She snatched the bottle from his hand and placed it on the table. "You've had enough. We're gonna need at least a few working cells in that brain of yours to sort through all your junk."

He led her to the bedroom, though she already knew the way. "You remember the last time we walked down this hall together?"

She sighed behind him. "I didn't come here to talk about things that ended a long, long time ago, Martin."

He grinned over his shoulder, trying to provoke her. They continued down the hall, to the closet that had been mirrored until shortly after the incident with Nico Damiani, when looking into mirrors in the dead of night had gotten to be too much for him.

The wheels squeaked as he opened the closet door. He kept meaning to oil them but had never gotten around to it. On a high shelf were several cardboard boxes of old research. He reached up and snagged one down, then set it on the floor with a jangle of plastic.

"This one's all James Barclay. It's everything I've got on the sick little puppy."

Sheila gave him a look. She saw right through his false bravado. He was terrified and she knew it.

She didn't even need to tell him. She knew that too.

Martin found it both comforting and terrifying to be known so well. To know someone as well as he knew her. He'd spent his entire life keeping people—especially women—at arm's length. He'd never even visited the same barber twice. During one of their last arguments Sheila had suggested it was his fear of abandonment. Martin wasn't so sure, but he'd let her have the win if only to stop from fighting all night.

Diving into the box, he pulled out photocopies of Barclay's criminal records, including the mug shots they'd taken the two times he'd been arrested prior to his multiple murder charges. One for DUI and another for assault and battery, both when Barclay was much younger. He'd worn a real slick wide-collared shirt in one of them. Looked like a carbon-copy Roy Rogers.

Beneath these was a stack of small cassettes held together with a rubber band, copies of Sheila's interviews and originals of his own, along with pages of court transcript. He brought his notebook to the bed, rubbing his right thumb on the old scar on his left palm in a circular motion while leafing through it.

"'Juvenile record expunged,'" he read. "Is it true about serial killers and bedwetting? I only ask because I know a certain someone who wet the bed until she was eight."

Sheila swatted his leg with a manila folder. "I never should have introduced you to my parents."

"'No signs of sexual contact on the bodies,'" he continued. "'Three different modes of death: vehicular manslaughter with victim's own car—'"

He thought about the car earlier that night, the big old Lincoln, and he shivered despite the bedroom's warmth. If it really had been Barclay, he wouldn't be sitting on his bed with Sheila Tanner at his feet. He'd be dead in a ditch, one of Aunt Norma's favorite phrases, as in: For all I knew, you could've been dead in a ditch.