“My take is that he’s crazy in love with her, still wonders how he ever managed to snag her and he’s glad O’Connor’s dead. He didn’t kill him, but he sees it as a favor that someone else did.”

“So you think he was threatened by the senator?”

“Big time,” Freddie said. “He knows he wasn’t the love of Natalie’s life.”

“Good. That’s good. Crazy how much he looks like O’Connor, huh?”

“I’d say creepy would be a better word.”

“Agreed. I want you to look into those ‘other relationships’ of hers that he referred to. Find out if any of the other men in her life met with an untimely demise, and while you’re at it, do a search for unsolved cases involving dismemberment. The senator might not have been the first.”

“Local or national?”

“Start local and see what pops. I’ll be authorizing overtime for both of us, so while you’re at it, get me everything you can find on the three women we met today. No detail is too big or too small. If they have a tattoo, I want to know what it is and where.”

“Tramp stamps,” he wrote as she snickered at the term. “Got it. You’re really sure it was a woman, aren’t you?”

“Every fiber of my being tells me this was a love affair gone very wrong.”

“Or someone wants us to think that.”

“We can’t rule that out,” she conceded.

“In light of what we’ve learned today, we also can’t rule out that it might’ve been a love affair with a man that went very wrong.”

“Right again,” she said. “Nothing is ever as cut and dried as we’d like it to be, is it?”

“Nope.”

“You’ve had a few girlfriends.”

“So?” he said warily.

“Don’t you compare notes on past relationships?”

His face flooded with color. “Depends on how serious it is with the new one and whether or not she asks.”

“Is it weird that Natalie Jordan never told her husband that things got kinky with the senator?”

“I don’t know, Sam. That falls into a serious gray area. What guy would want to know that his woman did it all with the ex?”

“Hmm. It just seems strange to me that she’s never even alluded to it. I mean, they’re married. And you saw his face. He had no idea what I was talking about.”

“Did you share that kind of stuff with Peter?”

“Bad example. We weren’t your typical married couple.”

“Sorry to dredge up the past, but I think you’d be in a better position to answer your own questions than I would be, having never been married myself.”

“Yeah, I guess, but I hardly had the kind of marriage where major sharing factored in.”

“So what’s next?” he asked, seeming anxious to change the subject.