“I admit I had a few, am driving along and know I’m not going to make it home,” Deedrick kept talking, nervous and excited.

“Then you pulled back here to use the bathroom?” Brazil flipped a page, writing fast.

“Pulled in, and see this car with lights on, the door open and think someone else is taking a leak.” Deedrick hesitated. He took off his baseball cap and put it on backward. “I wait, don’t see no one. Now I’m getting curious, so I go on over and see him! Thank God I got a phone.”

Deedrick’s wide stare was fixed on nothing, and sweat was beading on his forehead and rolling from his armpits. At first he thought the guy was drunk, had dropped his pants to take a piss, and had passed out. Then Deedrick saw orange paint, and blood. He had never been so frightened in his life. He galloped back to his car, peeled out, and floored it the hell out of there. He pulled off under an overpass and peed. He called 911.

“My first thought?” Deedrick went on, a little more relaxed now. “It’s not really happening. I mean, the little bell is ringing and ringing, all this blood, pants down around his knees. And I . . . Well, you know. His parts.”

Brazil looked up at him. Deedrick was stuttering.

“What about them?” Brazil wanted to know.

“It’s like they were spray-painted traffic cone orange. With this shape.”

Deedrick was blushing as he outlined a figure-eight in the air.

Brazil handed him the notepad. “Can you draw it?” he asked.

Deedrick shakily drew an hourglass, to Brazil’s amazement.

“Like a black widow spider,” Brazil muttered as he watched West and Hammer duck under crime-scene tape, ready to leave.

Brazil ended the interview in one big hurry, conditioned by now to fear being left. He also had a question that Hammer and West needed to hear. He addressed the chief first, out of respect.

“Has the killer spray-painted all his victims with an hourglass?” Brazil said earnestly and with excitement.

West went still, which was rare for her. She did not move. Brazil thought Hammer was the most overpowering person he had ever met. She waved him off with a no comment sort of gesture.

“I’ll let you handle this,” she said to West.

Hammer headed to shadows where her car was parked. West strode to her Ford without a word, and when Brazil got in and fastened up, they had nothing to say to each other. The scanner was active and it was getting very late. It was time to return Brazil to the parking deck so he could get in his own car and get the hell out of her hair. That was the way West felt about it. What a night.

They were riding back to the LEC at almost midnight, both of them keyed up and tense. West couldn’t believe she had hand-delivered a reporter to that scene. She absolutely could not take it in. This had to be somebody else’s life that was happening to West on a dimension where she had no control, and she was reminded of a time she would never admit to anyone, when she was a sophomore at a very small, religious school in Bristol, Tennessee. The trouble began with Mildred.