Stone Shadow

Dallas

Only one of the first three got a look at him. Yolanda de la Cruz never saw him. She was worrying about her long black, shiny hair looking terrible and windblown when he took her out. She was twenty-two. Formerly Miss Watermelon of Dilly, Texas, where watermelons are no joking matter, and by any standards quite gorgeous. Schlepping her books around the agencies in the Dallas area, getting a good deal of midrange work. Modeling Conventions. The usual stuff. This could be good. It was a call from MG GRAPHICS. Mark Gold to do this print thing for Patio Foods. It was one of Mark's three biggest accounts and she had her fingers crossed as always. This could be the biggie.

“Do we gotta have the window shot, honey?"

“We gotta have the window shot,” he assured her, climbing out the window and his assistant uncoiling cable and handing him the camera carefully as he squatted down on the hot rooftop. “Anything for the Patio account. Now, gimme the face, please, angel."

She stuck her kisser out the window, at which point the wind blew a hunk of the long mane into her mouth as she said, “Maaaaarrrrrrrk! AAAAHHHH. SPAAAAAWWWW.” Spitting hair out and Mark fighting back a laugh as the young assistant left the corridor heading for the rest room, and the spitting sound the last audible noise Yolanda de la Cruz—workname Yolie Dale—would make prior to the moment of her neck being snapped. She was thinking a thought, cursing cocky little Mark Gold and his queen assistant and trying to spit the hair out of her lovely mouth when she felt herself unhinged. Yes. Unhinged. Dislocated. And suddenly her brain was feeding the oddest signals to her body, and her eyes were seeing from the strangest perspective as she blacked out and the killer picked her up as if she weighed five pounds instead of ninety-five and hurled her through the open window, which is all Mark Gold saw—a blur of woman flying out at him like Supergirl—and he was going out of control hitting the guardrail and both of them going out in space as he grabbed for something, screaming, and his scream as they plummeted off the roof what the assistant heard and moments later he came running out of the rest room and, Where was everybody, and he stuck his blow-dried head out the window and screamed, “Hey!” just as the killer flung him across the roof like a sack of potatoes and he glimpsed the face of the man as he flipped over the guardrail ass over pudding pot, arms flailing, a scream trapped in his throat as his heart gave up the ghost and he cashed in as it were in midflight.

The jogger out by the lake north of Dallas, Linda Wilson, twenty, a pre-med honey going to Baylor—she was number four and she never got a glimpse of the man as he came out from behind the bushes like a snake, soundlessly and smoothly, gliding in behind her panting, hard-breathing footfalls, and instantly blinded her with shock waves of pain and flung her off the edge of the cliffs that were so conveniently near the jogging pathway. The killer loved the feel of throwing someone from a height, the power of seeing them plunge to their death. So reassuring.

The MG GRAPHICS tragedy was assumed to be an awful accident. Everybody knows how these photographers take such chances. It was just terrible, though, the three of them all falling off that roof like that. And there was no reason to ever autopsy Linda Wilson. It was a case of a foolhardy and adventuresome girl who was far too daring for her own good. Everybody said so. And she just got too near the edge. Wrong to be out jogging alone like that anyway. Her body was found crushed on the stones below, but no reason to suspect anything since there was no visible sign of assault or molestation. Just a bad, awfully tragic accident. Pure coincidence that two of the victims had been young and pretty females. Just the breaks.

But the rest of the seventeen random kills and twenty-two assorted missing-persons cases appeared to be without logical connectives. The number—thirty-nine—had a terrible feel to it.