"A tribal witch hunt," Sheila said, her voice cracking. It was clear the image had shaken her. "A brutal relic of ancient superstition."

"Not superstition."

Another brief pause. "You believe these were real witches."

"I ain't stupid, woman. There may have been a witch or two among em, but the majority was just reg'lar old scapegoatin. Just another poor little lamb slaughtered to ease the—the hearts and minds of the tribe."

"So you think, despite the massive cultural gap, not to mention the huge physical distance between you and these—" She said what followed patronizingly enough for Martin to notice it, and surely enough to rile Barclay. "—these witch smellers, that somehow you've acquired this ability, and that the women you've murdered, Mr. Barclay—Jessica Renault, Tina Wozinski and Paula Danlon, three innocent young women and their unborn children murdered in cold blood—that these girls were in fact witches?"

"That is what I believe, correct."

Martin felt his skin crawl as Sheila flicked off the tape and took it out of the player. He knew well enough there were no bogeymen, no witches, warlocks or demons. The true monsters of this world were flesh and blood—men and women who struggled against the darkness in their own hearts and all too often gave in to temptation.

But something about Barclay's tirade had shaken him. It scratched at him, a truth just beyond his reach. He tried to clear his mind, to get a handle on what it was that bothered him, but an image from an old fairy tale popped up in its place: Hansel and Gretel gnawing away at the gingerbread house, oblivious to the ravenous old hag at the window, ready to fatten and then gobble them up.

"The scarf was hers—Paula Danlon's," Sheila said, reading from Martin's notebook. "Forensics pulled a ton of dead skin off it matching her DNA. It was a printed, kind of Jackson Pollack-y thing, splotchy and multicolored." She looked up, firing a hard gaze at him. "I remember Barclay told me the 'deathblow' had to be dealt by something these women owned, that it was the only way they could be..." She squinted, looking toward the Manhattan skyline. "...how did he put it?"

"Vanquished," Martin said, remembering.

"Right. Vanquished."

"You think he literally believed these women were witches? It wasn't just some bullshit he conjured up to stay out of prison?"

"Oh no, these were full-blown delusions. The oddest thing about it was, he considered himself a white knight. The way he saw it, he wasn't trying to eliminate those women at all. He felt he was releasing them."

"Meaning?"

"In his mind, they were mercy killings. He told me something that particularly stuck in my head, something that still bothers me. He thought of these women as 'unclean.' He didn't think of them as witches in the fairy tale sense of the word, but in the medieval sense. He believed they'd been..." She looked off for a moment in thought. "That they'd been defiled by the Devil."