“It was in the Bahamas,” I said. “And it was to keep them from killing a priest. Who happened to be going out with my mother at the time.”

“Episcopal priest?” she asked.

“Catholic.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It wasn’t an exploitive relationship.”

She returned to business. “We need someone. To take care of”—her hand moved in a circle over the space between us—“this part.”

“You wanted a woman to do it.”

“That was the original idea,” she admitted.

“Part of equality and empowerment?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it would be.”

I made a dismissive sound.

She changed tack again. “Don’t…you wouldn’t have to do it yourself.”

“It? It? What ‘it’?”

“Killings,” she said.

“Murders,” I said.

She nodded. “If you like. Or executions. Or…call it what you like…what would be perfect, the perfect answer for all of this, is for you to set things up. Find people. Safe, reliable people. Like yourself. Under your supervision.”

“Preferably women?”

“Yes. If you can. That would be good. We’d structure it,” she said, “so you’d be our Head of Investigations. Real job, real title. Six-figure salary, plus bonuses…all of which you could report, clean, legal, up front…perfect…plus your piece of the company…then once things are up and running, any time after that, at your own choosing, you can walk away. Yet the money keeps flowing to you.”

I don’t know if she read my face or she read my mind or she simply knew that she had reached the point, gone way past the point, where she had to address the screeching issue, “You think I’m insane.”

Yes, I did. I don’t doubt it showed.

“You do know what a top lawyer bills? They broke the thousand-dollar-an-hour barrier at least a decade ago.

“Think about it. It’s simple math. Two weeks can easily be one hundred hours, billable hours. That’s a hundred thousand dollars. For the top guy. He, or she, has associates, paralegals, expenses. How much is that? Figure another hundred and fifty thousand. In two weeks you can run up a bill of a quarter million dollars. Four weeks, you get to half a million. A couple of months, we’re at multimillion-dollar legal fees. Think about an ordinary person, let alone an exploited, abused, minimum-wage woman, going up against that.”

I didn’t look at all convinced.

“You’re a male,” she said. “That’s why you don’t get it. Let me give you a hyper-male example. You know Hulk Hogan.”

“Not personally.”

“You know Gawker?”

“No.”

“They were an online gossip magazine. They posted a short video clip of Hulk having sex with a woman named Heather Clem, the wife of a man who was supposed to be one of Hulk’s closest friends, Bubba ‘the Love Sponge’ Clem.”

“The Love Sponge?”