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O’Malley, the recently elected State’s Attorney for Cook County, with a political hot potato.
    I’d heard about the case, of course. You’d have to live under a rock in Chicago not to. Some months earlier, Gunther Westlake, a controversial University of Chicago professor, had been discovered dead on the university’s South Side campus—and under circumstances that quickly had the wheels of journalism humming.
    â€œI don’t blame you for feeling squeamish, though,” Josh said through a mouthful of potato chips. “Just thinking about what happened to the guy makes me want to puke.”
    â€œYou and me both,” I said, resisting a powerful urge to cross my legs.
    It wasn’t just that Westlake’s body showed up on the last day of “Scav,” the university’s world-famous scavenger hunt, when the campus was overrun with scores of visiting parents and dignitaries. Or that his corpse was found inside one of the colorful exhibits displayed in the school’s main quad for scoring by the competition’s judges. Or even that Westlake’s remains appeared just as one of them—a class of ’73 alumna who collapsed and had to be carried away on a stretcher—was looking inside an entry that should have earned its team a whopping fifty points: a giant papier-mâché replica of a woman’s vagina.
    It was also that Westlake appeared to be missing some anatomy of his own, which had been severed at the root and stuffed down his throat.
    â€œStill, you’ve got to admit it’s an interesting case,” Josh said.
    â€œâ€˜Interesting’ is one way of putting it,” I said. “‘Media circus’ is another.”
    Under the circumstances, Westlake’s murder initially struck some as ideologically motivated: the professor’s polemics, appearing in his popular blog and on the op-ed pages of several national newspapers, could always be counted on to provoke someone’s ire. A member of the university’s Sociology Department, he rarely confined himself to subjects of purely academic interest, penning caustic, in-depth pieces on everything from women in the military (he didn’t approve) to stay-at-home mothers (he did), usually drawing enthusiastic applause from the Right and stinging scorn from the Left. Only a month before his death, an article Westlake had written for the National Review on the underrepresentation of women in the STEM fields (entirely appropriate in his view) had erupted into chaos when female undergrads stormed the Ida B. Plotkin Sciences Hall dressed as Barbie dolls—the Chicago Maroon had humorously captioned the story “Breastageddon”—bringing unwelcome attention to the university’s record on promoting women and forcing its president to convene a hasty press conference reaffirming “our commitment to gender equity in all tenure decisions.”
    The investigation had taken a different turn, however, when the police discovered evidence that Westlake had been killed in his home and that the weapon used to emasculate him was one of the professor’s prized Shun hollow-steel chef’s knives, then missing (according to his housekeeper) from its section of a wooden block on the kitchen counter. Their antennae were further raised by reports of altercations between Westlake and his estranged wife, Rachel Lazarus. When students returning from a frat party in the middle of the night claimed to have seen a woman fitting Lazarus’s description moving a suspicious bundle across campus, the case seemed open and shut. Lazarus was removed to an Area 5 police station and promptly confessed.
    Even with all the theatrics, the case might have produced less fanfare had it not been for the public defender assigned to represent Lazarus who, upon researching possible defenses, discovered what appeared to be a long history of domestic abuse. Police logs going back a decade showed