JAIME’S DRIVER WAS DOWNSTAIRS WAITING TO PICK HER up. My first thought was “Wow, she has a chauffeur,” but once we were behind the soundproof tinted glass in the backseat, she assured me that the driver was a rental, hired for the trip by her production company. Jaime didn’t own a car—she was rarely home, so a car would have sat in the parking garage. Milwaukee was less than a two-hour drive from Chicago, so there was no sense flying. The driver was just a bonus, the kind of luxury that comes with being semifamous.

We spent the afternoon in the hotel business lounge. Other people came and went, popping in just long enough to check their e-mail or send a fax. One stuck around, a guy in his early thirties, still young enough to be impressed by the posh hotel his company had put him up in, and to expect others to be equally impressed. When that and his pricey suit didn’t win him coy glances from Jaime, he switched to that modern-day equivalent of dragging in a freshly killed hunk of meat—attempting to wow her with his computer skills.

She assured him that she could handle it, but he still hovered at the next terminal, pretending to work, stopping every few minutes to make sure Jaime was “still doing okay,” hoping she’d become hopelessly snarled in the Web, and he would swoop to her rescue, maybe win an invitation back to her room and hours of acrobatic sex with a gorgeous flame-haired stranger. Hey, it happens in the Penthouse letters column all the time, and they don’t put stuff in there that isn’t true.

When Jaime finished, she escaped with the old “just running to the ladies’ room” line. Now, if it’d been me…but it wasn’t me, so I kept my mouth shut.

Once back in the hotel room, Jaime grabbed a roll of hotel-supplied Scotch tape from the desk, and plastered the walls with the printouts so I could read them. There were over a hundred pages, detailing twenty-three cases, some obvious suspects, some your garden-variety domestic murders but with something extra that had warranted national attention. When she ran out of wall space, she laid pages on the bed and sofa. Then she checked her watch.

“I’m supposed to be in makeup in twenty minutes.”

“Go on.” I looked around. “This is fine.”

“So long as housekeeping doesn’t decide to slip in and turn down the sheets.” She glanced around the room and shuddered. “Even the showbiz spiritualist gig wouldn’t explain this.”

“I’ll cast a lock spell on the door.”

My spell wouldn’t work on a door in the living world, but there was no harm in trying, if it made her feel better.

“Good luck,” I said. “Or is it ‘break a leg’?”