“Great, and no hard feelings about that other thing, right?” Bernie held his hands up in the air as a truce.

“Right.” We said good-bye and I shook my head as I walked away. How many other women were there? And did everyone know? It was bad enough that I had to deal with his betrayal, but the fact that every-one knew he was cheating on me made me feel so much worse. When a man cheated on a woman and people knew, it was as if he were pro-claiming to the world that you were lousy in bed. Because if he was getting laid with any decency, why would he stray and mess that up?

I took my sad, single-girl salad home and sat in front of the computer, trying to come up with a fresh way for our investigators to talk about a dead body lying on a metal autopsy table. Writing the dialogue wasn’t really that hard, but coming up with creative new murder ideas was tough. The “Marilyn” story had been money, but there weren’t too many of those. And with all the forensic shows on the air now, we were all tragedy whores looking for the next great scandal.

Online, I came across a story in Canada where police had suspected a well-respected doctor of being a serial rapist. The guy worked out of one of Toronto’s biggest hospitals, and police tailed him for months, finally gathering enough circumstantial evidence to get a warrant for some DNA testing. The doctor passed the DNA testing, even though one of the victims had ID’d him from a police lineup. Canadian police were mystified over the negative test results. Over the next two years, they asked for more DNA samples, thinking maybe the negative result was the fault of shoddy lab work, but still they got no positive match.

It wasn’t until the fourth time they extracted blood from him that the nurse practitioner noticed something strange about the sample. She thought it looked old; the blood was too dark in color. After a thorough examination, investigators found that he had surgically implanted a vial of someone else’s blood under his skin near his own vein, so that when the sample was drawn from his arm it wasn’t his blood, but blood from the vial. It was totally gross to imagine someone thinking that up, but it would make for great television.

The light grew dark in my little house, and I hadn’t realized when the time passed from being late on a Saturday afternoon to the middle of Saturday night. I took my salad plate into the kitchen, rinsed off the remnants, and slid the lone dish into the dishwasher.