Henry turned and headed for the door. He still didn’t see Claire. The bar was shoulder-to-shoulder with half-aroused costumed yahoos, but Henry didn’t have time for niceties. He straight-armed through the horde and nearly flattened a blue guy in a diaper who tried to force a Jell-O shot into Henry’s hand.

This story has no moral

This story has no end

This story goes to show

That you can’t put your trust in men

Henry cleared the bouncer and stepped outside, immediately feeling his blood pressure go down twenty points as the fresh air washed over him. The relative silence was deafening. He lifted the phone back to his ear. “Okay, go ahead,” he said, walking into the parking lot.

“I thought you guys were champing at the bit for the Watson autopsy.”

Henry stopped walking. “What?”

“Archie called,” Robbins said, a note of impatience in his voice. “Said you guys wanted the Watson results. So I, being a dedicated public servant, decided to stay and do the autopsy despite the fact that it means working well past midnight. Then I call your partner, and what’s he doing? He’s asleep. And you’re apparently at a party.”

The back of Henry’s neck itched vaguely. “What do you mean, Archie was asleep?” Henry asked.

“I tried him first,” Robbins said. “He didn’t pick up.”

“Archie always picks up,” Henry said. He checked his watch. It was just after one A.M.

“Well, maybe he took a sleeping pill or something,” Robbins said. There was a pause. “I saw the news. The guy probably has a lot on his mind.”

Henry was pacing now, his bad leg starting to throb. “Archie doesn’t take sleeping pills.”

“You’re going to want to hear what I found,” Robbins said.

Henry stopped moving. He had to get ahold of himself. He cleared his throat. Then he said, “Go ahead.”

“Her killer put something inside her,” Robbins said. “A playing card. It was rolled up and pushed up into her vagina, almost to her cervix.”

“A playing card?”

“A suicide jack,” Robbins said. “I went to a conference in Hawaii last spring. A colleague of mine from Miami told a story about a similar case. He said he was aware of four other cases. Young women. Sexually assaulted. Tortured. All found with cards inside them. I didn’t find semen. I did manage to pull some skin from under her fingernails and I sent it to the DNA lab with a rush request. But I’m telling you, Gretchen Lowell didn’t do this.”

A serial killer. Henry rubbed his forehead. Another serial killer. In any other instance, Henry would have questions for Robbins, follow-up. But not right now. Right now his head was somewhere else entirely. “Okay,” Henry said.

“Okay?” Robbins repeated incredulously. “How about, ‘Excellent work, thanks for staying—’”