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rule was laid out on her scalp. In the pale-flesh center of the shaved patch was a small, perfectly round, perfectly black hole. The next photo was an extreme close-up that made the black hole look unanatomical, infinitely deep, and unspeakably evil.
    He tried to detach himself from the image by asking a pedestrian question. “What is that, three-sixteenths? Eighth of an inch?”
    Avakian had the report. “It’s the same as the others. Eighth-of-an-inch drill bit. Nothing distinctive about it. Same as you can get in any hardware store.”
    Minot slipped in behind them and watched them work for a moment. The fabric of his clothes was permeated with aromatic pipe tobacco and both men turned at the sensory cue. He asked them how it was going.
    Avakian deadpanned they’d have it wrapped up by lunch.
    There was an air of academia about Minot; it was difficult to imagine he’d ever qualified on the pistol range or the obstacle course at Quantico. He was borderline emaciated, blessed or cursed by a rapid metabolism that gave him the lipid profile of a youngster but left him so perpetually cold that he always wore a sweater vest under his suit jacket, even in summer. His thinning but carefully combed hair drained of color and his pink-tinged plasticbifocals that framed lachrymal eyes suggested an aging Boston banker, not someone with a holster in his desk and a badge in his pocket.
    He touched Cyrus’s arm the same way the priest had done earlier and asked, “How’s your daughter?”
    “She’s home. Everything’s status quo.”
    Minot gestured at the files. “I wish I didn’t have to give this to you.”
    Cyrus shrugged to signal he understood.
    “It’s a weird case, isn’t it?” Minot mused.
    Avakian handed him the photo of the punctured skull, then followed suit with other autopsy photos of two young black women with the same wound.
    “This is a sick guy,” he clucked. “Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer drill his victims?”
    Cyrus knew the details; he remembered these kinds of things. “He injected their frontal lobes with acid. He wanted to turn them into sex zombies but he wasn’t a great scientist. All of them died.”
    “Anything similar going on here?”
    “No one thinks foreign substances were introduced,” Avakian said.
    “What then?”
    He rubbed his bald head, fingers splayed like a man who still had tousled hair. “To be determined, Stanley.”
    After lunch they took a drive. They had to start somewhere so they decided to begin with the latest victim, Carla Louise Goslinga, a twenty-one-year-old prostitute from Boston whose body was found the previous Friday up in Hooksett, New Hampshire. Her probable interstate transport put the crime on the federal map. The case was shaping up to be a jurisdictional hash anyway: the first victim was found on state-owned land on the banks of the Charles in Newton, so the Massachusetts State Police had it; the second victim was discovered in a vacant lot in Columbia Point not far from the JFK Library, so that case was owned by Boston Homicide. Now that the third case triggered the FBI’s involvement, everyone was rushing to dump off their databases and let the feds have the headache and expense of a serial killing investigation.
    It was a straight shot out of Boston, north on I-93. Avakian drove one of the pool cars, his attention moronically glued to a sports radio station while Cyrus wearily rested his hands on his knees and stared through the beating wiper blades at the dull highway scenery. Despite that peak foliage was only a week or so past, the wet afternoon and gloomy light muted the palette of thewoodlands. Avakian was babbling to the radio, calling one of the talk-show guys an idiot, but Cyrus was able to tune out, only distantly aware of a stream of logorrhea.
    When they crossed the state line, Cyrus pulled out the report from the New Hampshire State Police with the precise location of Goslinga’s body. They had to drive right past the spot, so a quick tramp