“What does that matter?”

“Who knows? Maybe this guy only attacks women wearing hiking boots or something like that.” He skimmed through a couple of pages. “Nope. She was wearing wool slacks, a pea jacket, and snow-boots, according to her mother. Just a few scraps of cloth, according to the first man on the scene. Nobody heard anything, saw anything. Found by a couple of kids playing in the ravine after school. I wonder if they still play there,” he said, looking up. “Anyway, next victim. February 3rd, a Friday. High Park. Kirsten Johansson, age thirty-five, divorced, one child. A waitress. Lived with another woman who worked at the same restaurant. She had the afternoon off and went cross-country skiing. Roommate said she was probably wearing a heavy sweater, corduroy knickers, long red socks, and ski boots—as you might expect, since she was out skiing. Found by a man taking his dog for a run in the park at 5:00 p.m. Nobody heard or saw anything suspicious.” Dubinsky yawned and scratched his ear. They had gone through this material each time something new had come in, and nothing in this recital excited him.

“Sandra Diane Miller, age eighteen, student. February 28th, a Tuesday. The old Belt Line park, south of Eglinton Avenue. That’s hardly a remote area, you know. She was walking home from school. Lived at home with her family. Wearing gray tights, gray skirt, middy blouse—what’s that?”

“She was in her school uniform, I think.”

“Oh. Anyway, red ski jacket and snow-boots. See, Dubinsky, they were all wearing boots. All we have to do is round up all the boot fetishists in town and—”

Dubinsky pitched his coffee cup into the wastepaper basket. “It’s winter, John. Every woman in the city is wearing boots. My wife is wearing boots. So is yours.”

Sanders pushed the file aside and rubbed the back of his neck. “I feel godawful. I’m hung over; I got no sleep last night; I haven’t had any breakfast; and I spent the morning propping up a wall in a lousy hospital. The papers are screaming for someone’s head—mine seems the likeliest choice—and every female in the city is terrified and refusing to go outside without an escort. Except for the stupid ones who are getting themselves killed. Marie thinks we’re doing nothing about it because nobody gives a damn what happens to women anyway because we all work so late every night and don’t make enough money to buy a vacation retreat in Florida. Or something like that. I lost the drift of her argument around my fifth or sixth Scotch. Anyway,” he said, dragging himself back to the file on his desk, “Miller was found soon after by two boys also walking home from school; she was still alive, almost naked, sexually assaulted, with half her face a bloody pulp. But they didn’t see anyone else. She died on the way to the hospital. So, what does that tell us?”

“It tells us that he raped them and he beat them to a pulp and sometimes cut their throats if they didn’t seem dead enough. You left that out,” said Dubinsky impatiently. “And they’re all under five foot five, so we’re probably looking for someone who is at least five foot six and doesn’t like tackling someone his own size or bigger. And there weren’t any signs of a struggle at any of the scenes, so he probably attacked them somewhere else and dumped them. For chrissake, John, until something comes in from Forensic on this one, there isn’t anything in that file we haven’t gone over a hundred times. Let’s go get some lunch.”

Sanders stood up without comment and reached for his coat. His thin face was set in lines of black depression.

Amanda Griffiths stood on the bridge looking down over Mount Pleasant Road where it bisected the ravine. She had walked her friend Jennifer up to the bus stop. After the bus left with her safely on it, Amanda and Leslie Smith would walk little Heather home to the enormous house next door to Amanda’s. Really, thought Amanda, everyone was getting ridiculously paranoid. She was sick of moving around in a big group all the time—like a herd of sheep, she thought, or a school of green-uniformed fish. She liked that; she’d have to put it into her next letter to her mother. Her eye was caught by the two bright yellow police cruisers parked by the side of the path leading down into the ravine. This is too much, she thought. “Look, Jenn. The ravine’s full of cops. Johnson must have seen the rapist again and called them out.” Jennifer groaned dramatically. Every day they got endless lectures on the subject of traveling safely and avoiding suspicious-looking characters, but Jennifer’s tirade on the subject was cut short by the arrival of her bus.

Amanda waved goodbye to Jennifer as she got on, then, two minutes later, to Leslie as she ran up the stairs to her front door. She and Heather plodded silently the short distance to Forest Crescent; she conscientiously watched until Heather had safely slammed her front door shut behind her; then she turned and trudged up the walk to Aunt Kate’s. She hoped—without much expectation that her hopes would be realized—that Aunt Kate would be in. Somehow the house seemed very lonely on this bright and bitterly cold Thursday afternoon. She was supposed to be happy. It was the first day of the March break, and school had ended at noon. A whole afternoon with nothing to do, at least for Amanda. Leslie and Jennifer were going home to pack for Florida and the West Indies, respectively. It seemed to Amanda that she was the only girl in the entire school who wasn’t fleeing south for the holidays this afternoon. She and little Heather next door, whose mother was a real estate agent and couldn’t afford to miss the spring house-buying season. But who wants to spend the holidays amusing a ten-year-old? Even a nice one?

She walked slowly upstairs and through her bedroom to her study, dropped the knapsack full of books and notes on her desk, shrugged her coat off onto the floor, and headed back into the bedroom to get out of her uniform. She was shaken by a wave of homesickness. Tears spilled out of the corners of her eyes as she slowly began to crawl into her cords and warm sweater. It was very nice of Aunt Kate to let Amanda come and live with her while her parents went off to the States; it would have been silly to change school systems for just two years, and her aunt’s offer saved her from being enrolled as a boarder. After fifteen years of being an only child, she didn’t think that she would care for the communal existence, no matter how jolly it could be. But it was very unfair of her parents to be unavailable for the March break, or at least for the first week of it. Just as her spirits were sinking into the depths of self-pity, the front door crashed open.

“Amanda! Are you home? Let’s go out and have lunch!” Aunt Kate’s carrying tones galvanized her into movement. She grabbed her jacket and, taking them two at a time, leapt down the stairs.

“I don’t know, Aunt Kate,” said Amanda somberly as she spooned the last of her butterscotch sundae into her mouth. “It’s just so awful around the school right now that I get really depressed.”

“But I thought you were doing well there, with lots of friends and all that sort of thing. Aren’t you? Oh dear, I’m really not very good at dealing with the crises of adolescence, I’m afraid. You’ll have to forgive me. Put it down to lack of experience, and the general inelasticity of middle age.” Kate looked inquisitively at her pretty niece, and then put down her cup with a small spasm of guilt. She had been too preoccupied with her own life; she should have been keeping closer track of the poor girl. “Now, if you were a Malaysian girl faced with an unsuitable choice of husband, I’d know what to say—”

Amanda giggled. Aunt Kate’s scholarly view of life always cheered her up. She looked at every problem as though it had occurred on one of her archeological expeditions and took it seriously, unlike most adults who assumed that what was wrong with you was merely some temporary hormonal imbalance. “No, Aunt Kate, it’s not your fault at all. It’s just that the atmosphere has been so grim lately. Ever since that girl at AGS was attacked on her way home from school—right in the middle of Forest Hill—everyone is jumpy. If you’re under five foot four, like me, the whole world thinks you’ll never make it home from school alive. It’s depressing. And the new physics teacher is just awful. I had a whole hour of physics yesterday, and I don’t think I’ll be able to stand her until June. Physics used to be my best subject,” she said mournfully. “I don’t see why Mrs. Resnick had to pick this year to have a baby. Conway is so mean, and yells all the time. She spends more time having fits than she does teaching.”