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The man is still out there, and killers that meticulous rarely kill only once.

“Thank you,” she says. “You might be saving another young woman’s life.”

Ruth dials the number for the police department.

“Captain Brennan, please.”

She gives her name and her call is transferred, and then she hears the gruff, weary voice of her ex-husband. “What can I do for you?”

Once again, she’s glad she has the Regulator. His voice dredges up memories of his raspy morning mumbles, his stentorian laughter, his tender whispers when they were alone, the soundtrack of twenty years of a life spent together, a life that they had both thought would last until one of them died.

“I need a favor.”

He doesn’t answer right away. She wonders if she’s too abrupt—a side effect of leaving the Regulator on all the time. Maybe she should have started with “How’ve you been?”

Finally, he speaks. “What is it?” The voice is restrained, but laced with exhausted, desiccated pain.

“I’d like to use your NCIC access.”

Another pause. “Why?”

“I’m working on the Mona Ding case. I think this is a man who’s killed before and will kill again. He’s got a method. I want to see if there are related cases in other cities.”

“That’s out of the question, Ruth. You know that. Besides, there’s no point. We’ve run all the searches we can, and there’s nothing similar. This was a Chinese gang protecting their business, simple as that. Until we have the resources in the Gang Unit to deal with it, I’m sorry, this will have to go cold for a while.”

Ruth hears the unspoken. The Chinese gangs have always preyed on their own. Until they bother the tourists, let’s just leave them alone. She’d heard similar sentiments often enough back when she was on the force. The Regulator could do nothing about certain kinds of prejudice. It’s perfectly rational. And also perfectly wrong.

“I don’t think so. I have an informant who says that the Chinese gangs have nothing to do with it.”

Scott snorts. “Yes, of course you can trust the word of a Chinese snakehead. But there’s also the note and the phone.”

 “The note is most likely a forgery. And do you really think this Chinese gang member would be smart enough to realize that the phone records would give him away and then decide that the best place to hide it was around his place of business?”

“Who knows? Criminals are stupid.”

“The man is far too methodical for that. It’s a red herring.”

“You have no evidence.”

“I have a good reconstruction of the crime and a description of the suspect. He’s too tall to be the kind a Chinese gang would use.”

This gets his attention. “From where?”

“A neighbor had a home motion-sensing system that captured wireless echoes into Mona’s apartment. I paid someone to reconstruct it.”

“Will that stand up in court?”

“I doubt it. It will take expert testimony and you’ll have to get the company to admit that they capture that information. They’ll fight it tooth and nail.”

“Then it’s not much use to me.”

“If you give me a chance to look in the database, maybe I can turn it into something you
can
use.” She waits a second and presses on, hoping that he’ll be sentimental. “I’ve never asked you for much.”

“This is the first time you’ve ever asked me for something like this.”

“I don’t usually take on cases like this.”

“What is it about this girl?”

Ruth considers the question. There are two ways to answer it. She can try to explain the fee she’s being paid and why she feels she’s adding value. Or she can give what she suspects is the real reason. Sometimes the Regulator makes it hard to tell what’s true. “Sometimes people think the police don’t look as hard when the victim is a sex worker. I know your resources are constrained, but maybe I can help.”

“It’s the mother, isn’t it? You feel bad for her.”

Ruth does not answer. She can feel the Regulator kicking in again. Without it, perhaps she would be enraged.

“She’s not Jess, Ruth. Finding her killer won’t make you feel better.”

“I’m asking for a favor. You can just say no.”

Scott does not sigh, and he does not mumble. He’s simply quiet. Then, a few seconds later: “Come to the office around 8:00. You can use the terminal in my office.”

The Watcher thinks of himself as a good client. He makes sure he gets his money’s worth, but he leaves a generous tip. He likes the clarity of money, the way it makes the flow of power obvious. The girl he just left was certainly appreciative.

He drives faster. He feels he’s been too self-indulgent the last few weeks, working too slowly. He needs to make sure the last round of targets have paid. If not, he needs to carry through. Action. Reaction. It’s all very simple once you understand the rules.

He rubs the bandage around his ring finger, which allows him to maintain the pale patch of skin that girls like to see. The lingering, sickly sweet perfume from the last girl—Melody, Mandy, he’s already forgetting her name—reminds him of Tara, whom he will never forget.

Tara may have been the only girl he’s really loved. She was blonde, petite, and very expensive. But she had liked him for some reason. Perhaps because they were both broken, and the jagged pieces happened to fit.

She had stopped charging him and told him her real name. He was a kind of boyfriend. Because he was curious, she explained her business to him. How certain words and turns of phrase and tones on the phone were warning signs. What she looked for in a desired regular. What signs on a man probably meant he was safe. He enjoyed learning about this. It seemed to require careful watching by the girl, and he respected those who looked and studied and made the information useful.

He had looked into her eyes as he fucked her, and then said, “Is something wrong with your right eye?”

She had stopped moving. “What?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. But yes, it’s like you have something behind your eye.”

She wriggled under him. He was annoyed and thought about holding her down. But he decided not to. She seemed about to tell him something important. He rolled off of her.

“You’re very observant.”

“I try. What is it?”

She told him about the implant.

“You’ve been recording your clients having sex with you?”

“Yes.”

“I want to see the ones you have of us.”

She laughed. “I’ll have to go under the knife for that. Not going to happen until I retire. Having your skull opened up once was enough.”

She explained how the recordings made her feel safe, gave her a sense of power, like having bank accounts whose balances only she knew and kept growing. If she were ever threatened, she would be able to call on the powerful men she knew for aid. And after retirement, if things didn’t work out and she got desperate, perhaps she could use them to get her regulars to help her out a little.

He had liked the way she thought. So devious. So like him.

He had been sorry when he killed her. Removing her head was more difficult and messy than he had imagined. Figuring out what to do with the little silver half-sphere had taken months. He would learn to do better over time.

But Tara had been blind to the implications of what she had done. What she had wasn’t just insurance, wasn’t just a rainy-day fund. She had revealed to him that she had what it took to make his dream come true, and he had to take it from her.

He pulls into the parking lot of the hotel and finds himself seized by an unfamiliar sensation: sorrow. He misses Tara, like missing a mirror you’ve broken.

Ruth is working with the assumption that the man she’s looking for targets independent prostitutes. There’s an efficiency and a method to the way Mona was killed that suggested practice.

She begins by searching the NCIC database for prostitutes who had been killed by a suspect matching the EchoSense description. As she expects, she comes up with nothing that seems remotely similar. The man hadn’t left obvious trails.

The focus on Mona’s eyes may be a clue. Maybe the killer has a fetish for Asian women. Ruth changes her search to concentrate on body mutilations of Asian prostitutes similar to what Mona had suffered. Again, nothing.

Ruth sits back and thinks over the situation. It’s common for serial killers to concentrate on victims of a specific ethnicity. But that may be a red herring here.

She expands her search to include all independent prostitutes who had been killed in the last year or so, and now there are too many hits. Dozens and dozens of killings of prostitutes of every description pop up. Most were sexually assaulted. Some were tortured. Many had their bodies mutilated. Almost all were robbed. Gangs were suspected in several cases. She sifts through them, looking for similarities. Nothing jumps out at her.

She needs more information.

She logs onto the escort sites in the various cities and looks up the ads of the murdered women. Not all of them remain online, as some sites deactivate ads when enough patrons complain about unavailability. She prints out what she can, laying them out side by side to compare.

Then she sees it. It’s in the ads.

A subset of the ads triggers a sense of familiarity in Ruth’s mind. They were all carefully written, free of spelling and grammar mistakes. They were frank but not explicit, seductive without verging on parody. The johns who posted reviews described them as “classy.”

It’s a signal, Ruth realizes. The ads are written to give off the air of being careful, selective, discreet. There is in them, for lack of a better word, a sense of taste.

All of the women in these ads were extraordinarily beautiful, with smooth skin and thick, long flowing hair. All of them were between twenty-two and thirty, not so young as to be careless or supporting themselves through school, and not old enough to lose the ability to pass for younger. All of them were independent, with no pimp or evidence of being on drugs.

Luo’s words come back to her:
The men who go to massage parlors for sixty dollars an hour and a happy ending are not the kind who’d pay for a girl like this.

There’s a certain kind of client who would be attracted to the signs given out by these girls, Ruth thinks: men who care very much about the risk of discovery and who believe that they deserve something special, suitable for their distinguished tastes.

She prints out the NCIC entries for the women.

All the women she’s identified were killed in their homes. No sign of struggle—possibly because they were meeting a client. One was strangled, the others shot through the heart in the back, like Mona. In all the cases except one—the woman who was strangled—the police had found record of a suspicious call on the day of the murder from a prepaid phone that was later found somewhere in the city. The killer had taken all the women’s money.

Ruth knows she’s on the right track. Now she needs to examine the case reports in more detail to see if she can find more patterns to identify the killer.

The door to the office opens. It’s Scott.

“Still here?” The scowl on his face shows that he does not have his Regulator on. “It’s after midnight.”

She notes, not for the first time, how the men in the department have often resisted the Regulator unless absolutely necessary, claiming that it dulled their instincts and hunches. But they had also asked her whether she had hers on whenever she dared to disagree with them. They would laugh when they asked.

“I think I’m onto something,” she says, calmly.

“You working with the goddamned Feds now?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t seen the news?”

“I’ve been here all evening.”

He takes out his tablet, opens a bookmark, and hands it to her. It’s an article in the international section of the
Globe,
which she rarely reads. “Scandal Unseats Chinese Transport Minister,” says the headline.

She scans the article quickly. A video has surfaced on the Chinese microblogs showing an important official in the Transport Ministry having sex with a prostitute. Moreover, it seems that he had been paying her out of public funds. He’s already been removed from his post due to the public outcry.

Accompanying the article is a grainy photo, a still capture from the video. Before the Regulator kicks in, Ruth feels her heart skip a beat. The image shows a man on top of a woman. Her head is turned to the side, directly facing the camera.

“That’s your girl, isn’t it?”

Ruth nods. She recognizes the bed and the nightstand with the clock and wicker basket from the crime scene photos.

“The Chinese are hopping mad. They think we had the man under surveillance when he was in Boston and released this video deliberately to mess with them. They’re protesting through the backchannels, threatening retaliation. The Feds want us to look into it and see what we can find out about how the video was made. They don’t know that she’s already dead, but I recognized her as soon as I saw her. If you ask me, it’s probably something the Chinese cooked up themselves to try to get rid of the guy in an internal purge. Maybe they even paid the girl to do it and then they killed her. That or our own spies decided to get rid of her after using her as bait, in which case I expect this investigation to be shut down pretty quickly. Either way, I’m not looking forward to this mess. And I advise you to back off as well.”

Ruth feels a moment of resentment before the Regulator whisks it away. If Mona’s death was part of a political plot, then Scott is right, she really is way out of her depth. The police had been wrong to conclude that it was a gang killing. But she’s wrong, too. Mona was an unfortunate pawn in some political game, and the trend she thought she had noticed was illusory, just a set of coincidences.

The rational thing to do is to let the police take over. She’ll have to tell Sarah Ding that there’s nothing she can do for her now.

“We’ll have to sweep the apartment again for recording devices. And you better let me know the name of your informant. We’ll need to question him thoroughly to see which gangs are involved. This could be a national security matter.”

“You know I can’t do that. I have no evidence he has anything to do with this.”