I was able to make it downstairs for dinner that night. Nana rewarded my appearance at the table with chicken, gravy and biscuits and a homemade apple crisp. I made an effort to eat, and I surprised myself by doing pretty well.
After dinner, I put little Alex to bed. I went back up to my room around eight-thirty and everybody seemed to understand that I was tired, not myself yet.
I didn’t sleep once I got up to my room, though. Too many bad thoughts about the murders were buzzing in my head. Right or wrong, I felt like we were getting close to something. Maybe I was just fooling myself.
I worked for a couple of hours on the computer and my concentration was fine. I was pretty certain that something had to link the cities where the murders had taken place. What was it, though?  What was everybody missing? I looked at anything and everything. I studied the schedules of airplane carriers that flew into each of the cities, then bus companies, and finally railroads. It was probably just busy work, but you never know, and I had nothing better to do.  I checked out corporations that had main or branch offices in the cities and found there were a lot of matches, but it wasn’t likely to get me anywhere. Federal Express, American Express, the Gap, the Limited, McDonalds, Sears, J.C. Penneys were just about everywhere, so what?
I had at least one travel book for each of the cities and I pored over them until it was almost midnight. Nothing came of it. My arm was throbbing again. I was starting to get a headache............