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wriggled again, the pressure relieved.
    ‘So can I go?’ Gregory asked.
    ‘Of course,’ Grace answered. ‘We can call your mom.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can take the bus.’
    ‘I’ll have to call,’ Grace said.
    ‘It’s OK,’ he said, resigned. ‘I’ll stay. So long as you know I’m not going to tell you anything.’
    ‘It’s up to you,’ Grace said evenly.
    ‘It isn’t just the dreams,’ Gregory said. ‘I can cope with them. It’s the waking stuff I can’t take.’
    Hope surged in Grace of a real beginning, but then, abruptly, he stood up.
    ‘I’m sorry, doc,’ he said. ‘I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.’
    ‘I hope you know you can trust me, Greg,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said.
    Hope melted away.

Chapter Six
    A little wariness, even prickliness at first, had emanated from Detective Dave Rowan from the Broward County Sheriff’s homicide unit when Sam had first made contact about
the Pompano Beach killing, though things had eased up when he and Martinez had gone up there to talk.
    Sam understood cops who preferred to protect their more challenging cases, guessed he’d been guilty of that too a couple of times in the past when the FDLE – the Florida Department
of Law Enforcement, the agency with state-wide jurisdiction – had first stepped in to help and then taken over a Miami Beach investigation. He had known at the time that it was probably the
right thing, but still, when a team had run with a case for a while, had done all the donkey work and was anticipating actually getting someplace, it could be a little hard to take.
    No suspects in the Pompano Beach killing, nothing to convincingly tie the murder of Carmelita Sanchez to that of Rudolph Muller. Nothing, that was, other than the beach setting, which meant
little, and the bludgeoning before cutting.
    ‘With a baseball bat,’ Martinez said later.
    No sports fan, neither as a player nor spectator, he had long regarded bats as potential weapons, had set his sights on the missing bat as the piece of proof they most needed to locate in order
to link these two cases.
    ‘
Possible
baseball bat.’ Sam had reiterated Sanders’s report.
    A few minute fragments of wood had been embedded in Carmelita Sanchez’s forehead. Of ash, the Broward County ME had reported, but since most wooden baseball bats in the US were made from
ash, that had rendered the evidence of minimal use to the sheriff’s office. The same applied to the finding of alcohol and linseed oil residue, both of which simply meant that the owner of
the bat had – at least until it had been used as a club – liked to take care of it.
    No wood fragments had been found in the mess of Rudolph Muller’s smashed face, and Dr Sanders had made no mention of either oil or alcohol.
    ‘Doesn’t mean it was or wasn’t the same bat,’ the doctor had said when Sam had called him to double check. ‘Could mean the killer noticed a chip and rubbed it down
and cleaned it before the next assault. Could also mean, as I said, that it wasn’t a baseball bat at all.’
    ‘Or just another bat that
wasn’t
taken care of,’ Sam said.
    ‘Like my oldest boy’s,’ Sanders said. ‘Never seen so much as a drop of linseed oil since we bought it for him.’
    The cutting blade of whatever instrument had been used to slice off Mrs Sanchez’s lips had, the Broward County ME felt, been fine and sharp, but was, she had thought, more likely to have
been a sharp kitchen knife than, say, a cutthroat razor. Sanders had hazarded at a kitchen knife in the Muller case too, but with no telltale markings or striations in the throat wound, he had been
unable to be any more specific than that.
    ‘No sense looking in people’s kitchens then,’ Martinez said. ‘Find a suspect with a bloodstained bat and we got our killer.’
    ‘Piece of cake,’ said Sam dryly.
    By Saturday afternoon, the Miami Beach investigation team had completed their first round of routine tasks, including the