Chapter 10, by Elizabeth Shipp

I thought about that, staring down at him and pulling the dry air of San Antonio into my lungs along with the smoke from my Lucky. "Who's we?"

"There's a whole group of us from San Francisco who came out here for the weekend. We're all on an e-mail list, and we talk about Aikido with other people from all over the world. Anyway, people from the list came here for this seminar...Matt has been trouble before, and we kind of put our heads together and decided we'd keep him from coming."

"You mean e-mail as in computers?" I'd heard a little bit about this e-mail thing. But, the only thing I knew about computers was that they were what the bank, credit card creeps, and the IRS always used to get me in trouble. This case was really getting weird.

"Yeah, it's really great. But you can't control who gets involved, is the only problem."

Normally, I'm suspicious of anyone and everyone. Sometimes, I even suspect myself of things my folks wouldn't approve of. But, I couldn't reconcile the Matt Burns I'd spent the day with in my office with a rough-and-tumble, obnoxious, killer. "Maybe Matt Burns isn't your killer. You got a picture of him?"

"No, but I can describe him to you. Really red face, about as wide as he is tall, red hair, rough grating voice, just a totally abrasive personality."

Now I was getting to like this case. Maybe. "That's not the Matt Burns I met in the city," I declared.

Akiyama started, and looked up at me from the sidewalk. All of a sudden he was on his feet beside me. "Are you sure?" I hand't even seen him move.