The song made it to 19 on the Billboard Top 100, stayed on the charts for a month. Baby Boy bought himself a nice car and a whole bunch of guitars and a house in Nashville. Within a year, all the money was gone, as Lee kicked up his pattern of voracious womanizing and dining, and polydrug use. The next several years were a blur of fruitless rehab stints. Then: obscurity.

No relatives called about the case. Lee’s parents were both dead, he’d never married or sired a child. That, God help her, made her care about him deeply, and the image of his corpse stayed in her head.

The usual procedural things were: having Baby Boy’s apartment taped off before dropping in for a personal look-through, interviewing Baby Boy’s band mates, his manager, the owner of the Snake Pit, bouncers and bartenders and cocktail waitresses, the few patrons who’d stuck around to gawk at the crime scene and had gotten their names on a list.

No one had any idea who’d want to hurt Baby Boy. Everyone loved Baby Boy, he was a great big kid, naÏve, good-natured, would give you the shirt off his back- would give you his guitar, for God’s sake.

The high point of usual procedure was an hour in a tiny, close interview room, in the company of star witness Linus Brophy.

When Petra first heard about an eyewitness, her hopes had surged. Then she’d talked to the homeless man and realized his account was next to worthless.

Brophy’s description boiled down to a tall man.

Age? No idea.

Race? No idea.

Clothing? Not a clue.

It was real dark, Detective Lady.

If that wasn’t enough to endear her to Brophy, the bum had a media jones, kept pestering her, wanting to know if someone from TV would be talking to him. Petra wondered how long till Brophy tried to peddle a screenplay. Hawking his story to the tabloids: I WATCHED ALIENS MURDER BABY BOY LEE.