Mallory made a neat pile of the papers on his desk. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and placed them on top of it. That was a signal that the interrogation was over. “Vicki, I know how much you loved Boom Boom. I think that’s making you place too much importance on his death. We see that a lot in here, you know. Someone loses their son or wife or father in a terrible accident. They can’t believe it’s happened, so they say it’s murder. If there’s a conspiracy, it makes the death easier to handle—their loved one was important enough for someone to want to kill.

“Now, you’ve had a rough time lately, Vicki. Your cousin died and you almost got killed yourself in a bad accident. You go away for a few weeks, go someplace warm and lie in the sun for a while. You need to give yourself a chance to recover from all this.”

After that, naturally, I didn’t tell him about Boom Boom’s documents or about Mattingly flying in from the Soo on Bledsoe’s plane. McGonnigal offered to take me home, but in a continuing spirit of perverseness I told him I could find the way myself. I got up stiffly—we’d been talking for over two hours. It was close to ten when I boarded the northbound subway at Roosevelt Road. I took it as far as Clark and Division, then transferred to a number 22 bus, getting off at Belmont and Broadway. I could walk the last half mile or so home.

I was very tired. The pain had come back in my shoulder, perhaps from sitting so long in one position. I walked as rapidly as I could across Belmont to Halsted. Lincoln Avenue cuts in at an angle there, and a large triangle on the south side of the street is a scraggy vacant lot. I held my keys clenched between my fingers, watching shadows in the bushes. At the front door to my building I kept a weather eye out for anything unusual. I didn’t want to be the fourth victim of this extremely efficient murderer.

Three dePaul students share the second-floor apartment. As I walked up the stairs, one of them stuck her head out the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She came all the way out, followed by her two roommates, one male and one female. In an excited trio they told me someone had tried to break into my apartment about an hour before. A man had rung their doorbell. When they buzzed him in, he’d gone past their door to the third floor.

“We told him you weren’t home,” one of the women said, “but he went on up anyway. After a while we heard him kind of chiseling away at the door. So we got the bread knife and went up after him.”