The Venetian Judgment by David Stone Page B

like being a homicide cop, a priest, and an executioner. He had seen many photos of what was left of one of their agents or what an agent had done to someone else. Pictures of the victims caught in the obscene sprawl of violent death, of deliberate murder, impose a special burden on anyone who must look at them. The victim needs to be honored, to be recognized as a human being, and, for a moment, held in your own heart, as much as you can, as she was held in the hearts of those who knew and loved her in life.

    You owed them that much.

    Mandy passed the camera over to Dalton. He pressed the ON button and looked at the wide LCD screen. There were thirty pictures on the chip, taken from several angles. It was brutally clear from the shots that they were taken by the killer, or killers, before, during, and after the murder. Looking at what was being done to the frail nude body of an elderly woman was like looking into the sun. It couldn’t be done for long, and Dalton was no different.

    There was a long silence between them after he set the camera down. Mandy picked it up and put it in her purse again, handling it like poison, which it was. Dalton knew he would never forget those shots, that they’d come back to him every now and then for the rest of his life, that he was not the same man now that he had been a few seconds ago.

    Mandy, knowing this, feeling it herself, reached out and put a hand on his wrist, not to comfort him so much as to touch another human in the midst of such a cold place.

    “Micah, I have to tell you this part too. Whoever did this sent copies of the shots to everyone on the victim’s e-mail list. Her kids. Her grandchildren. Her brother. College alumni. Hank Brocius too. Sound familiar to you?”

    Dalton was staring at her, his expression setting like concrete. Mandy held his look.

    “Yes, I thought it might.”

    Dalton looked out at the rain streaming down the pub windows. Night was coming on, and the little pin lights across the street were bravely blinking on in the storm. You could almost hear Vera Lynn singing, he thought: When the lights go on again all over the world . Then a procession of mole people passed by the windows of the pub, blurred brown figures hunched against the driving rain, braced against the coming of the night.

    “But what about this home-invasion angle? I mean, taking the photographs? Sending them out to the family? Are there any records of that kind of thing happening in London—hell, anywhere in the U.K.?”

    Mandy shook her head.

    “Nothing remotely like this. Lots of things as weird: this is England, isn’t it? We gave the world Jack the Ripper. But the . . . methods here? The extreme violence, the way it was . . . prolonged? I’ve seen crime scene shots like these only in one other place and that was when we were in Singapore.”

    Dalton was still struggling with it.

    “I mean, didn’t they find his body in the water off Santorini? Strangled with a scarf. Cut up. Sexually mutilated. Do you really think it’s him?”

    She considered it for a while, staring at her cold tea, listening to the rain. Finally, she said, “I really don’t know for sure. What I do know is that the Glass Cutters stumbled onto something that brought Mariah Vale down on Deacon Cather’s head, and now one of them is dead. And either the killing was random or it wasn’t. And, if it wasn’t, the NSA isn’t going to let us poke around at their end, so we need a line of our own. And, as far as I can see, this is the only one we have.”

    “Kiki Lujac,” said Dalton, “is he alive or is he dead?”

    “And if he’s alive, why is he in England killing Glass Cutters?”

    Dalton made one last attempt to slip his cables, not because he didn’t want to know the truth but because he didn’t want to put another woman for whom he had real affection out on the firing line. His record in that area was rotten: two dead, one still missing, one badly wounded and currently