I had it cold. My brother and Morris Kotite, an Albuquerque detective who supposedly killed himself with a shot to the chest and another to the temple, left suicide notes that quoted the same stanza of poetry. It was a lock. But these feelings of vindication and excitement quickly gave way to a deep, growing rage. I was angry at what had happened to my brother and to these other men. I was angry at the living cops for not seeing this sooner and my mind flashed to what Wexler had said when I had convinced him of my brother's murder. A fucking reporter, he had said.

Now I knew his anger. But most of all, I realized, my anger was for the one who had done this and for how little I lmew about him. In his own words, the killer was an Eidolon. I was chasing a phantom.

It took me an hour to get through the remaining five cases.

I took notes on three of them and dropped the other two.

One was rejected when I noticed the death occurred on the same day John Brooks was killed in Chicago. It seemed unlikely, given the planning each of the killings must have involved, that two could be carried out on one day.

The other cases was rejected because the victim's suicide had been attributed, among other things, to his despair over a heinous kidnap-murder of a young girl on Long Island, New York. It initially appeared, though the victim had left no note, that the suicide would generally fit my pattern and require further scmtiny, but I learned when I read the report to the end that this detective had actually cleared the kidnapmurder with the arrest of a suspect. This was outside the pattern and, of course, didn't fit with the theory that U" Washington had floated in Chicago and that I subscribed to, that the same person was killing both the first victim and the homicide cop.

The final three that held my interest-in addition to the Kotite case-included Garland Petry, a Dallas detective who put one shot into his chest and then another into his face. He left a note that read, "Sadly, I know I am shom of my strength." Of course, I hadn't known Petry. But I had never heard a cop use the word "shom" before. The line he had supposedly written had a literary feel to it. I just didn't think it would have come from the hand and mind of a suicidal cop.

The second of the cases was also a one-liner. Clifford Beltran, a detective with the Sarasota County Sheriffs Department in Florida, had supposedly killed himself three years earlier-it was the oldest of the cases-leaving behind a note that said simply, "Lord help my poor soul."

Again, it was a conglomeration of words that sounded odd to me in the mouth of a cop, -any cop. It was just a hunch but I included Beltran on my list.