Lastly, the third case was included on my list even though there was no mention of a note in the suicide of John P. McCafferty, homicide detective with the Baltimore police. I put McCafferty on the list because his death eerily resembled the death of John Brooks. McCafferty had supposedly fired one shot into the floor of his apartment before firing the second and fatal shot into his throat. I remembered Lawrence Washington's belief that this was a way of getting gunshot residue on the victim's hands.

Four names. I studied them and the rest of the notes I had taken for a while and then pulled the book on Poe I had bought in Boulder out of my flight bag.

It was a thick book with everything that Poe had supposedly ever written. I checked the contents page and noted there were seventy-six pages containing his poetry. I realized that my long night was going to get longer. I ordered an eight-cup pot of coffee from room service and asked them to bring some aspirin as well for the headache I felt sure I would get from the caffeine hinge. I then started reading.

I'm not one who has ever been afraid of aloneness or the dark. I've lived by myself for ten years, I've even camped alone in the national parks and I've walked through deserted, burned-out buildings to get a story. I've sat in dark cars on darker streets waiting to confront candidates and mobsters, or to meet timid sources. While the mobsters certainly put fear in me, the fact that I was out there by myself in the dark never did. But I have to say that Poe's words put a chill in me that night. Maybe it was being alone in a hotel room in a city I didn't know. Maybe it was being surrounded by the documents of death and murder, or that I felt the presence of my dead brother somehow near. And maybe also it was just the lmowledge of how some of the words I was reading were now being used. Whatever it was, I put a scare on myself that didn't lift as I read, even when I turned the television on to provide the comfo hum of background noise.

Propped against the pillows on the bed, I read with the lights on either side of me turned on and bright. But, still, I bolted upright when a sudden sharp sound of laughter shot down the hallway outside my room. I had just settled back into the comfort of the she]] my body had formed in the pillows and was reading a poem titled "An Enigima7 when the phone rang and jolted me again with its double ring so foreign to the sound of my phone at home. It was half past midnight and I assumed it was Greg Glenn in Denver, two hours behind.

But as I reached for the phone I knew I was wrong. I hadn't told Glenn where I had checked in.