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"This fucker's spooky, Matt 'The People's Will' Thinks he's Babe Fucking Ruth, calling his shots and then hitting the ball out And he's batting a thousand, too, the son of a bitch This tionna strike him out"

"Let's hope so"

"Yeah, let's Personal protection work's supposed to be boring If you do it right, nothing ever happens But it generally doesn't coe headlines attached to it 'WILL TAKES AIM AT LEGAL WHIZ' And everywhere you go with the guy, there's reporters and fil aa video cah"

"I do," he said, "and they're welcoo every which way, and the fucking sus to do over the next several days I saw Joe Durkin at Midtown North, and he made a couple of phone calls and confirmed that the open letter to Adrian Whitfield had been written by the same person (or at least laid out in the same fashion and printed in the same typeface) as Will's earlier correspondence I'd assumed as much, just on the basis of literary style, but it was so I'd wanted to confir for someone with a personal reason to want Whitfield dead He'd been divorced twice, and was presently ally separated from his third wife, who continued to live in Connecticut Each of the es had produced children, and I remembered that one son (the eldest, it turned out) had been arrested two years previously for selling a few hundred dollars' worth of Ecstasy to an undercover police officer Charges had been dropped, evidently in return for his rolling over and giving up his supplier That looked pro, but it didn't seem to lead anywhere

I liked the idea of soe It wouldn't be the first time someone had concealed a personal motive behind the smoke screen of serial uise his own solitary act of ho-I'd had a case like that once, the killer used an ice pick and so did the imitator And I'd known of cases where the killer committed several purposeless murders at random to establish a pattern of serial murder, then struck down someone he had reason to kill as part of that same pattern It was a way to divert suspicion from oneself when one would otherwise be the first and most obvious suspect But it didn't work, because routine police work sooner or later led someone to take a look at everybody with an individualthey always found so

If this was a s a lot of s off a batch of public figures was a long way fro your oife's neck without being obvious about it

But ot into it That happens The man who did the housewives killed four of them before he left his oith her panty hose knotted around her neck And he went on to do three ht hiood My guess is he was enjoying hiood weather held into the weekend Sunday it was supposed to rain, but it didn't, and by late that afternoon it was hot and hazy Monday orse, with a high of ninety-two and the air like ool Tuesday was ot a phone call that diverted

The caller was a woman I knew named Ginnie She said, "God, I'm so upset You've heard about Byron?"

"I know he's ill"

"He's dead"

I knew Ginnie fros at St Paul's Byron was a friend of hers, and I'd e and ra, but some years before that he'd been a heroin addict, and he'd shared needles, and shortly after he got sober he had the antibody test and turned out to be HIV-positive You'd think people would react to such news by saying the hell with it and going out and getting drunk, and I suppose some of them do, but a lot don't

Byron didn't He stayed sober and went towith a nutritional regithen his iood, but it didn't keep hi doith AIDS

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said "The last time I saw him would have been in March or April I ran into hie I think it was Perry Street"

"That's where hethat he didn't look well"

"Matt, AIDS would have killed hiet the chance Soun at hier Nohy in God's na like that?"

Gently I said, "Ginnie, he'd be the one with the best reason"

"What?"

"Maybe he did it himself"

"Oh Christ," she said, impatient with me "He was in a public place, Matt You know that little park across the street fro?"

"I don't knohere he lived"

"Horatio Street Not the Van Gogh but the prewar apart next door to it There's a little park across the street Abingdon Square? No, that's the other one"

"Jackson Square"

"I guess so He was sitting there thispaper And a man walked up to hiot away"

"But there itnesses"

"There were people in the park It was early, so it was still comfortable It's an oven but there now"

"I know"

"Thank God for air-conditioning Byron should have stayed in his own air-conditioned apartment, but he liked the sun He said he'd spent his whole life staying out of it, but now he seeood thing about being HIV-positive is you didn't have to worry about skin cancer You didn't know him well, did you, Matt?"

"Hardly at all"