Photographing the Dead (Nameless: Season One, #2)

by Dean Koontz

Sometimes a girl who doesn’t like guns is nevertheless obliged to carry one if she’s got any common sense at all.

Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not. “Veronica,” she says, referring to another waitress, “says you look dangerous. But the girl has zero spirit of adventure.” “Good for her,” Nameless says. “Girls who want a little danger in their lives will end up with a lot of it.”

Should a monster who has no mercy be accorded mercy at his end? Civilized men say yes. But perhaps it’s hard specimens like Ace who make civilization viable in the first place.

In fact, Palmer has no friends. No one does. Friendship is an illusion, like love and compassion. Palmer’s true identity is Death, Death incarnate, and Death has no illusions.

Fewer still realize that the National Security Agency, at its one-million-square-foot data center in Utah, preserves a record of everywhere every GPS vehicle has been.

Justice is often in the eye of the beholder; what is justice to some can look like injustice to others. Justice can be politicized, but truth cannot; truth is what it is.

Rarer is the serial killer whose father was once governor of a major state and is currently a US senator.

“Of all wildlife, mule deer fawns are the safest newborns, ’cause during their entire first year, they don’t produce a scent by which a predator might find them.”

“Nevertheless, we both know that career prosecutors of high ambition and a grand jury of easily manipulated fools can destroy the innocent as easily as they can destroy the guilty.”

Concerning people who commit the most terrible crimes, he does not believe in second chances or the possibility of rehabilitation. For them, he doesn’t believe in pity or mercy. He believes in hungry mountain lions and the right recompense for the suffering of all the little animals.