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people she’d ever met that knew when to let things go.
    Except, the problem was, she wasn’t. She didn’t ever let things go until they were entirely resolved. A personal flaw.
    “The killer wants us to feel him out there.” Neatly she severed the white part of the root from the onions and the scent was clean and almost sweet. Outside the window over the sink, the street was peaceful and serene as the evening faded in a molten slide into the heavy dusk. There was a barbecue going on somewhere, maybe at the house two doors down, because a man and a woman carrying covered dishes got out of a minivan, both of them laughing.
    This was, after all, the day before the Fourth of July. Somehow, after a stint in that house with the dead body, she didn’t feel all that festive.
    Bryce picked up his glass of wine and lifted it to his mouth to take a quick drink as he stirred the chicken. “Okay. If you can’t tell me I understand, but I’m naturally curious. Maybe it was the word ‘stage.’ How so?”
    She could never do that. Cooking for her required a single-minded concentration, but their personalities were certainly very different.
    Maybe too much so. She couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.
    “I won’t give you the gruesome details because I know you don’t want them, but the victim was definitely placed in a position so we know they didn’t die that way naturally, and then, it appears, set on fire.”
    “That’s gruesome enough, thank you. No more details necessary.”
    “The medical examiner is hopefully going to tell us more.” She said it in a meditative voice, more thinking out loud than anything. “Dead is dead and I would look for the killer either way, but it really feels like someone went to some trouble to make us investigate this one.”
    “Why the hell would anyone want to attract the attention of the homicide department of the Milwaukee Police?” He spoke with the conviction of a person who had once been under scrutiny.
    She’d wondered that herself. Quite a lot in the past few hours. Ellie lifted a shoulder and lopped the top off another scallion. “Who knows? I agree, it sounds risky to make sure we know what happened wasn’t an accident. However, my job is pretty straightforward. Why doesn’t interest me all that much. Who really does. And he’d better watch it, for he really has my attention.”
    “Does he? And in a bad way. I can tell you from experience, he doesn’t want that.”
    He was probably right, Ellie thought. The dark spot in his life might have shifted, but Bryce spoke with the resigned cynicism of someone in the aftermath of a bitter divorce and who had been suspected of being a serial killer.
    Add: You might just date a homicide detective .
    She needed to refocus. Oh sure, he stood there in the kitchen just a few feet away, but he’d faded and gone blank as she looked at the diamond-patterned backsplash and remembered things she wished would never be imbedded in her psyche, like blackened corpses.
    She mused out loud, “You’re on the right track, of course. That part I don’t get. Who would seek to deliberately draw our notice? Maybe, when we find out the identity of the victim, we’ll be able to at least speculate.”
    But she was speculating now, wine in hand, mind busy, the shiny knife turning the onions into tiny white and green rounds …
    “How did they get the body there?”
    She appreciated the effort. He knew that engaging her this way would make her run through it out loud instead of doing it abstractly as they ate, trying to keep from him that she wasn’t really part of the conversation.
    “He.” She finished chopping and settled on a bar stool. “I doubt this could be a conspiracy.”
    “Why?” Bryce had told her once he found this part of her fascinating. It was different from how his mind worked but a little like brainstorming a book … he rejected out of hand violence and the motivation for it, but then again, it was her job, and the