He was such a handsome man, and unlike the rest of his body, this part was unmarred by violence. She wasn’t going to insult the poor bastard by saying he looked peaceful in death, but she could say he looked relieved. After all the pain that had been inflicted upon him, she could imagine he had welcomed the moment of death. With the crime scene well-documented, she felt free to reach up and unstrap the gag from the back of his head and pull it away from his rigid mouth. “You know what we have here, don’t you?” a voice asked behind her. Regan looked over her shoulder at her partner, JoJo Mathers, an African-American woman several years her junior. “A serial killer.” “Mmm hmm,” the woman replied through tight lips. Her gaze was fixed on the victim, thirty-eight year old Joseph Xavier Bennington, III. As she stood, Regan looked at the man, too. He lay face down, covered in nothing except welts, cuts, and a large quantity of his own blood, on his massive and stylish bed. The killer had tortured him with a variety of as yet unknown devices for hours, by the coroner’s estimation, before neatly castrating him.
