“Courtney?”

Vivid blue eyes stared first at the warden, then took in Sherlock and Savich. He grinned. “What’s this? You bring me a pretty girl? My, would you look at those beautiful blue eyes, sort of like mine. Hmm, could I be her granddaddy, you think?”

“I don’t think so, Courtney.”

“Then I’m on my way out, Warden?”

“Nah, you’re a fixture. She’s not just a pretty girl, she’s an FBI agent. Her name’s Sherlock. This is Agent Savich. They’re here to speak to you. You feeling up to it?”

“Of course I’ll speak to this pretty girl. I haven’t seen a pretty girl in thirty years, and I haven’t seen such beautiful hair in all my life. My mama dyed her hair red, but you could tell, you know? But your hair, Agent Sherlock—you married, sweet girl?”

Sherlock leaned down to his thin, sharp cheekboned face with its pale, amazingly unlined skin. A sick old man, she thought. Interesting how it blurred the reality of what he’d done. “You’ve got to be careful, Mr. James. Agent Savich is my husband.”

Courtney James said, “Nah, he can’t be jealous of me, I’m just an old man on his way out. Maybe I should try to look pitiful— put those oxygen clips back in my nose. Big fellow, isn’t he? Looks like he eats nails for breakfast.”

“Not me,” Savich said, “I eat Cheerios along with my little boy.”

“Ain’t that a kick now?” His smart old eyes went from one to the other and back again. “You want to talk to me? About what? You reopening the case? You want to get me out of here?”

“That would be nice,” Savich said, “but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

“Well, Agent, the thing is, I can’t tell you where any of those bodies are buried since I never killed those folk they thought I did. I killed the Pallacks, true enough, and the good Lord knows I’m sorry I got caught. Fact is, they deserved it. They were a pair of shits, especially her. She was worse than both her husband and her son.” He sighed deeply. “Can I touch your hair, Agent Sherlock? That’s quite a name you’ve got there.”

“Thank you, Mr. James.” Sherlock didn’t pull away from the old man when he raised his thin veined hand to smooth her thick hair.

Warden Rafferty was moving from one foot to the other, doubtless wondering why they were playing around like this, but he kept quiet, something Savich appreciated.

Savich said, “Okay, Mr. James, you’ve flirted enough with my wife. You back off now or I’ll have to hurt you.”

The old man grinned wide again, showing white teeth that looked like his own. “You’re a lucky boy,” he said. “Okay, you’re here to ask me questions. Obviously something’s happened. What’s up?”

Savich said, “I want you to tell us all you remember about the Pallacks. The parents and their son Thomas. You said Mrs. Pal-lack was the worst, worse than her son and her husband. Tell us what you mean.”

Courtney James looked over at the blank white wall. “It was a long time ago, but you know, some things are like photographs, they stay in your brain forever. I can still see the look on her face when I stabbed her the first time. Okay, let me get back on track here. Margaret Pallack was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen, and she knew it. She was almost sixty, Pallack sixty-five when I killed them, but you know what? She was still a beauty, tall and slim— she stayed fit, had her own gym in her house and exercised every day—and she had beautiful dark hair that curved around her jaw. A stranger would have thought she wasn’t a day over forty. And did she ever know it, and use it.”

“Why would you kill a woman you so obviously admired?”

“Well, now, pretty girl, since you ask, the thing is, she slept with me. I never admitted that to the cops, prurient little bastards, never told them anything, really, since they’d already made up their minds that I was this demon psychopath, that I’d butchered everything that moved. But I don’t care now that you know. The truth is, I had loads of provocation, a whole bulging truckload.

“I think that whole serial killer nonsense was Thomas’s doing. Thomas Pallack was a chip off the old block, his mama’s old block, always tied to his mama’s leash, was Thomas. I remember that the prosecutor kept trying to sneak in references to ‘other crimes’ and ‘other people,’ that sort of thing, but they didn’t have any proof of that.

“Yeah, I’ll bet it was Thomas. The snooty little creep always hated me. I’d see him staring at his mother, then over at me, and he looked vicious, like he knew. You know something else? He looked jealous. I used to wonder if he’d have tried to frame me for killing his parents even if I hadn’t done it. But the thing is, his folks, they really asked for it like I said, they really did.” He stopped talking for some time, just stared blankly at the white wall in front of him.