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agitated than when I had left her
    minutes ago. Her cell phone was clasped tightly in her hand.
    “Not yet. I'm not ready to do that,” she said, looking at her
    watch. “I decided to wait another hour, till my father gets home
    from work. I want them to be together when they get the news.”
    The cell phone in her hand rang. She flipped it open and looked
    at the incoming caller's number. “It's Jim Dylan. I don't need to
    take it. He can just rot in hell,” Janet said, dropping the phone
    into her tote.
    “Why do you think he's calling you now?” Mike asked.
    “Oh-well, I just left him a message about Amber. About her
    murder.”
    Mike grimaced and tried to hide his displeasure. “From here on,
    Janet, I don't want you talking to him, or to any other people who
    might be witnesses, okay? I need to know exactly what you said to
    Dylan, and then I'll take it over now.”
    She pointed at me. “Ms. Cooper didn't tell me I couldn't speak
    to people about Amber.”
    “I'm sorry. It didn't occur to me that you would try to reach
    anyone but your family.”
    Janet's red-rimmed eyes were more focused now. “That prick has
    some answering to do, Mr. Chapman. For more than a year he'd been
    promising Amber he was going to leave his wife. We talked about it-
    we drank to it-on her last birthday. On Sunday, Jim told
    me he didn't want me to mention her name, that she wasn't welcome
    in his bar anymore. Well, let him come down here and take a look at
    what he drove her to.”
    I doubted it would be as simple as the formula to which Janet
    seemed to reduce Amber's fate.
    “Does Dylan have a key to her place?” Mike asked.
    “I don't know. I doubt she gave keys to a living soul. She
    didn't even give one to me,” Janet said. “Not exactly the kind of
    habits you'd want someone to walk in on.”
    Mike was eager to get to Amber's apartment before anyone else
    tried to enter. “Why don't we start on up there.”
    “I want to know how she died, Doctor.” Janet's hand trembled as
    she brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and lowered her voice.
    “Do you think she suffered much?”
    There was no way to soften the blow. The best that forensics
    could do was to explain the manner of death, the mechanism that had
    cut short Amber's life. But the length of time Amber Bristol was in
    the company of her killer and what had happened to her while she
    was still conscious-the answers Mike Chapman wanted-would
    undoubtedly prove even uglier.
    “It's quite possible that she did suffer,” Kestenbaum said.
    “Your sister was-badly bruised, Ms. Bristol. Most of the injuries
    occurred before she died.”
    Janet winced and breathed in deeply.
    “The newspapers-will there have to be stories about this? About
    Janet and her, uh, her lifestyle?”
    “Hard to know,” Mike said, pacing behind Kestenbaum's back in
    the narrow room. “Right now, there's no reason for any sensational
    press.”
    “Is there DNA?”
    “It's unlikely that anything Dr. Kestenbaum recovered will
    identify the killer.”
    “Then at least she wasn't raped.”
    A little bit of television forensics was a dangerous thing.
    Maggots had done their work well, moving into body openings and
    cavities, destroying what the killer might have left behind.
    “Do you have more, well-something else to go on?”
    “Look, Janet,” Mike said, leaning his strong forearms on the
    desk. He was impatient to get on his way, to get to work before the
    next shift brought him more cases. “We don't know the first thing
    about Amber. Till you walked in the station house today, we didn't
    have a clue to connect her to a name. There wasn't a shred of
    identification, not a piece of clothing, not a blessed thing-”
    “There was the whip, wasn't there?” Janet said.
    Mike lifted his head to glare at me. I shook mine back at
    him.
    “What whip?” There was no sure way to link it to Amber's death
    at this point, and it was the kind of detail that investigators
    would withhold from the