The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.

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      “Bait,” Harry said, setting his can of soda on the hood of the cruiser, leaning back against its fender. “He used a purse as bait.”

      “It’s brilliant,” I said. “Who can resist a purse? The good want to help, the bad see money and credit cards.”

      We were parked on the causeway connecting the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with the city. Twilight was an orange lantern hung below the horizon of an indigo sky. Fresh stars shimmered in the east. A hundred feet distant, three elderly black men fished from lawn chairs, frequently consulting the brown bags beside them.

      “After pushing her back into the car, he didn’t touch Mrs Atkins,” I said. “Didn’t lay a hand on her.”

      “He threatened her with death,” Harry reminded me.

      “He said he had a gun. Two hours earlier he’d just butchered a woman with a five-inch knife. Why didn’t he threaten to stab her, slice her? Why didn’t he ransack the car? And what’s with that ‘perform to expectations’ line? It sounds like a damn stockbroker.”

      Harry looked south at the dark horizon, the mouth of Mobile Bay thirty miles distant.

      “He probably tried the purse bit with Taneesha but she heard him running up. She closed the door, locked it. Maybe that’s what pissed him off.”

      “Something sure did. How many wounds did Ms Franklin have?”

      “Over thirty. But he broke her fingers first. I don’t get it. Why he’d kill one woman, two hours later give another a break?”

      I forced myself to revisit the Franklin crime scene: the Wookiee breaking the young woman’s fingers, getting off on her pain, then going wild with the knife – poke, slash, jab. Then, interrupted by the sudden appearance of the semi, the perp bails out, runs wildly into the truck’s headlights, veers away into the night.

      “Did Forensics find any blood in Mrs Atkins’s vehicle?”

      Harry said, “No blood, no hair, no trace of any evidence.”

      “At least we got a knife.”

      Harry finished his can of soda, crumpled the can like paper, bouncing it in his hand. “With nada on the prints. An uncharted whacko.”

      “Is this going to turn weird, brother?” I asked.

      “Going to?” he said.

      We heard a ship’s horn and turned to watch a freighter slipping from the mouth of the Mobile River. The ship’s bridge was at the stern and lighted. The only other light was at the bow. Somewhere between the two points were hundreds of feet of invisible ship. A minute later, its wake reached us, hissing against the shoreline with a sound like rain.