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a magic act.
    “Wow,” Raina said, more polite than impressed.
    The guy told Raina his name was Shane and he had learned this spiffy technique in Asia. As a matter of fact, he had only recently returned from overseas and was glad to be back on U. S. soil. He told her he was even happy to be in an American laundromat. He had been backpacking continuously throughout Asia for the past six years, where, he informed her, they had terrible laundry facilities.
    “Oh?” she said. “I thought the Chinese were the laundry masters.”
    “Yeah, they probably are, but I was in Tibet and Nepal. It’s quite a bit more primitive in those countries.” Sincerity oozed from his very blue eyes.
    “Right.” She looked at him with more interest. “You really went to Tibet? Wow! I’ve always wanted to go there and maybe even try to get an audience with the Dalai Lama or something,” she said, wide-eyed with excitement. “Did you just get back or something?”
    “Yeah, I just got back ... yesterday.  The trip was unbelievable. The experience of going there and seeing and doing the things that I did was so spiritual, so magical.
    “But I’ve been gone so long, everything’s seems kinda weird,” he confessed. “It’s hard to explain, but it’s tough for me to adjust to being back. I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Like I don’t know anyone anymore. Know what I mean?”
    Raina wasn’t exactly sure what he meant but she nodded anyway, happy to have met someone who had been in the same country as her spiritual leader.
    She had no way of knowing that what he was telling her was a complete song and dance. He had never been to Asia and he certainly wasn’t interested in anything spiritual or anything Dalai Lama. If he had mentioned to her that he had just gotten out of prison a couple of months earlier, she probably would have had a markedly different opinion of him. She did not have the insight to understand that throughout his copious chatting, throughout his elaborate lies, throughout his phony-baloney folding tricks, his sole goal was to determine how he might make the best use of a person like Raina. How he might help her help him find a way to commit a crime or two.
    January 28, 1996
    Unfortunately for Shane, six weeks after beginning work for PNM, he found himself in a bit of a pickle. An unnamed source had notified Shane’s dad that PNM was about to perform a routine background check on his son. The source told his dad the investigation should have been done when he was hired but somehow it had fallen through the cracks. When Shane heard about the imminent background check, he immediately advised his boss that he was a convicted felon.
    His supervisor thanked him for his honesty and then promptly fired him for lying on his job application.
    January 29, 1996
    Raina was still living in her green VW bus, despite Shane’s many invitations to crash on his couch. As it was, she was parking her van in front of his apartment on a regular basis and using his facilities when necessary. Shane had been nice enough to her, and even though she sort of trusted him, she didn’t really feel comfortable staying at his house. He was single and she was single, and she didn’t want to give him the opportunity for the wrong things to happen. She had let him know, in no uncertain terms, she had zero interest in men, but she was well aware that some men saw themselves as irresistible.
    However, as temperatures continued to drop and each night got colder than the last, Raina had second thoughts about sleeping in her vehicle. One night she woke up with both feet close to being frozen. She vowed to ask Shane the next day if she could sleep on his sofa until things warmed up a bit.
    “No problem, Raina,” he said. “Stay over any time you want. My couch is your couch.”
    January 30, 1996
    When Esther arrived at John’s apartment with some groceries, Shane was sitting on the couch.  She knew Shane was a Community Corrections program