Lee Campbell stood looking at the naked body draped over the altar of the church. The girl's delicate white skin was pale as the cold marble floor beneath his feet, in stark contrast to the vivid red wounds slashed across her torso and the purple bruising around her neck.

"Come on, Marie, talk to me," he whispered. He bent down over her, looking for petechial hemorrhaging in or around the eyes, but could find none. The lack of patterned abrasions meant there had been no ligature. "So he used his hands," he murmured. Some strangulation victims had no sign of injuries at all, so he was grateful for the bruising around her neck-pronounced enough to suggest that this, and not the slash wounds, was the cause of death. He thought about what her last moments were like: eleven pounds of pressure for ten seconds could cause unconsciousness, and thirty pounds of pressure, for four or five minutes, would result in death.

He observed the blue creeping into her lips, the porcelain smoothness of her dead cheeks. At least he left her face alone. He had always found it odd that strangulation victims sometimes looked strangely peaceful, with all of life's pain, suffering, and uncertainty behind them now. Lee felt a stab of envy in his stomach, and a warning sounded in his head. He could not allow himself to linger over such thoughts. He closed the door of his mind to the desire to be where this dead girl was now, to be done with the mad dance of life and its many trials.

But, of course, there had been nothing peaceful about her death. His eyes fell on the jagged letters carved into her naked torso: Our father who art in heaven. The O encircled her left breast like a red halo, the blood droplets symmetrical on her pale flesh. For some reason, he was reminded of a red and white hula hoop his sister had as a child. The writing was uneven and slanted downward-a job done in haste, he concluded, by a killer who was not yet comfortable with this part of his work.