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formed on his lips.
    ‘I was with my girlfriend. Both dates.’ He grinned.
    There was no movement from him this time. His body settled firmly in place.
    ‘Where does your girlfriend live and what’s her name?’ Gibron prodded.
    ‘Ellen Jacoby. She lives with me. Would you like to have a talk with her? She’s home right at this moment.’
    Now it was a full, bright smile. He showed Doc and me all those teeth, and their whiteness almost shot out a glint, a gleam of their own.
    *
    Ellen Jacoby concurred when confronted with the dates. He’d been with her all the time on both evenings in question. She was a brunette. Not pretty. But seemingly very sexual. There was something seeping out of her. She had long, dark, curly hair, and she sent out some very strong signals. I could see why Karrios overlooked the cosmetic beauty.
    ‘Is that all you wanted to know?’ she asked, eyeballing me until she obviously expected me to break our interlocked glances. But I outlasted her, and she finally stared in the direction of her man, Marco Karrios. When the two of them locked up, eyeball to eyeball, Doc nudged me and we got the hell out of there before those two started dropping their pants on the spot.
    Outside, Doc asked the obvious.
    ‘You like him?’ he queried.
    ‘No. But I lik e he r a lot better.’
    Gibron laughed briefly, but then his face went serious as we made our way back to the car.

 
     
    Chapter Seven
     
    I went to funerals. The idea was that killers sometimes liked to relive their crimes by being around the mourners of their victims. I didn’t remember ever catching somebody at a funeral or at a wake, but I figured I would take any edge I could get. Someday it might work out.
    But not at Delores Winston’s service, out here at Oak Hill Cemetery on the far South Side. The only attendees were a mother, a sister, Doc, Jack Wendkos, and me. It seemed that Delores had been a loner in life, and that was the way she was going out, too.
    No one looked remotely like a potential cutter. Unless the guys working for the mortuary were double-dipping as moonlighting killers.
    Delores’s mother, Frances, thanked the three of us for coming on out here.
    ‘I know you don’t have to do this,’ she smiled sadly.
    ‘Actually we do. We come out to have a look at the folks in attendance, Mrs Winston,’ I explained. ‘But we would’ve come anyway. We get more involved in things like this than most people imagine.’
    She looked a bit confused, so I didn’t try to clarify anything.
    ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ Jack said as he extended a hand to the bereaved mother.
    Doc nodded and shook her hand, and then we walked toward the parking lot and the two cars we’d arrived in.
    I was telling her the truth. Delores was not just a number on the board for Doc and me. Or for Jack, either. It became personal. When I started doing the reading on each of the victims I investigated, the first thing that hit me, over and over again, was that each of them had a history. Every one of the dead had a mother and a father, at least initially, and every one of them spent nine month s i n uter o , and they all popped out the chute thereafter in order to learn to stop dirtying their underwear, to grow up, to make friends, to play ball or ride a bike, to mature, to have a life — and then to have some murderous piece of shit end it with a knife or a gun or a lead pipe or whatever. Yeah, they all had a background. I knew because I read about them. I did research on each one of them. And then some miserable son of a bitch stopped time on them and the file closed.
    That was when Doc and I entered the picture.
    *
    I was thinking this guy was in business with the organs. I don’t think he was a Jeffrey Dahmer cannibal. I can’t imagine him storing the vitals in some freezer as a trophy. Some of the shrinks who advised us downtown had that theory about our man — who had now acquired the name ‘The Farmer’. I don’t like nicknames for