To my friends, a thousand homicide detectives from at least a hundred different departments around America. For almost thirty years, I have watched them work under circumstances that most people could never imagine. When the rest of us are enjoying holidays, spending time with our families and sleeping, they are often out in the field, slogging through rain, mud, snow, and sometimes blood. They are coping with the devastation that violence can do to the human body. They come to know and care for the victims they never met in life, and they strive to find who took their lives away even if it means working twenty-four to thirty-six hours without sleep. They are skilled, dedicated, dogged, tough, perceptive, tender, inquisitive, compassionate, hard-nosed, meticulous, and sometimes even clairvoyant. We all hope we will never need their services, but if we should they will do their best to deliver justice. Yes, the homicide guys are sometimes full of black humor- but I have also seen most of them cry.

And a salute to Detective Sergeant Don Cameron, thirty years with the Seattle Police Department's Homicide Unit, on his retirement. A better homicide detective never served. And to Chuck Wright, who retired in 1999 after three decades with the Washington State Department of Corrections. Chuck has helped rehabilitate the thousands of people who have been assigned to his caseload, and he has also worked tirelessly for victims' rights.

And, finally, to the memory of Seattle Police Homicide investigators Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson, Detective Dick Reed and Detective Don Strunk.

After writing more than a thousand articles about homicide cases, I suppose it's natural that some of them blur slightly in my memory.

She is still afraid of the man who hunted humans rather than animals, and she dreads the day he is paroled.