Carol’s skin was slightly gray, with the exception of the wound areas and some postmortem bruising on her shoulder blades. There, a couple of shiny specks glinted. Birdy looked closer.

Something was adhering to Carol’s back.

In the arsenal of equipment in her Rubbermaid tote, Birdy found a UV light. Turning it on, she ran the bluish beam over the body. Tiny particles pulsed under the glow.

What were they?

Painstakingly, the forensic pathologist collected each minute fleck, fifteen in total. They looked like pieces of fiberglass.

Kendall and Josh walked across the parking lot without speaking. Kendall couldn’t take her mind off the victim, and Josh couldn’t stop brooding over the lashing that Dr. Waterman had given him over his relationship with Serenity Hutchins.

Josh broke the silence. “She’s a good reporter,” he said.

“No one’s that good, Josh. Birdy is right. If you’re not blabbing case facts to her directly, then she’s digging into your stuff when you’re not around.”

“She’d never do that.”

Kendall lingered by the door. She wasn’t ready to go inside without telling Josh what everyone in the Sheriff’s Office was already saying.

“This is the biggest case we’ve ever had, and you’ve compromised it. Get it together, Josh. Someone out there is torturing and killing innocent victims. Your ego is of no consequence in the grand scheme of things.”

He didn’t reply. He knew she was right.

Josh Anderson dialed Serenity the first chance he had. She was at her desk, working on an article. The newsroom was mostly silent, and she almost resisted answering. Personal calls were allowed, of course, but things hadn’t been going well with Josh lately.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“I’m in the middle of something,” she said.

“This is serious, Serenity. Meet me.”

She looked at her computer screen and let out a sigh. “I guess so. Tonight?”

“No. Now.”

“Now?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes. See you out front.”

“Where are we going?” Serenity asked after getting into Josh’s idling BMW in the customer parking spot in front of the Lighthouse editorial and advertising offices.

“Nowhere. We just need to talk. But not here and not on the phone.”

He drove down Mile Hill and pulled into the mostly empty parking lot at the South Kitsap Mall behind the A &W.

He turned off the engine and turned to Serenity.

“Where in the world are you getting the information that you’ve been putting into the paper?”

“I’ve told you,” she said, coolly. “I have my sources.”

“I know. Who?”

“I can’t-or, rather, I won’t-say.”

“Damn it, Serenity. I got ripped a new one by Dr. Waterman today at the Godding autopsy. She thinks-everyone thinks-that I’m your goddamn source.”

“You know you’re not.”

“It doesn’t matter. Perception is everything. So tell me: Who is your source?”

Serenity looked out the window. She paused, considering. “I can’t say. Not for sure. But I think the guy who’s been calling me is the Kitsap Cutter. I mean, I really do think he is, Josh.”

“Jesus, are you sure?”

She looked back at him; this time her eyes flooded with tears. “I am. I really am. It scares the hell out of me too.”

Josh leaned closer and put his hand on her shoulder. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he’s not finished. He told me that much. He says he won’t stop until he’s caught.”

To the right of her desk, Kendall had hung photographs of the Kitsap Cutter’s victims. While the brutality that each had endured indicated a specific type of sexually sadistic serial killer, the women themselves were a diverse bunch. They weren’t a collection of “throwaways,” as some media people characterize a victim like Midnight Cassava. Carol was an accomplished professional woman; Skye, a recent college graduate.

Kendall wondered if there was some similarity in their backgrounds that had attracted the Cutter to them, or if their selection had been completely random. She looked at Paige’s photo and retrieved her file. Why her? What had made her stand out? She read the article in the paper about her being crowned Fathoms o’ Fun Queen and how she was going to use her achievement to feed the homeless and embark on a career in the entertainment industry.

Her eyes wandered over Celesta Delgado, victim one, and then to her file. She studied the witness statements and Dr. Waterman’s autopsy report. Her hands had been expertly removed. Was the killer a butcher? Chef? An ardent hunter? She perused the article Serenity Hutchins had written when the partially clad body was found in Mason County. She recalled what she had learned about brush picking and saw the photo that had been published the previous summer showing Celesta as the hostess at the grand opening for the remodeled Azteca.

Victim two, Marissa, had also been profiled by the Lighthouse reporter, although less sympathetically than Celesta. Marissa’s mother had conceded that her daughter had had a “troubled” past, including arrests and convictions for prostitution and check kiting. Her head had been removed and the two parts of her body discarded in two different places, at two different times. The head in the box was meant to shock, which it did. She was found nude.

Skye Hornbeck, victim three, had been an adventure seeker-the opposite of Celesta, who had merely aspired to a cozy middle-class life with her future husband. Skye had been strangled and stabbed and was missing a necklace, but there was no way to tell if the other victims had had any personal effects taken by the killer.

Celesta’s engagement ring was presumably somewhere with her hand.

Marissa couldn’t hang on to any jewelry, hence the wrist tattoo of her daughter’s name.

All had been dumped in water. The killer surely had a boat. But so did a hundred thousand other people in the Seattle Tacoma area. Finding the right boat was like finding a needle stuck in the muddy bottom of Puget Sound.

Impossible.

There was no way she could stop herself. There was a kind of rush that came with reporting the news of a serial killer’s latest victims. Serenity Hutchins knew that some kind of evil being had anointed her to be the messenger of his deeds. The afternoon that Carol Godding’s body was snagged in the fishermen’s nets, she posted an entry on the Lighthouse news blog-there was no waiting for the print edition.

The posting was headlined:

CAROL GODDING’S BODY FOUND IS PAIGE WILSON THE KILLER’S NEXT VICTIM?

She wrote that while the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office had not made an official statement that the missing beauty queen was a victim of the Kitsap Cutter, she had it on “good authority” that they suspected as much.

A source close to the investigation indicated that Wilson is the fifth victim, and there likely will be others.

She didn’t say that the source was the killer himself.

Sam Castile read the blog and grinned.

“‘Close to the case?’ She has no idea just how close she is,” he said to himself.