Directly after the mysterious I BEARED MY SOUL AND STILL YOU IGNORE ME??? clue, Jane clipped one of the Chesterfield cigarettes to the clothesline. Next to the notepaper with 1401 Imperial written on it, she attached the short stack of info that Hank copied for her. Jane stood back and read the clothesline like a book from left to right. Until somebody proved it to her otherwise, she was convinced that this was a story—albeit a complex one—and all she had to do to figure it out was to be as smart as the kidnapper and get into his skin. Into, not under. That’s the way Jane always worked. She could stare at a photo or a bloody crime scene and eventually, there would be that intuitive nexus that bonded her with either the perp or the victims. She’d feel things that didn’t belong to her. When she worked the tragic Stover and Lawrence cases nearly two years prior, the numinous nudges of the dead haunted her and drove her to dive into a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. The booze numbed the pain and darkness that enveloped those two cases.
