He lowered his hand. “Jasper’s been at this for three times longer than I’ve been chasing him. He’s had more practice.” He gave her a grim smile as he checked his watch. “We’re regrouping at six o’clock. Gif’s going to bring in dinner.”

They climbed the stairs. The two bedrooms were separated by a short hallway, the shared bathroom between them. “I put my things in here.” She pointed to the bedroom on the right. “I’ll see you a little before six.”

She turned away, but before she’d taken a single step, he reached for her and brought her around. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her.

“I want to lie down with you so bad.” He kissed the side of her neck. “But you wouldn’t want to go where I’ve got to go now.”

He hugged her tighter, then his arms relaxed and finally dropped to his sides. He left her, entered the darkened room, and closed the door behind him.

Gif had brought in Chinese. They divided the cartons and sat around the dining table to eat.

The cookbooks, Drex noted, had been ripped apart. Pages from them formed a snowbank in a corner of the room. Nodding toward it, Drex said, “Nothing?”

“Not a single notation,” Gif replied. “And we went through each book page by page. Nothing glued into the backings. We turned up nada.”

“Some of the recipes look good, though,” Mike said. “I saved those.”

“You can add that to the paper pile.” Drex pointed his fork at the phony manuscript he’d set on the bar when he’d come in. It had been included in his belongings that Mike and Gif had brought from the garage apartment. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”

“Did you actually write all that?” Talia asked.

“I had it copied from a paperback book.”

“Elaine told Jasper it wasn’t very good.”

“Pam will be crushed,” Mike said as he polished off an egg roll.

Talia looked at Drex. “Pam?”

Drex shot Mike a warning look. “A woman at the office typed it for me. I never even read it, only messed up the pages to make them look authentic.”

“You had me fooled,” Talia said. “That day I came over to the apartment and asked…”

Becoming aware that Mike and Gif were listening with rabid interest, Drex said, “That was the point. To fool you.”

After that, conversation lagged, and they focused on eating. When they were finished, they made quick work of cleaning up then chose their seats in the living area. Mike claimed the largest chair, Gif straddled one of the dining chairs, Talia curled up into a corner of the sofa. Drex perched on the opposite arm of it.

He had decided how he was going to call the meeting to order, despite how tough it would be on Talia. He had to be straightforward, perhaps even harsh, because it was essential to erase any lingering doubts in his partners’ minds about her culpability.

“Talia?”

She took a breath and let it out slowly. “This is the ‘I want to hear it all later,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes. Speaking for all three of us, we need it explained how you couldn’t have known that you were married to a psychopath.”

It was the opening Mike had been waiting for. “When I saw you in that picture taken at Marian Harris’s party, that did it for me.”

“And you haven’t changed your mind,” she said.

“Say you didn’t meet your husband that night—”

“I didn’t.”

“—and that everything else you’ve told us is true, didn’t he ever strike you as not quite right in the head?”

“I’d like to hear that myself,” Gif said, quieter and less judgmental than Mike.

“Yes, I sensed something wasn’t quite right,” she said. “But I couldn’t isolate what it was. You three think in terms of criminology and psychopaths every day. That’s outside my realm. So, no,” she said, addressing Mike, “it didn’t pop into my mind one day that my husband was a serial killer.”

“Okay,” Drex said. “Take a breath. This isn’t an inquisition. We’re trying to analyze and understand him more than we are you. What first sparked your feeling that something was off?”

“It didn’t spark. It came on gradually. Initially, I talked myself into believing that it was the difference in our ages. Three decades’ difference.”

“But you married him anyway,” Drex said.

“The strangeness didn’t start until after we married. Soon after, though, I began to notice oddities. For instance the way he phrased things. Words and expressions seemed to have a double meaning that escaped me. I felt particularly uneasy when we were alone, but I couldn’t account for it. I thought it might have been hormonal. I was going through some procedures.” She glanced at Drex. “But my uneasiness persisted. Over the past few months things he said and did became even stranger.”

“Did this strangeness intensify around the time Marian’s remains were discovered?” Drex asked.

Her brow furrowed. “Now that you mention it, yes. About that time.”

“That fits,” he said, getting nods of agreement from Mike and Gif. “That would have agitated him. Made him second-guess burying her alive.”

“Maybe it wasn’t his intention to,” Gif said. “When he nailed shut that box, he mistakenly thought she was dead.”

Mike jumped on that. “‘Mistakenly’ is the key word. A blunder like that is anathema to him. It would have set him off.”

Drex had followed their exchange with interest, but he didn’t want to address the particulars of it yet. “It would have set him off in either case. The discovery of that grave spoiled his perfect record.”

Back to Talia, he said, “You went out to dinner together one night this week. I waved at you as you were leaving.”

“Yes.”

“You two seemed simpatico. All dressed up. Hubby taking his best girl to dinner.”

“So you heard that conversation?”

He nodded.

She looked embarrassed. “The invitation surprised me. That was the first date night we’d had in weeks.”

“He was playing to me?”

“He must have been. But what I thought was that he was trying to cover an affair.”

Drex looked at his cohorts to gauge their opinions. Gif looked interested but as yet undecided. You could have cut Mike’s skepticism with a knife.

Drex turned back to Talia. “What shape did his strange behavior take? What did he do to make you think something was really out of joint?”

“Nothing threatening or overtly weird. He never mistreated me. On the contrary, he was solicitous, often to an annoying degree. But sometimes, when he looked at me in a certain way, it would cause a chill to creep over me. I began making up excuses to avoid intimacy.”

“How did he react?”

“Casually.”

“Not violently?”

“Not at all. Just the opposite. He was indifferent.”

She pulled one of the sofa’s throw pillows into her lap and hugged it against her chest. A shield, Drex thought, against what she was still reluctant to admit.