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photography?”
    Feeling oddly detached, I shake my head.
    “He’s getting more savage,” Kaiser observes. “Losing control, maybe? The face is actually torn this time.”
    I nod again. “There’s subcutaneous fat showing through the cheek.”
    The floor shudders as Sean sets my heavy dental case beside me. Too late I try to conceal that I jerked when the vibration went through me. I tell myself to breathe deeply, but my throat is already closing, and a film of sweat has coated my skin.
    One step at a time…Shoot the bites with the 105-millimeter quartz lens. Standard color film first, then get out the filters and start on the UV. After that, take your alginate impressions…
    As I bend and flip the latches on my case, I feel like I’m moving at half speed. A dozen pairs of eyes are watching me, and their gazes seem to be interfering with my nerve impulses. Sean will notice my awkwardness, but maybe no one else will. “It’s the same mouth,” I say softly.
    “What?” asks Agent Kaiser.
    “Same killer. He’s got slightly pegged lateral incisors. I see it on the chest bites. That’s not conclusive. I’m just saying…my preliminary assessment.”
    “Right. Of course. You sure you don’t need some help?”
    What the hell am I saying? Of course it’s the same guy. Everybody in this room knows that. I’m just here to document and preserve the evidence to the highest possible degree of accuracy —
    I’m opening the wrong case. I need my camera, not my impression kit. Jesus, keep it together . But I can’t. As I bend farther down to open my camera case, a wave of dizziness nearly tips me onto the floor. I retrieve the camera, straighten up, switch it on, then realize I’ve forgotten to set up my tripod.
    And then it happens.
    In three seconds I go from mild anxiety to hyperventilation, like an old lady about to faint in church. Which is unbelievable. I can breathe more efficiently than 99 percent of the human population. When I’m not working as an odontologist, I’m a free diver, a world-class competitor in a sport whose participants commonly dive to three hundred feet using only the air trapped in their lungs. Some people call free diving competitive suicide, and there’s some truth to that. I can lie on the bottom of a swimming pool with a weight belt for over six minutes without air, a feat that would kill most people. Yet now—standing at sea level in the kitchen of a ritzy town house—I can’t even drink from the ocean of oxygen that surrounds me.
    “Dr. Ferry?” says Agent Kaiser. “Are you all right?”
    Panic attack, I tell myself. Vicious circle…the anxiety worsens the symptoms, and the symptoms rev up the anxiety. You have to break the cycle …
    Arthur LeGendre’s corpse wavers in my vision, as though it’s lying on the bottom of a shallow river.
    “Sean?” asks Kaiser. “Is she all right?”
    Don’t let this happen, I beg silently. Please.
    But no one hears my prayer. Whatever is happening to me has been waiting a long time to happen. A slow black train has been coming toward me for a very long time, from very far away, and now that it’s finally reached me, it plows over me without pain or sound.
    And everything goes black.

Chapter
3
    A female EMT is kneeling over me, reading from a blood pressure cuff strapped to my arm. The deflating cuff awakened me. Sean Regan and Special Agent Kaiser are standing over the EMT, looking worried.
    “A little low,” says the tech. “I think she fainted. Her EKG is normal. Sugar’s a little low, but she’s not hypoglycemic.” The tech notices that my eyes are open. “When was the last time you ate, Dr. Ferry?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “We should get some orange juice into you. Fix you right up.”
    I look to my left. The stockinged feet of Arthur LeGendre’s corpse lie beside my head. Its legs and torso extend away from me at a right angle, down a different side of the kitchen island. I glance in that direction and see the