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rat.”
    I exited the car and opened the door to my building and let myself in to my apartment. David was asleep in bed. I sometimes wondered if, after prison, with its inherent lack of privacy, he slept better when I wasn’t in the bed next to him.
    Bo came over to me and accepted a few pats. My cat slunk over and nudged his head against my knee. The two of them got along surprisingly well.
    I flicked on the light in the kitchen and opened the fridge and poured myself a tall glass of apple juice. I was convinced hydration was the secret to avoiding a hangover. I opened a cabinet and took out three Advil. Hydration and over-the-counter pain relievers. I hoped I wouldn’t hate the morning too much.
    But they didn’t have a pain reliever for what was really bothering me.
    Lewis was considering leaving the lab for stardom on the boob tube.
    Joe was considering shutting down the foundation for his ambitious girlfriend’s career plans for him.
    C.C. was still MIA.
    My father was considering selling my childhood home.
    My brother was again dabbling in the same sort of things that got him arrested before.
    And my mother’s killer had decided I would make a nice mouse.
    No, there wasn’t a pill big enough to fix what was wrong with my life.

Chapter 5
    I trained my gun on the paper silhouette at the end of the firing range. Six shots later I had nailed my target square between the eyes, twice in the heart, once in the belly, once in the shoulder and once pretty close to where his family jewels might be.
    I knew I was a good shot. What troubled me was knowing that if I ever came face-to-face with someone, conditions wouldn’t be like the firing range, where I could concentrate and focus and aim ever so accurately. Guns were my father’s and Mikey’s territory, not mine. When I fired my handgun, I usually pictured myself coolly facing down my mother’s killer, channeling my anguish into something powerful and calculatingly devastating.
    I took off my ear muffs and safety glasses, put my gun in its holster and checked my watch. It was time to go home. David and I had made plans to take Bo to the park.
    As I left the firing range, I thought about Marcus’s case. And my mother’s. DNA isn’t done on every case. Now, more and more, it is, but there just isn’t enough money—particularly if you have a public defender, like Marcus did. Sometimes, in old cases, tests weren’t done simply because they didn’t exist at the time, or because the advances in technology were too new. For instance, now we can test with smaller fragments of DNA than ten years ago. The specimen doesn’t have to be as pure. The tiny drop of blood found in Marcus’s case didn’t belong to him or his victim. It opened a window for his possible release.
    I walked the five blocks to my car. I had parked it down a side street. The neighborhood wasn’t the best; it was a warehouse district, and Saturday left it abandoned. I instinctively shook my head to clear my mind and pay better attention. I walked taller and deliberately appeared more confident. I had been in plenty of seedy bars in tough parts of town with Dad and Mikey. If you don’t look for trouble, but don’t appear afraid, you’re more likely to be left alone.
    I reached my Caddy and started to climb in, but noticed a large brown envelope tucked under the windshield wiper blade on the passenger side. I walked around my car and retrieved it, opening it right away.
    Then I screamed. Inside was a thick lock of human hair with what looked like dried bits of blood attached to it. I squinted and looked closer. The hair definitely had once been caked in blood. Someone had left me a “souvenir.”
    I scanned the street. I didn’t see anyone, and it could have been left for me two hours before, when I first arrived at the shooting range. Then I got an eerie feeling. I couldn’t identify it precisely, but a cold chill tingled at the back of my neck. I had the sense I was being watched. I told