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because it felt dirty somehow, like having an affair in the bed I shared with Steve.
    The computer’s screen faded and then flashed another set of photos at me, but not before I saw the smudges from my fingerprint.
    Gotta clean that .
    I suddenly felt like an amateur and also felt equally overwhelmed, maybe even a bit stupid. I had to be smarter about what I was planning, what I was going to do. The first thing I had to do was to clean my smudgy fingerprints from the computer screen. Steve hated it when anyone touched the glass.
    The screen is for looking, not touching, I could hear his voice saying in my head.
    I cradled my chin, my elbows leaning on the desk as I watched more photos come to life. A holiday party, complete with a pair of horribly loud Christmas sweaters and floppy Santa hats. I think Snacks had just turned two back then. Oh, and that night. That had been a good night. I shifted in my seat, titillated by the memory. That was the night Steve and I ditched the wool sweaters and wore only our Santa hats. I wore mine in the traditional style. And Steve? Well, he wore his Santa hat somewhere else. He’d joked, asking if I’d like to visit his North Pole. The urge to laugh came to me, but I couldn’t.
    My eyes wandered back to the smudges.
    My fingerprints. Evidence.
    Steve was smart about that stuff, and the detectives in his division were very smart about that stuff. The excitement from earlier began to fade with the screen’s photos. A stack of case folders lay there on the desk next to me; I recognized them immediately. There was a mix: some from the city, some local. The two offices often crossed since our town bordered the city, and as Steve would say, “Criminals respect no boundaries, geographic or otherwise.”
    The sight of the folders spurred a memory from the year before—just after I’d made a habit of reading through them. There had been a particularly disturbing case that I’d pored over one evening. Nearly a half bottle of wine warmed my belly as I disappeared into my favorite reading chair. Yellow light from my lamp shone down—soft and familiar and in a perfect round halo. I’d opened the case file and learned more than I ever wanted to know about a dangerous pedophile. Worse yet, this man my husband was trying to put away lived fewer than five miles from our house. I’d known that last part only because Steve had openly talked about the case. I shook in disgust, recalling some of the things he’d done and the lives he’d ruined.
    “I’d definitely kill the creep if given the chance,” I’d mumbled, adding his name to my list. “The world wouldn’t miss him.”
    My husband had almost lost that case, though. The conviction had hinged on a key witness who’d backed out of testifying. And to make matters worse, they’d found nothing on his computer.
    “It’s as empty as our case,” Steve said gravely. He’d come home late, flustered and defeated and upset that the guy was going to walk. I couldn’t shake his mood—no matter what I tried.
    “You’ve got nothing else?” I’d asked, thinking through every crime scene television show we’d ever watched.
    “Guys like him, they usually keep trophies,” he’d said in a rant. “Thought for sure we’d find something on the computer.”
    And they did find something. It was a chance find. Luck, really. Dust on a bookshelf pulled the eyes of a young police officer trying to prove himself. A thin gray coat covered the shelf, hinting that none of the books had been read in a long time. That is, all except one book. That book had no dust in front of it.
    “Like someone had drawn an arrow and pointed to it,” Steve told me. “Just needed to pull the book open.” Inside, they’d found the pages had been welled out to store a portable hard drive. Thousands of images were recovered. They had their evidence. It was all they needed to convict the bastard.
    But the pedophile was out already. Free these days. A year in jail, and he