I walked over to where Stemple was putting his watch on and still basically ignoring me.

"Could I talk to you for a minute?" I asked. I was trying to be polite, but it took an effort with this guy who liked to beat up on his girlfriend.

"About?" Stemple barely looked my way.

I lowered my voice. "I want to talk to you… about Kim Stafford."

All at once, the less-than-friendly welcome downgraded to pure animosity. Stemple rocked back on his heels and looked me up and down like I was a street person who'd just broken into his house.

"What are you doing in here anyway? You a cop?"

"I used to be a cop, but now I'm a therapist. I work with Kim."

Stemple's eyes beaded and burned. He was getting the picture now, and he didn't like what he saw. Neither did I, because I was looking at a powerfully built male who beat up on women and sometimes burned them with lit objects.

"Yeah, well, I just pulled a double, and I'm out of here. You stay away from Kim, if you know what's good for you. You hear me?"

Now that we'd met, I had a professional opinion of Stemple: He was a piece of shit. As he walked away, I said, "You're beating her up, Stemple. You burned her with a cigar."

The locker room got still, but I noticed that no one hurried to get in my face on Stemple's behalf. The others just watched. A couple of them nodded, as though maybe they knew about Stemple and Kim already.

He slowly turned back to me and puffed himself up. "What are you trying to start with me, asshole? Who the hell are you? She screwing you?"

"It's nothing like that. I told you, I just came here to talk. If you know what's good for you, you should listen."

That's when Stemple threw the first punch. I stepped back, and he missed, but not by much. He was definitely hot-tempered, and strong.

It was all I needed, though, maybe all I wanted. I feinted to the left, then countered with an uppercut into his gut. Some of the air rushed out of him.

But then his powerful arms latched around my middle. Stemple drove me hard against a row of lockers. The metal boomed with the impact. Pain radiated through my upper and lower back. I hoped nothing was broken already

As soon as I could get my footing again, I bulldozed him back, and he stumbled, losing his grip. He swung again. This time, he connected hard with my jaw.

I returned the favor – a solid right to the chin – followed with a looping left hook that landed just over his eyebrow. One for me, one for Kim Stafford. Then I hit him with a right to the cheekbone.

Stemple spun halfway around; then he surprised me and went down to the locker room floor. His right eye was already starting to close.

My arms pulsed. I was ready for more of this punk, this coward. The fight never should have started, but it had, and I was disappointed when he didn't get up again.

"Is that how it is with Kim? She pisses you off, you take a swing?"

He groaned but didn't say anything to me.

I said, "Listen, Stemple. You want me to keep what I know to myself, not go any higher with this? Make sure it doesn't happen again. Ever. Keep your hands off her. And your cigars. Are we clear?"

He stayed where he was, and that told me what I needed to know. I was halfway to the door when one of the other cops caught my eye. "Good for you," he said.

Chapter 71

IF NANA HAD BEEN WORKING the Georgetown case, in her own inimitable style, she'd have said it was "simmering" about now. Sampson and I had tossed a bunch of interesting ingredients into the mix, and we'd turned the heat up high. Now it was time for some results.

I looked at the big man across a table full of crime reports spread out between us. "I've never seen so much information lead to so little," I said grumpily.

"Now you know what I've been dealing with on this," he said, and squeezed and unsqueezed a rubber stress ball in his fist. I was surprised the thing hadn't burst into a million pieces by now.

"This guy is careful, seems smart enough, and he's cruel. Got a powerful angle too – using his souvenirs to threaten these women. Making it personal. In case you hadn't figured that out already," I said. I was just talking it through out loud. Sometimes that helps.

My thing lately, my habit, was pacing. I'd probably covered about six miles of carpet in the past fourteen hours, all in the same Second District station conference room where we were holed up. My feet hurt some, but that's how I kept my brain going. That and sour-apple Altoids.

We'd started that morning by cross-referencing the last four years of Uniform Crime Reports, looking for potentially related cases – reaching for anything that could start to tie this thing together. Given what we now knew about our perp, we had looked at female missing persons, rape cases, and especially murder where mutilation was involved. First for Georgetown and then for the whole DC metro area.

To keep our mood as light as possible, we'd listened to "Elliot in the Morning" on the radio, but even Elliot and Diane couldn't brighten our moods that day, good as they are at mood-brightening.

In order to cover all our bases, we made a second pass, checking unsolved murders in general. The result was a list of potential follow-ups that was just as large as it was unpromising.

One good thing had happened today. Mena Sunderland had granted us another interview, where she went so far as to give a few descriptive details on her rapist. He was a white man, in his forties, she guessed. And from what we could glean from Mena, he was good-looking, which was difficult for her to admit. "You know," she'd told us, "the way Kevin Costner is good-looking for an older guy?"

It was an important part of the profile for us to pin down though. Attractive attackers had an edge that made them even more dangerous. My hope was that with a little time and the promise of a lot of protection, Mena would be willing to keep talking to us. What we had so far wasn't enough for a useful police sketch. As soon as we had a likeness that didn't match about twelve thousand other faces on the streets of Georgetown, Sampson and I wanted to go wide with it.

Sampson tilted his chair back and stretched his long legs. "What do you think about getting some sleep and starting in on the rest of these in the morning? I'm cooked."

Just then, Betsey Hall came whizzing in, looking a lot more awake than either of us did. Betsey was a newbie detective, eager, but the kind who knew how to be helpful without getting underfoot.

"You only looked at female victims in your cross-refs?" she said. "That's right, isn't it?"

"Why?" Sampson asked.

"Ever heard of Benny Fontana?"

Neither of us had.

"Midlevel mob soldier, underboss, I guess is the term. Was, anyway," Betsey said. "He was killed two weeks ago. In an apartment in Kalorama Park. Actually, on the night that Lisa Brandt was raped in Georgetown."

"And?" Sampson asked. I could hear the same tired impatience in his voice that I felt. "So?"

"And so, this."

Betsey flipped open a file and spread half a dozen black-and-white photographs out on the table. They showed a white man, maybe fifty years old, dead on his back in a living room somewhere. Both of his feet were completely – and freshly – severed at the ankle.

All of a sudden, I wasn't so tired anymore. Adrenaline was pumping through my system.

"Jesus," Sampson muttered. We were both on our feet now, scanning from one grisly photo to the other, repeating the process a couple of times.

"The ME's report says all the cutting on Mr. Fontana was done antemortem," Betsey added. "Possibly with surgical tools. Maybe a scalpel and saw." Her expression was hopeful, kind of sweetly naive. "So you think this is the same perp?"

I answered, "I think I want to know more. Can we get the keys to that apartment?"