The twenty-three victims had no connection to each other, at least not as far as the investigators had managed to work out. Clarisse Match, grocery clerk and single mother. Wes Gerfers, retired dentist and amateur poet. Tim Mistovich, grad student and internet troll. So on, so forth. They were from all different walks of life. Different professions. Different generations. The only thing they had in common was that they’d all twenty-three been found with an open pair of scissors somewhere at the crime scene.

Twenty-three was a bad number.

But it wasn’t the worst number, in Carmen Farooq-Lane’s opinion. This one was the worst: sixteen. That was the age her brother had been when he’d killed his first victim. He’d been a junior. She’d been a freshman. What had she been doing while he was stalking his first kill? She’d been joining clubs, that’s what. Chess club. Art club. Debate club. Economics club. Mixed martial arts club. Young Citizens for Abolishing Hunger club. If there was a club at their high school, Carmen Farooq-Lane had joined it and was a model member.

You have a bizarre fascination with running in packs, Nathan had told her once as they walked to school together. They need you, Carmen. You don’t need them.

In spring of her freshman year, spring of Nathan’s junior year, the school’s star quarterback Jason Mathai had disappeared. The day after he didn’t come to school, the janitor found four pairs of scissors, one at each of the school’s main entrances. Open, like a cross. Later, investigators would try to understand why there had been four at this first murder when there was only one at each of the others. But of all the puzzles surrounding her brother, this one made sense to Farooq-Lane. This was his maiden voyage and he wanted to be sure it was noticed. One pair of scissors for each entrance, just in case.

He was sixteen. Farooq-Lane was clueless.

She was clueless even though scissors were Nathan’s thing. He drew them in his sketchbooks. Hung them on his walls and over his bed. Hung them over her bed until she made him take them down. They were enough of his thing that she remembered mentioning the presence of the scissors to him as the rumors flew through the school, because she thought he’d find it curious.

But no part of her thought: Nathan killed Jason Mathai.

And definitely no part of her thought: I need to tell someone before he kills twenty-two others.

Later, the murders made the news. The journos tried out several names for the mysterious killer. The Cutter. The Mad Tailor. The Cloth Butcher. The Scissors Killer. None of them stuck. It would have been different if the killer had murdered the victims with scissors, but all of them had been killed by bizarre explosive devices.