Carina pictured Jodi tied to a bed, struggling for her last breath, alone and scared. Her stomach flipped and she turned away from the dead girl’s corpse.

Nick touched her lightly on the small of her back, cleared his throat. “He came in and found her dead. Became enraged and punched her.”

“Repeatedly,” Chen said. “Two broken ribs, the nose, severe postmortem damage.”

“Her abdomen looks like pulp,” Jim said, disgusted. “She’d been dead about four to five hours before he found her.”

“Did he use his bare hands?” Carina asked.

“Absolutely. He may have had on gloves of some sort, but I don’t see any latex or fiber residue under the microscope. And if he’d used a hammer or another object the wounds would have a smaller center. These are fist-size impressions.”

“But if he didn’t use latex gloves, how could she have died from a latex allergy?”

“Some glues have latex in them. I’m going to check for latex on the glue samples when I get back to the lab.”

“His hands would be damaged, wouldn’t you say?” Carina asked. She couldn’t rid her mind of the image of Jodi fighting for breath as her body swelled up.

“Very likely. Bruised. Possibly split, especially on the knuckles.”

“He’s like a kid with a bug jar,” Nick said.

“Excuse me?” Jim looked over his shoulder. Nick had even attracted Chen’s attention.

“Essentially, he has a woman in a jar. She’s restrained, trapped. He can watch her if he wants. Prod her. Attack her. He touches her to see how she reacts. Rapes her for the sensation, then uses convenient items so he can watch. Like pulling the wings off a fly. It can’t go anywhere, can’t escape. When the bug finally dies, sometimes a kid gets mad. How dare the bug die on him. Stomps on it. Shows it how powerful he really is, though he really feels small and helpless because he couldn’t keep the bug alive long enough to do everything he wanted.”

No one said anything for a long minute.

“Sheriff, I think you’re right,” Dillon said. “She died before he wanted her dead. She shattered his fantasy. The ultimate high for him is sex and death.”

Dillon looked at everyone in the room. “He’s going to act again, and soon. Jodi cheated him and he’s angry. But because he’s angry, he has a greater chance of slipping up.”

Carina prayed they caught a break before another woman died.

His skin prickled, as if a spider were crawling on him. He batted it away, and it was replaced by another phantom spider.

It was Jodi’s fault. She’d ruined everything. She wasn’t supposed to just die like that. She wasn’t playing her part. In the back of his mind he kept thinking that somehow he’d forgotten something, that maybe he’d made a mistake. So he kept replaying everything in his mind. From going in through her window-he’d worn gloves-to putting her in the trunk-no one had seen him-to cleaning her body. He’d covered all bases.

So why did he feel so odd?

The high he’d had after Becca plummeted, and he didn’t know what to do. He watched his special tapes over and over. They didn’t help.

He watched the slide shows he’d made of Angie and Becca. That was a little better, but then the show he had of Jodi reminded him of his failure.

When his father disappeared, he knew it was his mother’s fault. She was loud and disrespectful, and she slept with other men. Even then as a child, he’d known it. He’d seen it. For years he’d blamed his mother and wished he had the courage to kill her with his bare hands, watching her eyes bulge, squeezing her throat until every bone in her neck broke.

But it was his fault, too. His failure as a son. If only he’d been older, smarter. If he’d followed his father and begged him to take him, too.

For a long time he’d thought his father was back in prison, but his mother denied it. Said he wasn’t coming back and to forget him. How could he do that? How could he forget his own father?

His dad would understand the feelings. The pictures that popped into his mind all the time.

When he looked in the car next to him and saw a pretty woman, he could imagine her naked and bloody beneath him-a vision so vivid he believed he could touch her and feel warm blood on his fingers.

Or when his mother was around and he dreamed so distinctly of going into her bedroom and cutting her throat. He’d wake up after that smelling blood, certain he’d done it, needing to check that he hadn’t somehow killed his mother in his sleep.

He never had.

Or when he saw his brother and wondered if he had the same feelings, that maybe if he talked to him and explained everything clearly, he would have a partner. Someone to help. Someone who understood.

But he didn’t dare go after his mother, and didn’t dare tell his brother. It was just him, alone. He had to figure everything out.

He stopped the slide show and stared at a picture of Becca dressed in plastic wrap. She wasn’t dead, but waiting. Becca had been the best. Why? Why had he felt complete with Becca and not Angie or Jodi?

Because she wasn’t a slut. She wasn’t like them. She was pure and beautiful and whole.

He needed to find another girl like Becca. Elizabeth Rimes, his MyJournal penpal in Georgia, would be perfect, but she was too far away.

He needed someone here in San Diego.

But soon he’d go to Elizabeth. And they’d have a real relationship, date, see each other like boyfriend and girlfriend. He’d be ready for her then, because he’d have gotten all these strange needs out of his system.

So if he couldn’t have Elizabeth tonight, he knew exactly who could replace her.

Already, he felt better.

TWENTY-SEVEN

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY afternoon, but Carina and Nick were sitting in the windowless task force room painstakingly reviewing all three autopsy reports for any odd detail or stray piece of evidence that might offer them another direction in which to look.

But there didn’t appear to be anything other than the differences they’d already noted. Until Carina saw something odd in the personal effects record.

“It says that only one earring was found with both Becca and Jodi.”

“Is that unusual?”

“I can see how an earring might fall out, especially with a body that has been manhandled, but one earring in both victims? Angie had six ear piercings, three on each side, and she still had six posts in her ears when she was found.”

“Maybe the killer kept an earring as a souvenir,” Nick guessed.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“It’s good news. It connects him with his victims.”

Patrick walked into the room. “What does?” he asked.

“Angie was missing a navel ring. Becca and Jodi were each missing one earring.”

“That’s creepy,” Patrick said.

“You can say that again. So what brings you down here?”

“Good news, bad news,” Patrick said.

“What else is new,” Carina grumbled. “Give me the good news first.”

“I have proof that Scout used a Sand Shack public computer.”

Carina grinned. “Really? When?”

“Several times over the last three months, usually in the late afternoon during the week.”

“Only three months?”

“That’s all MyJournal has archived.”

“But the time frame suggests that he’s a college student,” Nick said. “He comes by in the late afternoon.”

“Nothing he said using the Shack computer system was incriminating. Most of it was viewing MyJournal pages and surfing the Internet. But I have every private message or public post he made through that server on a grid to see if we can find a pattern or anything that identifies him.”

“We need to talk to the employees again,” Carina said. “Someone might recognize a general description. What about the library?”

“I went there, showed the librarian Kyle Burns’s photo like you asked, and she put on thick glasses and was noncommittal. The woman can’t see more than two feet in front of her is my guess.”