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  “Where’d you get that pearl of wisdom? Dr. Phil?”

  “What does it matter? Whether you care to admit it or not, pushing everyone away is just another example of self-destructive behavior.” He leaned forward. “Susan, you’re a smart, healthy adult female. You need a smart, healthy adult male.”

  “And get trapped in a relationship? With the mess I am right now? Sounds pretty risky to me.”

  “It is a risk. Of course it’s a risk. So what?” Coutant checked his watch, then laid down his pen and paper. Apparently the fifty-minute hour had come to an end. “Susan, how is it you’ve managed to live in Vegas your entire life but you’ve never learned how to gamble?”

  DESPITE HIS YEARS of experience and training, despite the steady succession of suicides and homicides that had inevitably hardened his stomach, if not his heart, despite his almost obsessive concern with self-image and making a good impression on his superiors and inferiors, the moment Lt. Barry Granger stepped behind the counter at the fast-food restaurant to which he had been summoned and took a look at what lay beyond, he fell to his knees and began uncontrolled retching.

  It didn’t make him forget what he had seen. A deep fat fryer with blood splattered all around it. Severed flesh simmering in the oil.

  “Still think we don’t need to bring her in on this one?” Chief Robert O’Bannon asked, hovering over his convulsive chief homicide detective. He was using a cane to keep himself on his feet.

  Granger took long slow controlled breaths. “What…happened?”

  O’Bannon paused reflectively before answering. “I’m not sure there’s a word for what happened here.” He glanced over his shoulder and shouted at one of the crime scene techs working the site. “Hey, Crenshaw! Is there a word for dissolving someone’s face in an industrial-strength deep fat fryer?”

  The tech looked up, grimaced, then returned to his work.

  “There’s just no precedent for…death by melting. Unless you count The Wizard of Oz.” Steadying himself with the cane, O’Bannon reached down and slowly pulled his detective to his feet.

  “I’m—I’m sorry, sir,” Granger said feebly, wiping his mouth. He had sandy hair and, normally, a sun-baked ruddy complexion. At the moment, his face was ashen white. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Barry. I’ve been a cop for over thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. You should’ve seen the poor chump teenager who came in this morning to open—and found this mess of blood and melted flesh where the french fries are supposed to be.”

  “Where’s…the rest of the body?”

  “We don’t know. Apparently, melting off the guy’s face wasn’t good enough for this killer. He wanted to take the body home with him as a souvenir.”

  “That’s bizarre.”

  “Agreed. Which is why we need to bring in Susan.”

  Despite the aching in his stomach, Granger managed to mount a protest. “We don’t need her. Give me and my boys a few days—”

  “Granger, we have a bona fide psychopath on our hands.”

  “Brutality alone doesn’t prove craziness, Chief, not in this day and age. It’s still possible there was some rational explanation.”

  “You’re in denial, Granger. It’s a psycho. We need a profile. We need Susan.”

  “You know I have issues about working with her.”

  “I thought you’d grown out of them.”

  Granger pressed his lips together. At the same time he was talking to the chief, he was also watching the CSIs crisscrossing the wax paper laid on the floor, the med techs from the coroner’s office, the uniforms posted at all the entrances, wondering how many of them had seen him break down and spew like a newbie. He knew he wasn’t popular. A lot of people thought he didn’t deserve his promotion, that he had taken advantage of Susan’s breakdown to seize something he hadn’t earned. Didn’t matter how many perps he’d caught in the last few months. Didn’t matter that he hit the gym four times a week, keeping himself in prime physical condition. Once the gossip mill started, nothing could stop it, and this humiliating display wasn’t going to help.

  “It’s not that easy, Chief. I was David’s partner.”

  “Yeah, and she was David’s wife. You think that gives you one up on her?”

  Granger wiped his hand across his brow, trying to make this make sense, even though deep down he knew he wasn’t really thinking rationally. He just knew what the chatter would be, back in the locker room. Granger couldn’t solve a murder if he’d committed it himself. Granger can’t wipe his ass without Pulaski’s help.

  “I think you should give your homicide squad a crack at the case before bringing in outside consultants.”

  O’Bannon frowned. “I’ll admit, I hate to dump something like this on her. I’ve kept her busy since the Edgar mess, but far away from anything that might be too…traumatic. Tried to give the girl a chance to heal, for God’s sake. Get off the booze, pull her life back together. She always gets so wrapped up in these psychos, trying to think like they think, trying to make some sense out of the craziness. If I pull her into something as ugly as this—”

  “She’ll be back in the drunk tank in twenty-four hours. You and I both know it.”

  O’Bannon’s nostrils flared, making the purple veins on the tip of his nose darken. “She’s kept herself clean for months.”

  “And we want it to stay that way, right? So, I say—keep her out of it.”

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t your decision to make.”

  “Hey, Chief! Have you seen this?”

  It was Tony Crenshaw, one of O’Bannon’s best forensic experts, waving at him from the other side of the kitchen.

  Granger followed O’Bannon over, with considerable relief. Any excuse to get away from that damn deep fat fryer. At least until the techs had finished taking samples and someone from the scrub squad had swept away the remains. They rounded the central cooking console and came out facing a large flat grill that looked as if it had been designed to fry a hundred burgers at once.

  “Check it out,” Crenshaw said, pointing.

  The grill was coated with a thick layer of grease, but in the grease, someone had left a message. Like a kid writing WASH ME on a dirty car, except this wasn’t written in the English language. Or any other language. It was all numbers and symbols and things Granger only hazily remembered from school if at all.

  It wasn’t a message. It was an equation.

  O’Bannon glanced at Granger out of the corner of his eye. “Still think there’s some rational explanation?”

  Granger didn’t bother answering. The chief was already on his cell phone.

  4

  “TUCKER WAS EXHAUSTED. HE WAS A STRONG MAN—BUILT LIKE A BULL, HIS mother had said, since he was a toddler. Ten hours of construction work six days a week would build strength in anyone. But he was used to that. Hauling a corpse around—that was something new.

  He didn’t mind the bloody stuff. A change of pace from the repetition of his day job, the cutting and sawing and measuring. He was never much good at anything but grunt labor; they only kept him around to do the heavy lifting no one else wanted—or was able—to do. But he knew how to use his fists. He’d learned that early on. He knew how to take someone down and take them out, quickly and painlessly, or slowly and painfully, whichever worked best.

  Tucker grunted, then shifted his burden from one shoulder to the other. Hard work, lugging this through the darkened streets of one of Vegas’s seedier downtown districts in the dead of the night. Maybe he had made a mistake, coming on foot. But the distances had to be exactly right, to the number, so he needed the pedometer. His van’s odometer might get him close, but close wasn’t good enough.

  It had all started at that damned grade school, he supposed, in a small town near the Utah border. He didn’t know why he couldn’t make friends. Maybe it was his father and…everything that was going on at home. Maybe it was the way he looked. Who knew? He wanted friends, he wanted people to like him. But they never did. No matter what he did or tried, they never did. Tucker was an unusual first name back then, and kids being what they were it wasn’t long before “Tucker the Fucker” became the chant he heard every time the teachers were out of sight, till finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He popped an older kid three times his size and a huge fight ensued. Tucker ended up with a broken nose, so mangled it was still crooked and he permanently lost his sense of smell. Which might be a blessing, given his current activities.

  The worst of it was, even though the older kid started the fight, Tucker was the one who got in trouble. The teachers didn’t like him any more than the other children did. He scared them, so they paddled him till he was raw and there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do to them, anyway. A stray calico cat made the mistake of crossing his path on the way home from school. So he killed it. Twisted its neck with his bare hands, so hard the head nearly came off.

  Not that different from last night’s work, now that he thought about it.

  He shifted his load back to his left shoulder. How much farther? He checked the pedometer. Only about a tenth of a mile. Hell, he could do that standing on his head. Wasn’t any harder than…well, ripping the head off a kitten. Which as it turned out, he really enjoyed. He did it again and again, every time he saw one running loose, each time envisioning the face of someone from school, some kid. A teacher. His father.

  How many times had dear old dad popped him in the face, huh? And he’d never hit him back, never once. He was afraid to. How could they expect him to learn anything at school? Didn’t matter. He already knew more than those teachers, at least about the things that were really important, about the way the world really worked. He just ignored them. All of them. Taking his little pleasures where he could find them. The cats.

  Except one day, when he was out in the woods behind the McKinley place doing a black and white Maine coon, that damned meddling Suzie Connery saw him. She threatened to tell everyone.

  So he did to her what he did to the cats. Or tried, anyway. She managed to get a few screams out and one of Old Man McKinley’s wives came running, screaming her head off, and he had to run. Not long after that, the police found the trash dump where he’d been leaving the cats, more than fifty of them. The police grabbed him and told him he was a “nasty boy” and had “violent urges” and that they were going to beat them out of him. They pounded him pretty good, too, until he got one smack in the nose and made a run for it. Never went back. Never saw his father again. Always wondered if the cop lost his sense of smell. Seemed only fair.

  He was fourteen then and he’d been on his own ever since. He’d done pretty damn well for himself, all things considered. But he never forgot the cats. He never forgot what it felt like to hold someone’s life in his hands. He still did a cat every now and again, or a puny little poodle. He dreamed of greater things. But he never knew how to fulfill those dreams, how to make them a reality. He never had an excuse—no, a reason—to use his God-given talents. To do what he did best. He had nothing to live for. Until, at long last, by means he never could have anticipated, his destiny was revealed unto him.

  Now he could do all the things he had always wanted to do without guilt or penalty. Even better, he could sleep soundly with the knowledge that he was doing something good, something that was meant to be. That he was doing it for love.

  At long last he arrived. Exactly twenty-one miles from the epicenter, the central axis point. 0,0. He slid the headless corpse off his shoulder and fell back against the brick wall of the alleyway, breathing heavily. The body was bundled in painters’ sheet wrap, but it wouldn’t be long before it was discovered by a homeless person or wino or vagrant. Fine. He wanted the body to be discovered.

  He was still tired, even with his burden lightened, but he had to move on. Couldn’t risk discovery. At home, he could sleep. A carefree, dreamless sleep.

  Until tomorrow night. When, thanks to the magic of the calendar, he would have the blessed opportunity to exercise his God-given talents once again.

  5

  “I SPOONED ANOTHER HELPING OF THE MARVELOUSLY CREAMY AND UNDOUBTEDLY fattening frozen custard into my mouth. “Have you tried it yet, Darcy?”

  “I—I—”

  “Try it, Darcy.”

  “But, today is Thursday, and on Thursday, I—”

  “Yes, I know. You have Praline Lovers’ Delight on Tuesdays and Vanilla Toffee on Wednesdays and Strawberry Mash on Thursday, unless there’s a new flavor, in which case you substitute the new flavor for whichever flavor on your list has the most letters in its name. If there’s a tie, you cross out whichever one comes last alphabetically, unless the Thursday falls on the last day of the month, in which case you reverse the alphabetical order and…I forget the rest.”

  “So you will understand why—”

  “The Peppermint Pop is a seasonal special, Darcy. It won’t be here next week, and it’s delicious. So even though Praline Lovers’ Delight has more letters in its name, you need to try it today.”

  “But—”

  “Darcy.” I looked at him, not harshly, but firmly.

  And to my happy surprise, he took a bite.

  It may seem like a small thing, but it reminded me just how far Darcy had come in the relatively short time since I met him. Darcy was diagnosed at age three as an autistic savant, but his father—Police Chief O’Bannon—had undertaken constant therapy and consultation with behavioral intervention experts at the Lovass Center in L.A. and had worked wonders. Slowly but surely he’d left his autistic world and entered our own. In time, his compulsive obsessions began to fade, though they were never extinguished, and he developed relatively normal speech ability. His inflection was askew, unless he was imitating someone, which he could do flawlessly, and he often didn’t understand what people were saying, particularly if they spoke euphemistically or idiomatically or sarcastically, but he was still light-years ahead of most autistics, even other savants. His problems with language were understandable; he didn’t understand why one word should have multiple meanings and had difficulty gathering which one to apply in context. Metaphors were beyond him; tell him that the sun was a glistening incandescent orb and he would politely tell you that the sun was a thermo-nuclear reactor processing helium and hydrogen. Jokes—especially word-play—similarly escaped him.

  His appearance was perfectly normal; autistic kids are renowned for their angelic appearance. He was sweet as a baby and kind and incurably gentle. He hated to see people in pain. He had a genuinely sympathetic nature and cared for others. But you didn’t have to be around him long to know there was something different about him. Part of it was his reaction—or lack of reaction—to what went on in his environment. He never made eye contact, couldn’t read facial expressions or take cues from them. Non-verbal language was a form of expression he would never master. Some theorists believe autistic persons don’t really see faces at all, which would explain why Darcy was often confused about whether he had met someone before, unless he was able to pick up on some other clue—the sound of their voice, a scent, even the familiar squeaking of a shoe. He didn’t understand people, their motivations, what made them do the things they did. But that was okay. Because I did.

  After his father was shot—and my niece, Rachel, was taken into a foster home—we began to spend time together. He enjoyed the company, I think—you can never really be sure of anything with Darcy. He had profound tactile defensiveness; he didn’t like to be touched and shunned signs of affection. Even though you suspected he wanted them, something inside just wouldn’t let it happen.

  “I think that actually this is kinda good,” Darcy said, as he gobbled the custard down.

  “Five stars?”

  He stopped eating and reflected a moment. “Two point seven five.”

  “And that makes it…”

  “Number seventeen on my list. Just beneath Rocky Road Almond with Skittles. But that is still very good.”

  “I’d say so. Especially since your list includes…how many flavors?”

  “Two hundred and seventy-four. Would you like me to list them all for you in order?”

  “Thanks, I’ll pass.”

  On the other hand, his savant gifts were astounding. He remembered virtually everything he had ever read—sometimes he could even tell you what page he’d read it on. Probably because he saw the world from such a different viewpoint, he had a penchant for noticing things everyone else missed. He’d come up with telling pieces of information all the crime tech and forensic experts had missed. I couldn’t begin to measure his mathematical abilities, since I personally can’t even balance my checkbook. He could solve puzzles, cryptograms, codes, almost instantaneously. His brain was an overcrowded hodgepodge of information that made it difficult for him to focus, but I tried to teach him to sift through all the concurrent and conflicting thoughts and stay on task. Every day he took another baby step out of his obsessive autistic prison. It may not seem like getting him to try a different flavor of custard on the wrong day was a major triumph. But it was.

  “So tell me—how are you and your father getting along?”

  His face always changed whenever we talked about his father, or whenever his father was around. It wasn’t that Darcy didn’t like him. I knew perfectly well they both loved each other. But Darcy was his only child and…well, obviously not what O’Bannon had expected. His wife died when Darcy was seven, and raising him alone had been an incredible burden.

  “My dad is fine. He walks much better now. With his cane, he gets around almost as well as he did before the Bad—you know.”

  I did know. Before the Bad Man shot him. Which Darcy didn’t like to talk about.

  “You’re not answering my question, Darcy. How are you and your father getting along?”

  He shrugged lopsidedly, then flapped his hands together. “My dad never lets me do anything, not unless you are with me. He thinks I cannot do anything.”