Sanders grinned. “Well, I got your reports—”

“I should hope so,” she snapped. “Those damned things were done weeks ago. If you’re trying to tell me you just read them, after I busted a gut to finish them, that’s the last time I ever do a rush job for you, baby.”

“No, no,” he said hastily. “I read each one as soon as it came in. But they didn’t help much, that’s all.”

“What do you want from pathology? A description of the murderer imprinted on the retina or something? I gave you what was there—that’s all there is.” She finished her sticky bun and was trying to clean the sugar and grease from her strong, short-nailed hands.

“I’m not expecting miracles, but you’ve worked on all three of these, haven’t you?”

Melissa nodded, her eyes bright with curiosity and interest.

Sanders looked intently at her. “Well, isn’t there anything you get from the marks or patterns that would tell us something about him? I thought maybe you might have noticed something that didn’t seem to be the kind of thing you’d put in a report.”

Melissa shook her head. “There aren’t things like that in this sort of case. I mean, if I notice something, I put it in. There might be more information in those cadavers, tests we didn’t run because they didn’t seem pertinent—”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I don’t really look hard for slow arsenic poisoning or black widow spider bites when the cause of death is so clear.”

“No, that wasn’t what I was thinking about. I mean, what do we know about him from the way he bashed them around, and from those knife marks—I don’t know. I suppose if I can’t see a pattern that tells us anything useful, there’s no reason why you should be expected to.” He pushed aside his coffee cup and rubbed his hand over his forehead.

“Come on, John,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t look so depressed. I can tell you a few things, but they didn’t come from cutting those girls up. I can tell you I wouldn’t go for a long lonely walk on a weekday between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., especially in the vicinity of a large park.”

“All that tells me is that you’re not as stupid as some women, obviously. But I knew that already.”

Melissa ignored this. “He goes for girls who are rather short and have medium brown hair and are bouncy. All the cadavers were in excellent physical condition—except that they were dead, of course. It was hard to tell whether they were pretty or not. And he obviously doesn’t have a job, or at least, a day job, but probably has a late model car in good condition. So I would be looking for a fairly good-looking guy with light to dark brown hair who got fired around Christmas and is driving an ’83 or ’84 medium-sized car in a rather nondescript colour—light blue, gray, tan, something like that.”

John looked at her with interest. He had come to some of the same conclusions as Melissa had, but wondered whether she had based hers on something other than instinct. “Why?”

“The murders started in January, so before that he worked during the day or didn’t feel like killing women—the first seems likelier. And what kind of a man does a girl instinctively trust? One who’s good looking but not too good looking, with honest brown hair. If he looked like a rapist—whatever that means—wouldn’t you have had a lot of girls reporting attempts? I mean, he would have approached some females who ran or screamed or something. Unless you have had a lot of these?”

“None. This is the first time I can remember when we had a rapist who didn’t have a few unsuccessful attempts to his credit. That’s how we catch them, usually.” Jerry slouched over with the coffee pot and refilled their cups, a look of pain in his eye as he considered the cost of the extra liquid.

“You see, the funny thing,” she said, swishing the coffee around in her cup thoughtfully, “is why any woman is going to trust some strange man enough to let him within ten feet of her when there’s been so much publicity about this. He’s got to be presenting himself as someone who’s absolutely safe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. Take a kid who’s really—what do they call it?—street-proofed, the kind who wouldn’t go across the street with her Uncle Jimmy to see newborn puppies. You can still put her into situations where she’s vulnerable. Say, she was just asked to sell Girl Guide cookies, so she goes up to every person she sees who looks as if he’d buy cookies—and she feels safe and in control. If one of those guys approached her, instead of her approaching him, she’d scream, but she’d go off cheerfully enough with some friendly looking type who promised to buy six boxes.”

“And where does that get us? None of these ladies was selling cookies, Melissa.”

“No, but maybe we’re looking for someone a woman would approach without any fear. Maybe he’s an off-duty cop still in his uniform who usually works nights, for instance. How does that grab you?”

Sanders looked at her in horror. “Jesus,” he said softly, “I wish you hadn’t said that. But there’s no one that crazy on the force.” As soon as he’d said it a succession of possible candidates tumbled through his brain. He shook his head. “Anyway, what sort of guy kills them over and over again? I mean, that’s what he’s doing, isn’t it? I guess I really should be talking to a psychiatrist about this, not to you.”

“Psychiatrist!” said Melissa dismissively. “You don’t need to be a shrink to recognize when someone’s that loony. I would suspect that he just is never quite sure that they’re all that dead, myself. And, of course, he’s got a point there, hasn’t he? That one who’s in the hospital still wasn’t all that dead when he got finished with her.”

“Okay then, answer me this one. When do we get our next corpse? When is he going to stop?”

“The next one? Pretty soon, I’d say,” she responded cheerfully. “And I don’t suppose he’ll stop until he gets I caught. But it’s been a month now, hasn’t it? That’s the longest interval so far. So either he’s through for some reason or there will be a new one any day now. Anyway, thanks for the coffee and the bun. I have to get back to Forensic. Lots of work to do. Ta, ta.” With a lively grin she gathered up her things and dashed back across the road, leaving Sanders no wiser than before.

Monday afternoon Jane Conway walked down the big front steps of the school and shivered in the cool spring air. The fifteen-minute walk to her apartment was going to feel like a ten-mile forced march. It was already 4:30, and today she had counted on leaving early so that she could collapse for a while before having to consider doing anything. Fat chance. As she trudged up to MacNiece Street and turned toward the square yellow-brick building whose fourth floor she shared with five other apartments, the whole neighbourhood began to look drearier and drearier. The left-over dirt of winter made the pathetic attempts of the spring bulbs and the pale sun to cheer up the world even more depressing than gray skies and empty flowerbeds would have been. Parked a few yards to the north of the building was a gray Honda. Jane slowed down and glanced in the window, then stopped and opened the door on the passenger side. She slipped in for a few minutes of apparently earnest conversation before jumping out, slamming the door, and moving on with quickened pace. Without a backward glance she entered the front door of her building and headed for the creaky elevator. The wait was endless, the ride ponderously slow, and just as she was fumbling in her purse for her keys the phone began to ring, persistently and maddeningly. It took forever to locate her key chain, an eternity to find the right key, eons to fit it into the lock and make it turn. Damnation. This time it had to be Paul. She grabbed the phone off the hook and gasped “Hello,” certain that by now he would have hung up.

A familiar, flat, female Toronto voice replied, “Hi, Jane. How come it took you so long? You busy or something? I was just about to hang up. It’s me, Marny. Remember me, kid?”