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and as I myself am very occupied, my assistant will indicate a quiet place where you may go to read these materials.”
    I stood up. I couldn’t have asked for anything better; I hadn’t been looking forward to listening to him sigh and tap his watch while I went through the material, and being spared his scowl did a lot to brighten my day. Alone, I could really think about what I was reading, maybe even wrap my brain around exactly what was happening in my city.
    Maybe.
    I opened the folder in a small airless room procured by a constable who made it clear she had more important things to do than show me around, and flipped through the reports on the latest victim: her autopsy results, crime scene photographs around the park bench where her body was displayed, a notation of drugs found in her body, the first narratives written by the responding officers. My stomach lurched and I swallowed hard, several times, until the bile went back down.
    The drugs didn’t mean much to me; I’ve been fortunate in my good health, and perceive medications taken by others as I might a strange custom practiced in a foreign land. Still, it seemed like there were a lot of them for someone so young. I scribbled the names down and decided to Google them later.
    I steeled myself and looked again at the bench—and felt the nausea again. How could anyone sit on one of those ever again, after seeing this? The lifeless body was naked, and streaked with some dark brown substance I could only interpret as blood; it was curled up on one side of the bench, the head leaning against the back, as though taking a catnap.
    I swallowed again, pulling my eyes away from the photograph, and glanced through the rest of the autopsy report. She’d been in good health when she was killed. I struggled to read the minutiae of the descriptions written up by the doctor who’d performed the autopsy, by the crime scene techs. Rape, it said. Mutilation, it said. I swallowed hard.
    And then, without really being aware of what I was doing, I pulled out another photograph and came face-to-face with Danielle Leroux, alive and vibrant and far more real than what had been left on that city bench.
    No wonder Richard had been attracted to her. She looked younger than her thirty-four years, with dark hair swept up into a barrette on one side, eyes sparkling with humor, and a smile that invited one in return. No one’s idea of a librarian, I thought.
    Someone’s idea of a victim.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    I looked at that photograph for a long time. It seemed inconceivable that this beautiful, vibrant girl had any connection to the chilling autopsy report, inconceivable that those laughing eyes weren’t laughing somewhere anymore. It had to be someone else, the rational part of my brain was insisting.
    I sighed, finally, and put it aside. There was little else in the folder to see; we were, after all, still in the first day of the investigation. I knew that there were homicide detectives out there now, interviewing neighbors, contacting family members, piecing together a life that somehow met with a killer on a warm night on the Plateau. One of them would be speaking, soon, with Richard, another piece in the puzzle. I should probably give him some time off.
    And I should probably have thought of that before, when he’d first told me.
    The next folder was a lot thicker, though it had just as few answers. I flipped quickly through what I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know: rape. Stabbings. Mutilation of the face in particular. My stomach lurched, and I flipped away from those pages.
    And flipped to a photograph of Annie Desmarchais alive and well, and even though I had already seen it on the front page of the Gazette , I was still taken aback. What little I knew of serial killers had come from the pages of mystery novels and the occasional movie; and that, along with common sense, dictated that victims look similar, that serial killers are attracted to a certain