She was such a little beauty, such a sweetheart, I could see. Even after what someone had done to her. I was looking at the how; the manner in which the six-year-old girl had been brutally murdered sometime earlier that night, her whole life silenced in an instant of madness and horror.

I gently turned the girl's body a few inches. Her head lolled to one side, the neck probably broken. She weighed next to nothing.

Just a baby The right side of her little face was partly gone.

Obliterated was a better description. The murderer had struck Shanelie so many times, and so violently, that little on the right side of the face was recognizable.

“How could he do this to such a beautiful little girl?” I muttered under my breath. “Poor Shanelie. Poor baby,” I whispered to no one but myself. A tear formed in my eye. I blinked it away, There was no place for that here.

One of Shanelle's eyes was missing. Her face is like a two-sided, two-faced mask. Two sides to a child? Two faces? What did that mean?

There was another fiend on the loose in Washington.

A child killer this time.

A TALL, THIN MAN in a black raincoat and black floppy rain hat slowly, cautiously approached the door of Senator Daniel Fitzpatrick's apartment a little before six o'clock Tuesday morning.

He examined the outer hallway for signs of a break-in, a struggle of some sort, but didn't find any He was thinking that he didn't want to be outside this apartment or anywhere near it. He wasn't sure what he expected to find inside, but he had the feeling it would be bad. Powerfully, overwhelmingly bad. This was so unreal.

It was so odd for him to be here, a mystery inside a mystery. But here he was.

The man noticed everything about the hallway Sprinkles of fallen plaster on the rug. Eight other doorways in sight. He had once been reasonably good at this routine. Being an investigator was like riding a bicycle, right? Sure it was.