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hated and hate the thing he loved. He was drawn to the street and its hungers up to a point—the point when those hungers became chaos.
    Denver did have its share of truly weird ones, those who moved far beyond excitement in order to open doors to subterranean terrors. Some drifted in from Texas or New Jersey on their way to LA, where they settled in like ticks to start a religion or a revolution. Some were homegrown—native talent to be proud of, like the kid who thumped his roommate to death with a ball peen hammer and then carved him up and wrapped the bits and pieces in neat packages, which he distributed around the neighborhood. Or the woman who went just a tad too far into chemically induced ecstasy and burned her mother to death so the smoke could carry her prayers to heaven. And there was the series of half a dozen killings of young women—rape, strangle, and dump—that was still on the open file, without even a suspect to watch. Those were the ones that made killings like that of the garroted Ellison seem as routine and familiar as tying a shoe.
    Perhaps Denver was no longer to be spared the kind of mass murderer who surfaced in other corners of the country—the Zebra killers of California, some of whom were still at large and still preaching revenge against whites; the Texas murders of forty girls and women—still no suspect a decade later; Gacy in Chicago; the Atlanta ghoul who fed on black children; the Zodiac killer of San Francisco, never caught even with a description of the suspect and the notes left behind for the police—a cross in a circle. The Zodiac notes had not been Xeroxed, and the victims had been chosen at random—which added an even scarier note, as if the black edge of the careless universe had been touched.
    One of the things Wager liked about his job was that while doing it he sought—and often found—reasons behind an act of insane savagery. Sometimes it was only insanity—temporary or otherwise—a term that comfortably covered a lot of explanations in the eyes of the law. But it was an explanation, though a weak one; it re-established the line between confusion and coherence. The law—people like Wager who served the law—traced that line, and maybe it was part of the burden of his occupation that he could see both sides of that line. But he always felt a personal victory when he could explain the motive of an act, even if in terms of insanity. His job was to claim some territory for coherence, even if that effort had once led him to claim more than the law allowed. And in claiming, to lose a partner’s trust. But of late the territory of chaos seemed to grow larger, while Wager’s victories were smaller and smaller in the face of a threat that loomed like the coming night sky. An angel holding a sword. Somehow that message towered over the usual chaos of the street: manslaughter, family slayings, garrotings—even these were dwarfed by that little drawing. Because whoever committed that murder acted from reason, but a reason founded on, and growing out of, the same vast insanity that brought wars—a superstructure of coherence that gathered more and more followers, those who never looked to see that their belief was founded on insanity.
    Cross-in-circle, angel-and-sword. Wager caught himself assuming that there would be more angel killings. He could feel the promise of some kind of pattern in these killings, which was why he was certain there would be more: someone was following a path that led to specific victims. Those notes—symbols of the killer’s triumph—were meant to be seen by future victims.

CHAPTER 3
    T HE THIRD ANGEL came almost a week later as Wager, elbow-deep in a new set of time-study forms, tried to classify his activities for the previous six months into little boxes that the computer could scan. The little boxes indicated the number of cases handled, the types, the number of hours each demanded, the range of support areas utilized, and something called