"I hate to think of anybody this vicious being smart too," Jordan said, "but I think we'd regret assuming otherwise."

"Yeah. Still, we'll find out what we can."

"Might get lucky," Jordan agreed somewhat dubiously.

Marc sent him a wry look, then summoned with a gesture one of his two crime scene technicians and handed over the knife. "Shorty, you or Teresa find anything we can't see for ourselves?"

"Not so far, Sheriff." Shorty, who in the grand tradition of nicknames towered over both other men and, indeed, most people, blinked sleepy eyes and appeared to stifle a yawn. "Might have to move the tape back a few yards, though; I think I've found a couple pieces of her right at the periphery of the area."

Jordan, who had been about to make a caustic demand to know if they were keeping Shorty up, absorbed this new information with another sick twist of his stomach.

Stoic, Marc said, "So the vic was a woman."

"Hard to tell without the… relevant parts," Shorty said, "but Teresa thinks so. Me too. We found the tip of a finger with a polished acrylic nail still attached. A pinky, I think."

Jordan retired to the bushes again.

Shorty looked after him briefly, then directed his attention back to the sheriff's expressionless face. "My excuse is five years of morgue duty in Atlanta," he said. "What's yours?"

"Rage," Marc Purcell said.

"Ah. You wear your mad like a shield. I've known other cops could do that." Shorty nodded, studying the sheriff openly. This fairly rural county tended to see few murder cases, and most of those were the domestic or grudge type, where the killer was as obvious as the victim was, as like as not still standing over the body, looking bewildered, smoking gun or bloody knife in hand.

Not so hard to solve, those cases.

In the two years Shorty had been with the Prophet County Sheriff's Department, this was the first real murder scene he had worked with Purcell.

Interesting guy, Shorty thought. Born here, raised here. Went to a top university in North Carolina, earned a law degree, and returned to Venture to practice. Word around the department was that he'd always been slated to hold some kind of elected office, that it was a family thing going back generations, but everybody seemed a bit surprised he'd chosen law enforcement over other political opportunities.

Shorty wasn't surprised. He'd spent his entire adult life around cops, and this guy was a cop down to his bones. There were some like that, maybe with an innate sense of justice or just outrage-as Purcell had admitted-that the world was chaotic and needed somebody to at least try to impose order. Somebody to wear the white hat and fight the good fight.

A lost cause, Shorty thought, because the bad guys these days were well funded and had access to way too many dangerous toys. But, hey, there were sure as hell worse things to live your life in pursuit of. He was quite aware of that, since his own ambitions usually went no further than a warm and willing piece of ass for the upcoming weekend.

Apparently oblivious to the scrutiny, the sheriff said, "Am I wrong in thinking she was killed here, not just butchered here?"

"There's some arterial spray over there by the pool, so, yeah, I'd say so. Dunno if she was conscious, but I think she was alive for quite a while from the time she first started bleeding."

"You're saying he tortured her?"

"I'm saying he wanted her to bleed, Sheriff. And from all the bloody drag marks, he moved her around while he was doing it."

"Why, for Christ's sake?"

"Maybe he was painting a picture for us." Shorty grimaced when the sheriff stared at him. "Sorry. But I'm not being flippant about that. Most of the drag marks show she was a deadweight-no pun intended-when he was moving her around." He gestured to one area of the stamped concrete nearest them that even a layman would have defined as a bloody drag mark.

"Like that one. And the one on the other side of the pool. I'm no profiler, but I've seen more than my share of bloody murder scenes and this one is… really, really weird."

"I wish you'd just said grisly and horrible."

Shorty looked at him curiously and then offered a shrug. "Like I said, I've seen bloody crime scenes before. But most of 'em, they're the result of somebody getting pissed beyond belief and going nuts. If a knife is the weapon, they stab, they slash, they chase after the vic as long as he or she is still moving. But the only reason they move the body afterward is to get rid of it.

"This guy, either he couldn't make up his mind where he intended to leave the body or… or he was just having fun. Maybe posing her. Cutting off a piece of her here and there. I'd swear at least a few of the internal organs were placed, arranged, and very carefully."

With no discernible emotion, Purcell said, "Like the heart on the end of the diving board?"

"Yeah. I imagine a shrink could have a field day with that. Just like they could write a paper or two on why he decided to wrap twelve inches of her small intestine around that rosebush and why exactly half her liver is lying in the center of the birdbath over there. We haven't found the other half yet."

Purcell drew a breath. "Shorty, how much of her isn't here?"

"Well, a lot, really. The tip of that one finger is the only bone we've found. A lot of skin, but it's in pieces, like everything else. Most of the internal organs are here, including some brain matter."

"He gutted her and opened her head."

"Looks like. We haven't found any scalp so far, but there's what looks to me like an ax or hatchet mark in the stone of the pool coping, and that's where we found the brain matter."

"The knife couldn't have…?"

"Nah, it would have taken something with a lot more heft and a solid edge. Hatchet is about as small as I'd go, and it would have to be a good sharp one. Could be something larger, but the cut in the stone is only about four inches from end to end, and the edges are distinct, so I wouldn't think it's any sort of long, curved blade. My money's on an ax or a hatchet."

"We didn't find either."

"Not so far. Maybe that was his personal toy and he didn't want to leave it behind."

"Yeah. Yeah, maybe."

"There were a couple hairs in that cut as well, not obvious because of the gore. Too bloody to make out the color now, but, well, once we get back to the lab, at least we'll know a bit more about her. Again, I'm no profiler, but I think he probably didn't mean to leave any hair at all, so the little we found may turn out to be important."

Purcell stared rather fixedly at the end of the diving board over the red-tinted pool, where the heart of a murdered woman still lay, and Shorty thought he was holding on to his mad with both hands and a hellacious willpower.

"The fingertip," the sheriff said at last. "Enough for a print?"

"It's enough."

"Good. Get me that print, Shorty. And every other bit of information you can, including your own theories and suppositions. I even want to hear your guesses. Understood?"

Shorty didn't bother with a verbal okay, just nodded and moved a bit quicker than was normal for him to get back to doing his job. Mad made a dandy shield, he thought, but Marc Purcell's mad was beginning to smolder.

He didn't want to be close when it finally exploded.

She knew.

Marc wondered if this was what Dani had dreamed, and hoped to hell it wasn't. Not this.

But she had known something bad would happen, or had already happened, and this was about as bad as Marc ever wanted to see.

Except that he had a leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him this was just the beginning, that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. Dani had looked worried, which was unusual enough; she didn't give away much and never had. But, even more, he had felt her anxiety, like a jolt to the gut, and the sudden reawakening of that old connection had caught him off guard.