Larry Sterne gazed back at him, his expression more thoughtful than fearful. Larry Sterne who had reminded him of Mister Rogers. Larry Sterne, the soft-spoken dentist. Larry Sterne, the serene dental-medical entrepreneur. Larry Sterne, the son of Ian Sterne, who’d built a multimillion-dollar beauty-bestowing empire.

Larry Sterne, the son of Ian Sterne, who’d invited a lovely young Russian pianist to share his Woodstock home. And almost certainly his bed. And, potentially, a place in his will.

Dear God, was that what this was all about?

Had Larry Sterne simply been securing his inheritance?

Protecting his financial future from his father’s unpredictable affections?

It was, of course, a substantial inheritance. An inheritance worth worrying about. A money machine, in fact. Not something one would want to lose.

Had the calm and gentle Larry been avoiding, through the simple expedient of killing his father, any risk of that money machine ending up in the hands of the lovely young Russian pianist? And then, by cluttering the landscape with five additional bodies, had he simply been avoiding any risk of the police asking what would have been their first question if Ian Sterne had been the only victim—the damning question that would have led them straight to Larry:

Cui bono?

In the weird combination of moonlight and shifting floodlights shining through the window, Gurney could see that Sterne’s grip on his gun was still firm and steady, but the man’s eyes were unmistakably focused on a world of diminishing options. It was hard to identify the emotion in those eyes. Was it terror? Rage? The fierce determination of the proverbial cornered rat? Or was it just that the icy calculator had gone into overdrive—giving the man’s racing mental processes a frantic appearance?

Gurney concluded that he was in the presence of an essentially heartless, mechanical process. The same heartless, mechanical process that had been responsible for … how many deaths?

How many deaths? That was the question that brought the White Mountain Strangler case into sudden focus. It fit the pattern—the pattern of a case in which one murder mattered, a murder hidden by others that didn’t matter at all—all tied together in a psycho-killer package with a white silk scarf. Gurney wondered, what had Larry’s girlfriend done to make her life an inconvenience to him? Perhaps she’d gotten pregnant? Or perhaps it wasn’t anything that serious. For a man like Larry—the White Mountain Strangler, the Good Shepherd—murder did not require a serious cause. It required only the prospect of producing a benefit greater than its cost.

The words of the RAM evangelist came back to Gurney with a chill: To extinguish life, to blow it away like a wisp of smoke, to trample it like a piece of dirt, that is the essence of evil.