I took everything. Left him a note.

He's a creature. Needs his blood. After the girls left, whenever something went wrong, when he got stressed, he'd go down to his room, take out his trophies, say his prayers.

Saturday morning, I called the house. Mom answered, like she always does.

"Put him on," is all I said.

"What d'you wants' he challenged. Hard, aggressive. The way he told us you had to be…to be a man.

"Revenge," I told him, quiet-voice. "Revenge for Denise."

"Hey! I didn't have nothing to do with…"

"Yes. Yes, you did. You're going down. Soon. Very soon. Maybe a fire while you sleep. Maybe your car will blow up when you start it. Maybe a rifle shot. There's no place you can go. Nothing you can do. I'm good at it now. Stay there and wait for it, old man. It's coming."

I hung up the phone.

He called the next day. Frankie listened in on the extension. He told me how he was a sick man, How the girls had led him on, how Mom wasn't any good for sex anymore, what with all her plumbing problems. How he was going to see a psychologist, get all better. It wasn't his fault.

I told him I didn't know what he was talking about.

When Frankie called later to tell me the old man went out with Mom, I drove over there.

Frankie and I went in the back door, quick and smooth. I popped the fuse to the basement lights and went downstairs. I opened my briefcase, took out the sheets of clear soft plastic, like cloth. We wrapped the plastic around ourselves and we waited.

It was late when he came downstairs. We heard the click of the light switch. Nothing. He came back with a flashlight. Made his way into the little back room.

We heard the sound of the brick being moved. He made some beast-noise in his throat and ran out. Frankie and I took him before he got to the stairs.

We left him there on the concrete floor He was just bloody pulp, no face left. A corpse, clutching the suicide note he wrote years ago.

Anytime I Want.

Born Bad

The man was husky, with a big chest and thick wrists, wearing a tweed jacket over an oxford–cloth white shirt and plain dark tie. His hair was cropped short, eyes alert behind aluminum–framed glasses. He handed his battered leather medical satchel to the guard standing by the metal detector.

"Morning, Jackson," he said.

"Good morning to you, Doc. Carrying any weapons today?"

Doc tapped his head, smiled. The guard looked carefully through the satchel, ran his electronic wand over Doc's body.

"Everybody there?"

"Waiting on you, Doc."

He threw a half–salute at the guard and strolled down the sterile concrete corridor, the bag swinging at his side, taking his time.

He came to an institutional green door with a hand–lettered sign taped on its front: Task Force. He knocked. The door was opened by a heavyset, thick–necked man wearing a shoulder holster. He stepped aside and the man the guard had called Doc entered.

The room was long and narrow. He was facing a row of windows. Barred windows. The wall behind him was covered with corkboard, littered with randomly fastened charts, graphs, maps. A battered wood podium stood at the head of a double–length conference table; behind it, a small movie screen pulled down like a window shade. In the upper corner of the room, a TV set stood on an elevated platform, a VCR on a shelf underneath. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, blue–tinted in the slanting sunlight.

Doc took his seat, looked around. They were all there, waiting.

"How come you're always the last to show up, Doc?" Oscar asked. The slim black investigator pretended an irritation he didn't feel. "We moved the Task Force into this looney bin just 'cause you work here, the least you could do is make the damn meetings on time."

"Sorry, hoss. There was a little problem on one of the wards."

"Never mind that now," a red–haired woman said, the chief prosecutor in the Homicide Bureau. "Tell him what happened."

A tall blond man stepped to the podium, moving with the authority he carried from his long–ago days as a street cop, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He carefully extracted a single sheet, smoothed it fiat, flicked on an opaque projector. One page of a neatly typed letter sprang into life on the screen.

"It's from him?" a Hispanic with a duelist's mustache asked. He was the group's forensics expert.

"Yeah," the blond man answered. "We Xeroxed the whole thing. Seven pages. The lab boys went over it with an electron microscope. Typed on a computer, probably that laptop he carries around. It was printed out on a laser printer. Generic paper, standard number ten business envelope. Untraceable. But we know it's him—he left us a perfect thumbprint below the signature."

"Damn!" the black man said.

"Postmark?" the redhead asked.

"Tucson, Arizona. Four days ago," the blond answered. "Central Post Office. He won't be there now."

On the screen, the letter stood out in bold contrast to the darkened room. Justified margins, single–spaced with the paragraphs indented.

"He's always so neat, so precise," the woman said.

"Yeah," the blond agreed. He looked across the table. "Looks like your idea worked, Doc. When you wrote that article about the Surgeon—the one where you said he had to have been an abused child—it made him mad. Smoked him out. Look at this letter—he's boiling over. Slashed at your theory like he's been doing at women all around the country."

Doc nodded, waiting patiently for the recap he knew was coming as soon as he'd spotted new faces in the room.

The blond man swept his eyes around the table, willing everyone to silence. "Mark Anthony Monroe," he began, nodding his head toward a blown–up black–and–white photograph on the wall to his left. "White male, age forty–one last birthday. Five foot eleven, one hundred and sixty pounds. Blond and blue. Undergraduate degree in physics, graduate work in computer technology. No scars, marks, or tattoos. No known associates. Mother and father divorced when he was two. Mother remarried when he was five. Divorced again when he was eight. No contact with either father or stepfather since, whereabouts of both unknown. Mother died when he was in his late twenties. You with me so far?"

Nods and grunts of assent from around the room. Doc drew a series of tiny boxes on his notepad, not looking up.

"First arrest, age thirteen," the blond man continued. "Fire–setting. He convinced the juvie officers it was an accident—dismissed. Next time down, he was fourteen. He put a cat in a shoebox, poured gasoline over it, dropped a match. He got probation, referred for counseling. The counselor said he didn't mean to hurt the cat—some kind of scientific experiment. At sixteen, he was dropped for attempted rape. Attacked a schoolteacher on a stairwell right outside the gym. Cut her too. Sent to a juvenile institution. Did almost five years. After his discharge, he was quiet for a while. We have an admission, voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital when he was in his mid–twenties. He was treated for depression, signed himself out after a few months. Nothing since.

"He went to college, like I said. Far as we can tell, he's never worked a real job.

"For the last two and a half years, he's been roaming the country. Killing. He kills them different ways. All women. But no matter how he kills them, he always cuts out the heart. Neat, clean cuts. He knows what he's doing. That's why the newspaper guys call him the Surgeon.