I Don't Want To Kill You by Dan Wells

attacks?’
     
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I guess it’s possible.’ It’s also possible that she can turn invisible, or change her shape, or some other crazy supernatural thing that would help her hide from her prey , I thought. Trying to profile a demon was getting harder and harder.
     
    ‘I was just thinking,’ said Marci. ‘This guy showed up at my house one time just incensed about something – another bad dating story, sorry. But this guy was so mad, I didn’t even go out with him. He terrified me. I called off the date right there on the porch.’
     
    ‘Which probably only made him madder,’ I said.
     
    ‘Obviously,’ said Marci, ‘but he couldn’t freak out on me with my dad’s squad car parked twenty feet away, so he just left. But the point is, if someone came up to these victims looking mad enough to stab them thirty-seven times, they would have run away screaming. But none of them did.’
     
    ‘You’re right,’ I said, going back over the news stories in my head. ‘Nobody heard screaming, nobody found any sign of a fight, and there were no defensive wounds on either of the bodies. So whatever the killer looks like, she doesn’t look scary.‘
     
    ‘Or angry,’ said Marci.
     
    ‘Or,’ I said, ‘she might not even be angry at all. We might be misinterpreting the stab wounds completely.’
     
    ‘Can you think of anything else it could be?’
     
    ‘Well, what if it’s a message?’ I asked. ‘She leaves these bodies outside where everyone can see them, so she’s obviously trying to say something. Maybe the stab wounds are part of it.’
     
    ‘But they were covered up,’ said Marci; she was getting excited again. ‘You said the stab wounds were hidden by the shirt. As a proud graduate of Home Ec I can assure you that thirty-seven cuts in the back of a shirt would completely destroy it – you wouldn’t be hiding anything under there. This woman had to take their shirts off, stab the living crap out of them, and then put their shirts back on.’
     
    ‘So if anything,’ I said, ‘she’s trying to hide the stabs, not display them.’
     
    ‘All right,’ said Marci. ‘We have a killer who starts out calm and then gets angry. All we have to do is figure out what the victims did to make her angry – probably something pretty simple, since both of them did it.’
     
    With that comment, another piece of the puzzle snapped into place for me, as clear as a bell. I looked up at Marci. ‘The only common factor between the two situations is her. The killer is making herself angry.’ Forman said that demons are defined by what they lack , I thought. She kills because she’s trying to fill a hole, in her mind or her heart, and somehow that hole is filling her with rage .
     
    ‘Why would she make herself angry?’
     
    ‘It’s not on purpose,’ I said. ‘It’s just the side-effect of something else. She’s calm, and then she kills, and then she flips out.’
     
    ‘And then she tries to cover it up with a shirt,’ said Marci, nodding slowly. ‘It fits. But what does it mean?’
     
    ‘It means she doesn’t want to kill,’ I said. ‘She probably hates it, but she can’t stop it, and she promises herself she’ll never do it again and then she does it again anyway. And she goes nuts.’
     
    ‘This is . . .’ Marci grimaced again. ‘This is really vile.’
     
    ‘But really cool,’ I said. ‘This is a piece I’m sure the police don’t have yet.’
     
    ‘I’ll tell my dad as soon as the funeral’s out.’
     
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘not yet. This is a good piece, but it doesn’t lead to anyone.’ She looked troubled, and I held out my hands to soothe her. ‘Let’s wait until we have more to give him; there’s no sense jumping the gun when we’re this close.’
     
    Marci looked uneasy. ‘How close do you think we are?’
     
    ‘Very close,’ I said. ‘Maybe close enough to predict the next victim.’
     
    ‘And if we can predict him,’