Afterward, I return to the office and look at the stack of files in the corner that Shauna has given me for the Arangold trial. She identified a particular aspect of the trial—a fight over the flooring that was put in the civic auditorium—for me to handle. I need to read some depositions and go over some architectural drawings with the client, but my mind starts to wander on page one. I hate working on this case, and I haven’t even started yet.

I light a match, hold it upright, and run through the words again:

I’ve got tar on my feet and I can’t see.

All the birds look down and laugh at me.

Miss again—this time my index finger getting in on the fun with my thumb, the flesh near the knuckle. The match goes into the Styrofoam cup with the others.

I’m thinking about this meth-head client, whom I got through the public defender program—the PD outsources its overflow; the hourly rate sucks, but it keeps you busy and sharp. This kid has been in and out of rehab twice, done two stints inside, and is undoubtedly looking at a third stay in both. He’ll fail rehab almost assuredly and find himself back under the spell of that drug, and next time he might shoot somebody else instead of his own foot. There are so many clients like that, especially in the drug world, for whom you have the feeling you’re just a temporary stop on a merry-go-round that will end only when they’re dead or sentenced to serious time.

Sometimes this job sucks. It doesn’t help that I feel like shit, out of sorts, my head ringing like the old rotary phone hanging on the wall in my house growing up, plus I have the fucking dry mouth again. I chew an Altoid and chug half a bottle of water.

A half hour later, Joel Lightner waltzes in and I’m feeling better. At my request, Joel had drinks with one of the cops investigating the stabbings of those three women on the north side. He likes to do that anyway. It’s good for business to keep his former colleagues on the police force happy. A private investigator needs lots of favors, and it’s easier to call one in if you’ve bought the cop a steak and a night full of whiskey.

I already have printouts from the Internet, mostly Herald articles, on each of the three murders, but I’ve read enough media accounts over the years on things I’ve been involved with—the public corruption case against Senator Almundo, the gubernatorial scandal, my prosecution of six members of the Tenth Street Crew for the torture-murder of a witness—to know that reporters only rarely get the story right, and almost never complete. They pick and choose what is relevant and sensational, no different from writers of fiction.

Alicia Corey, age twenty-six, was a stripper who was last seen leaving her club at about two-thirty in the early morning of Wednesday, May 22. She was found dead the next morning in her apartment, the victim of “six or seven” stab wounds. There was no sign of forced entry; police believe she was accosted outside her apartment and the assailant forced his way in, presumably at knifepoint.

Lauren Gibbs, twenty-eight, was a bank teller who also ran a website design business out of her home on the north side. She was found dead of “multiple” stab wounds at her house on Friday, May 24. None of the articles on Lauren mentioned the number of wounds.

And then Holly Frazier, twenty-seven, a graduate student at St. Margaret’s downtown and a barista at Starbucks, found dead of “at least half a dozen” stab wounds near midnight on Friday, June 7.

I put down the papers I’ve printed out. Hard to discern a pattern when all you have is media reports. The police have not even confirmed that they believe these murders are related. But they haven’t denied it, either.

Joel helps himself to a chair and uses my desk for a footrest. “Turns out one of the main cops working this case is Chris Austin’s nephew.”

I don’t know who Chris Austin is. Probably a cop Joel worked with before he turned to the lucrative career of private investigation.

“Nice kid, the nephew. Vance is his name. Guys must give him shit for that. Anyway, I didn’t get Vance, but I got one of the uniforms assisting on the task force who loved talking about the stuff. He spilled all he could for me and probably a little more. The kid can drink Scotch.”

I roll my hand for him to get to the punch line.

“What’s with your hand?” he asks me. “You smashing it with a hammer?”

“I don’t have a hammer.”

He sniffs the air. “You’re lighting matches in here?”

“Keeps me awake,” I say. “When I get bored.”

Joel shakes his head, like I’m not making any sense, but that it’s not the first time he’s felt that and it’s not worth pursuing. He’d be right about all of that, especially the last part.

“Anyway,” he says, “these three murders are definitely the same offender. All three women—Alicia Corey, Lauren Gibbs, Holly Frazier. Right?”

“Right.”

“He butchered them. Not just clean stabs. It was like he gutted them. Enjoyed it. Real violent. Angry guy, this offender.”

“Anything else connecting them? Any suspects?”

“None he mentioned. But there was one other thing,” he says. “This guy has a signature.”

“A signature beyond gutting them like fish?”

“Yeah. Something else. Don’t know what, though. That’s where the lid came down. I mean, that’s going to be real hush-hush, right?”

I nod. If the offender has some signature to his murders, the cops will usually keep that information out of the press. It makes it easier to distinguish real confessions from bogus ones, the crazies who want to take credit for crimes they didn’t commit.

“He didn’t give any hint? Anything at all about this signature?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. I wouldn’t ask. Guy could lose his badge over that.”

True enough. “And what about the three women? Any pattern to them?”

He blinks his eyes no, a quiet shake of the head. “All pretty young. ‘Nice-looking,’ he said, but not bombshells or anything. Well, the one was a stripper at Knockers. He said she was pretty hot. Nice figure, fake boobs.”

That was the one James Drinker said he dated. He got very defensive when I doubted that a stripper would be interested in him.

“Actually, what this uniform said was, she used to have fake boobs. Sounds like our offender was pretty vicious with that knife.”

I shudder. Did the freaky redheaded guy who sat in the same chair Lightner is sitting in do those things to those women? Lightner’s eyes catch mine. We’re thinking the same thing.

“You want me to look at your client now,” he says. “James Drinker.”

I nod my head. “At least check out that he’s being straight with me. Name, address, work, that kind of thing. And obviously, you’ll be happy to do this free of charge.”

“Obviously. All of a sudden, I’m a candy striper.” Lightner makes a face, but he knows I need this. I’m his best client, too.

I reach for the file that Marie opened for James Drinker. The informational sheet is always appended to the left side of the open file. I take a look at the sheet, and it looks weird immediately.

“This doesn’t look like his handwriting,” I say. “This looks like a woman’s handwriting.”

I buzz my intercom. “Yes, Your Highness?” Marie squawks. She knows I don’t have a client in here, thus the attitude.

“James Drinker,” I say. “The weird redheaded guy? His info sheet looks like a woman’s hand—”

“That’s ’cause I wrote it for him. He said he sprained his hand or something and he couldn’t write it himself. So he dictated the information to me.”

I stifle the easy smart-ass reply—You take dictation?—and hang up.

“Okay,” Joel says. “James Drinker. Give me the sheet.”

“James Drinker, 3611 West Townsend. No phone number listed. No phone number?”

“That’s Townsend and Kensington,” Joel says. “Not a nice neighborhood. That’s—I know that building. There’s an apartment building at that intersection.”