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how much would that mean … from the point of view of the victim?”
    “From the point of view of the victim, it wouldn’t mean anything. For the victim, motive is irrelevant. Especially when there’s no prior personal connection between victim and killer. On a dark road, from an anonymous passing car, a bullet in the head is a bullet in the head, regardless of the motive.”
    “And the families?”
    “Ah, the families. Well …”
    Gurney closed his eyes, thinking back slowly over his homicide career to one sad conversation after another. So many of them over the years. Over the decades. Parents. Wives. Lovers. Children. Stunned faces. Refusals to believe the dreadful news. Desperate questions. Screams. Groans. Wails. Rage. Accusations. Wild threats. Fists smashing into walls. Drunken stares. Empty stares. Old people whimpering like children. A man staggering backward as if punched. And worst of all, the ones with no reactions. Frozen faces, dead eyes. Uncomprehending, speechless, emotionless. Turning away, lighting a cigarette.
    “Well …” he continued after a while, “I’ve always felt that the truth was the best thing. So I guess having a slightly better understanding of why someone they loved was killed might be a good thing for surviving family members. But remember, I’m not saying I know why the Unabomber and the Good Shepherd did what they did. Theyprobably don’t know the reason themselves. I just know it’s not the reason they said it was.”
    She gazed across the coffee table at him and seemed about to ask another question—was starting to open her mouth—when a light thump somewhere in the upper wall of the house stopped her. She sat stiffly, listening. “What do you think that was?” she asked after several long seconds, pointing toward the source of the sound.
    “No idea. Maybe a knock in a hot-water pipe?”
    “That’s what that would sound like?”
    He shrugged. “What do
you
think it is?”
    When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Who lives upstairs?”
    “No one. At least no one is
supposed
to be living there. They were evicted, then they came back, the cops raided the apartment, shithead drug dealers, so they were all arrested, but they’re probably out by now anyway, so who the hell knows? This city is pretty sucky.”
    “So the upstairs is vacant?”
    “Yeah. Supposedly.” She looked at the coffee table, focusing on the open pizza box. “Jeez. That’s looking nasty. Should I reheat it?”
    “Not for me.” He was about to say that it was time for him to get going, but he realized he hadn’t been there very long at all. It was one of those constitutional tendencies of his that had gotten worse over the past six months—the desire to minimize the amount time he spent with other people.
    Holding up the shiny blue folder, he said, “I’m not sure I can go through this whole thing right now. It looks pretty detailed.”
    Like a fast-moving cloud on a bright day, her look of disappointment came and went. “Maybe tonight? I mean, you can take that with you and look at it when you have time.”
    He was oddly affected by her reaction—“touched” was the only word for it, the same feeling he’d had earlier, when she was telling him how she’d narrowed her focus to the Good Shepherd murders. Now he thought he understood what the feeling was about.
    It was her wholehearted commitment, her energy, her hopefulness—her bright, determined
youthfulness
. And the fact that she was doing this alone. Alone in an unsafe house, in a desolate neighborhood, pursued by a mean-spirited stalker. He suspected that it was thiscombination of determination and vulnerability that was stirring his atrophied parental instinct.
    “I’ll take a look at it tonight,” he said.
    “Thank you.”
    The throbbing sound of a helicopter again emerged faintly from the distance, grew louder, passed, faded away. She cleared her throat nervously, clasped her hands in her lap, spoke with evident