On my second day in San Francisco, I worked out of a small cubicle near Jamilla Hughes’ desk at the Hall of Justice. I attended a couple of her briefings on the Golden Gate Park murders, which were thorough and highly professional. She was impressive.  Everything about the murder case was weird and wrongheaded, though. No one had a fix on it yet; no one had a good idea, at least none that I’d heard so far. The only thing we knew for sure was that people were being murdered in particularly horrible ways. It happens more and more frequently these days.
Around noon, I got a call on my cell phone. ‘Just checking in,’ the Mastermind said. ‘How is San Francisco, Alex? Lovely city. Will you leave your heart there? Do you think it’s a good place to die?  ‘Or how about Inspector Hughes? Do you like her? She’s very pretty, isn’t she? Just your type. Are you going to fuck Jamilla? Better hurry then. Tempus fugit.’ He hung up.
I went back to work. Lost myself for a couple of hours. Began to make some minor progress.
Around four o’clock, I was staring out at the start of rush hour San Francisco-style - pretty mild, actually - while I talked to Kyle Craig.  He was still at Quantico, but he was definitely heavily involved in the case.
Kyle was in a position to choose the cases he became personally connected with, and he told me this was going to be one of them.  We’d be working together again. I looked forward to it.
I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and saw Jamilla approaching. She had her leather jacket half-on and was struggling into............