In twenty minutes she was on the Crosstown headed home. When she came to her exit, she glanced by instinct in the rear-view mirror, and for the first time she saw him, the man who'd been hiding on the floor in back.

He said, "Just keep driving, bitch, just like you're headed home."

By ten o'clock they were driving county roads. Gravel dust glowed silver in their wake.

At a farm that had obviously been deserted, the outbuildings leaning so pitifully they seemed about to collapse, he had her pull in.

She got out, just as he told her to. She kept quiet, just as he told her to. She took off her clothes, just as he told her to.

He felt her breasts-she had very nice breasts-and then he slid his hand between her legs. He complained how dry she was there. "You fucking bitch." He backhanded her hard across the mouth.

She started crying. She thought of when she'd been a little girl on the farm near a small town named Coon Rapids. She thought of her high school graduation night, the only time she'd ever really gotten drunk in her whole life, and of giving up the struggle to keep her purity. She thought of moving to Minneapolis. Of working in the law office. She was now only twenty-eight yet it seemed she'd done so much in her young life and it whirled by her, voices and images and even smells. Memory.

He stabbed her first in the abdomen, ripping the knife through her stomach, and then he started stabbing her in the chest and face. She held up her hands to hold him off but that only gave his knife new targets. He cut and slashed and hacked at her fingers until several of them were just bloody stubs. Before she died, she had time to stare down at several pieces of her fingers in the dust.

Finally he stabbed her in the forehead. By this time she was on the ground, and he was straddling her. He left the butcher knife sticking out of her forehead as he unzipped his trousers and started putting himself into her.