Mark stood up and stretched, walked over to the window, and looked out. When he turned to face me, he looked wistful, as if recalling an old love affair, then disturbed, as if remembering the crash of its ending.

“What will this morph into in ten, twenty years, if we don’t get a handle on it soon? It’s a multi-headed, multi-tentacled monster already, and just looming on the horizon right now.”

His green eyes darkened, turned hard and remote—unreadable. Cop eyes. He turned back to the window.

“Maybe these dead guys figure heavily in all this too, in the snuff end. Girls, really young ones, are starting to disappear off the streets—sometimes in broad daylight. They’re finding headless female bodies, the grand finale in the worst of the snuff films. They’re turning up in ditches, alleys, in trash dumps around Juarez, Tijuana, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, the Sonoran Desert. Some cops seem to be in on it too, but nobody knows for sure.”

Mark continued to stare out the window, rubbing both temples with his fingers.

“Shit, I don’t know how much longer I can swim in this cesspool. Vice cops don’t have a long shelf life, and I get why. But, you know, this is personal. I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have this to occupy my mind. I don’t know where I’d put my hate.”

Mark went silent for a minute, brooding. I was busy trying in vain to remember what was hovering around the edges of my consciousness, playing its maddening game of hide-and-seek.

Another scotch helped calm my racing thoughts, stopped my hands from shaking. But I was getting sloppy, starting to slur my words.

Mark suddenly snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah, now I remember what I wanted to tell you.”

And so, he did.

After a sweep of Harvey’s glass-enclosed lair, he said, they found an earring outside on the terrace, one for pierced ears, but the back was missing.

“It was almost hidden by a plant leaf. They nearly missed it, but it glinted in the sun. Probably doesn’t mean much—might even belong to the maid. The slob had a Japanese garden going out there, or his landlords did, thick bamboo and such. Anyway, it wouldn’t belong to any girlfriend, I don’t imagine. I don’t think this dude’s bag was women, maybe not even girls. There were no unusual prints anywhere either—just Harvey’s and the maid’s. The earring went in the evidence bag. Not much else was found.”

I continued to listen to Mark, but my mind was drifting. I could almost feel Khalika in the room, hovering like a malevolent shadow. I caught a whiff of her rainy day on a tropical beach smell. I felt that twinge again too, bypassing the anesthetic effect of the good scotch. I tried to ignore it, but it only got more insistent. She was definitely close by, I knew—or was thinking about getting that way. Mark’s voice began to seem like it was coming from a different room.

“If there was a doer, either the terrace door was left open, or the doer got in some other way and waited for Harvey to step out there before they snuck inside. If the door had been locked, then they did an expert job of somehow getting the slider open without damaging it. The only way to get access would have been to slide down a rope hooked to the roof after it got dark. If that’s what happened. Either he dropped himself or was dropped on that joystick. Take your pick. If whoever it was didn’t do it, I can only imagine the reaction when they found him in the tub. It must have been like Christmas morning for Spider-Man—or Woman. There were crumbs on the counter, but it was probably from a sandwich Harvey made before he decided he needed a bath. If the doer made the sandwich, well, that’s some mighty cold shit right there.”

We both laughed. Our humor was right in sync, right from the start.

“The doorman doesn’t work there anymore, so we’re trying to track him down. The only other explanation is that Harvey knew his killer. We’ve got guys reviewing what we caught on the bug that was planted at the Envy now. As usual, there’s reams of boring shit—thug-speak—to sift through to find any gold. A real snore fest. These assholes sure love to talk about what they’ve done or would love to do with women. It’s like they’re trying to convince one another how straight they are.”

Mark returned to the mystery of the stud, and something else started working its way from the prop storage area in my head. I was getting woozier by the minute. The ruby stud earrings—the ones he’d given me at Il Cortile that evening, on our first real date? When I’d looked for them that morning in the dish by the sink, there was only one. I felt my stomach drop when I realized that maybe the mate had fallen into the sink drain. Now it hit me, like a truck: Khalika. She’d been here, saw them, and decided to borrow them. She did stuff like that all the time. I’d look for something, then find it somewhere else, somewhere I knew I hadn’t put it. I racked my brain. But why would she borrow just one—unless… unless… she lost one?

I asked Mark if he had any idea what color the earring was, whether it was a real stone or just glass.

“Nope, I haven’t even seen it yet. Why? They’ve got a jeweler testing it.”

I was starting to get a really bad feeling—about everything. The twinge in my spine got stronger still, until it almost made me jump. Still, I was twenty years old, and there was this beautiful, decent man in my loft, long muscle rippling under his mocha skin, a damp shirt stuck to it. He didn’t make any move though, and I didn’t either.