"Quinlan?"

"Yes." Nothing more, just the yes. Let her chew on nothing for a bit.

"Who is this Quinlan?"

"An agent and longtime friend. Now, Sherlock, what do you think we're going to find in Chicago?"

"You said the Chicago police believed they were close. How close?"

"You read it. A witness said he saw a man running from the victims' house. They've got a description. We'll see just how accurate it is."

"What do you know, sir, that's not in the reports?"

"Most of it's surmise," he said, "and some excellent stuff from my computer program." He nodded to the flight attendant to remove his cup of coffee. He gently closed his laptop and slipped it into its hard case. "We're nearly at O'Hare," he said, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

She leaned back as well. He hadn't shown her the computer analysis on the case. Maybe he'd thought she already had enough on her plate, and maybe she did. She hadn't wanted to look at the photos from the crime scenes, but she had. It had been difficult. There hadn't been any photos in the newspapers. The actual photos brought the horror of it right in her face. She couldn't help it; she spoke aloud: "In all three cases, the father and mother were in their late thirties, their two children-always a boy and a girl-were ten and twelve. In each case, the father had been shot through the chest, then in his stomach, the second shot delivered after he was dead, the autopsy reports read. The mother was tied down on the kitchen table, her face beaten, then she was strangled with the cord of the toaster, thus the name the Toaster. The children were tied up, knocked out, their heads stuck in the oven. Like Hansel and Gretel. It's more than creepy. This guy is incredibly sick. I've wondered what he would do if the family didn't have a toaster."

"Yeah, I wondered about that too, at first," he said, not opening his eyes. "Makes you think he must have visited each of the homes to make sure there was one right there in the kitchen before the murders."

"That or he brought the toasters with him."

"That's possible, but I doubt it. Too conspicuous." He brought his seat back into its upright position. "Someone could have seen him carrying something. Another thing, in a lot of houses, kitchen ovens are set up high and built in. In a situation like that, how would he kill the children? In the photos, all of these are the big old-fashioned ovens."

"He had a lot of checking out to do when he visited the families, didn't he?"

She looked at his profile. He didn't say anything. She slowly slid all the photos back into the envelope, each of them marked. She slowly lined up all the pages and carefully placed them back into their folders. He'd given this a whole lot of thought. On the other hand, so had she. She still wanted to see the computer analysis. Then again, she hadn't demanded to see it either.

The flight attendant announced that they were beginning their descent into Chicago and for everyone to put away any electronic equipment. Savich fastened his seat belt. "Oh yes, our guy did a lot of checking."

"How did you even remember my question? It's been five minutes since I asked it."

"I'm FBI. I'm good." He closed his eyes again.

She wanted to kick him. She turned to look out the window. Lights were thick and bright below. Her heart speeded up. Her first assignment. She wanted to do things right.

"You're FBI now too, Sherlock."

It was a bone, not a meaty bone, but a bone nonetheless, and she smiled, accepting that bone gladly.

She fastened her own seat belt. She never once stopped looking down at the lights of Chicago. Hallelujah! She wasn't going after bank robbers.

5

CHICAGO WAS OVERCAST AND a cool fifty degrees on October eighteenth. Lacey hadn't been to Chicago since she'd turned twenty-one, following a lead that hadn't gone anywhere, one of the many police departments she'd visited during her year of "mono."

As for Savich, he wasn't even particularly aware that he was in Chicago; he was thinking about the sick little bastard who had brutally murdered three families. Officer Alfonso Ponce picked them up and ushered them to an unmarked light blue Ford Crown Victoria.

"Captain Brady didn't think you'd want to be escorted to the station in a squad car. This one belongs to the captain."

After a forty-five-minute ride weaving in and out of thick traffic, everyone in the radius of five miles honking his horn, he let them off at the Jefferson Park station house, the precinct for what was clearly a nice, middle-class neighborhood. The station house was a boxy, single-story building on West Gale, at the intersection of two major streets, Milwaukee and Hig-gins. It had a basement, Officer Ponce told them, and that was because it had been built in 1936 and was one of those WPA projects. When there'd been a twister seven years before, everyone had piled into the basement, prisoners and all. One nutcase had tried to escape. There had been little updating since the seventies. There was a small box out front holding a few wilted flowers and a naked flagpole.