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It was a needle, half full of what I knew to be heroin.
    I looked closely at the girl’s arms and easily found the single needle mark, slightly bloody. On the face of it, it looked like an overdose or a suicide but not a murder. This was Maple Bluff after all – a cat up the tree, stolen stop signs, an occasional drunk and unruly grandmother visiting from up-country perhaps, but not murder.
    There was nothing more for me to do that night, so I went home to write up my report. Thank God for technology – I could do it all online with a cold beer and slice of pizza. Back in the day, I would’ve been up to my neck in paperwork.
    But as I was typing little details began to bother me. The walls of the house, for example, had been empty – no paintings, no photographs. It had been like being in one huge hotel room, impersonal yet inhabited. How could he live in that house without leaving a trace of himself? But that wasn’t a crime, I told myself. And perhaps the house wasn’t home for him; perhaps somewhere in Africa was a house full of photos of a smiling wife, kids and a little dog called Simba that only ate crocodile meat. But even if that was the case, how could a college professor afford a home in Maple Bluff? The taxesthemselves were enough to feed and clothe a family of six. Something didn’t add up – a beautiful blonde girl dead on the doorstep of an African professor. A suicide or an accidental overdose on a stranger’s front porch? No, it was too random to be random. And I’ve seen some fucked up shit. Like this guy who killed a man as he fetched his morning
Wisconsin State Journal
and left a note on him:
A STRANGER KILLS A STRANGER. ONCE. YOU WILL NEVER CATCH ME. SIGNED, RANDOM
. With today’s forensics as long as the victim has even the slightest connection to the killer, sooner or later we get the fucker. But the Random Killer case was different – the victim and the killer were strangers connected only by a theory we barely understood.
    To cut a long story short, the killer made one fatal mistake – he had left a partial thumbprint on the note. Five years later there was a fire in a hotel basement that was put out without much damage, but because we suspected arson we fingerprinted all the hotel guests and employees and crosschecked the fingerprints against our database. We didn’t catch the arsonist but it turned out that our Random Killer had been holed up in the hotel doing all sorts of things with a hooker. Nothing much to him in the end; just a local pharmacist with a loving wife and kids.
    When he was brought in I looked him straight in the eye and told him that he had fucked up. A perfect crime has no motive. And if there is no motive, then there’s no crime? But he just looked up at me with pity in his eyes. ‘You are a fool,’ he said. ‘Did it not occur to you, Detective, that I was trying to prove that chance is not random?’
    I don’t know what the hell he meant by that, and herefused to say another word – to me, to his lawyers, to his kids and wife – but this much I did know: there had to be a connection between the white girl and the African professor. If I found it, I would be closer to understanding what had happened. There had to be a connection, but what was it? I was tired as hell but I woke up early that morning to go see the coroner – one strange dude.
    ‘Always stuck with the real pretty ones, ain’t we, Ishmael?’ Bill Quella – BQ for short – said as he pulled the girl out of storage, his Southern twang, sing-songy and a little high-pitched for a man, echoing off the tiles.
    ‘Unlucky in life, lucky in death I guess,’ I answered.
    BQ laughed a nervous squeal of a laugh. He, like everybody else I worked with, knew my wife had left me. What they didn’t know was that she had left me because I was a black cop. At least that is what she’d said. I didn’t understand. How could I be a traitor to my race when I was protecting it? But then there were lots of