“This a riddle?”

“Answer the question.”

“I. Don’t. Fucking. Know.” I held up my hands. “Clear enough for you?”

“You have to help us out here, Mr. Kenzie.”

“And I’m trying, Bolton, but your interviewing technique is about as socially skilled as a loan shark’s. You piss me off, I’m not going to be able to be much help, because I won’t be able to think past my anger.”

Bolton walked to the back wall at the other end of the room. It was the width of the office, at least thirty feet, and about twelve feet tall. He tugged at the sheet covering it and when it came away in his hands I was looking at a corkboard that covered ninety percent of the wall.

Photographs and crime scene diagrams, spectral analysis sheets and evidence lists were stuck by pushpins and thin wires to the cork. I came out of my seat and walked slowly down the length of the table, trying to take it all in.

Behind me, Devin said, “We’ve interviewed everyone involved in either case that we know of, Patrick. Plus interrogations of everyone who knew Stimovich and the latest victim, Pamela Stokes. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

All the victims were represented by photos, two each of them living, several of them dead. Pamela Stokes looked to have been about thirty. One of the photos showed her squinting against the sun, her hand held over her forehead, a bright smile lighting up an otherwise bland face.

“What do we know about her?”

“Saleswoman for Anne Klein,” Oscar said. “Last seen leaving The Mercury Bar on Boylston Street two nights ago.”

“Alone?” I said.

Devin shook his head. “With a guy wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a goatee.”

“He’s wearing sunglasses in a bar, and nobody’s suspicious?”

“You ever been to the Mercury?” Oscar said. “It’s filled with très chic Euro-trash wannabes. They all wear sunglasses indoors.”

“So there’s our killer.” I pointed at the photo of Jason and the guy with the goatee.

“One of them anyway,” Oscar said.

“You’re sure there’s two?”

“We’re working on that assumption. Jason Warren, without a doubt, was killed by two men.”

“How do we know that?”

“He scratched them,” Devin said. “Two different types of blood under his fingernails.”

“Did the families of all the victims receive photographs of them before they were killed?”

“Yes,” Oscar said. “It’s the closest we have to an MO. Three of the four victims were killed in places other than where their bodies were found. Kara Rider was then dumped in Dorchester, Stimovich in Squantum, and what was left of Pamela Stokes was found in Lincoln.”

Below the current victims’ photos were photos under a heading “Victims. 1974.” Cal Morrison’s slightly cocky, boyish face stared out at me and even though I hadn’t thought of him for years until that night at Gerry’s bar, I could immediately smell the Piña Colada shampoo he’d worn in his hair, and I remembered how we’d all razzed him about it.