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“I’ll want a sample of that paper, Mr. Breen. It matches the type left at both homicides I’m investigating.”

“This is just too fucking weird.” He sat, heavily. “Take it.” Several emotions seemed to run across his face as he scooped a hand through his luxurious hair. “He knows about me. He’s read my stuff. What the hell did the note say? I can’t remember, just something about how he appreciated my work, my attention to detail or something like that, and my—what—enthusiasm for the subject.”

“Do you have the note?”

“No, I wouldn’t keep it. I answer some of the mail personally, have a droid do the bulk. If it’s snail mail, we recycle the paper after it’s answered. He’s using my work as research, don’t you think? That’s horrible, and really flattering at the same time.”

Eve passed one of the sheets and envelopes to Peabody to seal into evidence. “Give him a receipt for it,” she ordered. “I wouldn’t be flattered if I were you, Mr. Breen. This isn’t research, or words in a discbook.”

“I’m part of it now. Not just an observer this time, but part of something I’ll write about.”

She could see he was more pleased than appalled.

“I plan to stop him, and soon, Mr. Breen. Things go my way, you’re not going to have much of a book.”

“I don’t know what to think about him,” Peabody said when they were outside. She turned back, studied the house and imagined the good-looking Breen swinging his handsome son onto his shoulders and taking him to the park to play. And dreaming of fame and fortune written in blood. “The stationery was right out of the blue. He didn’t try to hide it.”

“Where’s the excitement if we don’t find it?”

“I get that—and he likes the rush, no question. But his story sounds solid, especially if the killer has read his stuff.”

“He can’t prove where it came from, and we have to waste time trying to trace it. And Breen’s juiced by it.”

“I guess it’s the sort of thing that’d juice him. His job’s on the sick side.”

“So’s ours.”

Surprised, Peabody hiked with Eve to the car. “You liked him?”

“I haven’t made up my mind. If he’s no more than he claims to be, I’ve got no problem with him. People like murder, Peabody. They jive on it when it’s got at least one of those degrees of separation. Reading about it, watching vids about it, turning on the evening news to hear about it. As long as it isn’t too close. We don’t pay to watch a couple of guys hack each other to death in an arena anymore, but we’ve still got the blood lust. We still get off on it. In the abstract. Because it’s reassuring. Somebody’s dead, but we’re not.”

She remembered, as she climbed into the car out of the vicious heat, how that thought raced through her head, again and again, when she’d huddled in the corner of that frigid room in Dallas and looked at the bloody waste of the thing that had been her father.

“You can’t feel that way when you see it all the time. When you do what we do.”

“You can’t,” Eve said as she started the car. “Some can. Not all cops are heroes just because they’re supposed to be. And not all fathers are good guys just because they give their little boys a ride on their shoulders. Whether I like him or not, his lack of alibi, his line of work, and his possession of the notepaper put him on the list. We’re going to do a very careful check on Thomas A. Breen. Let’s run the wife, too. What didn’t we hear from him in today’s conversation, Peabody?”

“I’m not following you.”

“He told us she came home from a late meeting. She went to bed. He worked. He slept in. She took the kid to the park. But I never heard anything about we. My wife and I, Jule and I. Me and my wife and Jed. That’s what I didn’t hear. And what impression do you suppose I get from that?”

“You’re thinking the marriage isn’t good, that there’s friction or disinterest between Breen and his wife. Yeah, I can see that, but I can see how with two careers and a kid a couple could get into a routine that revolves around work and pass the toddler.”

“Maybe. Doesn’t seem much point in being together