Which brought her back to Patrick Harrington. He was a do-gooder. Trying to move his family to a better neighborhood. Trying to save a troubled kid. Trying to succeed at a second marriage with a blended family. Then he lost his job. Then he got behind in his renovations. Then his adopted son started taking out neighborhood rodents. Maybe the pressure mounted, the growing chasm between what life was supposed to be and what it was actually becoming.

Can’t save the world? Then he’ll leave it—and take his innocent darlings with him.

D.D. could buy that logic. A grand jury could buy that logic. Except Phil and Alex had swept through the upper two floors of the Harringtons’ home, and as far as they were concerned, Patrick was only days away from completion. Following that revelation, they’d searched the Boston Globe, and sure enough, Patrick had placed a rental ad, which had started running just this morning. So the guy finally makes arrangements to rent out the top two floors of his triple-decker, then decides, Fuck it, I won’t even give it one weekend for a potential renter to materialize, I’ll just kill everyone tonight.

Impulsive crime, Alex kept telling her. Impulsive crime.

D.D. wasn’t sure about that. She’d just worked her way through eight different character testimonies, and each and every one of them agreed Patrick was a stand-up sort of guy. How did a man leap from steady father figure to impulsive family annihilator in five minutes or less?

Dammit, she wanted a pepperoni pizza.

Actually, she wanted sex. On her desk would do nicely. Just sweep the papers aside. Toss the files on the floor. Strip off her jeans, rip off Alex’s starched blue shirt, and go to town. He struck her as the kind of guy who would be both patient and intense. She’d like patient and intense. She’d like strong male fingers gripping her ass. She’d like the sensation of a hard-muscled body pounding into hers.

She’d like one moment when she was not Sergeant D.D. Warren, Supercop, but a woman instead.

Is this what a biological clock did to a female? Fried her brain cells, ruined her work ethic, made her stupid?

She was not getting married. She was not having children. She was not going to have sex in her office. So she might as well read the fucking case reports, because this was her life. This was what she had left. Five dead in Dorchester and no one alive to tell the tale.

She made it ten more minutes, then said Screw it and headed home. Time for a cold shower, reheated Chinese food, and a good night’s sleep.

D.D. was just pulling onto I-93 when her cell phone rang.

She grabbed it impatiently, barked out a greeting.

It was Phil; he didn’t sound good. “We got another one.”

“Another what?”