rules were clear and quickly learned and if you were strong enough and vicious enough, you could make your own.

And here, at least, someone loved him and cared about his welfare.

Cooper put an arm around Swann's shoulders, feeling the knobby bones through the mottled skin. In full light, Swann's torso and legs were covered with freckles. For some reason only his face had been spared the spots. Cooper had learned to love them. His punk leaned his head against the big man's chest and continued to pray.

'Sweet Jesus,' Swann implored, 'bring your divine love to the heart of Darn ell Cooper the way be has brought love to mine. Let the light of your great goodness shine upon him. Deliver him from the pit. Cause him to dwell no more in the valley of the shadow, darling Lord, but lift him up to your mountaintop of light!'

'Amen,' said Cooper, prematurely.

'And sweet Jesus, cleanse his mind of those thoughts which torment him.

Lift from him, Lord, those obscene fantasies that haunt his soul. Raise up his eyes so that they might dwell forever on your sweet goodness and look no more into the abyss Of the evil pit.'

Swann shivered and Cooper did not know if he was cold or frightened. He himself was getting excited again.

When the punk got through praying, he was usually very receptive.,Sometimes he thought up new ways to do it.

His punk had a lot of imagination.

Karen had placed the envelope on the kitchen table for him and Becker left it there amid the crumpled napkins and the spilled remainders of Jack's breakfast cereal while he did the dishes and straightened the kitchen. Giving the table a swipe with the sponge, he worked around the letter as if afraid to soil his hands by touching it. Kitchen duty was a chore that Becker had assumed on his own; Karen had never mentioned it, he had never volunteered. On the first few mornings he had spent at her house, she had gotten Jack off to school, then departed for work herself while he was still reading the newspaper at the table.

'Just leave it,' she had said, referring to the general litter while bending to give him a kiss. 'I'll do it when I get home.' Becker had not left it and it did not take long for her to stop urging him to do so.

The same process was at work when he gradually assumed the duties of dinner chef. He cooked the first, few times because it seemed unfair for her to have to launch into meal preparations as soon as she walked in the door. He cooked dinner a few times because he didn't like the frozen entrees and slapjack concoctions that Karen tossed together on her own.

After that he cooked because he realized he liked to, and because no one had ever told him he had to. Now, after living together for a year, Karen Still remembered every so often to say thank you, which Becker considered a surprise bonus. Jack never thought to voice his gratitude without prompting, but then Jack was ten and assumed that service was his due.

With the dishes rinsed and stacked in the dishwasher and the counters and tabletop cleaned and straightened, Becker was forced to regard the letter once more. It was addressed in typescript to 'Agent John Becker' in care of 'FBI, Washington, D.C.' The envelope was plain white, ordinary stationery as unremarkable as the typewriting. With a sigh, Becker lifted the envelope by its edges. Whomever it was from, Becker didn't want to hear from him. FBI agents didn't receive friendly letters addressed to headquarters. They got angry letters, they got pleading letters, they got threatening letters from attorneys insinuating lawsuits, they got paranoid letters from screwballs concerned about UFOS. And, in Becker's case, there were letters from psychopaths.

More than one of the serial killers whom Becker had tracked and apprehended tried to stay in touch with him, as if their relationship had not been severed by incarceration. They wrote to him as if they knew him, as if they shared something in common, some deep affliction of the soul that had empowered Becker to find them-that had allowed them to be caught by one of their own. For these correspondents the twisted growth within their souls that made them the way they were was a source of exultation.

They loved their mania, clutched it gleefully, protected it fanatically.

He could sense their caged but unaltered joy like the cackle of the demented in every line they wrote.

They crooned to him from their prison cells and mental wards like wolves howling for a caged brother to join them. For Becker, his understanding of their dementia was a sickness that he had quit the Bureau in a vain attempt to expunge. If he was no more capable of reforming his soul than they were, at least he could avoid the exercise of his failings. He was like a man with allergies that medicine could not control. Unable to live cleanly in a certain place, Becker had taken himself elsewhere, out of the FBI, away from the antigens that plagued him.

But the crazies would not let him go, they called to him, singing their siren songs of mutuality through the mail, and the Bureau, conscientious good citizen that it was, acted as middleman, running him down with the messages of lunacy.

He slipped a paring knife under the flap and opened the envelope, then turned it over to shake out its contents, still reluctant to come into contact with it. The masthead of The New York Times floated to the table. Scissors had cut away the newspaper's motto, 'All the News That was Fit to Print,' on one side, and the weather information on the other, leaving intact only the name of the paper and the date immediately underneath. The edition was two years old.

Becker flipped the paper to its other side. There was the name CARTIER in large letters, Part of an advertisement which had been cut away, a portion of a female model's face that was part of an adjoining ad, and the word 'News,' the second half of 'News Summary' having also been excised. Pinching just the tip of the paper, Becker held it up to the light, half expecting to see an 'invisible' message scrawled in some lunatic's urine.

What he saw were tiny dots of light bleeding through the paper, poked with caution through the letters of the masthead by a pin. Above the masthead was another series of dots. On the reverse side of the paper, the holes in the masthead fell in the empty space of the illustrations used for the advertisements.

A game player, he thought. Someone wants me to cooperate so he can jerk me off at the same time he does himself.

But despite his annoyance, Becker rummaged through the extra bedroom that they called a family room until he found an old Scrabble set. For each letter in the masthead with a hole in it, Becker selected a lettered square from the Scrabble set and placed it on the table. The who and the w each had two holes, so he added an extra of each letter to his little pile. Taken in Order from the masthead, the letters spelled 'hNwwooki.' Placing the capitalized n first and following it with a vowel, Becker came up with 'Now i howk. ' Nothing more intelligible presented itself immediately, so he shuffled the tiles and tried again.

At the first random casting the letters formed the word wowikhno.'

With rising exasperation, he reshuffled the letters, then again and yet again, trying to find words that made sense.

After ten minutes of effort his hands froze over the tiles.

His message was on the table before him.

'i know who.'

'So you know who,' Becker said aloud, his voice sounding strange in the empty house. 'Who what? Or who cares?'

The dots that ran above the masthead took a bit longer to decipher. They were neatly, almost meticulously placed, as if they had been ruled off with a caliper. Applying a tape measure, Becker determined that they were precisely one eighth of an inch apart. In some cases two dots ran vertically and in some cases one stood alone. The vertical holes were also precisely one eighth of an inch from those below them. However, they were not systematically aligned with any of the letters in the masthead that ran below them. The dots were a message by themselves:

At first glance they looked to Becker like a broken box kite, and then like an old-fashioned door key. He played with the idea for a moment before deciding that the pattern didn't look much like a key after all.

Leaving the tiles and their message on the table, he paced the kitchen, wondering why he was taking the trouble in the first place.

Whoever had sent him the message had been smart enough, or knew Becker well enough, to make it a puzzle.

He knows my weakness, Becker thought. Or one of them at least. If the message had been straightforward, Becker might well have dismissed it out-of-hand, throwing it out joining this jerkoff in his activity. with the morning's trash. Now here I am, he thought, Disgusted with his correspondent, and with himself for accommodating

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