This is gonna be a hella long post. so yes, please be patient if you want to read it. I am copying word by word from the book.

The eight-millimeter film flapped around the reel a few times before rolling out to leave a blank white screen. Nobody said a word, even after a few moments. Dead silence filled the room.

Not that you could blame them.

Tom Riggins scanned the faces gathered before him. A few minutes before, they were pumped. Excited to be called to the fabled Special Circs division at Quantico for this hush-hush meeting, all expenses paid. Some of them acted like they didn't give a , but Riggins could tell. The curiosity was killing them. He was counting on it.

And a few minutes before, they were like schoolkids, before a midterm exam. Focused. Determined to succeed. But now...

These were not just cops or forensic scientists. The people gathered here were the best of the best, and they'd been summoned by the most elite law enforcement division in the country. But to Riggins- a man in his fifties with the lean, hard muscle of an ex-middleweight champ- they were a bunch of doe-eyed kids, some even bearing the faint traces of acne scars. This was nothing new. Everyone in Special Circs had started looking ridiculously young in the early 1990s, when momentum took over and Riggins realised he'd be a Special Circs lifer. 

"You've just watched the handiwork of Sqweegel," Riggins said, "He's a psychopath who has shot, , maimed, poisoned, burned, strangled, and tortured upwards of fifty people in six countries over a span of more than twenty years."

Two decades, Riggins thought. The monster had started his work when some of the people in this room were still stuffing lunch boxes in book bags for their first day of school. He continued.

"Sqweegel is a very patient killer. He takes his time between targets and expends an almost inhuman number of hours preparing. We only see his homework after he's struck. In some cases, the prep work stretches back months."

Riggins scanned the room. They apeared to be listening- or at least they nodded at the right times. But he could tell they were still thinking about the piece of film they'd just watched. Some of them even blinked rapidly, as if their eyelids could wash the images from their retinas. 

Good luck with that, kids.

Special Circs had been born out of the justice department's ViCAP - violent criminal apprehension programn - in the mid 1980s. The public knew all about ViCAP, a computerized think tank that attempted to track and compare serial killings. Cops and investigators everywhere could use ViCAP as a resource. But there were certain cases that no city police department- or even the FBI - was equipped to handle. Wanted to handle. 

That's when they flipped up to Special Circs. 

Riggins knew better than anybody else that the burnout rate here in Special Circs was stunning - agents lasted anywhere from 48 hours to 6 months, tops. A spectacularly "long" run might be considered a year ot two, but tht usually ended in suicide, solitude or sedation. You don't bounce back from Special Circs into another career, you bounce into survival mode.

Special Circs was the little known division that floated below the radar of the american public. Few newspapers covered Special Circs cases. They don't make TV specials about them. Their cases don't come up at cocktail parties in L.A, the beltway or Manhattan. They work cases most citizens never heard about, would never want to hear about, and certainly did not want to think possible. 

If they did, they'd never leave the house.

Not that they'd be safe at home. A high percentage of the really twisted stuff happened behind front doors all over the country. Like the husband who found out his wife were running around with an old college boyfriend, then took a golf club and impaled her with it, from cavity to throat. The lab guys marveled at the sheer muscle it took this guy to force the steel rod through her entire body, past tough muscle and bone. 

Then there was the fifteen-year-old meth head who searched everywhere in his house for his copy of Vehicular Homicide, the video game that he would play for hours on end to offset his tweaking. The kid looked and looked and looked; no game. Then his grandparents got all intervention on him, told him that they threw away that horrible game for his own good, and that he was going to a special place near the beach that would help him. The kid left the room, then returned with a power drill and proceeded to irrigate their ear canals, one at a time- right through a hearing aid, in the case of his grandfather, a korean war vet. You're not hearing me; you never listen to me, he reportedly screamed at them as their blood and brain tissue rained down around him.

Riggins could list cases all night. The body parts in fruit jars. The pregnant slaves in the pit. The in the baby diaper.

This was all stuff nobody in their right mind wanted to think about for more than a few seconds.

The was the stuff he thought about all the time.

He lived for the dark side of man.

But this case at hand, and this snuff film they'd just watched... 

Well, he could almost understand the silence.

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i finally typed finish, tell me what you think of it.