Alicia looked at Jack and wanted to cry. How could she have so underestimated this man?

Yes, she thought, it is a start.

She realized that for the first time in her life she had control—power—over a set of these prints. And power over the negatives too. How could she do anything but destroy them?

She reached into the envelope and pulled out three or four prints, eight-by-ten sheets with glossy color surfaces—no, she would not look at them—and fed them into the top of the shredder. Whirring, grinding, then thin little strips cascading from the bottom, twisting into a tangle of paper spaghetti.

Yes! It worked. The images were destroyed, all coherency lost in the hundreds of divisions. No one but a madman would try to put them back together, and the more strips she added to the tangle, the harder it would be. A hundred, no, a thousand years to reconstruct even one image.

Sensing that this might be some sort of watershed for her, Alicia dug into the envelope and pulled out more to feed into the whirring maw. She felt tears running down her cheeks and heard herself laughing.

This felt so good… so good!

12.

12.

BZZZZZZT !

A woman in tears was bad enough. Never failed to bum Jack out. What do you do? What do you say? But a woman laughing and crying while she was feeding a paper shredder…

Very scary.

But the tears and the laughter soon slacked off, and then she started talking about it, and that was worse, because it made him wish that Ronald Clayton were still alive… so that Jack could kill him… very slowly.

“I did it for my daddy,” she said. “That’s how it was. A part of me sensed it was wrong, or bad, especially when it hurt, but my daddy wanted me to do it, and I didn’t have much choice. And after all, he was my daddy… the man who took care of me. He wouldn’t really make me do something really bad. Not my daddy.”

Her tone was remote, as if she’d cut all emotional ties with the child she was talking about.

BZZZZZZT… more prints into the shredder.

“And that was the really sick part of it. Beyond his perversion. That he would take his own child, someone who depended on him, who looked up to him and trusted him, and use that bond of trust and dependency to make her do exactly what he wanted in front of his camera. But that’s part of the pedophile’s nature: he gets off on the power over the young and weak and small, the power to corrupt innocence through unspeakable acts.”

BZZZZZZT!