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and hooded sweatshirts. They pressed up against the fluttering cordon tape, while the CSI people waited in the mist down by the bodies, drinking cold coffee from paper cups and grumbling about the delay.
    For most of that time Ulysses Grove sat in the back of a squad car, scribbling in his notebook, reviewing photos and diagrams of the Ripper’s earlier victims stored in his camera—always in pairs, always facing each other, always with the offset times of death. Grove hadn’t told the other investigators anything of substance yet, and he hadn’t made any calls to Quantico. He had to be sure his theory was correct, and the only way he was going to be sure was to have the eye surgeon confirm his suspicions. But it all seemed like a forgone conclusion now. He knew he was right.
    Grove knew he was right because he felt the same delicious mixture of exhilaration and relief that he had felt so many times before when a case had cracked wide open—the soothing rush of a thorn pulled from his side. He had felt it while hunting the Hurricane Killer, when he stared into that thermograph of a deadly storm bearing down on New Orleans. He felt it a couple of years ago when he gazed upon the Mount Cairn mummy posed in precisely the same postmortem position as the Sun City victims. He felt it when he was hunting Keith Jesperson and saw that happy-face sticker in that squalid restroom in that South Dakota truck stop. This was the part that Grove never told anybody: it was like a drug. It was the only moment in his life when he truly felt alive—when he finally turned over the correct stone and saw evil clearly, saw it in the light.
    Was this the mysterious part of him that people talked about behind his back? Was it the part of him his mother called “his birthright”? Old Vida Grove, the eccentric Kenyan woman whom the neighborhood kids back in Chicago had called the voodoo lady, had always thought her son Ulysses was born to be a shaman, a visionary. And who was he to question his gift? Who was he to resist his own destiny?
    Let them watch.
    A sudden muffled thud pierced Grove’s thoughts, and he turned with a start, just in time to see Agent Menner standing outside the squad car, rapping his knuckles on Grove’s window. Grove rolled it down.
    â€œI got a Dr. Samuel Habbib here from Quincy’s Blessing Hospital.” The beefy FBI agent jerked his thumb at the gentleman standing behind him in the overcast light.
    â€œGood, excellent, thanks a lot.” Grove opened the door and climbed out.
    The rain had lifted, and now the gray sky hung low over the pewter-colored waters of the Mississippi. A chill breeze was blowing in off the Missouri side, and the air smelled of fish reek and ancient boat oil. Grove lifted his collar, then extended his hand to the surgeon standing behind Menner. “Appreciate you coming down, Doc, especially on such short notice.” Grove gave him a perfunctory smile. “I’m Agent Grove. Ulysses. Surgeon out of D.C. did some work on me last year, Stanholm at Johns Hopkins, gave us your name.”
    â€œJohn Stanholm and I went to medical school together at Oxford,” the little man marveled, shaking Grove’s hand with a nervous tic of a smile twitching in his face. He was a diminutive Pakistani man with a narrow, pointed face and a receding hairline. He wore a North Face windbreaker that looked a little anachronistic over his hospital tunic. “I’m guessing you had an open-globe injury to the left eye?”
    â€œI’m impressed, Doc.”
    â€œI wish I knew what this was about.” Habbib seemed unnerved by all the spinning light and forensic minutiae around him. He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ve got a LASIK procedure scheduled at two o’clock.”
    â€œThis should just take a minute. C’mon.” Grove gave Menner a nod, then ushered the surgeon under the tape, down the slope, and across the rain-slick