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with a little psychological profiling of the culprit: He was a solitary figure, she’d decided. Probably someone who still lived with his parents. Past convictions might include minor charges for being a Peeping Tom or some other minor voyeuristic offense. He was someone who liked to watch people, and that desire to watch had escalated into a desire to touch, to control, to possess.
    As it had turned out, Ouelette did not fit this profile. He was a young number cruncher with an associate’s degree in accounting, and he was raising his teenage brother by himself; he had once been charged with a DUI, but the criminal history ended there. Vera was sure that the person who fit
her
profile would damn well try to make use of his victim sexually before disposing of her body, yet there had been no discernible attempt to violate Angela Galvez, whose body had been found in a Dumpster behind a neighborhood Laundromat.
    The news broadcast ended, and Vera sat in a stupor, watching the next two shows that followed. By the time evening had settled—another unseasonably warm evening, with the temperature holding fast—Vera became restless. To go out or not to go out? She decided it would do no harm to walk to one of her favorite bars for a solo congratulatory drink or two, a pick-me-up for having survived her first day at the Wallace School.
    The bar she chose, a place called Pearl’s, was comfortable and dimly lit, with dark wooden fixtures and nooks where one could make oneself inconspicuous if one wanted to. Tonight she sat up at the bar, on a seat as distant from everyone as she could find; it was true that some men might notice her and try to strike up a conversation, but she trusted her ability to steer them away politely. Though she liked the validation of being thought attractive enough to single out in a bar—and found it hilarious that those who did ranged in age from twenty-two to sixty-two—it was the three-dollar well drink specials, and not the men, who drew her there.
    An hour passed, then two. Vera enjoyed the music that was playing from the jukebox and even, in her own masochistic way, began to enjoy the banal conversations she could overhear from nearby tables. “I might have gone out with him a second time,” she heard one girl with a piping voice say to another, “but my ferret hated him. She hates all men. I think one time a man did something bad to her. You know, like a gerbil-type deal.” Her intention of leaving after two drinks somehow got cast aside, and as she was on her third drink, a man asked if he could take the bar stool next to her. “I guess so,” she said.
    The man who’d taken the seat next to her ordered a bottled beer and introduced himself as Sam—or was it Stan? Hard to make out over the jukebox, not that it mattered to Vera. He might have been in his late forties but wore a boyish-looking athletic jersey; even after all these years, Vera never ceased to be surprised when athletically inclined men paid attention to her. She thought herself too intelligent-looking to warrant a second glace from them. Perhaps the memories of high school jocks jeering at her in the halls had helped her to formulate this opinion. She could only conclude, then, that some men didn’t look at her very closely or were not very picky.
    “Let me guess,” the man in the athletic jersey said. “You’re a dancer, right? You have a dancer’s body.”
    Vera looked askance at him; she had heard this one before. “No,” she said. “I’m a
teacher
.”
    “What grade?”
    “I’ve taught college English.”
    “You look young to be teaching college.”
    “I’m a writer, too,” Vera said carelessly, draining her drink. This was something she simply never said to other adults. They never believed it, for one thing.
    “Yeah? Whaddaya write—I mean, nonfiction or fiction or what?”
    Vera wondered if he knew the difference between the two, never mind the
or what
. “It’s about Ivan Schlosser. He was what I