He heard a noise in the bedroom and turned to look. Heather was up on her knees. She had managed to free her right wrist and was now trying to loosen the cords around her ankles. She wasn't having any success. She was unsteady, swaying.

Blackburn went to her. "I can do that," he said.

She looked up at him and tried to say something, or to scream. All that came out was a moan.

Blackburn wiped his hands on his shirt. It didn't help. His shirt was wet. "This is mostly his," he said.

Heather looked away as Blackburn untied the cords around her ankles. When she was free, he tried to help her up, but she pulled away and got off the bed on the other side. She stumbled into the hall.

Blackburn pulled the top sheet from the bed. The apartment was cold, and he thought Heather should cover herself. He went into the hall and saw her step over Roy-Boy's body. She didn't seem to notice it.

He followed her into the kitchen and turned on the light. Then he draped the sheet over her shoulders, and she didn't even glance at him.

He saw that she was no longer the Heather who had slept with him, and he knew that he was responsible. For the first time in his life, he was horrified at himself. Not for what he had done, but for what he had failed to do. In that failure, he had become an accessory to torture and rape. Killing was not always murder, and stealing was not always a crime... but torture and rape were absolutes.

Heather lifted the receiver from a wall telephone and pushed 911. Blackburn heard the dispatcher answer the call, but Heather didn't put the receiver to her ear. She stared at it as if trying to figure out why it was making noise.

"Let me," Blackburn said. He reached for the receiver.

Heather jerked it away, then hit him in the face with it.

His eyes filled with tears. The receiver had struck his nose hard. "Let me talk to them," he said. "You're hurt. You need to go to the hospital."

Heather dropped the receiver and yanked the telephone from its wall jack. The sheet fell away, and Blackburn saw the red lines that her wounds had left on it.

She swung the telephone and hit his head. Then she hit him again, and again. The telephone clanged, and the receiver bounced on its cord, thunking against the floor.

Blackburn backed up against the refrigerator and then stood there, letting Heather hit him. He should never have begun stealing for a living. That moral slip had led to the next one, and that in turn had led to this. So he would take his punishment. It was the only punishment he had ever received that made sense. "I'm sorry," he told Heather. She had become a blur. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

The telephone clanged. Heather began to grunt with each clang, and then to shout. There were no words. Only the voice of her rage.

Blackburn heard it and knew it was just. He slid to the floor. The tiles were like cool water against his cheek.

And so the State of Texas took him, and healed his face, and charged him with rape and murder. He let the rape charge stand. Murder, however, he could not accept. He had killed, but he had never committed murder. This went double in the case of Roy-Boy.

His court-appointed attorney said that this was not a suitable defense.

Homicide investigators from across the nation came to Houston to question Blackburn, but he was only able to help two of them. Most of the others were trying to track down serial killers of women, and Blackburn had nothing to tell them about that sort of thing-except to say that there were a lot of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out there, and he should know, having killed a number of them.

Then the State of Texas charged him with murder again.

He was told that on the night that he and Roy-Boy had met, there had been a woman in the bedroom from which Roy-Boy had emerged. Blackburn had not known of her existence because she had been sick in bed for a week. She had been the sister of the apartment's other occupant, the woman who worked the night shift at Whataburger.

The sick woman had been tortured, raped, and killed.

And since Blackburn admitted that he had been in her apartment on the night of her death, he was accused of the crime.

Blackburn was astonished. "I've never killed a woman," he told his interrogators.

"Yet you've confessed to raping a woman," one of them said.

Blackburn shook his head. "No. What I confessed to wasresponsibility for that rape. And I won't let you use that as grounds to blame me for something else." He turned to his attorney. "You have to make them see my point."

"What point is that?" an interrogator asked.

Blackburn looked at him.

"One sin," he said, "is more than enough."

VICTIM NUMBER NINETEEN.

The rape charge and one of the murder charges were dropped in April when Heather announced that she would not testify against Blackburn. It had taken her three and a half months of therapy and hypnosis, she said, but now she had grasped the reality of what had happened on the night she was attacked: Blackburn had not been her rapist, but her savior. While he had arrived too late to stop the rape, he had prevented the rapist from killing her. In order to do that, he'd had no choice but to kill the rapist. It had been justifiable homicide.

Blackburn read Heather's statement in theHouston Chronicle over and over again. His first thought was that she was overlooking some basic facts-such as that he should have killed Roy-Boy a week earlier, and that he had broken into her apartment in Roy-Boy's company. But then some of her words began to resonate in his brain.

"While I might wish that Mr. Blackburn had acted sooner," she said, "I cannot condemn him for not having done so. He is only human. He did the best that he could."

That was the key. Blackburn had fallen short of perfection... but no one was perfect. To be human was to fail, and Blackburn could not escape his own humanity. So if Heather was willing to absolve his sin, he had to be willing to forgive himself for committing it.

The State of Texas, however, was peeved. To make up for the charges it had lost, it added a new rape charge to the remaining murder charge.

This p.i.s.sed Blackburn off.

"I didn't kill that woman," he told his attorney, "and I didn't rape her either. I didn't even go into the bedroom. I didn't even know she was there."

"I believe you," his attorney said.

Blackburn found no comfort in that. "It doesn't make sense. They've known all along that she was raped before she was killed, so if they were going to charge me with it, why didn't they do it when they charged me with her murder?"

"Because the physical evidence didn't support it," his attorney said. "The tests showed that the rapist had a different blood type."

"Roy-Boy's."

"Yes. But now the prosecution will argue that you and he committed the crime together-that you also raped her, but didn't e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. You see, even though there's no physical evidence, the jury's likely to believe you did it just because the state accuses you of it. And that'll help the prosecution push for a conviction and a capital penalty on the murder charge."

"But there's no evidence for the murder charge either," Blackburn said.

The attorney looked down at his notes. "Well, there's no physical evidence," he said. "But you've already confessed to killing a man in Goodland, Kansas, in 1981, and another in Kansas City in 1982. You haven't been charged with those crimes, but the prosecution will make a big deal of them anyway.Furthermore, you've admitted to being in the murdered woman's apartment on the night she was killed, and the police found a homeless man who'll testify to seeing you enter the premises within fifteen minutes of the time of death. That's close enough for a jury."

"But I didn't enter with Roy-Boy," Blackburn said. "He went in through a window in the back, where the woman was. Didn't anyone see him?"

"Apparently not. But even the state admits he was there, so that's the route we'll take during the trial.

We'll try to make the jury believe that he did it, and that you entered the apartment several minutes later."

"Well, that's what happened," Blackburn said.

"I believe you," his attorney said.

This time Blackburn not only found no comfort in the statement, but heard that it was a lie. His instincts told him that if he was going to get out of this mess, he would have to do it himself. This time, he would listen to them.

The hearing on the new rape charge took place on Wednesday, May 14, 1986, Blackburn's twenty-eighth birthday. His lawyer arranged for him to be allowed to wear a suit and tie instead of jail fatigues, but he was transported to the courthouse in handcuffs and leg shackles. His lawyer was not allowed to accompany him in the van.

He sat on a wooden bench in the van's rear compartment. Three Texas Department of Public Safety troopers serving as guards sat on a bench across from him. They wore cowboy hats and mirrored sungla.s.ses. They reminded him of Officer Johnston.

"You know that needle they stick in your arm," one of the troopers said. "Supposed to be painless, but it ain't."

Another trooper nodded. "It's as big around as a garden hose."

"Sometimes they have to dig for twenty or thirty minutes to find the vein," the third trooper said.

Blackburn watched them. They were pretending to be talking to each other, but their message was for him.

"Personally," the first trooper said, "I wisht they hadn't gone to the needle at all. It hurts some, but not enough. Not as much as this boy hurt that woman he killed."

"I've never killed a woman," Blackburn said.

The troopers turned toward him. Their mirrorshades reflected his face six times. The van went over a b.u.mp, and the reflections jiggled.

"Shut up, boy," the second trooper said. "Don't speak unless you're spoken to."

"You were speaking to me," Blackburn said.

The third trooper reached across with his rubber baton and jabbed Blackburn in the stomach. Blackburn saw it coming and tensed his muscles for it, then doubled over to make the trooper happy. "Don't puke on them shiny shoes," the first trooper said. "The judge won't like it."

"Judges frown on puke," the second trooper said.

Blackburn sat up and smiled.

"Wipe that grin off," the third trooper said, "or I'll give you another politeness lesson. You hear?"

"Yes," Blackburn said. "Thank you."

The troopers glanced at each other-or seemed to; it was hard to tell with the mirrorshades-and then laughed.

" 'Thank you,' " the first trooper repeated. "Ain't that polite?"

"Polite as Sunday school," the second trooper said.

"Why you thanking us, boy?" the third trooper asked.

"For giving me a reason," Blackburn said.

"A reason for what?" the first trooper asked. Blackburn said nothing.

The van stopped in a tunnel under the courthouse, and the troopers hustled Blackburn to a courtroom where the third trooper took a set of keys from his shirt pocket and removed Blackburn's handcuffs and leg shackles. That was another concession that Blackburn's attorney had won for him. It was to be the last one.

The hearing was quick. Blackburn's attorney protested the rape charge, but the judge let it stand. Since Blackburn was to be tried for murder anyway, the judge said, the state might as well kill two birds with one stone and try him for rape at the same time. If the charge had no merit, the jury could say so. Bail was denied. Blackburn's attorney sighed and said nothing more.

Five minutes later Blackburn was in handcuffs and shackles again. Five minutes after that he was back in the van with the three DPS troopers, waiting on the driver and shotgun rider. The driver and shotgun rider had not expected to be needed again so soon, and had gone to the courthouse cafeteria. One of Blackburn's troopers called them on a walkie-talkie, but they replied that it would be a few minutes before they could return to the tunnel.

The troopers didn't seem to mind.

"Tough break in court today," the first one said in mock sympathy.

"Guess you won't be raping anyone else," the second said.

"I've never raped anyone," Blackburn said.

The third trooper jabbed him with the baton again. This time Blackburn didn't double over.

"I've never raped anyone," Blackburn repeated, "and I've never killed a woman. Men, yes. But never awoman."

"How many men?" the first trooper asked.

"Just so we know how scared we should be," the second said.

"Eighteen," Blackburn said. "So far."

The troopers laughed.

" 'So far,' " the third one said. "Whoo, this boy's a mean one."

"You remember them all, do you?" the first trooper asked. "Every man you killed, every way you did it?"

"Yes," Blackburn said.

"Well, h.e.l.l, enlighten us," the second trooper said. "We got time. Who was your first one? A cripple in a wheelchair?"

The troopers were chuckling. They thought Blackburn was a psychopathic freak who needed to hurt women to feel strong. They didn't believe he had killed any men.

Blackburn stared at his six reflections. "The first one," he said, "was a cop."

The troopers stopped chuckling.

"It was my seventeenth birthday," Blackburn said, "eleven years ago today. It was even a Wednesday.

He was the city cop of my hometown in Kansas. He shot a dog on the steps of the Nazarene church, so I took his gun and killed him. The gun was a Colt Python with a four-inch barrel." He nodded at the third trooper. "Like the one in your holster. Most people with three fifty-sevens have Smith and Wessons, but I was always glad to have a Colt."

"There's nothing wrong with Smith and Wessons," the first trooper said.

"h.e.l.l, no," the second said.