“Rizzoli,” she answered on the first ring, her greeting as direct as a bullet.

“You paged me.”

“You never told me you got a hit on VICAP,” she said.

“What hit?”

“On Diana Sterling. I’m looking at her murder book now.”

VICAP, the Violent Criminals Apprehension Program, was a national database of homicide and assault information gathered from cases across the country. Killers often repeated the same patterns, and with this data investigators could link crimes committed by the same perpetrator. As a matter of routine, Moore and his partner at the time, Rusty Stivack, had initiated a search on VICAP.

“We turned up no matches in New England,” said Moore. “We ran down every homicide involving mutilation, night entry, and duct tape bindings. Nothing fit Sterling’s profile.”

“What about the series in Georgia? Three years ago, four victims. One in Atlanta, three in Savannah. All were in the VICAP database.”

“I reviewed those cases. That perp is not our unsub.”

“Listen to this, Moore. Dora Ciccone, age twenty-two, graduate student at Emory. Victim first subdued with Rohypnol, then restrained to the bed with nylon cord—”

“Our boy here uses chloroform and duct tape.”

“He sliced open her abdomen. Cut out her uterus. Performed a coup de grace — a single slash across the neck. And finally — get this — he folded her nightclothes and left them on a chair by the bed. I’m telling you, it’s too goddamn close.”

“The Georgia cases are closed,” said Moore. “They’ve been closed for two years. That perp is dead.”

“What if Savannah PD blew it? What if he wasn’t their killer?”

“They had DNA to back it up. Fibers, hairs. Plus there was a witness. A victim who survived.”

“Oh yeah. The survivor. Victim number five.” Rizzoli’s voice held a strangely taunting note.