Intensity

tape, three separate bullet wounds were visible in his chest. There might have been more than three. She didn't care to look for them and had no need to know. He appeared to have died instantly, most likely in his sleep, and to have been dead before he was brought into the bathroom.
        Grief welled in her, black and cold. Survival meant repressing it at all costs, and surviving was the thing that she did best.
        A collar of strapping tape around Paul's neck became a leash that tethered him to a hand-towel rack on the wall behind the toilet. The purpose was to prevent his head from falling forward onto his chest and to direct his dead gaze toward the shower. His eyelids were taped open, and in his right eye was a starburst hemorrhage.
        Shuddering, Chyna looked away from him.
        Although the intruder had needed to kill Paul in his sleep to establish control of the house quickly, here he had been fantasizing that the husband was being forced to watch the atrocities committed against the wife.
        This was a classic tableau, a favorite of those sociopaths who took delight in performing for their victims. They actually seemed to believe that for a while the recently dead could still see, still hear, and were thus capable of admiring the bold antics and posing of a tormentor who feared neither man nor God. Textbooks described the delusion. In one of her aberrant-psychology classes at UCSF, a speaker from the FBI's Behavioral Science Section had given them more graphic descriptions of such scenes than any textbooks could provide.
        Firsthand, however, the impact of this brutality was worse than words could convey. Almost paralyzing. Chyna's legs felt heavy and stiff. The tingling in her hands was incipient numbness.
        Sarah Templeton was in the stall shower, which was separate from the tub. Although the glass door was closed-and frosted-Chyna was able to see a faint, vaguely pinkish shape huddled on the shower floor.
        On the face of the soffit above the glass door, the killer had printed two words. The black letters appeared to have been made with multiple strokes of an eyebrow pencil: DIRTY BITCH.
        Chyna had never wanted anything as much as she wanted to be free of the obligation to look into this shower stall. Surely Sarah could not be alive.
        Yet if she turned away without being certain that the woman was beyond all help, ineradicable guilt would ensure that her own survival would become a kind of walking death.
        Besides, she had committed her life to trying to understand this very aspect of human cruelty, and no published case study would ever bring her closer to comprehension than might the things that she saw here. In this house, on this night, the bleak landscape of the sociopathic mind had been externalized.
        Echoing off the tile walls, the sizzle-splash of the falling water sounded like the hissing of serpents and the brittle laughter of strange children.
        The water must be cold. Otherwise, steam would have been seething over the top of the shower enclosure.
        Chyna held her breath, gripped the anodized aluminum handle, and opened the stall door.
        Sarah Templeton had been wearing a pale-green teddy and matching panties. Her garments were in a sodden ball in one corner of the shower.
        After her husband had been shot, the woman had evidently been hammered unconscious, perhaps with the butt of the gun. Then she had been gagged; her cheeks bulged with whatever rag had been forced into her mouth. Strips of strapping tape had sealed her lips, but in the relentless icy spray, the edges of the tape had begun to peel away from her skin.
        With Sarah, the killer had used a knife. She was not alive.
        Chyna quietly closed the stall door.
        If there was such a thing as mercy, then Sarah Templeton had never regained any awareness after being knocked unconscious.
        She remembered the hug that Sarah had given her on the front walk when she had first arrived with Laura. Repressing tears, she wished that she herself were dead instead of the precious woman in the shower stall. Indeed, she was half dead and less alive by the minute, because a piece of her heart died with each of these people.
        Chyna returned to the bedroom. She moved away from the bed but didn't go immediately toward the hall door. Instead, she stood in the darkest corner, shaking uncontrollably.
        Her stomach