Fatal Reaction

telescope, new since the last time I’d been there. As Elliott took my coat and hung it up he explained that the telescope had been a gift from a grateful client who thought that turning it on the reaches of the heavens would be a welcome relief from scrutinizing the follies of mortal men.
    We settled into our places, Elliott behind his antique oak desk and I in an armchair of confessionally soft leather. Declining coffee and having serious second thoughts about the wisdom of having come in the first place, I immediately launched into an account of the little I knew about the circumstances of Danny’s death. I also filled him in about the pending negotiation with Takisawa and explained that it would leave Stephen and me little time to track the police investigation of his death.
    “The way things stand right now you’ll be lucky if there even is an investigation,” replied Elliott as soon as I’d finished.
    “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised.
    “I guess you must be too busy to read the papers,” he replied with good-natured disbelief. “But the police have their hands pretty full with this Stanley Sarrek thing.”
    Of course. Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Stanley Sarrek was the latest in a long and hideous line. How stupid of me not to have put it together. Ever since his arrest the newspapers, the media, the very air seemed filled with nothing else. It was amazing how the actions of one psychopath could cast a pall over an entire city.
    That Sarrek had been apprehended at all, much less in Chicago, was the sheerest of accidents. He’d been pulled over in a routine traffic stop. When the officers asked for his driver’s license they noticed what looked like bloodstains on the running board of Sarrek’s truck. When they made him open up the refrigerated trailer of his double rig they found the mutilated corpses of sixty-three women stored like so many flash-frozen sides of beef. It was, the media breathlessly assured us, a new record for a single serial killer.
    “Do you really think it will have that much impact?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
    “Are you kidding? This creep Sarrek picked his victims at random from all over the country. The cops don’t I even have a place to start. There’s no way to narrow it down. It’s even worse for the medical examiner’s office—worse than a plane crash even. At least when a jumbo jet goes down they have the passenger list to start from and some idea how everybody died. Not only that, but the bodies have been so mutilated that identification is going to be next to impossible—we’re talking body parts—and the fact that they’ve been refrigerated will make it hard to pin down any time of death.
    “Just the whole process of identifying the victims is going to take months. In the meantime, the family of every woman who’s gone missing anywhere in America in the last ten years is on the phone frantically trying to find out whether their wife or daughter is one of the ones who’ve turned up in the back of the truck.”
    “I understand that,” I replied, “but what happened to those women doesn’t make finding out who killed Danny Wohl any less important.”
    “I’m just telling you how it is, Kate.”
    “But you didn’t see his apartment,” I practically sobbed. “There was blood everywhere. It was his home and he ended up fighting for his life in his own living room and dying in a puddle of blood. What happened to those women is terrible, but it’s even worse if it keeps us from finding out what happened to Danny.”
    “So what exactly do you want me to do?”
    “Find out who killed him.”
    “You realize what that kind of investigation involves? Are you sure you really want me to do this? You’re not just acting on impulse?”
    “Of course not,” I replied. Suddenly it seemed very clear. “It’s bad enough that Danny is dead. It will be worse if he ends up the victim of an indifferent bureaucracy just because he had the bad luck to die when some homicidal psychopath got pulled over in Chicago.”
    “Why don’t we wait a little before we jump into this,” urged Elliott. “Let’s give the police a little bit of time to do their job.”
    “You said it yourself. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. They don’t have the manpower and the external pressures of the Sarrek investigation are too great.”
    “You can’t be sure of that.”
    “Oh come on! Which do you think is going to