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funds.”
    “When’d you first figure it out?”
    “The pattern? In ’96, after I got out of the Navy. I mean, I’d never stopped thinking about it. How could you?”
    “You can’t.”
    “When I got out, I was in Guam. White Plains was grounded there by Typhoon Oscar. When it was over I stayed ashore. First decommissioning the ship, then a job in the staff office. I stuck out four more years. I’d been in the Navy since I was eighteen. After Tara was killed, the Navy really was a family. They closed around me like brothers. The men in Sasebo, we’re talking enlisted guys—Marines—took up a collection after she was found. She was a civilian, but the Navy paid for her funeral. Then I got out, and didn’t know what to do. I decided to go to New Zealand and just think for a while. I could fly free on any Navy plane that had a spare seat, and there was a seat going to Wellington. I’d worked nonstop since she’d died and then I was out and had nothing. You know what it’s like.”
    Chris hadn’t worked since the day he’d gotten the call about Cheryl. He’d left his office with half a sentence typed on a document he never thought about again. Six months later, when his partners finally realized he wasn’t coming back, a secretary brought him the things from his office. He’d never even looked in the boxes. They were from another man’s life.
    “You went to New Zealand and before you knew it, you’d been on a barstool for a month and a half. Yeah. I know about that.”
    Westfield took another swallow of his iced coffee.
    “I was renting a room in Wellington, near the docks. Downstairs was a bar. At first when I got there, I did some hiking. Went out in a small sailboat, fished for snapper. It all seemed fake, like I was in someone else’s body. You know that silence, when you’re alone on the sea or in your house and the only thing breaking it up is the wind, or a clock ticking in some other room? And you think to yourself, is this really it? Is this really what’s happening to me? Then I started stopping in the bar before bed. Then, before lunch. Finally I just stood outside the door before breakfast and waited for them to open. They had a little TV in a corner. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was just drinking. I don’t know how long I’d been there. Maybe three weeks, maybe a couple months. I looked up and saw a news story on the TV. They had a picture of the victim.”
    “She looked just like Tara.”
    Westfield nodded. “Like Tara. Like Cheryl and Allison Clayborn. They could’ve all been sisters. There’s this reporter standing on the street outside the house where she’d been found. Says the police are getting counselors for officers who’d worked the scene. That it was so bad no one who’d been inside would talk about it. And that he’d—I heard this clearly, because he’d done it to Tara.”
    Westfield paused and looked around. They were still alone in the coffee shop. The kid behind the bar was sitting at a stool reading his book. Westfield lowered his voice anyway.
    “He’d eaten her face.”
    Chris nodded and closed his eyes. Westfield went on.
    “I learned more later. Found the doctor who did the autopsy. I didn’t have to get him drunk; he already was. I just told him what I knew and he told me the rest. The killer took her face off with his teeth, just ripped it off. She was still alive. The other parts, he cut off and took away.”
    “And then you knew,” Chris said. He didn’t open his eyes.
    “I knew. But I didn’t know where to start. How do you explain something like that? Who do you explain it to?”
    A group of five college-aged kids came in and set up laptop computers around one of the tables on the other side of the coffee shop. Chris thought they might have been medical students. He remembered with a shiver the coffee shops where he’d spent late nights with Cheryl in his last year of law school while she was in her first year of medical school.