Katherine Belle Hennepin, thirty-three, a bookkeeper at a mom-and-pop accounting firm in Sherman Oaks, had been found in the bedroom of her West L.A. apartment, strangled and stabbed. The blowup of her driver’s license photo portrayed a thin-faced, fine-featured woman with shoulder-length light-brown hair, a sweet smile, and freckles that managed to assert themselves with the DMV camera. Sad eyes, I thought, but maybe I was already biased.

I knew why Milo had included the shot: wanting me to think of her as a person.

Wanting to remind himself.

Rosiness and pinpoint blood dots around the ligature mark but far less pooling and castoff and splotches than you’d expect with thirty-six stab wounds suggested the killer had choked first, slashed second.

A few blood drops and a tamped-down section of carpeting indicated the murder had begun in the hallway just outside the kitchen, after which Katherine Hennepin had been dragged to her bedroom. The killer then positioned her atop her twin mattress, lying faceup, head propped on a pillow. She was found covered, head-to-toe, with a blanket taken from her linen closet.

The pose the killer had chosen—arms pressed to her sides, legs close together—suggested peaceful repose, if you didn’t consider the gore. No obvious sexual positioning and the autopsy confirmed no sexual assault. Milo and Detective 1 Sean Binchy had gone over the apartment with customary thoroughness and found no evidence of burglary.

An empty slot in a knife-block in the kitchen fit the heaviest butcher blade in the set. The dimensions of that high-quality German utensil synced with the coroner’s description of the murder weapon. A careful search of Katherine Hennepin’s apartment and nearby garbage bins failed to turn up the knife. The same disappointing result followed a canvass of the quiet, middle-class neighborhood where the victim had paid rent for two years.

No fingerprints or blood were lifted that couldn’t be traced to Katherine Hennepin. The lack of foreign blood was another letdown; knife-murderers, particularly those engaging in overkill, often lose their grips on blood-slicked hafts and cut themselves. Despite the apparent frenzy of this attack, there’d been no slip.

I turned the page to a new set of photos.

In the dinette off the kitchen, the table was set with dinner for two: a pair of lettuce side-salads, later determined to be dressed with olive oil and vinegar, plates bearing grilled salmon fillet, rice pilaf, and baby string beans. An uncorked bottle of medium-grade Pinot Noir stood to the right of a small floral centerpiece. Two glasses held five ounces of wine each.

Everything about the crime scene—no break-in, theft, or rape, obvious overkill postmortem attack, shrouded victim, opportunistic weapon—suggested a killer well known by the victim, and driven by nuclear rage.

Milo’s interview of Katherine Hennepin’s employers, an octogenarian pair of CPAs named Maureen and Ralph Gross, uncovered a stormy relationship with a boyfriend, a chef named Darius Kleffer.