There are a lot of good profilers working on serials, but I think they miss one thing. You can’t really think like these people. You just can’t. You can try. You can crawl into their heads so far that you feel like you’ll never be clean again, but in the end, unless you are one, you can’t really understand what motivates them. And they are selfish creatures, caring only about their own pleasure, their own pathology. Serial killers don’t help you catch other serial killers unless it helps their agenda. Of course, there were people who said that I was a serial killer. I still had the highest kill count of all the legal vampire executioners in the United States. I’d topped a hundred this year. Did it really matter that I didn’t enjoy my kills? Did it really change anything that I took no sexual pleasure from it? Did it matter that in the beginning I’d thrown up? Did the fact that I’d had an order of execution for most of my kills make them better, less brutal? There were serial killers who had used only poison, which caused almost no pain; they’d been less brutal than me. Lately, I’d begun to wonder exactly what set me apart from people like Vittorio. I’d begun to question if to my oh-so-legal victims it mattered what my motives were.

A woman answered the phone in Las Vegas, and I began the process of getting passed up the line to the person who might be able to tell me whose head I had in the box.

2

UNDERSHERIFF RUPERT SHAW had a rough voice; either he’d been yelling a lot, or he’d smoked way too much, for way too many years. “Who did you say this was?” he asked.

I sighed, and repeated for the umpteenth time, “I am U.S. Marshal Anita Blake. I need to talk to someone in charge, and I guess that would be you, Sheriff Shaw.”