March explained, “Every night I was online, looking at this stuff. It’s the only thing that kept the…”

“The what?” Dance asked.

A pause. “Only thing that kept me calm,” he said. “He had good-quality pictures and I bought a number of them. We got to know each other that way. Then he started running low on original material—he’d been out of the army for years. I asked if he’d be interested in buying some from me—pictures he could resell. I didn’t have much but I sent him a video I’d done of an accident during a bungee jump. I was the only one who’d gotten the actual death. It was…pretty graphic.

“Chris told me it was very good and he knew a collector who’d pay a lot for it as an exclusive. It would have to be private—if it was posted, then a video lost its value. I got to work and started to send him material. After a few months we met in person and decided to start our business. He came up with the idea of a humanitarian website, with pictures of disasters. Sure, some people went online to give money. Mostly people downloaded the pictures. I took a lot of them myself, traveling overseas or to disaster areas. They were good, the video and the pictures. People liked them. I’m good at what I do.”

“Where did you get this material?”

A smile crossed his face. His eyes stroked her skin and she forced the cold away. He said, “Next time you find yourself at any tragedy, a train or car crash, a race car accident, a fire, a stampede…” His voice had fallen.

“Could you speak up please?”

“Of course, Kathryn. Next time you’re someplace like that, look around you. At the people who are staring at the bodies and the injured. The spectators. You’ll see people helping the victims, praying for them, standing around numb. But you’ll also see some people with their cameras, working hard to get the best shot. Maybe they’re curious…but maybe they’re collectors. Or maybe they’re just like me—suppliers. ‘Farming,’ we call it. Harvesting pictures of the dead and injured. You can spot us. We’ll be the ones angry at police lines keeping us back, disappointed there’s not more blood, grimacing when we learn that no one died.”

Farming…

“You’ve always had this…interest?”

“Well, since I was eleven.” A tongue touched a lip. He was savoring a memory. “And I killed my first victim. Serena. Her name was Serena. And I still picture her every day. Every single day.”

Kathryn Dance masked her shock—both at the idea of someone committing murder at that young age and at his wistful expression when he told her.

Eleven. One year older than Maggie, one younger than Wes.

“I was living with my parents, outside Minneapolis. A small town, suburban. Perfectly fine, nice. My father was a salesman, my mother worked in the hospital. Both busy. I had a lot of time to myself. Latchkey but that was fine. I didn’t want too much involvement from them. I was a loner. I preferred that life. Oh, the weapon I used on Serena was an SMG.”