"Did they catch who did it?" I am quick to ask, not happy

about the parallel.

"A construction guy working in her apartment building," she says with a small frown. "The heat gun was for burning off paint. A real dumb shit, loser_broke into her apartment about three o'clock in the morning, raped, strangled her and all the rest, and when he went out several hours later, his truck had been stolen. Welcome to New York. So hello, he calls the cops and next thing is in a patrol car, a duffel bag in his lap, giving a statement about his stolen truck at the same time the victim's housekeeper shows up, finds the body, starts screaming hysterically and calls nine-one-one. The killer's sitting right there in the cop car when the detectives roar up, and he tries to run. A clue. Turns out the asshole has clothesline and a heat gun inside the duffel bag."

"Was there a lot about the case in the news?" I ask.

"Locally. The Times, the tabloids."

"Let's hope it didn't give someone else the idea," I reply.

I AM SUPPOSED TO HANDLE ANY SIGHT, ANY IMAGE, any smell, any sound without flinching. I am not allowed to react to horror the way normal people do. It is my job to reconstruct pain without feeling it vicariously, to conjure up terror and not allow it to follow me home. I am supposed to submerge myself in Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's sadistic art without imagining that his next mutilated work was supposed to be me.

He is one of the few killers I have seen who looks like what he does, the classic monster. But he didn't step from the pages of Mary Shelley. Chandonne is real. He is hideous, his face formed of two halves set together unevenly, one eye lower than the other, teeth widely spaced, small and pointed like an animal's. His entire body is covered with long, unpigmented, baby-fine hair, but it is his eyes that disturb me most. I saw hell in that stare, a lust that seemed to light up the air when he pushed his way into my house and back-kicked the door shut behind him. His evil intuition and intelligence are palpable, and although I resist feeling even a breath of mercy for him, I know the suffering Chandonne causes others is a projection of his own wretchedness, a transient re-creation of the nightmare he endures with every beat of his hateful heart.

I found Berger in my conference room and now she accompanies me down a corridor as I explain that Chandonne suffers from a rare disorder called congenital hypertrichosis. It afflicts only one in a billion people, if such statistics are to be trusted. Before him, I had encountered only one other case of this cruel genetic disorder, when I was a resident physician in Miami, rotating through pediatrics, and a Mexican woman gave birth to one of the ghastliest deformities of human life I have ever seen. The infant girl was covered with long, gray hair that spared only her mucous membranes, her palms and the soles of her feet. Long tufts protruded from her nostrils and ears, and she had three nipples. Hypertrichotic people can be overly sensitive to light and suffer anomalies of their teeth and genitalia. They might have extra fingers and toes. In earlier centuries these wretched people were sold to carnivals or royal courts. Some were accused of being werewolves.

"Then do you think there's significance to his biting his victims' palms and feet?" Berger asks. She has a strong, modulated voice. I would almost call it a television voice: Low-pitched and refined, it gets your attention. "Maybe because those are the only areas of his own body that aren't covered with hair? Well, I don't know," she reconsiders. "But I would have to suppose there's some sort of sexual association, like people, for example, who have foot fetishes. But I've never seen a case where someone bites hands and feet."

I turn on lights in the front office and pass an electronic key over the lock of the fireproof vault we call the evidence room, where the door and walls are reinforced with steel, and a computer system logs the code of whoever enters and when and how long he stays. We rarely have much in the way of personal effects locked up in here. Generally, the police take such items to the property room or we return them to the families. My reason for having this room built is I face the reality that no office is immune from leaks and I need a secure place

to store extremely sensitive cases. Against a back wall are

heavy steel cabinets, and I unlock one of them and pull out two thick files sealed with heavy tape that I have initialed so no one can snoop without my knowing. I enter Kim Luong's and Diane Bray's case numbers in the log book beside the printer that has just hammered out my code and the time. Berger and I continue talking as we follow the hallway back to the conference room where Marino awaits us, impatiently, tensely.

"Why haven't you had a profiler look at these cases?" Berger asks me as we pass through the doorway.

I set the files on the table and give Marino a look. He can take this one. It is not my responsibility to send cases to profilers.

"A profiler? What for?" he answers Berger in a manner that can only be described as confrontational. 'The point of profiling is to figure out what sort of squirrel did it. We already know what sort of squirrel did it."

"But the why? The meaning, the emotion, the symbolism? Those sorts of analyses. I would like to hear what a profiler has to say." She pays no attention to him. "Especially about the hands and feet. Weird." She is still focused on that detail.

"You ask me, most profiling is smoke and mirrors," Marino holds forth. "Not that I don't think there are some guys who really got the gift, but most of it's bullshit. You get some squirrel like Chandonne who's into biting hands and feet and it don't take no FBI profiler to consider that maybe those body parts have some significance to him. Like maybe he's got something oddball with his own hands and feet_or in this case, it's the opposite. Those are the only places he ain't got hair, except inside his friggin' mouth and maybe his asshole."

"I can understand him destroying what he hates in himself, mutilating those areas of his victims' bodies, such as their faces." She will not be bullied by Marino. "But I don't know. The hands and feet. There's something more to that." Berger rebuffs him by her every gesture and inflection.

"Yeah, but his favorite part of the chicken's the white

meat," Marino pushes. He and Berger treat each other like lovers who have turned on each other. "That's his thing. Women with big tits. He's got some mother-thing going when he selects victims with certain body types. Don't take no FBI profiler to connect them dots, either."

I say nothing but give Marino a look that tells him plenty. He is acting like an insensitive ass, apparently so intent on battling this woman that he fails to realize what he is saying in front of me. He knows damn well that Benton had a genuine gift based on science and a significant database the Bureau has been building by studying and interviewing thousands of violent offenders. And I don't appreciate references to the victims' body types since mine was selected by Chandonne, too.

"You know, I don't like the word 'tit.' " Berger says this matter-of-factly, as if she is telling a waiter to hold the bear-naise sauce. She looks levelly at Marino. "Do you even know what a tit is, Captain?"

Marino, for once, is without words.

"A small bird, maybe," she goes on, shuffling through her paperwork, the energy of her hands betraying her anger. "A blow. Tit for tat, blow for blow. Etymology. And I don't mean the study of bugs. That would be with an N_Entomology. I'm talking about words. Which can offend. And can offend back. Balls, for example, can be something used in games_ tennis, soccer. Or refer to the very limited brains between the legs of males who talk about tits." She glances at him with a weighty pause. "Now that we've crossed our language barrier, shall we proceed?" She turns expectantly to me.