“At the moment I’m content to take things a little at a time,” he said. “I’m not worried too much about what’s ahead.”

His regrets are few but like all retired investigators and fishermen, McCaleb laments the ones that got away.

“I wish I had solved all the cases,” he said. “I hated it when somebody got away. I still do.”

For a moment McCaleb studied the photo they had used with the story. It was an old head shot they had used many times before during his days with the bureau. His eyes stared boldly into the camera.

When Keisha Russell had come around to do the story on him, she had come with a photographer. But McCaleb wouldn’t let them take a fresh shot. He told them to use one of the old photos. He didn’t want anybody to see the way he looked now.

Not that anyone could tell much, unless he had his shirt off. He was about thirty pounds lighter but that wasn’t what he wanted to hide. It was the eyes. He had lost that look-the eyes as piercingly hard as bullets. He didn’t want anyone to know he had lost that.

He folded the newspaper clip and put it aside. He tapped his fingers on the desk for a few seconds while brooding over things and then looked at the steel paper spike next to the phone. The number Graciela Rivers had given him was scratched in pencil on the scrap of paper that sat at the top of the stack of notes punctured by the spike.

When he was an agent, he had carried with him a bottomless reservoir of rage for the men he hunted. He had seen firsthand what they had done and he wanted them to pay for the horrible manifestations of their fantasies. Blood debts had to be paid in blood. That was why in the bureau’s serial killer unit the agents called what they did “blood work.” There was no other way to describe it. And so it worked on him, cut at him, every time one didn’t pay. Every time one got away.