“So the door was locked,” I say.

“Uh-huh. If whoever did it came in that way, they either had a key or picked the lock,” says Herman.

“Or maybe she let him in?” I say.

Herman shakes his head. “Not according to the paramedics. It looked like she was in bed alone. Whoever got in caught her lying there facedown. Whether the perp made noise and she woke up they couldn’t say. But the way the blankets were laid out covering the body, and the blood pattern, they were guessing she was surprised.”

“How was she killed?” I ask.

“Stabbed. Of course, they couldn’t verify that as the cause of death. But according to them it looked like she bled out.”

“Sarah, you really don’t need to be listening to this,” I tell her.

“I want to know.”

“Fine. Then please tell me you didn’t have a key to Jenny’s house.”

“No. Why?”

“I’m just checking.” Unless the police already have a primed and warmed-up suspect, they are likely to throw a wide net. They will want to talk to everybody who knew Jenny. And unless they identify another point of entry, they’ll be asking about keys and who had them. “The police are probably going to want to talk to you at some point.”

“Why would they want to talk to me?”

“You were probably one of the last people to see Jenny alive.”

“But I can’t tell them anything, that is unless you tell me what’s going on,” she says.

“In a minute,” I tell her. “Did Jenny have a boyfriend?”

“No,” says Sarah.

“Nobody she broke up with recently?”

Sarah shakes her head. “Nuh-uh.”

“Did she have any male admirers who weren’t welcome?”

“Not that I know of. She never said anything to me.”

“Go on. Anything else?” I look back at Herman.

“Yeah,” he says. “The landlord panicked when he saw the blood, called 911, and asked for an ambulance. He didn’t wanna go inside, and he couldn’t tell if she was dead. According to the paramedics, it’s not a pretty scene. Reason for the shoe impressions, there was a lotta blood. They stepped in it. Whether anybody else did or not they didn’t seem to know, or if they did they weren’t saying.”

“When you say a lot of blood, did it sound like a rage killing?”

“No,” says Herman. “That’s the problem. It’s more like whoever did it knew what they were doing. They couldn’t be absolutely certain, but according to the paramedics it looked like there were only two stab wounds.” Herman stops and looks at Sarah. “You really don’t want to be listening to this stuff,” he tells her.

“She was my friend. I want to hear it all. Every bit of it. I want to know who did it and why.”

Herman looks to me for a reprieve.

I shrug my shoulders. “She’s an adult, as she keeps reminding me.”

“You’re the one’s gotta stay up with her when she gets nightmares. Both wounds were well placed. Seems they caught all the vital organ systems. To get that much blood it’s either that or a main artery. They didn’t get a real good look at the two wounds. They weren’t doin’ a postmortem,” he says. “As soon as they confirmed she was dead, they backed out of the room and tried not to disturb anything any more than they had to. But one of ’em said the wounds looked small and narrow. It was not a wide-bladed weapon, but deep, like maybe whoever did it might have used a long-bladed shiv or a stiletto.”

Herman can tell this has my attention.

“Anything else?” I ask.

“Like what?”

“Like maybe fingerprints?”

“You mean…”

“Yeah.” My darkest dream, the one I will curl up with tonight, is that forensics will find an itinerant thumbprint at the scene, one they cannot exclude or identify.

“It’s too early.” Herman turns his nose up. “They wouldn’t have had time to pull all the latents yet and check ’em against the victim and anybody else who had regular access to the house.”

“So there’s no way to know,” I say.

Herman shakes his head. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he says.

“Wait for what?” says Sarah.

“To see if they can identify a perpetrator from the fingerprints,” I tell her.

“I see.”

Herman looks at me, round eyed, as if perhaps I should tell her.

“Oh, I am,” I whisper to him. “Got no choice now.”

“You gonna tell her all of it?” he whispers back.

“All of it, including what you and I did,” I tell him.

“What are you two talking about?” says Sarah.

“I was asking Herman if he wanted to join us for a cup of coffee in the kitchen.”

“I’d like to, but I gotta go,” he says.

“Nonsense.” I have one hand on his shoulder, steering him toward the kitchen. “Come on, Sarah, there are some things we need to talk about.”

Snyder slept fitfully on the red-eye flight from L.A. back to Chicago. By the time he arrived at O’Hare, it was five in the morning and he was exhausted. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a full night’s sleep. It was before his son was murdered, of that he was sure. Even with all the medications given to him by his doctor, a cornucopia of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, Snyder was unable to dodge the pain.

He looked down at the notepad lying on his lap-“aka Dean Belden.” The man’s photograph walking next to Jimmie was now branded on Snyder’s fevered brain. He hoped that Cole was right. If so, it was something he could feed to the FBI and perhaps harvest some information in return.

One thing bothered him. Snyder was convinced there was something Madriani wasn’t telling him. Whether it had to do with Jimmie’s murder he couldn’t be sure. The tip-off was in the needling current of inquiry directed by Cole at Madriani during lunch, her observations about the business card in Jimmie’s wallet and the thumbprint, her uptake on Liquida and the danger this posed to Madriani, and the obvious fact that the lawyer was already well aware of this but wasn’t saying anything. What else did he know that he wasn’t telling them?

It provoked questions regarding some of the background research Snyder had done on Madriani. The night before he left for San Diego he ran a couple of online news site searches and Googled Madriani’s name. Most of what came back was the usual stuff you might expect concerning a criminal defense lawyer, news on cases Madriani had tried.

But there was one item, more recent, that caught his attention. Madriani’s name popped up in connection with the attack on the Coronado naval base. This was one of those seminal events that the entire world knew about because of the blanket coverage on the cable news networks. It never rang any bells with the name Madriani until Snyder read the news articles online. At first he figured Madriani must have defended someone in connection with the case until he realized that the lawyer had been taken into custody in the shootout. When he saw this, and knowing that Madriani’s business card was found in his son’s wallet, the adrenaline began to spike in Snyder’s body. He was sure he had something. He wasted two hours reading news articles until in the end it all turned out to be smoke. Or was it? According to the FBI, Madriani and one of his employees happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were caught up in the law enforcement net after the shootout.

The second he got home, Snyder dropped his luggage inside the front door and headed for the study. The large, stately home in the North Shore area of Chicago was dark and empty. Snyder had lived alone ever since the divorce from his wife five years earlier.

He turned on the floor lamp, plopped himself down in front of his desktop, and hit the browser button.

Snyder had already hired a private investigator. Now he would feed him all of the information he had gathered on his trip to San Diego. He fired off an e-mail to the investigator, giving him the name Liquida and the term “the Mexicutioner” along with the rumor that he worked for the Mexican drug cartel in Tijuana. He laid it all out, including the thumbprint on the business card, and then typed in the name Thorn and his alias, Dean Belden. He told the investigator to gather any information he could find under the name Belden regarding a federal grand jury investigation and a floatplane crash on Lake Union in Seattle and gave him the approximate time frame for the events. Snyder told the investigator that he needed whatever information he could find, and that he needed it immediately. He told him he was willing to pay a premium by way of fees for thorough and prompt service and that he would be waiting for a reply ASAP. He hit the Send button.