She told him about a particularly troubling case she had worked in Atlanta: a serial killer who was dumping the corpses of his victims—prostitutes and crystal meth addicts mostly—across south-central Georgia. Some were missing their heads, others their arms or legs or even their genitalia. She had been instrumental in breaking the case, but only because she had linked it to the much larger local investigation of missing pooches in Conyers. It turned out their SUB had been making his own mythological creatures in a creative yet misguided attempt to father the Anti-Christ. And even though she had needed sleeping pills and several months of counseling afterward, the source of her enduring outrage wasn't so much what she and her partner had found as it was the way the missing dogs and not the missing sex-trade workers had dominated the local media during the investigation.

'Can you explain that to me, professor? Huh?' she asked, trying to smile around a hateful fact. 'How pets merit more airtime than mutilated women?'

'It's yet another reflex,' he replied, knowing full well how lame anything he said would sound. 'Pets start to seem like our children because our brains use the same inference systems to understand them. If you think about it in those terms—missing sons versus missing junkies—it makes more sense.'

'Of course,' she replied, her tone vigilante cold. She wiped at the outer corners of her eyes with a pinky, swore under her breath. She wished she was stronger, he realized—like pretty much everyone else in the developed world. Some social roles demanded far more than others, and Thomas could imagine few more exacting than the FBI. The only difference between her and a soldier, he supposed, was that she defended decency instead of geography, innocents instead of agendas.

It sobered him, somehow, seeing her in this broader light. She had seen things, survived things—more than enough to command his respect and admiration. But there was an emotional honesty to what she said, an almost confessional air, which turned it into more than an ordinary this-is-what-I-do story. It made part of him wonder whether she did in fact 'like' him.

Since he and Nora had separated, he had gone out on only a couple of dates, both of them with faculty members from other departments, both of them predictably intellectual—just enough to prevent any real communication from slipping through—and both of them simultaneously consummated and terminated with a bout of hasty, cold-handed sex. They were enough for him to realize that he was no ladies' man, even though he had seemed to get laid enough back in college.

Because of Neil, of course. Neil had pretty much had a finger in all of his fucking. Metaphorically and otherwise.