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that of Margaret Mosley in March of that year, Miller and Roth had walked the streets around Bates, around Patterson and Morgan and Jersey Avenue for little more than a day. They’d asked questions, waited for answers, listened carefully as those answers never came. Other detectives had then taken their place, and meetings were held to discuss the fact that they’d learned nothing of any great value. Then the case had been reassigned out of precinct, Miller had forgotten about it, had heard about the second killing several weeks after its occurrence. By that time he was already waist-deep in all that had happened, in the IAD investigation, the coroner’s inquiry, in the slow, painful death of a fourteen-month relationship with a girl named Marie McArthur, and thus - understandably - had given it no great deal of attention.
    Between the first killing in March, the second in July and the death of Barbara Lee in August, right through September and into the first week of November, Miller knew there was nothing of any significance that had shone a light on the truth. Had there been he would have heard from Roth or one of the other detectives. The Second Precinct was a close community; they lived out of one another’s pockets. The case was a nightmare, and though the newspapers turned to other stories, though the sports page and the mid-terms became once again the focus of attention for the vast majority of Washingtonians, the nightmare had evidently continued to walk and talk and breathe the same air as everyone else. Somebody had killed four women. He had killed them swiftly, violently, without clear reason or rationale, and the burden of investigation, identification, discovery and proof had now arrived with Robert Miller.
    Miller told Roth about the FBI when he arrived. Roth sneered sarcastically, but he did not challenge Lassiter’s authority.
    On loan to the Washington Police Department by the Behavioral Sciences Unit, FBI Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia, their visitor was in his mid-fifties, his manner perhaps that of a college professor. He wore a flannel jacket with cotton pants, the knees dusty and worn as if he spent much of his life kneeling awkwardly, peering into darkness, making cryptic notes. His name was James Killarney. He did not look like a married man. He did not look like someone’s father. He greeted each entrant with a half-smile, a nod; he knew his presence was somehow unwelcome - nothing personal, simply a matter of territorial and jurisdictional issues long-ingrained in the system. He seemed at ease, unhurried, as if such events were a matter of course.
    It was a little after nine in the morning as seven detectives took seats in that closed-door session on the second floor of Washington’s Second Precinct building. Amongst that group were people such as Chris Metz, Carl Oliver, Dan Riehl and Vince Feshbach - veterans of homicide, men that Miller would have considered more suited to heading up such a case. One for one they all carried the same look. I have seen everything. There is nothing the world can bring me that I cannot face. Soon, perhaps sooner than I think, I will have seen it all. Theirs was a look that Miller had hoped he would never assume, that it would be different for him, that he would never look that way. But he did. He knew that now. He believed he wore it better than all of them.
    The tension was evident in glances, shifting expressions, in the way each man present looked at the man beside him, the man adjacent, and back to Killarney at the front. This was Washington, such things could not be permitted to go on, but nevertheless the feeling of unexpressed resentment was tangible. Miller himself was caught between this and his curiosity about what the visitor from Arlington could tell them about their case.
    Killarney smiled. He stood for a moment at the front of the room. And then he backed up and perched on the edge of the desk. Like the teacher, the college lecturer. All that