After a moment, Shelly said, “The body... I remembered this guy — Andy — who'd picked me up at a bar one time. He was really funny, a nice guy — for someone who does autopsies all day. He was also making a nice low salary, so he was happy to take thirty thousand cash to get me a body and arrange to do the autopsy and fake the dentals — to identify the corpse as me. They aren't all that hard to come up with, did you know? Dozens of unidentified people die in the city every year.”

She shook her head. "That night I was on some kind of automatic pilot. The body was in the room at Lame Duck where Andy and I had put it that evening, before I came over to your place for the taping session. The bomb was in the telephone. You were outside. I called to you, then went into the back of the studio and pressed a couple of buttons on this radio transmitter. The bomb went off.

“In my bag I had what was left of my savings, in cash, an original-edition Moliere play, a ring of my mother's, some jewelry. That was it. All my credit cards, driver's license, Citibank cash card letters, were in my purse in the room at Lame Duck.”

“Aren't you afraid somebody here will recognize you?”

“Yes, of course. But Chicago's different from New York. There are only a couple adult theaters here, a few adult bookstores. No Shelly Lowe posters, like you see in Times Square. No Shelly Lowe tapes in the windows of the bookstores. And I had the surgery.”

“And dyed your hair.”

“No, this is my natural color.” Shelly turned to her. “Besides, you're talking to me now, a few feet away — what do you think? Do I seem like the same person you interviewed on your houseboat?”

No, she didn't. She didn't at all. The eyes — the blue was there but they weren't laser beams any longer. The way she carried herself, her voice, her smile. She seemed older and younger at the same time.

Rune said, “I remember when I was taping you, you started out being so tough and, I don't know, controlled.”

“Shelly Lowe was a ballbuster.”

“But you slipped. Toward the end you became someone else.”

“I know. That's why...” She looked away. They started walking again, and Rune grinned.

“That's why you broke into my houseboat and stole the tape. It gave away too much.”

“I'm sorry.”

"You know, we thought Tommy was the killer.

I heard about it. About Nicole... That was so sad.“ Her voice faded. ”Danny and Ralph Gutman and all the others — they were just sleazy. But Tommy was frightening. That's why I left him. It was those films of his. He started doing real S & M films. I left him after that. I guess when he found he couldn't get off on just pain alone he started doing snuff films. I don't know."