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you understand we can’t reveal details that would jeopardize—”
    â€œWhat about Dr. Frank Navarone?” Pauline suddenly asked, and now September glanced back to the TV. Seeing herself blink in surprise at the unexpected question, she narrowed her eyes on Pauline’s image, but her mind started traveling down avenues that had seemed like dead ends once, but now opened up to new possibilities. Pauline had brought up Frank Navarone who was Glenda Tripp’s uncle and shortly thereafter Glenda Tripp was murdered by, it certainly looked like, the Do Unto Others killer.
    The killer had seen September in this interview.
    Pauline looked impatient, but finally September said, “Dr. Navarone is a person of interest.”
    â€œIn which case?” Pauline pounced.
    â€œThe Zuma Software shootings,” September was forced to admit.
    And that was it for September. Pauline turned back to the camera for a close-up where she finished, “It may be just as Detective Rafferty suggests, that the police are doing everything they can”—her tone suggested otherwise—“but can we trust our lives to an undermanned, overworked local police force? There’s a killer out there. Likely more than one. Take care and lock your doors. . . .”
    September fast-forwarded to the end of the recording, but she didn’t erase it just yet.
    She’d been with the Laurelton PD for almost five months now. Sheila Dempsey had been killed around the time September was hired, but in Winslow County. Emmy Decatur’s body was found in the Laurelton city limits, and then September had given the interview to Channel Seven. The next morning Glenda Tripp’s body was discovered in her apartment.
    And then the Do Unto Others message on her second grade artwork had arrived.
    September stood up and stared across the room, out the window of her living room toward the backside of the building and the street. But she wasn’t seeing anything, her mind was picking at possibilities.
    What was it about her that interested the killer? Was he someone from her past, maybe seeking to even some old score she was unaware of? Or, was he someone who’d seen her on the news, and then found her artwork somehow? That didn’t make any sense. Or, was it that he knew where her artwork was, and then when he saw her on the news, he was suddenly driven to send her the message? That maybe she happened to cross his path after he’d started his deadly mission? But then he still would have had to know the artwork was hers.
    â€œHe knows me,” she decided. “He has to.”
    I need to find my stuff.
    Tomorrow. Whether her father was home or not, she was going to attack the attic and basement.
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    The killer sat on the concrete floor, cross-legged and naked, his arms straight in front of him, his eyes closed. The blinds were drawn so if the bitch next door came snooping around she wouldn’t be able to see in. New blinds, because the old ones had been bent and saggy and offered holes—windows—into his world.
    New blinds because that was his outer self’s current job: installer for Mel’s Window Coverings and he ordered some for himself and haggled with Mel about the discount.
    New blinds because the cords used to manipulate the slats had been lying there when he first needed them . . . with Sheila.
    He inhaled and held his breath. For years . . . half his life . . . he’d kept the beast hidden inside himself and had managed to evade capture over his first human kills. He’d lived in pure fear, expecting the authorities to find him, but they never did. He’d fed the beast’s need with an ample supply of pornography and sudden spurts of nighttime hunting for small, stray animals. And it had worked. He’d burned to prove them all wrong . . . the doctors . . . the medical staff . . . all the fuckers who’d passed judgment on him and labeled him a deviant.