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adjoining unit, so the detectives spoke quietly. If the walls were that thin, how could no one have heard anything, with the violence that had happened here? Forgan listened to the old hardwood floor under his feet creak. Did the victims hear the guy coming?
    He knew the investigation would be complicated. Two victims — two circles of friends and relatives and acquaintances and potential enemies and motives. The only witness so far was the kid, who was speaking in riddles. No sign of forced entry to the apartment. Did the victims, or at least one of them, know the killer?
    Forgan left the living room and walked out the front door of the unit, saw the key chain dangling from the lock. It was the mother’s key chain. Who left it there? It would make no sense for the killer to lock the door and leave the key on his way out, unless he was trying to throw them off. The kid? The boy clearly had not exited via the chain-locked back door; more likely he had exited through the front, and then locked the door like he had seen his mother do many times before.
    Forgan walked down a flight of stairs and out into the darkness, to the strip of grass in front of the apartment building. Shoe indentations on the grass. On the front concrete facade, the word Victoria and an iron lamp fixture below the balcony of unit C. The second-floor balcony was maybe 10 feet off the ground. Someone with strength and purpose could grab the fixture, climb up to the balcony, and hop back down again. Might explain the pronounced footprints in the grass.
    His night ended at 4:00 a.m. Forgan drove home, caught a few hours’ sleep, and was back in the office at Central Station Monday at 9:30 a.m. He had three voice mails from reporters about the case already. That afternoon he attended autopsies for both victims performed by forensic pathologist Dr. Chitra Rao. Her conclusion: both were bludgeoned to death; struck numerous times in the head and face. Multiple skull fractures and hemorrhages in the brain. Tramline bruising caused by striking by a cylindrical object. Later that day Forgan drove to Stoney Creek with Detective Dave Place, who had been among those called in to assist. The second of the victims, the male, had been identified by fingerprints. The family had to be notified.

— 4 —
    “I’m Going to Be Okay”
    It had been a sad year for Ruth Del Sordo. She had lost her mother, Lily, in February. Ruth’s husband had tried to tell her all the right things, that Lily had lived a good and long life, 84 years. But Ruth had been very close with her mother, could not believe she was gone. Lily had family who were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, but her parents made it to England, where she was born. The family moved to Canada after the war, and ended up in Hamilton, where Lily raised a family on her own after her husband left her. Ruth grew up on the Beach Strip, went to Van Wagners Beach School on the lake, the building that would one day be reborn as Barangas restaurant. She married an Italian-Canadian named Flavio Del Sordo in 1973.
    Their first child, Pasquale, was born a year later, on September 20, 1974. Ruth and Flavio had four other kids: Anthony, Flavio Jr., Cindy, and Joey. Flavio started a construction company; all the boys worked for him.
    Pasquale especially loved the work, had a passion for woodworking since he picked up a toy hammer as a toddler. In his teens he won awards for woodworking and carpentry projects. As the first-born, he occupied a special place in the family, but especially in Ruth’s world. He had had epilepsy as a boy, but with treatment his symptoms had vanished before he hit his teens. Still, Ruth had never stopped worrying about Pasquale, even into his twenties. They continued to be very close. He shared everything with her, and was always driving her places, taking her shopping. Ruth always got a steady dose of the music he cranked in the house or car. He used to always give her a big hug, and say,