“Yeah,” Doug said. “We all have.”

“I’ll see you later.” She waved to Mike. “Good night, Mr. Trenton.”

“Good night.”

Doug pulled a chair next to the coffee table and motioned for Mike to sit down on the couch. The young policeman sat down tiredly, placing the photo album on the table before him. “Did you know Mrs. Ronda painted?”

“What?”

“She painted. You know, art. She was like an amateur artist.”

Doug shook his head, puzzled. “No, I didn’t. But what does that have to do with anything?”

The young policeman reached for the photo album. “We found some paintings in her closet. She kept them secret.” He opened the book and Doug suddenly knew what was coming next. “I’m not supposed to show you this. This is police evidence. The chief said these paintings mean nothing, that if anything they’re merely signs of a disturbed personality, but…” He looked up at Doug and pushed the open album across the table.

The paintings were indeed disturbing, done in bright garish colors, executed in an angular expressionistic style. Doug stared at the picture of the first canvas. A blue-uniformed man, carrying a jagged baseball bat, was treading on a field of anguished screaming faces. The sky was an apocalyptic red, the same color as the man’s fiery hair. The man’s face was a grinning white skull.

The next picture was of a monster, a hideous creature with a sharply fanged mouth that took up a full half of its malformed face. The monster held in its obscenely twisted claw a white letter. The street down which the creature was walking was an off-center path dividing identical rows of mailbox houses.

The pictures were all variations on a theme, personal and highly idiosyncratic depictions of a horrific mailman.

In the last, unfinished painting, the mailman was dressed as the Grim Reaper, and the blade of his scythe had shish kebabbed several women between their legs.

“She knew,” Mike said.

Doug closed the album. “So what? Who doesn’t know?”

“But she knew what was going to happen to her. Did you see those women? Did you see that baseball bat?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my idea is that if she knew, others do too. We just have to find them. It’ll be tough. People aren’t being real cooperative right now. But if we can find his next victim, we can stake him or her out and catch Smith with a sting operation.”

It sounded good, but Doug did not think that the mailman was a killer who was methodically murdering people in town. He was something far worse than that. Murder was merely one tool he used to get what he wanted. For all they knew, he had killed all the people he needed to kill and now he was moving on to something else.

Or perhaps he was going to kill them next.