Denton waited in the drab, windowless room. The thought that Bill was about to arrest him for the murders began to seep into his mind. He stared at his reflection in the one-way glass and told himself not to be paranoid. Whatever Bill's reason for asking him to come down to the department with him, it couldn't be that. The fact that he had been made to wait in an interrogation room was only because Bill didn't have an office of his own.

He looked over at the gray metal door and tried to remember the name of that lawyer he met at last year's Art in the Park fundraiser. On the ride over to the station house, Bill had asked, "Okay Dent, what's this about her personality changing?"

"The girl... the woman was neat, almost obsessively so." 

"Was she?"

"You saw her room. The way she kept it goes beyond clean. I wouldn't be surprised if she's borderline OCD."

Bill made a left onto Byron and with one eye on the road gave Denton a nod, encouraging him to go on.

"Then she started making the eights. Think for a minute: you are an extremely orderly, organized person and you want to draw a figure eight somewhere in your room. Where do you do it? How do you do it? She could have done it any number of ways that fit with her mental profile, but she didn't. She reorganized things on her dresser; she doodled in her book; she put stickers all over her laptop. And the stickers actually show a progression: she started off with labels from bananas. She probably added a new one each time she ate one, but how many could she eat in a day? It started slowly, a sticker every now and then. It may have been an odd thing for her to be doing, but she was consistent about it. Then all of a sudden, she grabbed anything at hand to finish the design quickly."

"I hardly think a bunch of stickers makes someone a slob." There was an unfamiliar frown on Bill's face, the right corner of his mouth tugging down involuntarily.

"No, not a slob, but these acts were erratic. They even seemed to be absent-minded. She let the tight control she kept on her environment slip."

"Still, I don't see how—"

"She was changing, and it was very specific to those eights. Under normal circumstances, they should have appalled her sense of order. But this change was even more obvious with the other victim."

"What? Now you're going to tell me that Meyers was a neat freak?"

Meyers. So that had been the delivery man's name.

"No, not neat. He had been a recluse. You told me that the neighbors said he kept to himself, but it went beyond that. He was asocial. He had almost no life outside of that apartment. He didn't care about his appearance or what people thought of him. The place was well lived in. He had spent a lot of time wearing out the furniture, the carpets. But he didn't entertain. He didn't even have a computer, so he didn't email or chat with anyone online."

"So?" Impatience permeated every millisecond that the one syllable was drawn over.

"So, there were new clothes in his closet. The trash can in the bedroom was full of department store bags. He had been going out to bars all over town; there was a pile of receipts on his nightstand. There was also a plastic bracelet from The Green Fiend." Denton almost gasped after that last word. The oxygen in his lungs was completely exhausted.

The Green Fiend was a popular club with students. Denton had never been there, but he'd passed it often enough. It was on 9th Avenue not far from the Square, up on the second floor over a bunch of shops. Its sign depicted a cartoonish green demon with bright red eyes. The lime green bracelets they gave out at the door were a common sight around campus, especially in September when freshmen would keep them on the next day like a badge of honor, proof that they had actually gotten in.

When he had first spotted it, the only thought it had triggered was, why would a man in his forties go there, of all places? It was only much later that he wondered why a loner would go at all.

"He didn't stop being neat." Denton lingered on his conclusion, relishing the moment. "He suddenly started going out regularly and meeting people in public places. And if I were to guess, I'd say it began about the same time he started drawing eights on his walls."

It had taken Denton hours of mulling over the evidence to piece it together. When he'd examined the Grimshaw apartment, he never realized he was looking at signs of two different but not completely distinct psyches: the old and the new. The problems with his initial report had been due to him trying to make them fit within a single profile.

After several blocks, quietly thinking over what had been said, Bill asked, "And what would cause someone to change like that?"

"In adults? Most likely extreme emotional trauma," Denton said. "Tumors or other brain damage could be another possibility. I've read of some rare cases where a significant event, such as a powerful religious experience, could cause dramatic changes to a person's behavior."

"Four people, Dent? Are you saying that they all saw god or that they all had cancer?"

"I didn't say any of it fit. I was only telling you what I could find on the subject."

At least those were the scientific explanations he'd come up with in the brief research he had done before leaving the house. There were some non-scientific ones too, but what was the point in bringing up something like demonic possession?

As Bill pulled the car into a spot at the side of the Bexhill Police Department, he turned and looked at Denton. "Her room—it wasn't neat." There was an unfamiliar anxiety in his voice. "It was a mess. I'm going to need a copy of those photos."

The door to the interrogation room finally opened, and Denton couldn't help glancing at his watch. Had it only been fifteen minutes?

Bill had two file folders in his hand. The light blue dossier was at least an inch thick. The beige one was so thin Denton wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't a different color.

"Sorry to make you wait." When he was seated, Bill said, "I spoke with the roommate. She said she'd been acting strange for about a week. Small things at first. But then it got worse. She just chalked it up to pre-exam stress. From what she said, the girl had a heavy course load."

Before Denton could say anything about the confirmation, Bill gestured at the folders on the table. "The first two murders."

He passed the thin file across the table to Denton. "Let's start with the second one: Alfred Reynolds, aka Ray, aka The Troll. The boys on patrol called him that anyway. For the last few years, he's been living under the train bridge, out by the water treatment plant. Sets up a camp there during the summer. Usually leaves town around September, before the cold weather starts. Not this year. We found him dead two weeks ago."

Denton flipped open the file. The first few pages were reports from various officers. Even at a cursory glance, he could tell it was just standard paperwork. One form filled out by the officers that found the body, another with the basic case details, a final one from the medical examiner. There were no witness statements, no follow ups, no sign that they had tried to find the culprit.

Then there were some photographs. The first few were hard to make out. They just appeared to be abstract patterns of black and gray, until the fourth picture in the stack. It was taken from a little farther back and showed a circle of burnt ground filled with unidentifiable carbonized debris.

Next were several shots of the camp: a blue tarp strung up for shelter, a shopping cart piled with junk, an old crate with canned food stacked on it, and the side of a bridge strut. The concrete was covered in graffiti. There was a generation's worth—layer after layer of spray paint. Dead center was a giant eight. It must have been at least ten feet high, and the lines were a good two feet thick of garish crimson red.

When Denton looked closer, he realized that surrounding it were dozens of others, which were smaller and painted in different colors. There was a knock at the door and a uniformed officer leaned in. He motioned for Bill to follow him with a jerk of his head and said, "Sir."

"I'll be right back," Bill said.

Denton watched them leave, pleased that Bill hadn't shut the door behind him. He turned back to the photos. It took a moment for him to notice that the next picture had not been taken at the railway bridge. When he deciphered what he was looking at, he recoiled in horror.

He now knew what had been burned at the camp. On a steel medical examiners table was a charred body. What had confused him at first was that it was not in one piece. Alongside the partially limbed torso was an assortment of blackened body parts.

He slammed the file closed. His hand slapped the table, causing a shrill ring to fill the room. When the echo ended, and the room was quiet again, a commotion of voices filtered in. They drifted down the hall and through the door as a jumble of static, but there was an electricity to it. A nervous energy replaced meaning and language. Curiosity lured him out of the room. Denton traced his way back down the hallway, passing other blank metal doors and a large security door with a small window revealing a row of cells. At the end of the corridor was a big open area with about a dozen desks.

Inside, nearly the entire Bexhill police force was assembled.

A small group of people stood in front of a man in a navy blue suit. He had gray hair with a receding hairline and seemed to be in charge. Bill was there along with two other men in suits and four officers in uniform. Beyond this knot of police, other cops, clerical staff, and Denton loitered around. None of them needed to be there, but all of them were hanging on every word that was being said.

"Stahl, go interview this witness," the man in charge ordered. "Sedo, Gavin, start canvassing the area for other witnesses. Adams, McClorry, try and find a security camera with footage we can pull. Lee, Anderson, patrol the neighborhood and look for any suspicious vehicles. I want an ID on this van by the end of the day. Get moving. Clock's ticking."

The man walked off, and the room filled with confusion, as everyone started talking at once.

Denton made his way toward Bill, who was at his desk, throwing his jacket back on. He noticed a young woman, with a stack of files in her arms, enter from the stairwell. She walked a few steps ahead of him and looked around, clearly puzzled. She changed course and walked up to a couple of patrolmen, standing around and talking loudly. Sensing the question on her lips, Denton sped up his pace, until he was right behind her.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"Got a lead on the missing girl. Someone saw her going into a van Friday afternoon."

There was something about the word "going" that Denton Reed found peculiar. She hadn't been seen getting into the van; she had been seen going into the van. It might have been a bad choice of words, but the image it conjured in his head was of her body being carted into the back of the vehicle.

Before he could get any more details, Bill came up to him. "I've got to go. I'll get an officer to take you back to your car."

And just like that, Denton was back to being a private citizen getting in the way of official police business.