“Serial killer. Young women. We had a tip. It didn’t seem like a good lead at first, and then bodies started showing up, and the info we had started making sense. There’s been a small task force following him from state to state for the last six months, but they could never catch him at it. All we had were victims and no way to link them to him. The snitch tipped us, from prison, but there was no evidence to support the tip for over a year. I guess our guy pissed someone off before he left the joint, so they gave us a call. The guy is very cool. We had nothing solid on him till last week, and now we’ve got him on two murders almost for sure, and probably two more. We’re going to try and make all four stick. That’s your job,” he said to both Jack and Alexa, as they listened with interest. And then he mentioned that Charlie McAvoy, the kid outside, was on the task force that had been following him around. He said the suspect crossed state lines, so the FBI got into it, but Jack and Charlie had made the collar last night. “All four victims are in New York, so the case is ours,” he explained.

“What’s his name?” Alexa asked him. “Have we seen him before?” She never forgot a face or a name, not so far.

“Luke Quentin. He got out of Attica prison two years ago. He pulled some robberies upstate. We’ve never had him in our court or on anything like this before. Apparently he told someone in Attica that he likes snuff films and watching women die during sex and wanted to give it a try when he got out. He’s a pretty scary guy.” He smiled at Alexa then. “He’s your boy.” Alexa’s eyes opened wide, and she smiled. She thrived on hard cases, and putting away the people who deserved to be segregated from society forever. But she’d never had one as bad as this. Four charges of rape and murder one was a major case.

“Thank you, Joe.” She knew that it was a tribute to her that he had given her the case.

“You deserve it. You’re good at what you do. You’ve never let me down. We’re going to get a lot of press on this one. We have to mind our p’s and q’s. We don’t want the guy getting a mistrial because we fucked up. The task force is working to collect data from the other states he’s been in. If he’s who we think he is, he’s been on a killing spree for the past two years. His MO is always pretty much the same. First his victims vanish into thin air. Then we find the bodies but have no way to link them to him. We found two of them last week, and we got lucky. McAvoy got into his hotel room and got some dirt off his boots from the carpet. There was dried blood in it, and we’re waiting for a final DNA match. It’s a start. We had two other victims murdered in exactly the same way. Raped and strangled during sex. We found both of them in the East River, and two hairs off his carpet that match. That gives us four victims. Anyway, you two are going to have your hands full. I’m putting Jack in charge of the investigation, and you’ve got the case,” he said, looking at Alexa. “Arraignment is at four o’clock.”

“We’d better get busy,” Alexa said, looking anxious. She was itching to bolt out of the office and start reading about the case. She wanted to be sure just how much they could charge him with that day, although they could always add more charges later on, as they got more information, more matches from forensic, and if more bodies turned up when they started checking unsolved crimes. All she wanted now was to put Luke Quentin away. This was what the taxpayers paid her to do. And she loved her job.

They left the DA’s office after a few minutes, and he wished them luck. Charlie followed them out of the office, and Jack sent him back to work to check with the forensic lab for progress, and said he’d come back to him later on. Charlie nodded and disappeared.

“He’s a quiet one,” Alexa commented.

“He’s good at what he does,” Jack reassured her, and then decided to share some private information with her. “This is a tough case for him.”

“How so?”

“If this is the guy, he killed Charlie’s sister in Iowa a year ago. It was pretty ugly, and Charlie got himself on the task force after that. He had to do a lot of talking to get them to allow it, even though it’s a personal vendetta for him. But he’s a great cop, so they let him do it.”

“Sometimes that’s not a good thing,” Alexa said, looking worried, as they walked back to her office. “If he’s going to help us, he needs to be clear-headed. I don’t want him misinterpreting information or being overzealous because he wants to nail him. It could blow our case.” She didn’t like what she had just heard at all. She wanted everything about this case to be picture perfect, so the guilty verdict she got couldn’t be overturned. And she knew she would get one. She was relentless in her prosecution and meticulous in her work. She had learned it from her mother, who was a lawyer too, and a good one. Alexa hadn’t gone to law school until after the divorce. She had been married right out of college to the first and only man she had ever loved. And she had been madly in love with him. Tom Beaumont was a handsome southerner who had gone to UVA and was working, more or less, at his father’s bank in Charleston, where the spirit of the Confederacy had been kept alive, in part by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of which Tom’s mother was the head of the local branch, and a very grande dame. Tom was divorced and had two adorable little boys who were seven and eight at the time. She had fallen in love with them immediately, and Tom, and everything about the South. He was the most charming man she had ever known. Tom was six years older than she was, and much to their delight she had gotten pregnant on their wedding night, or maybe the day before. Everything had been idyllic for them for seven years, she had been the happiest woman alive and the perfect wife, and then Luisa, his ex-wife, came back, when the man she had left him for died in a car crash in Dallas. And the Civil War was fought again, and this time the North lost, and Luisa won. Tom’s mother turned out to be Luisa’s strongest ally, and Alexa never had a chance. To clinch the deal, Luisa got pregnant, while Tom sneaked off to see her, dazzled by her once again, as he had been when they met in college. Tom’s mother showed him where his duty lay, not just to the Confederacy, but to the woman who was carrying his child, the mother of his “boys.” Tom was torn between the two women and drank far too much while he tried to sort it out. In the end, Luisa was the mother of three of his children, Alexa only one. His mother kept reminding him of that and convinced him that Alexa had never really fit into their way of life.

It all happened like a very bad movie-a real-life nightmare. Everyone in town was talking about it, and his affair with his first wife. Tom explained to Alexa that he had to divorce her and marry Luisa. He couldn’t let this child be illegitimate, after all, could he? He promised to work it out as soon as Luisa had the baby, but by then she was running his life again, and it seemed as though everyone had forgotten, including Tom, that there had ever been another wife-and child. Alexa had done everything she could to reason with him and talk him out of the insanity he was committing, but she couldn’t stem the tides. Tom was too determined, and insisted that marrying Luisa for the baby’s sake was the only option. It was the only one he saw.

Alexa felt as though her heart was being torn out of her body when she left Charleston. Luisa was actually moving her things in while Alexa packed. She took Savannah and her broken heart, went back to New York, and stayed with her mother for a year. The divorce had come and gone by then, and Tom didn’t know how to explain it to her, but he said it just seemed better to leave things as they were. Better for him, Luisa, and his mother, and the little girl Luisa gave birth to. Alexa and Savannah had been banished, and went back to the North from whence they came, Yankees.