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want to put my two cents in. You all are the task force on this thing. Now Bill’s in charge.” He looked at Ebbans. “Which I think is what Sheriff Ellison’s agreeable to.”
    “Yessir,” said Ebbans. “I’m just a hired hand here.”
    “Now between all of you,” Ribbon continued, “you got a flatbed full of investigating experience.” His burdened gray eyes rose to Corde’s. “And I’m busier’n a dog in a fire hydrant factory.…”
    Corde nodded sympathetically.
You’re running and there’s an election come November
.
    “So I can’t get as involved in the case as I’d like. But keep remembering, people’re going to be watching us. They’re going to be real curious how we do on this one so I want us to be pretty, you know, aggressive. Now I’ve been doing some research and I’m pretty bothered by this cult business.”
    Corde was silent. It was Ebbans who asked, “Cult?”
    “What I want you to do is first come up with a profile of our killer.”
    Jim Slocum said, “In these situations that’s what you always have to do.”
    Wynton Kresge wrote this down.
    “Absolutely,” Ribbon said. “I know we haven’t had any of these kinds of killers here in New Lebanon before but I think it’s important for us to get up to speed. What you have to do with cult murderers is peg them. Find out what makes them tick.”
    Kresge scribbled rapidly. Corde glared at him and he stopped writing.
    Ribbon continued, “Now a profile should include two things. The physical description of our man, one, and what’s going on in his mind, two. Stuff like is he sexually repressed, does he hate his mother, does he have trouble, you know, getting it up, was he beaten as a child.…”
    Corde, who had a well-used NCAVC criminal profiling flowchart tacked up on his wall, nodded solemnly and let the embarrassment for his boss trickle off.
    “Sounds important,” Miller said, and brushed his hand over his excessively short crew cut.
    “Absolutely,” Ribbon said. “I’ve been reading up on investigations like this. One thing that’s troubling is this moon business. Think about it. She was killed on the night of the quarter moon. That could be lunar fixation for you. And this one’s particularly troubling, you know why? Because we’ve got two quarters and a full and a new. So that’s four potential strike windows—”
    “What’s that?” Wynton Kresge asked the question that Corde had been about to.
    Ribbon said patiently, “That’s the entire period when our man’s likely to kill again. In this case I’d say it’s from thirty-six hours in front of the full moon till thirty-six hours after.”
    Corde and Ebbans, who’d worked together on investigations for four years, got to play the eye-rolling game.
    “Ah,” Kresge said, and wrote.
    Corde and Ebbans played the game again.
    “Well, that’s my two cents. I’ll let you boys be. Do me proud and go catch this sickie.” Ribbon left the room.
    Corde took center stage. He searched for something politic to say. “All right, I suppose we might be looking at the possibility of a serial killing here but I wouldn’t go spreading that around. We don’t want to give anybody any ideas.” Slocum seemed about to speak but remained silent and Corde continued, “Now I’m going to give us ten days to get a suspect under. And I want an ID within two or three.” From his St. Louis days Corde remembered the forty-eight/four rule in homicide investigations: If you don’t identify the perp within forty-eight hours of a killing, the odds are it will take at least four weeks to find him.
    “Also,” Slocum said, “the full moon’s coming up in seven days or so.” He was scanning a
Farmer’s Almanac
.
    Corde said delicately, “I think Steve’s got a good point. We’ve got to be aware of this moon business but we don’t want to drop other leads because of it. It’ll be something to consider, is all.” Corde opened the envelope Kresge had brought and pulled out