chapter forty-two

“Oh, Paul.” Rarely had I felt such despair. The worst of it was, he would never, never understand. “This thing you did—this thing you programmed HOAP.2 to do … it is wrong.”

“No. It’s black.”

“You cannot put … obstacles”—I silently apologized to the dead women—“in someone’s way to wait and see if they will be killed, and then arrest the one you set up to kill them.”

“Oh, fuck me,” George groaned. “Michaela, give me a knife, please. I gotta decide whether to use it on him or me.”

“No chance,” she muttered down at her eggplant. She went to the fridge, withdrew a bundle of drumstick pods, and began chopping them in perfect two-inch sections. “If anyone knifes anyone, it’ll be me.”

“What’d you do, nutcake? You hacked his e-mail or his phone or whatever the fuck, you hacked it and stuffed it with the data that his type, either a woman in his stable or what HOAP figured he wouldn’t be able to resist, you found a way to tell him the perfect victim was gonna cross his path. And you found a way to watch. What’d you do—follow him? Hack into the nearest security cam? I guess it doesn’t matter. You put her in his way, you waited until you knew number three was dead, and then you called the cops.”

“Yes yes I did.” Paul’s puzzlement broke my heart. “He would have kept putting down the women of the black.”

Women of the black. I had heard that before today. I had heard it yesterday, in fact. I’ve almost caught the man disappearing all the ladies of the black. If I hadn’t been wondering how Dr. Gallo’s mouth tasted, I might have picked up on it.

Ah … no. Though it was in both our natures to self-flagellate, I don’t know that anyone in the world could have followed Paul’s thought process.

Pity knowing that did not make me feel better.

“He wouldn’t have wouldn’t have stopped until we stopped him until HOAP.2 stopped him. Now he’s stopped.”

“So’s number three,” George said hoarsely. Cadence might have mistaken his tone for horror and sorrow for the third victim. I knew George was watching his cushy retirement fly away on lazy black wings. “Let me break it down for you, Brain Man. You’ve heard of entrapment, right? It’s a legal term, and every once in a while it’s used by someone in law enforcement? Okay, so: in the real world—where we all have to live, Paul—in the real world, we couldn’t entrap a john about to get a blow job and have a prayer of convicting him. Because it’s entrapment. So the killer o’ three your system made?”

“It only predicted—”

“Made. Your wonky program entrapped him into killing number three, and guess what? We can’t prosecute him for that one! We have to hope and pray—good luck, cuz God’s on vacation—there’s enough evidence to tie him to the first two.”

Paul stood perfectly still for perhaps twenty seconds. Then he began to shake; if it was a seizure, it was like none I had ever seen. He trembled from head to foot. His face was blank with horror. His glasses fell off his face and I reached out and snatched them before they hit the floor.

“Look out!” George cried, ushering me behind the counter with Michaela. “He’s gonna blow!”

He certainly was. Some or all of what George had said had made it into the part of Paul’s brain that grasped information the way our brains did. He understood what HOAP.2 had done. What he had done. What he had made happen. Yes. He understood just fine.