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‘Again.’
    â€˜Which is not like you,’ Sam said. ‘And I wish you’d told me yesterday.’
    â€˜I knew it was nothing.’
    â€˜Still,’ he said. ‘I thought we had a deal.’
    They did. Anything that significantly worried either of them, they shared.
    â€˜I’m sorry.’ Grace paused. ‘The dinghy thing’s still bugging me.’
    â€˜Me too,’ Sam told her.
    â€˜MO’s change, don’t they?’ she said.
    â€˜Sometimes.’
    â€˜What if it is him?’
    â€˜Then we’ll catch him.’
    â€˜You didn’t before,’ she said.
    â€˜If it is him,’ Sam said, ‘this time we will.’

EIGHT
    April 21
    T he fact was, Jerome Cooper, aka Cal the Hater, had been back on Miami Beach PD’s Most Wanted list since he had sent Sam Becket a handwritten letter last year and ceased being presumed dead. And everyone in their line of work knew that it was hard as hell for some attention-seeking psychos to stay in hiding for too long, and right now, what Sam wanted to be happening most was for every boat in every marina and at every mooring in the whole of Miami-Dade to be searched; every boat big enough, that was, to hold one man and a dead body.
    â€˜Not gonna happen,’ Martinez said.
    Which Sam already knew.
    What he did not want one day before his father’s big day (and today was his brother Saul’s birthday, too, though they’d agreed to celebrate tomorrow) was a homicide investigation laid in his lap, but Beth Riley – promoted to Sergeant when Mike Alvarez had made Lieutenant – knew same as everyone else in the unit that there were some parallels here that had to make it Sam Becket’s case.
    So here they were in their open-plan office on the third floor at 1100 Washington Avenue, going through their starters’ paces, with no real crime scene to focus on and no immediate hopes of a name to put to their John Doe. And the temptation was to go ahead and pin this crime on Cooper, but in so doing they risked letting some other killer continue about his business while they pulled out all the stops on the wrong man.
    In other words, Sam knew they had to go by the book.
    Detectives Mary Cutter and Joe Sheldon – a recent recruit to Violent Crimes, a young New Yorker married to a Miami Beach doctor – were out on day two of a neighborhood canvass in hopes of finding a witness. Ideally some insomniac with a telescope or binoculars, who’d been scanning the ocean at first light and had seen the victim being dumped from a boat.
    â€˜About as much hope of that as finding icicles under the Venetian Causeway,’ Cutter had said as they’d started out the previous afternoon.
    â€˜I heard it snowed this January,’ Sheldon said.
    â€˜You believe all the crap you hear?’ Cutter had said.
    An appeal for witnesses had gone out this morning on Channel 7, and the story of the grisly find had appeared on the Channel 10 website. People were already calling in, as they often did in the early stages, some well-meaning, sharp-eyed folk with information worth imparting; but outweighing those callers were the attention seekers and cranks and sometimes, worst of all, those citizens with nasty minds and little better to do than try to lead the police astray.
    Nothing of value yet.
    Lieutenant Alvarez had okayed Sam’s absence for tomorrow afternoon – the wedding not scheduled till four o’clock – but still, Sam, the host , for crying out loud, not to mention the man the bride had asked to give her away – was now going to be working right down to the wire; and Martinez, who’d put in for a day the instant he’d been invited, was going to miss the ceremony for sure, though he still hoped to make it for a little partying before the newly-weds departed on their honeymoon.
    â€˜What’s eating you, man?’ Martinez asked Sam around noon Wednesday. ‘If