Carla Davis sits up straight, crosses her legs. Today she is wearing a red wool skirt, cut just above the knee and a white silk blouse. All three men do their very best to look her straight in the eye. “Sex Crimes will look into the tattoo freaks, as well as the guys who like it in public. If Fayette Martin was having sex in that doorway, right before she was murdered, maybe this guy has done this before, and this time it got out of hand. Also, anybody who’s shown a propensity for recreational carving.”

“That happen a lot?” Paris asks.

“You’d be surprised,” Carla says.

“Doubt it.”

“Had a guy, few years ago,” Carla continues. “Creepy crawler. He used to prowl Tremont in summer, looking in windows, watching girls undress. His thing was sneaking in after the girls had gone to sleep, chloroforming them, then carving a series of numbers on their foreheads with a hat pin.”

Paris and Ebersole exchange a glance. “And that’s how he got off?” Greg asks.

“Well, he used to masturbate while he carved. Never raped any of them. Did it five times.”

“Please tell me he’s in Mansfield now,” Paris says.

“Oh yeah,” Carla says, standing, collecting her papers. “And are you ready for what the numbers meant?”

“What?”

“It was his locker combination,” Carla says. “His damn high school locker combination.”

“Jesus,” Greg says.

“The worst part is that he’ll be out in eighteen months and there are five women walking around Cleveland with this asshole’s locker combination written across their foreheads in scar tissue.”

No one in the room feels it would be appropriate to laugh, considering the serious nature of the crime. They are professionals and they take the violation of a citizen under their watch very seriously. Laughing would be unprofessional.

So, instead, they grab their papers and coffee and cigarettes and head for the door as fast as they can.

“Are you Detective Paris by any chance?”

They are in the Justice Center lobby. It is noontime, crowded. Paris turns to see a young man of his height, nice looking. A Nikon hangs around his neck.

“By every chance. You are?”

“Julian.”

Paris arches an eyebrow, waits for more.

The man continues. “I’m sorry. Mercedes Cruz is my sister.”

“Ah, yes, okay,” Paris says, extending his hand. “Jack Paris.”

“Julian Cruz,” he says, shaking hands.

Julian is clean-cut—khakis, suede hikers, leather flight jacket, tortoiseshell sunglasses, trimmed mustache—and perhaps a few years older than Mercedes.

“Nice to meet you,” Paris says.

“Same here. I called upstairs but they told me I just missed you.”

“Yeah. They have to let me out sometimes. Union thing.” Paris buttons his coat, smoothes his hair, anticipating having his picture taken with little notice. “How’d you know it was me, by the way?”

“Believe me, my sister described you to the last detail. She’s awfully good at detail.” He unsnaps the leather case around the Nikon and holds it up. “I’ll make this as quick and painless as I can.”

“Where do you want me?”

Julian gestures to the huge windows overlooking Ontario Street. “Light looks good there.”

They walk across the lobby. Julian positions Paris, steps away, focuses, says: “You know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but Mercedes is awfully taken with you.”

“Is that right?”

He snaps a picture. “Well, maybe taken is the wrong word. It’s just that this is the biggest assignment she’s ever had. She just is glad to be working with such a professional.”

“Well, it’s my pleasure.”

Snap. “I love her very much and I hope she sets the world afire. That’s all.”

“I have no doubt she will. I hope I can help,” Paris says.

“Don’t tell her I said anything, okay? I don’t know if you’ve gotten a taste of that temper yet. She’d kill me.”

“I understand.”

“A few more?”

“Sure.”

Julian snaps a third, fourth, and fifth picture, then caps the lens. “Thanks. All done. I’ll make sure you get copies.”

Paris lies: “I look forward to seeing them.” They are near the door to the parking garage. Paris points to the garage. “Can I give you a lift anywhere? I’m heading east.”

Julian holds up an RTA pass. “West. Thanks anyway. Nice meeting you.”

“My pleasure.” Paris pushes open the door, wondering—about twenty seconds too late—if his cowlick had been sticking up on the top of his head, a tonsorial battle against gravity he has waged with his hair, on a daily basis, since he was eight years old.

The Flower Shoppe is a tan, rough-cedar-and-glass building on Caves Road in semirural Chesterland, conveniently located across the street from the LaPuma-Gennaro Funeral Home.

The sky has brightened but the day is still cold enough to make the snow crunch beneath Paris’s feet as he approaches the garland-and-ribbon-bedecked building. His breath describes small cirrus clouds of vapor before him. He opens the door and is immediately enveloped by the humid fragrances of pine and spruce and balsam.

The interior of the store is packed with seasonal flora, every surface covered with snow-flocked wreaths or huge red and yellow poinsettias. Behind the counter stands a man wearing a green apron, starched white shirt, and raspberry red bow tie, just wrapping up a sale of two large wreaths to an even larger woman. When she leaves, he turns to Paris.

“Can I help you, sir?” the man asks.

Paris badges the man. Then he notices a name tag that identifies him as Gaston Burke.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Burke.”

“This is about Faye, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t slept since I heard,” Gaston says. He is fifty, pear shaped and well tended. His hair is a dyed copper, slicked back like that of a barber from the 1930s.

Paris takes out his notebook. “How long did you work with her?”

“Twelve years or so, on and off. She came to work here right out of high school, I think. This was my parents’ store then. I worked here part time, off and on, until five years ago, when I took over the shop.”

“Was she a good employee?”

“The best,” Gaston says, his voice breaking a little. “In early, out late, always willing to come in on her day off when we were busy or if we had some kind of emergency. Three weeks after my parents died in a car accident, I had an appendectomy. Faye slept in the back room for five days in order to run the shop. Faye wasn’t just an employee, detective.”

“What else can you tell me about her, Mr. Burke?”

“I can tell you that she was a true artist. Had a real talent for floral design. Had a natural ability with orchids. These are Faye’s,” he says, gesturing to a tall, narrow glass case behind the counter. Inside are a dozen extraordinarily delicate flowers of rose, lilac, and yellow. “I can’t believe her Ladies Tresses are still alive and she is not.”

“What can you tell me about her personal life?”

Gaston thinks for a moment. He smiles ruefully. “Only that she didn’t have one. Faye was the kind of sad woman you see all the time now. Pretty woman beaten by life. Guess she got burned once, then it was check please as far as romance goes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she never really talked about it, but I always got the sense that she had had a pretty serious relationship once, and had been rather unceremoniously dumped. I guess she never got over it. Holidays would come around and I would see her usually pleasant demeanor start to slump and it would break my heart. Every year I invited her to spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family. Every year she begged off.”

Paris asks: “So no one ever came to pick her up after work some Friday or Saturday night?”

“No. Never.”

“She never came in on a Monday morning and talked about a date she might have had over the weekend?”