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I said, “You’re a good daughter.”

She replied, “Thank you, but for chrissakes, look at me. Hardly good enough, hardly what my old man wanted me to be. My mother’s had a tough life. I’m intensely proud of my father. He was a great detective, and he helped a lot of people over the years — hundreds and hundreds of them. But he was never the same after the Boston Strangler case, and he never made it easy on my mom.”

I nodded. “I think that Strangler case ruined a lot of people’s lives.” Not to mention ended; Edgar Sullivan’s corpse flashed in my mind like a slide in a PowerPoint presentation, but of course I didn’t mention it. What I said was, “I know it’s not exactly making mine a pony ride at the moment.”

Now she nodded knowingly, with a smile, though I wasn’t sure what she actually knew. She said, “Good Lord, he was tough to get along with. My mother’s an alcoholic. I ended up spending my twenties shoving heroin into my arms and up my nose. I lost everything I had. My husband, my child, my job. I’m not blaming my old man, I’m really not. You create your own problems in life. But man, he didn’t make it easy to get out. He was a miserable old guy, right to the end. Maybe the Strangler case was the cause, or maybe it was an excuse. I was never sure.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

Deirdre Hayes shrugged. “My mother has alcoholism in her family, but my dad brought it all to the fore. If I was her, I can’t tell you I would have done it any differently, except maybe divorcing him and living my own life on my own terms.”

We talked a little bit about my meeting with her father the day that he died. I mentioned how surprising it was that he fell down the stairs that day.

She said, “You triggered something in him. He never got out of bed, but after you left, there was something he had to see.”

I said, “He was trying to tell me something before I left, but he couldn’t get the words out. Then his health worker showed up and kicked me out.”

She nodded. I was beginning to hear the clock ticking toward my return flight, so I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m on a tight schedule, and the truth is, I’m really eager to see what it is that your old man has.”

“Let’s go.”

She led me from the kitchen down a short hall and out a metal door into an obsessively neat two-car garage, where the floor still looked like it was brand-new. There were no vehicles in the garage, giving it a cavernous feel. It was also un-air-conditioned, making it feel hotter than a day in hell, which perhaps this was and someone forgot to tell me.

Deirdre said, “The day after my father died, I was really sad for all that had happened, not just his death, but what became of his life, and my mother’s life, and my life. I wanted to relive some of it, reach back to the better times and try to figure out what went wrong. I took a peek through his stuff myself. There’s some interesting stuff. Maybe it explains all this — his misery, the way he died. You know?”

I didn’t know. Not yet, anyway. As she said this, she led me to the far rear corner of the garage, where an old footlocker — a chest, really — sat on the floor. The key was already in the hole. She turned it and opened the locker upward, revealing four old boxes in pretty good shape sitting side by side inside.

She opened the top of the second one and pulled out a notebook from inside. She slowly flipped through it to a section in the back that she had tabbed with a Post-it note, and she began reading to herself, getting lost in the words and her own thoughts. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “My father always said he had another prime suspect in the stranglings, but he would never tell anyone who it was. Here it is, in black and white, in his own words.”

With that, she handed me the notebook. As I received it, I could already feel my heart falling. I read through the notes, which were of the exact interview he had already described to me in his bedroom on the morning that he died, the one with Paul