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binder he’d been carrying under his arm on the table. “It’s the murder book for one of the old cases I’m working on.” He’d never even mentioned a murder book before, let alone put one in front of me. We both stared at it for a moment before he invited me to have a look.
    I’d become a bit of an amateur sleuth and happened on a number of bodies, but I wasn’t prepared for the photos. I guess I’d been lucky, the bodies I’d encountered hadn’t been that gory. I gasped at the photo of a man’s body sprawled in a pool of blood.
    “That’s from a murder five years ago. There were no suspects and it seemed like a home-invasion robbery gone bad. The guy worked at a liquor store. He did a lot of deliveries. The girlfriend said he didn’t have any enemies, and that all the customers liked him and sometimes invited him to join the events he’d delivered for.”
    Part of me wanted to close the book and go inside. But I couldn’t stop looking at the photograph. I noticed a band of skin on his wrist that was lighter than the rest of it. “It looks like they got his watch,” I said.
    Barry smiled. “Very good, babe, I mean, Molly. The girlfriend said he’d recently gotten a fancy watch. She wasn’t very good about listing what was missing. She thought some household goods had also been taken. The only thing she did say was that something had happened to change things for the guy. He had never given her details, just that he’d recently had some kind of uptick in his life. And that he’d also recently purchased a gun.” I gazed at the picture again and noticed something odd on the carpet. It looked like a plastic juice bottle, but there was black tape around the mouth and the bottom seemed to be missing. There was a plastic number next to it, I knew they used to mark evidence. I asked Barry about it.
    “The original notes described it as a homemade silencer,” he said. I knew very little about guns and even less about a silencer. Barry was only too happy to answer when I asked about them.
    “The obvious point is to muffle the sound of the gunshot. The homemade ones I’ve seen were made of two-liter plastic bottles filled with Styrofoam peanuts that were taped onto the end of the guns. It looks like this one was improvised at the last minute from the victim’s own bottle of juice.” He pointed to the mouth of the bottle and said the notes said they’d swabbed it for DNA and it had matched the victim’s. “The original investigators thought, judging by the bullets, that he’d been shot with his own gun, though they never found it.”
    I’d gotten so involved with the murder book and hearing what a silencer was, I’d forgotten I was trying to leave. Finally I set the binder back on the table and picked up my mug. “I better go in,” I said, getting up.
    “Oh,” he said. “I was going to tell you about the other case I’m working on.” I stopped in my tracks. I wanted to go, but I was curious about the other case. Barry had never shared like this before. And I liked being complimented on my sleuthing skills for noticing the missing watch. I sat back down. What harm could there be from spending a few more minutes with him?
    “Are there pictures?” I asked sliding back into my chair as I gazed at the binder.
    “I didn’t bring that binder home with me,” he said. “I’ll just have to tell you about it with no visual aids.” He started to tell me the details. The big difference with this case was the detectives who worked the case were sure who did it. The victim was a wealthy man who lived in a gated community in Chatsworth. He was single, entertained often and liked to surround himself with low-level celebrities. He’d been hit on the head with a large geode. This particular one had amethyst crystals inside, not that it mattered. When it had first been investigated, the detectives had found out that the victim had recently accused the housekeeper of taking pieces of jewelry and