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your head is down. Leo’s going to want results on this one, like, yesterday, so he can go on camera with all this new information.”
    “Better him than me.”
    “Don’t worry about that. Leo’s smart enough to know that the camera will love your pretty face a lot better than his. He’ll make sure you’re locked in the cellar if any Hollywood princes call.”
    “Me and the rats.”
    “I’ll rescue you,” he promised.
     
     
    Theresa said good night to a smoking deskman on the loading dock and walked through the cool night air to her car. She had grabbed the last space in the farthest corner of the lot, blocked from the streetlights by the building next door, tucked up against the small copse of trees between the M.E.’s and University Hospital’s medical school.
    She had always loved September, the month of her birth, the end of humid summer days, the start of a new school year, which a bookworm like her did not consider torture. Now she took a deep breath to clear the dust of 1935 from her sinuses. A different age. What would have been the effect of Cleveland’s first serial killer on its citizenry and its police force? Surely neither group could fully comprehend what they’d come up against.
    The populace simply felt beleaguered, under attack by a faceless monster who lurked in the shadows, a specter they could have written off as an urban myth useful for scaring their children into good behavior, were the tale printed in a storybook instead of the newspaper.
    Theresa pulled a heavy sweater more tightly around her body. The police, she knew, had approached the crime as they would any other, searching for men who frequented the areas where the bodies turned up, men with criminal records and a documented propensity for violence, men who were “perverted”—a word defined much more broadly then than in the current day. The second victim, and one of the very few identified, Edward Andrassy, had possibly been bisexual, since rumors of homosexuality dogged him. Yet he had also been considered a ladies’ man. This started police on a running hunt for perverts and others who lived outside society’s norm. Much had changed in three-quarters of a century. If the events of the 1930s occurred today, with the experience of too many serial killers to comfortably count, police would hunt for a man with a minor criminal record or none at all, a man with a steady job, unsuspecting neighbors, and an ordinary appearance who remained quite firmly below the radar.
    Different, but not easier. It had taken twenty years to catch the Green River Killer.
    Theresa had parked under what turned out to be the only nonfunctioning light in the lot. A few more leaves scuttled by as she reached into her pocket for her keys. A door slammed behind her, most likely the deskman returning to work after his cigarette.
    Of course police today might not meet with any more success than in the past. “That description fit so many people.” She found herself talking aloud, a common exercise for those too often alone. “Though forensic science—”
    A scraping sound behind her, too big to be caused by a leaf, stopped her midsentence.
    “Hello, ma’am—”
    She whirled, hand still in her pocket. The man had at least six inches and seventy pounds on her. He stepped closer, his face thrown into shadow by the light behind him. He wore dark pants and a dark jacket, and carried something in his hand.
    Her hand came out of her pocket, clutching a small canister of pepper spray. “Stop right there! Don’t come any closer!”
    He stopped and put his hands in the air, dropping whatever it was he held. It fell to the asphalt with a harmless splat. A notebook. “Whoa, hold it. Don’t spray, please. Look, Ms. MacLean—”
    “How do you know my name?” She glanced across the lot behind him, hoping the deskman would reappear on the dock, and did not lower the spray.
    “That’s my job.” He turned slightly, so that the vague light showed her a