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of her upper chest, exposing internal organs that looked like nothingso much as meat at the butcher’s counter. But her stomach had been spared, and stood out white and unmarred except for the message the killer had sent. The letters were carved with unexpected precision: BITCH , in boxy capitals that had been formed by joining together straight-edged cuts that oozed smears of blood.
    “Look how neat it is,” Butch said. “Like he had all the time in the world. I bet the autopsy’s gonna say the knife he used to write on her was different from the murder weapon. Something small and sharp, a box cutter, maybe, or a scalpel. We recovered the murder weapon, and just eyeballing it, it’s too fat to make those nice, neat cuts.”
    Butch let the leaves fall back into place and stood up.
    “You got the murder weapon?” Dan asked.
    “Yeah,” Butch said. “Guy threw it down toward the lake and we found it lying on a rock. Sloppy. Typical resin-handled hunting knife with a ten-inch steel blade. Nothing unusual enough to trace easy. We’ll print it and all, but we won’t get anything, seeing as he was wearing gloves.”
    “What about the stun gun?” Dan asked.
    “That might be easier to bring back to an individual purchaser than a knife. A lotta guys hunt, but not too many electric-shock people,” Butch said wryly.
    Somebody called to Butch from above.
    “Oh, the footprint casts are set. I gotta go pull ’em up. But you two relax. Stay as long as you want,” Butch said, like he was inviting them to sit by the fire.
    Dan turned to Melanie, who stood solemn and silent, her eyes glued to Suzanne Shepard’s blood-drenched legs protruding from the leaves. They reminded her of the Wicked Witch’s legs sticking out from under the house in The Wizard of Oz, a sight that had never failed to make her tremble with fear as a child.
    “I’m sorry,” Dan said. “This one was worse than I expected. You must hate me for bringing you here.”

    It took her a second to pull her eyes away and meet his gaze. “I hate the killer, not you. Anybody who could do this to another person isn’t fit to be called human. I bet it’s some jerk who’s done this to other women, too.”
    “That’s why I like what I do for a living,” he said meaningfully. “We make a difference. We can get him off the streets. You can.”
    “You’re right,” Melanie said, sighing deeply. “I’m in.”

3
    M elanie had a special talent for investigating the ugliest crimes—homicides, home invasions, narcotics, gunrunning—that stood in marked contrast to her good diction and fancy education. Indeed, people who met her often thought she seemed too nice or too polite or too feminine to succeed at such a brutal job. But growing up on the block had left her with special insight into how the criminal mind worked and a high tolerance for an environment that sometimes felt like the Wild, Wild West. For months now, she’d been coasting, handling a series of stultifyingly dull bank-fraud cases. The cases rarely went to trial, so she could count on a predictable schedule. They required her to wade through piles of sleep-inducing documents, but she could do that at night in the comfort of her apartment, wearing old sweatpants, after Maya went down to sleep. Doing those cases, Melanie hadn’t been within spitting distance of anything violent or gruesome in a long time, and being out here tonight was making her realize that she’d missed the rough stuff more than she’d imagined. She’d been bored out of her mind and hadn’t even known it.
    When Dan went off in search of his NYPD counterpart, Detective Julian Hay, Melanie stayed behind in the ravine. She wasn’t alone. A junior crime-scene detective was stationed nearby, guarding the site so there could be no allegations later that unauthorized personnel had gotten access to the body. His reassuring presence gave Melanie the freedom she needed to stand and look, to think and analyze, to try to figure out