I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Merker had alluded, at one point, to the deaths of the three other bikers at the Kickstart in Canborough.

How he’d taken care of them too.

The police wondered whether he had told me why. I said no. Best to play dumb. But when they got in touch with Detective Cherry in Canborough, he’d tell him his theory that maybe Merker had worked out some sort of deal with the opposition, that he’d already been the prime suspect in the death of his former second-in-command.

The thing was, they were already able to tie half a dozen murders to Merker. Why not throw in another three for good measure?

Other stuff happened later.

Trixie was released from prison. They’d been holding her as the chief suspect in the Benson murder. There wasn’t much point in that anymore.

She let me know, quietly, that the gun she’d pointed at me in the basement of her house, the same one Eldon Swain had given her and which had the potential to connect her to the killings in Canborough, had been dropped into a river from a highway overpass on her way up to Kelton. She’d been scared to hang on to it.

Brian Sandler, the health department inspector that the Gorkins dumped into the fryer, didn’t die. But his recovery will be long and difficult. He was soon well enough to communicate everything he knew about corruption in the health department. About his boss, and others, who’d turned a blind eye, either for money or out of fear, to a number of establishments’ health violations, as well as other illegal activities that were being conducted on the premises.

Sarah wrote the story for the Metropolitan. I put her onto Sandler and turned over to her everything I had, all my notes, the audio file that Lawrence Jones found in his e-mail.

I thought if it was her story, it would get her out of Home! and back into the newsroom. After all, I was already on suspension. Better to rescue a career that still had a chance to be redeemed.

It worked. And Sarah’s version of the story was better than what I could have done.

Managing editor Bertrand Magnuson did call me, however. He’d had some sort of change of heart, given everything Sarah and I had been through. He said he was willing to rescind the suspension and let me write about tracking down Trixie Snelling, her subsequent exoneration, the Gary Merker affair, the biker massacre in Canborough—the whole nine yards, as they say. A first-person exclusive.