William Diehl - 27 aka The Hunt

In Germany, 1933, Johann Ingersoll, star of screen and master of disguise, enjoys a sinister talent. It is one that lets him indulge a taste for cruel sex and casual murder. And one soon spotted by Hitler's brutal regime.

To the four people who love this island as much as I do:

The late, great Bobby Byrd,

my daughter, Temple,

Mark Vaughn,

and always, for Virginia

What is past is prologue.

William Shakespeare The Tempest

BOOK ONE

What other dungeon is so dark

as ones own heart!

What jailer so inexorable

as ones self.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851

The creature was a terrifying specter. A bizarre distortion, part human, part animal, this scarred, panting, wild-eyed obscenity seemed proof that all things in nature are not perfect and that even God in his infinite wisdom is sometimes capable of a monstrous blunder.

The face was a network of red, ridged scars, one of which stitched his left eye shut. The nose was a crushed lump, its nostrils flattened against a pale, cadaverous face like the snout of a pig. Thick lips revealed tortured, broken teeth which overlapped as if, in a divine afterthought, had been jammed haphazardly into the gums. His hair was a thick, blond, twisted mane that tumbled down both sides of his face, framing and accentuating its abnormalities.

His body had not escaped the ravages of natural disorder. He was short, barely five feet tall, bent over by a bowed spine, his shoulders jammed against his neck in a perpetual shrug, one foot turned inward and slanted so he walked on its side in a curious limp that lacked rhythm and cadence.

Misery permeated every pore and sinew of this tortured being.

His one good eye hinted at the angry soul encased in this crippled cage of skin and bone; a fearful gray, glittering orb, unable to conceal his unbridled hatred for the normal humans who, on those rare times when he had been seen, were so revolted by his hideous deformities that they turned their own eyes away from him in horror.

Only his arms and hands seemed to have escaped the uncontrolled genes which had molded him into a human disaster. His arms were powerful and muscular, his hands long, expressive, even delicate. And yet as if their beauty reminded him of what might have been he kept them tucked away under his armpits, making his peculiar gait even more ominous.

A night predator, he emerged only after dark to forage for food, to steal what little money he required.

And to kill.

Shrouded by a long, dark green loden coat, its hood concealing his face, he stalked the shadows, dodging the police and the brownshirts, looking for victims. His rage was such that he hunted only the most beautiful and innocent-looking women, and when he found them he killed them, disfiguring their bodies with a ragged butcher knife as if he were getting even with the fates for what they had done to him.

In this, the spring of 1932, he had butchered no less than two dozen women over a period of three years.

The Berlin police were confounded by this monster serial killer who seemed to vanish in the citys shadows. Clues were nonexistent. There was no pattern to his crimes other than the victims youth and beauty.

To everyone who read the newspapers or listened to the radio, he was now known as Der Nacht Hund, the Night Dog.

In deep shadows, Der Nacht Hund lurked ten feet above the grim, dimly lit alley that wound between the Berlin city hospital and the morgue and ended a block away at the Gelderstrasse bus stop. He had pulled himself, hand-over-hand, up into the shadows by the pipes that ribbed the alley wall. There he waited and watched as the night shift ended and the doctors, interns and nurses drifted out, jabbering as they walked to cars or down the alley below to the bus.