“I’m glad to be your hot bitch,” she finally said, sliding her pink top up to reveal her breasts, still round and lovely even after having had a child. “Pinch me hard.”

Sam complied, taking her nipples between his rough, callused fingertips and twisting as if he were turning a stuck cap on a ketchup bottle. He could feel her tense up in pain, and it aroused him. She reached down and grabbed his crotch, feeling the power of her own.

“Good girl,” he said, twisting her harder.

“Yes, I am.” Tears rolled down her face, and her knees buckled. “I’m a very good girl, Daddy.”

He kissed her, his breath smoky and sweet from a beer he’d had with his friends.

“I want you to put it in me,” she said, almost pleading.

“My bitch wants it bad?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“Real bad?”

“Yes, Daddy, yes.”

He took his hands off her breasts and smacked his palms against her shoulders, sending her backward into the counter. A dinner plate fell and shattered.

“Only I say when!”

She pulled herself up as their son, Max, entered the room.

“Mom, what happened?” he asked, looking first her, then at his father. “Dad?”

Sam turned away, and Melody gathered herself. “We’re fine. Mommy just slipped. Dinner’s ready in five minutes.”

Max stood in the doorway for a beat and then went back to watching TV.

“Good, bitch,” he said, his voice a whisper. “You know just what to do.”

Melody Castile dreaded the encounter for more than a week. Her husband had rented a motel room in Tacoma a couple of exits south of the mall. She got a babysitter and had her hair done at the Gene Juarez Salon, a big splurge.

“I like your hair that way. Special occasion?” the sitter, a neighbor girl, asked as the couple was headed out the door.

“Any time with my husband is special,” she said, feeling her heart beat a little faster under her blouse.

“When will you be home tomorrow?”

“Early afternoon. There’s a frozen pizza you can fix for lunch.”

The conversation was mundane, constructed on what had to be said. What was an acceptable bedtime? Which snacks were okay, and which were verboten. The conversation with the sitter was a part of the deception that had started to overrun their lives. Soon everything was a lie. What they did. Who they were doing it with.

Except for their love. That would always be grounded in truth. And fear.

She told herself over and over that it was like going out on a double date, except there would be three of them. He had promised that the guy was “clean” and “in good shape” and that “he thinks your pictures are hot.”

His name was Paul. He was in his late thirties, divorced, no kids. He’d made the remark that swinging as a single would be a better use of his free time than trying to find another woman to settle down with. Women are heartbreakers, she sensed he was thinking, although she also sensed that he’d never admitted to Sam or anyone that his heart had been broken.

Melody remembered little of the encounter, and what she did recall came to her in pieces like the colors of a kaleidoscope, moving, turning, never really fitting into any identifiable shape. Her husband tied her up and took pictures as Paul penetrated her in every orifice. Repeatedly. After he could no longer maintain an erection, he used the neck of a champagne bottle that he’d brought along “to get us all in the mood.” Sam put down the camera and let Paul take photographs of her while he “tickled” her nipples with the tip of a hunting knife.

At one point Melody remembered looking down on herself as one man straddled her, forcing his penis in her mouth, while the other entered her anally. She could not be sure which of the pair of sweaty men was her husband and which was their playmate. When the man ejaculated into her mouth, he rolled out of view. In a mirror over a cheap dresser, she could see her face, smeared makeup, puffy eyes, and a small river of tears.

“Take it, whore! Take it!”

When she woke up the next day, Paul was gone. Sam was next to her, spooning her naked body with his own.

“Fun last night,” he said. His breath was hot on the nape of her neck, and she fought the urge to recoil.

Melody moved her head slightly, indicating her approval with a nod. But she swore to herself that she’d never do that again. How had it gone so far? How could this man who loved her so brutally violate her with another man? It was cruel. Scary. She would never get herself into that kind of a situation again. Not one in which she was the object of her husband’s twisted fantasies.

If there were any more three-ways, there’d be a second woman.

And I don’t care what happens to her, she thought. So long as it isn’t me and as long as it keeps my love happy.

When he offered up an alternative scenario, she jumped at it.

“I was thinking,” he said as she helped him shove a new chest freezer into a corner of the old mobile home. “Wouldn’t it be hot if we, you know, caught someone?”

“‘Caught?’”

“Yeah, you know, snagged some chick that we could play with together.”

Melody’s heart raced. “A woman?” she asked.

Her husband’s eyes flashed that look that she knew better than anyone. It wasn’t a question. It was a demand. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“I like it,” she said. “Sounds like fun.”

Melody Castile brought a bag of Nacho Doritos to pass the time by feeding the seagulls. She drove all over Kitsap County before finding herself on Olalla Valley Road in the very southern part of Kitsap County. Just after the Olalla Bay Bridge, she crossed the centerline and parked, her car facing traffic. If there was any. A young man sat in his pickup truck twenty yards ahead, his window cracked, smoke sliding out into the sea breeze. She opened the car door, found her footing on the rocks that edged the causeway, and ambled down to the water. She was alone. Her hands dipped into the Doritos bag, her fingertips turning orange. As if on cue, the birds came.

As they circled around her, pulling the DayGlo snack from her fingers, she winced at the pain.

The girl begging for her life.

The shadowy figure of a man as he penetrated a woman’s severed head.

A baby crying for its mother.

The images that came to her mind were raw. They brought a visceral response that shocked and soothed her at the same time. The birds mistook her orange-colored fingertips and bit her. Blood rolled down her wrist.

The smell of sex and murder.

The taste of a man after he’d finished having sex with a dead girl.

The light that went out in a young woman’s eyes as she tumbled into the depths of her terror.

Melody continued feeding the birds as a man with a clam bucket and shovel walked toward her.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked.

She didn’t respond.

“Those birds are hurting you.”

Snapped out of her thoughts, she turned toward the man.

“You all right?”

Melody’s eyes were dilated and scarcely showed the recognition that another human being had asked her a question.

The man put down the bucket and shovel. “Seriously, you all right?”

The last of the Doritos were snatched by a particularly aggressive gray gull.

“Fine. Yes. Fine.” She smiled at him. “Just lost in my thoughts, that’s all.”

Weeks passed and the temperatures dropped. Northwest rains came and turned maple leaves into a sodden mass. Detectives Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson felt the case of the so-called Kitsap Cutter grow cold. The FBI’s famed Behavioral Science Unit was consulted, but offered up nothing more than what an avid viewer of Forensic Files could: the killer was a white male, in his late thirties to forties, and likely had someone who helped him either with the procurement or torture of his victims.