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okay?” I asked.
    She nodded. “I just want to get out of here.”
    It shamed me, but the thought did fly through my mind: not much chance I’ll have to worry about her moving in now.
    Annabeth was smoking furiously when they released her from the interrogation session. She turned her back to the cop who was picking through the back issues of
Rising Tide
on the coffee table and spoke low and urgently. “Where the fuck is Dan? That cop is asking all this stuff about who lives here and he sounds like he thinks Dan might have done it.”
    Lord. In all the confusion, I had forgotten about Dan Zuni. I looked over at Cliff, repeated the question. “Where is Dan?”
    “Taking photos, I guess.”
    “Where?”
    “Who knows.”
    It wasn’t at all unusual for Dan to take off by himself for days at a time. He’d throw a few things in the back of the car and go into the woods to take photos, to think—meditate, as Mia called it—or to enjoy the peyote a friend had laid on him.
    Of course, it was just as likely that he’d met some girl and gone off with her. Dan was spacy by nature, and a loner, but he had that gorgeous mane of silken hair, that burnished skin and those arresting black eyes. Females couldn’t get enough of him.
    The cops let us make tea. It felt weird to be puttering at the stove. The kitchen had been Mia’s province. I didn’t get to drink mine, though. Detective Norris had saved the best for last, so to speak. He crooked his finger at me, calling me out to the sunporch.
    Man, that guy rubbed me the wrong way. Earlier, the feeling had seemed to be mutual, and then some. But Norris’s manner had softened a little by the time I took a seat across from him on the foldout sofa.
    The questions he put to me about Wilt and Mia went all over the map—jealous exes, drug deals, enemies, gang membership, Mafia ties, sexual kinks, satanic cults.
    I guess my answers jibed sufficiently with what the others had told him. As the interview rolled on, he even deigned to answer a couple of my questions.
    “Did you take those ropes off of him? Are they gone yet? The bodies, I mean.”
    “Yeah. They’re on the way to the morgue.”
    “How long were they laying there like that? You’ve got some kind of tests to tell you that, haven’t you?”
    “Hard to say. The ME’s gonna have fun with this one. There’s no heat in that place. It being so cold, they coulda been killed yesterday afternoon or late last night. Why do you ask?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know, really.”
    But I did know. I was being stupidly messianic. I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d stayed at home, or if I hadn’t decided to spend the night at Nat’s, I could somehow have stopped the slaughter.
    “Are you finished with me now?”
    “Almost.” He leaned back in his chair, offered me a cigarette. “You go to the same school as Wilton Mobley?”
    “No.”
    “Where do you go?”
    “Debs.”
    He gave me a Gomer Pyle grin. “Huh. So you like them commie teachers?”
    Off-the-wall question. But I knew what he meant. Debs College had been founded in the 1930s by a renegade group of Socialist academics fed up with the ivory-tower mentality and racial quotas. From all accounts, it was a glorious hotbed. But now, some thirty years later, there was little difference between it and just about any other midlevel university.
    “I like them okay,” I said. “They’re better than fascists anyway.”
    As the interrogation wound down, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d much rather deal with the fat-ass street cops who had busted heads in Lincoln Park than a jerk like Norris. At least you could usually outrun them.

CHAPTER THREE
    WEDNESDAY
    1
    I lay there listening to the others in the kitchen. The room was freezing cold. I had forgotten to put the heater on and had slept—if you could call it that—all curled up, the covers pulled over my head. I knew I had to get out of bed sooner or later, but the effort seemed enormous. This huge weight