“He’s not my client, his father is.” I started counting off on my fingers. “Shannon was zeroing in on young Colby for the strangled secretary and the hit-and-run boiler-room broker. That dominatrix kept a little black book with her clients in it, and if she wasn’t blackmailing a certain one, who liked to dish it out rough—and if his name wasn’t Vincent Colby, whose favorite room at the Tube is the S & M suite, then I’m in the wrong damn business. As for our dead mixologist here, he was the previous boy friend of Vincent’s current squeeze—a young female that Vincent is obsessive about, who the ex here liked to pound like minute steak.”

He was nodding, barely. “The girl who found the body.”

“Sheila Ryan, yeah. You’ll be talking to her. Tonight, I bet.”

Another non-laugh. “How smart you are. But smart enough to explain the second hit-and-run? The one that clipped young Colby right in front of your private eyes?”

I thought for a moment, then shrugged again. “Could be Colby and Kraft had a prior grudge. Maybe Colby’s been backing the play of that bank-heisting crew. Maybe he staked them and was getting a cut of the action, and the crew got more successful than they ever dreamed of and Kraft was sent out to get rid of a troublesome ongoing expense.”

“Oh brother.” His eyes rolled. “You are really reaching.”

I leaned in and thumped his chest with a forefinger. “Or maybe Kraft was hired to do that first hit-and-run in the parking ramp! Maybe for some reason Vincent Colby wanted that broker dead and hired a hit, and then stiffed Kraft or otherwise had a falling out with him. So Kraft tried to run him down, too.”

He was shaking his head. “Sad. Really sad to see the depths a once great deductive mind has sunk to.”

It was time to throw my hands in the air, so I did. “Okay, so our killer isn’t a textbook serial. He isn’t a mass murderer by standard thinking, either. Neither was Penta—he was a hit man who left a serial-killer-style signature.”

“Granted.”

“But for some reason, somebody—and it looks like Vincent Colby to me, just about has to be Vincent Colby—is settling old scores or cleaning up after himself. Right now we can see no connective tissue between the kills, other than Colby himself—he’s the connective tissue. Colby, who has martial arts training. Colby, who has outbursts of rage since his concussion. And all of these bunkai kills, remember, came after Vincent got hit by that car.”

Silence.

Then, finally, Pat said, “I don’t disagree.”

“Good. Nice to see your great deductive mind hasn’t sunk.”

His eyes returned to mine. “I’m making no deductions yet. Not necessary. Simply experiencing the resistance any good cop has to coincidence. A resistance a certain Michael Hammer claims never to have had.”