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yesterday, while you were…where were you, anyway?”
    â€œShopping for my daughter.” Stillman shrugs, because he doesn’t have a daughter, or a son, or a girlfriend, or anything in his universe except achieving his goal of ruling the world. “So this meeting you set up. Who’s it with?”
    â€œWith the victim’s family. I’ve got the father, the mother, and the victim’s boyfriend.”
    OK, probably not a waste of time. “And when is this auspicious meeting to take place?”
    â€œTuesday, three-thirty, Jackson conference room. If you approve.”
    If I don’t watch this kid, he’s going to run all over me. “OK, Stillman. We’ll take the meeting.”
    â€œThanks.”
    I point at the files. “I take it you’ve read this?”
    â€œYeah, last night.” The smile thins into an ironic line. “Should I have checked with you?” I give Stillman a warning look, and he backs off. “Sorry.”
    â€œSo tell me, Stillman. What do you make of our friend Moses Bol?”
    â€œMr. Bol’s not from around here. Maybe he grew up somewhere where rape and murder are acceptable forms of behavior.”
    Stillman’s description is understatement: Bol is from the horribly war-torn country of Sudan, and thanks to the vagaries of international politics, he and 150 or so of his countrymen are now attempting to scrape out their lives in the projects of the American South. This was a world I assumed was just as strange to him as his would be to me. “What’s the victim’s name, Stillman?”
    Stillman shuffles through the papers a second. “Tamra Hartlett,” he says.
    â€œThat’s right. We claim Bol raped her and then murdered her. What’s the basis for that assessment?”
    â€œPhone records show a seven-minute call between Bol’s apartment and the victim’s less than two hours before the estimated time of death. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen Bol and Hartlett vehemently arguing on two occasions in the days before her death. Another witness places Bol’s car in front of her apartment that night. Forensics claim that a bloody handprint on her body matches Bol perfectly. His DNA was found all over her apartment, and her blood was found in his car. His semen was found on the bedsheets and in her vagina.”
    â€œWhy was she found in a bathtub?”
    â€œWomen often try to wash off what happened to them in a rape. Hartlett ran into her bathroom, locked the door, and got into the tub.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œBol broke the door down with a heavy pedestal, splintering it into pieces. Fragments of wood were found on the base of the pedestal, and paint from the pedestal was found on the door.”
    â€œWere Bol’s prints found on the pedestal?”
    â€œHis, and only his. Bol and she struggled, and he beat her to death with the pedestal. Not before she got him once, though.”
    â€œConfirmed by?”
    â€œBol had a nice-sized knot on his own head consistent with a blow from the same pedestal he used to kill Hartlett.”
    â€œLet’s see the photos, Stillman.”
    Stillman blithely pulls out a set of horror-show pictures, including the victim collapsed in a half-filled bathtub run red with human blood. Among them is a single picture of the victim while still alive and well. Tamra Hartlett, the picture shows, is a white woman, early twenties, with sexy eyes and breast implants that are definitely not the work of Dr. Michael Sarandokos. She’s at least a EE, and her low-cut blouse leaves little to the imagination. I don’t know what kind of skinny, half-starved women there were trying to stay alive in the refugee camp Bol lived in before he came to America, but it’s a fair bet they were nothing like Tamra Hartlett. It didn’t take a genius to imagine her effect on Bol.
    â€œTamra Hartlett,” I say. “She’s a part-time dancer,