Strip Search by William Bernhardt

words. Only…numbers. And symbols. And it wasn’t a sentence, it was an equation:
     

     
    “What does it mean?”
    Amelia gently slid her impression into a plastic evidence bag. “As if I would know. I gave up on math after my second semester of algebra.”
    “Uh, yeah. That was a tough one for me, too.” I hadn’t taken a math class since junior high school. “If this was left behind by the killer, it might be important. There must be someone on staff who knows math.”
    “My understanding is that O’Bannon is trying to round up experts, but not having much success. You know anyone who’s good at math?”
    As a matter of fact, I did, but he had been barred from the premises. I jotted the equation into my notebook and started to move on, when Amelia said, “By the by, Susan—it’s really good to see you here.”
    “Because of my sunny personality?”
    “Because the person who did this…” She grimaced. “Needs to be caught. As soon as possible.”
    “Amelia, dear. Have you no faith in our distinguished chief homicide detective?”
    “I wouldn’t want to say anything that might lose me my job…” She paused. “So I won’t. But as I said…I’m really glad you’re here. And most of the gang in Forensics feel the same. So don’t let Granger get you down, okay?”
    “Deal,” I said, not feeling nearly as much confidence as I pretended. But when you had someone as sweet as Amelia trying to give you a happy shot, it would be churlish not to cooperate. The reality was, I was already feeling edgy, nervous. I knew Granger didn’t want me on this case. He was content to let me handle minor matters—property theft, embezzlement, and what-not. But this was something else again. If I didn’t produce, and fast, Granger would be pushing O’Bannon to get rid of me. The first time I slipped up, any way at all, he’d have my consulting contract yanked and kick my butt back to the suburbs. That kind of pressure I didn’t need. That kind of pressure made me instantly flash on my uneraseable mental map of every liquor store in the city, made me calculate the approximate distance to the nearest of them and plan a route.
    Granger, Tony, Amelia—all of them had said the same thing, in one way or another. This was my kind of case. They were counting on me to bring this monster in, to stop him before he mutilated someone else.
    The only problem was—I didn’t know if I could.
     
     
     

8
     
     
    “CHIEF ROBERT O’Bannon found his son, Darcy, lying on the floor in his library, as usual. Darcy didn’t look up, didn’t say hi. But then, he never did. Why would he? In his mind, there was no reason to offer a common greeting. What purpose did it serve?
    The library also doubled as O’Bannon’s home office, but he always preferred to call it the library. Because he loved books. Three walls of the room were lined with high-quality mahogany shelves—he’d done the carpentry work, as well as the wood-staining, himself. And all the shelves were full. Full and then some—they’d had to put overflow shelves in the garage. He had all kinds of books—dictionaries, encyclopedias, fiction, nonfiction, books on every topic imaginable. He was curious about almost everything. He often said the best cure for being lonely, or depressed, was to learn something new.
    He had scores of criminology texts; every time something at the office was replaced by a more current edition, he took the throwaways home. But he rarely read them. That was what he did during the day. At night, he indulged his first love: novels—the best of everything, from classic literature to current bestsellers. But his favorites had always been nineteenth-century British fiction: Hardy, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Trollope, and perhaps his personal favorite, Jane Austen. Not exactly the conventional image of what a tough-as-nails cop read in his spare time. But he was not a cliché he didn’t go to monster truck shows or watch NASCAR races and