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return.
    With skill born of practice, he used the razor-sharp tip of the knife to remove both eyeballs from their sockets and placed them in a jar of formaldehyde.

 
     
     
    Chapter 3

     
    He felt the hair on top of his head being pulled tighter and tighter, forcing him to stretch his neck and expose his jugular veins. His legs and arms felt weighted down, preventing him from fighting back.
    He wanted to keep his eyes closed. He didn’t want to see what was coming. But his eyelids raised and he saw his tormenter’s face in a halo of light above him. Her red-painted mouth parted and her long lashes fluttered seductively.
    He sensed a movement to the side and shifted his gaze in time to see the long, curved knife slashing toward his throat.
    Luke jerked upright, his heart pounding, his body drenched in sweat. He hadn’t had the nightmare in years, and that somehow made it seem worse than it used to be. Yanking the tangled sheet away from his legs, he glanced at his alarm clock. There were two hours of night left but he knew there was no way he would fall back to sleep.
    As he padded to the bathroom, he saw the cause of the nightmare—yesterday’s newspaper. Because it was his habit to read it through every day before leaving for school, he had seen the short article on page four.
    The owner of a high fashion men’s clothing store in Beverly Hills, California, was the victim of a gruesome murder last Friday night. The suggestion was made by the leader of a gay rights group that the murder was related to the recent increase in violence against homosexuals.
    But if that was the motivation, why would the murderer have taken the man’s eyes?
    All day yesterday, while trying to explain Chaucer to undergraduate students who’d rather be sleeping, Luke kept repeating the suggestion from the news article in his head, determined to accept it as a reasonable explanation.
    The recurrence of the nightmare proved he had not succeeded. Instead, he awoke completely convinced that this murder was connected to the others.
    Twenty-one years ago this month, because he couldn’t admit to what he was doing in East Los Angeles at that time, he had not gone to the cops about what he had seen.
    He had told Terrell and Pablo, however. And when Pablo got pulled in for questioning about the liquor store break-in and shooting, he thought he could save himself by pretending that he was the one who had witnessed the murder in the alley twenty blocks away. He had taken Luke’s story and exaggerated it a bit too much. The police hadn’t accepted any of it.
    Two days later, Pablo was found dead from a drug overdose. Since Luke had never known Pablo to do anything stronger than smoke a little weed, he and Terrell believed it was something much more sinister. They figured the psycho hooker had a friend on the inside who told her about Pablo’s story, and she murdered him, thinking he could identify her. Under the circumstances, Luke and Terrell decided to keep their opinions to themselves.
    From the newspaper account of that murder, Luke had learned that there had been a similar murder-mutilation a few weeks before in Oakland. When another body was found in the same condition in San Diego the next month, one reporter dubbed the killer “The Eye Doctor”.
    Each victim had been drugged, his throat slashed from one jugular vein to the other and both eyeballs removed.
    There were no more such killings in California, at least as far as Luke ever heard. And yet, for the rest of his high school years, he had not been able to shake the fear that the killer whore was hiding around every corner, poising her knife to strike the moment he appeared. After the bungled robbery he had cleaned up his rebel act, even to the point of receiving scholarship offers from several highly respected colleges.
    He chose the University of North Carolina, not for its academic reputation but because it was the school farthest from where his nightmares originated. By the time