The police asked if they could search his office.

The doctor’s consent was needed; no grounds for a warrant existed. Charmingly, smilingly, Dergraav declined. During the interview, he laughed and told the investigators they couldn’t be farther off the mark. His use of the laser was limited to academics, and the instrument was far too expensive for him to own. Furthermore, his gynecologic specialty was the surgical treatment of vulvodynia- vaginal pain. He was a physician, his mission in life was to alleviate agony, not cause it.

The police left. Three days later, Dergraav’s office suite and his home were emptied and padlocked and wiped clean of fingerprints. The doctor and his family were gone.

Dergraav’s wife surfaced a year later in England, then in New York, where she professed ignorance of her husband’s behavior and his whereabouts. She sought, and was granted a divorce from Dergraav, changed her name, and was never heard from again. Colin Pugh cited speculation that the doctor had been taken in by American officials as payback for wartime cooperation by Dergraav’s father. The Oslo-based diplomat had deceived his Nazi masters and passed crucial information to the Allies. However, this remained rumor, and subsequent sightings of Gerd Dergraav placed him far from the States: in Switzerland, Portugal, Morocco, Bahrain, Beirut, Syria, and Brazil.

The last two locales were verified. Some time during the early ’70s, Dergraav slipped into Rio de Janeiro using a Syrian passport issued in his own name and managed to obtain expedited Brazilian citizenship. Remarried, with a child, he lived openly in Rio, purchasing a villa above Ipanema Beach and volunteering his services to a human rights group that offered free medical service to the slum dwellers of the city’s fetid favillas.

Dergraav swam, sunbathed, ate well (Argentinian beefsteak was his favorite) and worked tirelessly without pay. Among the human rights workers and the favillitos, he came to be known as the White Angel- a tribute to both his pale coloring and his pure soul.

During his known residence in Rio, that city’s prostitutes began showing up dead and cut into pieces.

Degraav’s second reign of murder lasted another decade. In the end, he was snared by the most banal of circumstances. The screams of a prostitute he was attempting to asphyxiate attracted a gang of hoodlums from the neighboring slum, and Dergraav fled into the night. The thugs exploited the bound and gagged woman’s helplessness by gang-raping her, but they left her alive. After some indecision, she reported the doctor to the police.

Dergraav’s house was searched by Rio detectives, less concerned than their German counterparts with due process. The cache of videotapes was found, including one in which the doctor reduced a woman’s body to forty chunks using a laser scalpel. In the film, Dergraav narrated as he mutilated, describing the procedure just as he would a bona fide surgery. Also retrieved was a suede box filled with women’s jewelry and a cache carved of rosewood, rattling with vertebrae, teeth, and knucklebones.

Imprisoned in Salvador de Bahia prison, Dergraav awaited trial for two years, ever the charmer. Jailers brought him international newspapers, literary magazines, and scientific journals. Catered food was delivered. Citing worries about his cholesterol, Dergraav ate less beef, more chicken.

Rumor had it that money would soon exchange hands, and the doctor would be deported under cover of night, back to the Middle East. Then German authorities learned of the arrest, requested and received permission to extradite. That process stretched on, and Dergraav could be seen sitting in the prison’s courtyard, relaxed, dressed in tropical whites, nuzzling with his wife, playing with his child.

Finally, the German authorities got their way. The day after the extradition certificate was drawn, Dergraav blocked the peephole in his cell with chewing gum, ripped up his jail-issue clothing, knotted the strips into a rope, and hung himself. He was nearly sixty, but had the appearance of a forty-year-old. The jailer who discovered him remarked on the healthy, peaceful appearance of the White Angel’s corpse.

Nearly seventeen years ago, to the day, Gerd Dergraav’s ashes had been strewn at sea.

Seventeen years ago jump-started Jeremy’s memory.

The first laser article had been published that very year.

Norwegian authors. Russians, an Englishman. He rechecked the names. No Dergraav.

It was the date he was supposed to notice. Origins in Oslo.

Seventeen years ago, a murderous doctor had hung himself.

Laser surgery, physician suicide.

Oslo, Paris, Damascus by way of Berlin.

Gerd Dergraav had been born and trained in the Norwegian capital, learned female surgery in France, settled and tortured and murdered in Berlin.

Escaped to Damascus.

Arthur and surrogates had traced the Laser Butcher’s bloody swath.

How long before a postcard of Rio arrived in the mail?

A pretty picture of Sugarloaf or the white sands of Ipanema or some other Brazilian panorama?

Dr. C,

Traveling and learning.

The cards had set up the pattern; the articles had filled in blanks. Laser surgery on the eyes, because Dergraav had begun as an ophthalmologist, before switching to ENT, the source of the envelopes.

Lasers for female surgery to match Dergraav’s final career switch: women’s doctor. Women’s killer.

Where did the English girls fit in? Dergraav was long dead by the time of their murders.

Why all this attention paid to someone whose ashes had dissolved in a warm, welcoming ocean seventeen years ago?

Then he remembered his night drinking with Arthur. Collegial time in the Excelsior bar that old man had been so intent on sharing. Telling that apparently pointless story. Predatory insects that burrowed under their victims’ skins in order to plant their parasitic spawn.

The moral he, himself, had drawn from the tale.

Sins of the fathers.

Arthur’s pet topic: the origins of very, very bad behavior.

When Gerd Dergraav fled Germany, his wife escaped to the States, changed her name, disappeared into the great American freedom.

Along with her son.

Dergraav.

Dirgrove.

Arthur laying it out for him. Wanting Jeremy to understand.

The son was here.

Now Jeremy knew that his initial instinct had been right: That day in the dining room, Arthur had been studying Dirgrove.

And, for some time, Dirgrove had been studying Jeremy. Watching, following. Jeremy and Angela. Such a sensitive guy, always there to listen to a needy resident. No doubt his patients loved him- a nice case of genetic charm. Merilee Saunders’s mother had been smitten, but Merilee hadn’t been taken in.

Freaky Dirgrove. Roboticon.

Now Merilee was dead.

Did Sensitive Ted have a camera hidden in his office? Today’s technology made that so much easier than in his father’s day, everything miniaturized, computerized.

Getting rid of the daughter, taking the mother.

The take was the core- Dirgrove had targeted Angela because she was already seeing another man.

Just as apes raided colonies of other apes, murdered the males, made off with the females, some humans did the same thing under cover of war or religion or whatever dogma was at hand.

Some humans needed no excuse.

A sickening realization hit Jeremy.

Sensitive Ted and Jocelyn.

Putting a face on his lover’s killer drove home the horror, and suddenly Jeremy was as wrenched and raw and overcome by weeping as the day he’d found out. A red film blanketed his vision, and he lost balance, had to struggle to remain on his feet.