She got up from her submissive bow to the porcelain goddess (also, today, the goddess of death), and stumbled to the mirror. She didn’t like the sallow-cheeked, red-eyed Raggedy Ann doll staring back at her. She had a moonstruck look on her face, a look of wounded surprise, and Wendy wiped it off with water so cold it numbed her cheeks and stung the fear right out of her eyes.

She lit a smoke and focused.

Numbers one and three were high-class escorts. Two was a streetwalker. All anally violated, then mutilated and separated neatly into three piles: limbs, torso, and head. Underneath the tongue of each victim was found a neatly folded hundred-dollar bill. Some crazy mysoginist with money. They’d get him.

Wendy had breezed through one through three without a problem. But she hit a wall on four. Four had fucked her up. She was kind of glad for it now that she thought it over.

Cuz it seemed to her if you didn’t vomit over the corpse of a mutilated twelve-year old girl, you maybe needed to turn in your badge.