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couldn’t actually arrange for Mr. Grothan to die of cancer, I could kill him with smoke inhalation.
    I arranged for him to be heavily sedated first, and spent a fair bit of time carefully designing the “accidental” fire that I had Travis set.  It produced a fairly impressive blaze in the townhouse Grothan resided in, but only the one building was damaged.  Travis, so far as I know, was never even a suspect in the arson investigation.
    And then there was my latest target, Okay Hampton; I trust I don’t have to tell you who he was.  My instrument in that case was a dentist named Rosalee Klein, who killed the erstwhile wrestler by asphyxiating him with nitrous oxide.  A simple error on her part—or so it appeared to the rest of the world.  A world that now has one less monster in it.
    Jack finished the file and shut off the computer.  Then he went to find Nikki.
     
    ***
    He found her in the gym they’d set up in the basement, working out.  She was on her back bench-pressing weights, her skin already covered with a sheen of sweat. 
    “So far, I’m still not—uh!--seeing a problem,” she said through gritted teeth.  “You said it yourself.  He’s—uh!--probably just taking credit for—uh!—accidents.”
    “I don’t think so.  I did a little digging, and every death Remote listed is being investigated as suspicious.  The mechanic he mentioned has been charged with criminal negligence.”
    “So?  That—uh!—doesn’t mean Remote’s responsible.” 
    “No, but the facts line up.  The police didn’t charge the mechanic with homicide because they couldn’t find a motive—he had no reason to kill Henshaw.  The police in North Dakota did find the poison in the wine that killed the rapist, but they haven’t charged anyone either—the clerk apparently had no connection to his victim other than the fact that he sold him groceries on a regular basis.  Even the Hampton case—nobody’s willing to believe a successful Beverly Hills dentist would kill one of her clients just because she disagreed with a jury.”
    Nikki finished her last rep and set the bar back in place on the supports over her head.  She sat up, breathing heavily but evenly.  “Jack.  You want to know what one of the simplest cons is?  Guy gets a letter in the mail, telling him which sports team is going to win a game.  Team wins.  Guy gets another letter picking another team in another game.  Same thing, the team wins.  After three or four letters—every one accurate--the guy gets one asking for money for the next pick.  He pays it.  Team loses.  Know how it works?”
    “Yeah.  Statistics.  The scammer sends out a couple dozen letters to a bunch of different people in the first batch, half picking one team, half the other.  He only sends follow-up letters to the ones that got the winning pick, and does the same thing again. The pool of possible suckers gets divided in half each time, until there’s only one or two shmucks who think they’ve got a line on a sure thing. “
    She picked up a towel from the floor, slung it around her neck.  “That’s right.  And in the good old US of A, there’s one big-ass pool of statistics to draw on.  So this guy found a few newspaper stories that fit his parameters?  So what?  Doesn’t mean he has magic mind-bending powers.”
    “No, it doesn’t.  But that’s not the part that’s bothering me.”  Jack sat down on the weight bench beside her.  “The crash that killed that Mayor in Arkansas?  He wasn’t the only one.  His wife and two kids were in the car.  And the pick-up they slammed into was being driven by a couple in their sixties.  The only that survived was one of the kids, and he’ll be an orphan in a wheelchair for life.”
    Nikki met Jack’s eyes.  She didn’t say anything.
    “The rapist that was poisoned?  He shared that bottle of wine with his date.  She died, too.”
    “People die, Jack.  Doesn’t mean this guy is