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animal had chewed off her vulva. Her fingertips were missing at the first knuckle. The skin of her stomach, upon which he used to lay his head, had been ripped off and her intestines hung in loops over the knobs of the lower kitchen cabinets, as if thrown there in a hurry to get to something else. Much later, he learned her intestines had been tossed aside to get at her liver, which was never found.
    They dragged him outside.
    Other people—line officers, forensic technicians—had already vomited next to the bushes where he knelt retching. Six months later, when the police hadn’t found a single suspect, he began his search on a simple premise: anyone or anything capable of something so awful had done it before and would do it again.
    His search took him first to Mike Nakamura and then all over the world. He told her the last six places he’d been: Vanouver, Manila, New Orleans, Sydney, Vladivostok, Stockholm. And now Galveston.
    “You think this is what happened to my sister?”
    “Yes.”
    “How many has he killed?”
    “Thirty-six I know about. That’s going back ten years, the definite ones. I don’t think I catch them all. And he’s been doing it a lot longer than a decade.”
    “When you find this guy, you’ll kill him?”
    “Yes.”
    The young woman turned the gun away from him. Then she asked a question he didn’t expect.
    “You still live in that house?”
    “No. I had it torn down. Sold the vacant land. I bought a different house in Kaneohe. I thought I should stay close, because I thought I was looking for someone close by. Then I learned that wasn’t true, but I stayed in Kaneohe anyway.”
    “Since he’s everywhere, it doesn’t matter where you live.”
    “That’s right.”
    “What do you do?”
    “This.”
    “What about before?”
    “I was a lawyer.”
    “What’ll we do next?” she said.
    “You could tell me your name.”
    “Julissa Clayborn.”
    “I’m Chris Wilcox.”
    He held out his hand, but instead of shaking it, she took it and held it. She looked dizzy. They just sat that way for a moment, their hands together on the table. Her hand was so warm, the skin soft. How long had he been huddling by the memory of Cheryl, as if that could sustain either of them? He turned away from her green eyes, feeling naked. He went to the bathroom, took off the towel, and changed into jeans and a polo shirt.
    When he came back, he told her about the meeting with Aaron Westfield and Mike Nakamura.
    “I want to be there,” Julissa said.
    Westfield was right—they could have been sisters, all of them.
    “What I’m doing isn’t legal. And it isn’t safe.”
    Her eyes dropped and he followed her gaze to the pistol on the table between them. It was a match grade Sig Sauer. The chrome plating was worn on the barrel from coming in and out of its holster in a hurry.
    “You lost everything and took this up because you had to,” she said.
    He nodded.
    “My sister was my best friend.”
    When he didn’t say anything, she picked up the Sig Sauer and put it back into her handbag. Then she looked at him again.
    “When you told me, you brought me into it. We both know there’s no way back. And I could help you more than you think.”
    She reached into her handbag and brought out an ID card in a clear plastic holder. She slid it across the table and he looked at it. This time he nodded again, his eyes closed. She was right. There was no way back.
    He’d wasted enough time looking for that path.
    “We’re meeting as soon as Mike gets to Galveston.”
    “Good,” she said.
    “I need to sleep,” Chris told her. “I’m sorry.”
    “Can I stay a bit? I’m not ready to drive anywhere.”
    Chris nodded to the room’s other bed, which was still made. “Sure.”
    He remembered what it was like in the first few weeks of shock. Nothing was strange. He’d just gone from one event to the next as if dragged on a rope. He got into the bed closer to the air conditioner and pulled the covers up to