The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

The victims who survived these initial attacks, the ones in May and early June, before Katherine Latchford was abducted—people who had been roped and bound, prone on their bedroom and living-room floors, sometimes stripped by the figure clad in black and wearing the overlarge ski mask—said that whoever had attacked them was “weeping” when he left the residence after he had apparently been sated: a few of the attacks were sexual in nature but most were not. When the first murder happened, and the home invasions and the assaults picked up in mid-December after the long lull of a three-month hiatus, many people who survived the next wave of invasions commented that the attacker hadn’t cried at all; it was almost as if he had gained confidence, a strength, and perhaps by committing his first murder had become emboldened.