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the photos, remember? That was disgusting. You ought to do something about it.”
    “The cougar? Not my department. Fish and Game. But you’re right: They should certainly hear about the attack on Danny.”
    “What do you think of him?”
    “Danny? He’s okay.”
    “Not professionally. I know you busted him. I mean as a person.”
    “Don’t really know him. Kind of difficult to separate the two.”
    “But first impressions?” she asked.
    “He asked you out,” Walt stated.
    “Yeah. Is that bad?”
    Walt knew Danny Cutter as a womanizing playboy who’d had a two-thousand-dollar-a-week cocaine habit prior to the bust. He thought the cocaine part had gone away. He wasn’t sure the other part ever changed. He liked the man in spite of his criminal record.
    “We got some crime-scene photos from Salt Lake,” he told her. “Pretty gruesome stuff. But they’re lousy photos. I’d like to enlarge some, crop and zoom some others. Above my skill set.”
    She looked out the top of her eyes at him and said disdainfully, “I see.”
    “I need them pretty quickly.”
    “It’s a date, is all.”
    “A guy named Capshaw—TSA down in Salt Lake—thought it important enough to send these. I have a five o’clock with everyone who’s anyone connected to C 3 security. But as I said, the photos are pretty heavy. If you’d rather not do them, maybe you could give me a five-minute course in Photoshop for Dummies.”
    “I’ll do them myself.” She sounded angry. “Just tell me what you want.”
    The surprise in the photos, especially under enlargement, was the degree of the horrors. The victim’s fingers had been cut off with precision. Teeth had been pulled, shown in the photos with a latex-gloved thumb holding the dead man’s upper lip up over the gap. But worst of all: The face was disfigured and both eyes had been carved out of the sockets. Fiona battled her way through the work.
    “None of my business,” she said, “but why do you even want these? You realize they’re far more disgusting as close-ups, right? But evidence is evidence. You can see everything in the originals, so I don’t get it.”
    “Can you load them into PowerPoint and burn a disk for me?”
    “Of course I can. But it won’t make them any easier to take.”
    “What is it they say about first impressions?” Walt asked rhetorically.
    “You’re a diseased individual,” she said.
    “But you’d watch it?” he tested.
    “Of course I would. But I’m sick that way. Like you.”
    “This goes no further than this office.” He paused to make sure he had her attention. “There’s been a credible threat on Liz Shaler’s life.” He watched as the shock registered. “At first I wondered if this killing in Salt Lake might be related. Happened this morning—less than eight hours ago. But once I saw these, once I went through what you just went through, it was no longer if, but how. ”
    “Jesus. This guy’s here ?”
    He lowered his voice. “Now I need to get several others to make that same jump.”

Ten
    C ristina’s lunch crowd had thinned out an hour earlier, leaving only a few tables occupied on the restaurant’s back deck at 3:30. The wait staff, dressed in all black, hurried about servicing the remaining tables.
    “A cougar? Are you sure?” Patrick Cutter wore a pink golf shirt with the C 3 logo embroidered on the breast. He focused intently across the table at his brother.
    “Of course I’m sure. Give me a break!”
    “Did you tell anyone?” Patrick asked.
    “I got out of the shower about ten minutes ago. Besides, in case you’ve missed the news: I’m not overly eager to spend time with Walt Fleming.”
    “Walt could have been a lot harder on you.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    “What about Liz? She’s all right?”
    Danny set down his fork, eyed his brother with disbelief. “I almost get mauled by a cougar, and all you can think about is your keynote speaker?”
    Patrick pursed his lips.
    “Fear not, Paddy: She’s all