Besides, there was an old newspaper maxim that he was happy to honor: too many facts could ruin a perfectly good story. Nobody could complain that he hadn't done the work-he'd talked to the principal law-enforcement officer of the county where the murder happened, he had talked earlier in the week to Sloan about the Angela Larson murder, he had comments from survivors. He didn't need Davenport.

He settled in behind his computer, webbed his fingers together, cracked his knuckles, and started typing.

A serial killer is loose in Minnesota, a sexual predator armed with a razor, a man who tortures his victims before raping them, male and female alike, and cutting their throats…

Another reporter passed by Ignace's cubicle as he passed a thousand words, and thought, Jesus: the guy really does buzz.

AND WHILE IGNACE WAS BUZZING, Millie Lincoln was…Well.

MILLIE LINCOLN WAS SHORT and blond and liked men; always had. She liked her father, she liked her uncles, she liked all four of her brothers, and they liked her back.

Men liked her back.

Millie gave up her virginity when she was sixteen, fumbling around in her boyfriend's parents' bed.By twenty-two, she'd had four addi-tional lovers. She spent her senior year to high school with the second one, after the fumbler, and then messed around with a college kid, an affair begun with another freshman during the first long Mankato winter, then got into a more serious thing that lasted almost two years.

Then, finally, Mihovil Draskovic.

MIHOVIL WAS SEVEN YEARS OLDER than she. A strong, ropy man, slightly mysterious; and a doctor.

Mihovil had made his way from his native Serbia to the United States as a fifteen-year-old, had enlisted in the marines when he was seventeen, became a medic, got out of the crotch, as he called it, went to med school on a marine corps scholarship. He had marine tattoos and now wore his hair long and loose over his wide shoulders, like Jesus. He always had a smile on his face, he was a man perpetually amused, a man with Gypsy eyes…a man of slightly fractured English, a crazy mixture of broken grammar and cutting-edge slang.

Mihovil had spent much of his young life in a refugee camp, where the children slept on one side of the hovel and the parents made love behind an army blanket that hung from the ceiling. Since they didn't have a TV, they were behind the blanket almost every night, and the activity was almost uncommented-upon. Natural.

Mihovil and Millie met in the Mankato hospital emergency room. Millie had dislocated a finger playing football, and he'd popped it back in place. They'd talked a little before and after, had bumped into each other in the bagel place a couple of days later, and one thing led to another…

Led to another all over the place.

Inside, outside, on hospital beds, floors, lawns, under apple trees; standing up, lying down, now one on top, now the other.

Mihovil taught her to say things like "Wait. Do this-here, move your head right over here and now lick slower and shorter…Oh, my God, that's almost right. Wiggle your finger down… Oh, my God…"

He'd gone into instructional mode the second time they slept together. Why was she moving around aimlessly, he wanted to know. Why didn't she have an orgasm and beat her feet on the sheets? Why was she treating his dick like a shovel handle?

He was nice enough about it, but blunt. She didn't think it was a language barrier; he was just a blunt guy.

For example, they'd gone to an arty party, and a woman had been holding forth on Diverse Ways of Meaning, the Science of Signs and the Clash of Cultures. Millie spotted her for a poseur: not only did she smoke, but she held her cigarette upright, between her thumb and forefinger, like some kind of Russian film director or maybe a Nazi. She made no bones about edging in on Mihovil. After delivering a nearly in-comprehensible spate on the Evils of American Cultural Imperialism, she asked Mihovil what he thought.

He said, "I think what you said is bullshit. No, wait-it's worse than that. We talk about the black people in Uganda and the brown people in New Guinea, and you say that we push our cultural artifacts upon them… You mean, medicine? You mean, TV? You mean, cars? Those people are just as smart as we are. They'd love to sit around a swimming pool and drink lemonade and listen to Eminem and get flu shots when they need them.

"You want to keep thern in some kind of crazy zoo, hunting with spears, so we can look at them and study their culture. That's bullshit. I've done that. I lived in a zoo, I lived in a tent when I was a kid and drank sewage and had the shits for six years in a row. I'd kill somebody to keep from going back to that. I can goddamn well guarantee if you took one of those guys out of the jungle in New Guinea and gave him some jeans and T-shirts and a good pair of shoes, he'd cut your heart out before he'd let you send him back.

"I'd bet you anything that they'd rather live in a nice apartment with a stereo and a toilet and running water that you can drink. So what I think is, you're arguing that you have to allow the niggers to stay in their place. That's about half a step from we gotta keep, the niggers in their place. Simple racism is what it is."

ANYWAY, HE WAS A BLUNT GUY. She wasn't the least embaressed by any of his blunt sexual suggestions, except for the suggestion of ignorance.

"If you'd tell me what to do, I'd do it," she said.

"I don't know what you want, I only know what I want. You have to tell me what to do, and I tell you what to do, and we're both happy."

"That sounds kind of… icky."

"No, no, no," he said, moving his index finger like a windshield wriper, a gesture she'd only seen from people who'd grown up outside the U.S. "Not icky. Icky is the wrong word. Dirty, maybe. Like Catholic dirty. Or… I don't know. But not icky. Icky is like when somebody sneezes and blows snot on your croissant."

So she started telling him what she liked.

She found out that she liked telling him.

ANY OTHER TIME, she'd have been nothing more significant than a college girl discovering sex. Not this time. This time, there was a predator hovering next to her.

She was the most vocal woman he'd ever encountered, talking, analyzing, demanding-a long-running commentary that might have been a template for an advanced version of The Joy of Sex.

All that turned him on. But what really got to him, on an emotional level, something that went beyond any simple erotic twitch, was her or-gasms. They started with a growl, a sound that was almost doglike, and proceeded up in pitch and intensity until she was screaming like a cat; yowls that must have woken half the building.

If he had ever sat with her, and told her what he really felt, how he wanted to go a step beyond anything she'd ever contemplated, wanted to go there with steel and rope…then they'd lock him up. They'd know that he'd already been there with other women, and they'd put him next to the Gods Down the Hall, and they'd come and look at him like a goldfish in an aquarium.

But God, he'd like to talk about it; just to tell her how her howls were tearing him apart. To go just one more step with her…