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who Mimi was. I thought maybe she was some friend or relative of my parents. Clearly we had been close once, or she wouldn’t have given me such an expensive gift. And I thought it was odd that I never heard from her after my parents died. As soon as Fred told me what I had said under hypnosis, I knew why. Mimi was dead long before my parents died. So I asked Fred to see if he could find any record of a woman named Mimi being stabbed to death. I wanted to know whether or not the people who did it were ever caught and punished. I felt I owed her that much.”
    I glanced at Fred. “Any luck?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “I guess I’m better at being a hypnotherapist than I am at being a detective. That’s your job, not mine.”
    “And how exactly did this particular case get to be my job?” I asked.
    “That’s my fault,” Sister Mary Katherine said at once. “Fred was the one who knew you worked in that new investigative unit in the attorney general’s office.”
    I made a mental note not to call us the SHIT squad in the good sister’s presence.
    “Before Father Mark retired from Christ the King, he had a young assistant priest named Father Andrew who moved up into the diocese office years ago. Father Andrew is now the new archbishop’s right-hand man. He was a huge help to me personally when I was starting Saint Benedict’s and needed to cut through mounds of red tape.”
    She stopped talking as if she had said enough, but I still didn’t get it.
    Obligingly, Freddy Mac clued me in. “Years ago, Father Andrew Carter and Ross Connors played football together at O’Dea High School.”
    Click. In that one sentence, my worst suspicions were confirmed. With those kinds of high-placed connections, this was indeed a case with almost unlimited potential for disaster. Bearing that in mind, I decided it was time to treat it that way. I hauled out my notebook and began asking questions and taking notes.
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C HAPTER 3

    B Y THE TIME I LEFT THE HYATT , it was early afternoon, but traffic was already a mess. Make that still a mess. Unit B has a conference room with a VCR, but when I called into the office to see if I could use it, Barbara told me the room was booked.
    “All right then,” I told her. “Tell Harry I need to spend the next several hours reviewing videotapes, and I’m going home to do it.”
    “Absolutely,” Barbara said. “No sense sitting around the office waiting for rush hour.”
    Barbara Galvin is a good twenty-five years younger than I am, but that doesn’t keep her from mother-henning anybody who gets near her, me included.
    “And the DJ on KMPS just said it’s going to get worse,” she added. “They’re expecting more black ice tonight and maybe even the s -word for tomorrow.”
    The s -word is wintertime Seattlespeak for snow. I’m sure the people who live in Buffalo, New York, and other places where it really snows would find it hilarious that two or three inches of white stuff can bring this whole region to a grinding halt, but that’s the way it is. And if it’s more than three inches? Then we can look forward to days of downed trees and power outages.
    With that cheery prospect in mind, I headed back across Lake Washington. By three o’clock I was settled into my recliner with the first of Sister Mary Katherine’s videos playing on the VCR. It was a lot like viewing tapes done in cop-shop interview rooms everywhere—only this was shot with higher-quality equipment, so it had better sound and better resolution.
    When the first interview started, before Fred MacKinzie put Mary Katherine under, she sounded just as she had earlier that day at lunch. That first session was a fishing expedition as Fred carefully led her back through her years as a nun, through high school, her years with Adelaide Rodgers, and back to that fateful day at camp when she first learned of her parents’ tragic deaths. I think Fred and Sister Mary Katherine both expected to find the answer to her