“Just like that.” Sean’s voice drops to a whisper. “Get your lovely ass down here, okay?”

Today his Irish intimacy makes me want to jab him. “No I love you?” I ask with feigned sweetness.

His reply is barely audible. “You know I’m surrounded.”

As usual. “Yeah. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

Night falls fast as I drive my Audi from my house on Lake Pontchartrain to the Garden District, the fragrant heart of New Orleans. I spent two minutes in the bathroom trying to make myself presentable, but my face is still swollen from sleep. I need caffeine. In five minutes I’ll be surrounded by cops, FBI agents, forensic techs, the chief of robbery homicide, and possibly the chief of the NOPD. I’m accustomed to that kind of attention, but seven days ago-the last time this predator hit-I had a problem at the crime scene. Nothing too bad. A garden-variety panic attack, according to the EMT who checked me out. But panic attacks don’t exactly inspire confidence in the hard men and women who work serial murder cases. The last thing they want is a consulting expert who can’t hold her mud.

The word got around about my little episode, too. Sean told me that. Nobody could really believe it. Why did the woman that some homicide detectives call “the ice queen” suddenly lose her composure at the scene of a not-very-grisly murder? I’d like to know that myself. I have a theory, but analyzing one’s own mental condition is a notoriously unreliable business. As for the sobriquet, I’m no ice queen, but in the macho world of law enforcement, playing that role is the only thing that keeps me safe-from men and from my own rogue impulses. Of course, Sean gives the lie to that little strategy.

Four victims now, I remind myself, focusing on the case. Four men between the ages of forty-two and sixty-nine, all murdered within weeks of each other.