When I came out of the bathroom I wore the terrycloth bathrobe the hotel provided. She was lying on the bed, propped against the pillows, and still watching the television.

"The local news is about to start," she said.

I crawled across the bed and kissed her.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I don't know. Uh, whatever the relationship was that you had with Thorson, I'm sorry. Okay?"

"So am I."

"I was thinking… you want to make love?"

"Yes."

I turned off the television and the lights. At one point in the dark I tasted tears on her cheeks and she held me tighter than she had ever done before. There was a bittersweet feel to our lovemaking. It was as if two sad and lonely people had crossed paths and had agreed to help heal each other. Afterward, she huddled against my back and I tried to sleep but I couldn't. The demons of the day were still wide awake inside.

"Jack?" she whispered. "Why did you cry?"

I was silent for a few moments, trying to find the words that would explain an answer.

"I don't know," I finally said. "It's hard. All along, I think, I was hoping in a daydreaming sort of way that I would get the chance to… Just be glad you've never done what I did today. Just be glad."

Still later sleep would not come, even after I had taken one of the pills from the hospital. She asked me what my thoughts were.

"I'm thinking about what he said to me at the end. I don't understand what he meant."

"What did he tell you?"

"He said he killed Sean to save him."

"From what?"

"From becoming like him. That's what I don't understand."

"We probably never will. You should just let it go now. It's over."

"He said something else. At the end. When everyone was there. Did you hear it?"

"I think so."

"What was it?"

"He said something like, 'This is what it's like.' That's all."

"What does it mean?"

"I think he was solving the mystery."

"Death."

"He saw it coming. He saw the answers. He said, 'This is what it's like.' Then he died."

45

In the morning we found Backus already waiting in the conference room on the seventeenth floor of the federal building. It was another clear day and I could see the top of Catalina rising behind the marine layer of morning fog out on the Santa Monica Bay. It was eight-thirty but Backus had his jacket off and looked as though he had already been at it for several hours. His spot at the meeting table was cluttered with a spread of paperwork, two open laptops and a stack of pink phone message slips. His face was drawn and sad. It looked as though the loss of Thorson would leave a permanent mark on him.

"Rachel, Jack," he said by means of salutation. It wasn't a good morning and he didn't say that. "How's the hand?"

"It's okay."

We had brought containers of coffee with us but I saw he had none. I offered him mine but he said he'd already had too much.

"What have we got?" Rachel asked.

"Did you two check out? I tried to call you this morning, Rachel."

"Yes," she said. "Jack wanted something a little more comfortable. We moved over to the Chateau Marmont."

"Pretty comfortable."

"Don't worry. I won't submit it for reimbursement."

He nodded and I got the idea from the way he looked at her that he knew she hadn't gotten her own room and had nothing to submit anyway. It was the least of his worries, though.

"It's coming together," he said. "Another one for the studies, I suppose. These people-if you can call them that-never cease to amaze me. Every one of them, their stories… each one of them's a black hole. And there's never enough blood to fill it."

Rachel pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I sat next to her. We didn't say anything. We knew he wanted to go on. He reached over with a pen and tapped the side of one of the laptops.

"This was his," he said. "It was recovered from the trunk of his car last night."

"A Hertz car?" I asked.

"No. He arrived at Data Imaging in an eighty-four Plymouth registered to a Darlene Kugel, thirty-six, of North Hollywood. We went to her apartment last night, got no response and went in. She was in the bed. Her throat was cut, probably with the same knife he used on Gordon. She'd been dead for days. It looked like he'd burned incense, slopped perfume around to hide the smell."

"He stayed in there with her body?" Rachel asked.

"Looks like it."

"Were those her clothes he was wearing?" I asked.

"And the wig."

"What was he doing dressed like her, anyway?" Rachel asked.

"Don't know and never will now. My guess is he knew everybody was looking for him. Police, the bureau. He thought it was a way to leave her place, get the camera and then maybe get out of town."

"Probably. What did you get from her place?"

"There was nothing that was of much use inside, but her unit had two parking spaces assigned to it in the garage and we found an eighty-six Pontiac Firebird in one of them. Florida plate, it came back to Gladys Oliveros of Gainesville."

"His mother?" I asked.

"Yes. Moved there when he went to prison so she'd be close for visits, I guess. Remarried and changed her name. Anyway, we opened the trunk of the Pontiac and found the computer, some other things, including the books Brass found in the picture from the cell. There was an old sleeping bag. There's blood on it and the lab has it. The initial report is that there is kapok in the insulation."

"It means he put some of his victims in the trunk," I said.

"Which accounts for the hours they were missing," Rachel added.

"Wait a minute," I said. "If he had his mother's car, what about the car from Hertz in Phoenix? Why would he rent a car if he already had one?"

"Just another way of confusing the trail, Jack. Use mother's to move from city to city, but then he rents one when he moves in for the kill on the cop."

My confusion over the logic of that theory showed on my face. But Backus dismissed it.

"Anyway, we haven't gotten the Hertz records yet, so let's not get sidetracked. For the moment, the computer is what's important."

"What's in it?" Rachel asked.

"The office here has a computer unit, works with the group in Quantico. One of the agents, Don Clearmountain, took this last night and broke down the coding by about three this morning. He copied the hard disk to the mainframe here. Anyway, it's full of photographs. Fifty-seven of them."

Backus used his thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of his nose. He had aged since I'd last seen him at the hospital. Aged badly.

"Children?" Rachel asked.

Backus nodded.

"Jesus. The victims?"

"Yes… before and after. It's horrible stuff. Truly horrible."

"And he was transmitting these somewhere? Like we thought?"

"Yes, the computer has a cellular modem as Gordon… as he guessed. It, too, is registered out of Gainesville to Oliveros. We just got the records a little while ago."

He indicated some of the paperwork in front of him.

"There are a lot of calls," he said. "All over the place. He was into some kind of net. A network where the users were interested in these kinds of photographs."

He looked up from the papers at us, his eyes sick but defiant.

"We are tracing them all now. We're going to make a lot of arrests. A lot of people will pay for this. What happened to Gordon will not be for nothing."

He nodded more to himself than us.

"We can compare the transmissions and the users to the bank deposits I found in Jacksonville," Rachel said. "I bet we'll be able to know just how much they paid for the photos and when."

"Clearmountain and his people are already working on it. They're down the hall in the Group Three offices if you want to stop in."