"Not far enough inside his head," Bishop said, a tinge of bitterness creeping into his voice. "He was still able to get Annie, he was still able to get at least eleven other young women, and all I know for certain is that he isn't finished yet."

"It's been months. Is it likely that's why he's been waiting, for the heat to die down? Is that why he left Boston?"

"I believe that's at least part of it. It wasn't the spotlight he was after, the attention. He never wanted to engage the police, to test his skills and will against ours. That's not the kind of killer he is, not what it's about for him."

"What is it about for him?"

"I wish I could answer that with any kind of certainty, but you know I can't. That's the hell of hunting serials: the facts come only after we've caught him. Until then, we have only speculation and guesswork. So all I know is bits and pieces, and precious few of those. Despite all the bodies, he hasn't left us much to work with."

"But you know Annie was a mistake, wasn't she?"

Bishop hesitated, then nodded. "I think she was. He hunts a type, a physical look, and Annie fit like all the others fit. If he needed to go deeper than looks, needed to know anything else about his targets because knowing more than the surface was important to him, he would have known who she was, known the extreme risks in targeting her. The way she was living, quietly, like any other young woman in Boston, the ordinary surface appearance of her life, didn't warn him that the response to her disappearance would be so immediate and so intense."

"That's why he stopped, after her?"

Bishop was only too aware that the grieving father he was talking to had spent years as a prosecutor in a major city and so knew the horrors men could do, perhaps as well as Bishop himself, hut it was still difficult to forget the father and think only of the fellow professional, to discuss this calmly without emotion.