Means. The killer used a knife. I don’t know what kind, but I’d be willing to bet it was something ordinary. Something anybody could easily purchase.

What else did I say to him? I’m not thinking clearly these days. I haven’t been thinking clearly for months. I try to focus back to that conversation and come up with fuzz.

On the other end of the phone, it’s dead air. “James” is actually considering telling me, I think. That’s more than I expected. More than Go fuck yourself or Use your imagination.

“What evidence do I have against you? Just some souvenirs I collected from you,” he says. “Nothing you’d miss. Remember, Jason, you left me alone in your office for a few minutes.”

I move in my chair. The office around me comes alive, as if animated, no longer a place where I work but a crime scene of sorts. And now I remember another piece of advice I gave him during that conversation.

I told him that someone framing him would leave clues at the crime scene, things that belonged to James, or some trace evidence from his house or workplace.

He’s right, too. I remember now, during our meeting, taking a trip to the men’s room so I could pop an Altoid in private.

He stole things from my office and planted them at the crime scenes. Nothing too obvious, like a piece of my office stationery, or the police would already be at my door. But something effective. Something with my fingerprints, or better yet my DNA. Strands of my hair off my couch in the corner. A water bottle I drank out of. A pen—

Oh, shit.

A pen cap I chewed. It comes back to me now, a white-hot blast up my spine. I’d been chewing on a cheap Bic pen while we talked. I refused to use that nice pen my brother had given me, refused to waste expensive ink on “James Drinker,” so I went with the cheap Bic.

And I couldn’t find that pen when I returned to the office.

He took my fucking pen. It would have bite marks and saliva. He could make good use of that. The story would be that it fell out of my pocket during a struggle. Nothing I would have noticed, while I was butchering poor Holly Frazier or Nancy Minnows or Samantha Drury. The cops would do a DNA search and come up empty, because my DNA isn’t in the system. But if someone handed them the name Jason Kolarich, it would be a simple matter of obtaining a DNA swab from my cheek and pulling my dental records, and suddenly I have a lot of explaining to do.

And that’s probably not all. I spend half my life in this office. I wipe my nose, I sleep on the couch, I have extra shoes and ties. Hell, he could have emptied my wastebasket into his bag while I was out of the office. There could be ten used tissues for him to strategically place. He could have ripped the label off one of my extra ties hanging on my door, something that wouldn’t mean anything to the police—until they got my name, searched my office, and found a tie with a missing label.

It could be anything. Anything anything anything—

But I’ll never know what he took. I’ll never know.

“If the cops find me, I give them you,” he says. “Maybe directly, or maybe anonymously. If you find me and kill me, I have a last will and testament that will direct the authorities to a safe-deposit box filled with all sorts of fun facts about you. It will be a step-by-step guide to the prosecution of Jason Kolarich.”

“I will find you,” I say. “And I’m going to kill you.”

“You might. But I doubt it. But here’s the thing, Jason. There’s one very easy way to stop the murders of these poor women. Turn yourself in to the police. Pitch your story to them. It’s totally up to you. Maybe you’ll be able to talk your way out of it.”

Maybe so. But I’d bet everything I own that he’s lined up enough evidence against me that I couldn’t talk my way clear.

“So the ball’s in your court,” he says. “Are you willing to risk your ass to save innocent young women?”

47.

Jason

Tuesday, July 2

I pick up Alexa on my way home. She has two suitcases and a bag with her, plus her stenography equipment. When we get to my house, she unpacks everything, hanging dresses and blouses and pants in the second bedroom’s empty closet, lining the floor with shoes of all kinds. She puts lingerie and underwear in two of the drawers in the bedroom dresser. She puts makeup and toiletries in the master bathroom.

She’s moving in with me. Neither of us has said so out loud, and even if we did, we’d recognize it more as an act of necessity than a progressive step in our relationship—I’ve begun joking that I should introduce Alexa not as my girlfriend but as my “alibi”—but none of that changes the fact that she’s moving in with me.

“You doing okay?” she asks as she rearranges some things in one of the dresser drawers while I sit on the bed. “How do you feel physically?”

“I’m fine,” I say. Which is true, unless you count the dull pain over my eyes, or the incessant itching on my hands and forearms. Or the fact that I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in three months. Or my stomach, which is about as volatile as democracy in Egypt.

A clearheaded man might think that his body is telling him something. But clarity of thought is not something with which I have a lot of experience lately. I’m trying. Lord knows, I’m trying, because I need to get ahead of my murderous client, and I’m miles behind. I feel like I’m running in place. I feel like I woke up in a strange place, unsure of how I got there and not sure how to find my way back.

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” Alexa asks me.

“Shit, I’m always thinking about him.” I’ve been checking the Herald online on an hourly basis, looking for any updates on the investigation or any word of another murder committed by the North Side Slasher.

“Did you get your list of old cases to Joel?”

“Yeah. This morning. For what it’s worth.”

“It’s not worth much?”

“I can’t possibly go back and retrieve all the cases I worked on. We don’t have a system like the PACER system in federal court, where cases can be sorted by attorneys’ names. We don’t have that.” I fall back on the bed. “Do you have any idea how many cases I handled? From cattle-call courtrooms when I started, to juvenile and abuse-and-neglect cases that are now sealed? Arraignments and bond hearings I handled before turning the cases over to older prosecutors for trial? The major crimes I prosecuted, yeah, I can remember a decent number of them. But the rest? There’s no record. And they all blur together for me. And here’s the best part: He might not be any of those guys. He might be a friend of a guy I prosecuted, or a brother. I’d—I’d have better odds trying to guess the winning lottery ticket tonight.”

“Oh, it can’t be that dire.” She closes up a drawer and looks over at me. “Since he’s such a violent person, it was probably a big-deal crime you caught him doing. Probably not a traffic violation, for example. Right?”

She’s right, of course. And luckily for me, the really violent cases are the ones I remember best. “But most of the time I spent prosecuting violent crimes was in the gangs unit,” I say. “And this guy who came to visit me didn’t look like a member of the Tenth Street Crew or the Insane African Warlords or the Columbus Street Cannibals.”

“Okay, well, still. Anything you can do to narrow it down. And you said it’s likely to be someone who was recently released from prison?”

“That’s where Joel’s starting, with violent ex-cons released in the last year,” I say. “It’s the obvious place to start. But . . .”