As a sophomore at Livingston High School, Loren had been labeled a "problem student" and sent to St. Margaret's. Loren was a petite thing back then, just five feet tall, and she hadn't grown much in the ensuing years. The other investigators, all males and oh so clever, called her Squirt.

Investigators. You get them started, they'll shred you with the cutting lines.

But Loren hadn't always been one of the so-called troubled youth. When she was in elementary school, she was that tiny tomboy, that spunky spark plug of a girl who kicked ass in kickball and would sooner die than don anything in the pink family. Her father worked a variety of blue-collar jobs, mostly involving trucking. He was a sweet, quiet man who made the mistake of falling for a woman far too beautiful for him.

The Muse clan lived in the Coventry section of Livingston, New Jersey, a slice of suburbia well beyond their social and economic means. Loren's mother, the ravishing and demanding Mrs. Muse, had insisted because, dammit, she deserved it. No one- but no one- was going to look down on Carmen Muse.

She pushed Loren's father, demanding he work harder, take out more loans, find a way to keep up, until- exactly two days after Loren turned fourteen years old- Dad blew his brains out in their detached two-car garage.

In hindsight her father was probably bipolar. She understood that now. There was a chemical imbalance in his brain. A man kills himself- it's not fair to blame others. But Loren did. She blamed her mother. She wondered what her sweet, quiet father's life would have been like had he married someone less high maintenance than Carmen Valos of Bayonne.

Young Loren took the tragedy as one might expect: She rebelled like mad. She drank, smoked, hung out with the wrong crowd, slept around. It was, Loren knew, grossly unfair that boys with multiple sex partners are revered while girls who do the same are dumb sluts. But the truth was- and Loren hated to admit this- for all the comforting feminist rationalizations, Loren knew that her level of promiscuity was adversely (though directly) related to her self-esteem. That is, when her self-worth was low, her, uh, easiness factor rose. Men didn't seem to suffer the same fate, or if they did, they hid it better.