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a disemboweled oral surgeon named Matthew Fowler. The guide would point to the spot in the grass where they’d found him, and the fuckers would take pictures of it.
               
                Randy waited in the bus.
               
                Portlanders had been getting their wedding pictures taken at the 1914 stone palace since one of the Pittock grandsons had sold the house to the city in the sixties.
               
                He wondered how many wedding photos now had assholes in RUN, GRETCHEN T-shirts wandering around in the background.
               
                It was ten o’clock. The next stop was a motel in North Portland where Gretchen had jammed some poor schmuck’s dismembered penis in an ice machine. Randy liked that one. He liked to see the faces on the tourists when the guide flipped open the lid on the ice machine and they saw the rubber dildo the motel owner kept in there for laughs.
               
                Laughs.
               
                He needed another job.
               
                He pulled off his BEAUTY KILLER BODY TOURS T-shirt, turned it inside out, put it back on, and got out of the bus for a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to leave the bus unattended, but fuck it. What were they going to do? Dismember his penis?
               
                The tourists were inside, no doubt admiring the curved marble staircase at seven bucks a pop, so Randy lit up and walked around to the front of the house. They didn’t charge admission into the yard. The Beauty Killer Tour could have taken tourists right to the spot where Fowler had died, but instead they made the tourists pay to go inside the mansion first. It kept the Pittock people happy, and everyone got a little bit richer thanks to Portland’s favorite serial killer.
               
                The mansion was a thousand feet above Portland, and on a clear day the view was something spectacular. Today you couldn’t see shit. Not Mount Hood. Not Mount Saint Helens. Definitely not Adams.Just gray clouds that looked to be about a mile thick. It was for the best. They needed the rain. The whole city had shriveled up over the last few months.
               
                Randy walked to the edge, overlooking the foliage-thick cliff-side that led down to the city, and tossed his cigarette over the black chain-link fence.
               
                He immediately realized what he’d done. The brush on the hillside was like kindling. An arson rap was the last thing he needed. He stood at the fence and scanned the hillside to make sure the cherry tip had extinguished—and that’s when he saw it. At first he thought it was an old, deflated basketball. It was nestled in the brush, like someone had tossed it from exactly where Randy was standing. But as he leaned over to get a better look, he realized, with unusually sudden clarity, that it was a head.
               
                He lost his footing, and had to scramble, flapping his arms, to keep from falling. When he was upright, he started running, as fast as he could, for the mansion.
               
                He was only vaguely aware of the smoke snaking up the hillside behind him.
               
                C H A P T E R 9
               
                Susan glanced down at the array of self-defense sprays laid out on the passenger seat of her car. Pepper spray. Mace. Some toxic herbal spray her mom had made her out of nutmeg. She swept them into her open purse, started the car, and headed out of the hospital parking garage.
               
                Body parts.
               
                She looked up at the sky. It hadn’t rained since early