Dear Irene

He reached over and stilled my hands, making me realize that I had done a fairly good imitation of Lady Macbeth as a scullery maid. His voice was gentle when he said, “She was dead before you got the letter.”

“You’re sure?” Not too steady. Sort of squeaked it.

“Definitely.” He pulled me into his arms, and even though I was getting lemon dishwashing soapsuds on his white shirt, held me there. “He never really gave anyone a chance to save her — not by sending you the letter, anyway.”

“Why is he involving me in this?”

“I don’t know. Publicity, for one thing. He does things to frighten you, it comes across in your stories, and other people feel afraid. Maybe it makes him feel more powerful to have the whole city running around in a panic because of him.”

I leaned back. “You think I’m helping him? That we shouldn’t publish the letters?”

He hesitated, then said, “It’s a useless question. It’s not up to me.”

I knew that meant he thought we shouldn’t, but figured he’d had all he needed of arguments about the police and the press for one day. I let it drop.

I WENT TO WORK the next morning, even though it was Saturday. Like other people at the Express who were scheduled to have time off on Monday and Tuesday, which were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I was trading my weekend for the holidays. The weekend before Christmas is, however, a nearly impossible time to reach anyone by telephone. I wanted to contact officials at Mercury Aircraft, to try to persuade someone to help me look for a link between Rosie Thayer and E.J. Blaylock’s mothers. A couple of phone calls confirmed that I would have to wait until Mercury’s offices reopened on Wednesday — if I made any progress that soon. Corporations that do work for the government are not hasty to let reporters snoop around their plants, let alone ferret through confidential — and legally protected — personnel files. Big companies are often sensitive about their public image, but the fact that two murder victims were children of women who once worked for Mercury Aircraft wouldn’t give me much to push with. Mercury had long been one of the largest employers in town, and my finding out that a couple of local residents had links to it would not scare anyone into giving me an interview.

In the meantime, my imagination was going wild: I wondered if the two mothers had worked on some secret military project together. But why would Thanatos attack their daughters and not the workers themselves? Why wait until years after the workers had died? And even if Mercury Aircraft turned out to be the link between the victims, how was I linked to them? I was still confounded by the fact that Thanatos had singled me out for his contact with the paper.

I kept hoping Hobson Devoe would call.

I also wondered if Thanatos would call to gloat over all the attention he was getting with the second murder.

I had plenty to keep me busy in the meantime. Fortunately, the political beat had slowed a little as the holidays approached, or I would have been hopelessly behind in my work on City Hall stories. I did some catching up.

After a couple of hours in the office, I noticed that some of my coworkers were avoiding me. Stuart Angert seemed to notice it, too.

“It’s not your breath, in case you wondered,” he said, sitting on a corner of my desk.

“I wondered. Glad you stopped by. So what is it?”

“It’s the letters. Same thing happened with me over Zucchini Man. Only this is much worse.”

“Zucchini Man?”

“Let me tell you the story. We had a couple of slow news days one summer, and Wrigley gets a brainstorm. Decides we should have a contest among local amateur gardeners, see who can grow the biggest zucchini. You ever plant zucchini?”

“Frank has the green thumb, Stuart. If he’s smart, he won’t ask me to do more than look at the garden. If the army had known about me, they could have saved a lot of misery by using me instead of Agent Orange.”

“Me, too. I am the bane of the botanical world. Nevertheless, Wrigley decided this contest should be run from my column. I didn’t like it, but what the hell, he’s the boss.”

“Ever stop to think of how much trouble that phrase causes around here?”

“Plenty. And boy, did I get plenty of trouble. Zucchini, I thought, were these skinny little Italian squash I bought in the grocery store. Six, seven inches long, max. ‘Mail in your entry,’ I foolishly said. We were inundated with them.

“As you probably know — I didn’t, but learned very quickly — left to grow on the vine, zucchini can best be described with words like humongous and gargantuan. People couldn’t afford to mail them; some of them weighed as much as a watermelon. So they’d bring them into the paper, hand-carrying them to the security desk. Geoff was calling me from the lobby every few minutes, asking me to come down and get these three-foot, twenty-pound vegetables.”

“So you became known as Zucchini Man?”

“No, Zucchini Man came on the scene a little later. As you can imagine, I quickly tired of lugging the things around, so I was happy when the contest deadline arrived. I declared a winner as quickly as possible, gave out the check for one hundred dollars in prize money, and prayed I’d never see another squash of any kind. I had become the butt of a lot of newsroom jokes.

“However, this one participant was very unhappy with the outcome. He was certain that he should have won. He kept bringing in zucchinis. They would be accompanied by long, rambling notes that didn’t make much sense. He signed them ‘Zucchini Man.’ Geoff warned me that the guy who dropped them off was wearing a tinfoil hat.”

Stuart did not need to explain the tinfoil hat. They are worn by a small segment of our downtown population, and can be seen in many other cities. To the people who wear them, the hats are not a fashion accessory, but a device whereby they attempt to deflect the radio waves that are interfering with their thoughts.

“And people in the newsroom started avoiding you because of that?”

“No, it was when he managed to get past Geoff one day and into the newsroom itself. He knew me from the