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Coincidence? His chest tightening, he sensed someone behind him and spun around in his chair.
    Abby Lang stood about five foot seven. She had square shoulders, a delicate neck, soft eyes and full, high breasts. She wore ordinary clothing, but it didn’t look ordinary on her. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, stealing a peek over his shoulder.
    He told her no, she was not interrupting.
    She handed him a second file, this one from CAPers, his own division. It too was marked with Lawrence’s name. “It was Kowalski’s case,” she informed him. “Lawrence’s suicide. But I keep the Sex Crimes files locked up, and I thought you might want to see it.”
    â€œWhy?” he asked, the guilt seeping into him. Did she know about the Ice Man? he wondered. Had she connected the Ice Man to the Asian Strangler investigation?
    â€œThat jumper last week. Everyone’s talking about how hot and bothered you were by it.”
    â€œEveryone?”
    â€œSam Richardson. She said you took it pretty hard.”
    Dartelli knew the truth. Roman Kowalski, the hairy-chest-and-gold-chain detective who drove a red Miata and bench-pressed two-ten, was loathed by nearly every woman on the force. Abby Lang was leaving it for Dart to see the connection between the two suicides: the investigating officer.
    Turning back to the file, he offered for her to pull up a chair, which she did.
    Lang saved him the trouble of reading. “Gerald Lawrence was known in his neighborhood as Gerry Law. He hanged himself from a ceiling light fixture using a length of lamp cord. He left a note that read quite simply, ‘I can’t live with my crimes. Forgive me.’ There was no booze found in his blood workup, and though half an ounce of pot was discovered in the apartment, there was no THC in his blood at the time of death, and no indication of foul play. Place was locked from the inside, Kowalski closed the case with little more than writing up the necessary reports, although it took him a couple of days to do so.” She sounded a little annoyed by this.
    Dartelli allowed as how any CAPers detective would have acted in pretty much the same way; suicides cleared quickly.
    â€œListen,” she confessed openly, “this is the kind of thing I celebrate. A known piece of shit takes himself out. Saves me time and energy. Five months on a five-year sentence? That’s justice?” she asked angrily. “But it was a suicide, and it was investigated by Kowalski.”
    â€œMeaning?” If she had evidence to support that Kowalski had somehow mishandled the investigation, then it was a case for Internal Affairs, not CAPers, not him.
    She didn’t answer his question directly. “Gerry Law worked the young girls in the neighborhood. Befriended them. Got them to trust him. Obtained a promise of secrecy. And then the horrors began. He took his time with them to make sure he could count on their secrecy—broke them in slowly. Kept some of them for several years. Took photos and videos. Sold some of them, used the photographs to blackmail the older ones: ‘You wouldn’t want your mother to see this.’ Pure slime. Discarded those over fourteen. We had some mothers who suspected someone in the neighborhood, but couldn’t find a witness. He had them all too well trained.”
    â€œYou knew but couldn’t do anything?” Dartelli asked incredulously.
    â€œSuspected,” she corrected. “This kind of abuse is often first noticed in the bathtub at home or at the doctor’s office. It’s insidious because it’s not always that obvious, depending on the act. A doctor has to know what to look for. Parents—mothers in particular—are often the worst: They don’t want to believe what they see. Happens all the time.”
    â€œBut you busted him,” Dartelli recalled. He leafed through the CAPers file, studying the photographs of the hanging.