A few flakes of snow drifted in through the open door behind him. Cole turned and realized how brazen and exhibitionist the murder had been. Reaching out, he threw the door shut with a metallic bang, dropping the room into complete darkness. He pushed his goggles up to his brow and surveyed his victim in the light filtered through the semi-transparent ceiling. He knew what he needed to do to delay his capture.

He pulled the boots off first, and then the man’s fur jacket. He hesi-tated a moment before stripping the jerkins from his legs—more out of respect than embarrassment—then proceeded to loosen them up and tug them off as well.

The man’s body offered quite a bit of resistance, the heaviness of death forcing Cole to struggle with the pants. As they came free, he noticed the legs were slathered in a purple mess, like a war-paint of some sort. Setting the clothing aside, he reached for the strips of fur around the man’s face, having saved that for last. He hated to look, but he needed to see what he was doing in order to untangle the covering.

He lifted the man’s head to unravel the continuous strip of fur. After the first wrap came away, he saw that the goggles were on top of the rest, the rubbery strap helping to hold it all in place. He pulled the goggles off and made the mistake of looking at the man’s eyes. They stood open, tear-tracks of pain running back from the corners.

Cole tucked the goggles into one of the jacket pockets and looked away from the accusatory glare. Even with nothing of the man’s face visible but those eyes, he couldn’t take the sight. He worked blindly, staring down the man’s body, gritting his teeth with the nastiness and intimacy of the task. As he untangled the head covering, he tried to lose himself in the bands of purple paint encircling the man’s thighs. He wondered what their significance was. He unraveled more fur, one hand looping behind the man’s neck, and he suddenly became even more fixated on the colorful bands of paint. There was a pink line wrapping around each, right above the man’s knees and barely visible through the purple stain.

Something stabbed Cole in the chest before he was fully aware of it on a conscious level—the primitive part of him outpacing his frontal lobe and reaching the awful truth first.

Flashes of terrible awareness strobed through his brain: an image of the man clutching at his leg; him thinking to look for Cole in that awful room; even what he had been trying to say right before he died. The man wasn’t complaining of the cold, he had been saying a name, over and over.

All these things occurred to Cole at once, jumbled and overlapping. In a split second, he knew. He knew before he looked back to the man’s face just why those frozen, tear-streaked eyes had bored into him so.