on direct action, shooting you with a moose gun, but chickened out and shot himself instead?” She was dubious.

“That’s what I got,” Lucas said. “Doesn’t make me happy.”

“What about the wife?”

“As soon as the crime-scene guys get finished with the basics, we’re going to lift up Leslie’s pant legs,” Lucas said. “See if he’s got Screw holes. If he does, we go have an unpleasant talk with Jane.”

“If he doesn’t?”

“We’ll still have an unpleasant conversation with Jane. Then everybody’ll talk to lawyers and we go back into the weeds to figure out what to do next,” Lucas said.

“How much of this would have happened if Burt Kline hadn’t been banging a teenager?”

Lucas had to think about it, finally sighed: “Maybe…there’d be one or two more people alive, but we wouldn’t solve the Bucher case.”

THEY WERE STANDING, talking, when John Smith showed up, looking sleepy, said, “Really?”—looked into the car, said, “Holy shit.”

“You want to come along and talk to Jane?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah,” Smith said. “This whole thing is…” He waved a hand in the air; couldn’t think of a phrase for it.

“Screwed up?” Rose Marie offered.

EVENTUALLY F OUR GUYS from the Medical Examiner’s Office carefully lifted, pulled, and rolled Leslie Widdler’s body out of the Lexus and onto a ground-level gurney. “Guy shoulda worn a wide-load sign,” one of them said. When they got him flat, one of the ME investigators asked Lucas, “Which leg?”

“Both,” Lucas said.

They only needed the first one. Widdler’s left leg was riddled with what looked like small-caliber gunshot wounds, surrounded by half-dollar-sized bruises going yellow at the edges. There were a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Though they didn’t really need it, they pulled up the other pant leg and found more bites.

“Good enough for me,” Smith said. “DNA will confirm it, but that, my friends, is what happens when you fuck with a pit bull.”

“Half pit bull,” Lucas said.

“What was the other half?” Rose Marie asked.

“Nobody knows,” Lucas said. “Probably a rat terrier.”

ON THE WAY to Widdler’s, Lucas and Smith talked about an arrest. They believed that Leslie had been bitten by a dog, but had no proof that Screw had done the biting. That was yet to come, with the DNA tests. But DNA tests take a while. They knew there had been a second person involved, a driver. They knew that Jane Widdler had probably profited from at least three killings, in the looting of the Donaldson, Bucher, and Toms mansions, but they didn’t have a single piece of evidence that would prove it.

“We push her,” Smith said. “We read her rights to her, we push, see if she says anything. We make the call.”

“We take her over to look at Leslie, put some stress on her,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a warrant coming, both for her house and the shop. I’ll have my guys sit on both places…look for physical evidence, records. We’ll let her know that, maybe crack her on the way to see Leslie.”

“If she doesn’t crack?”

“We do the research. We’ll get her sooner or later,” Lucas said. “There’s no way Leslie Widdler pulled these killings off on his own. No way.”

THE THING ABOUT BOTOX, Lucas thought later, was that when you’d had too much, as Jane Widdler had, you then had to fake reactions just to look human—and it’s impossible to distinguish real fake reactions from fake fake reactions.

Widdler was at her shop, working the telephone, her back to the door, when Lucas and Smith trailed in, the bell tinkling overhead. Widdler was alone, and turned, saw them, sat up, made a fake look of puzzlement, and said into the phone, “I’ve got to go. I’ve got visitors.”

She hung up, then stood, tense, vibrating, gripped the back of the chair, and said, “What?”

“You seem…Do you know?” Lucas asked, tilting his head.

“Where’s my husband?” The question wasn’t tentative; it came out as a demand.

Lucas looked at Smith, who said, “Well, Mrs. Widdler, there’s been a tragedy…”

A series of tiny muscular twitches crossed her face: “Oh, God,” she said. “I knew it. Where is he? What happened to him?”

Lucas said, “Mrs. Widdler, he apparently took his own life.”

“Oh, no!” she shouted. Again, Lucas couldn’t tell if it was real or faked. It looked fake…but then, it would. “He wouldn’t do that, would he?” she cried. “Leslie wouldn’t…Did he jump? Did he jump?”

“I’m afraid he shot himself,” Smith said.

“Oh, no. No. That’s not Leslie,” Widdler said. She half turned and dropped into the chair, and made a weeping look,