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certain details of the crimes should be released publicly.
    Maybe some police department somewhere has had a similar crime but Benton’s argument continues to be overruled by his boss Ed Granby. He’s ordered that there can be absolutely no sharing of investigative information about former Cambridge resident Klara Hembree and that means there can’t be information released about the other two recent cases. Details will get leaked and might inspire a copycat and Granby’s not going to budge from that opinion. While he’s got a valid point, he’s ground the investigation to a halt, according to Benton.
    Since Granby took over the Boston division last summer Benton has felt increasingly ostracized and marginalized, and I’ve continued to remind him that some people are jealous, controlling, and competitive. It’s an ugly fact of life. By now the two of them cordially despise each other and this is probably a hidden reason why my husband wanted to come home. It wasn’t just about my being sick or that his birthday is tomorrow or that the holidays are here. He was extremely unhappy when I talked to him last and I’ve been halfway expecting him any minute, or that might be wishful thinking. He left for D.C. almost a month ago and I miss him terribly.
    I walk back into the bedroom with Sock on my heels, and Marino’s just going to have to wait a minute or two longer. Retrieving my iPad from the bed, I log on to my office database and find what Benton scanned to me last month, quickly scrolling through the files. The three homicides play out in my mind as if they’re happening before my eyes and the details are just as perplexing as when I first looked at them. I envision what I’ve envisioned before, reconstructing the way I know biology works or doesn’t, and I watch them die as I’ve watched them die before. I see it.
    A woman with a clear plastic bag over her head and duct tape around her neck, a designer duct tape with a black lacy pattern, and clear plastic rapidly sucks in and out, her eyes panicked as her face turns a deep blue-red. Pressure builds, causing a light scattering of petechial hemorrhages across the cheeks and eyelids, tiny pinpricks blooming bright red as vessels rupture. Fighting to stay alive but restrained somehow and then all goes silent and still, and the final act, a bow fashioned from the same designer duct tape is attached under her chin, the killer wrapping his gift to inhumanity.
    Yet the physical findings don’t add up to what I would expect. They tell a truth that seems a lie. The victims would have struggled violently. They would have frantically fought to breathe when they were being suffocated but there’s no evidence they did. As Benton put it, they seemed to comply as if they wanted to die and I know damn well they didn’t.
    These aren’t suicides. They’re sadistic murders and I believe the killer is restraining them, possibly with a ligature that leaves no mark. But I can’t figure out what that might be. Even the softest material will leave a bruise or abrasion if someone is tightly bound with it and panics and fights. I can’t fathom why the duct tape left no injury. How do you suffocate someone and leave virtually no sign of it?
    Each body was found in a northern Virginia or southern Maryland public park, and I continue to quickly skim through what Benton sent to me the end of November, knowing I’ve got to hurry up and I can’t tell Marino what’s on my mind. Three different parks, two with a lake, another with a golf course, all of them very close to railroad tracks and within twenty miles of Washington, D.C. In the scene photographs the victims were clad only in panties that were identified as belonging to a previous victim except in the case of the former Cambridge resident Klara Hembree. A DNA profile recovered from the panties she had on is the unknown female of European descent – in other words, white.
    I click through photographs of dead faces staring