Would a man with a face like that crack the way this theory held, and then-here was the strange part-fragment into two beings, one still stoic and capable of intelligence gathering and analysis, complex escape planning, and execution in the form of great shooting followed by fallback through an unfamiliar area, without a single slipup, and the other clear-out crazy as a burning duck in a tornado? It didn’t sit with any theory of human behavior Bob had ever seen or heard of, and he’d been around a bit. He’d heard of great warriors who suddenly were torn down by black dogs of depression-hell, he’d been one of those, in another lifetime, a solitary, furious loser off in the woods by himself, with nothing but mean for any and all-but those guys usually just ate the.45 one night. They had too much respect for what guns can do to go serial killer on anybody. They might end up lonely, bitter drunks, wife beaters, terrible fathers, serial adulterers, bar fighters, but it wasn’t in the mind to go out and kill. Still, evidently some docs somewhere said it was possible. It was a symptom of post-combat stress syndrome, or whatever they were calling it these days. These guys in white coats were much smarter than him, so maybe they knew something. They said that it worked as a motive, and so the reality was, it worked as a motive. That would not go away. Carl got what little glory RVN bestowed, rode it hard, saw it turn to nothing, and he cracked. So be it.

So Bob set aside motive and turned at last to his most dreaded and melancholy task, feeling no progress had been made and none was on the horizon.

This was the actual product of the killer’s enterprise: four corpses. Bob had seen corpses his whole life and had donated more than could be counted to the cause of universal extinction for meaningless reasons. He knew what bullets did to flesh and bone. He himself had been hit at least seven times and had in his hip a stainless steel ball joint to keep his old thighbone functional where a.30 caliber had torn through and shredded everything it hit. He knew what grotesqueness the collision of supersonic bits of copper-covered lead and human matter was likely to produce, and there’d been little grotesqueness of that sort he hadn’t seen.

Nevertheless he was pleased to ease into his virtual trip to the morgue via the first of the victims, the movie star, who alone had been shot in the body. The crime scene photos were of little use; they simply displayed a woman handsomely dressed, petite, lithe, lying facedown on the bricks in a sleepy, relaxed, yet dignified position: her knees were together, and nothing untoward could be glimpsed (and police photographers were notoriously inclined to denude the body of any vestige of dignity by going for the looker-upper to panty). A pool of blood lay beneath her, and one expensive shoe had dislodged itself from her foot. She had pretty painted toenails, and nothing that he could see suggested that she was older than he was by a few years: taut legs, thin wrists, a thin neck. She looked a toned thirty-five. A little sherbet stain marked the entrance wound, but most of the gore was from another angle, and when he turned to that photo, he saw nothing but a delta of black liquid soaking her clothes. A hand at the end of a splayed arm hung limp; blood ran down it, inside her sleeve, and it slid down her curled fingers and deposited itself in little splotches on the bricks beneath.

The morgue shots showed even less, really. A neat puncture of an entrance wound, an exit wound (now cleaned) about the size of a fist, traversing her from left front to opposite rear right, that is to say, breast to shoulder blade. Alas, between them had lain her heart, and it had been neatly exploded by the velocity; a separate photo showed the shredded organ, and he shuddered, thinking of the millions who’d loved and hated this woman, who’d been moved by her art or sickened by her politics, who’d worked out with her on her exercise tapes or loved her famous father and brother, who’d followed her in the gossips or on the tube. What would they say of this pulverized piece of meat that stood for her soul?

He put down the case of Joan Flanders and turned to the far more devastating photos and diagrams of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. He tried to be professional, objective, distanced, but couldn’t quite bring that off, as indeed what he saw was an atrocity.

The integrity of the head, after all, is the surest of biological assumptions. The head is a vault, a treasure chest, a reliquary, the container of all our sacraments, of all that makes us human. When you blow it up, the sight disturbs anyone.

It disturbed Bob. Jack Strong’s face was gone. It simply wasn’t there. The bullet had tilted sideways-its entry was small enough, a little bitty thirty-caliber hole hard to find under Jack’s thick hair-as it coursed through and churned up stuff and had built up enormous energy in just nanoseconds so that like a typhoon of brain matter, it literally exploded, tearing out everything that had been the upper left quarter of his face. What remained was an immense crater of red curd, squashed bean, broken potato chip, and vomited banana, sustained in a bowl of shattered skull; stared at long enough, the image fuzzed and became a volcano photo-reconned from above.

If anything, Mitzi’s photos were even worse. Because she was thin-boned and thin-skulled, the bullet had actually broken her face into three plates as it exited her head sideways and bent. The three plates had been propelled by hot gas and hydraulic pressure to expand, almost as if inflated, and when the trauma of that moment passed, they reassembled themselves on her skull, though not quite precisely. The result was a terrible sense of the broken: each part of the face was recognizably Mitzi Reilly, famed guerrilla warrior of the sixties turned law school professor, but each was askew from the other, and the fissures that separated them deeply were evident. The face so diverged from assumption that it had a truly nightmarish reality. Even Bob, no stranger to the horrors of war, couldn’t stomach it for long, and turned away to the autopsy diagram stapled to the report, which displayed nothing but a nude, generic body upon which the doctor had Xed the entrance and exit wounds in the frontal and rear skull and concluded that they were “consistent with death by high-velocity bullet trauma.” No shit, Sherlock. The trauma was also located cartographically, by centimeter. “The epicenter of the entrance wound is located longitudinally 133 centimeters beneath the highest point of the crown and 133 centimeters from the lowest point of the jaw. It is located latitudinally 62 centimeters from the left and right occipital bones.”

It was here that it first hit him. A strangeness, a premonition, his subconscious telling him to pay attention. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to make a discovery, see a clue, a trace of some other hand. It made his own and everybody else’s life so complicated. He wasn’t sure he could face it.

But still, that feeling would not go away: what am I missing? He could feel he was missing something. Something was not right. It was so obvious that no one had seen it; he could feel it, sense it, almost touch it in the empty space of the Major Case working room. It was in the Xs. Each diagram of each body bore an X to designate an entry wound and an exit, four Xs doubled for a total of eight Xs, carrying the inadvertent meaning of pornography, but something else too, X the unknown, X the mystery. He stared at the Xs, advancing even to Mitch’s, and looked for a pattern in all eight… but then it was gone.

Feeling frustrated, he turned to poor Mitch Greene, least important of the four comrades in arms. Mitch would have called them “comrades in holes, see?” Always the joker, Mitch, even in death; from the first photo, he looked like he’d passed out and puked, sort of lolling on the chair behind the podium of the Cleveland-area Borders, with a spew of blackness from his slack jaw. You could look at it and almost laugh, calling up the memory of the man and his antics.