Tomorrow’s Victims

Not the dead, of course. The word prefer belonged to a category of thought she would never have tolerated in a report. What she preferred was clarity. Six magnetic frames on the whiteboard in room 4B, five ID photographs, and, in the middle of the bottom row, an older photograph of Kara Bloom, twenty-six, missing for nine years. Beneath each face, a strip of paper: name, date, last verified location. Nothing else.

An imprisoned serial killer remembers victims who are still alive here.