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on Route 50 halfway to Sedalia, which was a euphemism for taking off her clothes for truckers rumbling along through Warrensburg, Lone Jack, and Kansas City, toward the great blankness of Kansas itself.
    “You know how I can reach your mom?” Armand asked, but the kid shook his head, said she wasn’t answering the cell phone, but she’d call when she got her break.
    “Where’d you find my cat?” Lamar asked again.
    Armand sat on the front steps beside the boy, looking out over Prospect Avenue, unsure of what to tell him. Kids made him nervous—he didn’t have any of his own, though once he’d thought he would. But he liked Lamar, who lived in a neat house on a not very good corner of a bad neighborhood.
    A patrolman found the third victim, Wilma Perrin, fifty-five, in a white Toyota Camry parked illegally near the east end of a construction site where Bannister Mall once stood. Satisfied that she was dead, he closed the trunk and waited for Armand and Jackson to arrive.
    The woman’s eyes were open and glittered white in the streetlights’ glare. Her teeth also glittered behind the sad grimace of rigor, her face tight and strange and pale. She probably hadn’t been dead very long, though it would be hard to tell because of the cold.
    She looked a lot like the little doll the killer had slipped into her mailbox before anyone noticed she was missing, a neatly sewn, three-inch-tall plump doll in a pale blue dress and tiny boots. The victims all looked too much like their dolls. The Dollmaker had studied them carefully, gotten the wardrobes just right, the freckles and the jewelry.
    With the end of a pencil he carefully peeked under her collar at two thick welts. He’d choked her, but he didn’t kill her that way. He’d choked her to have fun. Probably after he gave her the injection, as it was taking effect.
    Sodium thiopental takes some time to work, maybe two, three minutes. So, first she became dizzy, then her eyes closed, her muscles going momentarily rigid, then slackening, loosening. Completely limp. Maybe he brushed hair out of her face. Then he choked her for a while. Then he straightened her collar to hide the welts. Then he probably followed up the first injection with another, this one phenobarbitol, to prolong the effect.
    And then he’d loaded her into the trunk of the Toyota Camry—all this flashed before Armand’s eyes quickly as he sat on the stoop with Lamar and the cat. He placed her lovingly into the trunk of a stolen Camry and drove her through the snow, down Hillcrest, where he parked the car and disappeared.
    Armand told none of this to Lamar. Nor did he tell Lamar that when he and Jackson finally got that trunk open again—it had frozen shut—it was not the dead woman Armand saw first. No, it was the cat—Lamar’s cat—tired, hungry, and angry, sitting on the victim’s chest. Armand looked at the cat and the cat looked at Armand. Its eyes glowed greenly in the darkness.
    Then Armand closed the trunk once more, lest the animal escape.
    “Where’d you find my cat?” Lamar asked again.
    And Armand shook his head. “Crime scene,” he said. “She was at the scene of a crime.”
     
    * * *
     
    Armand thought about all this as he drove around and around the Plaza, watching the last bars close. Through the windows, he could see waiters mopping floors, flipping chairs upside down atop the tables.
    The cat mewed in the box beside him. When he turned onto Wornall, he heard pellets of food roll around.
    From behind him came the long low moan of what might have been a cold wind. And the snow fell like a million little white angels in the night.
    “Here’s what we do,” Jackson had told him, when they finally got Wilma Perrin to the morgue and the Toyota to forensics. “We put a tracker on the cat, then we let it go. The cat leads us straight to its home and there’s our crime scene.” He laughed, like it was joke, but it wasn’t. And after a moment he said, more seriously: “That