Back to that second level, I recalled a warning Jennie once gave me. If you haven't passed through the darkest forest, you cannot imagine the ghoulies and monsters that inhabit the back shelves inside people's minds. She was right. I had prosecuted and even defended individuals whose crimes seemed to be the progeny of madness, but on closer inspection, always the roots of those sins were sunk in more ordinary proletarian muck: greed, lust, or some other idiosyncrasy of human selfishness.

Jennie was most certainly different. For all her outward sanity, I was sure she was utterly insane, whatever that means these days. Some stew of demons had mortgaged her soul, and I did not want even a peek at them.

But Larry was persistent. He said, "Come on, Drummond. This might be our last chance." After a moment, he added, "Incidentally Townsend asked me to pass on that he would regard this as a huge favor to him."

Well, what could I say? So Larry and I batted around a few ideas, and I agreed to meet with Jennie-conditionally-though not until the next morning, and only after I had had a chance to run down one small detail.

Which was how I ended up pacing in a tiny courtyard tightly enclosed in chain-link and barbed wire, experiencing a quiet claustrophobic fit. Jennie insisted that we would meet out here, or nothing. Probably she was just tired of being ogled by prying eyes through two-way mirrors. Or maybe she thought the outdoor setting would level the playing field a bit. Or maybe both. Nothing was arbitrary with this lady.

Jennie was led to the doorway by a hefty matron, who backed away and allowed her to shuffle into the courtyard alone. The day was warm, though off in the distance dark clouds were gathering, which seemed fitting somehow. She stopped about two yards from me.

We avoided each other's faces and eyes, and the silence grew uncomfortable. I knew she was forcing me to make the first move. I said, "Would the prisoner like a cigarette?"

"The prisoner does not smoke. Neither do you."

"Well, one acquires bad habits on death row. Never too early to get a head start."

She ignored this barb and asked, "Are you wired?"

"No. Are you?"

"Liar."

"Spare me Jennie."

She finally looked up at me. Sounding hurt and annoyed, she said, "I'm sorry… I'm having a little trouble trusting you these days. The deal, as I remember it, was you'd watch my ass."

"The deal turned out to be too open-ended."

"Did it? I saved your life."

"Did you?"

Jennie reached up and grabbed my chin. She said, "Look at me. Look at what you did."

So I did. She did look dreadful. She was dressed, appropriately, in a baggy gray hopsack muumuu with matching foot and hand manacles, and white slippers. Her hair was dirty, stringy, and matted and hung in oily clumps and strands. Dark pits were under her eyes, and her shoulders slumped with fatigue. She was still very pretty, but like a rag doll after a playdate with the family rottweiler. In an accusing tone, she said, "Now they want you to finish what you started. Right?"

"I'm here because you wanted to see me."

She acknowledged this truth with an ambiguous shrug. "And how do you feel now that you see me? Proud? Guilty? Disgusted?"

I knew she was trying to put me on the defensive, and if I let her, I knew I'd never get out of the pit. "I feel sorry for you."

She laughed. "You should. I'm innocent."

I replied, truthfully, "In a way, Jennie, I believe you are."

She looked a little surprised by this admission, and I was sure she wondered why I felt this way. In an irony run amok, the profilers at Quantico had taken a deep and incisive look at the woman who had walked among them not so long ago, one of their top guns. Employing their queer skills, they had cast a net far and wide into her past and dragged back a number of revelations that in hindsight were illuminating, breathtaking, and, mostly, quite saddening.

In preparation for this meeting, I had been provided that file, which I read closely.

As Jennie once told me, she was an only child, and in fact, her parents did die when she was only thirteen, though not in a car crash, as she expressed; they were roasted in a fast-burning house fire in the middle of the night. The neighbors told the investigating officer that Mr. Terry Margold was a heavy drinker, a brown-fingered chain-smoker, an abusive husband, and a father whose cruelty was nearly boundless. Jennie's mother, Mrs. Anne Margold, was meek, timid, and overpowered, or as a neighbor described to a police officer after the fire, "Old man Margold ruled that house and beat the… well, the dickens outta everybody. You'd always hear howls and screams comin' from that place. I got chills just walkin' past it. Good riddance to 'em, I say. Nicer neighborhood now."

And from other neighbors, more of the same. Essentially, people who knew Jennie and her family in those early years universally recalled a monstrous man, and a childhood of Dickensian horror, a poor little girl born into pathetically harsh circumstances, molded by brutality and terror.

A few pages later I found this interview, conducted with Mrs. Jessica Parker, Jennie's eighth-grade English comp teacher: "She was an odd girl, brilliant, highly competitive, though I thought, insular and utterly stressed. I… actually, several of us… we often saw horrible bruises, and scrapes, and scabs. Once she had a cast on her leg. Several times I asked how she got these wounds. She claimed through roughhousing on the playground. She would even make up elaborate alibis about her wounds. She could be terribly deceptive and utterly convincing. I knew she lived in mortal dread of her father. Really-I felt awfully sorry for her."

I recalled the scars and burns on Jennie's body, and I understood, as I suspected Jessica Parker had understood, that some scars go more than skin-deep, straight to the soul.

On the night of her parents' roast, according to the police report, Jennie had had the rare good fortune to be at a sleepover at a friend's house, only three blocks and a short walk through the woods from her own home. No arson inspectors were brought in to sift through the ashes, as there was no evident cause for suspicion, the house was small and wooden, and the local fire department found traces of cigarette butts sprinkled around the bed of Terry Margold, a known drunk and careless slob.

Beyond the age of adoption, Jennie was shuttled into the foster home system. Twice, she had to be relocated after accusations of sexual abuse that were never proven, though a medical examination-conducted when she was only thirteen and first entered the child welfare system-revealed that Jennie's virginity was a long and distant memory Her cervix was unnaturally enlarged with unusual erosion, indicating extensive and painful sexual activity with adult-sized male organs.

Reading through the thick ream of reports from various Ohio State Child Welfare Agency officials, over the years Jennie displayed none of the classic symptoms of abused childhoods- she remained well behaved, no trouble with the authorities, no truancy, no drugs, no alcohol, and no transparent personality disorders. Jennie Margold, in fact, was regarded as a shining exemplar of the welfare system's healing vitality and success. She remained a top student, popular, brilliant, talented, and driven.

I wasn't judging the hardworking welfare officials of that very fine state, nor did I doubt Jennie's precocious flair for deception. Yet somebody should have had enough sense to know that, contrary to all outward appearances, no child spawned in such a shower of horrors could emerge internally intact. In effect, the more normal she appeared the less normal she probably was.

In an analysis of possible motives regarding the recent murders, some anonymous investigator wrote: