The other pictures were taken after. There were more of these and I was struck by the number. Why did the cops need so many? Each one seemed like some kind of a terrible invasion, even though the girl was already dead.

Theresa Lofton's eyes had lost their brilliance in these photographs. They were open but dull, webbed in a milky caul.

The photos showed the victim lying in about two feet of brush and snow on a slight incline. The news stories had been correct. She was in two pieces. A scarf was tightly wrapped around her neck and her eyes were wfficiently wide and bugged to suggest this was how she died. But the killer had more work to do afterward. The body had been hacked apart at the midriff, the bottom half then placed over the top half in a horrific tableau suggesting that she was performing a sex act on herself.

I knew that Wexler was at the other desk watching me as I looked at the gallery of ghastly photos. I tried not to show my disgust. Or my fascination. I knew now what my brother was protecting me from. I had never seen anything so horrible. I finally looked at Wexler.

"Jesus."

"Yeah."

"The stuff the tabs said about it being like the Black Dahlia in L.A., it was close, wasn't it?"

"Yeah. Mac bought a book about it. He called some old horse in the LAPD, too. There were some sties. The chop job. But that one was fifty years ago."

"Maybe somebody got the idea from that."

"Maybe. He thought of that."

I returned the photos to the envelope and looked back at Wexler.

"Was she a lesbian?"

"No, not as far as we could tell. She had a boyfriend back up in Butte. Good kid. We cleared him. Your brother thought the same thing for a while. Because of what the killer did, you know, with the parts of the body. He thought maybe somebody was getting back at her for being a lezzie.

Maybe making some kind of sick statement about something. He never got anywhere with it." I nodded.

."You've got forty-five minutes left."

,"You know, that's the first time I've heard you call him Mac' in a long time."

"Don't worry about it. Make that forty-four minutes."

The autopsy report was pretty much anticlimactic after the photos. I noticed that the time of death was set on the first day of Lofton's disappearance. She had been dead more than forty hours when her body was found. Most of the summary reports dealt with dead ends. Routine investigations of the victim's family, boyfriend, friends on campus, coworkers and even parents of children she cared for, turned up nothing. Almost all were cleared through alibis or other investigative means. a Lofton The conclusions in the reports were that Theres had not known her killer, that her path had somehow intersected with his, that it had simply been bad luck. The unknown killer was always referred to as a male, though there was no positive proof of this. The victim had not been sexually assaulted. But most violent murderers and mutilators of women were men, and it was believed it would have taken a physically strong person to cut through the body's bone and gristle. No cutting weapon was ever found.