Fair Warning

1

I had called the story “The King of Con Artists.” At least that was my headline. I typed it up top but was pretty sure it would get changed because it would be overstepping my bounds as a reporter to turn in a story with a headline. The headlines and the decks below them were the purview of the editor and I could already hear Myron Levin chiding, “Does the editor rewrite your ledes or call up the subjects of your pieces to ask additional questions? No, he doesn’t. He stays in his lane and that means you need to stay in yours.”

Since Myron was that editor, it would be hard to come back with any sort of defense. But I sent in the story with the suggested headline anyway because it was perfect. The story was about the dark netherworld of the debt-collection business — $600 million a year of it siphoned off in scams — and the rule at FairWarning was to bring every fraud down to a face, either the predator’s or the prey’s, the victim’s or the victimizer’s. And this time it was the predator. Arthur Hathaway, the King of Con Artists, was the best of the best. At sixty-two years old, he had worked every con imaginable in a life of crime centered in Los Angeles, from selling fake gold bars to setting up phony disaster-relief websites. Right now, he ran a racket convincing people they owed money that they didn’t really owe, and getting them to pay it. And he was so good at it that junior swindlers were paying him for lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays at a defunct acting studio in Van Nuys. I had infiltrated as one of his students and learned all I could. Now it was time to write the story and use Arthur to expose an industry that bilked millions each year from everybody from little old ladies with dwindling bank accounts to young professionals already deep in the red with college loans. They all fell victim and sent their money because Arthur Hathaway convinced them to send it. And now he was teaching eleven future con men and one undercover reporter how to do it for fifty bucks a head twice a week. The swindler school itself might be his greatest con of all. The guy was truly a king with a psychopath’s complete lack of guilt. I also had reporting in the story on the victims whose bank accounts he had cleaned out and whose lives he had ruined.

Myron had already placed the story as a co-project with the Los Angeles Times, and that guaranteed it would be seen and the Los Angeles Police Department would have to take notice. King Arthur’s reign would soon be over and his roundtable of junior con men would be rounded up as well.

I read the story a final time and sent it to Myron, copying William Marchand, the attorney who reviewed all FairWarning stories pro bono. We didn’t put anything up on the website that was not legally bulletproof. FairWarning was a five-person operation if you counted the reporter in Washington, DC, who worked out of her home. One “wrong story” spawning a winning lawsuit or forced settlement would put us out of business, and then I’d be what I had been at least twice before in my career: a reporter with no place to go.

I got up from my cubby to tell Myron the story was finally in, but he was in his own cubicle talking on the phone, and I could tell as I approached that he was on a fundraising call. Myron was founder, editor, reporter, and chief fundraiser for FairWarning. It was an Internet news site with no paywall. There was a donate button at the bottom page of every story and sometimes at the top, but Myron was always looking for the great white whale who would sponsor us and turn us from beggars into choosers — at least for a while.

“There really is no entity doing what we’re doing — tough watchdog journalism for the consumer,” Myron told each prospective donor. “If you check out our site you’ll see many stories in the archives that take on powerful kingpin industries including auto, pharmaceutical, wireless, and tobacco companies. And with the current administration’s philosophy of deregulation and limiting oversight, there is nobody out there looking out for the little guy. Look, I get it, there are donations you could make that might give you a more visible bang for your buck. Twenty-five dollars a month keeps a kid fed and clothed in Appalachia. I get that. It makes you feel good. But you donate to FairWarning, and what you are supporting is a team of reporters dedicated to—”

I heard “the pitch” several times a day, day in and day out. I also attended the Sunday salons where Myron and board members spoke to potential white-hat donors, and I mingled with them afterward, mentioning the stories I was working on. I had some extra cachet at these gatherings as the author of two bestselling books, though it was never mentioned that it had been more than ten years since I had published anything. I knew the pitch was important and vital to my own paycheck — not that I was getting anywhere close to a living wage for Los Angeles — but I had heard it so many times in my four years at FairWarning that I could recite it in my sleep. Backward.

Myron stopped to listen to his potential investor and muted the phone before looking up at me.

“You in?” he asked.

“Just sent it,” I said. “Also to Bill.”

“Okay, I’ll read it tonight and we can talk tomorrow if I have anything.”

“It’s good to go. Even has a great headline on it. You just need to write the deck.”

“You better be—”

He took his phone off mute so he could respond to a question. I gave him a salute and headed toward the door, stopping by Emily Atwater’s cubicle on my way out to say goodbye. She was the only other staffer in the office at the moment.

“Cheers,” she said in her crisp British accent.

We worked out of an office in a typical two-story plaza in Studio City. The first level was all retail and food, while the second floor was walk-in businesses like car insurance, manicure/pedicure, yoga, and acupuncture. Except us. FairWarning wasn’t a walk-in business, but the office came cheap because it was located above a marijuana dispensary and the venting in the building was such that it brought the aroma of fresh product inside our office 24/7. Myron took the place at a heavy discount.

The plaza was L-shaped and had an underground parking garage with five assigned spaces for FairWarning employees and visitors. That was a major perk. Parking in the city was always an issue. And sheltered parking was an even bigger perk for me because this was sunny California and I rarely put the top up on my Jeep.

I had bought the Wrangler new with the advance on my last book, and the odometer served as a reminder of how long it had been since I was buying new cars and riding bestseller lists. I checked it as I fired up the engine. I had strayed 162,172 miles from the path I had once been on.

2

I lived in Sherman Oaks on Woodman Avenue by the 101 freeway. It was a 1980s Cape Cod — style apartment building of twenty-four townhomes that formed a rectangle enclosing a courtyard with a community pool and barbecue area. It, too, had parking underneath.

Most of the apartment buildings on Woodman had names such as the Capri and Oak Crest and the like. My building stood nameless. I had moved in only a year and a half before, after selling the condo I had bought with that same book advance. The royalty checks had been getting smaller and smaller each year and I was in the midst of reordering my life to live within the paychecks from FairWarning. It was a difficult transition.

As I waited on the sloping driveway for the garage gate to lift, I noticed two men in suits standing at the call box at the pedestrian gate to the complex. One was white and middle fifties, the other a couple of decades younger and Asian. A little kick of wind opened the Asian man’s jacket and I got a glimpse of the badge on his belt.

I drove down into the garage and kept my eyes on the rearview. They followed me down the slope and in. I pulled into my assigned space and killed the engine. By the time I grabbed my backpack and got out, they were behind the Jeep and waiting.

“Jack McEvoy?”

He had gotten the name right but had pronounced it wrong. Mick-a-voy.

“Yes, McEvoy,” I said, correcting him. Mack-a-voy. “What’s going on?”

“I’m Detective Mattson, LAPD,” the older of the two said. “This is my partner, Detective Sakai. We need to ask you a few questions.”

Mattson opened his jacket to show that he, too, had a badge, and the gun to go with it.

“Okay,” I said. “About what?”

“Can we go up to your place?” Mattson asked. “Something more private than a garage?”

He gestured to the space around them as if there were people listening from all quarters, but the garage was empty.

“I guess so,” I said. “Follow me. I usually take the stairs up but if you guys want the elevator, it’s down at that end.”

I pointed to the end of the garage. My Jeep was parked in the middle and right across from the stairs leading up to the center courtyard.

“Stairs are good,” Mattson said.

I headed that way and the detectives followed. The whole way to my apartment door I was trying to think in terms of my work. What had I done that would draw the attention of the LAPD? While the reporters at FairWarning had a lot of freedom to pursue stories, there was a general division of labor, and criminal scams and schemes were part of my turf along with Internet-related reporting.

I began to wonder if my Arthur Hathaway story had run across a criminal investigation of the swindler and whether Mattson and Sakai were about to ask me to hold the story back. But as soon as I thought of that possibility, I dismissed it. If that were the case, they would have come to my office, not my home. And it probably would have started with a phone call, not an in-person show-up.

“What unit are you from?” I asked as we crossed the courtyard toward apartment 7 on the other side of the pool.

“We work downtown,” Mattson said, being coy, while his partner stayed silent.

“What crime unit, I mean,” I said.

“Robbery-Homicide Division,” Mattson said.

I didn’t write about the LAPD per se, but in the past I had. I knew that the elite squads worked out of the downtown headquarters, and RHD, as it was called, was the elite of the elite.

“So then what are we talking about here?” I said. “Robbery or homicide?”

“Let’s go inside before we start talking,” Mattson said.

I got to my front door. His nonanswer seemed to push the answer toward homicide. My keys were in my hand. Before unlocking the door, I turned and looked at the two men standing behind me.

“My brother was a homicide detective,” I said.

“Really?” Mattson said.

“LAPD?” Sakai asked, his first words.

“No,” I said. “Out in Denver.”

“Good on him,” Mattson said. “He’s retired?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “He was killed in the line of duty.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mattson said.

I nodded and turned back to the door to unlock it. I wasn’t sure why I had blurted that out about my brother. It was not something I usually shared. People who knew my books knew it, but I didn’t mention it in day-to-day conversation. It had happened a long time ago in what seemed like another life.

I got the door open and we entered. I flicked on the light. I had one of the smallest units in the complex. The bottom floor was open-plan, with a living room flowing into a small dining area and then the kitchen beyond it, separated only by a counter with a sink. Along the right wall was a set of stairs leading up to a loft, which was my bedroom. There was a full bath up there and a half bath on the bottom floor beneath the stairs. Less than a thousand square feet in total. The place was neat and orderly but that was only because it was starkly furnished and featured little in the way of personal touches. I had turned the dining-room table into a work area. A printer sat at the head of the table. Everything was set for me to go to work on my next book — and it had been that way since I moved in.

“Nice place. You been here long?” Mattson asked.

“About a year and a half,” I said. “Can I ask what this—”

“Why don’t you have a seat on the couch there?”

Mattson pointed to the couch that was positioned for watching the flat screen on the wall over the gas fireplace I never used.

There were two other chairs across a coffee table, but like the couch they were threadbare and worn, having spent decades in my prior homes. The decline of my fortunes was reflected in my housing and transportation.

Mattson looked at the two chairs, chose the one that looked cleaner and sat down. Sakai, the stoic, remained standing.

“So, Jack,” Mattson said. “We’re working a homicide and your name came up in the investigation and that’s why we’re here. We have—”

“Who got killed?” I asked.

“A woman named Christina Portrero. You know that name?”

I spun it through all the circuits on high speed and came back with a blank.

“No, I don’t think so. How did my name—”

“She went by Tina most of the time. Does that help?”

Once more through the circuits. The name hit. Hearing the full name coming from two homicide detectives had unnerved me and knocked the initial recognition out of my head.

“Oh, wait, yeah, I knew a Tina — Tina Portrero.”

“But you just said you didn’t know the name.”

“I know. It just, you know, out of the blue it didn’t connect. But yes, we met once and that was it.”

Mattson didn’t answer. He turned and nodded to his partner. Sakai moved forward and held his phone out to me. On the screen was a posed photo of a woman with dark hair and even darker eyes. She had a deep tan and looked mid-thirties but I knew she was closer to mid-forties. I nodded.

“That’s her,” I said.

“Good,” Mattson said. “How’d you meet?”

“Down the street here. There’s a restaurant called Mistral. I moved here from Hollywood, didn’t really know anyone and was trying to get to know the neighborhood. I’d walk down there for a drink every now and then because I didn’t have to worry about driving. I met her there.”

“When was this?”

“I can’t pinpoint the exact date but I think it was about six months after I moved in here. So about a year ago. Probably a Friday night. That’s when I would usually go down there.”

“Did you have sex with her?”

I should have anticipated the question but it hit me unexpectedly.

“That’s none of your business,” I said. “It was a year ago.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Mattson said. “Did you come back here?”

I understood that Mattson and Sakai obviously knew more about the circumstances of Tina Portrero’s murder than I did. But the questions about what happened between us a year ago seemed overly important to them.

“This is crazy,” I said. “I was with her one time and nothing ever came of it afterward. Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Because we’re investigating her murder,” Mattson said. “We need to know everything we can about her and her activities. It doesn’t matter how long ago. So I will ask you again: Was Tina Portrero ever in this apartment?”

I threw my hands up in a gesture of surrender.

“Yes,” I said. “A year ago.”

“She stay over?” Mattson asked.

“No, she stayed a couple hours, then she got an Uber.”

Mattson didn’t immediately ask a follow-up. He studied me for a long moment, as if trying to decide how to proceed.

“Would you have any of her property in this apartment?” he asked.

“No,” I protested. “What property?”

He ignored my question and came back with his own.

“Where were you last Wednesday night?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, we’re not.”

“What time Wednesday night?”

“Let’s say between ten and midnight.”

I knew I had been at Arthur Hathaway’s seminar on how to rip people off until the 10 p.m. start of that window. But I also knew that it was a seminar for con artists and therefore didn’t really exist. If these detectives tried to check out that part of my alibi, they either would not be able to confirm the seminar even existed or would not be able to find anyone to confirm I was there, because that would be acknowledging that they were there. No one would want to do this. Especially after the story I just turned in was published.

“Uh, I was in my car from about ten to ten twenty and then after that I was here.”

“Alone?”

“Yes. Look, this is crazy. I was with her one night a year ago and then neither of us kept in contact. It was a no-go for both of us. You understand?”

“You sure about that? Both of you?”

“I’m sure. I never called her, she never called me. And I never saw her at Mistral again.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

I laughed uneasily.

“How did what make me feel?”

“Her not calling you back after?”

“Did you hear what I said? I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me. It was mutual. It just wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

“Was she drunk that night?”

“Drunk, no. We had a couple of drinks there. I paid the tab.”

“What about back here? More drinks or right up to the loft?”

Mattson pointed upstairs.

“No more drinks here,” I said.

“And everything was consensual?” Mattson said.

I stood up. I’d had enough.

“Look, I’ve answered your questions,” I said. “And you’re wasting your time.”

“We’ll decide if we’re wasting our time,” Mattson said. “We are almost finished here and I would appreciate it if you would sit back down, Mr. McEvoy.”

He pronounced my name wrong again, probably intentionally.

I sat back down.

“I’m a journalist, okay?” I said. “I’ve covered crime — I’ve written books about murderers. I know what you’re doing, trying to knock me off my game so I’ll make some kind of admission. But it’s not going to happen, because I don’t know anything about this. So could you please—”

“We know who you are,” Mattson said. “You think we would come out here without knowing who we’re dealing with? You’re the Velvet Coffin guy, and just for the record, I worked with Rodney Fletcher. He was a friend and what happened to him was bullshit.”

There it was. The cause of the enmity that was dripping off Mattson like sap off a tree.

“Velvet Coffin closed down four years ago,” I said. “Mostly because of the Fletcher story — which was one hundred percent accurate. There was no way of knowing he would do what he did. Anyway, I work someplace else now and write consumer-protection stories. I’m not on the cop shop.”

“Good for you. Can we get back to Tina Portrero?”

“There is nothing to get back to.”

“How old are you?”

“You already know, I’m sure. And what’s that got to do with anything?”

“You seem kind of old for her. For Tina.”

“She was an attractive woman and older than she looked or claimed to be. She told me she was thirty-nine when I met her that night.”

“But that’s the point, right? She was older than she looked. You, a guy in your fifties, moving in on a lady you thought was in her thirties. Kind of creepy, you ask me.”

I felt my face turning red with embarrassment and indignation.

“For the record, I didn’t ‘move in on’ her,” I said. “She picked up her Cosmo and came down the bar to me. That’s how it started.”

“Good for you,” Mattson said sarcastically. “Must’ve made your ego stand at attention. So let’s go back to Wednesday. Where were you coming from during those twenty minutes you said you were in the car driving home that night?”

“It was a work meeting,” I said.

“With people that we could talk to and verify if we need to?”

“If it comes to that. But you are—”

“Good. So tell us again about you and Tina.”

I could tell what he was doing. Jumping around with his questions, trying to keep me off balance. I covered cops for almost two decades for two different newspapers and the Velvet Coffin blog. I knew how it worked. Any slight discrepancy in retelling the story and they would have what they needed.

“No, I already told you everything. You want any more information from me, then you have to give information.”

The detectives were silent, apparently deciding whether to deal. I jumped in with the first question that came to mind.

“How did she die?” I asked.

“She had her neck snapped,” Mattson said.

“Atlanto-occipital dislocation,” Sakai said.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“Internal decapitation,” Mattson said. “Somebody did a one-eighty on her neck. It was a bad way to go.”

I felt a deep pressure begin to grow in my chest. I did not know Tina Portrero beyond the one evening I was with her, but I couldn’t get the image of her — refreshed by the photo shown by Sakai — being killed in such a horrible manner out of my mind.

“It’s like that movie The Exorcist,” Mattson said. “Remember that? With the possessed girl’s head twisting around.”

That didn’t help things.

“Where was this?” I asked, trying to move on from the images.

“Landlord found her in the shower,” Mattson continued. “Her body was covering the drain and it overflowed and he came to check it out. He found her, water still running. It was supposed to look like a slip-and-fall but we know better. You don’t slip in the shower and break your neck. Not like that.”

I nodded as though that was good information to know.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I didn’t have anything to do with this and can’t help you with your investigation. So if there are no other questions, I would like—”

“There are more questions, Jack,” Mattson said sternly. “We are only getting started with this investigation.”

“Then what? What else do you want to know from me?”

“You being a reporter and all, do you know what ‘digital stalking’ is?”

“You mean like social media and tracking people through that?”

“I’m asking questions. You’re supposed to answer them.”

“You have to be more specific, then.”

“Tina told a good friend of hers that she was being digitally stalked. When her friend asked what that meant, Tina said a guy she met in a bar knew things about her he should not have known. She said it was like he knew all about her before he even started talking to her.”

“I met her in a bar a year ago. This whole thing is — wait a minute. How did you even know to come here to talk to me?”

“She had your name. In her contacts. And she had your books on the night table.”

I couldn’t remember whether I had discussed my books with Tina the night I met her. But since we had ended up at my apartment, it was likely that I had.

“And on the basis of that, you come here like I’m a suspect?”

“Calm down, Jack. You know how we work. We are conducting a thorough investigation. So let’s go back to the stalking. For the record, was that you she was talking about with the stalking?”

“No, it wasn’t me.”

“Good to hear. Now, last question for now: Would you be willing to voluntarily give us a saliva sample for DNA analysis?”

The question startled me. I hesitated. I jumped to thinking about the law and my rights and totally skipped over the fact that I had committed no crime and therefore my DNA in any form from semen to skin residue could not be found at any crime scene from last Wednesday.

“Was she raped?” I asked. “Now you’re accusing me of rape too?”

“Take it easy, Jack,” Mattson said. “No sign of rape but let’s just say we got some DNA from the suspect.”

I realized that my DNA was my quickest way off their radar.

“Well, that wasn’t me, so when do you want to take my saliva?”

“How about right now?”

Mattson looked at his partner. Sakai reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out two six-inch test tubes with red rubber caps each containing a long-ended cotton swab. I realized then that most likely the sole purpose of their visit was to get my DNA. They had the killer’s DNA. They, too, knew that it would be the quickest way to determine whether I had any involvement in the murder.

That was fine with me. They were going to be disappointed by the results.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

“Good,” Mattson said. “And there is one other thing we could do that would help us with the investigation.”

I should have known. Open the door an inch and they push all the way through.

“What’s that?” I said impatiently.

“You mind taking your shirt off?” Mattson said. “So we can check your arms and body?”

“Why would—”

I stopped myself. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to see if I had scratch marks or other wounds from a fight. The DNA in evidence had probably come from Tina Portrero’s fingernails. She had put up a fight and taken a piece of her killer.

I started unbuttoning my shirt.

3

A s soon as the detectives left, I pulled my laptop out of my backpack went online and searched the name Christina Portrero. I got two hits, both on the Los Angeles Times site. The first was just a mention on the newspaper’s homicide blog, where every murder in the county was recorded. This report was early in the case and had few details other than the fact that Portrero was found dead in her apartment during a wellness check by the landlord after she did not show up for work and did not respond to calls or messaging through social media. The report said foul play was suspected but the cause of death had not yet been determined.

I was a religious reader of the blog and realized I had read the story and scanned through it without recognizing the name Christina Portrero as the Tina Portrero I had met one night the year before. I wondered what I would have done if I had recognized her as the woman I had met. Would I have called the police to mention my experience, my knowledge that on at least one occasion she had gone to a bar by herself and had picked me for a one-night stand?

The second hit in the Times was a fuller story that ran the same photo Detective Sakai had shown me. Dark hair, dark eyes, looking younger than she was. I had completely missed seeing this story, because I would have recognized the photo. The story said Portrero worked as a personal assistant to a film producer named Shane Sherzer. I thought this was interesting because when we had met a year earlier, she was doing something else in the film business: she was a freelance reader who provided “coverage” of scripts and books for a variety of producers and agents in Hollywood. I remembered her explaining that she read material submitted to her clients for possible development as films and TV shows. She then summarized the scripts and books and checked off on a form the kind of project they were: comedy, drama, young adult, historical, crime, etc.

She concluded each report with her personal take on the potential project, recommending a hard pass or further consideration by higher-ups in the client’s company. I also remembered that she told me the job often required her to visit production companies located at the major studios in town — Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal — and that it was very exciting because on occasion she saw major movie stars walking out in the open between the offices, stages, and the commissary.

The Times story included quotes from a woman named Lisa Hill, who was described as Portrero’s best friend. She told the newspaper that Tina led an active social life and had recently straightened herself out after suffering from some addiction issues. Hill did not reveal what these issues were and probably wasn’t even asked. It seemed to have little to do with who had killed Portrero by twisting her neck 180 degrees.

Neither of the Times posts mentioned the exact cause of death. The second, fuller story said only that Portrero had suffered a broken neck. Maybe Times editors had decided not to put the fuller details into the story, or maybe they had not been told. The information on the crime in both posts was attributed to the generic “police said.” Neither Detective Mattson nor Detective Sakai was mentioned by name.

It took me a couple attempts to spell atlanto-occipital dislocation correctly so that I could search for it on Google. Several hits came up, most on medical sites that explained it was usually seen in traumatic vehicle accidents involving high-speed collisions.

The Wikipedia citation summed it up best:

The word mechanism in that description began to haunt me. Someone strong or with some kind of tool had powerfully twisted Tina Portrero’s neck. I now wondered if there had been any markings on her head or body that indicated a tool had been used.

The Google search brought up a few citations of AOD as the cause of death in auto accidents. One in Atlanta and another in Dallas. The most recent in Seattle. All were deemed accident-related, and there was no reference to AOD being the cause of death in a murder case.

I needed to do a deeper dive. When I was working for the Velvet Coffin, I had once drawn an assignment to write a story about a convention of coroners from around the world. They had all met in downtown Los Angeles, and my editor wanted a feature on what coroners talk about at these events. The editor who assigned me the piece wanted war stories and the gallows humor exhibited by people who deal in death and dead bodies day in and day out. I wrote the story and in reporting it learned of a website primarily used by medical examiners as a resource for posing questions to other coroners when faced with unusual circumstances involving a death.

The site was called causesofdeath.net and it was password protected, but because it was available to coroners around the world, the password was mentioned in much of the literature handed out at the convention. I had visited the site a few times over the years since attending the convention just to poke around and see what was of current interest on the discussion board. But I had never posted anything until now. I worded my post so that I was not falsely portraying myself as a medical examiner, but I wasn’t exactly saying that I wasn’t, either.

The shorthand in my post suggested expertise. YOA for years of age, AOD the abbreviation for atlanto-occipital dislocation. The mention of the International Association of Medical Examiners convention was legit because I was there. But it would also help readers of the post believe I was a working coroner. I knew it skirted ethical considerations but I wasn’t acting on this as a reporter. At least not yet. I was acting as an interested party. The cops had all but said I was a suspect. They had come and collected my DNA and studied my arms and upper torso. I needed information and this was one means of getting it. I knew it was a shot in the dark but it was one worth taking. I would check the site in a day or two to see if I had any responses.

Next on my list was Lisa Hill. She was quoted in the Times story as a close friend of Portrero’s. For her, I switched hats — from potential suspect to journalist. After the routine efforts to get a phone number for her turned up nothing, I reached out to her — or at least who I thought was her — with private messages to her Facebook page, which appeared dormant, and to her Instagram account as well.

I included my name and cell number on each message but also knew that Hill could reach back to me through those social-media outlets as well. Like the message on the IAME board, it would be a waiting game.

Before shutting down my efforts, I checked back on causesofdeath.net to see if my fishing expedition had attracted any bites. It had not. I then went back into Google and started reading up on digital stalking (or cyberstalking, as it was more commonly called). Most of what was out there didn’t jibe with what Mattson had described. Cyberstalking most often involved victims being harassed by someone they knew in at least a peripheral way. But Mattson had specifically said that Tina Portrero had complained to a friend — most likely Lisa Hill — that she had randomly met a man in a bar who seemed to know things about her he shouldn’t have known.

With that in mind, I set out to learn all I could about Tina Portrero. I quickly realized I might already have an advantage over the mystery man who had set off alarms with her. When I went down the usual checklist of social-media apps, I remembered that I was already her friend on Facebook and a follower on Instagram. We had exchanged these connections the night we met. Then afterward, when no second date grew out of the initial meeting, neither of us had bothered to unfriend or block the other. This I had to admit was vanity — everybody likes to pad their numbers, not subtract from them.

Tina’s Facebook page had not been very active and appeared to be used primarily to keep in touch with family. I remembered that when we had met she said her family was from Chicago. There were several posts spread over the last year from people with her last name. These were routine messages and photos. There were also several cat and dog videos posted by her or to her.

I moved on to Instagram and saw that Tina was far more active there, routinely posting photos of herself engaged in various activities with friends or alone. Many had captions that identified the locations and people in the shot. I went back through the feed several months. Tina had been to Maui once and Las Vegas twice during that time. There were shots of her with various men and women, and multiple photos of her at clubs, bars, and house parties. It was clear from these that her drink of choice was a Cosmo. I remembered that that was the drink she held in her hand when she came down the bar to me at Mistral the night we met.

I have to admit that even though I knew she was dead, I felt envious as I reviewed photos of her recent life and saw how full and active it was. My life was not nearly as exciting in comparison and I fell into morbid thoughts about her upcoming funeral, where invariably her friends and others would say she had lived life to the fullest. The same could not be said about me.

I tried to shake off the feelings of inadequacy, reminding myself that social media was not a reflection of real life. It was life exaggerated. I moved on and the only post I found of real interest was a photo and caption from four months earlier that showed Tina and another woman about the same age or slightly older. They had their arms around each other. The caption Tina had written said: “Finally tracked down my half sis Taylor. She’s a blast and a half!!!!!”

It was hard to tell from the post whether Taylor was a half sister who had fallen out of touch and therefore had to be tracked down, or whether Taylor had been previously unknown to Tina. What was clear was that the two women definitely looked related. Both had the same high forehead and high cheekbones, dark eyes, and dark hair.

I searched to see if there was a Taylor Portrero on Instagram or Facebook but drew a blank. It appeared that if Tina and Taylor were half sisters, they had different last names.

After my survey of social media ended, I went into full reporter mode and used a variety of search engines to look for other references to Christina Portrero. I was soon able to find the side of her not celebrated on social media. She had a DUI arrest on her record as well as an arrest for possession of a controlled substance — that being MDMA, more commonly referred to as Ecstasy or Molly, a party drug with mood-elevating effects. The arrests resulted in two stints in court-ordered rehab and probation, which she completed in order to have the judge expunge her record of convictions. Both arrests had occurred more than five years before.

I was still online, looking for more details about the dead woman, when my phone buzzed and the screen showed a blocked number.

I took the call.

“This is Lisa Hill.”

“Oh, good. Thank you for calling me.”

“You said you wanted to do a story. For who?”

“Well, I work for an online publication called FairWarning. You might not have heard of it but our stories are often picked up by newspapers like the Washington Post and the L.A. Times. We have a first-look agreement with NBC News as well.”

I heard her typing on a keyboard and knew she was going to the site. It made me think she was smart and nobody’s fool. There was silence for a moment as I guessed she was looking at the FairWarning home page.

“And you’re on here?” she finally said.

“Yes,” I said. “You can click on the link where it says our staff in that black header and it will take you to our profiles. I’m the last one. The most recent hire.”

I heard the click while I was giving directions. More silence followed.

“How old are you?” she asked. “You look older than everybody but the owner.”

“You mean the editor,” I said. “Well, I worked with him at the L.A. Times and then joined him here after he set it up.”

“And you’re here in L.A.?”

“Yes, we are based here. Studio City.”

“I don’t get it. Why does a site like this for consumers care about Tina getting murdered?”

That was the question I was ready for.

“Part of my beat is cybersecurity,” I said. “And I have sources in the LAPD and they know I’m interested in cyberstalking because that gets into the area of consumer security. That’s how I heard about Tina. I talked to the detectives on the case — Mattson and Sakai — and they told me that she had complained to friends that she felt some guy she had dated or met was digitally stalking her — that was the phrase the detectives used.”

“They gave you my name?” Hill asked.

“No, they wouldn’t give out a witness’s name. I—”

“I’m not a witness. I didn’t see anything.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. From the investigation standpoint, they consider anybody they talk to in the case a witness. I know you don’t have any immediate knowledge of the case. I saw your name in the Times story and that’s why I reached out.”

I heard more typing before she responded. I wondered if she was checking on me further by typing an email to Myron, who was at the top of the FairWarning staff page and listed as founder and executive director.

“Did you use to work for something called Velvet Coffin?” she asked.

“Yes, before I came to FairWarning,” I said. “It was locally based investigative reporting.”

“It says you went to jail for sixty-three days.”

“I was protecting a source. The federal government wanted it, but I wouldn’t give up the name.”

“What happened?”

“After two months the source came forward on her own and I was released because the feds got what they wanted.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was fired for leaking information to me.”

“Oh, man.”

“Yeah. Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“I’m curious. How did the Times find you?”

“I once dated someone who works there in the Sports section. He’s on my Instagram and saw the photo I posted after Tina died, and he told the reporter that he knew somebody who knew the dead girl.”

Sometimes it takes a break like that. I’d had more than a few of those in my career.

“Got it,” I said. “So, can I ask you, then, are you the one who told the detectives about the cyberstalking?”

“They asked me about anything unusual with her lately and I couldn’t really think of anything except some asshole she hooked up with in a bar a few months ago seemed like he knew too much about her, you know? It freaked her out a little bit.”

“Knew too much how?”

“Well, she didn’t really say a lot. She just said she met this guy at a bar and it was supposed to be some rando hookup but that it felt like a setup. Like they were having drinks and he said stuff that made her realize he already knew who she was and things about her and it was really fucking creepy and she just got the hell out of there.”

I was having trouble tracking the steps of the story so I tried to break it down into pieces.

“Okay, so what was the name of the place where they met?” I asked.

“I don’t know but she liked to go to places up in the Valley,” Hill said. “Places on Ventura. She said the men up there weren’t so pushy. And I think it had something to do with her age.”

“How so?”

“She was getting older. The guys in the clubs in Hollywood, West Hollywood, they’re all younger or looking for younger.”

“Right. Did you tell the police about her preferring the Valley?”

“Yeah.”

I had met Tina in a restaurant bar on Ventura. I was beginning to understand Mattson and Sakai’s interest in me.

“She lived near the Sunset Strip, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” Hill said. “Just up the hill. Near the old Spago’s.”

“So would she drive over the hill to the Valley?”

“No, never. She got a DUI a while back and she stopped driving when she went out. She used Uber and Lyft.”

I assumed that Mattson and Sakai had gotten Tina’s Uber and Lyft records. They would help identify the bars she frequented and determine her other movements.

“And so, getting back to the stalking thing,” I said. “She just went to the club on her own and met this guy, or was it prearranged like through a dating app or something?”

“No, she was doing her thing,” Hill said. “She just went there to get a buzz on and hear music, maybe meet a guy. Then she sort of bumped into this guy at the bar. From her standpoint it was random, or it was supposed to be.”

It seemed that what had happened between Tina and me wasn’t a one-off. Tina had a habit of going alone to bars to maybe meet a guy. I held no old-fashioned beliefs about women. They were free to go wherever and do whatever they wanted, and I did not believe that a victim was responsible for what happens to her. But along with the DUI and prior drug possession, I did have an angle on Tina now as a risk-taker. Going to bars where men were less pushy was not enough of a safety edge. Not by a long shot.

“Okay, so they meet at the place and start talking and having drinks at the bar,” I said. “And she had never seen him before?”

“Exactly,” Hill said.

“And did she tell you what he specifically said that creeped her out?”

“Not really. She just said, ‘He knew me. He knew me.’ It was like he somehow let something slip and it wasn’t random at all.”

“Did she say whether he was already there when she got to the club or came in after?”

“She didn’t say. Hold on, I have another call.”

She didn’t wait for my response. She clicked over to the other call and I waited, thinking about the incident in the club. When Hill came back on the line her tone and words were completely different. She was harsh and angry.

“You motherfucker. You scumbag. You’re the guy.”

“What? What are you—”

“That was Detective Mattson. I emailed him. He said you’re not working a story and I should stay away from you. You knew her. You knew Tina and now you’re a suspect. You fucking asshole.”

“No, wait. I’m not a suspect and I am working on a story. Yes, I met Tina once but I’m not the guy from the—”

“Don’t fucking come near me!”

She disconnected the call.

“Shit!”

I felt like I had been punched in the gut, and my face burned with humiliation over the subterfuge I had used. I had lied to Lisa Hill. I wasn’t even sure why, or what I was doing. The visit from the detectives had tipped me into a rabbit hole and I wasn’t sure of my motives. Was it about Christina Portrero and me, or was it about the case and the story I might write about it?

Christina and I were one and done. That night she had ordered a car and left. I had asked for another date and she had said no.

“I think you’re too straight for me,” she said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That it wouldn’t work.”

“Why?”

“Nothing personal. I just don’t think you’re my type. Tonight was great, but for the long haul, I mean.”

“Well, then, what is your type?”

It was such a lame response. She just smiled and said her car was arriving. She went out the door and I never saw her again.

Now she was dead and I couldn’t leave it alone. My life had somehow changed since the moment the two detectives had approached me in the garage. I was down the rabbit hole now and I sensed that what was ahead of me in this place was only darkness and trouble. But I also sensed that it was a story. A good story. My kind of story.

Four years ago I had lost everything because of a story. My job and the woman I loved. I had blown it. I had not taken care of the most precious thing I had. I had put myself and the story ahead of everything else. True, I had come through dark waters. I had killed a man once and nearly been killed. I had ended up in jail because of a commitment to my job and its principles, and because deep down I knew the woman would sacrifice herself to save me. When it all fell apart, my self-imposed penance was to leave everything behind and turn myself in a different direction. For a long time before, I had said death was my beat. Now, with Christina Portrero, I knew it still was.

4

Myron was waiting for me when I came into the office the next morning. The newsroom where we worked followed an egalitarian open-floor design — individual cubicles in a cluster. Everybody from editor in chief to most recent hire (me) had the same amount of work space. Up-lighting bounced off the ceiling tiles and came down gently on each of our spaces. Our desktop computers had silent-touch keyboards. Some days the place was as silent as a church on Monday, unless somebody was working the phones, and even then they might move into the conference room at the back of the office so as not to disturb anyone. It was nothing like the newsrooms I had worked in earlier in my career, where the cacophony of clacking keyboards alone could make you lose focus on what you were doing.

The conference room, with a window looking out at the newsroom, was also used for walk-in interviews and employee conferences. That was where Myron took me, closing the door behind him after we entered. We took seats across an oval table from each other. Myron had a printout of what I assumed was my “King of Con Artists” story that he put down on the table. He was old school. He edited with a red pen on paper, then he had our office assistant, Tally Galvin, enter the changes digitally in the story.

“So, you didn’t like my headline,” I said.

“No, the headline has to be about what the story means to the consumer, not the personality — good or bad, tragic or inspirational — that you tell the story through,” Myron said. “But that’s not what I want to talk about here.”

“Then what, you didn’t like the story either?”

“The story’s fine. It’s more than fine. Some of your best work. But what I want to talk about is an email I got last night. A complaint.”

I laughed uneasily. I instinctively knew what this was about but I played innocent.

“A complaint about what?”

“This woman — Lisa Hill — says you misrepresented yourself in an interview about a murder that you are a suspect in. Now normally I would have deleted this or put it up on the wall with the rest of the crazies.”

There was a corkboard in the break room where people posted printouts of the most outrageous and bizarre responses to stories we publish. Often they came from the companies and people who were behind the consumer dangers in our stories. We called the board the wall of shame.

“But then,” Myron said, “I got a call first thing this morning from the LAPD that backs this woman’s email and now we have an LAPD complaint as well.”

“That’s complete bullshit,” I said.

“Well, tell me what’s going on because the cop who called wasn’t friendly.”

“Was his name Mattson?”

Myron looked down at the printout and some of the notations he had made by hand on it. He nodded.

“That’s him.”

“Okay, this whole thing started last night when I drove home from work.”

I proceeded to walk Myron step-by-step through what happened the night before, from Mattson and Sakai following me into the garage at my apartment complex to Lisa Hill’s call in response to my messages and her angry misunderstanding and hang-up. Myron, always the old-school reporter, took notes while I told the story. When I was finished, he reviewed his notes before speaking.

“Okay,” he finally said. “But what I don’t get is why you thought a story about a murder would be something we would put on FairWarning. So—”

“But don’t you—”

“Let me finish. So it makes me think you were using FairWarning and your legitimate standing here as a reporter to investigate something else, the death of this woman you knew. You see what I’m getting at? It doesn’t feel right.”

“Okay, look, whether or not Lisa Hill emailed you or the cops called you, I was going to come in here today and tell you this is my next story.”

“It can’t be your story. You have a conflict of interest.”

“What, because I knew a woman who was murdered a year later?”

“No, because you’re a person of interest in the case.”

“That’s bullshit. It’s pretty clear from what Lisa Hill told me before she hung up and my review of the victim’s social media that she dated a lot of guys. No judgment there, but all of them, including me, are persons of interest. That’s just the cops throwing out a big net. They have DNA from the crime scene because they took a sample from me and—”

“You conveniently left that out of your story just now.”

“I didn’t think it was important because it’s not. The point is I voluntarily gave it because I know that once it gets analyzed I will be in the clear. And free to write this story.”

“What story, Jack? We are a consumer watchdog, not the L.A. Times murder blog.”

“The story is not the murder. I mean, it is, but the real story is the cyberstalking and that gets us into the arena of consumer protection. Everybody has social media. This is a story about how vulnerable we are to cyber predators. How privacy is a thing of the past.”

Myron shook his head.

“That’s an old story,” he said. “It’s been done by every paper in the country. That’s not a story we can partner on and I can’t let you go off chasing it. We need stories that break new ground and draw a lot of eyes.”

“I guarantee it will be one of those stories.”

Myron shook his head. This was going sideways.

“What could you possibly bring to this that’s new?” he said.

“Well, I have to spend some time on it before I can fully answer that but—”

“Look, you are a great reporter who has a history with this kind of story. But it’s not what we do here, Jack. We have certain objectives in our reporting that need to be followed and fulfilled.”

I could tell Myron was extremely uncomfortable because we were peers. He wasn’t dressing down a kid fresh out of J-school.

“We have followers and we have a base,” he continued. “Our readers come to our site looking for what it says on our mission statement: tough watchdog reporting.”

“You’re saying that our readers and financial supporters determine what stories we pursue?” I asked.

“Look, don’t even go there. I didn’t mention our donors and you know that isn’t true. We are completely independent.”

“I’m not trying to start a fight. But you can’t go into every story knowing what the end result is. The best reporting starts out with a question. From who would break into the Democrats’ national headquarters to who killed my brother. Did cyberstalking get Christina Portrero killed? That’s my question. If the answer is yes, then that is a FairWarning story.”

Myron looked at his notes before answering.

“That’s a big ‘if,’” he finally said.

“I know,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t try to answer the question.”

“I still don’t like that you are knee-deep in this story. The cops took your DNA, for Chrissake!”

“Yeah, I gave it to them. I volunteered it. And do you think if I had anything to do with this I would say, Sure, guys, take my DNA. I don’t need a lawyer. I don’t need to hesitate. No, Myron, I wouldn’t. And I didn’t. I will be cleared of this, but if we wait for the police lab on it, we lose the momentum and we lose the story.”

Myron kept his eyes on his notes. I knew I was close.

“Look, let me just run with this for a few days. I’ll either find something or I won’t. If I don’t I’ll come back and work on whatever you put me on. Killer cribs, dangerous car seats — I’ll take over the whole baby beat, if you want.”

“Hey, don’t knock it. The baby-beat stuff gets more eyes than almost anything else we do.”

“I know. Because babies need protection.”

“All right, what are the next steps... if I let you run with this?”

I felt I had won the battle. Myron was going to give in.

“Her parents,” I said. “I want to see what she told them about being stalked. She also posted something on Instagram about finding her half sister. I don’t know what that means and want to find out.”

“Where are the parents?” Myron asked.

“Not sure yet. She told me she was from Chicago.”

“You’re not going to Chicago. We don’t have the funds for—”

“I know. I wasn’t asking to go to Chicago. There’s a thing, they call it the phone, Myron. I’m asking you for time. I’m not asking to spend money.”

Before Myron could respond, the door opened and Tally Galvin stuck her head in.

“Myron,” she said. “The police are here.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked out the window into the newsroom. I saw Mattson and Sakai standing at Tally’s desk at the public entrance to the office.

“Well,” Myron said. “Send them back.”

Tally went to get the two detectives and Myron looked across the table at me. He spoke in a low voice.

“Let me handle this,” he said. “You don’t say anything.”

Before I could protest, the conference-room door opened and Mattson and Sakai entered.

“Detectives,” Myron said. “I’m Myron Levin, founder and executive director of FairWarning. I believe I spoke to one of you this morning.”

“That was me,” Mattson said. “I’m Mattson and this is Detective Sakai.”

“Have a seat. What can we do for you?”

Sakai started to pull one of the chairs away from the table.

“We don’t need to sit down,” Mattson said.

Sakai froze, his hand still on the chair.

“What we need is for you to stand down,” Mattson continued. “We are conducting a murder investigation and the last thing we need is a couple of half-assed reporters poking around and screwing things up. Stand. Down.”

“Half-assed reporters, Detective?” Myron said. “What does that mean?”

“It means you aren’t even the real thing and you’ve got this guy running around, talking to our witnesses and intimidating them.”

He gestured to me. I was ‘this guy.’

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “All I—”

Myron put his hand out to cut me off.

“Detective, my reporter was pursuing a story. And as far as you thinking we are half-assed anything, you should know we are a fully recognized and legitimate member of the media and enjoy all the freedoms of the press. We are not going to be intimidated while pursuing a valid news story.”

I was amazed by Myron’s calm demeanor and strong words. Five minutes earlier he was questioning my motives and the story I wanted to pursue. But now we had closed ranks and were standing strong. This was why I went to work for Myron in the first place.

“You won’t have much of a story if your reporter ends up in jail,” Mattson said. “How will that look to all your media brethren out there?”

“You are saying that if we continue to look into this story, you will jail our reporter?” Myron asked.

“I’m saying he could go from reporter to prime suspect pretty quick and then freedom of the press won’t matter much, will it?”

“Detective, if you arrest my reporter, I guarantee you it will be a story of widespread interest. It will make news across the country. Just as it will do when you are forced to release him and admit publicly that you and your department were wrong and trumped up a case against a reporter because you were afraid he might find the answers you could not.”

Mattson seemed to hesitate in responding. Finally he spoke, looking directly at me since he now understood that Myron was a solid wall. But he no longer had the hard edge in his words.

“I’m telling you for the last time to stay away from this,” he said. “Stay away from Lisa Hill and stay away from the case.”

“You don’t have anything, do you?” I said.

I expected Myron’s hand to come up to signal me to silence again. But this time he did nothing. He looked intently at Mattson, awaiting a reply.

“I have your DNA, buddy boy,” Mattson said. “And you better hope it comes back clean.”

“Then that confirms it,” I said. “You’ve got nothing and you’re wasting time trying to intimidate people and make sure nobody finds out.”

Mattson snickered like I was a fool who didn’t know what I was talking about. He then reached out and hit Silent Sakai on the arm.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Mattson turned and led Sakai out. Myron and I watched through the window as they swaggered through the newsroom toward the door. I felt good. I felt supported and protected. It was not a good time to be a journalist. It was the era of fake news and reporters being labeled by those in power as enemies of the people. Newspapers were folding right and left and some said the industry was in a death spiral. Meanwhile, there was a rise in biased and unchecked reporting and media sites, the line increasingly blurring between impartial and agenda-based journalism. But in the way Myron had handled Mattson I saw a throwback to the days when the media was undaunted, unprejudiced, and therefore could not be intimidated. I suddenly knew for the first time in a long time that I was in the right place.

Myron Levin had to raise money and run the website. Those were his priorities and he didn’t get to be a reporter as much as he wanted to be. But when he put on that hat he was as relentless as any I had ever known. There was a famous story about Myron from his days as a consumer reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This was before he took a buyout, left the paper, and used the money to initially fund FairWarning. In reporting circles there is no better feeling than to expose a scoundrel, to write the story that reveals the con man and shuts him down. Most often the charlatan claims innocence and damage. He sues for millions and then quietly slips out of town to start over somewhere else. The legend about Myron is that he exposed a grifter who was running an earthquake-repair con after the Northridge quake in ’94. Once outed on the front page of the Times, the grifter claimed innocence and filed a defamation-and-slander suit seeking $10 million in damages. In the filing documents, the grifter stated that Myron’s story had caused him so much humiliation and anguish that the damages went beyond reputation and earnings to his health. He said that Myron’s article had caused him bleeding from the rectum. And that was what cemented Myron’s legendary status as a reporter. He had written a story that allegedly made a man bleed from the ass. No reporter would ever be able to best that, no matter how many millions they were sued for.

“Thanks, Myron,” I said. “You had my back.”

“Of course,” Myron said. “Now go get the story.”

I nodded as we watched the two detectives go through the office door.

“And you better watch yourself on this,” Myron said. “Those assholes don’t like you.”

“I know,” I replied.

5

With my editor and publisher’s approval I was officially on the story. And on my very first official move, I got lucky. I went back on Tina Portrero’s social media, used her Facebook tagging history to identify her mother, Regina Portrero, and reached out to her through her own Facebook page. I assumed that if Regina reached back from her home in Chicago we would set up a phone call. Phone calls with the bereaved were safest — I still have a scar on my face from asking the wrong question of a woman grieving the sudden death of her fiancé. But things can get lost or missed in a phone call: nuances of conversation, expressions, emotion.

But that is where the luck came in. Within an hour of sending my private message, Regina contacted me and said she was in town to make arrangements to take her daughter home. She said she was staying at a hotel called the London West Hollywood and expected to leave Los Angeles the next morning, Tina’s body in the cargo hold of the jet. She invited me to come to the hotel to talk about Tina.

I couldn’t make an invitation like that wait, especially when I knew that Mattson and Sakai might take it upon themselves to warn Regina about me. I told her I would be in the lobby of the hotel in an hour. I told Myron where I was going and headed off in the Jeep, taking Coldwater Canyon south over the Santa Monica Mountains and down into Beverly Hills. I then went east on Sunset Boulevard toward the Sunset Strip. The London West Hollywood was located right in the middle of it.

Regina Portrero was a small woman in her mid-sixties, which indicated she had Tina early in her life. I could see the resemblance most in the same dark brown eyes and hair. She met me in the lobby of the hotel, which was just a half block south of Sunset on San Vicente. It was her daughter’s neighborhood. She had lived just a few blocks away.

We sat in an alcove that was probably meant for people waiting for their rooms to be ready. But there was no one there at the moment and we had privacy. I took out my notebook and put it on my thigh so I could write notes and be as inconspicuous about it as possible.

“What is your interest in Tina?” she asked.

Regina’s first question threw me because she had not asked it during the initial communication. Now she wanted to know what I was doing and I knew that if I answered it fully and honestly it would probably end the interview before it got started.

“Well, first of all, I am very sorry for your loss,” I said. “I can’t imagine what you are going through and I hate so much to be an intruder. But what the police on this case told me makes it different and makes what happened to Tina something that the public should possibly know about.”

“I don’t understand. Are you talking about what happened to her neck?”

“Oh, no.”

I was mortified that my clumsy answer to her first question had conjured in her mind the horrible manner in which her daughter had been killed. In many ways I would have preferred a backhand across the face, the diamond of an engagement ring raking across my skin and leaving another scar.

“Uh...,” I stammered. “What I meant was... the police, they told me that she might have been the victim of cyberstalking, and so far, as far as I know, there is no evidence that the two are connected but...”

“They didn’t tell me that,” Regina said. “They said they didn’t have any leads.”

“Well, I don’t want to speak for them and maybe they don’t want to tell you anything until they’re sure. But I understand that she told friends — like Lisa Hill — that she felt she was being stalked. And to be honest, that is what is of interest to me. That is a consumer thing — it’s about privacy — and if there is a... problem then that’s what I’m going to write about.”

“How was she stalked? This is all news to me.”

I knew I was in trouble here. I was telling her things she didn’t know, so the first thing she was going to do after I left was call Mattson about it. Then Mattson would learn that I was still actively pursuing the case, and Regina would in turn learn that my reporter’s interest in Tina and her death was compromised by my having known her briefly but intimately. This meant that this was the one and only time I would get to talk to Tina’s mother. She would be turned against me in the same way Lisa Hill had been.

“I don’t know exactly how she was stalked,” I said. “That is only what the police said. I talked to her friend Lisa and she said Tina apparently met a man in a bar but that it felt like he was there waiting for her or something. That it wasn’t a random encounter.”

“I told her to stay out of the bars,” Regina said. “But she couldn’t keep away — even after the arrests and rehab.”

It was an incongruous response. I was talking about her daughter being stalked and she fixated on her daughter’s drug and alcohol issues.

“I am not saying one thing had anything to do with the other,” I said. “I don’t think the police know yet either. But I know she had arrests and had been to rehab. Is that what you mean about her going to bars?”

“She was always going out, meeting strangers...,” Regina said. “All the way back to high school. Her father told her it could end this way — he warned her — but she didn’t listen. She didn’t seem to care. She was boy crazy from the start.”

Regina seemed to stare off into the distance when she spoke. Boy crazy seemed like an innocent term but, clearly, she was seeing a memory of her daughter as a young woman. An unpleasant memory in which there was upset and rancor.

“Was Tina ever married?” I asked.

“No, never,” Regina said. “She said she never wanted to be tied down by one man. My husband used to joke that she saved him a bundle by never getting married. But she was our only child and I always wished I had gotten to plan her wedding. It never happened. She was always looking for something she felt no man she met could provide.... What that was, I never knew.”

I remembered the post I had seen on Tina’s social media.

“I saw on her Instagram that she said she found her sister,” I said. “A half sister. But she’s not your daughter?”

Regina’s face changed and I knew I had hit on something bad in her life.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Regina said.

“I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”

“All these people, they are so interested in that stuff. Where they come from. Are they Swedish, are they Indian. They don’t know what they’re playing with. It’s like that privacy thing you mentioned. Some secrets are meant to stay secret.”

“The half sister was a secret?”

“Tina sent her DNA in and then next thing she does is tell us she’s got a half sister out in Naperville. She... I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“You can tell me off the record. It will never go into a story but if it helps me understand your daughter and what she was interested in, it could be important. Do you know why she sent her DNA in for analysis? Was she look—”

“Who knows? That’s what people do, right? It’s quick. It’s cheap. She had friends that were doing it, finding their heritage.”

I had not submitted my DNA to any of the genetic-analytics sites but I knew people who had and therefore knew generally how it worked. Your DNA went through a genetic data bank that returned matches to other customers of the site, along with the percentage of shared DNA. Higher percentages meant a closer relationship — from distant cousins to direct siblings.

“She found her half sister. I saw the photo of them. Naperville — that’s near Chicago, right?”

I needed to keep her talking about something she didn’t want to talk about. Easy questions got easy answers and kept the words coming.

“Yes,” Regina said. “I grew up there. Went to high school there.”

She paused and looked at me and I realized she needed me to tell the story. It was always amazing to me when people opened up. I was a stranger but they knew I was a reporter, a recorder of history. I had found many times when reporting tragedies that those left behind wanted to reach out through their grief to talk and set down some sort of record of the lost loved one. Women more than men. They had a sense of duty to the lost one. Sometimes they needed only a little prodding.

“You had a baby,” I said.

She nodded.

“And Tina didn’t know,” I said.

“Nobody knew,” she said. “It was a girl. I gave her up. I was too young. And then later I met my husband and we started a family. Tina. And then she grew up and sent her DNA in to one of those places. And she had done it, too. The girl. She knew she was adopted and was looking for connections. They connected through the DNA site and that’s what destroyed our family.”

“Tina’s father didn’t know...”

“I didn’t tell him at first and then it was too late. It was supposed to be my secret. But then the world changes and your own DNA can unlock everything and secrets aren’t secrets anymore.”

I once had an editor named Foley who said that sometimes the best question is the one not asked. I waited. I didn’t feel I had to ask the next question.

“My husband left,” Regina said. “It wasn’t that I’d had the baby. It was that I didn’t tell him. He said our marriage was built on a lie. That was four months ago. Christina didn’t know. Her father and I agreed not to put that guilt on her. She would have blamed herself.”

Regina had been holding a clot of tissues in her hands and now used them to dry her eyes and wipe her nose.

“Tina went back to Chicago to meet her half sister,” I said, hoping to spark more revelations from the broken woman.

“Tina was such a sweet girl,” Regina said. “She wanted to reunite us. She thought it was a good thing. She didn’t know what was going on with her father and me. But I told her no, I couldn’t see the girl. Not now. And she was very upset with me.”

She shook her head and continued.

“Funny how life is,” she said. “Everything’s good, everything’s fine. You think your secrets are safe. Then something comes along and it all just goes away. Everything changes.”

It would only be a detail in the story but I asked what genetics site Christina had submitted her DNA to.

“It was GT23,” Regina said. “I remember because it only cost twenty-three dollars. So much grief for just twenty-three dollars.”

I knew about GT23. It was one of the more recent entries into the DNA testing-and-analytics business. The upstart company was attempting to take control of the billion-dollar industry by dramatically undercutting the pricing of the competition. It had an advertising campaign based on the promise of DNA analytics accessible to the masses. Its slogan was DNA You Can Afford! The 23 in its name stood for the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in a human cell as well as the price of its basic kit: a full DNA and heredity report for twenty-three dollars.

Regina started to cry full-on then. Her knot of tissues was falling apart. I told her I would get her more and got up. I started looking for a restroom.

Something told me that while the emergence of the half sister in Tina’s life was important, this was not the angle of the story that led to the cyberstalking. This was just one spoke in the wheel of Tina’s life, although it was one that brought about profound changes to those close to her. But the stalking had to have come from another angle and I was guessing that was her lifestyle.

I found a restroom, pulled open a steel container holding a cardboard box of tissues, and took the whole thing back out to the lobby alcove.

Regina was gone.

I looked around and she was nowhere to be seen. I checked the couch where she had been sitting. No purse, no wad of tissue.

“Sorry, I had to go to the bathroom.”

I turned around and it was her. She returned to the couch. She looked like she had washed her face. I put the box of tissues down next to her and returned to the chair I had been sitting in to her left.

“I’m sorry to make you go through all of this,” I said. “I didn’t know when I asked the question that it would bring up this difficult stuff.”

“No, it’s okay,” Regina said. “It’s kind of therapeutic in a way. To talk about it, get it out. You know?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

I wanted to move in a different direction now.

“So,” I asked. “Did Tina ever talk to you about any of the men she dated?”

“No, she knew my feelings about that and her lifestyle,” Regina said. “Also, what could I say? I met my husband at a blues club in South Side Chicago. I was only twenty years old.”

“Do you know if she did any online dating, that sort of thing?”

“I would guess that she did but I don’t know about it. The police asked me the same thing and I said that Tina didn’t tell me about the specifics of her life here. I knew about the arrests and the rehab — because she needed money. But that was all. The one thing I always told her was that I wished she’d come back home and be close. I told her that every time we talked.”

I nodded. I wrote the lines down.

“And now it’s too late,” she added.

She started to cry again and I wrote that last line down as well.

I should have ended the interview there and not pushed the woman further. But I knew that once she interacted with Mattson again he would tell her to steer clear of me. It was now or never and I had to roll with it.

“Have you been to her apartment?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “The police said it’s still sealed because it was the crime scene.”

I was hoping to get a look inside Tina’s home myself.

“Did they say when you could go in and get her things?”

“Not yet. I’ll have to come back for that. After the funeral, maybe.”

“Where exactly was her place?”

“Do you know where the Tower Records used to be?”

“Yes, across from the bookstore.”

“She lived right above it. Sunset Place Apartments.”

Regina pulled fresh tissues out of the box and dabbed at her eyes.

“Cute place,” she said.

I nodded.

“She was beautiful and kind,” Regina said. “Why did someone have to kill her?”

She buried her face and her sobs in the tissues. I just watched her. She had asked a question only a mother could ask and only the killer could answer. But it was a good line and I memorized it to write down later. For the moment I just nodded sympathetically.

6

I got back to the office by lunchtime and everyone was in their cubicles eating sandwiches from Art’s Deli. Most days we ordered in food but no one had thought to text me for my order. That was okay because at the moment I didn’t need food. I was fueled by the momentum of the story. I was in that early stage where I knew I had something but wasn’t sure what it was or what the next step should be. I started by opening up a Word file on my laptop and typing up my handwritten notes from the interview with Regina Portrero. I was halfway through the process when I realized my problem. The next step was to go back to Lisa Hill to ask more questions about Tina and her stalker, but Lisa Hill thought I was not only a scumbag but a suspect in her friend’s murder.

I put transcribing my notes aside and checked my phone to see if Hill had gotten around to blocking me on Instagram. She had not, but my guess was that this was just an oversight and she would do so as soon as she checked her followers and was reminded of my previous deception.

I spent the next half hour composing a private message to her that I hoped would give me a second chance.

I put my phone number on the end of the message and sent it, hoping for the best but knowing it was a long shot, and that I couldn’t just wait for Lisa Hill to change her mind about me. I next checked the causes-of-death website where I had posted my request for information on atlanto-occipital dislocation. And this was where my luck and the story changed dramatically. There were already five messages waiting for me.

The first message had been posted at 7 a.m. L.A. time but 10 a.m. Florida time, where the posting had come from the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. A pathologist named Frank Garcia cited an AOD case from the previous year that had been ruled a homicide.

I could decipher most of the shorthand. COD was cause of death and TA meant traffic accident, while I/O meant investigating officer. And I thought FLPD meant Florida Police Department until I googled it and came up with Fort Lauderdale Police Department, which was located within Broward County. I copied the message and transferred it to the story file I had created on my computer.

The next message was from Dallas and it was similar to the first in that the victim was a woman of similar age — thirty-four-year-old Jamie Flynn — who had died in what appeared to be a single-car accident with AOD listed as cause of death. This was not classified as a homicide but as a suspicious death because all of Flynn’s toxicity reports came back clean, so there was no clear explanation as to why she drove off a road and down an embankment into a tree. Flynn’s death had occurred ten months earlier and the case was still open because of the suspicious circumstances.

The third message was a follow-up from Frank Garcia at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The fourth post on the message board was about another case, which had occurred three months before. This one came from Brian Schmidt, who was an investigator with the Santa Barbara County Coroner’s Office.

I knew that BAT meant blood-alcohol toxicity and that the limit for driving in California was .08, indicating Taggart was at least slightly inebriated when she walked to the edge of a cliff in darkness and fell to her death.

The fifth message was posted most recently. It was the shortest message but it froze me.

It had been posted only twenty minutes earlier by Dr. Adhira Larkspar, who I knew was the chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. It meant I was in danger of discovery. When no one volunteered to identify themselves to their boss, Larkspar might check to see if her office did indeed have a recent AOD case, and this inquiry would undoubtedly lead her to Mattson and Sakai, who would undoubtedly conclude that I had been the one to initially post on the message board.

I tried to push thoughts of another visit from the detectives aside and to focus on the information I had in front of me. Three cases of AOD in the last year and a half, with Tina Portrero making a fourth. The victims were women ranging in age from twenty-two to forty-four. So far, two of the cases had been ruled homicides, one was suspicious, and one — the most recent before Portrero — was classified as an accident.

I did not know enough about human physiology to be sure whether the fact that all four cases involved females was significant. Since men are generally larger and more muscled than women, it was possible that AOD happened more to women because their bodies were more fragile.

Or it could be that they are stalked and become the targets of predators more often than men.

I knew that I had to add more to the profiles of these four women if I were to make any informed judgment based on the information I had. I decided to work backward and start with the most recent case first. Using basic search engines I found very little on Charlotte Taggart other than a paid obituary that had run in the East Bay Times and an accompanying online memorial book where friends and family could sign their names and make comments about the deceased loved one.

The obituary said Charlotte Taggart grew up in Berkeley, California, and attended UC — Santa Barbara. She was in her senior year when she passed. She was interred at Sunset View Cemetery in Berkeley. She was survived by both parents, two younger brothers, and many close and distant relatives she had discovered in the past year.

The end of the last line drew my focus. Charlotte Taggart had discovered new relatives in the last year of her life. That said to me that she most likely discovered these people through a heritage-analysis company. My guess was she had submitted her DNA just as Christina Portrero had done.

This connection didn’t necessarily mean anything — millions of people did what these two young women had. It was not uncommon at all and at this stage it appeared to be a coincidence.

I scanned the comments in the online memorial book and found it to be full of heartfelt but routine messages of love and loss, many written directly to Charlotte as though she would be reading them from the great hereafter.

After entering what I knew about Charlotte Taggart’s life and death into the story file, I moved on to the Dallas case, where Jamie Flynn’s death was labeled suspicious because there was no explanation for her driving down an embankment into a tree.

This time I found a short story about the death in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Jamie was from a prominent family that ran a well-known boot-and-saddlery business in Fort Worth. Flynn was a graduate assistant at Southern Methodist University in Dallas while working on a doctorate in psychology. She lived on a horse ranch in Fort Worth owned by her parents and commuted because she liked to be close to her horses. It was her life’s goal to open a counseling practice that incorporated riding as therapy. The story contained an interview with Flynn’s father, who lamented that his daughter had battled depression and alcoholism before straightening her life out and returning to school. He seemed proud of the fact that she had not had a relapse and that her blood screens in the autopsy were clean.

The story also quoted a traffic-accident investigator from the Dallas Police Department. Todd Whitney said he wouldn’t close the case until he was confident the death of Jamie Flynn was an accident.

“A young healthy woman with a lot going for her doesn’t just go off the road and down into a ravine and get her neck broken,” he said. “It may be purely an accident. She could have seen a deer or something and swerved. But there are no skid marks and no animal tracks. I wish I could tell her parents I have the answers, but I don’t. Not yet.”

I noted that there was nothing in the story about whether Jamie Flynn might have driven off the road on purpose in an attempt to disguise a suicide as an accident. It was not an uncommon occurrence. But if it had been considered, it was not publicly reported. There was such a stigma attached to suicide that most newspapers avoided it like the plague. It was only when public figures offed themselves that suicide stories were written.

I moved on for the moment from Jamie Flynn. I wanted to keep my momentum. I was certain that I was closing in on something and did not want to be delayed.

7

The last case I reviewed was the first mentioned on the causes-of-death message board. It had been posted with a short case summary. The death of thirty-two-year-old Mallory Yates in Fort Lauderdale was open and being treated as a homicide because, like the case in Dallas, there were incongruities about the supposed traffic accident that took her life. Histamine levels in some of the wounds to her body suggested that the injuries were postmortem and the accident was staged. But moving on from the post, I found no funeral notice or news story about the case. A second-tier search brought up a Facebook page that was publicly accessible and had been turned into a memorial page for Yates. There were dozens of messages posted by friends and family in the sixteen months since her death. I scrolled through them quickly, picking up bits and pieces of the dead woman’s history and updates on her case.

I learned that Mallory had grown up in Fort Lauderdale, had attended Catholic schools and gone to work in her family’s boat-rental business operating out of a marina called Bahia Mar. She had apparently not attended college after high school and, like Jamie Flynn in Fort Worth, lived alone in a home owned by her father. Her mother was deceased. Several of the Facebook posts were messages of condolence directed to her father in regard to losing both his wife and daughter in the space of two years.

A message posted three weeks after Mallory’s death caught my eye and brought my casual scroll through the page to a dead stop. Someone named Ed Yeagers posted a message of sympathy that identified Mallory as his third cousin and lamented that they were just getting acquainted when she was taken away. He said, “I was just getting to know you and wish there was more time. Profoundly sad to find family and then lose family in the same month.”

That sentiment could have come from the obituary for Charlotte Taggart. Finding family in this day and age usually meant DNA. There were heredity-analytics companies that used online data to search for family connections but DNA was the shortcut. I was now convinced that both Charlotte Taggart and Mallory Yates had been searching for connections through DNA heritage analysis. And so had Christina Portrero. The coincidence extended to three of the women and might include all four.

I spent the next twenty minutes running down social-media links to relatives and friends of Mallory Yates and Charlotte Taggart. I sent every one of them the same message asking if their loved one had submitted DNA to an analytics company and, if so, which one. Even before I finished I got an email response from Ed Yeagers.

My adrenaline hit the floodgates. I had two confirmed cases that shared a rare cause of death and submission of DNA to GT23. I quickly went back to the story about Jamie Flynn in the Fort Worth paper and got the name of her father and the family business he ran, selling boots, belts, and equestrian products like saddles and reins. I googled the business, got a phone number for the main office, and called it. A woman answered and I asked for Walter Flynn.

“Can I ask what this is regarding?” she asked.

“His daughter Jamie,” I said.

Nobody likes to cause someone more grief than they already carry. I knew that I would do that with this phone call. But I also knew that if I was right about my instincts I might eventually be able to lessen that grief with answers.

A man picked up the call after a very brief hold.

“Walt Flynn, what can I do for you?”

He had a no-nonsense Texas drawl that I guessed went back generations. In my head I pictured the Marlboro Man in a white Stetson sitting on a horse, his chiseled features set in a frown. I chose my words carefully, not wanting him to dismiss me or grow angry.

“Mr. Flynn, I’m sorry to disturb you. I’m a reporter calling from Los Angeles and I’m working on a story about the unexplained deaths of several women.”

I waited. The bait had been thrown out. He would either bite or hang up on me.

“And this is about my daughter?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, it could be,” I said.

I didn’t fill the silence that followed. I started to hear a background noise, like running water.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Sir, I don’t want to cause you any more grief than you’re already going through,” I said. “I am so sorry about the loss of your daughter. But can I speak frankly to you?”

“I’m still on the phone.”

“And off the record?”

“Isn’t that what I say to you?”

“What I mean is, I don’t want you to turn around and share this conversation with anyone apart from your wife. Is that okay?”

“It’s fine for now.”

“Okay, well, then I’ll just lay it out for you, sir. I’m looking at — I’m sorry, do we have a bad connection? I hear this back—”

“It’s raining. I stepped outside for privacy. I’ll put it on mute while you talk.”

The line went silent.

“Uh, okay, that’s fine,” I said. “So, I’m looking at four deaths of women aged twenty-two to forty-four across the country in the last year and a half where the cause of death was determined to be atlanto-occipital dislocation — AOD, as they call it. Two of the deaths, one here and one in Florida, have been classified as homicides. One is listed as accidental but I find it suspicious. And then the fourth, which is your daughter’s case, is officially classified as suspicious.”

Flynn took it off mute and I heard the rain before he spoke.

“And you’re saying these four are somehow linked?”

I could hear the disbelief creeping into his voice. I was going to lose him pretty quickly if I didn’t change that.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m looking for commonalities in the cases and the women. You could help if I could ask you a few questions. That is why I’m calling.”

He didn’t respond at first. I thought I heard the low rumble of thunder providing a bass line for the rain. Flynn finally replied.

“Ask your questions.”

“Okay. Before her death, had Jamie submitted her DNA to a genetic-analytics lab, whether for hereditary or health analysis?”

Flynn had muted the call. There was only silence in reply. After a few moments I wondered if he had disconnected the call.

“Mr. Flynn?”

The rain came back.

“I’m here. The answer is she was just getting into that sort of stuff. But as far as I know, she had not gotten anything back. She said she wanted to incorporate it into her doctoral program somehow. She said that she was having everyone in one of her classes at the university do it. How does this connect to her death?”

“I don’t know yet. Do you happen to know what company your daughter submitted DNA to?”

“Some of the kids in her class, they’re scholarship kids. Money is tight. They went with the cheapest one. The one that charges twenty-three bucks for the test.”

“GT23.”

“That’s it. What does all of this mean?”

I almost didn’t hear his question. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. I now had a third confirmation. What were the odds that these three women who suffered the same kind of death had all sent their DNA to GT23?

“I don’t really know what it means yet, Mr. Flynn,” I said.

I had to guard against Flynn getting as excited over the connection in the cases as I was. I didn’t want him running to the Texas Rangers or the FBI with my story.

“Do the authorities know about this?” he asked.

“There is nothing to know about yet,” I said quickly. “When and if I have a solid link between the cases, I’ll go to them.”

“What about this DNA stuff you just asked about? Is that the connection?”

“I don’t know. It’s not confirmed yet. I don’t have enough to take to the authorities. It’s just one of a few things I’m looking at.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the rain. I knew it would come to this. Flynn’s daughter was dead and he had no answers, no explanations.

“I understand what you’re feeling, Mr. Flynn,” I said. “But we need to wait until—”

“How could you understand?” he said. “Do you have a daughter? Was she taken from you?”

A flashback memory hit me. A hand swinging at my face, me turning to deflect the blow. The diamond raking across my cheek.

“You’re right, sir, I shouldn’t have said that. I have no idea what kind of pain you carry. I just need a little bit more time to get further into this. I promise you I will stay in touch and keep you informed. If I come up with something solid you will be the first person I call. After that, we’ll go to the police, the FBI, everybody. Can you do that? Can you give me that time?”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I can’t — we can’t — go to the FBI or anybody if we don’t have this nailed down. You don’t yell fire unless there’s a fire. You know what I mean?”

“How long?”

“A week, maybe.”

“And you’ll call me?”

“I’ll call you. That’s a promise.”

We exchanged cell numbers and he needed to hear my name again because he had missed it the first time. We then disconnected, with Flynn promising to sit tight until he heard from me at the end of a week.

My phone rang as soon as I put it back in its cradle. It was a woman named Kinsey Russell. She had been one of the posters in Charlotte Taggart’s online memorial book. I had found her on Instagram and sent her a private note.

“What kind of story are you doing?” she asked.

“To be honest, I’m not quite sure yet,” I said. “I know that your friend Charlotte’s death was listed as an accident but there are three other similar deaths of women that are not. I’m writing about those three and just want to check out Charlotte’s death to make sure something wasn’t missed.”

“I think it was murder. I’ve said that from the beginning.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she wouldn’t have gone out to those cliffs at night. And definitely not alone. But the police aren’t interested in finding out the truth. An accident looks better for them and the school than a murder.”

I had little knowledge of who Kinsey Russell was. She had written one of the messages directly to her dead friend.

“How did you know Charlotte?”

“From school. We had classes together.”

“So this was like a school party.”

“Yes, kids from school.”

“So how do you jump from her disappearing at the party to it being a murder at the cliffs?”

“Because I know she wouldn’t have gone out there by herself. She wouldn’t have gone out there at all. She was scared of heights. She always talked about all the bridges they have up there where she was from and being too scared even to drive over the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate. She almost never went into San Francisco because of the bridges.”

I wasn’t sure that was convincing enough to declare the death a murder.

“Well... I’m going to look into it,” I said. “I’ve already started. Can I ask you a few other questions?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll help you any way I can because this isn’t right. I know something happened out there.”

“The obituary that ran in the paper up in Berkeley said she was survived by her family and several distant relatives she had discovered in the last year. Do you know what that meant, the part about distant relatives?”

“Yes, she did the DNA thing. We both did, except she was really into it and was tracing her family back to Ireland and Sweden.”

“You both did it. Which company did you use?”

“It’s called GT23. It’s not as well-known as the big ones, but it’s cheaper.”

There it was. I was four for four. Four AOD deaths, four victims who had turned their DNA over to GT23. There had to be a connection.

I asked Kinsey Russell a few follow-up questions but didn’t register their answers. I was moving on. I had momentum. I wanted to get off the phone and get to work. Finally, I thanked her for her help, said I would stay in touch, and ended the call.

I looked up after putting the phone down and saw Myron Levin looking over the half-wall of my cubicle. He was holding a mug of coffee with the FairWarning logo on it. The A in Warning was a red triangle with a lightning bolt through it. I was feeling the power of that bolt right now.

“Did you hear all of that?”

“Some of it. You have something?”

“Yeah, I got something big. I think.”

“Let’s go to the conference room.”

He pointed his cup toward the room.

“Not yet,” I said. “I need to make a few more calls, maybe go see somebody, then I’ll be ready to talk. You’re going to like it.”

“Okay,” Myron said. “Ready when you are.”

8

I pulled up everything I could on GT23 and immersed myself in the business of DNA analytics.

The piece that was most informative was a 2019 profile of the company published in Stanford Magazine as GT23 turned two years old and had just gone public, making its five founders extremely wealthy. It was an offshoot of an older company called GenoType23, which was founded two decades earlier by a group of Stanford University chemistry professors who pooled money to open a secure lab catering to law-enforcement agencies too small to fund their own labs to conduct forensic DNA analysis in criminal cases. The first company was initially successful and grew to have more than fifty court-certified technicians working and testifying in criminal cases across the western United States. But DNA became the panacea. It was increasingly being used around the world to solve crimes old and new, as well as to clear those wrongfully accused and convicted. As more and more police departments and law-enforcement agencies caught up technologically and opened their own forensic DNA labs or funded joint and regional labs, GenoType23 faced declining business and revenues and had to lay off staff.

As the company declined, a new area of social analytics emerged in the DNA field following the completion of the human-genome project. Millions of people began seeking their ancestral and health histories. The founders retooled and opened GT23, a budget DNA analytics firm. There was a catch to the low cost, however. While the large forerunners in the field asked customers to volunteer their DNA anonymously for research, GT23 didn’t offer a choice. The low cost of analysis needed to be offset by making the collected samples and data available — still anonymously — to research facilities and biotech firms willing to pay for it.

The move was not without controversy, but the whole field was awash in privacy-and-security concerns. GT23’s founders weathered the questions with the basic explanation that submitting DNA to them was in fact volunteering it for research, and they proceeded to market. And the market responded. So much so that little more than a year later the founders decided to take their company public. The five founders rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange as trading in their company opened — ironically or perhaps coincidentally — at twenty-three dollars a share. The founders became rich overnight.

I next came across a more recent article in Scientific American that carried the headline “Who Is Buying GT23’s DNA?” The article was a sidebar to a larger story that explored the ethical and privacy concerns in the freewheeling world of DNA analysis. The writer of the article had found a source inside GT23 and obtained a list of universities and biotech research facilities that bought DNA data from the company. These ranged from labs at Cambridge University in England to a biologist at MIT to a small private research lab in Irvine, California. The article said that DNA from GT23 participants — the company did not use the word customers — was being used in studies involving the genetics behind a variety of diseases and ailments, including alcoholism, obesity, insomnia, Parkinson’s, asthma, and many others.

The variety of studies that the data from GT23 contributed to and the good that might come from it — not to mention the potential profits to universities, Big Pharma, and companies producing wellness products — were staggering. The article identified a study at UCLA that dealt with appetite satiation and the genetic roots of obesity. A cosmetic company was using GT23 participants to study aging and skin wrinkling. A pharmaceutical company was researching why some people produce more earwax than others, while the lab in Irvine was studying the connection between genes and risky behaviors such as smoking, use of drugs, sex addiction, and even speeding while driving. All these studies aimed at understanding the causes of human maladies and developing drug and behavioral therapies that would treat or cure them.

It all seemed good and it was all profitable — at least to the founders of GT23.

But the main article that ran with the sidebar threw a shadow over all the good news. It reported that regulatory enforcement of the billion-dollar genetic-analytics industry fell to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which until recently had taken a complete pass on those responsibilities. The article quoted a recent report from the National Human Genome Research Institute:

The article went on to report that the FDA was only now in the process of formulating rules and regulations that would eventually be presented to Congress for adoption. Only then would any kind of enforcement begin.

I was stunned. The report concluded that there was virtually no government oversight and regulation in the burgeoning field of genetic analytics. The government was far behind the curve.

I printed a copy of the story for Myron to read and then went to GT23’s website to look for any acknowledgment that the services the company provided and the security it promised were not backed by government regulation. I found none. But I did stumble across a page that outlined how researchers could go about requesting anonymized data and biological samples and the fields of study the company supported:

On the website the recipients of data and bio samples were called collaborators. It was all presented in a cheery, change-the-world-for-the-better pitch that I was sure was crafted to allay any potential participant’s concerns about anonymously putting their DNA into the great unknown of genetic analysis and storage.

Another section of the website contained a four-page privacy- and-informed-consent statement that outlined the anonymity guaranteed with the submission of one’s DNA in a GT23 home-sampling kit. This was the boring fine print but I read every word of it. The company promised participants multiple layers of security in the handling of their DNA and required all collaborators to meet the same levels of physical and technical protection of data. No biological sample would be transferred to a collaborator with any participant’s identity attached.

The consent statement clearly said that the low cost to participants for DNA analytics, matching, and health reporting was underwritten by the collaborating companies and labs that paid for the anonymized data. As such, the participant was agreeing to field requests from collaborators funneled through GT23 to maintain anonymity. The requests could range from additional information on personal habits to surveys in the specific field of study or even additional DNA samples. It was then up to the participant to decide whether to respond. Direct participation with collaborators was not required.

After three pages of outlining self-imposed security measures and promises, the last page contained the bottom line:

It was the lead sentence of the last paragraph and was followed by a list of worst-case scenarios that were “highly unlikely.” These ran from collaborator security breaches to the theft or destruction of DNA samples while in transit to labs sponsored by collaborators. There was one line in the disclaimer paragraph I read over and over, trying to understand it:

I copied this off the screen and put it at the top of a notes document. Below it I typed: WTF?

I now had my first follow-up question. But before I pursued it I clicked on a tab labeled law enforcement on the menu. This page revealed GT23’s statement of support and cooperation with the FBI and police agencies in using its genetic data in criminal investigations. This had become a hot-button topic in recent years as police used genetic-analytics providers to help solve cases through linkage of familial DNA. In California, most notably, the alleged Golden State Killer was captured decades after a murder-and-rape spree when DNA from a rape kit was uploaded on GEDmatch and investigators were provided with matches to several relatives of the alleged killer. A family tree was constructed and soon a suspect was identified and then confirmed through further DNA analysis. Many other lesser-known murders were also solved similarly. GT23 made no bones about cooperating with law enforcement when asked.

I was now finished with my review of GT23’s website and I had one question on my notes page. I wasn’t sure what I had or what I was doing. I had a connection among the deaths of four young women. They were connected by their gender, the cause of their deaths, and their participation in GT23. I assumed that GT23 had millions of participants so was unsure if this last connection was a valid common denominator.

I sat up and looked over the wall of my cubicle. I could only see the top of Myron’s head in his cubby. I thought about going to him and saying now was the time to talk. But I quickly dismissed the idea. I didn’t like going to my editor, my boss, and saying I didn’t know what to do next. An editor wants confidence. He wants to hear a plan that will lead to a story. A story that would draw attention to FairWarning and what we were doing.

I stalled the decision by googling a contact number for GT23 and calling the corporate office in Palo Alto. I asked for Media Relations and soon was talking to a media specialist named Mark Bolender.

“I work for a consumer news site called FairWarning and I’m doing a piece on consumer privacy in the area of DNA analytics,” I said.

Bolender did not respond at first but I heard him typing.

“Got it,” he finally said. “Looking at your website right now. I was not familiar with it.”

“We usually partner on stories with more recognizable media outlets,” I said. “L.A. Times, Washington Post, NBC, and so on.”

“Who is your partner on this one?”

“No partner at the moment. I’m doing some preliminary work and—”

“Gathering string, huh?”

It was an old newspaper phrase. It told me Bolender was a former news guy who had crossed to the other side. He was handling media now, rather than being media.

“Only a reporter would say that,” I said. “Where’d you work?”

“Oh, here and there,” Bolender said. “My last gig was twelve years at the Merc as a tech reporter and then I took a buyout, ended up here.”

The San Jose Mercury News was a very good newspaper. If Bolender had been a tech reporter in the breadbasket of technology then I knew I wasn’t dealing with a public-relations hack. I now had to worry that he would figure out what I was really up to and find a way to block me.

“So what can I do for you and FairWarning?” Bolender asked.

“Well, right now I need some general information about security,” I said. “I was on the GT23 website and it says there are multiple layers of security established for handling participant genetic data and material, and I was hoping you could walk me through that.”

“I wish I could, Jack. But you are asking about proprietary matters that we don’t talk about. Suffice it to say, anyone who submits a genetic sample to GT23 can expect the highest level of security in the industry. Way beyond government requirements.”

It was a stock answer and I noted that going beyond government requirements when there were no such requirements meant nothing. But I didn’t want to jump on Bolender and position myself as an adversary so early in the conversation. Instead, I typed his words into the file because I would need to use them in the story — if a story was published.

“Okay, I understand that,” I said. “But on your website you clearly say you can’t guarantee that there will never be a breach. How do you reconcile that with what you just said?”

“What is on the website is what the lawyers tell us to put on the website,” Bolender said, an edge sharpening in his voice. “Nothing in life is one hundred percent guaranteed, so we need to make that advisement. But as I said, our safety measures are beyond question second to none. Do you have another question?”

“Yes, hold on.”

I finished typing in his answer.

“Uh, could you explain what this means?” I asked. “It’s from your website: It may be possible, but unlikely, that a third party could identify you if they are able to combine your genetic data with other information available to them through other means.”

“It means exactly what it says,” Bolender said. “It’s possible but unlikely. Again, it’s legal speak. We are required to provide it in our consent form.”

“Do you want to expand on that? For example, what does ‘other information available to them’ mean?”

“It could mean a lot of things but we are not going to go past the disclaimer on that, Jack.”

“Has there ever been a breach of participant data at GT23?”

There was a pause before Bolender answered. Just long enough for me to be suspicious of his answer.

“Of course not,” Bolender said. “If there had been it would have been reported to the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that regulates the industry. You can check with them and you will find no report because it has never happened.”

“Okay.”

I was typing.

“Are you putting this into a story?” Bolender asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Like you said, I’m just gathering string. We’ll see.”

“Are you talking to the others? Twenty-Three and Me, Ancestry?”

“I will, yes.”

“Well, I would appreciate it if you would circle back to me if you’re going to publish a story. I would like to review my quotes to make sure I’m quoted accurately.”

“Uh... you didn’t make that request at the top of the call, Mark. It’s not something I usually do.”

“Well, I didn’t know at the top what the call was about. Now I’m concerned about being quoted accurately and in context.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. I’ve been doing this a long time and I don’t make up quotes or use them out of context.”

“Then I guess this conversation is over.”

“Look, Mark, I don’t get why you’re upset. You were a reporter, you now deal with reporters, you know how it works. You don’t lay down rules after the interview. What’s upsetting you?”

“Well, for one, I pulled up your bio and now see who you are.”

“I told you who I was.”

“But you didn’t mention the books you wrote about those killers.”

“Those are old, old stories that have nothing to—”

“Both were about advances in technology being used by bad people. The Poet? The Scarecrow? Serial killers so bad they had media names. So I don’t think you called up here to do a reassuring piece on our security. There is something else going on.”

He wasn’t wrong but he wasn’t right either. I still didn’t know what I had but his evasiveness was only increasing my feeling that there might be something here.

“There is nothing going on,” I said. “I am truly interested in knowing about the security of the DNA that is submitted to your company. But I will do this for you: if you want me to read back your quotes to you now, I will do that. You will see that I have them down accurately.”

There was silence and then Bolender responded in a clipped tone that told me the conversation was over — unless I found a way to keep it going.

“So, if we’re done here, Jack—”

“I’d like to ask a couple more questions. I was reading about how GT23 has grown so quickly into one of the largest providers of DNA analytics.”

“That’s true. What’s your question?”

“Well, does GT23 still do all of the lab work or has it gotten so big so fast that it subcontracts lab work?”

“Uh, I believe there is some contracting out of work to other labs. I know your last question is whether they operate with the same safety-and-privacy measures and the answer is yes, absolutely. Same standards right down the line. Well beyond government requirements. There is no story here and I need to go now.”

“Last question. You mentioned that the company and its contractors go beyond federal regulations and requirements in terms of security, reporting of any privacy breaches, and so forth. Are you aware that there aren’t any regulations and requirements and that any reporting on these issues would have to be self-reporting?”

“I, uh... Jack, I think you have bad information there. The FDA regulates DNA.”

“True, it falls under FDA purview, but the FDA has chosen, up till now, at least, not to regulate. So when you say that GT23 goes beyond govern—”

“I think what I’m saying is that we’re done here, Jack. Have a nice day.”

Bolender disconnected and I put the phone back in its cradle. I made a fist and silently bounced it on the desk like a hammer. My torching of Bolender with his own words aside, I was feeling the groundswell building around me. Bolender had great reason to be upset. Beyond his efforts to protect the reputation of the company that employed him, he had to know that the larger secret of the industry as a whole was in danger of being exposed. Genetic testing was a self-regulating industry with very few if any government eyes upon it.

And that was a news story.

9

I printed out all of my notes from the research and interviews. After retrieving the pages from the communal printer, I left the office, passing by Myron while he was on the phone making a pitch to another potential donor. This was a break. I would not have to explain what I was doing or where I was going. I got out the door without hearing my name called.

It took me forty-five minutes to drive downtown and find parking. I knew I was risking about two hours of wasted time by not calling ahead but I also knew that calling ahead risked that Rachel Walling would be conveniently out of her office when I got there.

Her office was in the elegant old Mercantile Bank at 4th and Main. It was on the historic registry, which guaranteed that the front of the structure still looked like a bank. But the once-grand interior had been renovated and chopped up into private offices and creative spaces primarily leased by lawyers, lobbyists, and others with business in the nearby civic center. Rachel had a two-room office with a secretary.

On the door it said raw data services. RAW as in Rachel Anne Walling. Her secretary was named Thomas Rivette. He was sitting behind his desk, staring at his computer screen. He handled much of the computer work involved in the background investigations that were the mainstay of the business.

“Hey, Jack,” Thomas said. “Didn’t expect you today.”

“Wasn’t expecting it myself,” I said. “Rachel back there?”

“She is. Let me just check if it’s clear. She might have client stuff spread out.”

He picked up the desk phone and called the room six feet behind him.

“Rachel? Jack McEvoy is here.”

I noted the use of my full name. It made me wonder whether there was another Jack in Rachel’s life and Thomas had to be clear about which one was waiting to see her.

He hung up the phone and looked up at me with a smile.

“It’s all clear. You can go back.”

“Thank you, Thomas.”

I walked around his desk and through the door centered on the wall behind him. Rachel had a long, rectangular office with a small seating area in front and then an L-shaped desk with large monitors on each side so she could work different jobs simultaneously on separate computers with separate IP addresses.

She looked away from one of the screens and at me as I entered and closed the door behind me. It had been at least a year since I had seen her and that was only at the crowded open house in these offices when she announced that RAW Data was in business. There had been random texts and emails in the meantime but I realized as I smiled at her that I had probably not been alone with her for two years.

“Jack,” she said.

Nothing else. No What are you doing here? No You can’t just show up here anytime you feel like it. No You need to make an appointment before coming here.

“Rachel,” I said.

I stepped up to her desk.

“Got a minute?” I asked.

“Of course. Sit down. How are you, Jack?”

I wanted to go around behind the desk and pull her up out of her chair into an embrace. She still had that power. I got the urge every time I saw her. It didn’t matter how long it had been.

“I’m good,” I said as I sat down. “You know, same old same old. What about you? How’s business?”

“It’s good,” she said. “Real good. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. That means business for me. We’ve got more than we can handle.”

“We?”

“Thomas and me. I made him a partner. He deserved it.”

I nodded when I couldn’t find my voice. Ten years ago we shared a dream of working side by side as private investigators. We put it off because Rachel wanted to wait until she was fully vested in her FBI pension. So she stayed with the bureau and I worked for the Velvet Coffin. Then the Rodney Fletcher case came up and I put the story ahead of what we had and what we planned. Rachel was two years shy of full vesting when they fired her. And our relationship fell apart. Now she did background searches and private investigations without me. And I did tough watchdog reporting for the consumer.

This was not the way it was supposed to be.

I finally found my voice.

“You going to put his name on the door?”

“I don’t think so. We’ve already done the branding with RAW Data and it works. So... what brings you here?”

“Well, I was hoping maybe I could pick your brain and get some advice on a story I’m working on.”

“Let’s move over here.”

She gestured toward the seating area and we shifted there, me sitting on the couch and Rachel taking the armchair across a coffee table from me. The wall behind her was hung with photos from her time with the bureau. I knew it was a selling tool.

“So,” she said when we were seated.

“I have a story,” I said. “I mean, I think. I wanted to run it by you, see if anything pops for you.”

As quickly as I could I told the story of Tina Portrero’s murder, the connection to three other deaths of women across the country, and the rabbit hole it had led me down. I pulled the printouts from my back pocket and read her passages from the GT23 informed-consent pages and some of the quotes from Bolender and Tina’s mother.

“It feels like there’s something there,” I concluded. “But I don’t know what the next steps would be.”

“First question,” Rachel said. “Is there any indication that the LAPD is going the same way with this? Do they know what you know?”

“I don’t know but I doubt they’ve come up with the three other cases.”

“How did you find out about this in the first place? It doesn’t feel like the new you. The consumer reporter.”

I had conveniently left out the part about the LAPD coming to me because I had spent a night with Tina Portrero the previous year. Now there was no way around it.

“Well, I sort of knew Tina Portrero — briefly — so they came to me.”

“You mean you’re a suspect, Jack?”

“No, more of a person of interest, but that will get cleared up soon. I gave them my DNA and it will clear me.”

“But then you have a big conflict of interest here. Your editor is letting you run with this?”

“Same thing. Once the DNA clears me there is no conflict. Yes, I knew Tina, but that doesn’t preclude me from writing about the case. It’s been done before. I wrote about my brother and before that I knew an assistant city manager who got murdered. I wrote about the case.”

“Yeah, but did you fuck her too?”

That was harsh and it led me to realize that Rachel had a conflict of interest herself when it came to me. Though our decision to part three years before was mutual, I don’t think either of us had gotten over the other and possibly never would.

“No, I didn’t fuck the assistant city manager,” I said. “She was just a source.”

I realized as soon as I said the last line that it had been a mistake. Rachel and I had had a secret relationship that blew up publicly when she revealed that she was my source on the series of stories exposing Rodney Fletcher’s misdeeds.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay, Jack,” Rachel said. “Water under the bridge. I think you’re right about this DNA stuff. There is something there and I would pursue it.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“You said it’s a self-regulating industry. Remember when it came out that Boeing was essentially self-regulating and self-reporting when they had those airliner crashes? You could be onto something just as big here. I don’t care what it is — a government, a bureaucracy, a business. When there are no rules then corruption sets in like rust. That’s your angle. You have to find out if GT23 or any of them has ever been breached. If it has, then game over.”

“Easier said than done.”

“You need to ask yourself where the vulnerability is. That part you read to me: We cannot guarantee that a breach will never happen. That’s important. If they can’t guarantee that, then they know something. Find the vulnerabilities. Don’t expect the media flack to just give them to you.”

I understood what she was saying but I was on the outside looking in. The weaknesses of any system are always hidden from the outside.

“I know that,” I said. “But GT23 is like a fortress.”

“Weren’t you the one who told me once that no place is a fortress to a good reporter? There is always a way in. Former employees, current employees with grievances. Who have they fired? Who have they mistreated? Competitors, jealous colleagues — there’s always a way in.”

“Okay, I’ll check all of that—”

“The collaborators. That’s another vulnerability. Look at what GT23 is doing, Jack. They are handing off data — they’re selling it. That is the point where they lose control of it. They don’t control it physically anymore and they don’t control what’s done with it. They do their due diligence on the research application and then trust that that is the research that is actually conducted. But do they ever double back and check that it is? That’s the direction you have to take this. What did the mother say?”

“What?”

“The mother of the victim. You read me her quotes. She said Tina was never married, never wanted to be tied down to one man, was boy crazy from the start. What is all of that? It’s a nice way of saying she was promiscuous. In current society, that is considered a behavioral problem in females. Right?”

I was seeing all of her profiling instincts come into play. I might have had ulterior motives in coming to see Rachel Walling again, but now she was using her skills to give direction to my reporting and it was beautiful.

“Uh, right, I guess.”

“It’s the classic profile. A man pursues sex with multiple partners, no big deal. A woman? She’s loose. She’s a whore. Well, is it genetic?”

I nodded, remembering.

“Sex addiction. At least one of the GT23 collaborators is studying risky behaviors and their genetic origin. I saw that in a story. There might be others.”

Rachel pointed at me.

“Bingo,” she said. “Sex addiction. Who is studying the genetic relation to sex addiction?”

“Wow,” I said.

“Man, I wish we had this stuff when I was working bureau cases,” Rachel said. “It would have been a huge part of both victimology and suspect profiling.”

She said it wistfully, remembering her past work for the bureau. I could tell that what I had brought to her excited her but also served as a reminder about what she once had and once was. I almost felt bad about my motives for coming.

“Uh, this is all fantastic, Rachel,” I said. “Great stuff. You’ve given me a lot of angles to look at.”

“All of which I think a seasoned reporter like you already knew,” she said.

I looked at her. So much for my motives. She had read me the way she used to read crime scenes and killers.

“What did you really come here for, Jack?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Well, that’s just it,” I said. “You just read me like an open book. And that’s what I came for. I thought maybe you’d want to take a shot at this, maybe profile the killer, profile the victims. I have a lot of victimology and on the killer I’ve got times, locations, how he staged things — I’ve got a lot.”

She was shaking her head before I finished.

“I’ve got too much going on,” she said. “This week we’re backgrounding candidates for the Mulholland Corridor Planning Board for the city, and I have the usual backlog from our steady clients.”

“Well, I guess all that pays the bills,” I said.

“Besides... I really don’t want to go down that path. That was the past, Jack.”

“But you were good at it, Rachel.”

“I was. But doing it this way... I think it will be too much of a reminder of that past. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve let it go.”

I looked at her, trying to get a read now myself. But she had always been a hard nut to crack. I was left to take her at her word but I wondered if the past she didn’t want to return to was more about me than the job she had left behind.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I should let you get back to it, then.”

I stood up and so did she. The shin-high coffee table was between us and I leaned across to engage in an awkward hug.

“Thanks, Rachel.”

“Anytime, Jack.”

I left the office and checked my phone as I walked down Main Street to the lot where I had left the Jeep. I had silenced it before going in to see Rachel and now saw that I had missed two calls from unknown numbers and had two new messages.

The first was from Lisa Hill.

“Stop harassing me.”

Short and simple, followed by the hang-up. This message led me to accurately guess who the second message was from before playing it. Detective Mattson used a few more words than Hill.

“McEvoy, if you want me to put together a harassment case against you, all you have to do is keep bothering Lisa Hill. Leave. Her. Alone.”

I erased both messages, my face burning with both indignation and humiliation. I was just doing my job, but it bothered me that neither Hill nor Mattson viewed it that way. To them I was some kind of intruder.

It made me all the more determined to find out what had happened to Tina Portrero and the three other women. Rachel Walling said she didn’t want to venture into the past. But I did. For the first time in a long time I had a story that had my blood moving with an addictive momentum. It was good to have that feeling back.

10

FairWarning did not have the budget for such niceties as the LexisNexis legal search engine. But William Marchand, the lawyer who was on the board of directors and reviewed all FairWarning stories for legal pitfalls, did have the service and offered it to our staff as just one of the many things he did for us gratis. His office, where he served most of his paying clients, was located on Victory Boulevard near the Van Nuys Civic Center and the side-by-side courthouses where he most often appeared on their behalf. I made my first stop there after leaving downtown.

Marchand was in court but his legal assistant, Sacha Nelson, was there and allowed me to sit next to her at her computer while she conducted a LexisNexis search to see if GT23 or its parent company and founding partners had ever been the subject of a lawsuit. I came across one pending action against the company and another that had been filed and dismissed when a settlement had been reached.

The pending case was a wrongful-termination claim filed by someone named Jason Hwang. The cause-of-action summary on the first page of the lawsuit stated that Hwang was a regulatory-affairs specialist who was fired when another employee claimed that he had fondled him during an encounter in the coffee room. Hwang denied the accusation and claimed to have been fired without the due process of a full internal investigation. The lawsuit stated that the sexual-harassment complaint was trumped up as a means of getting rid of Hwang because he had demanded strict adherence to company protocols regarding DNA testing and research. The lawsuit also stated that the alleged victim of the unwanted sexual contact was promoted to Hwang’s position after he was fired, a clear indication that the termination was unlawful.

What stood out to me in the filing was that Hwang did not work directly for GT23 at the company’s Palo Alto lab. He was technically an employee of Woodland Bio, an independent lab located in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles. Woodland Bio was described in the lawsuit as a GT23 subcontractor, a lab that handled some of the overflow demands of the mother company’s genetic testing. Hwang was suing the mother company because they had ultimate control over personnel decisions and that was also where the money was. Hwang was seeking $1.2 million in damages, saying his reputation had been ruined in the industry by the false accusation and no other company would hire him.

I asked Sacha to print out the lawsuit, which included a notifications page with the name and contact information for Hwang’s attorney, who was a partner in a downtown L.A. law firm. Sacha sensed my excitement.

“Good stuff?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “If the plaintiff or his lawyer will talk to me, it could lead to something.”

“Should we pull up the other case?”

“Yes, sure.”

I was sitting on a roller chair next to Sacha’s as she worked the keyboard. She was in her early forties, had been with Marchand for a long time, and I knew from previous conversations that she was going to law school at night while working in the office by day. She was attractive in a bookish, determined sort of way — pretty face and eyes hidden behind eyeglasses, never lipstick or any sign that she spent much time in front of a makeup mirror. She wore no rings or earrings and had an unconscious habit of hooking her short auburn hair behind her ears as she stared at the computer screen.

It turned out that there had been six Stanford men who had originally founded GenoType23 to cater to the burgeoning law-enforcement need for DNA lab work. But Jenson Fitzgerald had been bought out early by the five other partners. When years later GT23 was founded, he filed a lawsuit claiming that he was owed a piece of the GT23 action because of his standing as an original founder of the mother company. The initial response to the lawsuit said Fitzgerald had no claim to the riches generated by the new company because they were separate entities. But the LexisNexis file ended with a joint notice of dismissal, meaning the two parties had come to an agreement and the dispute was settled. The details of the settlement were kept confidential.

I asked Sacha to print out the documents that were available even though I did not see much in the way of follow-up on that case. I believed that the Hwang case could be far more fruitful.

After finding no other legal action regarding the company, I had Sacha enter the names of the five remaining founders one by one to see if there was ever a legal action personally filed by them or against them. She found only a divorce case involving one of the founders, a man named Charles Breyer. His marriage of twenty-four years came to an end in a divorce petition filed two years earlier by his wife, Anita, who made claims of intolerable cruelty and called her husband a serial philanderer. She settled the divorce for a lump-sum payment of $2 million and the home they had shared in Palo Alto, which was valued at $3.2 million.

“Another happy loving couple,” Sacha said. “Print it?”

“Yeah, might as well print it,” I said. “You sound pretty cynical about it.”

“Money,” she said. “It’s the root of all troubles. Men get rich, they think they’re king of the world, then they act like it.”

“Is that from personal experience?” I asked.

“No, but you see it a lot when you work in a law office.”

“You mean with the cases?”

“Yes, the cases. Definitely not the boss.”

She got up and went to the printer, where all the pages I had asked for were waiting. She tapped them together and then put a clip on the stack before handing it to me. I stood up and moved around from behind her desk.

“How is law school?” I asked.

“All good,” she said. “Two years down, one to go.”

“Think you’ll work here with Bill, or strike out on your own?”

“I’m hoping I’ll be right here, working with you and FairWarning and our other clients.”

I nodded.

“Cool,” I said. “Well, as always, thanks for your help. Tell Bill thanks as well. You two really take good care of us.”

“We’re happy to,” she said. “Good luck with the story.”

When I got back to the office, Myron Levin was closed up in the conference room. Through the glass I could see him talking to a man and woman but they didn’t look like cops, so I assumed it had nothing to do with my pursuits. I looked over at Emily Atwater in her cubby, caught her attention, and pointed at the conference-room door.

“Donors,” Emily said.

I nodded, sat down in my cubicle, and started the search for Jason Hwang. I found no phone number or social-media footprint. He wasn’t on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. I got up and walked over to Emily. I knew she was on LinkedIn, the professional networking site, and I wasn’t.

“I’m looking for a guy,” I said. “Can you do a quick check on LinkedIn?”

“Let me finish this line,” she said.

She kept typing. I checked on Myron through the glass and saw that the woman was writing a check.

“Looks like we’ll get paid this week,” I said.

Emily stopped typing and glanced at the conference-room window.

“She’s writing a check,” I explained.

“Six figures, I hope,” Emily said.

I knew FairWarning’s biggest financial support came from individuals and family foundations. Sometimes there were one-to-one matching grants from journalism foundations.

“Okay, what’s the name?” Emily asked.

“Jason Hwang,” I said, and spelled it.

Emily typed. She had a habit of leaning forward when she typed, as though she was diving headfirst into whatever she was writing. With powder-blue eyes, pale skin, and white-blond hair, she seemed just a few genetic ticks away from being full albino. She was also tall — not just for a woman but for anyone, at least six feet in flats. She chose to accentuate this signature feature by always wearing heels. On top of that she was a damn good reporter, having been a war correspondent, followed by stints in New York and Washington, DC, before heading west to California, where she eventually landed at FairWarning. Her two separate postings in Afghanistan had left her tough and unflappable, great attributes for a reporter.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“He worked for a lab that subcontracted for the company I’m looking at,” I said. “Then he got fired and sued them.”

“GT23?”

“How do you know that?”

“Myron. He said you might need help on it.”

“I just need to find this guy.”

She nodded.

“Well, there’s four here,” she said.

I remembered how Hwang was described in the lawsuit.

“Lives in L.A.,” I said. “He’s got a master’s in life sciences from UCLA.”

She started looking at the pedigrees of the four Jason Hwangs, shaking her head and saying “Nope” each time.

“Strike four, and you’re out. None of these are even from L.A.”

“Okay, thanks for looking.”

“You could try LexisNexis.”

“I did.”

I went back to my desk. Of course, I had not run Hwang’s name through LexisNexis as I should have. I now called the law office and quietly asked Sacha Nelson to do the search. I heard her type it in.

“Hmm, only the lawsuit comes back up,” she said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.”

After hanging up I continued the search for Jason Hwang. I knew I could simply call the attorney who had filed the lawsuit on Hwang’s behalf but my hope was to get to Hwang without his lawyer sitting on his shoulder and trying to control the flow of information. The attorney was useful, however, in that he had listed Hwang’s credentials and experience in the claim, noting his receiving the master’s degree from UCLA in 2012 before being recruited by Woodland Bio. That told me that Hwang was a young man, most likely in his early thirties. He had started at Woodland as a lab technician before being promoted to regulatory-affairs specialist just a year before he was fired.

I conducted a search for professional organizations in the DNA field and came up with a group called the National Society of Professional Geneticists. Its website menu had a page labeled Looking for a Lab, which I took to be a help-wanted section. Hwang claimed in his still-pending lawsuit that he had become a pariah in the genetics industry because of the accusation made against him. In the #MeToo era, just an accusation was enough to end a career. I thought maybe there was a chance Hwang had posted his résumé and contact information in an effort to land an interview somewhere. He could have even been instructed to do so by his lawyer to help prove his inability to get work in the field.

The résumés were listed in alphabetical order and I quickly found Jason Hwang’s curriculum vitae as the last entry under the letter H. It was the jackpot. It included an email address, phone number, and mailing address. The work-experience section revealed the responsibilities of his GT23 job as a quality control specialist and liaison between the company and any regulatory agencies that kept watch on the various aspects of DNA analysis. The primary agencies were the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission. I noticed Hwang had also listed several references. Most were personal or academic supporters but one was a man named Gordon Webster, who was described as an investigator with the Federal Trade Commission. I wrote the name down, thinking that Webster might be useful to interview.

I wrote Hwang’s details down as well. I was in business and keeping my momentum. If Hwang’s mailing address was his home, he lived just over the hill in West Hollywood. I checked the time and realized that if I left the office now I could probably get through Laurel Canyon before it became clogged with rush-hour traffic.

I put a fresh notebook and batteries for my tape recorder into my backpack before heading to the door.

11

The winding two-lane snake that was Laurel Canyon Boulevard took nearly a half hour to pass. I relearned another object lesson about Los Angeles: there was no rush hour because every hour was rush hour.

The address on Jason Hwang’s CV corresponded to a home on Willoughby Avenue in a neighborhood of expensive homes with high hedges. It seemed too nice for an out-of-work biologist in his early thirties. I parked and walked through an archway cut into a six-foot-thick hedge and knocked on the aquamarine door of a two-story white cube. After knocking I rang the doorbell, when I should have done just one or the other. But following the doorbell I heard a dog start to bark inside and then the sound was quickly cut off by someone yelling the dog’s name: Tipsy.

The door opened and a man stood there cradling a toy poodle under one arm. The dog was as white as the house. The man was Asian and very small. Not just short but small in all dimensions.

“Hi, I’m looking for Jason Hwang,” I said.

“Who are you?” he said. “Why are you looking for him?”

“I’m a reporter. I’m working on a story about GT23 and I would like to talk to him about it.”

“What kind of story?”

“Are you Jason Hwang? I’ll tell him what kind of story.”

“I’m Jason. What is this story?”

“I’d rather not talk about it standing out here. Is there a place we can go to sit down and talk? Maybe inside or somewhere nearby?”

It was a tip my editor Foley had given me when I started out in the business. Never do an interview at the door. People can shut the door if they don’t like what you ask.

“Do you have a card or some sort of ID?” Hwang asked.

“Sure,” I said.

I dug a business card out of my wallet and handed it to him. I also showed him a press pass issued six years earlier by the Sheriff’s Department when I was regularly writing crime stories for the Velvet Coffin.

Hwang studied both but didn’t mention that the press pass was dated 2013 or that the man in the photo looked a lot younger than me.

“Okay,” Hwang said, handing me back the card. “You can come in.”

He stepped back to allow me entrance. “Thank you,” I said.

He led me through the entryway to a living room decorated in white and aqua furnishings. He gestured toward the couch — that was for me — while he sat on a matching stuffed chair. He put the dog down next to him on the chair. He was wearing white pants and a sea-foam-green golf shirt. He blended in perfectly with the house’s design and decor, and I didn’t think that was by happenstance.

“Do you live here alone?” I asked.

“No,” Hwang said.

He offered no further details.

“Well, as I said at the door, I’m doing a story about GT23 and I came across your lawsuit. It’s still pending, correct?”

“It’s pending — we don’t have a trial date yet,” he said. “But I can’t talk to you because the case is still active.”

“Well, your case is not really what I’m writing about. If I steer clear of the lawsuit, can I ask you a few questions?”

“No, impossible. My lawyer said I could not speak at all when the other journalist called. I wanted to, but he wouldn’t let me.”

I was suddenly gripped by a reporter’s greatest fear — being scooped. Another journalist might be following the same trail as me.

“Who was the other journalist?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” Hwang said. “My lawyer told him no.”

“Well, was it recent? Or are you talking about when you filed the lawsuit?”

“Yes, when I filed.”

I felt a wave of relief. The lawsuit had been filed almost a year ago. It was probably a routine call from a reporter — probably from the L.A. Times — who had noticed the lawsuit on the courthouse docket and called for a comment.

“What if we talk off the record?” I said. “I don’t quote you or use your name.”

“I don’t know,” Hwang said. “It still sounds risky. I don’t even know you and you want me to trust you.”

This was a dance I had engaged in many times before. People often said they couldn’t or didn’t want to talk. The trick was to leverage their anger and give them a safe outlet for it. Then they would talk.

“All I can say is that I would protect you from being identified,” I said. “My own credibility is at stake. I burn a source and no source will ever trust me. I went to jail once for sixty-three days because I wouldn’t give up the name of a source.”

Hwang looked horrified. Mentioning that experience often worked with people on the fence about talking to me.

“What happened?” Hwang asked.

“The judge finally let me go,” I said. “He knew I wasn’t going to give up the name.”

All of that was true, but I left out the part about my source — Rachel Walling — coming forward and revealing herself. After that there was no point in continuing the contempt order and the judge released me.

“The thing is, if I talk they’ll know it came from me,” Hwang said. “They’ll read the story and say, Who else could it come from?”

“Your information would be for background only. I won’t record. I don’t even have to take notes. I’m just trying to understand how all of this works.”

Hwang paused and then made a decision.

“Ask your questions and if I don’t like them, I won’t answer.”

“Fair enough.”

I had not really thought about how I would explain myself should Hwang agree to talk to me — on or off the record. Now it was time. Like a good police detective, I didn’t want to give the subject of my interview all my information. I didn’t know him and didn’t know who he might pass it on to. He was worried about trusting me but I also had to worry about trusting him.

“Let me start by explaining who I am and what I’m doing,” I began. “I work for a news site called FairWarning. It’s consumer-protection reporting. You know, watching out for the little guy. And I’ve been assigned to look at the security of the personal information and biological material in the genetic-analytics field.”

Hwang immediately scoffed.

“What security?” he said.

I wanted to write the line down because I instinctively saw it as possibly the first quote in a story. It was provocative and would pull the reader in. But I couldn’t. I had made a deal with Hwang.

“It sounds like you were not impressed by the security at GT23,” I said.

The question was deliberately open-ended. He could run with it if he wished.

“Not the lab,” Hwang said. “I ran a tight lab. We adhered to all protocols and I will prove that in court. It was what happened afterward.”

“Afterward?” I prompted.

“The places the data went. The company wanted the money. They didn’t care where it went as long as they were getting paid.”

“When you say ‘They,’ you’re talking about GT23?”

“Yes, of course. They went public and needed more revenue to support the stock. So they were wide open for business. They lowered the bar.”

“Give me an example.”

“Too many to list. We were shipping DNA all over the world. Thousands of samples. The company needed the money and no one was turned away as long as it was a lab registered with the FDA or the equivalent in other countries.”

“So then they had to be legit. It wasn’t like somebody drives up and says, I need DNA. I’m not understanding your concern.”

“It’s the Wild West right now. There are so many directions to go with genetic research. It’s really in its infancy. And we — meaning the company — don’t control what happens with the bio and how it’s used once it goes out the door. That’s the FDA’s problem, not ours — that was the attitude. And let me tell you, the FDA didn’t do jack.”

“Okay, I get that and I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but wasn’t there the safety that it was all anonymous? I mean, these researchers were given the DNA but not the identities of the participants, right?”

“Of course, but that’s not the point. You’re thinking in the present. What about the future? This science is very young. We haven’t even had the whole genome for twenty years. New things are discovered about it every day. Will what is anonymous now stay that way in twenty years? In ten years? Or will usernames and passwords not matter? What if your DNA is your identifier and you’ve already given it away?”

Hwang raised his hand and pointed a finger at the ceiling.

“Even the military,” he said. “Did you know that this year the Pentagon told all members of the military not to do DNA kits because of the security issues they pose?”

I had not seen that report but I did grasp Hwang’s point.

“Were you warning GT23 about this?” I asked.

“Of course I was,” Hwang said. “Every day. I was the only one.”

“I read the lawsuit.”

“I can’t talk about that. Even off the record. My lawyer—”

“I’m not asking you to. But the lawsuit, it says the employee who filed the complaint against you — David Shanley — set you up to get your job and that it was not investigated by the company.”

“It was all lies.”

“I know. I get that. But the motive. You don’t think it could have been to shut you up about this — about the lack of controls or concern over where the DNA was going?”

“All I know is that Shanley got my job. He lies about me and gets my fucking job.”

“That could have been his reward for getting you out of the company. They were afraid you would be a whistleblower.”

“My lawyer has subpoenaed company documents. Emails. If it’s there, we’ll find it.”

“Let’s go back to what you were saying about the DNA being sold by the company. Can you remember any names of labs or biotechs that were sold samples?”

“There were too many to remember. We put bio-packs together almost every single day.”

“Who was the biggest buyer of DNA? Do you remember?”

“Not really. Why don’t you tell me what it is you’re looking for?”

I looked at him for a long moment. I was the seeker of facts and information. I was supposed to hold them close to the vest and not share them until it was time to put them into a story. But I felt that Hwang knew more than he was saying, even if he didn’t yet realize it. I felt that I needed to break my own rule and give in order to get.

“Okay, I’ll tell you why I’m really here.”

“Please.”

“A young woman was murdered last week in L.A. — her neck broken. I was looking into it and came up with three other women in California, Texas, and Florida who were killed in exactly the same way.”

“I don’t understand. What does it have to do with—”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s all coincidence. But all four of the women were GT23 participants. They didn’t know each other but they had all sent in their DNA. Four women killed in the same way, four women who were participants. To me, that moves beyond coincidence and that’s why I’m here.”

Hwang said nothing. He seemed to be contemplating the possibilities of what I was telling him.

“There’s more,” I said. “I haven’t done a lot of work on this yet but there may be another commonality.”

“Which is what?” Hwang asked.

“Some sort of addictive behavior. The L.A. woman had been treated for alcoholism and drugs. She was sort of a party girl — went out to a lot of clubs, met men in bars.”

“Dirty four.”

“What?”

“Dirty four. It’s what some geneticists call the DRD4 gene.”

“Why?”

“It has been identified in relation to at-risk behavior and addiction, including sex addiction.”

“Is it in the female genome?”

“Both male and female.”

“Take a woman who frequently goes to bars by herself to pick up men for sex — are you saying it’s because she has the DRD4 gene?”

“Possibly. But the science is in its infancy and everybody is individual. I don’t think you can say for sure.”

“As far as you know, are any of GT23’s collaborators studying the dirty-four gene?”

“It’s possible, but that’s what I’m saying is wrong. We can sell DNA for one purpose, but who’s to stop them from using it for another purpose? What stops them from selling it again to a third party?”

“I saw a story about the company. It listed some of the places the DNA was going. It mentioned a study of addiction and risky behavior at a lab down in Irvine.”

“Yes. Orange Nano.”

“That’s the lab?”

“That’s the lab. Big buyers.”

“Who runs it?”

“A bio guy named William Orton.”

“Is it part of UC–Irvine?”

“No, privately funded. Probably Big Pharma. You see, GT23 liked to sell to the private labs better than to universities. The private labs paid more and there wasn’t a public record of transactions.”

“Did you deal with Orton?”

“A few times on the phone. That was it.”

“Why were you on the phone with him?”

“Because he would call me and ask about a bio-pack. You know, checking to see if it had shipped or maybe to add to an existing order.”

“He ordered more than once?”

“Sure. Many times.”

“Like every week? Or what?”

“No, like once a month or sometimes longer.”

“And what would an order be? How much?”

“A bio-pack contains one hundred samples.”

“Why would he need to keep ordering bio-packs?”

“For continuing-research purposes. They all do that.”

“Did Orton ever talk about his lab’s research?”

“Sometimes.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. Just that that was his field of study. Addiction in many forms. Alcohol, drugs, sex. He wanted to isolate those genes and develop therapies. But that’s how I know about dirty four. From him.”

“He used the phrase ‘dirty four’?”

“Yes.”

“Had anybody else used it with you before?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Have you ever been down to Orange Nano?”

“No, never. My only contact was by phone and email.”

I nodded. I knew at that moment that I would be going down to Irvine to visit Orange Nano.

12

I decided that the best use of my time would not be to get into the crush of cars waiting to go over the mountain to the Valley through one of the choked-off freeways or mountain roads. That could take ninety minutes at this time of day. One of the things that made the City of Angels so beautiful also created one of its greatest hardships. The Santa Monica Mountains cut through the middle of the city, leaving the San Fernando Valley — where I lived and worked — on the north side and the rest of the city, including Hollywood and the Westside, to the south. There were two freeways that cut through the big passes and several two-lane winders. Take your pick but at five o’clock on a weekday you weren’t going anywhere. I drove over to Cofax Coffee and set up with a cappuccino and my laptop at a table beneath the display of bobbleheads and other Dodger paraphernalia.

I first sent Myron Levin an email briefly summarizing my interview with Jason Hwang and the leads I had picked up regarding Orange Nano. Next, I opened a file and tried to recall everything Hwang had told me, writing a detailed summary of the interview from memory. I was halfway through my second cappuccino when I took a call from Myron.

“Where are you?”

“Other side of the hill. I’m at a coffee shop on Fairfax writing up notes and waiting out the traffic.”

“It’s six now. When do you think you’re coming back?”

“I’m almost finished with my notes, then I’ll wade into the traffic.”

“So, by seven, you think?”

“Hopefully before.”

“Okay, I’ll wait for you. I want to talk about this story.”

“Well, do you want to just talk now? Did you get my email? I just had a killer interview over here.”

“I got the email but let’s talk it out when you get here.”

“Okay. I’m going to try Nichols Canyon. Maybe I get lucky.”

“I’ll see you when I see you.”

After the call I wondered why Myron wanted to talk face-to-face. My guess was that he might not be as convinced as I was that there was something here. He had not commented on my email and it seemed as though I would need to sell him on the story all over again.

Nichols Canyon was a charmed route. The traffic flowed smoothly through the hillside neighborhoods above Hollywood until the unavoidable bottleneck at Mulholland Drive. But once I got through, it was clear sailing again down into the Valley. I walked into the office at 6:40 and considered it an accomplishment.

Myron was in the conference room with Emily Atwater. I put my backpack down on my desk and gave him a wave through the window. Since I had gotten back earlier than expected, I figured he was probably in a story conference with her.

But he waved me in and made no move to dismiss Emily when I entered.

“Jack,” he said, “I want to bring Emily in to help out with your story.”

I looked at him a long moment before responding. He had done a smart thing. He had kept Emily in the room because that would make it harder for me to push back against his plan. Still, I couldn’t just accept the encroachment without protest.

“How come?” I asked. “I mean, I think I have it covered.”

“This Orange Nano angle you mentioned in your email looks promising,” Myron said. “I don’t know if you know Emily’s pedigree but she covered higher ed for the Orange County Register before coming to FairWarning. She still has contacts down there and I think it would be good for you two to partner up.”

“Partner up? But it’s my story.”

“Of course it is, but sometimes stories get bigger and need more hands — more experienced hands. Like I said, she knows people down there. You also have the police situation to deal with.”

“What police situation?”

“As far as I know, you’re still on their person-of-interest list. Have you talked to them lately? Have they processed your DNA?”

“I haven’t talked to them today. But that’s not a situation. As soon as they run the DNA I’ll be off the list. I was planning on going down to Orange Nano first thing tomorrow.”

“That sounds good but that’s what I mean. I don’t want you going there without preparation. Have you done any backgrounding on the lab or its people?”

“Not yet, but I will. That’s why I came back to the office, to do some research.”

“Well, talk to Emily. She’s already done some work and maybe you two can come up with a plan of action.”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked down at the table. I knew I wasn’t going to change his mind, and maybe also knew — grudgingly — that he was right. Two reporters were better than one. Besides, having half the staff on the story would make Myron more invested in it.

“Okay,” Myron said. “Then I’ll let you two get after it. Keep me in the loop.”

Myron got up and left the room, closing the door behind him. Before I could speak, Emily did.

“Sorry, Jack,” she said. “I didn’t go asking to be part of this. He pulled me in.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not blaming you. I just thought I had things in hand, you know?”

“Yes. But while we were waiting for you I did do a preliminary workup on William Orton, the guy who runs Orange Nano.”

“And?”

“I think there’s something there. Orton left UC–Irvine to start Orange Nano.”

“So?”

“So, you don’t just leave a UC job where you’re tenured and have a full lab at your disposal and unlimited doctoral candidates at your beck and call. You can start an outside company or lab but the university is your anchor. You keep that affiliation because it works for you. It’s easier to get grants, professional exposure, everything.”

“So something happened.”

“Right, something happened. And we’re going to find out what it is.”

“How?”

“Well, I’m going to work UCI–I still have a few sources there — and you do what you said, you work Orange Nano. I don’t want to step on your toes but I think I can help here.”

“Okay.”

“Good, then.”

“This is how I think we should work it...”

Over the next hour I shared everything I knew so far about the deaths of the four women and GT23. Emily asked many questions and together we made an action plan that had us attacking the story from two angles. I went from being reluctant to being glad she was on board. She was not as experienced as I was but she was impressive, and I knew she had probably broken the most important stories FairWarning had put out in the last couple of years. I left the office that night believing Myron had made a good move putting us together.

It was eight o’clock when I got back to my Jeep and drove home. After parking in the garage I walked to the front of the apartment building to check my mail. It had been a week since I checked the box and this was primarily to empty it of all the junk mail I received.

The building’s management provided a trash can next to the bank of mailboxes so junk mail could be quickly transferred to its final destination. I was going through my stack, dropping one piece after the other into the bin, when I heard steps coming from behind me and then a voice I recognized.

“Mr. McEvoy. Just who we were looking for.”

It was Mattson and Sakai. Mattson was back to saying my name wrong. He was carrying a folded document and held it out to me as he approached in the dimming light of the day.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“This is a warrant,” Mattson said. “All signed, sealed, and delivered by the City Attorney’s Office. You’re under arrest.”

“What? Arrest for what?”

“That would be section 148 of the California Penal Code. Obstructing a police officer in the discharge of his duty. That officer would be me and the investigation of the murder of Christina Portrero. We told you to back off, McEvoy, but no — you kept harassing our witnesses and lying your ass off.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t obstruct you or anybody. I’m a reporter working a story and—”

“No, you’re a person of interest and I told you to back off. You didn’t, so now you’re fucked. Put your hands up on that wall.”

“This is crazy. You’re going to create a major embarrassment for your department, do you know that? You ever heard of a thing called freedom of the press?”

“Tell it to the judge. Now turn around and put your hands up there. I’m going to search you for weapons.”

“Jesus, Mattson, this makes no sense. Is it because you don’t have jack shit on Portrero and you want a distraction?”

Mattson said nothing. I did what I was told and moved to the wall, not wanting to add resisting arrest to the bogus charge of obstruction. Mattson quickly searched me and emptied my pockets, giving my phone, wallet, and keys to Sakai. I turned my head enough to check out Sakai and he didn’t look like a man who was fully on board with this move.

“Detective Sakai, did you try to talk him out of this?” I asked. “This is a mistake and you’re going to go down with him when the shit hits the fan.”

“It would be best if you kept quiet,” Sakai said.

“I’m not going to keep quiet,” I threw back at him. “The whole world is going to hear about this. This is bullshit.”

One by one Mattson pulled my hands off the wall and cuffed my wrists behind my back. He led me to their car, which was parked against the curb.

As I was about to be placed in the back seat I saw a neighbor from the building come up the sidewalk with her dog on a leash and stare silently at my humiliation while her dog yipped at me. I looked away, then Mattson put his hand on the top of my head and pushed me down into the back seat.