Far more interesting, however, was the file that no one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my reaction was even more profound. "Well, well, well, well," I said, mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.

In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding chair. "What did you find?" she said. "Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past," I said, carefully pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn't leap across the desk and hug me.

"I knew it," she said. "What did he do?"
"It's not so much what he did," I said. "At this point, it's more like what was done to him."
"Quit screwing around," she said. "What is it?"
"To begin with, he's apparently an orphan."
"Come on, Dex, cut to the chase."

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn't work very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. "I am trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis," I said. "Paint faster," she said.

"All right. Halpern went into the foster-care system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the freeway. They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence."

"What the fuck does that mean?" "His parents were pimping him out to pedophiles," I said. "Jesus," Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked. Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

"And Halpern doesn't remember any of that part. He gets blackouts under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a conditioned response to the repeated trauma," I said. "That can happen."

"Well, fuck," Deborah said, and I inwardly applauded her elegance. "So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits. The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he's already worried about tenure-so he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it."

"A couple of other things," I said, and I admit that I enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary. "To begin with, the death of his parents."

"What about it?" she said, quite clearly lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.
"Their heads were cut off," I said. "And then the house was torched."
Deborah straightened up. "Shit," she said.
"I thought so, too."
"Goddamn, that's great, Dex," she said. "We have his ass."
"Well," I said, "it certainly fits the pattern."
"It sure as hell does," she said. "So did he kill his parents?"