The Blue Religion

Divine Droplets by Paula L. Woods

The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.

– William Faulkner

During those anxious nights, coiled into his narrow bunk, his mind would soar along the 101, down the 405, or out on remote stretches of Pacific Coast Highway until he arrived at one of those longed-for places – with their low counters, perfectly spaced chairs, glass cases holding the glistening jewels he’d come to crave. Ruby-hued maguro, carnelian-colored beads of ikura, or kurage glistening like citrine ribbons – he could feel the cool flesh yielding in his mouth, washed down with a subtly flavored sake. The sensation was liberating, one of the most intense he’d ever experienced. And he had come that close to losing it all.

But this afternoon, as he hastily assembled his Japanese pens and sketchbooks, he knew with a certainty that made his nerves dance that all the pleasures he craved would once again be his. He was being released from the county jail, his case dismissed by a fair-minded judge after his defense team showed just how stupid and overzealous the police had been. Their stupidity, not his. Because, in almost every aspect of his behavior, he had been remarkably clever. Clever enough to allow himself visits to only exclusive sushi bars such as Urasawa or Matsuhisa when preparing for his outings, although he’d stopped when he became aware of the pattern after the third. Later, there were the receipts from the decidedly downscale Yamashiro and the eyewitness testimony of bartenders who rang up rounds of sake he conspicuously bought for himself and anyone sitting within shouting distance in the lounge overlooking Hollywood. Even his accessories had been purchased years before, from specialized stores all over the country, always for cash and never more than one or two pieces at a time. Every contingency had been considered. There was no reason he should have been arrested.

As he was escorted to the reception area by two burly sheriff’s deputies, he savored the moment, knowing in the end he was much smarter than the cops would ever be. He hadn’t fallen for their subterfuge that first time they came calling. Had they asked him outright, they would have learned that he could thoroughly account for his movements on the nights in question, that they would never be able to put him anywhere near the locations where those eight girls had been found.

Yet because of his carelessness and one foolish lie, they had persisted until they trapped him. Then it was those detectives – Truesdale from the LAPD and Firestone from Simi Valley – who had interrogated him for four hours in a little room in Parker Center, their hot breath tickling his ears like the gnats one August at his mother’s home in the Hamptons. He’d laughed in their faces when they tried to trick him into confessing in exchange for a reduced sentence. But he never cracked, never said one word they could use against him.

But they indicted him anyway, on two counts, although he had refused to believe the misbegotten evidence would be admitted into court. And he was right, although his certitude had to be backed up by three days of grilling the cops on the stand and a fortune in legal fees to get the evidence excluded. It pleased him to think that the trust fund his mother had so diabolically constructed to control him from the grave had been relieved of 1.3 million dollars to secure his freedom. It pleased him even more to know he was being released three days before Mother’s Day.

But his vindication was anticlimactic. As opposed to the pack of reporters who had clamored outside the jail at his arrest and throughout the proceedings, their number had dwindled to only a half-dozen stalwarts willing to brave the weather for a sound bite. He stepped outside the confines of the jail – refusing the umbrella being held by Michelle Dunn, the lead attorney on his team – and tilted his head back, allowing the drizzle to caress his face. He could imagine how the shot would look on CNN – his untanned, chiseled face raised skyward, longish brown hair lifting slightly in the wind. He allowed himself to be gently led away by Dunn, selected as much for her resemblance to Tiffany Rutherford as for her skills in the courtroom. Superimposed over the shot, he could envision the words “Heir to Solange Fashion Empire Freed After Murder Charges Are Dismissed,” as the camera caught him in a private moment, mouthing a prayer, his palms raised as if the raindrops whispered a heavenly communication.

He wasted little time talking to the reporters, moving swiftly into the limo that had been arranged to pick them up. “Aren’t you joining me?” he asked, lowering the window as Dunn closed the door that separated them. “You worked so hard, I thought we might celebrate.” He sniffed the air around her, his nostrils identifying the scent of her rage and fear, but nothing else that told him she was his. “Urasawa maybe?”

One hand to her face as if to shield her mouth from the cameras’ prying eyes, Dunn leaned into the car, the smile she wore for the reporters congealing into an ugly grimace. “Our services to your mother’s estate are concluded, Mr. Nolent.”

He fingered the sketchbook in his lap. “I’m sorry, but you seemed to admire my work so much, I thought that you and I might – ”

He reached out for his attorney’s unadorned hand, which she withdrew at a speed that surprised him. “You’re out of your fucking mind if you think I’d ever have anything to do with you. Good-bye!”

Scanning the faces of the people around her, Christophe raised the window, hoping the paparazzi hadn’t captured the tense exchange. Had she forgotten who he was? With just a phone call to one of the major magazines, he could obliterate Michelle Dunn and her media-hungry partners, these so-called defenders of justice who raided his mother’s estate of its assets but never shook his hand, never touched him unless it was for the cameras. But what did she matter? She and the rest of the minions his mother’s money had bought were no more than servants, there to do his bidding, not the other way around.

“Let’s get out of here!” he muttered to his driver through the open glass partition. As the small knot of reporters and deputies receded in the rear window, Christophe Nolent settled into the leather seats for the ride to his home in Bel-Air, knowing God was on his side.

A LONE FIGURE stood at the rear entrance of the county jail, collar of his suit jacket turned up against the stinging rain, wondering why God was punishing him. He’d stood for a half hour, waiting, then watched as Christophe Nolent slithered by him, had a brief conversation with one of his attorneys, then pulled off in a Bentley limo, burning rubber as if leaving the scene of a crime.

Which he was, the little shit. First crime being the murders of those women, and the second, beating the rap because his slickster attorneys had got him off on a technicality. But no one would remember it that way. All they’d remember – the cops he used to work with here and those at his current job in Simi – was that Steve Firestone had fucked up again, and now a serial killer was back on the streets.

What the hell was he supposed to do?

His former coworkers in the department would have never had Nolent on their radar if it hadn’t been for him. He was the one who watched the news and pored over the LAPD bulletins on the murders of several women that Robbery-Homicide detectives believed were the work of a single killer. He was the one who reached out to Lieutenant Kenneth Stobaugh when they found Tiffany.

Tiffany Rutherford was an exotic dancer, like the other vics in the LAPD’s bulletins. She worked at a club in West LA, although she lived in Simi, out in Ventura County. She was found near the entrance to a remote park at the north end of town, skin flayed from her body and chunks of flesh removed from her stomach and arms. Firestone had caught the case with his partner, Kraig Tytus, nice guy but a wuss, threw up all over the crime scene. Steve had seen much worse than that in his fifteen years as a Homicide detective in the LAPD, although he had to admit that in his ten years at Simi, there hadn’t been one as brutal as this.

But rather than hold on to the sensational case and sew up that promotion to chief of the Detective Unit he’d been coveting, Steve had swallowed his pride and picked up the phone a couple of days after Tiffany was found, and called Lieutenant Stobaugh. “Just don’t tell me Detective Cortez or Justice is working it from your side,” he’d tried to joke with his former boss.

Stobaugh had refused to laugh about it, merely referred him to Billie Truesdale, who had been a fairly new transfer from one of the divisions into RHD when he was there but who had almost ten years on the job now. She’d shown up that afternoon wearing a boxy blazer, fitted trousers, and no makeup. Women that butch and that dark had never been Steve’s type, which probably was fine with her, from what he’d heard through the grapevine.

“Mind if I look around?” she’d asked as she stood in the tiled entryway of Tiffany Rutherford’s town house that day.

“Why the fuck else would I’ve called you?”

“Look, Firestone, I got no beef with you, okay?”

“You think Cortez and Justice feel the same way?”

“That’s the past, forget about it!”

Steve felt his fists unclench and his shoulders go down an inch or two. Maybe Truesdale meant it, maybe she didn’t, but at least she looked him in the eye when she said it. Maybe it was because she knew the sexual-harassment charges those bitches had filed against him were bogus, just sour grapes because he’d slept with one and not the other.

“You find anything of interest when your team went through the place?” Truesdale was asking him.

He shrugged. “For a stripper, she sure bought a lot of clothes.”

“You mean for her act?”

Steve shook his head as he led her upstairs. “According to her employer, she did a straight-up thong song at the Three-Way. What I mean is, she bought a lot of professional-looking clothes, like the girls wear on those Law & Order shows.”

The master bedroom’s wenge-wood bed and expensive perfumes on the dresser hinted at a sophistication out of step with the suburban setting. The adjacent walk-in closet was jammed with skirted suits, soft blouses, and flowing dresses, tags on a full third of the garments. Truesdale pulled out a tiny knit dress with the tag still on it, in a tiger print like Steve’s ex-wife used to wear and that probably would have suited the petite detective, if this dyke ever wore dresses.

“And look at all the receipts.” Steve gestured to an accordion file on a desk in the corner. “Maybe her family can return the shit with the tags still on and get their money back.”

Truesdale had donned a pair of gloves and started fingering through the file, making notes as she went along. “Your vic spent good money on her clothes. More for some of these outfits than I bring home in a week.” She flipped through some more receipts, pausing at one near the front. “It looks like Tiffany went shopping the day she was murdered.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Steve tried but couldn’t keep the acid from his voice. “We’ve already talked to the salesladies where she bought the stuff on that receipt. They recognized her from the picture we had but didn’t remember anyone with her.” Steve and Tytus had used the high school graduation photo sitting on the desk, Tiffany’s California-girl looks striking even then. Taken no more than three or four years before, it was more flattering than her driver’s-license picture, not to mention the postmortem photo taken by the coroner, the girl’s face rendered unrecognizable by the butcher who’d killed her.

Truesdale extracted a crumpled piece of paper that was wedged in a corner of the file. “You talk to the customer-service department too?”

Wondering what he’d missed, Steve could feel his shoulders stiffen. “The people working the counter that day were off when we went through,” he’d lied.

“Well, I’d talk to them sooner rather than later. It looks like Tiffany paid her credit card bill the same day she went shopping. The date and amount’s been recorded on the statement, right here.”

Smartass Truesdale’s discovery led them to the Simi Valley Town Center and a videotape of Tiffany Rutherford paying her bill in Macy’s customer-service department. Just as Tiffany was leaving, a white male wearing a Kirin baseball cap was recorded bumping into her. After they exchanged a few words, he approached the counter as if to ask the clerk a question, then headed in the same direction as the victim.

“Pause it right there,” Truesdale had ordered the guard in Security, where they were watching the tapes. She started fumbling through her notebook, muttering, “So that’s what she was saying!”

“What is it?” Steve had asked.

“Mrs. Apkarian, the salesperson in the lingerie section of Bloomie’s, Beverly Center, thought our seventh vic, Yustina Flores, was being followed by a white male in a baseball cap. With her accent, I thought she was saying ‘Korn,’ like the band, was the logo on the cap, not ‘Kirin.’” She handed a police artist’s drawing to Steve. “Mrs. Apkarian said he eased up on Flores like he did to your vic on the video, squeezing her forearm as he made his apology, as if sizing her up. I blew her off as being overly dramatic, but damn if I’m not watching this guy do the same thing she described!”

“She remember if he bought anything?”

“A pink flannel nightshirt with dogs on it.”

Steve suddenly felt cold in the pit of his stomach. “There were pink fibers found on my vic’s ankles and wrists. Was Yustina a stripper?”

“No, she was an exchange student from Argentina.”

“So if it’s the same guy you suspect did the strippers, then he was stepping outside his pattern with Yustina…”

“But went right back to it with your vic a few days later,” Truesdale added. “Sounds like he’s escalating.”

Which made him that much more dangerous. “What else do you have?” Steve asked.

“Apkarian almost got him to sign up for a credit card, but he decided midway through filling out the application to pay cash. Left without his change.”

“Probably in hot pursuit of your vic. Wonder what set him off.” Steve stared at the video as if it could tell him. “Did the saleslady, by any chance, keep the application?”

It was Truesdale’s turn to be embarrassed. “I didn’t think to ask.”

Thank God he did. A quick call to Bloomingdale’s revealed that Mrs. Apkarian, assuming the man was part of the store’s mystery-shopping team, had folded his change up with the application in case he returned to claim it. She dug it out from under the bill drawer to show Truesdale and Steve when they arrived an hour later.

Holding the application gingerly by the edges, Steve had known instinctively that it was bogus – the name “D. Vinedropletz” sounded completely made up, and the address the guy had given on PCH was so far up the coast, it should have been in Oregon. But there was always the hope that his prints would show up in one of the computerized systems, if he had a prior.

Because the prints were related to a murder in the LAPD’s jurisdiction, Truesdale had SID, the department’s Scientific Investigation Division, run them through the AFIS database. She got back a Christophe Nolent, convicted of a misdemeanor assault on a girlfriend back in the early nineties. A search of court records revealed that the charge had originally been felonious assault, but his attorneys had somehow been able to get the charges reduced and their client probation, a fine, and anger-management courses.

Christophe Nolent’s name also generated a DMV photo with an address in Bel-Air. But the license, like the conviction, was more than ten years old, although a check of the property’s address revealed the title was held in the name of the Solange Nolent Family Trust.

The name didn’t ring a bell with Truesdale when she called Steve on Friday afternoon to share her findings, but Steve knew it well. “My ex used to buy that Solange shit all the time,” he said, tapping the mother’s and son’s names into the “search” feature on his computer’s browser. “Little dresses like the one you were looking at in Tiffany’s place, expensive perfumes, and purses that cost a small fortune. I never understood the appeal, but when a woman’s got to have it, what can you do?”

Truesdale was silent on the phone for a moment, although Steve could hear the sound of pages being flipped. “You know that dress was one of the things she bought the day she died.”

Steve got back more than a million hits on the names search. Scanning the list, he randomly clicked on the fifth link and started reading about Solange Nolent’s car collection. “My gut tells me we should pay Christophe Nolent a visit.”

IF HE HAD followed his gut, he never would have let them in. They’d stood outside the gates in their nondescript car, peering into the surveillance camera and talking as nice as pie, so sorry to disturb your Saturday. The curly-haired man seemed clearly aware of whose Saturday he was disturbing, as he meekly identified himself as Steve Firestone of the Simi Valley Police Department and his cohort as Billie Truesdale of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division. They had traced him through a credit-card application and they had taken the liberty of calling on him on a Saturday because they needed his assistance on a case they were working.

“And to give you your change,” the woman named Truesdale had chimed in.

Ignoring his gut, he’d invited them in anyway, had the housekeeper set them up with green tea in the kitchen, and listened politely as the two of them rattled on about how they found him because of the saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s and the change he forgot to take, and how they, these two poorly dressed cops, had been working with a task force to capture a ring of boosters who’d been ripping off stores all over the Southland for tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise.

He knew he hadn’t used his real name on that application, but he went along with their little game, just to see where they were headed. “‘Boosters’ sounds like a group of cheerleaders.” He’d tried to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. “So you think I’m one of these booster people?”

Detective Truesdale gave him a mirthless smile as the other cop, Firestone, explained that they were talking to customers in all the departments the thieves hit, and something he may have seen in the store last Tuesday, no matter how small, could help them hook up these criminals. “You were in the lingerie department, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“You visit any other departments?”

“Just fragrances and women’s accessories.” When Detective Firestone raised an eyebrow, Christophe added, “I was on a mission.”

Detective Truesdale shifted in her chair. “Mission?”

“Yes. I was looking for a gift.”

“Do you remember anything unusual as you were shopping for this gift?” Firestone prodded. “Anything unusual the women were doing?”

“Just shopping, like women do.” But Christophe remembered everything about one particular woman, down to the repellent perfume he saw her trying on in the fragrance department. Dense, cloying, artificial, his keen sense of smell identified it immediately as Chanel No. 5. His mother had told him the story about the millions of women who bought it after Marilyn Monroe claimed two drops of it were all she wore to bed. The losses his mother’s company suffered in both perfume and lingerie sales had almost put her out of business all those years ago, a fact she never stopped yammering about, even on her deathbed.

“How about the woman you spoke with in Lingerie?” Detective Truesdale had prompted. “Yustina Flores? Was she doing anything unusual?”

Watching the pale Latina beauty sample and buy that hideous fragrance had aroused him then, just as thinking about it was doing now. He had imagined a girl like that would wear something evanescent, something floral and innocent. He had almost passed her by when the Chanel called out to him, taunting him. Dazed, he had followed the scent through three departments in Bloomingdale’s, wanting to be certain she was the vehicle through which he’d fulfill his divine mission. Flustered, he turned away from the detectives in his kitchen and asked if this Yustina person was involved in the booster ring, needing to say something to distract himself from his growing erection.

The room was silent for a moment, then Firestone said, “You say that like she’s dead, Mr. Nolent.”

“I didn’t intend to,” Christophe replied, exhaling all at once. “I just assumed two detectives coming here on a Saturday morning wasn’t just because she stole some clothes.” When they didn’t reply, he decided to take another tack, and made a show of racking his brain before remembering an Afro-American guy hanging around one of the racks, mumbling something as the women walked by. “Maybe he was controlling Yustina and the others.”

Truesdale fixed him with an off-kilter gaze, asked if there was any reason he’d remember that particular Afro-American guy. “He called me a faggot,” he’d replied, the childhood memory of his mother taunting him with the epithet adding some heat to his response.

After a few more questions about where else he shopped in the mall and how he spent the rest of the day, they seemed to be satisfied, when suddenly Truesdale asked to use his bathroom. “Too much tea,” she’d explained. As the housekeeper directed her to one of the downstairs powder rooms, Christophe watched Firestone go to the sink and deposit their earthenware cups, the detective’s beefy hands violating his collection of antique iron teapots and the sushi knives in the wooden block. “You have a lovely home, Mr. Nolent. I like the Japanese theme, right down to the accessories. It’s, I don’t know what to call it…”

“Peaceful? It took quite a bit of effort to transform it after Mother died.” And a lot of his mother’s money, which made the effort that much more enjoyable.

“Well, you’ve done an outstanding job, and I gotta tell you, I’ve seen some nice houses in my days as a detective.” Firestone gazed out the window, past a jumbled collection of ceramic pots and a grove of Japanese maples that led to the garages. “Do you keep your mother’s car collection on the property?”

“Some of it,” he’d replied, impressed that this hick cop would have heard of it. “There are over a hundred cars, all totaled. We couldn’t possibly store them all here.”

Firestone wheedled out of him that there were a dozen scattered in three garages on the estate before he asked about the 44 Roadster, the one everyone wanted to see.

“Actually, my mother owned three Bugattis – a ’27 Bugatti 44 she bought after her company went public and a couple of T-57 Cs she bought to celebrate her divorces.” Besides the money, the cars were the only aspect of his mother’s estate Christophe enjoyed, as much for the power and status they conferred on their owners as for their design or performance. And the Bugattis were the ne plus ultra of cars, like the three-hundred-dollar sushi dinners at Urasawa or the Divine Droplets, a sake the chef there kept for him that cost more than a bottle of Dom.

“I’ve never seen a Bugatti,” the detective said wistfully. Seeing Christophe’s hesitation, he pleaded, “Just a peek, man. I’ll tell Detective Truesdale to wait in the car. Chicks just don’t get cars the way us guys do, you know what I’m saying?”

Reluctantly, Christophe escorted Firestone to the garages, where the detective whistled at and ogled the cars like they were those murdered women, suddenly brought back to life. But twenty minutes later, he was still at it, time enough for Detective Truesdale to get tired of waiting and wander into the garage, where Firestone crouched near the 44 Roadster, admiring its pristine running board. “Christophe here – you don’t mind if I call you that? – was just showing me his mother’s Bugattis. Tell her about the yellow one.”

Christophe began reciting the car’s features and the races it had won over the years. Firestone asked him to show her the others in the adjacent garages while he went to stand under the maple trees between the house and garages to make a call. He caught up with them a few minutes later, dropping his phone into his pocket and buttoning his jacket. “I need to get back to my office,” he announced. “There’s been a break in the case.”

Worry pricked at the nape of Christophe’s neck. “So you don’t need me to provide a description of the guy in the lingerie department?”

“I can come back later for that.”

Truesdale cast a look at Firestone, then said, “There is one question you can answer for me, Mr. Nolent – who’d you buy the nightshirt for?”

“Uh…” The question had caught Christophe flat-footed. What should he say?

“Let’s go, Detective,” Firestone said.

“It was for a friend, uh, a girlfriend’s birthday.”

“That’s odd,” Truesdale replied, consulting her notes. “The salesperson swore you said it was for your mother. But that couldn’t possibly be, could it? Your mother’s been dead for six years now.”

Christophe suddenly felt light-headed. “I think you should both leave now.”

“Let’s go, Detective,” Firestone repeated, flapping his hands in his jacket pockets to urge Truesdale along.

He’d gotten her into the car and her door was almost closed when she asked, “And your girlfriend’s name is…?”

Christophe crossed to Firestone’s side of the car, as far from her prying questions as possible. “I’d rather not say.”

Firestone leaned out the driver’s-side window and grasped Christophe’s suddenly damp hand. “If I had a girlfriend in the habit of wearing dowdy nightshirts like that saleslady showed us,” he whispered, “I wouldn’t say either. I’m a silk-teddy man myself.”

Looking back on that interview in the days and weeks that followed, Christophe decided his wealth and breeding had made him an enemy of the two detectives, fueled their middle-class rage, and started a vendetta against him that had almost cost him his freedom. But as the Bentley pulled into Christophe’s mother’s, no his, estate, he thanked God it had all backfired, and in such a spectacular fashion that he knew they would never bother him again.

“I CAN UNDERSTAND your defending your client,” Steve muttered as Michelle Dunn passed him on her way inside the jail, “but did you have to ruin my reputation in the process?”

Dunn shrugged, raindrops dripping off her eyelashes. “It wasn’t personal, Detective. We had to get that nightshirt excluded from the evidence. Our focus groups indicated that Yustina Flores’s and Tiffany Rutherford’s DNA on that nightshirt were enough to get our client convicted, regardless of his family’s brand-name recognition.”

Steve spat on the ground in front of her. “Criminal trials are like making movies or selling cars – nobody makes a fucking move without their focus groups.”

Dunn took the insult calmly. “That’s why I’m getting out of defense work. Retire and open a yoga studio or something.”

Tall and lean, she didn’t seem old enough to retire, but he didn’t give a shit about what she did from here on out. “How can you live with yourself, knowing you put a twisted fuck like Nolent back on the streets?”

She took a step toward him. “The better question is – how can you, knowing if you hadn’t removed evidence from Nolent’s home and tried to replant it later, he might be on his way to death row?”

As Dunn click-clacked her way back inside the jail, Steve asked himself again what the hell he was supposed to do. He’d glimpsed some strips of fabric he was pretty sure came from that nightshirt – the brown stains almost obliterating the pink fabric beneath – behind some ceramic pots near the maples in Nolent’s garden, and was faced with a dilemma: should he identify the fabric right then and there, take Christophe Nolent in, only to have him claim they belonged to his gardener or his driver? Nolent was a smart guy. Smart enough to have an alibi prepared for every moment of his morning, noon, and night on the day Yustina Flores was murdered, as he would, Steve knew, for that of Tiffany Rutherford and any of the other murders they might accuse him with. And if Steve had left those scraps of nightshirt behind, how long would it take for Nolent to destroy them after the way Truesdale went after him on the girlfriend lie? Faster than Truesdale could get a search warrant signed and be back at the house to discover them, that was for damn sure.

So he knew he’d done the right thing – stuffed the fabric into his inside jacket pocket and got the hell out of there. It was a bit trickier convincing Truesdale to file a request for a search warrant, finally having to lie and tell her he’d seen but not touched the evidence they were seeking that would hook up this pervert for good.

How could he have known that Nolent’s housekeeper had seen him remove the fabric from the pots and then replace it hours later when they officially searched the premises? Or that Michelle Dunn would hire a private investigator to dig into his background, dredging up the ten-year-old sexual-harassment beef brought by those bitches he worked with in RHD, or that the stories would surface of how he’d tried to get them both out of the way when things got a little messy? And if he’d set up his own partners, Dunn’s argument had gone, what would he do to show up the department that had dumped him all those years ago?

It was gone now – his reputation, his chance of a promotion, maybe even his job with the Simi PD – all because some trust- fund baby knew the right attorney to hire. He was just about to call his second ex-wife when Michelle Dunn emerged from the jail, a black leather sketchbook clutched in her hand. “Where you headed now?” she asked.

“To a bar somewhere to drown my troubles. Or at least teach them how to swim.”

“That’s a good one.” She dropped the sketchbook she was holding at Steve’s feet as she opened her umbrella against the intensifying rain. “Oops! Menopause can make a woman as clumsy and forgetful as a teenage girl. Here I was, opening my umbrella, and I dropped one of the sketchbooks Christophe doodled in during the trial.”

Steve stared at her for just a moment before scooping it up. Ornate three-color ink drawings seemed to spill from its pages, scenes from the courtroom, Truesdale defiant and Steve sitting stone-eyed under cross-examination. Little dresses danced across the next two pages, and square bottles spilled drops of what looked like blood. He flipped to another page to find mountain peaks rising above a Japanese inn, the lake beside it offering up sushi from the bodies of fish and mermaidlike creatures that looked disturbingly like Yustina Flores and Tiffany Rutherford.

“The DA did the right thing, going after my client for two of the eight murders,” she whispered. “They were the strongest cases, but they weren’t the only ones.”

“What are you suggesting?”

She pointed at the sketchbook. “Maybe you can make it right with this.”

“Why would you do this?” he said softly. “You could get disbarred!”

“As I said, I’m getting out of the game. You, on the other hand, are still in it. You still care.” She gave his arm a friendly squeeze. “And if this doesn’t help, you can always waylay him at Urasawa for a little talk. A little birdie told me he’ll be there celebrating later tonight.”

“Thanks, Ms. Dunn.”

“Michelle.”

“Okay, Michelle. I don’t know what to say.”

“Just get him off the streets.”