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in an olive-skinned face watched her rotate the lens to a higher magnification.
    “I see the word’s out.”
    “Faster than a defense attorney’s motion to suppress,” he said in agreement.” You think it’s the guy Ness couldn’t catch?”
    “I think you’re too young to even know who Eliot Ness was.”
    He unhitched his leg, his foot slapping the floor with a sharp crack.
    “Come off it, Theresa. You’re only a few years older than me.”
    “Eleven,” she muttered, her head still bent to the microscope.
    “You counted?”
    “Wait until you hit forty. Numbers take on a new importance.”
    “Really.”
    “For instance, last week my butt fell. Overnight. I went to bed and everything’s fine, I wake up and my buttocks are resting on the tops of my thighs.”
    “Want me to take a look?” he asked.
    “If exercise and dieting won’t budge them, there’s nothing you can do.”
    “Can I try anyway?”
    She glared.
    “That hostage negotiator guy still calling you?”
    She glared again. The city manager’s daughter had just turned twenty-five. She went on. “
Anyway,
Frank and his partner learned, from the city building department, that the building on Pullman went up in 1933. A railroad guy named Arthur Corliss owned the place and rented out the offices, eight separate units, four on each floor. Then Frank and Angela went to the Western Reserve Historical Society to look through phone books.
Dusty
phone books, he whined at me. The city directories listed the tenants at that address.”
    “I didn’t know they even had phone books in 1935.”
    Theresa made a note of the fibers’ original colors—blue and brown—as well as the dried decomposition fluid coating them. “They came up with a list of unit numbers, but there’s no way to know how the suites were numbered. The owner had unit one, but we don’t know if that was on the upper floor or the lower floor or
where
on the lower floor. There was also a tutor named Metetsky, a few architects, a medium. Like a talking-to-the-dead medium. Oh, and a nutritionist named Louis Odessa.”
    “They had
nutritionists
in 1935?”
    Theresa examined a slide of the dead man’s sock fibers. Wool. “Americans’ obsession with health started in the twenties. Until then no one had heard of a balanced diet or the idea of
losing
weight instead of gaining it, or that kitchens were supposed to be sanitary. Plus, it was the roaring twenties. Times were good and new ideas were welcomed with open arms as Americans discovered a desire to be sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Until the 1929 crash, of course. Then people went back to eating what they could find.”
    “Did you major in history or something?” Don demanded.
    “As far as my mother is concerned, the TV set has two channels, the Food Network and the Discovery Channel.”
    “So you can’t figure out whose apartment he was in. What did the anthropologist say?”
    The doctor had driven up from Kent State University after his morning classes to consult with Theresa. “He says the guy was decapitated, neatly, without nicking a bone. Not an easy thing to do, especially if the victim’s still alive while you do it.”
    “Is that the COD?”
    She hoped not. The idea of James Miller being conscious while a man cut his head off gave her an uncomfortable twinge in her heart. Being able to do her job meant
not
picturing the victim’s last moments. “There could be another cause of death, sure, like poison or suffocation, something that wouldn’t leave a mark on bones or clothing. Maybe toxicology can help. They should at least be able to find any heavy metal poisons in the hair, or perhaps the dried-up little prune thing that the stomach has shriveled to.”
    “Yuck. You know Leo’s already been on the phone with Court TV.”
    Now she looked up from the ocular lenses. “Oh, no.”
    “Oh, yes. And
Unsolved Mysteries
. Just giving them the heads-up. So now I’m giving you the heads-up that where you want to keep