Prologue

The Murderer

In the morning, he drank coffee, and that was business between him and the morning. In the car to work, his eyes would flick dangerously to reports, as he skimmed blind across the busy roads. He never crashed. Once there was a scrape, but general consensus is that it was the other driver's fault. Business was all he knew from nine to five, profits, bottom-lines and quarterlies, four quarters of the day, excluding a half-hour for a whiskey and a cigarette, always at twelve-fifteen exactly. If he was in a meeting, out would come the bottle and the Camel, regardless. When he got home, he undressed and grew organically into casual clothes, covered by a thick, tired leather jacket that sighed onto his shoulders. Then he went into the streets, and what he did was business for the detectives the next morning, who sighed deeply, lit up another cigarette, and chalked up another slashing victim with no witnesses. They were used to it by now. It was business as usual. Business, just business. Nothing personal in it at all. When you make your business personal, you make your business fail.