“We’d better get busy,” Alexa said, looking anxious. She was itching to bolt out of the office and start reading about the case. She wanted to be sure just how much they could charge him with that day, although they could always add more charges later on, as they got more information, more matches from forensic, and if more bodies turned up when they started checking unsolved crimes. All she wanted now was to put Luke Quentin away. This was what the taxpayers paid her to do. And she loved her job.

They left the DA’s office after a few minutes, and he wished them luck. Charlie followed them out of the office, and Jack sent him back to work to check with the forensic lab for progress, and said he’d come back to him later on. Charlie nodded and disappeared.

“He’s a quiet one,” Alexa commented.

“He’s good at what he does,” Jack reassured her, and then decided to share some private information with her. “This is a tough case for him.”

“How so?”

“If this is the guy, he killed Charlie’s sister in Iowa a year ago. It was pretty ugly, and Charlie got himself on the task force after that. He had to do a lot of talking to get them to allow it, even though it’s a personal vendetta for him. But he’s a great cop, so they let him do it.”

“Sometimes that’s not a good thing,” Alexa said, looking worried, as they walked back to her office. “If he’s going to help us, he needs to be clear-headed. I don’t want him misinterpreting information or being overzealous because he wants to nail him. It could blow our case.” She didn’t like what she had just heard at all. She wanted everything about this case to be picture perfect, so the guilty verdict she got couldn’t be overturned. And she knew she would get one. She was relentless in her prosecution and meticulous in her work. She had learned it from her mother, who was a lawyer too, and a good one. Alexa hadn’t gone to law school until after the divorce. She had been married right out of college to the first and only man she had ever loved. And she had been madly in love with him. Tom Beaumont was a handsome southerner who had gone to UVA and was working, more or less, at his father’s bank in Charleston, where the spirit of the Confederacy had been kept alive, in part by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of which Tom’s mother was the head of the local branch, and a very grande dame. Tom was divorced and had two adorable little boys who were seven and eight at the time. She had fallen in love with them immediately, and Tom, and everything about the South. He was the most charming man she had ever known. Tom was six years older than she was, and much to their delight she had gotten pregnant on their wedding night, or maybe the day before. Everything had been idyllic for them for seven years, she had been the happiest woman alive and the perfect wife, and then Luisa, his ex-wife, came back, when the man she had left him for died in a car crash in Dallas. And the Civil War was fought again, and this time the North lost, and Luisa won. Tom’s mother turned out to be Luisa’s strongest ally, and Alexa never had a chance. To clinch the deal, Luisa got pregnant, while Tom sneaked off to see her, dazzled by her once again, as he had been when they met in college. Tom’s mother showed him where his duty lay, not just to the Confederacy, but to the woman who was carrying his child, the mother of his “boys.” Tom was torn between the two women and drank far too much while he tried to sort it out. In the end, Luisa was the mother of three of his children, Alexa only one. His mother kept reminding him of that and convinced him that Alexa had never really fit into their way of life.

It all happened like a very bad movie-a real-life nightmare. Everyone in town was talking about it, and his affair with his first wife. Tom explained to Alexa that he had to divorce her and marry Luisa. He couldn’t let this child be illegitimate, after all, could he? He promised to work it out as soon as Luisa had the baby, but by then she was running his life again, and it seemed as though everyone had forgotten, including Tom, that there had ever been another wife-and child. Alexa had done everything she could to reason with him and talk him out of the insanity he was committing, but she couldn’t stem the tides. Tom was too determined, and insisted that marrying Luisa for the baby’s sake was the only option. It was the only one he saw.

Alexa felt as though her heart was being torn out of her body when she left Charleston. Luisa was actually moving her things in while Alexa packed. She took Savannah and her broken heart, went back to New York, and stayed with her mother for a year. The divorce had come and gone by then, and Tom didn’t know how to explain it to her, but he said it just seemed better to leave things as they were. Better for him, Luisa, and his mother, and the little girl Luisa gave birth to. Alexa and Savannah had been banished, and went back to the North from whence they came, Yankees.

Luisa forbade Tom to bring Savannah back to Charleston, even for visits. She was back in full control. Tom came to New York to see his daughter a few times a year, usually when he came on business. Alexa wrote to her stepsons for a while, who were fourteen and fifteen when she left, and she worried about them both. But they weren’t her children, and she could sense in their letters how torn they were between their two mothers. Their letters dwindled off within six months, and she let it happen. She started law school then, and tried to shut them all out of her heart. Everyone except her daughter. It was hard not sharing her anger with Savannah, and she tried not to, but even the six-year-old could sense how wounded her mother was. Her father was like a handsome prince whenever he came to see her, and sent her beautiful presents. But eventually even Savannah figured out that she wasn’t welcome in her father’s life. She didn’t resent him for it, but sometimes it made her sad. She loved the time she spent with him. He was so much fun to be with. The fatal weakness that had led him back into Luisa’s trap didn’t show when he visited his daughter in New York. All that showed was how good-looking and fun and polite and charming he was. He was the epitome of a southern gentleman with the looks of a movie star. Alexa had fallen for it too, and so did Savannah.

“And the backbone of a worm,” Alexa would say to her mother when Savannah wasn’t around. “A man without a spine. Wasn’t that a movie?” Her mother felt sorry for her, but reminded her not to be bitter, it did no one any good and would hurt her child. “She has no father!” Alexa would lament for her.

“Neither did you,” her mother reminded her practically. Alexa’s father had died of a heart attack on the tennis court when she was five, a congenital anomaly no one had known about or suspected. Her mother had been very brave about it, and went to law school, just as Alexa had. But it was no substitute for a good marriage, the one Alexa thought she had and didn’t. “And you turned out fine,” her mother reminded her often. Muriel Hamilton was proud of her daughter. She had made the best of a bad situation, but it had taken a toll on her, and her mother could see it. Alexa had a hard outer shell that no one could get through except her daughter, and her mother. She had only dated a few men since the divorce. Another assistant DA at one point, one of her investigators, and the brother of a college friend, and all of them briefly. Most of the time she didn’t want to date and focused her attention on Savannah. The rest didn’t matter to her, except her work, which she was passionate about.

Alexa had made a vow when she left Charleston. No one was going to break her heart again. No one could find it. She had locked it away in a storage vault, except for her daughter. No man was ever going to get near her again and hurt her. There was a wall around Alexa a mile high, and the only one who had the key to the door was Savannah. Her daughter was the light of her life. That was no secret. Her office was full of photographs of her, and she spent every weekend and spare moment she had with her. She was home with her every night. The hard part was going to come when Savannah left for college in the fall. Alexa had cautiously suggested NYU or Barnard, but Savannah wanted to go away to school. So they had nine months left of living together and enjoying each other. Alexa tried not to think about what would happen after that. Her life would be empty. Savannah was all she had and all she wanted.

Alexa carefully pored over the files that Jack had on Luke Quentin, his rap sheet, and the list of victims they were trying to match him up with sent by other states. They had been watching him for months, and a cop in Ohio had tied him to one of the killings, not conclusively or enough to book him, but enough to cause concern. There was no evidence to prove it, but he had been in the right place at the right time, as he had on several occasions since. The murder in Ohio was the first one that had made them think Quentin was their man. But they didn’t have enough for an arrest. They had brought him in for questioning, and again on another case in Pennsylvania, which had turned up nothing. And he had laughed in their faces. It was only in the past two weeks in New York that Charlie McAvoy had been sure it was him when they found the bodies of two young women and fished the other two out of the river after that. They were exactly Quentin’s type, and had all died in the same way, raped and strangled. There were no other signs of abuse. He didn’t stab them or beat them up. He raped them and killed them while he did it. The only wounds on his victims other than the bruises on their necks from strangulation were the cuts and scratches they had gotten after their deaths, when their assailant dragged them away. Those cuts and scratches had provided the blood the forensic lab needed for DNA.

Alexa looked over the files that had come in from other states since the arrest the night before. They were trying to cross-check Quentin with a dozen victims. The photographs of the girls who had been killed were heartbreaking, and looked uncannily like Charlie’s sister. There was a photograph of her in the stack too. All of the victims were between eighteen and twenty-five, most of them were blond and had a similar appearance. They had the look of wholesome young girls next door. All had been raped before they died-the bruises on their necks showed that all had been strangled, asphyxiated while their assailant raped them, which was consistent with his supposed desire to reenact “snuff films” and kill women during sex. All the young women had parents and friends who had loved them, brothers and sisters and boyfriends and fiancés whose lives had been forever changed when they died. Some of the bodies still hadn’t been found, but many had. Some had just disappeared, and no one knew for sure if they had died, but the computer had spat them out as possible victims, and they had the same look as the others. In all, including those who hadn’t been found, there were nineteen of them. Twelve whose remains had been located. Seven more whose hadn’t.

Luke Quentin had a clear affinity for a certain type, if it was him. And if he wasn’t, the killer liked a certain kind of woman, young, blond, beautiful, usually tall and lanky. Several of them had been models or beauty queens, the pride of their community, young girls on their way to happy lives and success, until they met him. He wasn’t picking up sleazy women in bars, or killing hookers. He was on a rampage, seeking out the All-American Girl Next Door, which had left a trail of heartbroken, shocked, outraged parents across several states. Jack and Charlie and the rest of the investigation team and task force were all convinced he was the killer they were looking for. Now they needed to prove it, and the dried blood and hair in the soles of his boots and in his carpet was a first step. It had been their first lucky break, but that was all it took. One misstep on the killer’s part, one infinitesimal forgotten detail, and sometimes the whole house of cards came down and got them their man.

It was hard to believe that one man could kill so many women, but it happened. There were sick people in the world. It was Jack’s job to find them, and Alexa’s to put them away. And she knew as she looked at the photographs that she was going to put Luke Quentin away, if he was the killer. If so, Alexa was going to be relentless and stop at nothing to convict him.

It would be small consolation to the families who had lost their daughters. She knew that in many cases they were astonishingly forgiving, and even spoke with the killers and said they forgave them. Alexa never understood it, although she had seen it often. She knew that if anything had happened to Savannah, she would never forgive the person who did it. She couldn’t. The very thought of it made her tremble.