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sarcastic comment, but before Thorne could unleash it, one of the uniforms, a young sergeant named Johnson, stood and waved for Forsythe’s attention.
    “Captain, it’s Reilly, he says it’s a priority!” Johnson ran to Forsythe and handed him a phone.
    “Forsythe,” Forsythe barked into the phone. He listened for a minute. “Are you sure, are you absolutely fucking sure? Good. Sit tight, you’ll be hearing from us.”
    Forsythe tossed the phone back to Johnson, stood up on a chair and whistled to get the attention of everyone on the floor. Heads popped up from cubicles everywhere.
    “All right, everyone, we just had the break we were waiting for! That was the lab. They got something on the body parts found in Central City, the remains of the Moeller girl. They found a pubic hair belonging to an African-American male!”
    An excited murmur went through the room. Forsythe swiveled to Hairston.
    “Norm, who was that black guy we liked in Kearney?”
    “Carl Mitchell, convicted sex offender,” Hairston replied. “He’s the only African-American we looked at, a part-time truck driver, no alibis for many if not most of the abductions. We interviewed but he lawyered up and we had nothing solid to hold him on.”
    “Now we do. Get on the horn, I want him picked up pronto, I want warrants for his house and DNA sampling, I want it matched with the hair we found and I want him in the box and spilling his skeevy guts out! Let’s go!”
    Forsythe jumped down and grabbed his jacket as everyone in the room started moving all at once.
    “You’re making a mistake,” Thorne said as he casually made another move on his chessboard.
    “What was that?” Forsythe practically skidded to a stop.
    “I said, you’re making a mistake, he’s not your guy.”
    “How do you know?” Scroggins asked.
    “The Iceman is white, not black. No black man had anything to do with this.”
    “Oh shit, here we go again!” Forsythe slammed his jacket down. “What is it with you fucking feds, anyway? Why do you always think that it’s a white guy doing the serial killing?”
    “Primarily because the men we have been catching at it always seem to be white,” Thorne retorted. “Not only that, I’ve been here all day and I haven’t even seen a dark-haired person, much less a dark-skinned one. How many black people do you even have in this state, anyway?”
    “Two point eight percent of the total population,” Kane offered, grateful for her earlier research.
    “Two point eight percent? You want to tell me that in a state with less than three percent black people in it, a black man is somehow going to be able drop into different small towns where everyone is white as Casper the fucking Ghost, waltz in and waltz out with a young white girl under his arm and NO ONE, not a neighbor, not a gas station attendant, not one person reports a stranger with a dark face? Come on.”
    “We have a goddamn pubic hair from a black man!”
    “I don’t doubt that you do, but said pubic hair did not come from the nether regions of the Iceman. There will be some other explanation.”
    “I can’t believe I’m going through this fucking bullshit again,” Forsythe pointed his finger at Thorne. “Look, Slick, I remember this guy Mitchell, I sweated him on the box when we first brought him in four months ago, he’s guilty, I don’t care what color he is, he’s guilty, I could smell it on him. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got our killer in our sights,” Forsythe picked up his coat again.
    “Which one?” Thorne asked.
    “What?” Forsythe stopped.
    “Which killer do you have in your sights?”
    “What the fuck …”
    “Uh, Captain,” Simms found his voice again, “Agent Thorne has reason to believe that we are dealing with two subjects here.”
    “What? What is this happy horseshit?”
    “Agent Thorne believes …”
    “You have two separate serial killers at work here. One of the jokers is masking his kills to make them look like