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dancing along with the strings that dictated his actions from high overhead. This feeling of being at the will of others could nearly paralyze him at times. Secretly he wanted to believe that he stood behind the wheel of his own ship.
    As he glanced at the folder, it was not the name GERALD OBRIGHT LAWRENCE that caught his attention but instead, the two letters that preceded the booking number, SC—Sex Crimes. Had Dart not ignored the evidence gleaned late in the Ice Man investigation, evidence that confirmed the Ice Man was in fact the serial rapist dubbed the Asian Strangler by the media—for his Asian victims—then that file too would begin with these same two letters.
    But he had chosen to ignore the evidence for the sake of a precious friendship. Sergeant Walter Zeller’s wife had been viciously raped and murdered by the elusive Asian Strangler, and the evidence discovered by Dart irrefutably identified the Ice Man as the Asian Strangler. With the very real possibility that Zeller had cleverly avenged his wife’s brutal killing, but with absolutely no concrete evidence supporting this, his partner and protégé had chosen to let the evidence slide, electing not to put Zeller through an ordeal that ultimately could not be proven anyway.
    And now, like the great white whale resurfacing, this folder brought the Ice Man back.
    Dartelli, file in hand, navigated his way out of booking and down the hall to CAPers. He examined the opening pages of the report.
    Gerald Lawrence had been detained seven times on suspicion of sexual molestation of minors; he had been arrested and convicted only once, late the previous year. Having served five months of a four-year sentence, he had been released and paroled on probation eleven weeks earlier.
    Lawrence had hanged himself four weeks later.
    Dartelli stared at the file. A suicide. A sex offender. His best ideas rarely came to him in flashes of brilliance, instead seeping into him as a trickle, a faint voice that suddenly, for reasons unknown, gained in both volume and clarity. As he sat before this file, he asked himself, 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.”
    “Why?” 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?
    “That jumper last week. Everyone’s talking about how hot and bothered you were by it.”
    “Everyone?”
    “Sam 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