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ago, long before the Born in the USA album made the Boss a national celebrity. He liked the anger and violence of the early Springsteen, the scrawny kid wounded by the world and snarling back at it in furious despair.
    On a humid August night in 1978, he’d listened to Springsteen for hours, huddled in his bedroom in his parents’ house, headphones bracketing his ears, till he’d gotten up the nerve for his first kill.
    He had been eighteen then. At the time he hadn’t thought of it as a first kill. It was the only murder he was contemplating, the one he had fantasized and rehearsed for seven long years.
    Meredith had deserved it, too. That bitch.
    A chill moved through him as he remembered the ecstatic pleasure of slamming her head into the concrete rim of the swimming pool, then holding her, unconscious, under the surface till her lungs were waterlogged sacs.
    Afterward, he’d been free of any impulse to kill for a long time. Having exacted his revenge, he felt liberated, unencumbered by the past.
    Except that he exhibited a curious reluctance to date women who reminded him of her. He preferred brunettes and redheads. He stayed away from blonds, most particularly blue-eyed, fair-skinned blonds.
    He made it through his twenties without violence. But in his early thirties he did a thirteen-month stretch at Lompoc for a bank-examiner scam. His confinement gave him time to think, too much time, and the frustration of enforced abstinence from sex seemed to draw other, darker needs to his surface.
    It was then that the feelings started.
    He knew no word to describe them more exactly than that. Not sexual urges, not homicidal impulses, not sadistic tendencies—yet a little of all these, mixed with something else, something indefinable.
    He had always been smooth with women. He could have a one-night stand whenever he liked. But it seemed that ordinary sex just wasn’t enough anymore.
    He kept remembering the reflexive muscular twitches of Meredith’s body as he held her submerged, the pops and jerks of her shoulders, the sudden heaving of her chest as she inhaled water. And once she was dead, the wet blond hair wrapping her face like ribbons of kelp, the glazed emptiness in her eyes when he peeled back the lids.
    It had been the supreme moment of his life, more satisfying than any con. And he wanted another triumph like it. And another. And another.
    But he was determined to do it right. He’d made a small but potentially serious mistake in carrying out Meredith’s execution. The cops had been suspicious, and he’d spent some sleepless nights before her death was finally ruled an accident.
    This time there would be no sloppy screw-ups. Thirteen months in a cell had been long enough; he would never go back.
    He delayed his plans until he settled on the perfect strategy—the killing of strangers in random cities far from home—and the ideal method.
    His discovery of the method was pure luck. During a routine medical checkup, the nurse left him alone in the examination room for a few minutes. Restless, he looked through the drawers and found a box of unused disposable syringes. One of them went in his coat pocket, never to be missed.
    Being plastic, with only a thin steel needle at its core, it could be hidden in his suit jacket and carried through an airport metal detector without triggering the alarm. It was quick and sure, bloodless and silent, and above all, intensely satisfying. He loved watching the women’s convulsions, their rolling eyes and flapping limbs.
    Ronni Tyler’s death throes had been particularly gratifying. He had kissed her when she was finally dead, murmuring in her ear: “I hope it was good for you, too.”
    The 405 rocketed him to the eastbound 101, where traffic was heavier and progress slow. He had nearly finished the Springsteen CD by the time he reached the strip mall in the North Hollywood district of L.A. He pulled into his parking slot at 9:25.
    Of the eight business establishments in the