LITMIR.BIZ

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embarrassed, averted her eyes. “Candace.”

      “A girl named Candy is a candy vendor? Is that destiny or just a good sense of humor?”

      She blushed. “I prefer Candace. Too many negative connotations for a…a heavy woman to be called Candy.”

      “So you’re not an anorexic model, so what? Beauty comes in lots of different packages.”

      Candace obviously had seldom if ever heard such kind words from an attractive and desirable man like Roy Pribeaux.

      If she herself ever thought about a day when she would excrete no wastes, she must know that he was far closer to that goal than she was.

      “You have beautiful eyes,” he told her. “Strikingly beautiful eyes. The kind a person could look into for years and years.”

      Her blush intensified, but her shyness was overwhelmed by astonishment to such a degree that she made eye contact with him.

      Roy knew he dared not come on to her too strong. After a life of rejection, she’d suspect that he was setting her up for humiliation.

      “As a Christian man,” he explained, though he had no religious convictions, “I believe God made everyone beautiful in at least one respect, and we need to recognize that beauty Your eyes are just…perfect. They’re the windows to your soul.”

      Putting the cloud of cotton candy on a counter-top holder, she averted her eyes again as though it might be a sin to let him enjoy them too much. “I haven’t gone to church since my mother died six years ago.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that. She must have died so young.”

      “Cancer,” Candace revealed. “I got so angry about it. But now…I miss church.”

      “We could go together sometime, and have coffee after.”

      She dared his stare again. “Why?”

      “Why not?”

      “It’s just…You’re so…”

      Pretending a shyness of his own, he looked away from her. “So not your type? I know to some people I might appear to be shallow—”

      “No, please, that’s not what I meant.” But she couldn’t bring herself to explain what she had meant.

      Roy withdrew a small notepad from his pocket, scribbled with a pen, and tore off a sheet of paper. “Here’s my name—Ray Darnell—and my cellphone number. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

      Staring at the number and the phony name, Candace said, “I’ve always been pretty much a…private person.”

      The dear, shy creature.

      “I understand,” he said. “I’ve dated very little. I’m too old-fashioned for women these days. They’re so…bold. I’m embarrassed for them.”

      When he tried to pay for his cotton candy, she didn’t want to take his money He insisted.

      He walked away, nibbling at the confection, feeling her gaze on him. Once out of sight, he threw the cotton candy in a trash can.

      Sitting on a bench in the sun, he consulted the notepad. On the last page at the back of it, he kept his checklist. After so much effort here in New Orleans and, previously, elsewhere, he had just yesterday checked off the next-to-last item: hands.

      Now he put a question mark next to the final item on the list, hoping that he could cross it off soon.

      EYES?

       CHAPTER 6

      HE IS A CHILD of Mercy, Mercy-born and Mercy-raised.

      In his windowless room he sits at a table, working with a thick book of crossword puzzles. He never hesitates to consider an answer. Answers come to him instantly, and he rapidly inks letters in the squares, never making an error.

      His name is Randal Six because five males have been named Randal and have gone into the world before him. If ever he, too, went into the world, he would be given a last name.

      In the tank, before consciousness, he’d been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading. Once brought to life, he had continued to learn during sessions of drug-induced sleep.

      He knows nature and civilization in their intricacies, knows the look and smell and sound of places he has never been. Yet his world is largely limited to a single room.

      The agents of Mercy call this space his billet, which is a term to describe lodging for a soldier.

      In the war against humanity—a secret war now but not destined to remain secret forever—he is an eighteen-year-old who came to life four months ago.

      To all outward appearances, he is eighteen, but his knowledge is greater than that of most elderly scholars.

      Physically, he is sound. Intellectually, he is advanced.

      Emotionally, something is wrong with him.

      He does not think of his room as his billet. He thinks of it as his cell.

      He himself, however, is his own prison. He lives mostly within himself. He speaks little. He yearns for the world beyond his cell, beyond himself, and yet it frightens him.

      Most of the day he spends with crossword puzzles, immersed in the vertical and horizontal patterns of words. The world beyond his quarters is alluring but it is also…disorderly, chaotic. He can feel it pressing against the walls, pressing, pressing, and only by focusing on crosswords, only by bringing order to the empty boxes by filling them with the absolutely right letters can he keep the outer disorder from invading his space.

      Recently, he has begun to think that the world frightens him because Father has programmed him to be afraid of it. From Father, he has received his education, after all, and his life.

      This possibility confuses him. He cannot understand why Father would create him to be…dysfunctional. Father seeks perfection in all things.

      One thing gives him hope. Out in the world, and not far away, right here in New Orleans, is another like him. Not one of Father’s creations, but likewise afflicted.

      Randal Six is not alone. If only he could meet his equal, he would better understand himself…and be free.

       CHAPTER 7

      AN OSCILLATING FAN riffled the documents and case notes—held down by makeshift paperweights—on Carson’s desk. Beyond the windows, an orange sunset had deepened to crimson, to purple.

      Michael was at his desk in the Homicide Division, adjacent to Carson’s, occupied by much of the same paperwork. She knew that he was ready to go home, but he usually let her define the workday.

      “You checked our doc box lately?” she asked.

      “Ten minutes ago,” Michael reminded her. “You send me out there one more time, I’m going to eat a get-small mushroom and just stay in the doc box until the report shows up.”

      “We should’ve had the prelim autopsy on that floater hours ago,” she complained.

      “And I shoulda been born rich. Go figure.”

      She consulted photos of cadavers in situ while Michael watched.

      The first victim, a young nurse named Shelley Justine, had been murdered elsewhere and dumped beside the London Street Canal. Tests revealed the chemical signature of chloroform in her blood.

      After the killer rendered her unconscious, he killed her with a knife to the heart. With exquisite precision he removed her ears. A peptide profile

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