He smiled to himself.

Plus, what was there to steal?

No cash. No jewelry. No art. No portable electronic items.

Any self-respecting crook would have found significantly easier and considerably more valuable pickings elsewhere. Hell, the corner bodega probably had more than a thousand bucks in a metal drop box, and a useful twelve gauge on the shelf beneath the register. It would be a far more inviting target.

But ripping off a corner store junkie-style wasn’t what he had in mind. O’Connell looked around. What did this building have that was valuable?

He grinned again. Information.

The key to his adventure that night was to make sure the information he was seeking wasn’t quite what anyone would expect.

O’Connell took his time picking the lock to Murphy’s office, and when he finally let himself in, he was alert to possible secondary security devices, such as a motion detector or a hidden camera. As the door swung open, he pulled a thin balaclava over his head. The high-tech garment, designed to keep someone warm on some windy ski slope, covered everything except his eyes. He gritted his teeth, half-expecting to hear an alarm.

When he was greeted with silence, he could barely contain his delight.

Maneuvering cautiously through the office, he took a moment to assess what was there. He wanted to laugh.

There was a threadbare waiting room, with a desk for the secretary and a cheap, lumpy couch and armchair and a single inner office, where Murphy did business. A more solid door guarded this, and more than one dead-bolt lock.

O’Connell hesitated, reaching out with his hand to the doorknob, then stopped. He thought to himself, The cheap bastard probably has whatever security system he thinks he needs right in there.

He turned away and looked over at the secretary’s desk. She had her own computer station.

Sitting himself down at her chair, he clicked on the computer. A welcome screen came up, followed by an access prompt, demanding a password.

He took another deep breath and typed in the name of each of her dogs. Then he tried a few combinations of the two, blending them unsuccessfully. He considered possibilities for an instant, then smiled as he punched the keys for Pug Lover.

The machine whirred and clicked and O’Connell found himself looking at what he presumed were almost all of Murphy’s case files. He scrolled down and found Ashley Freeman. He fought off the urge to open that one instantly. Holding himself back would increase the pleasure. Then he systematically began going through every other file on the secretary’s machine, lingering on more than one occasion on the provocative digital pictures stored alongside some of the cases. Carefully, he began to copy everything onto some new rewritable computer discs that he had purchased. He did not think that he was getting everything that the ex-detective had on his own computer. Surely, O’Connell thought, Murphy had to be smart enough to keep some material concealed where only he could access it. But for his purposes, he had more than enough.

It took him a couple of hours to finish. He was a little stiff, and he stepped away from the secretary’s desk and stretched. He dropped to the floor and quickly did a dozen push-ups, feeling his muscles loosen. He went over to the inner door to Murphy’s office. He reached inside his duffel bag and removed a small crowbar. He made a couple of desultory efforts, scratching the door’s surface, digging into the wood, before giving up. Then he went over to the secretary’s desk, pried open the drawers, and tossed about the contents, strewing paper, printer cartridges, and pencils around the floor. He found a framed portrait of the two pugs, which he dropped, shattering the glass. As soon as he felt that enough of a mess had been made, he left, locking the door behind him. As soon as the dead bolt slid into place, he once again took his crowbar and broke out the doorjamb, leaving splinters of wood throughout the area, and the door ajar.

Next he went over to the counseling office and broke in there, using the same bash-and-batter technique. Once inside, he ransacked drawers and file cabinets quickly, spreading as much debris around as he could in a few minutes.

He went back down the stairwell and did the same to the attorney’s space. He tossed open file cabinets and dashed papers around the floor. He jimmied open the attorney’s desk, finding several hundred dollars in cash, which he stuffed into his duffel bag. He was about to leave when he decided to take a single whack at the drawers on the paralegal’s desk. She would probably feel left out if he didn’t trash her space as well, he thought, laughing to himself. But he stopped when he saw what was resting in the bottom of the last drawer.

“Now what’s a good girl like you doing with one of these?” he whispered.

It was a.25-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Small, easily concealed, a favorite of hit men and assassins because it was already quiet when fired, and because it was easy to fit with a homemade silencer. When loaded with expanding-head bullets in the nine-shot clip, it was more than adequate for the tasks it was designed for. A lady’s gun, unless it was in the hands of an expert.

“I’ll just be taking you along,” he hissed. “Did you get a permit for this? Did you register it with the Springfield police? I’m guessing you didn’t, honey. A nice, illegal street gun. Right?”

Michael O’Connell slipped the weapon into his bag. A most profitable night, he thought, as he stood and looked at the mess he’d made.

In the morning, the office manager in the counseling center would call the police. A detective would come and take a statement. He would tell them to go through their things and determine what was stolen. And they would then conclude that some half-fried junkie had broken in, looking for an easy score, and, frustrated by how little there was to steal, had resorted to angrily throwing things around. Everyone would have to spend the day cleaning up, calling in a couple of workmen to repair the ripped doors, a locksmith to install new locks. It would all just be an inconvenience to everyone, including the attorney and his lover, who sure as hell wouldn’t report the loss of an illegal gun.

Everyone, except Matthew Murphy, who would determine that his extra locks and heavy door had saved his office. He would first congratulate himself, conclude nothing was taken, and probably wouldn’t even bother to call his insurance company.

All he would do would be to buy his secretary a new frame for her pictures of her dogs.

A cheap frame, at that, O’Connell thought, as he exited into the night.

The chief investigator for the Hampden County District Attorney’s Office was a slight man in his early forties, with tortoiseshell eyeglasses and sandy-colored, thin hair that he wore disarmingly long. He promptly placed his feet up on his desk and rocked back in a red leather desk chair as he looked intently across the room toward me. He had an off-putting style that seemed both friendly and edgy at the same moment.

“And so, it is Mr. Murphy’s death and our subsequent failure to bring the investigation to a respectable conclusion that has brought you here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I presume that a number of different agencies ultimately looked at the case, but if anyone had been close to an arrest, it would have been your job to steer that case through the system.”

“Correct. And we did not indict anyone.”

“But you had a suspect?”

He shook his head. “Suspects. That, in a nutshell, was the problem.”

“How so?”

“Too many enemies. Too many people who would not only be served by his death, but a significant number of folks who would genuinely be pleased. Murphy was killed, his body tossed into an alleyway like a piece of trash, and there was more than one glass around this state raised in celebration.”