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“No problem,” she said.

The nitrous feed went into his nostrils, letting her work on his mouth unimpeded.  She hesitated before turning on the valve.

Don’t lose your nerve now,
the Voice said. 
It’s almost over.

She turned it on. 

You’re doing the right thing.  He’s a monster, he beat his wife to death with a piece of steel and now he’s laughing at the world.  You read that piece in
Variety
, you know what he’s going to do next—he’s coming out of retirement, going back into the ring as a villain.  He’s going to make millions of dollars by dressing up as a cartoon version of his own evil, and what he’s really doing is mocking the world.  Mocking justice, mocking life, mocking his victim.  Somebody has to make him pay.

This time, though, it wasn’t the Voice of Judgment she heard.

It was her own.

***

Jack Salter sat in the middle of a room full of horror and beauty, thinking about art.  Art, and the responsibilities of the artist—to his audience, to his craft, to himself. 

Jack once considered himself an artist.  But that was before he became a serial killer.

The media christened him the Closer.  His victims always turned out to be killers themselves, and all the unsolved murders they’d been responsible for became closed cases once Jack was finished.  Jack extracted information from his victims: detailed accounts of what they’d done, who’d they done it to, when, where, and how.  He left the information for the police, usually with the body of the killer he’d tortured to death to get it.  Despite his horrific methods, Jack was no sadist; he took no pleasure in what he did, only cold satisfaction that he was providing closure for the families of the killer’s victims.  

That’s what Jack kept telling himself.  Until he caught up with the man responsible for his own family’s brutal murder.

The one who butchered Jack’s parents, wife and son had called himself the Patron, because he only targeted those close to artists.  Jack had encountered killers who claimed what they did was art; the Patron had a different motivation. 

“I don’t create art,” he’d told Jack.  “I create
artists
.”

And the truly horrifying, damning fact was, he’d been right.

That was what surrounded Jack now, the fruits of the Patron’s endeavors.  Work by artists who’d had lovers, parents, friends taken away from them in terrible, haunting ways.  The Patron liked to strike on holidays, times when loved ones were especially close, and leave the bodies of his victims in creative poses designed for maximum emotional impact on whoever discovered them—usually the artists themselves.  Jack had been the one to find his family, on Christmas day.

He didn’t celebrate Christmas any more.

The Patron had been a monster, an inhuman intelligence all the more terrible for his understanding of the human condition—because, more than once, he’d been proven right.  Though the majority of the artists the Patron had tormented wound up spiraling into self-destruction, the few that survived the process had indeed made the leap from mediocre to outstanding.  Their work, a testament to the resilience of the creative spirit, surrounded Jack now, the Patron’s own private collection.  It was already worth millions; some of it, Jack suspected, would one day be considered priceless.

A consideration that would be untrue.  Jack knew exactly what the price had been.

The Patron had not escaped the Closer.  Jack had finally caught up to him, finally been able to ask him the same questions he’d asked every other killer he’d caught . . . but he never got to hear the answers.

Twenty minutes into the interrogation, the Patron had a massive heart attack and died. 

Jack studied the piece in front of him, a neon sculpture that hung suspended from thin wires.  It was a maze of words made from curving, glowing glass, the tubing of the letters interlinked so that the words bled into and wrapped around each other;
loss
and
joy
and
pain
and
thanks
and
skin
and
sweet
and
blood
, all of them inextricably entwined.  The words nearest the edges of the tangle were easiest to read; the ones in the center were just a jumble of dense, glowing light. 

It was beautiful and touching.  Every time Jack looked at it, he wanted to smash it with a ball-peen hammer. 

“Hey.” Nikki, Jack’s partner, stood framed in the doorway, holding a bottle of water in one hand.    They weren’t together in any romantic sense; violence and sorrow bound them to each other, not mutual attraction.  She wore baggy grey sweatpants, running shoes, and a shapeless black-t-shirt; her short blond hair was damp with sweat from her run.  She was in her mid-thirties, with the hard physique of an athlete, sharp features and ice-blue eyes.  Before she’d met Jack, she gave blowjobs to strangers for a living.   “You hear back from Deslane yet?”

“Yeah.”  Rene Deslane was one of the artists that had been targeted by the Patron.  “Sent me an email telling me to go to hell.  Didn’t believe I was who I said I was, or that I’d done what I said I did.  Didn’t believe me, period.”

“You gave him the details, right?”  She took a long gulp of water from the bottle.

“What I had, yeah.  But it’s pretty thin, Nikki—we just don’t have the hard data we pulled from other targets.”

“Not your fault, Jack.  We couldn’t know he’d just kick off like that.”  They’d stripped the Patron’s body of ID and dumped it in an alley on Vancouver’s East side; since he’d died of natural causes, there was no need to go to extensive lengths to get rid of it.  Only one other person could link them to the body, one the Patron had set up to take the fall.  Once they’d shown that person the evidence the Patron had planted implicating him in the Patron’s murders, he’d been easy to swear to secrecy. 

           But the evidence, while damning, did little to actually document the people whose lives the Patron had destroyed.  Jack and Nikki now had the Patron’s art collection, but it only connected them to his successes. 

“I don’t know what to do,” Jack said.  “I mean, the ones he put through his process that didn’t make it—I don’t even know how to
locate
them.  Some are dead, some are junkies or alcoholics or institutionalized—and those are the ones that most need to know he’s gone.”

“We can track them down.”

“Can we?  He didn’t restrict himself to a particular age, sex, or race.  He traveled all over the country.  He never used the same method twice.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t exactly subtle, either.  Liked to strike on holidays, always posed the bodies in some bizarre way.  That kind of signature can’t be hard to pinpoint.”

“Maybe not.  But even if we do track them down, what do I tell them?  So far, I can’t even convince the ones we’re sure about.”  Jack paused, ran a hand over his stubbled chin.  “And I’m not so sure I should even be trying.”

Nikki finished off the bottle of water, then walked around Jack to face him.  “Yeah, I get that.  Somebody manages to channel the biggest fucking tragedy in their lives into their art, uses their pain to make something beautiful—that’s a win, right?  That’s the kind of thing the six o’clock news runs as an example of what human beings are capable of.”  She eyed the same sculpture Jack had been studying.  “But we know better.  We know that was the plan the whole time. The whole process—shock, grief, creation—was just them running a maze set up by a psycho.”

“They used their art to transcend the worst thing that will every happen to them,” Jack said.  “They deserve to know the truth.  But how am I supposed to tell them that?  How can I, when the truth might destroy their accomplishment, might even destroy
them
?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”  Nikki shook her head.  “Questions were always your specialty, remember?”

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Homicide Detective Terrance Laramie studied the woman sitting across from him in the interview room.  Thirty years old, attractive, married with two kids.  Working professional with no criminal record.  Didn’t seem crazy, just a little stunned; he supposed he would be, too, if he’d just killed a guy while working on his teeth.

“So, Ms. Klein,” he said, his voice gentle.  “Let’s go over this from the beginning, all right?”

“All right.” Her own voice was subdued, a little shaky.  Scared, but there was something else, there, too.  Relief?

“Mr. Hampton came in for his appointment.  You’d seen him before, right?”

“Yes.  He’d had a few other procedures done.  The last time I saw him was to make some final measurements for the diamond I was insetting.”

“Ah, yes.  The diamond.  Pretty big rock, huh?”

  “It was . . . sizeable, yes.”

“That present any problems?”

“Not really.  The enamel surface was large and uniform.  I had to grind an indentation to properly seat it, but I didn’t get anywhere near the nerve.”

“Take me through it, step-by-step.”

Her breathing had evened out and her voice had lost its quiver; she was on firmer ground now, discussing the technical details of her livelihood.  “I administered a shot of xylocaine to his upper gums to numb them.  Once it had taken effect, I used a dental handpiece with a tungsten carbide burr to grind out the setting.”

“Sounds painful.”

She frowned.  “No, he didn’t feel anything at all.  As I said, the area was completely anesthetized.”

“Okay.  And then?”

“I isolated the tooth with cotton, then applied an etching agent of 37% phosphoric acid.  I blotted that up after ten seconds—“

“Only ten seconds?  Strong stuff.  Must burn like hell if you get it on someone.”

“Not really.  It’s quite weak for an acid—it’s actually used in Coca Cola.  It might cause some mild irritation if applied directly to the skin, but that’s all.”

“Okay.  Go on.”

“I rinsed and dried the surface, then repeated the procedure.  I applied a thin layer of sealant, then exposed that to a curing light for around twenty seconds.  I added sealant to the base of the diamond, used a wax-tipped rod to place it in the setting, then light-cured it again.   I added more sealant to even out the edges, cured them, then added several more layers for strength, curing between each one.  One final rinse and I was done.”

“Aren’t things like rinsing usually done by an assistant?”

She hesitated.  “I’m . . . between assistants.  I had to let the last one go, rather abruptly.”

“Oh?  Why is that?”

“Just a personality clash.  I didn’t get along with him.”

“Your assistant is the one that would usually administer the gas, right?”

A much longer pause.  “Yes.  That’s right.”

“But not today.  Today you did it yourself.”

She swallowed.  “Yes.”

“How long was it before you noticed Mr. Hampton was no longer breathing?”

“I’m . . . I’m not sure.”

“I’m assuming it was after you’d finished the procedure.”  He smiled.  “I mean, you’re not going to keep on going once you’ve noticed he’s dead, right?”

“No.  Of course not.” 

“And what did you do then?”

“I turned off the gas.”

“The oxygen, too?”

“Yes.  Both are flammable.”

“Sure, that makes sense.”  He paused.  “It’s this next part I’m having a little trouble with.”

“I needed some time to think.”

“Uh-huh.  So you went outside, got into your car and drove to Santa Monica.  You went straight to Marina del Rey, where you rented a small boat and took it out around fifteen miles into the North Pacific.   You weren’t there for very long, and came right back—all the way back to your clinic, in fact.  Where your staff had already discovered the body and the police were waiting, as you must have known they would be.”

“I—yes.”

Laramie shook his head.  “Why’d you come back?  Don’t get me wrong, you would have gotten caught anyway—the boat had a GPS transponder—but you might have made it to Mexico.”

“I wasn’t running away.  I just needed some time to think, to clear my head.  That’s all.”

“Uh-huh.  You know, I find it hard to believe that a professional such as yourself could perform an entire procedure on a patient and never once notice that he’d stopped breathing.  I mean, nitrous oxide isn’t even supposed to produce unconsciousness, is it?”

“No.  It’s not a general anesthetic, it’s just there to relax the patient.  We mix it with oxygen to prevent--” She broke off.

“Accidents.  Yeah.  But accidents happen, right?  Like a dentist turning on one tank and not the other.  Like a famous wife-beater asphyxiating to death in the chair of his female dentist while she’s gluing his late wife’s engagement ring to his grin.   Right?”

“I had no reason to wish Mr. Hampton any harm,” she said softly.  “I have a family, a career.  Why would I throw all that away?  I never knew Mrs. Hampton.  What happened to her was horrible, but a jury found her husband innocent.  I’m no . . . I have no right to judge.  It was just a mistake, a stupid mistake.”

“Yeah, it was.”  He shook his head.  “I just wish I was sure which mistake you actually made . . .”

***

The Patron wasn’t the only killer Jack had caught.  But the last five had been different; Road Rage, the Gourmet, Djinn-X, Deathkiss and the Patron himself had all belonged to an online community of serial killers that called themselves the Pack.  Jack had killed the webmaster, Djinn-X, and took over his dedicated site, the Stalking Ground.  Posing as Djinn-X himself, he’d used the site to lure and trap its members, one by one. 

They were all dead now, but Jack hadn’t taken the site down yet.  Nobody but a member of the Pack could access it—but Djinn-X had set up a series of other sites linked to it, designed to attract potential recruits while weeding out wannabes.  The final test, simple but foolproof, was guaranteed to eliminate the possibility of infiltration by anyone not willing to murder a stranger:  Djinn-X would visit the city of a possible recruit, obtain the fingerprints and business card of a hooker, then send the recruit after her.  If Djinn-X received a severed hand matching the prints at a mail-drop within a few days, the Pack would have a new member.  If not, they would change all their security protocols and the recruit would never hear from them again.