"I'd shake, but as you can see-" Agent Senatra held up a latexed hand. He was nice-looking, black, about thirty-five, with small wire glasses and a gold earring. He was dressed in an expensive suit, and Mary guessed he'd been pulled from a fancy dinner or an evening on the town.

"That's perfectly all right," Mary said. "Please- don't let us distract you."

Someone called to him. He gave them a half-wave and moved away.

Cameras were flashing; a video camera was running. Evidence was being collected. Finally the body was rolled onto a transparent plastic sheet-and a collective gasp was heard.

No eyes.

She had no eyes, just dry empty sockets looking blankly at them.

"Were the last victim's eyes removed?" Mary whispered to her sister.

Gillian leaned close, appearing unafraid and un-fazed. She'd obviously been in this situation before.

"Yes."

Here it was, their first nonhostile conversation in five years, and they were discussing missing eyeballs. But the role of FBI agent was second nature to Mary. She fell into it with ease and found comfort in its familiarity. And like the professional she was, she pushed all remnants of her fight with Gillian from her mind to focus on the scene before them. "And the other body?"

"We don't know. The coroner's report said she'd been in the woods approximately ten days before being found. What hadn't rotted was eaten by animals."

"Eyes are a delicacy in the scavenger world." "What's the deal with her hands?" The question came from a young male police officer.

Mary pulled her gaze from the empty sockets to track down the partially nude body. The woman's right arm, stiff with rigor mortis, was bent at an odd angle, the hand-now a claw-gripping the air. Attached with green tape to the tip of each finger were what looked like small branches. Mary leaned closer until she recognized the spiny shape of a familiar leaf. She straightened. "Rose stems." She looked at her sister. Gillian was staring at the clawed hand, her mouth a small O. Somebody whistled. Somebody else let out a nervous laugh.

"We'll get out of here so you'll have more room to move around," Mary said, addressing Agent Senatra.

Senatra, along with almost everyone else, was still staring at the hand. He looked up slowly and spotted Mary. Recognition dawned. "Detective Wakefield's gonna try to rush this through and get an autopsy done tonight," he said. "Hopefully I'll have some information when we meet." He pointed at her with a gloved hand. "FBI building. Nine o'clock tomorrow. You need directions?"

"I know where it is."

An officer guided them back to the parking lot; then they were on their own.

"That was weird as hell," Gillian said, sounding slightly out of breath as they both removed and tossed their slippers into a nearby container before heading toward the car. "Have you ever seen anything like it?"

"Never. Nothing that even comes close." Mary couldn't remember when she'd last been surprised by a murder scene, but she'd been surprised tonight.

"What do you think it means?"

"I'm not certain, but it looks to me like he was grafting her."

"Grafting?"

"Trying to turn her into something else, something she could never be."

Their earlier conflict had been pushed to the background. They were two officers trying to make sense of possible clues.

"Graft her into what? A plant?" Gillian sounded unconvinced. "A rosebush?"

"Have you read Symbolic Death by Ivy Dunlap?" Mary had worked with Ivy on a Chicago serial killer case. Since then the two of them had become good friends. "In it, she theorizes that oftentimes killings are symbolic, that the manner and style in which the killing takes place has a deep, personal meaning for the killer."

"And what do roses symbolize?"

"Love. Beauty. Loyalty. Perfection. Femininity Any number of things depending upon one's viewpointlts too early for speculation-I haven't seen any information on Ihe other two victims-but in this stance the simplified message is telling us that the woman didn t live up to his expectations."

"It seems like a twisted fairy tale."

"Or twisted romance."

It took twenty minutes to get from Lynwood Park to the FBI office in downtown Minneapolis. Mary circled the block in her rental car-a green Ford Taurus- and ended up in a lot between Marquette and Nicollet.

Years ago, the local division of the FBI had moved across the street and up the block to an ultramodern facility they shared with other businesses. Mary walked through the revolving doors of the skyscraper and took the escalator to the second floor. At the security desk, she flipped open her FBI photo ID. That garnered her access to a silent elevator that carried her to the eleventh floor, where she was directed down a carpeted hallway to Agent Senatra's office.

He shook her hand this time. The earring, which wasn't approved FBI dress, was gone. He'd traded his expensive suit for a more conservative gray.

The office was military tidy, with filing cabinets, a TV, and a VCR in the corner and maps of Minnesota and the Twin Cities on the wall. On a shelf was a framed photo of Agent Senatra and a laughing little girl.

"My daughter," he said, sitting down at his desk and motioning for Mary to take the seat across from him.

"She's beautiful." Fortunately, Mary could be honest in her response-something that wasn't always possible.

"She just turned eight and is a handful." He adjusted his burgundy tie. "Got any kids?"

"No," she said in a way that always sounded like an apology. It1 was good to make small talk before getting down to business, but the subject of parenting was something Mary knew very little about.

"We work closely with the Minneapolis Police Department's Homicide Unit. I hope you don't mind, but I've taken the liberty of arranging for you to meet privately with Detective Wakefield after your briefing here."

Wakefield. The detective Gillian had spoken to the night before. "That's fine."

They were lucky. In some cities, the police didn't work closely with the FBI. In some cities, if a crime occurred, the FBI might not know about it until after the media chewed it up and spit it out. "Here's what we've got."

Senatra put an eight-by-ten color photo of a dead, eyeless girl on the desk. "Four weeks ago seventeen-year-old April Ellison was kidnapped from the Mall of America. No leads* Nobody saw anything. A lot of people speculated that she'd run away. One week ago, her body showed up. Where? In one of the mall elevators. At that point, we treated it as a single, isolated incident. Five days before that, a body was found in a Minneapolis nature park." He put down another photo, this of an unrecognizable decayed body. "Turned out to be an eighteen-year-old named Bambi Scott."

"Bambi?"

"I know. You can imagine how that played out with the investigative team. Finding a dead Bambi in the woods."

"No doubt," she said dryly.

"Because of the decomposition of the body, we have even fewer leads with this victim than with the previous one."

"Any similarities other than age?"

"Here are high school photos of both victims."

He pulled out eight-by-tens of two smiling girls, both blond. "If the perpetrator is the same in both cases, then I'm guessing he likes 'em young and he likes 'em blond."

"Had the Scott girl been reported missing?"

"No. Her parents were divorced, and her mother had custody. As soon as she turned eighteen she left home. The mother said she hadn't seen or heard from her in two months, but didn't think it was strange."

"Where was she living?"

"In a house where transients hang out. Nobody there seemed to know much about her. A couple of druggies remembered her, but said she basically stuck to herself and didn't stay there all the time. Said they never saw her with anybody strange, but everybody there seemed a little strange to me."