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breathlessly assured us, a new record for a single serial killer.
    “Do you really think it will have that much impact?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
    “Are you kidding? This creep Sarrek picked his victims at random from all over the country. The cops don’t I even have a place to start. There’s no way to narrow it down. It’s even worse for the medical examiner’s office—worse than a plane crash even. At least when a jumbo jet goes down they have the passenger list to start from and some idea how everybody died. Not only that, but the bodies have been so mutilated that identification is going to be next to impossible—we’re talking body parts—and the fact that they’ve been refrigerated will make it hard to pin down any time of death.
    “Just the whole process of identifying the victims is going to take months. In the meantime, the family of every woman who’s gone missing anywhere in America in the last ten years is on the phone frantically trying to find out whether their wife or daughter is one of the ones who’ve turned up in the back of the truck.”
    “I understand that,” I replied, “but what happened to those women doesn’t make finding out who killed Danny Wohl any less important.”
    “I’m just telling you how it is, Kate.”
    “But you didn’t see his apartment,” I practically sobbed. “There was blood everywhere. It was his home and he ended up fighting for his life in his own living room and dying in a puddle of blood. What happened to those women is terrible, but it’s even worse if it keeps us from finding out what happened to Danny.”
    “So what exactly do you want me to do?”
    “Find out who killed him.”
    “You realize what that kind of investigation involves? Are you sure you really want me to do this? You’re not just acting on impulse?”
    “Of course not,” I replied. Suddenly it seemed very clear. “It’s bad enough that Danny is dead. It will be worse if he ends up the victim of an indifferent bureaucracy just because he had the bad luck to die when some homicidal psychopath got pulled over in Chicago.”
    “Why don’t we wait a little before we jump into this,” urged Elliott. “Let’s give the police a little bit of time to do their job.”
    “You said it yourself. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. They don’t have the manpower and the external pressures of the Sarrek investigation are too great.”
    “You can’t be sure of that.”
    “Oh come on! Which do you think is going to get first priority from the cops—investigating the death of a gay lawyer who was going to die of AIDS anyway or gathering enough evidence to convict the serial killer of the century?”
     
    Back at my office I asked Cheryl to bring us both a cup of coffee and shut the door behind her. There was no question about what I was going to do. Even if Guttman was wrong about what was at stake there was really no way I could say no to Stephen. Personal considerations aside, we are talking about a man who once recruited an entire twelve-man lab from NIH and moved them to Chicago over a three-day weekend. Any reservations I might have had about taking a leave of absence from Callahan Ross were sure to be quickly overridden.
    Even so I had my misgivings. I was currently billing close to 260 hours a month, a crushing load even by this firm’s macho standards, and unlike most of my partners who surrounded themselves with a cadre of ambitious associates, I preferred to work alone. It helped that I was blessed with a secretary who was smart enough to do much of the routine work I would normally shunt off to a first-year associate. For more complex legal legerdemain I relied on a brilliant lawyer named Sherman Whitehead who’d joined the firm the same year I did. Sherman was a nerd-savant whose complete lack of interpersonal skills guaranteed that he would never achieve partnership— much less meet a client. However, he was a nimble legal thinker and