He’d died without a sound. La petite mort, the French called orgasm. The little death. Well, the little death had drawn a moan from him, but the real thing turned out to be soundless. His breathing stopped, and never resumed.

She laid a hand on his upper arm, and the coolness of his flesh struck her as a sign that he was at peace now. She thought, almost wistfully, how very serene he had become.

In a sense, there’d been no need to kill the man. She could have robbed him just as effectively while he slept, and the drug would ensure that he wouldn’t wake up before she was out the door. She’d used the knife in response to an inner need, and the need had in fact been an urgent one; satisfying it had shuttled her right off to sleep.

Back in Hawley, her mother’s kitchen had held every kind of knife you could imagine. A dozen of them jutted out of a butcherblock knife holder, and others filled a shallow drawer. Sometimes she’d look at the knives, and think about them, and the things you could do with them. Cutting, piercing. Knife-type things.

“You’re my little soldier,” her father used to say, and she felt like a soldier the night of her high school graduation, marching when her name was called, standing at attention to receive her diploma. She could feel the buzz in the audience, men and women telling each other how brave she was. The poor child, with all she’d been through.

She never touched her mother’s knives, and for all she knew they were still in the kitchen in Hawley. But a few weeks later she left her apartment in St. Paul and went bar-hopping across the river in Minneapolis, and the young man she went home with had a set of knives in a butcherblock holder, just like her mother’s.

Bad luck for him.

She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she made her way down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.