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says. She has wintermint breath.
        By the time the dancers retreat and the band takes a break, Heather has decided he isn't a vice cop on stakeout, so she grows, bolder. She knows what he wants, she has what he wants, and she lets him know that he is a buyer in a seller's market.
        Heather tells him that across the highway from the Blue Life Lounge is a motel where, if a girl is known to the management, rooms can be rented by the hour. This is no surprise to him, for there are laws of lust and economics as immutable as the laws of nature.
        She pulls on her lambskin-lined jacket, and together they go out into the chilly night, where her wintermint breath turns to steam in the crisp air. They cross the parking lot and then the highway, hand-in-hand as if they are high school sweethearts.
        Though she knows what he wants, she does not know what he needs any more than he does. When he gets what he wants, and when it does not quench the hot need in him, Heather will learn the pattern of emotion that is now so familiar to him, need fosters frustration, frustration grows into anger, anger leads to hatred, hatred genera The sky is a massive slab of crystal-clear ice. The trees stand leafless and sere at the end of barren November. The wind makes a cold, mournful sound as it sweeps off the vast surrounding prairie, through the city. And violence sometimes soothes.
        Later, having spent himself in Heather more than once, no longer in the urgent grip of lust, he finds the shabbiness of the motel room to be an intolerable reminder of the shallow, grubby nature of his existence.
        His immediate desire is sated, but his desire for more of a life, for direction and meaning, is undiminished.
        The naked young woman, on top of whom he still lies, seems ugly now, even disgusting. The memory of intimacy with her repels him. She can't or won't give him what he needs. Living on the edge of society, selling her body, she is an outcast herself, and therefore an infuriating symbol of his own alienation.
        She is taken by surprise when he punches her in the face. The blow is hard enough to stun her. As Heather goes limp, nearly unconscious, he slips both hands around her throat and chokes her with all the force of which he is capable.
        The struggle is quiet. The blow, followed by extreme pressure on her windpipe and diminishment of the blood supply to her brain through the carotid arteries, renders her incapable of resistance.
        He is concerned about drawing the unwanted attention of other motel guests. But a minimum of noise is also important because quiet murder is more personal, more intimate, more deeply satisfying.
        So quietly does she succumb that he is reminded of nature films in which certain spiders and mantises kill their mates subsequent to a first and final act of intercourse, always without a sound from either assailant or victim. Heather's death is marked by a cold and solemn ritual equal to the stylized savagery of those insects.
        Minutes later, after showering and dressing, he crosses the highway from the motel to the Blue Life Lounge and gets in his rental car.
        He has business to conduct. He was not sent to Kansas City to murder a whore named Heather. She was merely a diversion. Other victims await him, and now he is sufficiently relaxed and focused to deal with them.
        In Marty's office, by the party-colored light of the stained-glass lamp, Paige stood beside the desk, staring at the small tape recorder, listening to her husband chant two unsettling words in a voice that ranged from a melancholy whisper to a low snarl of rage.
        After less than two minutes, she couldn't tolerate it any longer.
        His voice was simultaneously familiar and strange, which made it far worse than if she'd been unable to recognize it at all.
        She switched off the recorder.
        Realizing she was still holding the glass of red