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the other said, in a much louder voice.
      John’s head began to pound. It’s a hospital , he told himself. Many people die here . Theresa… He walked fast, out the wide doors. The autumn day was bright and crisp; the cool air sliced into his central nervous system, shooting his alertness up a notch.
      Patting his pockets for car keys, heading for the parking garage, he remembered his ride in the ambulance. Instead, he caught a cab dropping someone off. At first he gave the address of his office, then changed his mind and told the driver to take him home, to change out of his bloody shirt.
      Settling back, with nothing to do but be driven, the names came.
      Antoinette Moore , he thought. She was the one who had died at Shoreline General. John knew the case, the women, so well; they were inside him now, with him at all times. Antoinette, known as Toni…nineteen years old. A sophomore at Bushnell College, a long-distance runner in training for her first marathon. Petite, wiry, with short dark hair. Parents in Akron, Ohio. An older brother, two younger sisters.
      A close family, and they had sent her to Connecticut to die.
      She hadn’t, at first. Merrill’s pattern had been to wait until the waves came lapping at his victims’ mouths, until they were about to bleed to death or drown, but that day he miscalculated the tide, and Toni became the only one of Greg’s victims to live long enough to be rescued.
      He had left her, like the others, in a breakwater—in this case, a stone-and-wood jetty on private property, jutting into Stonington Harbor. He had slit her throat, wedged her between the weathered boards at the end of the jetty, and waited for the tide to take her away.
      He hadn’t counted on her amazing strength, on her marathon-woman determination. Toni had hauled herself out of the wet-wood grave, throat bleeding, to crawl into the air, into plain sight. A lobsterman checking his pots had seen her, his attention caught by the crimson streaming from her body, thinking at first that one of his red buoys had gotten snagged in the jetty.
      She had died at Shoreline General, forty-five minutes later, without ever regaining consciousness.
      John closed his eyes, picturing Toni’s face from the pictures in his file. The floodgates were now open: The other names and faces and facts came flowing through.
      Anne-Marie Hicks : seventeen, five feet four inches, curly blond hair, braces on her teeth, disappeared one April afternoon, her body found snagged in fishing lines.
      Terry O’Neal : twenty-two, model, pretty, darkly intelligent eyes, never made it to work at her father’s insurance agency, body found by two boys crabbing off the Hawthorne Town Dock.
      Gayle Litsky : eighteen, long blond hair, taking time off from college and living back home with her parents, last seen heading to the movies, body found wedged in the rocks of a Black Hall breakwater.
      Jacqueline Key , fourteen, only child and spitting image of her bright-eyed single mother, missing for four nights before being found among the timbers of the Easterly Yacht Club jetty.
      Beth Nastos , twenty, bookkeeper at Nastos Seafood, tall and slender with a shy smile, body hidden—more cruelly, perhaps, than any other—in the stone-and-steel breakwater of her family’s century-old Mount Hope fishing business.
      Patricia McDiarmid , twenty-three, newly married mother of one, murdered in her workout clothes and stashed in a tunnel under Exeter’s concrete State Pier.
      Never a day went by without John thinking of the victims. At first they had visited him in his dreams, one by one, and he had begged them to tell him what they wanted while he, in turn, had asked them for something in return: forgiveness. He had wanted them to forgive him for defending their killer. This was his town, and he loved the people in it.
      Everyone thought defense lawyers were tough and thick-skinned, so intent on obtaining victory for their clients