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needed someone else to follow through on the details of his death. No doubt the police were hard-nosed professionals who would do their job. However, I knew enough about how Chicago works to know that it also wouldn’t hurt to have someone making sure they did it right.
    I hadn’t seen Elliott in nearly six months. A former prosecutor and an ex-marine, Elliott had parlayed his legal training and connections with the city into a thriving practice as a private investigator. He’d also managed to get under my skin in a way that Stephen, with his matinee-idol good looks, never had.
    Elliott had done work for me on a number of cases; however, the most recent one had ended badly. The fault was mine, not Elliott’s. In my zeal to find the truth I’d given no thought to its consequences, which had turned out to be devastating. Unfortunately, in the emotional aftershock of its discovery I’d also come perilously close to behaving foolishly with Elliott.
    I took the stairs to the second floor of the Monadnock Building and gave my name to the receptionist. While I waited I pretended to examine the Art Institute prints that punctuated the walls, too nervous to sit down. I sensed him before I heard him call my name. So many things came back at the sight of him—the smell of his skin, the gentle pressure of his hand on the small of my back....
    Compared to Stephen, Elliott is nothing special to look at—indeed, there is an economy about him that is a direct contrast to Stephen’s swarming intelligence and extravagant good looks. A shade over six feet tall with a tousle of soft brown hair and warm brown eyes, Elliott is compactly built—good-looking without being handsome. The only thing extraordinary about his appearance is his smile, which not only completely transforms his face, but seems to illuminate the room.
    Ignoring any subtext, we shook hands and I followed him back to his office, which was large and furnished like the smoking room of a lesser men’s club. In the corner was a large telescope, new since the last time I’d been there. As Elliott took my coat and hung it up he explained that the telescope had been a gift from a grateful client who thought that turning it on the reaches of the heavens would be a welcome relief from scrutinizing the follies of mortal men.
    We settled into our places, Elliott behind his antique oak desk and I in an armchair of confessionally soft leather. Declining coffee and having serious second thoughts about the wisdom of having come in the first place, I immediately launched into an account of the little I knew about the circumstances of Danny’s death. I also filled him in about the pending negotiation with Takisawa and explained that it would leave Stephen and me little time to track the police investigation of his death.
    “The way things stand right now you’ll be lucky if there even is an investigation,” replied Elliott as soon as I’d finished.
    “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised.
    “I guess you must be too busy to read the papers,” he replied with good-natured disbelief. “But the police have their hands pretty full with this Stanley Sarrek thing.”
    Of course. Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Stanley Sarrek was the latest in a long and hideous line. How stupid of me not to have put it together. Ever since his arrest the newspapers, the media, the very air seemed filled with nothing else. It was amazing how the actions of one psychopath could cast a pall over an entire city.
    That Sarrek had been apprehended at all, much less in Chicago, was the sheerest of accidents. He’d been pulled over in a routine traffic stop. When the officers asked for his driver’s license they noticed what looked like bloodstains on the running board of Sarrek’s truck. When they made him open up the refrigerated trailer of his double rig they found the mutilated corpses of sixty-three women stored like so many flash-frozen sides of beef. It was, the media