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is concerned.
    There's a good reason for this. Find a man in an alleyway who has been murdered by a blow with a beer bottle, and your lists of suspect types will be virtually endless. Many different kinds of people are capable of committing a homicide such as this one. The death might even have been justifiable homicide — maybe the killer was a woman fending off a rape.
    The case that the Bureau often points to as a seminal one took place in October, 1979. The victim was a white twenty-six-year-old teacher who had been found on the roof of an apartment building. The killer had sliced off her nipples and written Fuck you. You can't stop me in ink on the inside of her left thigh.
    The nature of the crime narrowed the scope of the investigation immediately and significantly. After studying the crime scene and the Coroner's reports, the three agents working on the case began listing some assumptions about the killer. He would be:
     
White
25-35 years old
a high-school drop-out
living by himself (or with a parent)
intensely interested in pornography
     
    New York homicide detectives took this and all the other data in the profile and began checking the immediate neighborhood where the woman had been murdered.
    Three days later, they started interviewing a man who was:
     
white
30 years old
lived with his father
had a large collection of pornographic magazines
lived in the same building as the victim
     
    That's what I mean by the stranger the better where sexual homicides are concerned. The very nature of the atrocity helped focus the investigation. As far back as 1955, the Bureau started keeping extensive records of bizarre murders. By now, they have thousands of detailed profiles of sexual sociopaths. This is coupled with a lot of other information weather conditions at the time of a murder, the political and social environment, domestic setting, employment, reputation, habits, fears, physical condition, criminal history (if any), family relationships, hobbies, social conduct — and then the autopsy report with toxicology/serology results, autopsy photographs, and photographs of the cleansed wounds. And that's just the opening phase of the investigation.
     
    "I tried to get things ready for you," Cindy said. "I hope I used the right forms and everything."
    She handed me a formidable stack of papers from her desk. The top page bore the familiar logo of VICAP (The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), the standard report used by both the Bureau and an increasing number of law-enforcement departments throughout the country. "Take a look at Form 8, will you? I'm not sure I filled that out right."
     

     
    I looked at Form 8 of the report.
    "It looks fine," I said. "But why don't you just tell me a little more about it first."
    She glanced away out the window again. The temperature had dropped five degrees during the twenty minutes I'd been in here. You could smell rain. There was a hazy glow around the silver quarter-moon.
    We all grew up here, on the settlement, I mean — David and me and the two Moore sisters, although they were quite a bit older than us. They left here when they were still in their teens, I think. They were very, very beautiful and they made their looks their stock in trade."
    "Prostitutes?"
    "Probably. But not for very long, I don't think. They were more "kept" women than anything. You know, for rich men. They spent a lot of time in Vegas and then in Los Angeles and then they came back here. Even in their forties they were beauties. They really took care of themselves. But of course their rich men started wanting younger women nonetheless. And that's when the sisters went into procuring. I know they steered a couple of girls from the settlement into prostitution."
    "And your husband knew them?"
    The sisters lived and worked out of Cedar Rapids and that's where David liked to drink and run around. Over the past few years, he had relationships with both of them, I'm pretty sure."
    "Why would he want to