8
The clock radio woke Jack at nine. He lay in bed listening to the news about a murder in the Bronx and a fatal accident in the Midtown Dormen-talist temple. He shook off the memory of Jensen's dead eyes staring at him from the ceiling on the elevator ride down to the lobby and got to work.
Wearing boxers and a T-shirt, he dug out his X-Acto knife kit and seated himself at the round, paw-foot oak table in his front room. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves—man, he was going through these things like chewing gum—and got to work.
He removed the stack of Cordova's photos from the envelope and shuffled through them a second time. Familiarity did not make the task any less nauseating. Last night, while Cordova was unconscious, Jack had sorted them into three stacks: Brady alone, Brady pulling on the mask, and the masked Brady with the boys. He'd picked one at random from each of the first two, but it had taken him a while to find three from the third with the boys faced away from the camera. He'd cut off the corners where the camera had imprinted the date and time, and left them all with Cordova.
On this new pass through the stacks, Jack culled the most damning examples from each pile, then set to work with the X-Acto, cutting out the centers of the boys' faces. No need for something like this to follow them the rest of their lives. Again he cut off the camera's date-and-time imprint.
That done, he placed them in a FedEx envelope along with the letter he'd printed out from Cordova's office computer.
If you're reading this, I am dead, and this is the man who did it. Please don't let these pictures go to waste.