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hombre?” Rodriguez asked.
    “George Lusk,” Charlie Riggs mumbled, shaking his head in disbelief.
    “I’ll bring him in,” Rodriguez said.
    Charlie laughed but there was no pleasure in it. “Sorry, detective. Mr. Lusk is quite dead.”
    Rodriguez squinted at the mirror. “Then who’s—”
    “In the fall of 1888, in the East End of London, the Whitechapel section, there were a series of murders of young women.”
    “I get it,” Rodriguez said. “George Lusk was the cop who cracked the case.”
    “Not exactly,” Charlie said. “He was a private citizen who formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee to patrol the streets and help the police. One day Lusk received a parcel in the mail. It contained a kidney cut from the body of one of the victims and a most grisly note. I can’t remember the contents exactly, but the note concluded—”
    “‘Catch me if you can, Mr. Lusk,’” Pamela Maxson said.
    Charlie nodded.
    “Hey,” Rodriguez said. “You’re talking about Jack the Ripper.”
    Charlie nodded again and looked straight at me.
    “And I guess that makes me Mr. Lusk,” I said.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 4
     

Breaking the Ice
     
    They had already zipped the body into a plastic bag when I made a final pass through the living room. The assistant ME had packed his bag and capped his camera. The cops were growing bored and filing out; there were other bodies in other apartments and the night was young. Charlie Riggs was on the staircase outside with Pamela Maxson, reminiscing about murders most foul. I looked around and struggled to remember everything the old canoe maker had taught me.
    Be alert to every detail. I tried to memorize everything in the room. The computer was an IBM clone, the desk white oak, the telephone a new Panasonic. Marsha Diamond had been sitting at the computer when she was killed. I looked closer at the phone. Two lines, a bunch of buttons. One button was for making conference calls, another put you on hold, a third activated the speaker phone.
    Then the last one. “Redial.”
    I congratulated myself on how smart I was. Half a dozen cops and nobody thought about it—maybe the last person Marsha Diamond spoke to just a dial tone away. And maybe with some luck, that last person was the guy who squeezed the life out of her. Don’t you dare come over here, Harry, we’re through!
    Then again, it could be the weather number, a wrong number, or the public library. Only one way to find out. I picked up the receiver and hit the button. Seven electronic notes played do-re-mi in my ear.
    A click and then the whir of a woman’s recorded voice. “Welcome to Compu-Mate, where the person of your dreams awaits you. Dial ROMANCE, 766-2623, on your modem, and we’ll put you in touch. Why not let Compu-Mate find your life mate?”
    “Or your death mate,” I answered the mechanical voice, “as the case may be.”
     
    ***
     
    I put the top down on my ancient Olds 442 convertible, deposited Charlie Riggs in the back and Pamela Maxson in the passenger bucket seat. It’s the Turbo 400, yellow body, black canvas top, black interior, Rallye wheels, four-speed stick. An overgrown kid’s toy.
    “No sign of a break-in, nothing missing from the apartment,” Charlie yelled over the roar of three hundred sixty-five horsepower. “No apparent motive.”
    It was a cloudy June night; the air was humid with a hint of salt. We were approaching the Miami Journal, just on the Miami side of the MacArthur Causeway. The boxy building sat there, lights twinkling against the blackness of the bay, taunting me.
    “An organized crime scene,” Pamela Maxson added.
    Above us, on the superstructure, yellow lights flashed and we came to a stop at the drawbridge. When the lights turned red, the traffic gate lowered into place, the tender yanked on a long steel lever, and the bridge started clanking skyward. Below us, a nighttime sailor aimed a sleek Hinckley with a towering mast through the opening.
    “Based on a