“Ah, ah,” Mr. Patel said. “Wonderful.” He flicked his turn signal, looked to his left, and then pulled out from the curb. “Library?”

“Yes, that’s where we’re going.”

Mr. Patel pulled up smoothly to the light, looked both ways, flipped his right turn signal, and eased the cab around the corner. I looked over at Roger and he nodded back at me. I hadn’t been exaggerating about either Mr. Patel’s driving or his use of turn signals.

“At last some good news about this attacking of dogs and domestic animals,” Mr. Patel said. “Now if they would only catch the miscreant. But such disturbed persons are often hard to apprehend. If indeed this one is disturbed and not following some darker purpose. In some ways it puts me in mind of a Thug, one of those awful people we used to have in India who killed and stole for the goddess Kali as a part of their religious practices. But then”—Mr. Patel flicked his left turn signal and eased his way into downtown Providence—“they murdered their human victims by strangling with a silken cord, not by cutting off heads.”

A shiver ran down my back. “Excuse me,” I said, “did you say cutting off heads?”

“Oh my, yes,” Mr. Patel said. “Did I not mention it before? All of the other unfortunate animals that were attacked were decapitated and the blood drained from their bodies. Most gruesome.”

17

WEAKNESS

HEADS. AND NOT only had they been cut off the bodies of the dozen or so dogs and cats that had been killed over the last few days, they’d also been missing. Which meant that whoever cut them off took the heads with him. It sent my mind back to one of the more gruesome customs of some of my own ancestors.

One of the pictures that you often get in history books and movies about Indians is that of scalping redskins. Maybe not so much nowadays, but plenty of stuff still has that image. Like any John Wayne western. But anybody who knows much about our real history knows that scalping either didn’t exist or was really rare among the Indians before Europeans came. But after the British and the French got here, and brought their wars with them, things changed. Maybe Europeans didn’t invent scalping, but they made it big business. The colonial governments paid bounties for Indian scalps, and there were bands of white men back in the eighteenth century who made their living as scalp hunters. And those Indian scalps were sold on the street corners in London and Paris to people who bought them as collector’s items.