"Why did you kill her?" I said when I finally lowered the picture.

"What?" Orrin looked shocked.

"And the baby? Why did you kill the baby?"

He began shaking his head furiously. "I didn't kill them."

"Were the pictures no longer enough? Did you need to up the thrill?"

"I'm telling you I didn't do it. I never even touched her or spoke to her. I…" He paused, reddening. "I never speak to any of them. I just take their pictures."

"Why?"

He gave a helpless, pathetic little jerk of the shoulders. "It…it's just something I do. I can't help it."

"Why did you choose Esther?"

"She was so beautiful," he said, and the adulation in his voice made my skin crawl. "So lively, so radiant. She was special, unlike any of the others. You can see it in the pictures."

I looked again and saw he was right. Esther was dazzlingly beautiful, even when she was dusting the furniture in her apartment or dragging a mop across the floor, but there was something about her beyond her beauty. Something intangible and undefinable, an aura or an energy that leaped from the picture to my searching eyes. Again I was filled with rage, but even more so with sadness and grief.

"I never would have hurt her," Orrin said in a low voice. "She was precious to me."

I gritted my teeth. "You stalked her. You took her pictures without her permission."

He didn't seem to have heard me. He spoke in a dreamy tone. "A few times I thought of going over and talking to her. She would not laugh at me, like other women did. She was kind and understanding. Maybe, just maybe, she would see something in me others never did. I never built up enough courage to do it."

"And you killed her because you knew she wouldn't want you." But even to my ears the accusation sounded hollow, lacking in conviction.

His voice was plaintive, almost childish. "I didn't do it."

I scrutinized him for a long moment. He was certainly a credible suspect. He was mentally unstable, and he'd had a bizarre fixation on Esther. He might have been driven to rage and murder over her rejection of him, real or anticipated. Moreover, from his living room window, he had a clear view of Esther's building. He could see when all the neighbors had turned off their lights, when the time was right for him to cross the street, climb the stairs, and enter apartment six, where Esther and Willie slept.

He might have killed Willie for the reason Rivlin had suggested, because the baby had awoken and begun crying. But why would he disfigure their faces? Perhaps, again as Rivlin had said, it was simply an act of madness by a person who was clearly insane.

And afterward, with his clothes drenched in Esther's and Willie's blood, he could have crossed the street and entered his apartment without anyone seeing him. Easy.