Milo said, “Out with the old, in with the new.”

I said, “Like we thought, this is all about Corey starting a new life.”

He rubbed his face. “Nothing like a renaissance of blood.”

The horses had been picked up by a Lancaster outfit named Equi-Trans, specializing in “humane transformation.” The company’s website was thin on specifics but Milo finally pried out the cold facts from a “representative.”

Unwanted steeds were shipped to a pet-food slaughterhouse in Roswell, New Mexico.

He hung up. “Roswell. Coupla gorgeous animals turned to kibble for space aliens? Jesus.”

Shoving his office door open, he charged into the hallway, stalked up and down a few times, returned. “Here I am with a bunch of murders and horses are getting to me.”

“Animals can do that.”

“Sydney and Jasper.” He shook his head. “What the hell did they do to deserve being turned into pet chow? All right, enough sentimentality, onward.”

He sat back down, waited.

I said, “What?”

“Help me define ‘onward.’ ”

If I’d had anything to offer, I’d have told him.

The next forty-eight hours revealed no contact among Richard Corey, Grant Fellinger, and Flora Sullivan. After two nights of Fellinger and Sullivan returning dutifully to their spouses, enthusiasm for either lawyer as a suspect waned. The watch on Sullivan was lifted, surveillance on Fellinger limited to after dark.

Two additional days passed with nothing to report and Milo stopped calling me to pass along failure. That left me nothing to do but think and imagine.

The same questions kept spinning in my head.

If Richard Corey had hired his ex-wife’s executioner and had worked solo on the other murders, why the dinner-for-two tableau? I’d explained it as a control-freak production. But there were all kinds of ways to assert dominance and Corey’s condo had offered no signs of interest in culinary matters. Just the opposite, it was Sad Bachelor Central.

Had food and death somehow pushed an accomplice’s buttons? The obvious candidate was Darius Kleffer, a man who made his living cooking and had been dumped by one of the victims. Kleffer had been in New York during Kathy Hennepin’s murder but that didn’t absolve him of the other killings.

Could Kleffer and Corey have met up somehow and devised a homicidal tit-for-tat?

I carve up your girlfriend, you shoot my wife.

And let’s toss in a couple of other women just for laughs.

But so far no link had arisen between Kleffer and Corey and there didn’t seem to be an avenue to search for one. Still, I wrote down Kleffer’s name followed by a chunky question mark.