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leave her.
    Once he was back out on the sidewalk again, Bill walked quickly down the three blocks to where he’d left his car the night before. He was opening the door when his cell phone rang. His eyes still weren’t working quite right. He hadn’t been sleeping much more than five hours a night since meeting Emily, and while his earlier caffeine fix had helped to knock some of the fuzziness off his brain, he still needed another dose badly. He had to squint hard at the Caller ID before making out that a T. Roberson from Arlington was calling him. He didn’t know any Roberson, but seeing Arlington made him think it might’ve been one of Gail Hawes’s neighbors. Frowning, he grunted out a greeting over the phone, his voice at that early hour working about as well as his eyes.
    “Bill Conway?” a man answered. “ Tribune reporter? I’m Thomas Roberson, Gail Hawes’s attorney. If you’ve got a few minutes I’d like to meet with you.”
    That woke him up faster than if he had dunked his head into a gallon of iced black coffee. “I’ve got a few minutes,” he said, his voice tightening up in the cold air, and not much better than the grunt he’d given earlier.
    They arranged to meet in a half hour at Roberson’s office in Arlington. It was a quarter to eight then. Bill called Jack and found him at his desk, which was what Bill expected. He explained to the city desk editor about his phone call and told him that he would be in late that morning.
    “Interesting that he wants to meet with you,” Jack commented.
    “Yeah, it is.”
    “Hmm. Quite an opportunity falling in your lap. I’d have to think a reporter worth his salt would be able to get him to divulge what’s been going on with client.”
    Bill smiled at that. A hard smile. “Yeah, well, I guess we’ll soon see what I’m worth,” he said.

Chapter 8

    Bill is thirteen when he finds his mom dead in their Astoria apartment. He had been hanging out with his buddies after school playing basketball, and when he enters the apartment he feels the stillness of it and knows something isn’t right. When he calls out to his mom there’s no answer. At this time of the day his mom should’ve been in the kitchen preparing dinner and she should be yelling back to him asking what he’s been up to. He takes several steps into the hallway before he sees his mom’s body laying crumpled next to the small dining room table his parents had set up off the living room. From the way her body lays twisted he knows at some level what has happened, that she’s been murdered, but he’s in shock and his brain refuses to process the information.
    When he tries desperately to shake her back to life, he sees the damage that was done to her, but he can’t accept it. Her tongue thick and blue as it pushes out of her mouth, her dead eyes blind and bulging from their sockets, her skin ghastly white. And then there are all those deep ugly purplish marks along her throat and the side of her neck. It isn’t right for her to look like that. Alive she had such a gentleness and softness about her. Her voice, her manner, the way she’d smile at Bill when she’d kiss his forehead, even when she’d embarrass him by doing it in front of his friends. It just isn’t right for her to be left the way she was. When Bill finally accepts that his mom is dead—that someone had choked the life out of her—it’s as if his chest is made of tinfoil and has been crushed by a fist. He collapses alongside her body and sobs helplessly. Sometime later a neighbor enters the apartment and pulls him away. He has cried himself out that day, and hasn’t cried again since. It’s as if there’s nothing worth crying about in life after that had happened.
    Later he spends hours being questioned by the police, mostly about his dad and how his parents got along. When he answers their questions it’s with shrugs or one word monotonic responses. He knows what they are trying to get at—whether his dad