Prodigal Son

situation without hearing those two words, because the raised lid of the second freezer revealed the eyeless corpse of a young woman.
        "Why aren't you home reading about swashbuckling heroines and flying dragons?" Carson needled.
        "There's a different kind of dragon dead in the alleyway," Kathy said. "I wanted to see his lair, see if my profile of him holds any water."
        "Right hand," a tech said, taking a container from the freezer.
        Emery Framboise said, "Carson, looks like you've just been saved a ton of casework."
        "I suppose it wasn't an accident he went off the roof?"
        "Suicide. He left a note. Probably heard you and Michael were on his trail, figured he was a dead man walking."
        "Do homicidal sociopaths commit suicide?" Carson wondered.
        "Rarely," Kathy said. "But it's not unheard of."
        "Ears," said one of the CSI techs, removing a small container from the freezer, and his partner read the label on another: "Lips."
        "I disappointed my mother," Emery said. "She wanted me to be an airline pilot like my dad. At times like this, I think maybe I would be better off high in the night, up where the sky is clean, flying San Francisco to Tokyo."
        "Yeah," Carson said, "but then what airline pilot is ever going to have stories like this to tell his grandkids when he tucks them into bed? Where's the suicide note?"
        Kathy said, "I'll show you."
        In the living room, a computer stood on a corner desk. White letters on a field of blue offered a peculiar farewell:
        
         Killed what I wanted. Took what I needed. Now I leave when I want, how I want, and go where I want-one level below Hell.
        
        "The taunting tone is typical for a sociopath," Kathy said. "The suggestion that he's earned a princely place in Hell isn't unique, either, but usually if he's playing out a satanic fantasy, you find occult literature, posters. We haven't come across any of that yet."
        Only half listening, chilled by a sense of deja vu, of having seen this message before, Carson stared at the screen, reading the words twice, three times, four.
        As she read, she extracted a latex glove from a jacket pocket, pulled it on her right hand, and then keyed in a print request.
        "There was a time," Kathy said, "if a suicide note wasn't handwritten, it was suspicious. But these days, they often use their computers. In some cases they e-mail suicide notes to friends and relatives just before offing themselves. Progress."
        Stripping off the glove, waiting impatiently for the printer to produce a hard copy, Carson said, "Down there in the alley, is there enough left of his face to get a good photograph?"
        "No," Kathy said. "But his bedroom's full of them."
        Was it ever. On both nightstands and on the dresser were a dozen or more photos of Roy Pribeaux, mostly glamour shots by professional photographers, each in an expensive, ornamental silver frame.
        "He doesn't seem to have been lacking in self-esteem," Kathy said drily.

CHAPTER 59
        
        JENNA PARKER, TWENTY-FIVE, lived for parties. She seemed to be invited to one every night.
        This evening, she obviously had taken a few pre-party toots of something, getting primed for a late-night bash, for she was buzzed when she came out of her apartment, singing tunelessly.
        With or without drugs, Jenna was perpetually happy, walking on sunshine even when the day offered only rain.
        On this rainless night, she seemed to float a quarter inch off the floor as she tried to lock her door. The proper relationship of a key to a keyhole seemed to elude her, and she giggled when, three times in a row, she failed the simple insertion test.
        Maybe she wasn't merely buzzed but fully stung.
        She succeeded on the fourth try, and the dead-bolt snapped shut with a solid clack.
        "Sheryl Crowe," Jonathan Harker said from the doorway of his apartment, across the hall from hers.
        She turned, saw him for the first time, and broke into a sunny grin. "Johnny!"
        "You sound like Sheryl Crowe when you sing."
        "Do I really?"
        "Would I lie?"
        "Depends on what you want," she said coyly.
        "Now, Jen, have I ever come on to you?"
        "No. But you will."
        "When will I?"
        "Later. Sooner. Maybe now."
        She'd been to his apartment a couple