When it comes to police work, professional judgments about a crime are often formed early, sometimes during the first moments of viewing a crime scene. That can lead to tunnel vision and rushes to judgment. But more often than not, seasoned detectives’ expectations are met because patterns do exist and ignoring patterns is stupid and reckless.

A bright detective keeps a sliver of mind open. Milo’s one of the brightest but his assumptions had just been churned to sludge.

He wouldn’t be forgiving himself anytime soon, but I was coming to believe that he deserved a pass. Because the slaughter of Katherine Hennepin was a textbook example of an overkill slice-job by someone the victim knew well. And the assassination of Ursula Corey did bear the hallmarks of a for-hire hit prompted by money or passion or both.

A pair of textbook cases that had skidded way off the page. A couple of obvious prime suspects who’d alibied out.

Was blowing probability to bits the big thrill for the monster who’d choreographed, directed, and starred in all this violence?

Were the killings little more than stage shows? Dinner for two, the props?

But why these two women? The victims mattered. The victims always matter.

Full circle …

I brewed coffee, drank too much of it, walked around the house and out to the garden and back, developing a killer headache that proved oddly reassuring.

Dinner for two. Pleased at his first tableau and repeating it? Because something about setting up a cozy culinary scene made his penis hard and flooded his shallow mind with pulsating memories?

Or did it all reduce to an ad for himself? Just another look-at-me vanity production.

Murder as bragging.

If so, how many other women would be sacrificed to a metastatic ego?

Were we dealing with someone who’d never matured properly due to abuse or neglect? Or one of those mutants who defy explanation?

If I was right about his wanting to humiliate law enforcement, he’d probably had run-ins with the cops and come out on the losing end.

An underachiever who’d overestimated his own intelligence, convinced himself his failures were someone else’s fault.

Yet, for all that, a man sufficiently clever/​smooth/​innocuous to worm his way into Katherine Hennepin’s apartment.

To stalk Ursula Corey in a basement parking lot without her suspecting anything until it was too late.

Shooting her in the face fit an ego run amok.

Look at me look at me look at me.

No shortage of attention whores in L.A. Showbiz and haute couture and politics wouldn’t exist without them. But presidents and movie stars and supermodels get to flaunt themselves publicly. Our boy wasn’t able to.

Or he’d tried and failed.

So he’d retracted like a venomous mollusk, concealed by a shell of anonymity?

A guy you wouldn’t worry about if you saw him walking toward you.

If you noticed him at all.