the witching hour, walked up to her front porch, barely looking over his shoulder. There was no one peeking out of their blinds at this hour.

He methodically took rocks from the sorry excuse for landscaping and one by one, placed them in the way of the front door. He pulled the bench over, wedging it in place, too.

Each of John’s kills had been different. They were risky, heightened by the exhibitionist possibility of getting caught. He’d gotten Vanessa on her smoke break at work, thrilled by the slim window of time he had access to her. Alannah had been a delightfully eerie game of surprise, but he had to finish before the bus thundered right by him. Pearl, for all the incomparable rush of killing a woman while her closest friends were downstairs, had been quick.

John craved a slow burn. He wanted to taste her fear on the air. He wanted her to believe she could escape just so he could snatch that hope from her grasp.

The shabby neighborhood may have bordered on cliché, but it was the perfect place to go unnoticed. A red blinking light above him drew his attention to the security camera pointed at the welcome mat. John simply reached up and yanked it off the siding, revealing the device to be fake.

There was nothing to protect this woman, just her pathetic attempts to deter intruders.

John circled around the patchy yard, the grass coming up in uneven clumps, yellowed in some spots and simply dead in others. He had observed the house from a distance for so many nights, waiting for Vallejo's go ahead to begin this transformative journey.

This was how John learned about himself. He understood now the form he had been chiseled into by Vallejo's teachings and it was magnificent.

He picked up another rock, smaller this time, just a pebble. With one good toss, it clinked off the window of the second floor. He picked up another, repeating the process. Another pebble ricocheted of the window, then another until finally the window lit up with the glow of lamplight.

Immediately, John ducked into the shadows. He kept close to the siding, where he couldn't easily be seen from the vantage point of the window.

It would be no fun at all to creep in completely silently. John would not be the killer that killed a woman while she slept, waking her with a knife. He wanted his subject awake and aware of what was happening to her.

She was the one that meant the most, that John had offered to Vallejo with the most pride, knowing that she represented something Vallejo would most approve of.

Through the scrub of sad half-dead bushes, John circled all the way to the back of the house. Awake now, the librarian would be tensed for trouble and that was exactly what John intended to give her.