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the crisp, high notes of her voice broke against walls that had not rebounded a female sound for years. She noticed the effect of her words on the men’s faces and blushed ever so slightly before pressing on. “I’m a psychiatrist by training but I got involved with the FBI as a specialist in certain kinds of deviant behavior, and now I focus exclusively on serial killers. I understand you have one on your hands right now.”
    A few men nodded, but the rest were dumbstruck by her manner, both vulnerable and confident, by the fact that her hair announced its presence by glittering in the fluorescent lights. Most men in the room had a good enough grasp of English to understand what she was saying. The translation was merely a backup. Ibrahim stepped forward.
    “Dr. Becker,” he said, “thank you for coming. I’m Inspector Ibrahim Zahrani and I’m in charge of this case. We do appear to have a serial killer and we’d appreciate anything you could tell us.”
    “I understand you’ve never had one before?”
    This triggered a discussion once it had been translated. “Of course we’ve had serial killers before,” Daher remarked in Arabic. “Does she think that we’re completely backward?”
    “Tell her about Yanbu,” someone else said.
    “She already knows about that,” the translator replied. “She’s asking about this department specifically. Has anyone in this room ever dealt with a serial killer before?”
    “Sure,” Osama said from the back of the room. “The warehouse killer.”
    Kazaz translated this.
    “That’s a spree killer,” Charlie said, promptly ending the discussion. “Spree killers are different. They get carried away with bloodlust. A serial killer is someone much more thorough, and generally more careful.”
    Ibrahim noticed Katya Hijazi slip into the room. She stood just inside the doorway and tried to look as if she belonged there. Charlie noticed too, smiled at her, and fumbled whatever she was saying, causing the rest of the room to turn and stare at Katya. Finally Charlie gave up and said “Hello” with a vague expression of pity on her face. Katya looked as if she wanted to slap her.
    “Anyway,” Charlie went on, “the most important step in these types of investigations is to identify what you’re dealing with. And you’re halfway there. You already know he’s a serial killer. Until you start identifying some of the victims, there’s not much anyone’s going to be able to tell you about your killer specifically—such as where he might have met these women, what sort of neighborhood he lives in, what sort of job or family or other public façade he might have. So I’ll tell you what we know about serial killers, and then I’ll speak generally about yours, given what we do know about the patterns of his killings.”
    Once the translator had finished, the only sound in the room was the low whir of air coming through the air-conditioning vents.
    “For most serial killers, it starts with a fantasy,” Charlie said. Someone had offered her a bottle of water, and she cracked it open, took a sip. “Everyone has them, right? You fantasize about being the boss at work, about your wife loving you more than anyone else in the world. Whatever it is, it’s probably normal.”
    Somewhere beside him, Ibrahim heard a long, low whispered
“Ayyyyyyyywa.”
Yeeeees. He suspected Daher.
    “Most killers kill for obvious and intelligible reasons—greed, anger, revenge—but for serial killers, the reasons are personal, internal, and not fully comprehensible. They are more like compulsions. Their murders satisfy a deep inner need, the playing out of some fantasy that they’ve nurtured, usually for a very long time. Since childhood. Their fantasies are brutal. They commonly involve sadistic sexual violence and disfigurement. You’ve seen disfigurement here.” She glanced at the whiteboard, where photos of the nineteen shattered faces hung in neat rows. “But the important thing to