Knives are beautiful.

Take this one, for instance. It is ten and three-quarters inches long, a bowie type, similar to that beautiful Randall-made knife he’d had to leave in Richmond. This knife, though, had been made not by the legendary Randall, but by a young Idahoan named Reinhold Messer. He’d bought the knife from Messer himself, a long-haired full-bearded bear of a man who’d sat behind his table at a knife show in Provo, Utah, and showed off his creations with hands as gently expressive as an orchestra conductor’s.

All of Messer’s knives were beautiful, but he’d liked this one the best. It is heavy, you could hammer nails with the butt end, but its balance is so perfect it feels weightless in the hand. More, it feels like part of the hand itself.

Its grips, the half-round slabs on either side of the handle, are made of Micarta, a resin-based material favored by knife makers because they deem it superior to natural materials like wood and stone, ivory and oosik. (They use these materials, too, and he has seen grips of rosewood and rare tropical hardwoods, of malachite and lapis lazuli, of elephant and walrus and mastodon ivory, and of oosik, which is the name, Inuit in origin, for the bone in the penis of the walrus. Who even knew such a thing existed? Investigate any area thoroughly, he is delighted to observe, and you will acquire all manner of arcane knowledge.)

A knife like this, he believes, is artisanship of the highest order, with form always following function, and beauty growing out of the synthesis of the two. The blade itself continues past the hilt to the very butt of the knife, a single piece of steel, with the part above the hilt known as the tang. (Who would guess there was a word for it, and a lovely word at that.) This particular blade is made of Damascus steel, which means not that it was imported from Syria—it was made right here in the good old U. S. of A.—but that it was produced by a venerable process that probably originated in Damascus, of bending a piece of steel back upon itself, hammering it flat, bending and hammering, over and over, until the resulting blade is almost infinitely layered, with the layers showing in the finished knife like the wood grain on a hardwood tabletop. Each Damascus blade is unique and each is beautiful, but the purpose of the process is not beauty but strength; every time the piece of steel is hammered and hardened and folded and hammered again, it grows stronger and more durable. The beauty grows out of the functionality, and who wouldn’t want to own that sort of beauty? Who wouldn’t want to wield it like a baton in his hand, to wave it like a wand, like the épée of a fencing master? Who wouldn’t be proud to wear it on his belt and stride down the street with it?

Who wouldn’t yearn to draw it smoothly from its sheath and across a throat?

He’s used it twice, and one time he did in fact cut a throat with it. It was surprising, too, because it was as if it happened without his willing it, as if the knife acted on its own.

He remembers the occasion well, although it’s sometimes difficult to place events in a time frame. This was in southern Colorado, in a town called Durango, and he never lived there, never even spent an entire night there. He was passing through, and he stopped for dinner, and the waitress, who brought him first a welcome glass of Scotch on the rocks and then an equally welcome blood-rare steak, flirted with him in a manner that seemed aimed at more than a good tip. He flirted back, and told her she looked a little like a movie star, if only he could remember the name. It was, he assured her, right on the tip of his tongue. Stick out your tongue, she said, and maybe I’ll be able to see it.

He asked her what time she got off work. Ten-thirty, she said, and told him to wait for her at the far end of the parking lot, because she didn’t want anyone knowing her business.

He was in cowboy mode, dressed in boots and jeans and a western shirt with snaps instead of buttons, and it seemed natural to wear the knife on his belt. He waited for her in his car and followed her back to her trailer, where he fucked her to their mutual satisfaction and fell asleep at her side. He woke up after an hour and found her sleeping, her bottle-blonde hair spread out on the pillow, her jaw slack. She was snoring, and her breath smelled. He’d never told her the name of the actress she reminded him of—of course there was no such actress—and he thought now that she wasn’t very pretty, although she’d been a good enough sexual partner. He could stick around for a while, if only to find out what she would and wouldn’t do. He had no place to go, and this town was probably as good a one as the next to spend a few days or a week or a month.

He reached for his pants, and his hand brushed the sheathed knife, and it was as if the knife decided. Because the next thing he knew the knife was in his hand, its unsheathed blade resplendent in the light of the bedside lamp. If she’d turned off the light before she passed out, if he hadn’t seen the light glinting off the beautiful knife blade, if she weren’t lying on her back, giving him such a good look at her pale throat…

Did she even feel the knife? He drew it across her throat in one fluid motion and the flesh offered no resistance at all. It was like cutting warm butter. Her eyes fell open, but never saw anything. The light was already gone from them.

He dressed and left, and by the time the sun cleared the horizon he was a hundred miles from Durango. He’d cleaned up after himself in a limited fashion. He’d left his seed in her, so there was nothing to be done about that, and no point in worrying about hairs and trace evidence when he’d already provided them with a good DNA sample. Much luck to them, a small-town police force with the nearest competent lab where, in Denver? They were welcome to his DNA, they could store it in a test tube on a shelf in some back room, and what harm could it do him? None unless they arrested him, and that wasn’t going to happen.

He wiped away his fingerprints. That was enough. No one even knew he’d been to Durango, much less that he’d picked up the waitress. Anyone who’d watched her would have seen her get in her own car and drive off. No one could have noticed him pull out and drive off in her wake.

He’d paid cash for his meal. He hadn’t even bought gas in Durango. No trace of him in the town, except for a few cc’s of semen in a dead girl’s vagina.

Besides, he had an alibi. It wasn’t he who did it. It was the knife.

Online, he visits his newsgroups. There is, he’s pleased to note, a flurry of activity on the subject of Preston Applewhite. Several of the newsgroup’s more devoted participants have been following the coverage in the Richmond paper. Human remains have been unearthed from the private cemetery of an abandoned farmhouse, and preliminary evidence suggests strongly that the Willis boy has indeed been found.

There’s no end of speculation. Did Applewhite, unwilling to admit his crimes, arrange for someone to speak for him from beyond the grave? Did he have a confederate—one theorist calls him an unindicted coconspirator— who’d participated in his crimes? Was Applewhite in fact part of a long-rumored satanic cult?

The newspaper has reproduced a portion of the e-mail he’d sent them, along with his signature, and one newsgroup member has been quick to pick up on Abel Baker. “You younger types won’t know this,” he writes, “but these are the first two letters of the old phonetic alphabet. Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox …Can anyone remember the rest?”

Someone of course can and does, and someone else chimes in with the modern replacement, beginning with Alpha and Bravo. And another party wonders when exactly Alpha Bravo etc. replaced Able Baker, and someone supplies a date which someone else challenges, and the thread rapidly degenerates into a discussion of the relative merits of the two alphabets, and the implication of the change in terms of the evolving role of the military.

He exits the newsgroup, Googles his way to the Times-Dispatch’s website. He reads everything he can find on the story, including an editorial calling for a review of the whole notion of capital punishment, and an op-ed piece taking an opposite tack and arguing that the process should be streamlined, so that less “time for mischief” separate the imposition of sentence and its execution. Neither piece, it seems to him, is a masterpiece of rational thinking.

He reads on, and yes, some enterprising reporter has determined that Applewhite had a visitor before he died, that he spent more than a few hours during the several days before his death with one Arnold Bodinson. They’ve gone and anglicized the first name, he notes, probably having heard Arnie for Arne and opted for a more formal version, but surely they’ll correct that in the days to come. Dr. Bodinson is identified as a prominent psychologist affiliated with Yale University, and the coincidence of his initials matching those of Abel Baker has not escaped attention. No doubt the earnest chaps in the newsgroup will have something to say on the subject as well.

Efforts to reach Dr. Bodinson have thus far been unsuccessful, the reporter states. And are doomed to remain so, he thinks, but tomorrow’s paper should hold the revelation that Yale University has never heard of Arne Bodinson, or Arnold either.

Now won’t that be interesting?

He thinks of Reinhold Messer and wonders if that, like Arne Bodinson, is a nom de guerre. It seems almost too good to be true, as Messer is the German word for knife. Messer certainly conformed to the militia–Aryan Brotherhood archetype, and if his name at birth had been, say, Cuthbert Lavender, a name change would seem inevitable.

He has looked for Messer on the Internet, but the man doesn’t have a website, and hadn’t even provided a business card. You can look for me at shows, he’d said, which suggested a life lived off the books. Not so with the man who made the other knife he owns, an owlish boy-man named Thad Jenkins, called Thaddy by his colleagues. Jenkins specialized in folding knives, finding their manufacture more of an engineering challenge. ’Sides, he’d drawled, wasn’t anybody couldn’t find a use for a pocketknife.

From Thaddy’s array of folders, he’d selected a beauty, almost six inches long when closed, and about the same length as Messer’s bowie when open. While it was neither a gravity knife nor a switchblade, its mechanism and balance were such that a simple flick of the wrist, quickly learned, would open it, whereupon the extended blade would lock securely in place.

He turns it over in his hands. The grips are a tropical hardwood of exceptional density, with a color like pecan and a very close grain. It’s as smooth as glass, and quite beautiful, and over time the oils from his hand will burnish the wood and only make it more beautiful.

Of course he may not own it long enough to see that happen. Things come in and out of his life. I came like water and like wind I go, he wrote once, on a basement wall, quoting Omar Khayyám but attributing the line to Aubrey Beardsley. And didn’t most things come like water, and go like wind? For some time he’d worn a disc of mottled pink rhodochrosite, for clarity, but he’d had to leave that behind in that very basement. But by then he’d internalized the mineral’s properties and didn’t need it anymore. Then he’d taken to wearing an amethyst crystal, for immortality, and it too was long gone, and he couldn’t even recall what had become of it. But he’d internalized the special properties of the amethyst as well.

Would he live forever? Well, really, who was to say? But look at all the people he’s already outlived…

He flicks the knife and the blade leaps from its casing and locks into place. The blade is slender, half the width of the bowie’s, and the knife overall weighs no more than a third of its bulkier fellow. Do knives have gender? In a sense they’re all masculine, all sharpened phalli. But if one were to regard some as male and others as female, it’s easy to see Messer’s creation as bluntly masculine, Jenkins’s folder as graceful in its femininity.

The man, Scudder, the more difficult quarry, would fall to the sturdier weapon. It is Scudder who deprived him of the house on Seventy-fourth Street. He has long ceased to care about the house, he knows he never really wanted it in the first place, but that’s beside the point. It is Scudder, too, who made him leave New York. He’d had a thriving practice, he’d had a house full of people who loved and revered and, yes, needed him, and he’d had to stab them all dead and burn the house down around them. And yes, it was thrilling, sacrificing those men and women, but that too was beside the point, for it was Scudder who’d left him no choice but murder and flight, and Scudder who would pay for it.

Scudder was an ox, a brute. A bull, really, and he’d fight him as one would fight a bull, tricking him with a flourish of the cape, then dispatching him with a single thrust of the Damascus steel blade.

The folder will do for the woman.

And a far more serviceable tool it will be than the elegant bit of bronze he’d left behind on Jane Street. It had been poetic, surely, to buy from one woman what he’d used to kill the other, and it had done what he’d required of it, opening a hole to let out life as efficiently as it had ever opened an envelope. But this folding knife of Jenkins will do more, and do it with grace.

And she knows, he’s sure she knows. Not how or when, but only that he’s coming for her. Her shop, a sign in her window proclaims, is closed until further notice. Her answering machine carries the same message. Closed until further notice.

Closed for All Time, it might better say. Closed until Grand Opening under New Management.

Her knowledge will make her wary. Thus she’ll be a more elusive quarry than her friend Monica (who was really almost too easy) but she won’t elude him forever. He’ll find a way. And he has worlds of time.

He holds the knife, so light, so graceful, so feminine in its supple elegance. He works the catch that allows the blade to close, then flicks it open. Supple indeed, elegant indeed, but sturdy. According to the man who made it, it is more than equal to the task of skinning out big game.

There’s a thought. Perhaps he’ll flay her. Skin her alive, with her eyelids taped open and a mirror positioned so that she can watch, and her mouth taped shut to stifle her screams.

The image delights him, so much so that he can’t sit still. Before he leaves Joe Bohan’s apartment, he folds the knife shut and drops it in a pocket. It is, after all, a dangerous city. One would be well advised not to walk its streets unarmed.