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who had been discreetly following along, and Grove started to say something like “Let’s move these people further back”…or “Let’s put up some privacy curtains so we can work in peace”…but he abruptly stopped himself.
    A spark—a revelation actually—flashed in Grove’s mind, so powerful and unexpected it practically took his breath away. He looked up at the hundreds of people gathered in the drizzle like an audience at some macabre play. Camera lenses were trained on him, microphones aimed at him, pens poised to capture his every gesture. It was almost sensual, the power it conjured in him. Like a blast of hormones. Then he looked back down at the sad little bundles of human remains in the weeds twenty-five feet away, facing each other, their rain-spattered shrouds marbled with bloodstains.
    The realization nearly peeled off the top of his head. “Agent Menner,” Grove murmured, unable to tear his good eye away from the victims.
    â€œYes, sir.” The stocky field agent now stood beside him, waiting, his arms crossed against his barrel chest.
    â€œI’m going to need you to do me a favor.” Grove started walking toward the victims.
    â€œAnything you need,” Menner said, trundling along in the muck.
    Grove approached the first victim. He had to step over a low strand of yellow tape connecting a pair of evidence flags; then he sidestepped an ambu-gurney left in the weeds by the medical examiner’s assistant.
    Finally he reached the closest white-shrouded bundle of human remains. It lay at the base of a leprous elm tree. “I’m going to need you to get a specialist down here, Agent Menner.” Grove pulled out his rubber gloves and knelt down by the victim. “Immediately if possible.”
    Menner produced a small spiral-bound notebook from his pocket and prepared to write.
    Grove’s pulse quickened as he peeled the sheet away from the thirty-five-year-old female Caucasian lying in the fetal position. As Grove would later learn, her name was Dina Louise Dudley, and the ligature marks around her neck suggested that she had been strangled to death well before her evisceration. Like all the other Ripper victims, she would show a marked increase in free histamine and serotonin levels in her blood, indicating torture. But the method and motive for the torture—up until now—had remained elusive.
    Grove looked at the other sheet-covered lump lying in the cattails twenty feet away. The ME would place that victim’s time of death at one to two hours earlier than Miss Dudley. Like all the other scenes. Two dead women, offset times of death, a perfect matching set.
    â€œOkay…what kind of specialist are we talking about?” Menner finally asked, his voice sound faint and distant to Grove’s throbbing, ringing ears.
    Grove didn’t answer. He reached down to the blood-speckled face of Dina Dudley and touched the wet, dark tracks on her cheeks. Then he brought his fingertip back up to his tongue and tasted it. The salty, alkaline tang of tears was shot through with a telltale bitter flavor.
    â€œHow the hell did I miss it?” Grove was muttering more to himself than anybody else.
    â€œExcuse me? Agent Grove? You say something?”
    Grove stood. Swallowed hard. Put his gloves away. Then looked at Big Bill Menner. “I’m going to need an ophthalmologist down here on the double.”
    The burly investigator wasn’t sure he had heard him correctly. “Pardon?”
    Grove didn’t blink. “An eye surgeon. I know a doc in Washington who can refer us to somebody around here.”

THREE
    In the hour and fifteen minutes it took Special Agent William Menner to go and find the only qualified ophthalmologist in the Quincy/Hannibal area, very few onlookers left the scene. If anything, more reporters arrived. More remote trucks, more talking heads, and more bystanders dressed in yellow parkas