After rechecking the lock one more time, I find my iPod and plug in. Today, I’ll listen to R.E.M. and feel the thrum of music run through my body. As I hum along, I drag the heavy tomes from their resting place, plop myself into the chair and open the pages. Some of the pictures and articles have yellowed with age, but they are all in perfect order, as I have so carefully placed them. Photographs of Bentz. Articles about him. His entire life as a police officer captured.

There is one of a crime scene where Detective Bentz, standing just on the other side of the yellow tape, is talking with two other officers. In the background sits the house where the victim was found. But I’m not interested in the little bungalow with a blooming wisteria running over the front porch. Nor do I pay any attention to the blood still visible on the front steps.

No.

I focus on Bentz.

The good-looking prick.

In this shot, his face is in profile. His features are harsh and rugged, his stern jaw set, his razor-thin lips flat in anger. Always the tough cop.

Yeah, right. “Bastard,” I say, keeping my voice low.

I spy another photograph of him on the Ferris wheel at an amusement park. Kristi is at his side. She is all of seven in the photo, and Bentz’s lips are wide in a grin—a rare shot of him having fun.

The photograph, not clear to begin with, is around twenty years old. I run my fingers over the images. As I have done hundreds of times.

Twenty years!

Twenty effin’ years.

The child a grown woman.

It’s true, I think ruefully, time flies.

But no more. Time is about to stand still.

These pages with their clear plastic covers are filled with his life. Old wedding photos of his first marriage are fading, washing out, the fashions worn by the happy couple evidence of another era.

As the music runs through my brain I flip forward quickly, my fingers urging the years to spin past, faster and faster. Until I stop at the present. Here the more recent pictures of his new wife, Olivia, are fresh and clear.

New wife.

New life.

We’ll see about that.

One picture of the bitch, a photograph where she’s looking straight into the camera, catches my eye. In the shot, Olivia is serene and smiles slightly, as if she knows a secret, as if she can read my mind.

What a nut case!

And to think that Bentz actually believes he’s happy with a woman who has several screws loose!

A psychic?

If so, then she should be worried.

Really worried.

But then, of course, she’s a fraud.

Do she and Bentz believe her “visions?”