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give the girl a chance to heal, for God’s sake. Get off the booze, pull her life back together. She always gets so wrapped up in these psychos, trying to think like they think, trying to make some sense out of the craziness. If I pull her into something as ugly as this—”
    “She’ll be back in the drunk tank in twenty-four hours. You and I both know it.”
    O’Bannon’s nostrils flared, making the purple veins on the tip of his nose darken. “She’s kept herself clean for months.”
    “And we want it to stay that way, right? So, I say—keep her out of it.”
    “Unfortunately, it isn’t your decision to make.”
    “Hey, Chief! Have you seen this?”
    It was Tony Crenshaw, one of O’Bannon’s best forensic experts, waving at him from the other side of the kitchen.
    Granger followed O’Bannon over, with considerable relief. Any excuse to get away from that damn deep fat fryer. At least until the techs had finished taking samples and someone from the scrub squad had swept away the remains. They rounded the central cooking console and came out facing a large flat grill that looked as if it had been designed to fry a hundred burgers at once.
    “Check it out,” Crenshaw said, pointing.
    The grill was coated with a thick layer of grease, but in the grease, someone had left a message. Like a kid writing WASH ME on a dirty car, except this wasn’t written in the English language. Or any other language. It was all numbers and symbols and things Granger only hazily remembered from school if at all.
    It wasn’t a message. It was an equation.
    O’Bannon glanced at Granger out of the corner of his eye. “Still think there’s some rational explanation?”
    Granger didn’t bother answering. The chief was already on his cell phone.
     
     
     

4
     
     
    “TUCKER WAS EXHAUSTED. He was a strong man—built like a bull, his mother had said, since he was a toddler. Ten hours of construction work six days a week would build strength in anyone. But he was used to that. Hauling a corpse around—that was something new.
    He didn’t mind the bloody stuff. A change of pace from the repetition of his day job, the cutting and sawing and measuring. He was never much good at anything but grunt labor; they only kept him around to do the heavy lifting no one else wanted—or was able—to do. But he knew how to use his fists. He’d learned that early on. He knew how to take someone down and take them out, quickly and painlessly, or slowly and painfully, whichever worked best.
    Tucker grunted, then shifted his burden from one shoulder to the other. Hard work, lugging this through the darkened streets of one of Vegas’s seedier downtown districts in the dead of the night. Maybe he had made a mistake, coming on foot. But the distances had to be exactly right, to the number, so he needed the pedometer. His van’s odometer might get him close, but close wasn’t good enough.
    It had all started at that damned grade school, he supposed, in a small town near the Utah border. He didn’t know why he couldn’t make friends. Maybe it was his father and…everything that was going on at home. Maybe it was the way he looked. Who knew? He wanted friends, he wanted people to like him. But they never did. No matter what he did or tried, they never did. Tucker was an unusual first name back then, and kids being what they were it wasn’t long before “Tucker the Fucker” became the chant he heard every time the teachers were out of sight, till finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He popped an older kid three times his size and a huge fight ensued. Tucker ended up with a broken nose, so mangled it was still crooked and he permanently lost his sense of smell. Which might be a blessing, given his current activities.
    The worst of it was, even though the older kid started the fight, Tucker was the one who got in trouble. The teachers didn’t like him any more than the other children did. He scared them, so they paddled him till he was raw