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thoughtful, cheerful, church-going, Christian woman who had been given the moniker of “saint.” Nobody could have guessed that Christy was on high doses of four strong drugs to fight severe bipolar disorder and depression and that she’d stopped taking two of them, which pushed her into a cascading psychotic break. At the moment when her mind splintered, she was holding the baby who wouldn’t stop screaming and that’s when she probably said, “Time to go to sleep, baby,” and proceeded to suffocate it before burying it half-alive in the wall of her basement. The problem was that Christy was so out of it, she didn’t see Fletcher watching the whole thing as he hid in the basement behind the water heater.
    I don’t question how a woman can do that to a baby. I know that evil lingers in the minds of everyone. It just takes the right fuse to ignite it. I know that people looked at my own father and thought he was a great man. I also know that I didn’t have a chance in hell of convincing anyone that he
was a monster and that my brother and I were at his mercy. You can’t judge a book by its cover.
    And I don’t question how a fourteen-year-old boy can emerge from the bowels of hell with only a small part of his brain functioning and be able to speak to me with his mind. I don’t question the “coincidence” of being chosen that day to speak at Fletcher’s school or the “synchronicity” that he “just happened” to be warehoused in the classroom I was in at that time.
    And I never question my gut. Because my gut has gotten me where I am today. My gut allowed me to survive my own childhood hell and it’s led me to solve homicide case after homicide case for more than seven years.
    Writing about this whole ordeal has been cathartic for me. I feel a bit lighter right now. Maybe Sergeant Weyler was onto something when he suggested I do this. It sure as hell beats being psychoanalyzed by a Freud-loving woman with a mauve toilet.

YOU’RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
    My younger brother, Mike, is engaged to be married. Good for him. But the wedding won’t be for an entire year . I personally don’t understand long engagements. To me, it’s either do it or don’t do it, but don’t keep me in suspense. I have to get him a present, and if he thinks it’s not going to work with his fiancée, I’d like him to give me a heads-up so I don’t have to keep track of the sales receipt in case I have to return his gift.
    To further complicate my brother’s whole engagement, he and his fiancée, Lisa, decided that they needed to drag it out by first having a “spiritual blessing” by a “shaman.” Mike, if you’re reading this (and I know you’re reading this), why in the hell did we have to drag our asses across two states and end up in Sedona? If the attraction was the New Agers,
we could have packed a lunch and driven over the hill to the Socialist Republic of Boulder, Colorado. It’s infinitely closer than Sedona and I could have escaped the gathering sooner.
    I hope Mike doesn’t hire this “shaman” to marry him because I don’t think that quack has a license to do anything except wave a turkey feather and blow sweetgrass smoke in your face. I keep putting “shaman” in quotes because when I think of a real shaman , I think of a four-foot, ten-inch, oilyskinned Peruvian male wearing nothing but a loincloth and a piercing stare and carrying a humble walking stick. I don’t think of a bloated, sixty-year-old Jew who looks like Jack Klugman, wearing a Budweiser T-shirt and a pressed pair of dark denim jeans. Seriously. They were ironed. Who irons their jeans? Oh, that’s right. Bloated, sixty-year-old Jewish “shamans” who drink Bud.
    I know, I know. I come off as an abrasive cynic. But it comes with my job. I don’t think anyone else at Mike’s spiritual blessing gave this “shaman” a second thought. They just accepted him for whatever he said he was and left it at that. But not me. I