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eraser against my desk. “But what was his motive? Did he do this because he knew the victim and hated her? Is he a sexual predator, a lust killer, who derived pleasure from his acts? Or was this murder dispassionate? Maybe someone paid him to commit these acts, but he had no feelings about it one way or the other.”
    “You’re going to make an excellent police officer, Miss Streng,” Dr. Horner said. “And I agree with you completely. Mr. K’s intent was to murder in a ghastly fashion, but his motive might have been personal, sexual, or even financial. But the question is, which is the most evil?”
    Dr. Horner stepped closer to me, so the victim’s face projected onto his own.
    “If you were at Mr. K’s mercy, Miss Streng, would you prefer him to be a sexual sadist who delighted in your agony, or a cold-blooded mercenary who dispassionately inflicted these tortures because he was just following orders?”

Present day

    2010, August 10

    I flexed my fingers, my bound hands becoming dangerously numb. The ball gag felt enormous in my mouth. My heart was beating so fast I felt close to fainting.
    I closed my eyes, forcing myself to concentrate. I’d been following the Mr. K case for more than twenty-five years. It was both my hobby and my white whale.
    We’d crossed paths before. I’d logged in a lot of hours trying to catch him. A staggering one hundred and eighteen homicides had been attributed to the enigmatic killer.
    Killer. Mr. Killer. That’s the label the FBI attributed to him when they found a “ MR. K” written in marker on a ball gag found at one of his scenes.
    His victims seemingly had nothing in common. They were spread out across the nation, both men and women, ranging in age from seventeen to sixty-eight, encompassing many different races, religions, backgrounds, and histories.
    The murder methods also varied wildly. Victims had been shot, stabbed, burned, broken, sliced, beaten, smashed, drowned, dismembered, and worse. The only thing that tied these unsolveds together were Mr. K’s signatures: ball gags, salt in the wounds, and assorted, specific kinds of torture.
    I wanted this guy. Wanted him bad. Unfortunately, hard evidence had always eluded me.
    Ironic that I might have hard evidence very soon, but it would come at a very high cost.
    I pushed away thoughts of death, concentrating on the here and now. I’d been awake long enough for my eyes to adjust, but it was still pitch black. Storage facilities usually had some kind of light, both in the units themselves and outside in the hallway. Since barely a sliver of light penetrated through any cracks, I assumed Mr. K either taped or filled in every corner of this space.
    Total blackness was disorienting, making it impossible to focus on anything. But I was able to scoot toward the concrete block my legs were tethered to. I sat up, pushed myself backward against it, and explored the surface with my tingling fingers.
    Too big and heavy to move. But it was square-shaped. While the edges weren’t exactly sharp, the concrete was unfinished, rough. Was it enough to cut through the nylon cord securing my wrists?
    Only one way to find out. I flexed my arms, sawing my binding against the stone’s corner. I couldn’t see my progress, and might not have even been making any, but I had excellent motivation to try.
    I’d seen Mr. K’s work up close and personal. And I knew what happened to the people he left in storage lockers.

Three years ago

    2007, August 8

    “Y ou got anything to eat?” My partner, Detective First Class Herb Benedict, was rooting through my glove compartment.
    Two blocks ahead, the man we’d been following turned his black Cadillac DTS onto Fullerton. I gave it a little gas and continued pursuit.
    “Jack? Food? I’m starving here.”
    Herb was as far from starving as I was from dating George Clooney. He had to be close to the three hundred pound mark. Herb, not George.
    “I think there’s a box of bran flakes in the back