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Faith slammed the door to her apartment closed, but Michael caught it and shut it gently, so she didn’t even get that satisfaction.

“Damn it!” she shouted. “Fuck!”

Michael stiffened, but then shrugged. “Well, I guess they won’t be your neighbors for much longer.”

“Fuck the neighbors!” she said. “Damn it!”

Turk whined and nudged her gently. She sighed and ruffled his fur. “Yeah, I know. It just sucks. I really thought we had it figured out.”

“Yeah,” Michael said, “Me too. But hey, you never know. Maybe they’ll find something in the pills.”

Faith sighed. “No, they won’t. Even if they do, it won’t make a difference. MDMA is one of the most common drugs to find in a tox screen. So’s meth. They would have found that without needing to send it to the state lab.”

Michael nodded. “Yeah. They would have.”

“Damn it!”

“I know.”

Faith sat at her table and rested her chin on her hands. She bit her lip and looked pensively at the wall. Michael headed to the freezer and pulled out the microwave meals she had bought from the liquor store. “Glad I threw these in here before we went to the bistro. I’m going to make yours first, and you’re going to eat it.”

“I’m not hungry.”

"Yes, you are. You don't think you are because you're pissed, but you are. And you need fuel. So you're going to eat no matter what else we do tonight."

“What else are we going to do? We don’t have any more leads. We’re back to square one again.” She let her head drop into her hands. “God! What are the odds? How do three people by drugs from the same person at the same place the day each of them dies and their drug dealer isn’t the killer?”

“We still don’t know that for sure. We should at least wait until they—” his phone buzzed. He read the text, and his shoulders slumped. “Okay. Now we know that for sure.”

“The pills are clean?”

“That’s not the word I would use to describe a hallucinogen, but yes, they’re clean. Pure MDMA.”

Faith sighed. “All right. Make me dinner. Might as well eat as long as I’m staring at a wall.”

“Sounds good. Is Turk on a schedule with his food, or do you just feed him anything?”

“I thawed him a steak last night. You can give him that. Just fry it on the stove for a few minutes.”

“Sure thing. You’re eating good tonight, boy.”

Turk barked enthusiastically but then turned back to Faith and whined. When Faith headed to the living room, he followed her and immediately put his head on her lap. She chuckled and began scratching him behind the ears. “I love you, boy. You’re amazing.”

Turk held her gaze with the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen, and Faith felt the tension ease. “I’ll tell you a secret. I think I love you even more than I love David.”

“More than you love me?” Michael called.

She kept her eyes on Turk and said, “And so, so much more than I love Michael.”

"Ah, you break my heart, Faith. You break my heart.”

Faith chuckled and cupped Turk’s face in her hands. “You’re so cute.”

“Aww, thank you,” Michael called from the kitchen.

“I’m not talking to you.” She shook her head at Turk. “He’s such a dummy, isn’t he?”

Turk barked, then began to lick her face. She laughed and pulled away. “Okay, okay. I’m good boy. Mommy’s cheered up. Thank you.”

Turk wagged his tail happily and sat in his usual spot in front of the couch with his head on Faith's feet. It had taken years to get him to stop jumping on the couch, so Faith decided it wasn't worth the fight to convince him to leave her feet. Besides, it felt good to have him there right now. She wasn't really cheered up, just a little less tense. That was the best she could expect right now.

“What are we missing?” she called to Michael. “We know it’s someone with a vendetta against food critics. We know the vector is poison. But the killer isn’t any of the chefs who would have a reason to kill them, and the poison doesn’t show up anywhere on the food.”

“We haven’t confirmed those two things in Lila Vance’s case,” he reminded her.

“But we will. We know that we will.”

Michael sighed. “Yeah. Almost certainly.”

“So what are we missing? Someone had a reason to do this.”

“Yeah, they hate critics.”

“Yes, but they had a reason for these three victims specifically. There was a reason why Eleanor Crestwood, Harold Grimes and Lila Vance were killed. What is that reason?”

Michael brought out Faith's food and set it on the night table next to her, along with a freshly opened bottle of beer. "I'll scour Lila Vance's social media presence and see if I can find any connections between the victims. Maybe you can look into Tanya's supplier and the other employees at the Café Toulouse and see if there's anything that jumps out at you. We'll get this guy, Faith. We always do."

“Yeah, but people always die before we can stop them.”

“Fewer people than would die if we weren’t hunting them. Don’t think about the people we don’t save. Think about the people we save.”

Faith understood Michael’s point, but the image of Henri sobbing and crying out for his dead girlfriend was burned into her brain. Other images of other relatives floated through her head: a brother whose sister was bludgeoned to death, a mother whose son was dragged into a cave never to be seen again, a husband whose wife was stabbed to death in their own home.

So many she couldn’t save. So many who had lost forever everything they might have been.

“Remember that woman we pulled out of the well in Missouri?”

Michael’s voice cut through the darkness. Faith smiled slightly as she remembered the woman. She couldn’t quite remember her name, but she did remember seeing the fire department lift her from the well, somewhat the worse for wear but alive.

“I remember that. That was our first case after I got out of the hospital.”

“Yeah. You and Turk had to fight a religious nut who was burying ‘promiscuous women’ in abandoned wells.”

“Yeah, I remember him. The Demon of Morgan County.”

“Whatever,” Michael flipped his hand and sat next to her with his own meal. “I don’t pay attention to the names the media gives these people. You remember the woman we rescued from that puppy farm?”

“Yes, I do. I think she was named Lila too.”

“Yeah, something like that. Lila or Lisa. Let’s see, there was the other woman, the Marine we rescued from that crazy medic up in Washington.”

Faith shivered. “Yeah, that was when Turk got hurt.”

Turk looked up at the sound of his name, and Faith smiled. “But you’re right as rain now, aren’t you?”

“So are they,” Michael said. “I don’t always remember their names, but I remember their faces. I remember the gratitude. The relief. The joy. It’s hard to remember that when you’re in the middle of things and you’re chasing a psycho whose working his problems out by hurting people instead of going to therapy, but there’s a lot of people who make it because of the work we do. And those are only the people we see. Imagine how many more would have died if we hadn’t caught the Demon and put him in the psych ward? If Kenneth Langeveldt was still paralyzing fake families in Washington D.C.? Or that guy in Arizona who was using pheromones to trick lapdogs into eating people alive?”

Faith shivered again. “Don’t remind me of that asshole. Those are some of the worst scenes I’ve ever seen.”

“But fewer than there would be otherwise. I won’t pretend it’s always easy, but when I’m having a bad day, and I can’t get the images of death out of my mind, I fill them with images of the life that exists because I’m not afraid to face death. It helps.”

Faith smiled at him. “Why Michael Prince, who knew what a poet you were?”

He shrugged. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I retire.”

He reached for the remote and switched the TV on. Faith took a bite of her TV dinner. This one was pretending to be Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and peas. To be fair, she had no idea what Salisbury steak was, so maybe it was perfectly normal for steak to have the texture of wet cardboard.

She grinned and took another bite. Call her crazy, but there was nothing more comforting in life than a cheap TV dinner eaten on a couch with her two best friends.

The TV program returned from commercial and Faith’s grin faded when she saw the headline. WEST MAKES FIRST STATEMENT SINCE ARREST!

Michael looked at Faith. “Maybe I’ll change the channel.”

“No. I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Faith, I don’t know if—”

“Just leave it on.”

The anchor, a man with the fake hair and plastic smile of a politician, said, “The nation is abuzz today with the revelation that convicted serial killer Franklin West has released his first statement since being arrested just over four months ago. West, the prolific murderer known as the Copycat Donkey Killer—”

“They talk about him like he’s a damned celebrity,” Michael groused. “Like he’s a prophet.”

That’s what I’m afraid of, Faith thought. That, to some people, he is.

“What you are about to hear is a transcript of that statement read by a court stenographer who captured the statement at West’s pretrial hearing this morning.”

“That was this morning?” Michael asked.

“I guess so.”

“Aren’t they supposed to notify you?”

Faith shook her head. “I don’t know.”

A flat, slightly nasal male voice recited the statement. “The line between sanity and insanity is thin indeed. What separates me from a perfectly ordinary psychologist and counselor is as ephemeral as a puff of smoke or a gust of wind. People live their lives believing they are good, they are moral, they are sane; but put the right pressure in the right place, and that fa?ade crumbles.

“It’s been suggested that my obsession with Special Agent Faith Bold of the FBI is sexual in nature. I expected this comparison because for all of our insistence to the contrary, humans are, at their core, primates, and sexual expression is perhaps the foundational component of primate society. Still, the statement could not be further from the truth.

"I wished to break the fa?ade of sanity that surrounds Faith, a fa?ade that has been artificially strengthened by the renown she has received both within law enforcement and now to the wider public. I wished to show that even the greatest among us is as cruel and evil and, based at her core, the most violent of killers. I have failed. I underestimated her intelligence, and more so, I underestimated the lengths to which she would go to hide from the truth within her.

"But my point still stands. Faith Bold is no better than me. Her fascination with death and violence expresses itself in a manner more acceptable to society, but make no mistake. That sanity stands on a knife's edge. Don't be surprised if one day it is her who stands before you with the blood of innocents on her hands."

“What a fucking lunatic,” Michael said.

There was no anger in his voice, only contempt. West was beaten now and unworthy of his anger. If only Faith could feel the same way.

The channel cut back to the anchor. “While the majority of online respondents have decried West’s statement as ‘ludicrous’ and ‘the product of a deranged mind,’ some are quick to point out incidents in Special Agent Bold’s past that raise some serious concerns. In one particularly disturbing episode, she broke into an apartment and assaulted an innocent man who she erroneously believed to be the Copycat Killer, leaving him with thousands of dollars of damage that eventually led to his eviction from his home.”

Faith stiffened, and Michael lifted his hands in outrage. "What the hell?"

“In another, she commanded her K9 unit to viciously attack a South African tourist she falsely suspected of a series of poisoning deaths in the Twin Cities Terminal, an assault that left the man hospitalized with serious injuries and that nearly led to a diplomatic incident between the United States and South Africa.”

“Those fucking assholes!” Michael shouted. “Are they serious right now?”

“The FBI has not responded to requests for comment on—”

Michael stood and switched the TV off. The hand not holding the remote clenched and unclenched in time with his breathing. Turk jumped to his feet and looked around, sensing a threat but unsure where it was coming from.

Faith didn’t say anything for a long moment. She was too tired to try to wrap her head around what she had just seen. The only thing she was sure of was that even now, West still reached for her, clawing at the back of her mind, refusing to let go, refusing to stop until there was nothing left.

I will break you.

“We’re going to sue the hell out of those assholes,” Michael growled. “We’re going to sue them until they’re begging us to stop. We’re—”

“Just drop it, Michael,” Faith said. “Just…” She stood abruptly. “I’m going to bed.”

“Hey, don’t worry about what they’re saying. They’re just vampires. That’s all the news media is.”

“Yeah. I know. Good night, Michael.”

She headed to her bedroom before Michael could say anything else. Turk trotted after her, and when she collapsed onto her bed, he jumped on top of it with her and rested his head on her chest. She didn’t try to push him off. He wouldn’t have let her anyway.

She stroked his fur and stared at the ceiling. West’s taunting laughter echoed through the recesses of her mind. As though he were there in the room with her, she could almost hear his taunting voice crowing, “I told you I’d win, Faith.”