It was only when she attacked him where he was most vulnerable ... in his work ... it was only when she sneered at the novel she had once praised and returned it to him with blue-pencilings that made him no longer want to go on living ... it was only then that he decided that he could endure no more, and that only her death would set him free. Chapter V Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to coast by hundreds of millions of copies. He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember. He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was always a shock to him. Every time he saw a beautiful white body stretched out cold on a mortuary slab he remembered how he'd fainted at the sight of the first one, twenty-five years in the past when he'd been a young rookie. Just fallen to the floor and passed out, the way medical students sometimes do when they first have to dissect a cadaver--the organs are put in separate trays, each neatly labeled--and even experienced, case-hardened surgeons when an operation is especially sanguinary ... like on the human eye, for instance. He'd read that somewhere, and he didn't doubt it, not for a moment. Well ... there was no danger of that happening to him now. He'd seen too many of the really gruesome ones, and the badly marked up ones, and the "floaters" with no fingerprints left to identify them by, every vestige of flesh dissolved away by weeks in the water, and ... the beautiful unmarked ones who were in some respects the most tragic of all. He had watched many of them carried away in baskets, feeling angry and resentful but forcing himself to remain calm, refusing to let the photographers and print men suspect that he was dying himself a little inwardly, and had kept right on dying, inch by slow inch, across the years. His hair was white now and his face a little more heavily lined than it should have been, but otherwise it didn't show on the surface. In some of them he had sensed a strange kind of peace--like a hand reaching out to touch him from beyond the grave; cool, steady, no longer feverish. But over most of them there still seemed to hover a penumbra of violence, a crying out for vengeance and retribution, a protest that even death could not wholly silence.