Good Morning, Killer

One

It was winter and I was swimming laps in the rain.

I have found it a privilege to swim outside in the rain, a perk you get in return for living in Los Angeles that not many appreciate. You have to like being extremely wet, and enjoy the feeling of smug superiority because the canyon air is forty degrees and you’re in a relatively warm bath. You have to appreciate the subtle play of vanished circles on the water and the dance of droplets off your goggles, blurring the shapes of redtail hawks resting on a telephone pole and deer moving close to the houses.

I did not know about the girl.

I was doing the backstroke, looking up at the clouds, trying not to get pushed into the lane lines by the county lifeguard who was working out beside me, with the tapered legs and the chest of a manatee. He was gray-haired, with a stroke so smooth it never seemed to break water, as if propelled by some internal muscular power known only to yogis. In fact the lifeguard was a kind of spiritual seeker and would speak of “the breath” as if it were a living thing.

My personal meditation that day was on a briefing with the senior superintendent from the Hong Kong Police Force. It would be a lunch with twenty other folks, a long ungainly table in Distefano’s, everyone trying to look spiffy and smart — a total waste of time when I had to get my files in order for an upcoming ninety-day file review, an assessment of open cases as pleasant as a cross between a migraine headache and spring cleaning. When you work the kidnap squad you find a lot of cases — mostly missing children — stay open forever.

When the red hand on the workout clock brushed 6:55 a.m., I hauled out of the water and hightailed across the frigid pool deck, raindrops popping off my silicone cap. Checking the pager hooked inside the swim bag, I found it was blinking: Code 3-PCH-AB.

Emergency.

I stood alone in the freezing cinder-block locker room, dripping freely and staring at the numbers with a secret smile. It was a message in police code from “AB” (Detective Andrew Berringer), which usually meant not a life-and-death emergency but an emergency of the gonads, which I could feel responding as I peeled off the cold clinging bathing suit and headed for the open shower.

The two other women who had been swimming in the rain (both lawyers) came hurrying in, shivery and goose-bumped, absorbed in chatter about book clubs, children, different types of olives, someone’s half-demolished kitchen, as a wild mix of botanicals — mint, eucalyptus, citrus, rose — swirled in the steamy vapor and they lathered unabashedly and shaved and loofahed, while I stood under the hot pounding spray with head bowed in thanks because of this sudden unexpected gift of seeing Andrew, even more delicious if it were to take place, let’s say, behind the locked rest room door in Back on the Beach, a café down on Pacific Coast Highway.

Where, I thought, the emergency was.

Good thing I had those ten extra minutes.

In the parking lot of the YMCA facility I passed the lifeguard, who carried nothing but a small satchel while my shoulder was crippled under the weight of a swim bag loaded with fins, towels, hair dryer and an enormous makeup kit. I was wearing a slim black pants suit and heels because of the luncheon with the superintendent from Hong Kong. The lifeguard wore nothing but a T-shirt and shorts.

“Come under my umbrella.”

He shook his head. “How’d you like your workout, Miss FBI-FYI?”

“Good.”

“Make sure you get enough air.” He inflated his lungs. “Air,” he said.

“Air,” I agreed, and got into my car to the silent buzz of the Nextel cell phone on my belt.

“Ana?” It was my supervisor, Rick Harding. “Where have you been?”

Lost in an erotic delirium, I had forgotten to check the Nextel also. Two missed messages.

“Underwater. Sorry.”

“Tell me about it, the freeway was flooded, took an hour and a half to get in. We’ve got a kidnapping on the Westside. The police department requested our assistance. You’re next up.”

Next in line to be case agent. The senior in charge.

So much for ten minutes in heaven.

“What’s the deal?”

“The victim is a fifteen-year-old female missing since yesterday. I’m going to the police department. The techs are on their way to the family residence.”

He gave me an address on Twenty-second Street, north of Montana Avenue, the Gillette Regent Square section of trendy Santa Monica. Kind of like the tenderloin of the filet mignon.

“Is that why we’re all over this?” I asked. “High-profile neighborhood?”

“It’s the ‘new politics,’” he replied, which meant yes.

“We’re sure about the kidnap? It’s not just a runaway?”

“Mom and Dad got a call early this morning.”

“Ransom?”

“The girl was pleading for her life. Then they hung up.”

“Works for me.”

“Just get over there.”

I barreled down Temescal and took a quick detour south on PCH, swinging through a puddle at the entrance to Back on the Beach. The muddy water rooster-tailed up about ten feet, completely obscuring my windshield.

Andrew was not there to witness this dramatic arrival. His burgundy unmarked Ford was parked facing the ocean, empty, doors locked. The restaurant hadn’t opened yet. Patio tables were glassy and jumping with rain, and I knew if I took one step onto the bike path my black heels would instantly become stained with saturated sand. So I waited on the asphalt under the umbrella while impertinent gusts blew at my knees and under my arms, wishing I had taken the time to blow-dry my hair, which had become uncomfortably damp in the sideways mist. I began to sneeze, that smug superiority cooling down fast, as a yellow county rescue truck, red lights pulsing, came north across the beach.

Where the hell was he?

Against the unsettled ocean and the bluster of the blue-white sky, I watched as the heavy truck pitched stubbornly over rises in the sand. Its slow progress seemed to make a statement about law enforcement: We shall override.

A pitiful thing to take for comfort.

The truck stopped past the restaurant, just out of my sight. I could hear the deep idle of the engine and feedback on a police scanner. I stepped onto the bike path. A hundred yards away I could see Detective Berringer in his trademark black motorcycle jacket, kneeling beside a bicyclist wearing bright regalia who had skidded out.

“Andrew!”

He waved me back, yakking it up with some county lifeguards in fluorescent rain gear who were bringing out a spine board. Claps on the back, handshakes, long-lost pals. Now the wind was wrapping around my legs, and I could look forward to clammy panty hose the rest of the day.

Finally, he jogged over, brushing off his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you. Hi, doll,” giving me a smooch. “See that lifeguard? The tall, skinny guy? That’s Hank Harris!” he said wonderingly.

“You know him?”

“I know his dad!” Andrew shook his head. “When you turn fifty, things get weird. That kid’s supposed to be eight years old, playing Little League!”

“You’re not fifty.”

I never knew anyone to add to his age, but Andrew was several years ahead of himself in an apprehension he had about “getting old,” which was ridiculous. He was adorable. Not perfect-looking (nose like a stumpy old carrot, not the tightest chin), but a rough-hewn charisma you would definitely pick out at a bar — dark wavy hair cut short and greenish eyes that could bully or tease; a face that could be a mask of detachment, then open up like a kid who just hit a home run. I believe this was the reason — an extraordinary ease with his own emotions — that Andrew was often picked by the department for public relations gigs. He was a seasoned street detective who apparently was not afraid to show what he felt. Therefore he would not likely be afraid of the deeply awful things that had happened to you. When Andrew gave workshops on bank security the female tellers would write down their phone numbers on deposit slips. He would call them back, was my understanding.

That’s how we met. Working the same bank robbery, dubbed “Mission Impossible” because the bandit came in through the roof. We don’t always catch the bad guys, but we’re great with the nicknames.

Andrew took the umbrella. I put my arm around his waist even though his jacket was cold and slick. We were walking as fast as possible, an inelegant pair, since I am five four and he was six one, outweighing me by a hundred pounds. He was built like a football player and cared about it. He owned a bench and read weight-lifting magazines.

“So what happened?” I asked of the bike wreck.

“I don’t know why assholes go out in this weather.”

“Because they’re—”

“—The sand is all soggy, look at this, like riding in peanut butter.”

The wind picked up. We ran for it.

“Come into my office.” Unlocking his car. “Normally we don’t let Feds in here. But I have something special for you.”

“I have to go.”

“So do I.”

But we paused, very close, under the umbrella.

“I’m crazy about you, you know that,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you drive me crazy. Is that the same thing?”

The rain drummed on our makeshift roof. In the frank light our faces were eager, ruddy, his high round cheeks shining like a choirboy’s. In those days it lifted me to be with him. It just lifted me, like a kite off the ground that wants to return to the same spot in the sky.

His eyes half closed and I rose up and he leaned down to kiss me and we did and the umbrella tipped and rain went down our necks.

“Fuck this shit,” he said, fumbling for his keys.

“I have to get out of here. You know about the kidnapping?”

“Let me see. Do I work robbery/homicide, or is it Hal’s Auto Body?”

I laughed. “Sometimes a toss-up, huh?”

“I’ve been at the house since four this morning!”

“You have?”

“First it was a critical missing, then they got the call around three.”

“How are the parents?”

He shrugged. “Distraught. The girl never came home from school. They contacted her friends. Nothing.”

“‘Not like their daughter not to let them know where she was,’” I guessed.

“Not like their daughter,” he agreed.

Our few words implied a complicated professional speculation about who these people were and how the girl had disappeared.

“So what were you doing there?”

“I caught the case.”

“It’s your case? It’s my case, too!”

He snorted indulgently as he often did when I would say things that showed I was missing the precision of what was happening.

“What the hell did you think that page was all about?”

“There were … other possibilities.”

He tried to get past a smile. Code 3-ER-AB. A supply closet in a certain hospital emergency room. Code 3-RVM-AB. The Ranch View Motel.

“I was giving you a heads-up, in case it worked out.”

“I guess it did.”

But I wasn’t so sure.

“Get in the car, I’ve got more.”

“Is this a good idea?”

Teasing. “To get in the car, or to work together?”

Right then I didn’t like it.

“Andrew, how are we going to do this?”

“What do you mean, how?” He was hurt. “I thought it would be good for you at the Bureau. I thought you would get a kick out of it.”

“I did. I do. It’s very cool.”

I smiled and touched his hand, pushed up his sleeve to look at his watch. A kidnapping is a federal crime. The FBI has jurisdiction over the local police. He had to know I would be his boss.

“We better get over there.”

I had become aware of sirens. They might have called an ambulance for the fellow with the bike. Or maybe it was another wreck. Suddenly the light was hurting my eyes, hard off the ocean, steely blue. It was going to be one of those sickening days when the sun comes out after all.

Two

Juliana Meyer-Murphy was in ninth grade. She came from a stable home in which the parents had been married seventeen years, neither previously divorced. There was a younger sister. The house was a two-story Spanish with cast-iron balconies and fat curves and bits of colored tile set at odd places in the stucco. There were fan palms and potted flowers and even a fountain, as if the owners were Hollywood aristocracy instead of manufacturers in the garment business. The front door was painted purple.

The tech vans pulled up to the residence at the same time Andrew and I arrived in our separate cars. A blue sky was shining through a maw in the clouds while fine spray sifted across the rooftops like million-dollar rainbow dust. I grew up in this neighborhood, but these new mini mansions could have eaten our little cottage for breakfast. Like the Meyer-Murphys’, they each had at least one sport utility vehicle in the driveway and a sign for an alarm system on the lawn. A private security patrol car sat side by side in the middle of the street with a unit from the Santa Monica police.

Yet there was also a hum, a sense of ordinary family life, not so different from the days of the blow-up pool in our threadbare backyard. Kids left their trikes out. There was a handmade tree house, an American flag. The lofty pines on adjoining streets were old, with large heavy cones. How peaceful it would be to push a baby in their fragrant shade. A child could walk to the public school, a teenage girl chill on the curb with her friends, even after dark. The cars that passed would carry TV celebrities or dot-com money or entrepreneurs; well-meaning professional folks, if somewhat disengaged.

Maybe. Let’s hope. Nine times out of ten.

The FBI team assembled on the sidewalk. The full-bore response was part of the “new politics” Rick was talking about, an effort to position the LA field office as responsive to the diverse communities it served — especially the wealthier communities, whose constituents hired lawyers to make their hurts known — as well as to reinvent our image as “good neighbor” to local law enforcement.

We were convincing — a clean-cut group, sporting an assortment of windbreakers and trench coats, cropped hair, ties, khakis, neat as flight attendants, the female installers wearing ponytails and lipstick. We looked like cops — what else could we be? Poised, scanning the quiet street in every direction.

Ramon Diaz, the twenty-eight-year-old tech wiz, said it first: “Surveillance is going to be a bitch.”

Every other house seemed to be under construction. Today we had a break because of the rain, but tomorrow there would be laborers’ vehicles and Dumpsters obscuring the sight lines, making it impossible to know who belonged where, what was different, if the bad guys were watching the Meyer-Murphy home.

“The street can be secured, people,” commented Andrew with a patronizing smile.

Heads turned toward the big guy in the leather jacket.

“Do I know you?” answered Ramon, giving it a little strut.

Ramon, like me, was new LA. My dad emigrated from El Salvador, my mom grew up here and was Caucasian. With long wavy black hair and pale almond skin, you would take me for white. Ramon, on the other hand, was pure second-generation Salvadoran, no doubt about it — dark complexion, step haircut and aviator sunglasses, drove a huge black mother truck, married to a Mexican dental assistant with lined lips and attitude.

Andrew made his business card appear between his fingers with a flick.

“Santa Monica … I’m down for that,” Ramon acceded, shaking hands.

Ramon had only been playing, working out the tension, but as we marshaled toward the house he leaned in close so I could smell wintergreen gum.

“Why you siding with that white boy?”

Mrs. Meyer-Murphy opened the purple door with feverish anticipation.

“Officer Berringer!”

When she saw the rest of us her eyes narrowed and she began to blink rapidly.

“What’s all this?”

I stepped forward and offered my hand. “Ana Grey with the FBI.”

Mrs. Meyer-Murphy continued to squint as if she’d suddenly gone blind.

Andrew touched her shoulder.

“Remember, Lynn, I told you? We were bringing in the FBI?”

She’d been pumping my hand with both of hers. Autopilot. Cold, long fingers. She was tall and strikingly underweight, short black hair with short bangs that kind of triangulated out over the ears. Sassy. On a good day. She wore a mismatched yellow cardigan over a T-shirt and blue nylon track pants. She was tired and wired at the same time, sallow skin, and the circles underneath her eyes profound. She was in that state of fluid grief where tears just come and go. But now the nervous blinking stopped. She peered at me with all the spirit she could muster.

“Thank God you’re here.”

“We’re going to do everything possible to get your daughter home safely and quickly. May we enter the house, ma’am?”

“Please.”

She stepped back.

The gang, which had been pawing the driveway impatiently, trampled through the door.

It was like opening day at the big sale at Target.

In a matter of minutes they had fanned out through the house, hoisting metal briefcases and coils of wire.

Mrs. Meyer-Murphy stared. Strangers were chugging up her steps and opening her closets.

“What are they doing?”

“We’re taking over your home.”

Wide-eyed. “You are?”

“Where is your husband, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy? Who else is in the house?”

Inside the door a heap of helmets and Rollerblades sat underneath a hat rack. She led me through a living room dominated by a fireplace of river rock. Family pictures on the mantel. I would get to those. A Santa Monica uniform was leaning over a coffee table, reading off the top of a pile of newspapers that had spilled onto a rose-patterned rug. There were shoes all over the place, kid sneakers and grown-up running shoes.

“My little one’s at school,” said Lynn Meyer-Murphy. “I took her to school, was that wrong?”

“Not at all. I’ll send an agent over.”

The tears—“I didn’t know what else to do!”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy. Beautiful home.”

There were gingham-covered sofas, distressed-pine tables, quilts and old-fashioned brass lanterns — artfully arranged but incongruous. The country style of the inside seemed to have nothing to do with the Spanish style of the outside. Or maybe the purple door held a symbolism that I missed.

“This morning, around six o’clock, I actually drank a martini. Is that crazy?”

“Understandable.”

“But it had absolutely no effect.”

As we passed through an arched doorway I noticed a cluster of miniature watercolors — tiny corsets and hats and high-button shoes. Commercial quality, obviously trained.

“Those are nice.”

“They’re mine. I’m a clothing designer and my husband is the manufacturer. A good idea at the time,” she added dryly.

In the kitchen the husband was half seated on a bar stool, talking on the phone. Lynn threw up her hands at the sight of him.

“Ross. Get off.”

He held up an index finger, telling us to wait while he continued to talk, focused on the floor.

“Ana Grey with the FBI.” Badging him. “I need you to hang up the phone immediately.”

He lowered the receiver. “It’s my phone.”

I stayed cool. I did not engage his anger.

“The lines need to be clear in case your daughter calls.”

“Oh, really? I never thought of that.”

He had the body type where the fat goes to the shoulders, round and bulky on top, a waist pinched by a belt too tight for those fancy jeans, stocky powerful legs. Balding. A light beard, color indiscriminate, which he was rubbing up and down.

“This is my husband.”

“She’s Meyer,” he said dolefully. “I’m Murphy.”

I gave it a smile.

Ramon hustled in, whipping a screwdriver from his tool belt.

“The police already hooked something up,” the dad said, indicating a small tape recorder attached to the phone.

“I know, sir, but we have to install our own equipment.”

“How are we doing?”

Now Andrew entered the kitchen, trailed by another Santa Monica police officer, statuesque, with blonde hair in a French braid. She had been the first responder. Her arms were strong and capable beneath the tight-fitting midnight blue uniform but her broad Slavic cheekbones were oily, eyelids heavy with fatigue. She had been on her feet for hours. Seeing another female on the job was a relief for both of us; we exchanged brief smiles.

“I just want to say one thing.” The dad pivoted on the bar stool. His chin was up, weary eyes defiant. “You already know this, Andrew.”

I cringed. Police officers like to be addressed by their rank. So far neither one of the Meyer-Murphys had gotten it right.

“Juliana is loved. She comes from a loving home. She is a good kid. She doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke—anything.”

Andrew said, “I hear you.”

The police officer put a fist on her hip and shifted weight, keeping her expression neutral. She had heard it, too.

“Juliana has never even been late without calling,” the dad went on. “Something happened to her, because she would never do this to us.”

“We know something happened to her,” began the mom a little desperately.

“Do you have a recent picture of your daughter?”

They had already been to the shoe box with the sheaves of family photos like a mixed salad of time — trips to Big Bear and fifteen years of Halloween — and pulled the standard school portrait, one of those cookie-cutter images that reduced the victim to an everyday teenager with long brown hair and a pleasantly chubby face, along with a black-and-white full-body shot of her holding on to a tree, an exaggerated pose with her butt sticking out, imitating a model, with a tight self-conscious smile.

“Has Juliana ever run away?” I asked.

The dad rolled his eyes.

“I know you’re tired and you’ve been over this—”

He put up his palms in submission. “No. Okay? My daughter has never run away.”

“Does Juliana have a boyfriend?”

“Are you kidding? She has no friends at that school.”

“She’s doing fine,” countered the mom.

“What school are we talking about?”

“Laurel West. It’s a private academy.” Ross seemed to like the word. “She just started there, just when we moved into this house.”

New house, new school. New money? I was making handwritten notes.

“How is Juliana doing at Laurel West?”

“Maintaining a C average,” the dad said with some sarcasm. “In middle school she was pulling A’s.”

“How do you account for the change?”

Neither parent had an answer.

“Can you give me a general idea of her activities?”

They looked at each other. “Well,” said Lynn, “she likes to hang at the Third Street Promenade.”

“Was she at the Promenade yesterday afternoon?”

“Not yesterday. Yesterday she was going over to her friend Stephanie Kent’s house. She does have friends. He thinks he knows her. He doesn’t know her at all.”

“I don’t know my own daughter?”

Lynn ignored him, gripping the back of a bar stool.

“They had to work on a science project,” she continued deliberately. “They had to make a car out of paper.”

Ross: “For this we spend fifteen thousand dollars a year.”

That was it. Lynn crumbled and Andrew was there to catch her, just as he had been for the pair of terrified bank managers on the Mission Impossible job. He’d had both arms around them — one male, one female — as they wept on his shoulders after the ordeal of being held in the vault. I had been impressed to see that. With quiet patience he now held Lynn Meyer-Murphy through the present wave of anguish, his face closed down and solemn.

“Why don’t we sit?” Andrew said finally, indicating the breakfast nook. “When was the last time either of you had anything to eat?”

Lynn opened a drawer, pulled out a bag of bagels, put them on top of the counter and forgot about them.

Spread before us on the breakfast table was evidence of a family in the midst of a life too hurried even to sort out: mounds of magazines, catalogues, homework pages, The Silver Palate Cookbook, spelling tests and piles of mail still in rubber bands.

“What is that hammering?” Ross was staring at the ceiling.

“We’re putting in direct lines to the Santa Monica Police Department.”

“What for?”

“We’re setting up a command post over there. But we will have agents in your home, twenty-four/seven.”

This, also, was “new politics.”

“Twenty-four hours a day!” cried Lynn in a panic. “Where do they sleep?”

There was some drama happening across the room where Ramon was messing with a phone jack.

“Excuse me,” the uniform was saying. “You can’t just go ripping out our stuff.” She was holding the discarded tape recorder by the wires. She thrust it at him like a dead rat.

“Lady,” said Ramon, “the Bureau always puts in its own equipment — you never worked a kidnap before?”

“It’s Officer Oberbeck—”

The parents were watching. Andrew scrambled to his feet.

“Sylvia …,” he called.

“We were here first.” She jabbed an acrylic fingernail.

“It’s our jurisdiction.” Ramon angled the screwdriver.

“The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing,” Ross commented grimly.

“Sylvia,” said Andrew, walking over. “Take a deep break.”

“Don’t let them talk to you like that!” Lynn chimed in. “Just because you’re a woman!”

Officer Oberbeck suppressed a smile. “I’m really okay.”

“You’re more than okay — she’s terrific!” Lynn declared to the room. “When we got that hang-up call, I thought I would go over the edge—”

Me, alert: “A hang-up? A second call? Did anybody monitor it?”

Negative, according to Officer Oberbeck, and there was nothing on the tape.

“So nobody logged the call,” I said heatedly.

The police officer straightened, wiping an arm across her forehead, midsection held in tight. I could see her in basketball shorts playing hoops with the boys.

“I’m going home,” she said, adding kindly: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy. By dinnertime Juliana will be sitting here, and you’ll be yelling at her for scaring you to death.”

Lynn started blinking rapidly again.

It was twenty minutes into Day One and already I was corked.

“A call came in that we missed, people. We don’t know who it was or what they said? What the hell is going on?”

“It’s chillin’,” said Ramon. “We got it under control.”

Holstering the screwdriver, he left.

His emotion, my emotion, none of it mattered. The pressing absence of the girl was making itself felt even in the confusion of the kitchen: A leopard bag with ruby beads hooked on a chair. A Tale of Two Cities in paperback, a pink marker stuck in the pages. Blue nail polish. Size-eight pool thongs. These things, obviously Juliana’s, had become Day-Glo talismans, striking my eyes with mocking urgency as we took swipes at one another in frustration and landed on our butts.

There was a moment of bleak silence.

“Cream cheese or butter?” Andrew asked.

You had to love a guy standing in the center of a room, holding up a bag of bagels.

The dad’s eyes slowly rose.

“She’s Meyer, I’m Murphy. You figure it out.”

“No problem,” Andrew replied crisply. “My first wife was Jewish.”

“I didn’t know that,” I blurted.

“Lots of things you don’t know about me.” Untwisting the bag.

I hoped they thought we were being entertaining for their benefit instead of slip-sliding into the wrong movie.

I flipped a page in my notebook. The phone calls had come four hours apart. Maybe there would be a pattern.

“The next time the phone rings, who is going to answer, Mom or Dad?”

Lynn slowly raised her hand.

“The guy says, ‘We have Juliana and we want a million dollars ransom.’ You say, ‘I want to talk to my daughter. Put my daughter on the phone.’”

“I don’t ask where she is or anything like that?”

“You want to hear her voice,” I repeated calmly. “Before we even get into any type of negotiation, we need to know she’s alive. We call it ‘proof of life.’”

Lynn looked stricken by the implication. Her fingers went to her throat. “‘Proof of life’?”

“Anyone else, tell them nothing, get off the phone.”

She caught her breath.

“What if it’s my mother? I can’t tell her what happened. I can’t say, Mom, your granddaughter is missing, we don’t have a clue where she is, but we’re good parents, we really are.” She was twisting her wedding ring.

“Where does your mother live?”

“Florida. She moved there after my dad died.”

Ross: “After the loser”—making an elaborate point of gesturing to himself—“took over the business.”

Lynn’s cheeks were suddenly flushed. “You don’t understand. She’s very critical.”

“There will be a negotiator sitting right there, wearing headphones, listening to the conversation, passing notes on what to say.”

“A team of professionals,” said Ross, “trained to deal with your mother. God bless America.”

“I can’t do this.”

“For Juliana,” Andrew prompted. “Come on, you’ve been very brave.”

Lynn looked up with brimming eyes. She almost believed him.

“I’d do it,” said Ross. “But I hear that bastard’s voice, I’m gonna go ballistic, tear his fucking throat out over the phone …”

Then he saw something in his wife, a deep, sick fear he perhaps had never understood.

“You’re a good mom,” he said firmly. “Never let anyone tell you different.”

Lynn held on to her husband’s hand.

I asked about their manufacturing business.

“Business is fine,” answered Ross briskly, rubbing his beard. “Andrew went all over that.”

“We still need to look at your records. It would be helpful if you’d allow access to what’s on your desk.”

“My desk?”

“Employee records, ledgers, address books …”

“Fine,” said Ross. “How about what’s up my ass?”

Lynn said crossly, “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

Ross put his hands flat on the table and tilted back on the hind legs of his chair.

“Goddamnit, we are not the criminals.”

“In most kidnappings, the victim and the suspect know each other,” Andrew reminded them. “Someone in your world might have taken Juliana.”

Ross’s eyes went out of focus.

“I can’t do this. I can’t do this anymore.”

We waited.

“I just want her home.”

The scrambling went on around us. You could hear them working in the walls. Ramon appeared at the doorway, got the vibe, and backed away.

“Why,” whispered Lynn, “would someone we know take Juliana?”

“A grudge.” Andrew was watching her closely. “A threat.”

The mom’s cheeks flared even brighter.

“I’ll tell you who it is!” Ross snapped his fingers. “I should have thought of it before! David Yi.”

David Yi was a trusted employee who turned out to be a member of a Korean gang that worked the downtown garment district. He figured out the alarm system, broke into the plant and stole three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of spandex. Ross had testified against him.

“Good. We’ll check out David Yi. Next.”

It is a statistical certainty that the longer a person is missing, the smaller the chances of recovery.

“Stephanie Kent. The girl Juliana was supposed to meet. Do you have an address?”

Lynn said she did, and I followed her up the bare oak stairs to get it, she in her blue running pants moving heavily, I in the black suit, impatient. I wanted to see the daughter’s room. To touch her bedclothes and breathe her teenage hibiscus perfume.

It was my job to know the victim as if she were my own flesh and blood.

In that way, I would know her abductor.

“I see Juliana swims.” Spotting a suit and towel hanging over the banister. Remembering the thongs.

“She was on the swim team,” replied the mother, “but she quit. Another thing she quit.” Her voice was faint. “I guess we should have told you.”

“It’s okay. We’re only at the beginning of this.”

I shouldn’t have said that.

She pushed on the door, and Juliana’s world opened up to me.

Three

The Kent residence was on a walk-through street in a “transitional” part of Venice, which meant you could pay six hundred thousand dollars for a tear-down and still get hit by a random gang bullet.

Andrew and I stayed in contact on the cells all the way over. Cell phones and pagers were our thing. Because of our schedules sometimes we couldn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, but we’d talk, weaving in and out of a never-ending conversation about police work, police gossip, police movies, police screwups and the Dodgers. Tension would build. Then would come the teasing call, the secret beeper code: it is surprising how sexy you can feel driving a tan Crown Victoria.

“Think the parents are in it?”

“I’m not ready to rule them out.”

“Me either. What about the dad? Think he’s molesting the girl? That’s why she split?”

“I don’t know, but the guy was pretty stuck on that spandex theft. We should check it out for insurance fraud.”

“Would you wait on the polygraph?”

“Kind of early,” Andrew agreed.

“But what about the two of them? Lynn and Ross?”

“It’s an old marriage. You can smell it. Rotting meat.”

“Oh, Andrew!”

“What?”

I mugged so Andrew would see me in his rearview mirror and was rewarded when the top third of his face broke into a smile.

“You are so cynical about relationships.”

“I’ve been there,” Andrew said into the phone wedged between shoulder and ear. “In fact, I’ve been there so often my name is permanently inscribed in the relationship crapper.”

“Is that supposed to be inspiring?”

“I never make promises.”

“Really?”

We had pulled up and parked. Our car doors slammed and we drew in our jackets against the uncertain weather. The sky was full of moving clouds like squirting inks, charcoal and mauve. It was 4 p.m. A brief white light struck the puddles platinum.

“I thought you promised to move in with me,” I said. “Sooner or later.”

“Wasn’t it the other way around?”

“I don’t want to lose my lease.”

We crossed the street. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to that somber do-not-argue pitch. “It’s my father’s house. I can’t sell it.”

“Isn’t that love?” I poked his ribs.

“Isn’t what?”

“Giving it up?”

When I looked over he was watching me deeply, enigmatically.

“I’m just looking for safe passage, hon.”

“Meaning?”

“An expression my dad used to say when he had to tell us something. ‘Give me safe passage.’ And you’d say, ‘Okay.’ And he’d say, ‘I know you’re smoking cigarettes and it ain’t gonna cut it.’” “Like, don’t get mad at me.”

“Like, help me through this.”

“So, Andy — is there something you need help getting through?”

He laughed sardonically. “The fucking day.”

The walk-through streets, a maze of lanes too tiny for cars, had become prized for their bohemian hipness. Five years ago this area was a slum, but entertainment and foreign money was moving in, building eclectic houses like the Kents’—small, but well-proportioned and impeccably postmodern, with a Xeriscape garden made of cacti and rocks.

“What’s the point of a garden,” Andrew asked as we walked up the gravel path, “without flowers?”

“Saves water.”

“These people can’t pay for water?”

Andrew was an azalea man. The shade garden behind the one-story cottage in Sunset Park was the legacy of his father, who had also been a Santa Monica police officer. Sergeant E. Prescott Berringer, originally from North Beach, San Francisco, made his own beef jerky and brewed his own beer, and so did Andrew, who maintained the backyard meticulously, a shrine. You could eat off the potting table, and you never saw so many different-sized clippers and shears oiled and sharpened and hung in their places. Sunday mornings, when we first started going out, I would try to be cheery and helpful with the weeding and whatever, but it didn’t come naturally, like tending someone else’s child. Andrew took my tools away. “That’s okay,” he’d say, “I’ll do it,” and ignore me for a couple of hours.

One day Andrew told me he had been adopted, and I applied that like a balm to his remoteness and silences, all my discouragements and puzzlements and questions. It made the bond to his father sizzlingly poignant. There was a photo in the bedroom of Andrew (eight years old) and E. Prescott, both wearing Dodger jerseys. He said they often dressed alike. Mom was meek, and Dad, I guessed from the curly blond hair and cocksure posture, played around. The father-and-son photo hung next to a plaque Andrew received when he made detective. It read, “The Homicide Investigator’s Oath,” and listed Ten Commandments, including “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” At the time, I took all this to mean that Andrew was a person of discipline.

A frosted glass door was opened by the mother of Stephanie Kent, the girl who Juliana was supposed to have met at the bus stop yesterday. Mrs. Kent, hearing our business, wrapped her arms around her waist, as if we had brought an icy wind.

“You mean Juliana isn’t back?”

“We’re optimistic that she will be.”

“My God, what could have happened to her? Anything could have happened! I have to tell you, this is not like Juliana.”

“No?”

“How is Lynn doing? I haven’t talked to her since last night.”

Andrew gave the compassionate cop shrug. “Hard times.”

“The longer Juliana’s missing, the worse it is, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Kent knowingly. “My husband is a TV director. He’s done episodes of Law and Order and NYPD Blue.” Andrew’s mouth twitched which was like an electric shock to the pelvic giggle nerve. I had to look away not to pee my pants.

“We understand Juliana and Stephanie were friends?”

“She was new, we were just getting to know her. But she seemed like an awfully nice girl. That’s one of the things I am so proud of with Stephanie. The way she reaches out to other kids.”

“Can we talk to Stephanie?” I asked.

“She’s in her room. With the Boyfriend.”

Mrs. Kent could not help rolling her eyes.

“It’s very important that you not discuss Juliana’s disappearance with anyone. If there are rumors in school and it hits the media, her life could be in danger.”

The mother wore Levi’s and a plaid shirt; agile and loose in the body. Her face was pert, small gold-rimmed glasses, red hair cut radically short like a man’s, and I thought Miss Stephanie lucky to have a cool mom, wondering if Juliana liked it better here, the artsy Craftsman feel of red maple trim mixed with severe white walls, earthenware dishes still on the table and the lingering scent of curry, as opposed to the repressed tension of her parents’ disordered home.

“You have my word,” promised Mrs. Kent. “This is just so terrible. It could happen to any of us.”

A hip-hop bass was coming from behind Stephanie’s closed door, which had pearly plastic whorehouse beads hanging in front of it. I knocked and there was no reply. I knocked again.

“Give them a break, they’re getting dressed,” Andrew said.

Finally a female voice called, “Come in!” with exaggerated brightness.

I opened the door and poked my head through the chattering beads.

“Ana Grey with the FBI. This is Detective Berringer, Santa Monica police.”

Andrew said, “What up?”

Stephanie and her friend were lying together, fully clothed, on top of her bed. They did not jump up in embarrassment or even look surprised but regarded us with a low-grade curious disdain.

“What up wit’ you?” replied the boy, whose name was Ethan.

“We need to talk to you about Juliana Meyer-Murphy. She didn’t come home last night. Any help you can give will be very much appreciated.”

The girl sat up, hooking long blonde hair behind her ears. She wore skintight jeans with a snakeskin pattern and a short top that revealed a flawless abdomen with navel pierce.

The room smelled like burning raspberries.

“Is Juliana all right?”

“She’s still missing.”

“Really?”

Stephanie sat up straighter, surprised.

“We’re hoping she’s all right.”

“Me, too. Definitely.”

But Stephanie’s hands were laid along her thighs so the elbows stuck out and the thumbs pointed down. In the Comprehensive Coding System for Emotional Recognition, should we be taping this interview and running it through a computer, we would call it a backward sign, like nodding yes when saying no. It meant there was some emotional leakage in that heartfelt answer.

“You guys are friends?”

“We chill.” She glanced at the boy.

“We don’t know her all that well,” he added.

Andrew was leaning against the wall, arms folded. He had made himself very still.

I sat down on the desk chair in front of a computer where instant messages were popping up like pimples. r u down for cj’s?when?you are all a bunch of fucking gangsta homosexuals!

“You know this person?” reading the screen name. “Sexbitch?”

“Not a clue.”

Stephanie jumped up and pumped the keyboard, fast, to get back to her screensaver, which turned out to be a blue mushroom. Thinking better of that, she shut the thing off completely.

There were a lava lamp and enormous plastic daisies and all sorts of furry accessories that shouldn’t have been furry, such as an orange furry phone. We let the music thump along until the tension in the room built nicely, and then I reached over and cut the sound with the touch of a button.

“So what do you want to talk to us about?” Stephanie asked.

Now they were both sitting apprehensively on the edge of the bed.

“Juliana was supposed to meet you the day she disappeared. What can you tell us about that?”

“We were going to do homework. We had a science experiment. We had to make a car out of paper.”

Andrew, as if we hadn’t heard this already from Mr. Meyer-Murphy: “How in hell do you make a car out of paper?”

“It’s stupid,” Stephanie replied. “The teacher gives you the answer.”

“What about Juliana?”

“She just never showed up.”

“Where were you supposed to meet?”

“At the bus stop.”

“What did you do when she didn’t arrive?”

“Called her cell. Got a recording, so I figured, whatever.”

“You called her from where?”

“A pay phone.”

“You sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You could show us which one?”

“If I could remember.”

Her cheeks were hot. She knew I would check it out.

Ethan was fidgeting with a silver chain that went from his belt loop to his wallet. He began flipping the wallet open and shut.

“What’s this?” asked Andrew, holding up a small black cone.

“Incense.”

“What’s wrong with incense?” demanded the boy.

“Watch out,” I told him, “or you’ll grow up to be a lawyer.”

“My dad already is a lawyer.”

Andrew nodded sagely and took his time replacing the incense on the little china plate. The boy’s eyes followed.

“What do you think happened to Juliana?” Stephanie was anxiously hooking the hair behind her ears with both hands now.

“We’re working on some theories. Tell me what it’s like at Laurel West.”

She shrugged. “A lot of people think it’s cold, but it’s really a good school. The teachers really care.”

“A lot of homework?”

They nodded in unison.

“Lots of pressure?”

“If you’re motivated, you’ll make it there.”

“And you’re motivated?”

“I want to get into a good college.”

“What about Juliana? Was she motivated?”

Ethan, carelessly: “She tried too hard.”

“Like how?”

“With the other kids.” He was suddenly uneasy. “I don’t know.”

“She’d invite you for a sleepover,” Stephanie jumped in, “and if you couldn’t come, she’d like keep on asking. Incessantly.”

“She could be a pest?”

“She didn’t mean to be. She was just—”

Andrew: “Out of it.”

“Kind of, socially … I don’t know. I don’t want to say retarded.”

I was becoming more and more impressed by the way Stephanie reached out.

“We were on swim team together. She tried to be friends with the wrong people, and it just didn’t work.”

“She was playing the violin?” said Ethan. “And the bridge just flew off.”

They chuckled.

“Once, she couldn’t even get the case open. I felt sorry for her.”

Stephanie was holding something in her hands, a contraption made of lined paper and fasteners and rubber bands.

It is not unusual for people to give themselves away unconsciously. Once I interviewed a suspect who was wearing a white gold chain he had taken from a drug dealer he had just stabbed to death.

“What is that?” said Andrew. “Is that the car? Can I see?”

“Sure. It had to really work.”

Andrew twisted a paper clip, which torqued the rubber band up tight. He put the thing down, and it scurried across the red maple floor like a beetle.

“Cool.”

He had to retrieve it from under my chair.

“And what does that say right there? Looks like ‘Stephanie Kent and Juliana Meyer-Murphy’ and — what else? Help me out, I don’t have my glasses.”

He handed the car back to Stephanie.

And forced her to read the date she had written on the wheel, a date that was two weeks before.

“Is that the day you turned the project in? Two weeks ago? So you and Juliana weren’t working on it yesterday, were you?”

“We had other homework.”

“But why did you tell us, first thing, when we walked in here, that you and Juliana were getting together to make a paper car?”

Andrew and I seemed morbid and heavy with our serious questions and oversized adultness in that fluffy room. I wanted to go home and throw on a pair of jeans.

“Why did you say that, Stephanie?”

Stephanie’s creamy complexion turned pink. All at once.

“I don’t know—”

“Don’t trip,” Ethan warned.

I stood up. My back was stiff from wearing heels all day. “I think we’d better get your mom in on this.”

“No. You don’t have to.”

“When are you going to tell us the truth?”

Stephanie said nothing, trembling lips compressed. Her fingers held the denim coverlet, trying not to trip.

“If you’re not telling the truth about a silly car, how can we believe you’re telling the truth about something as important as what was going down with Juliana?”

“Obstruction of justice will look real impressive on your college application,” I suggested.

“That’s bullshit.”

“Bullshit makes the world go round,” Andrew shrugged.

“You can’t do that,” Ethan insisted. “We’re minors.”

“Ask your dad.” Offering my Nextel. “Call him up.”

“You know what, kids?” said Andrew. “This is bush. A girl is missing. You want this on your conscience the rest of your lives? Or does that not mean anything to you? Never mind. You have five seconds.”

He looked at his watch.

“See what I told you?” Ethan said to Stephanie in a high panicked voice. “She did not have a clue.”

“Juliana didn’t have a clue? What did she not have a clue about?” I asked with magnificent restraint.

This is the value of training.

“First of all,” said Stephanie, her clear eyes filling with tears, “it’s not our fault.”

Four

They lied. Of course they lied. They had no intention of meeting Juliana at the bus stop after school. The plan was for Juliana to score some weed and meet them at a diner called Johnny Rockets.

It wasn’t Stephanie or Ethan or Kristin or Brennan or Nahid’s fault that yesterday Juliana went to Crystal Dreams, a New Age store on the Promenade, and never came back. Privately, they thought it was a hoot. Only “some fool” would be so “ghetto” as to go to a public place of business and think they could just walk in and buy drugs. Like what was she going to do, go into the back room where they were smoking crack or whatever, and they’d all be so happy to see little Juliana with her piggybank full of quarters? It was “awesome” to imagine someone so “dumb” not getting ripped off, anyway. Maybe that’s what happened, Stephanie suggested, through beet red sobs: someone got paranoid at Juliana’s “totally tourist” attitude.

No way they asked her to score. They only showed up at Johnny Rockets mainly as a goof, because, as Stephanie and Ethan insisted over and over, they and their friends did not smoke marijuana. In fact they were sure Juliana hadn’t even tried it. That’s what made the whole thing “whack.” Later, we found a stash in Stephanie’s locker at Laurel West Academy.

To me, it was beautiful. But then, I like TV shows about beauty in nature, such as those South American frogs whose dazzling vermilion skin secretes a deadly poison.

We could now establish Juliana’s location yesterday at approximately 3:30 p.m. — and there had been a van, Stephanie and Ethan disclosed when Mrs. Kent had joined us, arms crossed stonily, in her daughter’s Day-Glo hip-hop cradle — a green van parked in a delivery zone at the north end of the Promenade. It pulled away when a Brink’s truck elbowed in. The kids had laughed when it was chased again by UPS. “Dork.” Andrew and I grabbed a noodle bowl and jetted over to the Promenade. The crowds were light for a weekday night because of the rain, which had sucked away the popcorny city stink of pigeons and cheap hamburgers and cigarette smoke, and freed some walking space where there were usually impenetrable ranks of bodies.

The Third Street Promenade was a successful outdoor mall geared to fourteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, anchored by a couple of big bookstores, a deli, some multiplex movie theaters. Clothing chains and street performers and carts selling dance-music CDs had replaced the aging dry goods stores and five-and-dimes from the sixties. Dinosaur fountains and artsy banners were supposed to make you feel safe.

(I had to chuckle when a crime scene instructor, formerly a Chicago homicide detective, who was out here from Quantico to conduct a seminar in which he showed slides of beheaded babies and disemboweled and maggot-encrusted bodies, found our homeless population less than paradise. “A lot of creepy people around here,” he said.) A gate was drawn and Crystal Dreams was dark when we arrived. I’d have an agent over here at first light, but right away we checked exits and entrances, the upper stories — and the parking structure and alleys for a persistent green van.

“It would have been three in the afternoon,” I reminded Andrew.

He nodded, peering up. “Exterior video cameras?”

I scoped the cornice of the brick frontier-style building. “No such luck.”

Peering through the gate I saw polished spheres and tarot cards in the window of Crystal Dreams, along with a cockamamy assortment of straw hats, brand-name backpacks, headphones and handbags, most likely stolen. I took out my pad and sketched the scene, indicating the vitamin store that was adjacent, the greeting card shop on the other side, making note of the position of the fountain and the shuttered carts where a stalker could hide. I sat on a bench and let Juliana’s presence come to me: an unformed girl with an ordinary longhaired look who doesn’t want to feel ordinary.

“Her A-list friends are waiting at Johnny Rockets the next block down. If she has the goods, no problem. If she doesn’t, she’s sitting here, scared out of her mind about how she’s ever going to show her face in school.” “Maybe she doesn’t care,” said Andrew.

I shook my head. “She’s vulnerable. Needy. Her violin fell apart, for God’s sake. She can’t go back to the cool kids with nothing.”

Andrew sat heavily beside me.

“I’m too old for this.”

“Get outta town,” I said of the empty Promenade. “This is the most exciting part.”

“I’m just saying, don’t get carried away.”

“With what?”

“Overidentifying. You don’t know anything about this girl.”

But I felt that I did. I knew something. She was an outsider who wanted to belong.

“What if she gets on a bus?” I riffed. “Winds up on the Strip. Or the Beverly Center, runs out of steam. She’s a good girl, doesn’t do this kind of thing. It’s late, she better call Mom, but she doesn’t. Why?”

Andrew: “Because she’s come into harm’s way.”

We sat in silence. A wind blew up. Strings of white lightbulbs flexed and dipped.

“What do you say, baby? Let’s go home.”

I snuggled against him. “How about Amsterdam?”

He had heard such improbabilities before and indulged me with an arm around the shoulder.

“Although,” I considered, “I’d take the Sandpiper motel.”

“The one up the coast? That was just a shitty little beach joint.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

He was silent, fingering my hair, and we watched the lights, like birds caught in a net, straining to release a flight of radiance from the gloomy trees.

I wish I had asked how he really felt about what happened at the Sandpiper, but I was afraid to push. I sensed he was backpedaling from the idea of living together, and that made me tentative. Still, it was a mistake. I wish I had understood more about the things he said up the coast in Cambria. I wish I had taken that quiet moment on the bench, before everything broke loose, to ask the questions that kept nosing up like shoots too green to tell what fine — or hideous — flowering might unfold.

“Come on, it’s freezing.”

I took his big warm hand. “I hope Juliana isn’t on the street tonight.”

I had become aware of a homeless African-American man on a nearby bench, fists in pockets. Every time his eyes fluttered closed, he jerked himself awake. Now another transient, a white guy with a huge belly, was lumbering toward a doorway.

Andrew was suddenly on his feet.

“Where’re you going?”

“That’s Willie John Black. Hey, Willie!”

The man looked over slowly.

Andrew said, “Remember me?”

“Sure I remember you,” he said, but seemed to need a little help.

“Detective Berringer.”

“Of course.” The man raised a hand, which was weighted down by a small, filthy, formerly yellow day pack. “How are you, Detective?”

“Good. How are you, my man?”

“Well, I was just going to claim this doorway. It’s a double, you see.”

It was the entrance to a vintage clothing store with side-by-side glass doors, room enough to lie down and stretch out. Willie lowered his small pack and a bedroll.

“Just put down my gear …”

Every move was shaky and painfully deliberate. I made him for fifty or sixty: matted white hair and a full white beard stained yellow around the lips. He wore a clean blue sweatshirt that said Beverly Hills 90210, paint-splattered pants and enormous round-toed boots with red nylon laces that were loose because he could not bend to tie them.

“You’re not going to bust me?” Willie said.

Andrew laughed and patted his shoulder.

“Last time I busted you had to be eight or ten years ago, when I was on the street.”

“You remember that?” said Willie shyly.

“Sure do.”

“I remember you, too. You were always nice. Always a gentleman. Even when you arrested me.”

“This is Willie’s doorway,” Andrew explained, with a significant look because it was directly across from Crystal Dreams.

“Used to be a bookstore,” Willie said.

“You hang out in this doorway a lot?” I asked.

“Sometimes I go up to the 7-Eleven. Up near Saint Anne’s. They’ve got a serenity meeting and a men’s room I can have access to. Sometimes I go down to that place behind the Holiday Inn. They’ve got soup. You can get a paper bag lunch.” It was hard to see what was going on underneath the hair and beard. His face was ruddy and weathered, and his eyes — I tried to find his eyes — were flat disks, faintly green. They slid away and came back to me.

“What’s your name?” he asked. I gave him my card and we shook hands. His was heavy and rough and imbedded with hard black grime.

“You go up to the 7-Eleven, but you come back?”

“Sometimes I penny-cup for a meal. A lot of people pass by here.”

That made sense. There would be crowds from the movie theaters and pedestrians streaming from across the street.

Andrew showed him the picture of Juliana.

“Did you ever see this girl?”

The paper trembled in Willie’s hands.

“Yup. I’ve seen her. Many, many times.”

My heart kicked up.

“Where?”

He seemed lost in the picture.

“Have you seen her around the Promenade?”

“Oh, yes,” said Willie. “She’s a regular.”

He handed it back.

“Look,” said Andrew, “can we buy you some dinner?”

Willie looked around. “Don’t want to lose my place. The man said it’s going to rain again.”

He swayed, tired on his feet.

“Willie,” I said, “this girl was kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?”

“We think she was here, yesterday, sitting on that bench in front of Crystal Dreams.”

“Did you see her,” Andrew prompted, “sitting on that bench?”

Willie squinted through the hazy light.

“Yup. I’ve seen her. Talking to that man with the camera.”

Sometimes you hit it. Sometimes the silver dollars tumble right out into your hands.

“Can you describe him?”

“Oh, he’s been around here. I think he must be a tourist from Arizona.”

“How do you know?”

“We talk.”

“You and the man?”

“Oh, sure. He gives me a hard time about my gear,” said Willie, moving the grimy pack aside with a big round toe. “Told me to get it disinfected for bugs.”

Andrew and I were like hounds baying on the leash.

“Tell us about him.”

“What was his name? What did he look like?”

“White fellow.”

“How old?”

Willie shrugged. “Young.”

“What kind of camera?”

“Pretty fancy camera. Called him ‘Arizona’ because he was always talking about Arizona. Wanted to go back there. Didn’t like it here in California. We had some deep talks. I told him he could count on me. You have to take care of your own.” “Was he a transient?”

Willie considered what it meant to be a transient.

“Never saw him up at the 7-Eleven.”

“Did he have a van? A dark green van?”

“Van? Don’t know. Never offered me a ride. But he did seem eager to leave.”

“What didn’t he like about California?” I asked.

“Wanted to go back to where he came from. Just like me. I’m originally from New Orleans. That’s where I’ve been trying to get back to, soon as I can recover my property.”

“But you saw him talking to this girl.” Andrew put the picture in front of Willie’s nose. “When?”

“On and off.”

“Yesterday?”

“Might have been.”

Willie lowered himself slowly and with great weariness, hands feeling along the glass door, until, with a sigh, he found that he was sitting on the bedroll. He was finished.

“Thanks for all your help.”

“I want to help out,” echoed Willie, and his eyes rolled up at us with a serious and sad expression. Everything he said had borne the same monotone, as if the world he saw through those colorless eyes was only gray-on-gray.

Andrew was gazing down at him.

“It’s going to rain, buddy. Let me give you a ride to the shelter.”

“That’s very nice of you, but I’m waiting for a dude named Steve. We’re going up to Malibu. He has access to a propane stove,” said Willie with a meaningful raise of white eyebrows. “It’s better to stay together because of street violence. That way we can maintain a reasonable situation.” “You’re not going up to Malibu tonight.”

Willie thought about this and nodded his shaggy head. “That’s true, I have to work.”

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked curiously.

“I travel around America for the national Defense Department,” he said. “I have an ID which the El Monte police took away. That’s what I’m talking about, trying to regain my property. They also impounded my vehicle. My job is to drive randomly throughout the United States and data-process sponge cake in the U.S. population.” I had the woozy feeling of being lifted up and set back down, like bobbing in a wave.

“Sponge cake?”

“‘Sponge cake’ is a code name that refers to Patricia Hearst, who was an individual from the Soviet Union who was being data-processed to be a high warden in the NOBD. That’s what I was trained to do, you see. Sometimes I would encounter a candlelight situation.” Andrew was looking away. A damp breeze lifted up the back of his hair.

“A candlelight situation,” Willie explained, “is an entity case where the future and today merge together.”

I thought for a moment, just one moment, he was pulling the greatest joke of all time. Then it all drained out of me.

“Willie,” I said gently, “have you ever been in a hospital?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. I was flying a Cobra and slammed into a mountain in Wyoming called Devil’s Ring. They put me in the hospital.”

“Did they give you medication?”

“They just give me medication and you talk to someone and they release you. I’m taking medication right now,” said Willie. “I’m a depressed person right now. I personally knew Sylvester Stallone in the HBD. He was killed in nineteen seventy.” Willie said these things with the same measured dullness as before. I felt as if I were in the presence of something enormous, like the pulsing of the stars.

I gave him ten bucks and said, “Take care of yourself.”

“What did you say your name was?”

I gave him another card.

“Thank you. I’m generally around here, if you want to talk to me.”

“God bless,” said Andrew.

We left him sitting cross-legged in the doorway, a mound of bedroll and scraggly white hair.

“Sometimes they whip up a vehicle and leave me someplace,” he called after us.

As we walked through the deserted street, I laid my head against Andrew’s shoulder, certain that they did.

And I dreamed we were in Amsterdam, walking hand in hand, and it was wet and cold and there were lights on the canals.

Five

Out of nowhere came the smell of cooking onions and the low chatter of the TV. I sat up in bed, awake, heart pounding, late for something I could not remember. Stocks were being traded in New York, but here it was still dark, a little after 6 a.m., Day Three. And the girl was still missing.

We had spent the last two nights in my apartment in Marina Del Rey, averaging about four hours’ sleep, which meant you were never out of the roar. Your eyes might be closed, but case points kept flipping through your brain: Jumpy parents. Employee records. Tax returns. A man with a camera. Sylvester Stallone. Rich kids talking rap and smoking weed and a voice in the night, fifteen years old, begging for some hopped-up piece of shit to bestow upon her the privilege of her life.

We had a bulletin out on the van that had been hovering around the Third Street Promenade: a dark green 1989 Dodge, identified separately by both youngsters, Stephanie and Ethan, after looking through police files. The Korean gang member, David Yi, who had stolen a load of spandex from the Meyer-Murphy factory and had been convicted, at least in part by testimony from Juliana’s dad, was at present serving four years in state prison on a plea bargain and not considered to be a suspect.

We’d had briefings every day at the police station, in a windowless lounge next to a kitchen that our techs had transformed into a command post: secured phones, a white board on an easel, a chain of laptops to input Rapid Start — software designed to track every byte of information relevant to the investigation, from interviews to lab reports, photos, computer searches, archives and dust bunnies under the bed. Rapid Start was a cutting-edge tool for examining the particulars and getting the overview. One pair of Big Eyes would be responsible for reading every page of Rapid Start every day: looking for patterns, searching out disconnects — the unanswered questions and the links.

Big Eyes. That would be me.

The case had a name:

UNSUB

Juliana Meyer-Murphy — Victim

Santa Monica Kidnapping

And that’s all we had.

Halfway out of bed I stole one more moment, to inhale the slow rich bloom of coffee and listen with pleasure to Andrew banging cabinet doors in the kitchen. My grandmother’s quilt lay on the carpet where it had been kicked; jasmine-scented massage oil stood, uncapped, next to a vibrator in full view on the nightstand. I slipped it back under the bed. We had been short of time that morning, forced to take the express route — which, in a tender way, seemed in keeping with our newfound teamwork on the job. He had been right, at the beach, in the parking lot, when he said it would be a kick. More than right. We were free and we were flying. We were hanging in that buoyant pocket in the sky.

I swung into the living room. Milky white light was coming through the curtains. As I drew them back, rows and rows of boats docked at the huge Marina were becoming visible in random jigsaw pieces out of a pale mist — hulls, rigging, motors, masts.

“Sleep well?” Andrew wiggled his nose with obnoxious smugness, then went back to assembling breakfast burritos.

“Pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

He said, “Aren’t you?”

A fresh copy of today’s LA Times lay on the counter. Flipping to the local section I saw no mention of the Santa Monica kidnapping.

“Looks like we still haven’t made the news.”

“From your lips.”

Mortified that her daughter, Stephanie, had sent Juliana on a fool’s errand, spunky Mrs. Kent organized a “community response,” apparently believing that she and her TV director husband knew more about crime fighting than we did. Laurel West Academy parents came running, with posters, fliers, search parties at the ready and showbiz contacts speed-dialing the story to the national news — exactly wrong. I thought we had been clear on Day One that she would not discuss the case. You didn’t want to panic the suspect, have him escalate to murder if the victim wasn’t already dead. Special Agent in Charge Robert Galloway had not been pleased. This was not the slick “new politics” of an efficient Bureau. This was anarchy. I had to go back to the Kents’ and kick privileged ass. Get them to understand we had a media blackout in effect on this case.

“Don’t you like my new furniture?”

“Yeah,” said Andrew absently, “it’s nice.”

I put my arms around him. “Nicer than that dark old stuff in your father’s place.”

“You are like a little terrier,” he said. “Don’t you ever let go?”

Holding tighter, “Nope.”

I had finally sprung for a whole new deal, all at once, on sale at Plummers. I am a klutz with colors, it was the worst day of my life, but three hours later I staggered out of there having committed to a blonde wood (actually particle board) entertainment center which faced a couch and two small wicker love seats on either side of a coffee table.

The coffee table was a dark varnished rose with a dandy drawer in which I kept a Colt.32 my enlightened grandfather had given to me when I went to college, as protection against what he called “the blacks,” as if I were to single-handedly hold off a revolutionary siege at UC — Santa Barbara. When I was arranging the furniture, I stowed the gun in the drawer. Poppy would be proud. The apartment was fortified.

The matching cushions on the love seats and couch were a bold tropical pattern in deep plums and greens, which more or less went with the dark gray carpeting. I had one of those curving chrome lamps you can bend all the way down to read by and some glass vases with dried flowers, which I bought at the farmers’ market that weekend, giddy with success. The entertainment center almost had enough shelves for the hundreds of mystery and sci-fi paperbacks I was always trading and borrowing, no longer in piles along the wall.

The place looked like a grown-up lived there. A grown-up who kept tonic and limes in the refrigerator, turkey bologna, hummus, some very nice imported Colby cheese, one percent milk, OJ with calcium, always a couple of beers, usually a leftover pasta primavera or soggy salad in a box, fruit in the bin and Zen muffins in the freezer, along with a slew of frozen diet entrées. A grown-up whose most-used appliance was the blender, with an industrial-sized crock of vanilla protein powder at the ready.

And there was this man in my kitchen, wearing a black short-sleeved knit shirt that had to stretch to get around hard, polished biceps, a zipper at the neck with some logo dangling off, tight jeans with a thick belt that pushed his alleged love handles up (sleek as a bull, he was always fighting ten invisible pounds), loafers, no socks. Long, crazy hours had taught Andrew to keep a change of clothes neatly folded in a gym bag in his trunk.

He had skinned a grapefruit and set perfect pink sections, no stringy white stuff, on each plate.

“How’d you do that?”

“Sharp knife.”

“I don’t have any sharp knives.”

We were sitting at the glass dining table. Glass wasn’t such a good idea, but I liked the bamboo legs. He pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket, including a contraption that fanned out like a geometric puzzle into screwdrivers and ice picks, featuring an impressive blade.

“Surgical steel.”

He then folded each tool back with a meticulousness that reminded me of the way he ordered the pruning shears. Andrew had a talent for mechanical things.

“What’s the program?” he asked.

“Rick thinks it’s time to polygraph the parents.”

“Cool. I’m going to walk the Promenade. Canvas the merchants again.”

“I’ve assigned an agent to do that,” I told him.

“My job.”

“I think it should be one of our guys.”

He looked up from mixing salsa with the eggs. “What is this, pulling rank?”

“I just know Rick is going to want it covered.”

“Do what you need to do. I’m going to look for the transient, Willie John Black.”

“What for?”

“Take him in for a composite.”

“Good idea. If you want to know what they look like on Mars.”

“He’s been helpful to me in the past. You can’t discount everything he says. A social services guy told me they can be lucid. Their delusions are a defense.”

“Against what?”

“Whatever their personal terror might be.”

We were picking up the dishes. “Andrew, why? I need you at the Meyer-Murphys’. You know they’re going to freak about the polygraph.”

“You can handle the M&Ms,” Andrew said, “and besides”—he leaned back against the sink and drew me close—“I have to ask you something. Do I have safe passage?”

“You have safe passage.”

“It’s a favor.”

Sighing hugely, “Okay, what do you need?”

He laughed. “You sound like my lieutenant. Only he’s nicer.”

“I’m nice.”

We were nuzzling.

“Yes, you are.”

“What kind of favor?”

“I’m a little short right now, and some unexpected things came up. Do you think you could loan me nine hundred bucks?” Then before I could answer he winced self-consciously and added, “It’s for the Harley.”

He might as well have said it was for a poor starving child in India since that is how he felt about the stupid bike. He worked on it every weekend; he did the Love Ride to Lake Castaic every year.

I knew all that, and yet sometimes you see a vision of the person as he was or will become. In Andrew’s pleading eyes there begged a young boy in the shade garden of the home of his adoptive parents, a pretty place, and yet he is unsure about the ground on which he stands. Something is unstable in his world, something he cannot trust, as basic as his name. He wants this thing so desperately, whatever it is, a little toy car, so he can hold it in his fist and it will tell him who he is. Worthy. Powerful. Comforted. Strong. And loved. Oh give it to him. I know how it feels to ask.

Lynn Meyer-Murphy was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, wearing the same track pants and sweater she had on since Day One, surrounded by pots and everything else she had taken out of the lower cabinets. Grocery bags were stuffed with mismatched plastic containers and grimy shelf paper.

“Good morning, ma’am.”

She turned and I almost flinched. Bright half-moons of scaly pink skin had popped up at the sides of her mouth like a horrible clown grin.

“Any news?”

I shook my head. “But we need to talk. I asked Special Agent Shaw to get your husband.”

Eunice Shaw was one of the most grounded people I have known. She had a light about her and spoke and moved in her own time. She was a churchgoing Baptist from Georgia, and even though her hair was straightened and rolled under, circa the civil rights movement, and even though she always wore a dress, even the bad guys wouldn’t dis Miss Eunice. She had iron poise. Because of this, she was a born negotiator and an almost religious presence for those, like the Meyer-Murphys, whose suffering had brought them to their knees.

Lynn’s fingers were massaging the inflammation. It looked itchy and mean. “Stress,” she explained. “Last time I had it this bad was my wedding day. What does that tell you?”

I smiled empathetically while rehearsing how to best inform the parents that they were now under suspicion in the disappearance of their child. Juliana had vanished too completely, with too few leads, for too long a time not to suspect foul play close to home; to consider the case a possible homicide.

“Why do I need this?” Lynn pushed a muffin tin into one of the garbage bags. “But Juliana likes popovers.” She pulled it out again. “Not that I ever make popovers.”

She sat there with the muffin tin on her lap.

Eunice appeared in the doorway with Ross Murphy. He looked like an eighty-year-old man who just had open-heart surgery.

“Did you get that bastard David Yi?”

“I told you, Mr. Yi is no longer a suspect.”

“He has friends,” Ross insisted. “Friends in prison, have you ever heard of that? It’s that bastard Yi. He calls again, you better not let me on the phone!”

An eighty-year-old man waving small weak fists. All puffed up because he was helpless.

I took a breath. “Folks, my supervisor has asked me to bring you in for a polygraph today.” When they looked blank I added, “A lie detector test.”

“Us?”

Eunice left the room to answer her Nextel.

“Standard operating procedure for anyone who might have come in contact with Juliana in the days before she went missing.”

“Bullshit,” said Ross, “and I resent the implication.”

“Oh Ross,” snapped his wife, “it’s the real world.”

“Don’t I know it. Doesn’t get realer than this. We’re her parents,” he exploded. “We love her! Okay, yes, people chop up their children and put them in concrete. Did we? No. Are we dying here? What the hell do you think?” Lynn was staring at the muffin tin.

“I know you’ve been through it. But we have to ask the tough questions and there is no question we will not ask, and nobody who will not be scrutinized.”

“We have no problemo taking your test,” Ross hissed, “because we have nothing to hide, but what really pisses me off is the fact that I gave you the guy. David Yi. Why doesn’t anyone listen to me?” “You’re a broken record,” murmured his wife in a monotone.

“Hold it,” I said. “Everybody take a deep breath.”

Lynn had covered her ears with her hands. They were trembling. Then, in slow motion, she keeled over.

“Lynn?”

Sitting cross-legged, she had folded forward until her forehead pressed the floor, as if assuming some kind of yoga position.

Her husband said, “Are you all right?”

“No test.”

“What?”

“No reason,” she mumbled.

I had to get down on my hands and knees to hear. We looked like two mental patients with ears to the ground, listening for Indian hoofbeats.

“Can you speak a little more clearly?”

Her nose was squashed against the oak flooring. “I should have told you before. I’m sorry I was not forthcoming, but I tried to believe it wasn’t true. I didn’t want it to be true, but now I’m so afraid because Juliana’s still not home.” “What the hell are you talking about?” Ross cried impatiently. He was bent over in a squat, hands on kneecaps, head cocked toward his wife.

“Eunice!” I wanted a witness. “Take it easy, Mrs. Meyer-Murphy—”

“I had an affair!” Lynn sobbed quietly. “I had an affair in Milan, with a buyer from Nordstrom.”

Ross closed his eyes and shook his head with a look of perverse satisfaction, as if he had always known this punishment would come to him.

“He took my baby!” Lynn was now convulsed with tears. “Oh my God,” she kept saying. “Oh my God, oh my God.”

Eunice was back, hooking the cell phone on her belt. She took in the scene with a knowing sigh.

“Why would this man kidnap Juliana?” I was asking.

“He was very, very angry with me—”

“Why, honey?” Eunice crooned. “How could he be that angry he would take your child?”

“Because he’s mean, and possessive, and I ended the relationship.”

“You ended the relationship?”

“I sent his underwear to his wife.”

“Who is this?” demanded Ross. “Who are you talking about? Is this Ed Hobart?”

Lynn’s whole face went crimson, and she was making coughing, barking sounds. Eunice and I were kneeling beside her and speaking soothingly, but it was impossible to unfold her from that repentant pose. Her body was like locked steel. Where was Andrew with his melting embrace?

“It’s Hobart,” said Ross with a tight, tight smile. “Head of the whole wonderful overseas Nordstrom operation. Good. Good choice. Go fuck Hobart. I guess there’s no need for the loser anymore.” He straightened up and left. A door slammed. Eunice and I exchanged a look and she darted after him.

“Tell us about this man and we will check him out.”

“He lives in Seattle,” Lynn gasped, “but he comes down here all the time. Oh, what if he has Juliana? All I can think about are terrible, awful, horrible things—”

“Ana!” Eunice interrupted sharply. “We have a situation. Dad locked himself in the powder room.”

“You must think we’re a bunch of lunatics,” sniffled Lynn.

I dragged her to her feet and into the foyer with the hat rack and the pile of Rollerblades beneath it and a small Oriental rug.

“Is there a window? What’s in there?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “Bathroom stuff.”

“Ross.” I banged on the door. “What’s going on?”

“Ross!” called Lynn hoarsely. “Come out.”

I heard the toilet flushing.

“You all right, buddy?”

No answer.

“Talk to me, Ross. Or I’m going to have to come in there to make sure you’re all right.”

“Screw you!”

“Listen to me. We’re making progress—”

“You don’t know what the fuck is going on. You don’t know if my daughter is alive.”

“We don’t have anything that says she’s not alive.”

Silence.

“Let’s come out and talk about it, Ross.” Nothing. “You’ll work this through with your wife. You’re both under a lot of stress right now—”

“I’m sorry, Ross!” Lynn cried. “I love you. I’m sorry! I never meant to hurt you, but I had to tell. I had to tell to get Juliana back. She’s the only thing that matters, please—”

“I’m tired of this bullshit. Nobody listens to me.”

“I’m listening to you,” I answered boldly. “What is bullshit, Ross? Your definition. Tell me what that is.”

“Bullshit is not getting anywhere. Bullshit is farting around and dicking around when I told you to go after Yi.”

“I hear you about Yi. What else is bullshit?”

Silence.

“Are you thinking of doing something to yourself in there, Ross? Are you thinking of committing suicide?”

“Fuck you. Fuck everybody!”

“You haven’t answered my question. Do you want to kill yourself?”

Eunice said, “I think we should call for backup. Get the guys outside—”

“I know,” I said, “but I’d rather—”

Suddenly the door flew open. My hand went to my weapon.

Eunice yelled, “Watch out!”

Lynn screamed, “Don’t shoot my husband!”

We ducked and rolled.

Ross was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, holding a gun.

“Easy! Easy!” he cried. “Don’t shoot! Jesus Christ!”

“Put the weapon down on the ground. Now.”

He put it on the ground. It was not a gun. Worse. A cell phone.

Six

An emergency briefing was called for 5 p.m.

The Santa Monica Police Department was housed in back of City Hall, in a white Moderne building with blue trim that suggested sand and sea. The police department was in the lee of the building, away from sand and sea, looking at an overpass. If you narrowed your vision to exclude the high-rise hotels, condominiums and gangland ghettos, you might get an idea of what they saw when they built this public works project in the thirties: a sleepy little beach town sparkling with optimism in which all that would be required of the local police would be the management of drunks and theft of the occasional Packard.

They built it small and it stayed small — quaint, by today’s antiseptic standards. The vintage sixties station in Long Beach, where my grandfather, Poppy, served, looks hip by comparison, and the Bureau downright millennial, I thought, quickening my pace across the Civic Center plaza. It was four-thirty and already several Bu-cars were lined up in the lot.

The entryway held a couple of metal chairs and drawings on the wall by schoolchildren. Turn right and a brown arrow led to the holding cells. The hallway to the left was short and dully lit, lined with cases of patches and awards. Over a doorway swung the kind of lacquered wooden sign they used to have in Western movies over the saloon, only this one read Licenses. I hoped they never remodeled the place. I hoped they turned it into a museum.

As I hurried up the staircase leading to Investigations, a woman clattered right into my arms.

“Ana! All the computers went down!”

Margaret Forrester, the police liaison working with the Bureau on the kidnap, had a flair for the dramatic, but as she gripped my elbows, eyes wide, it was clear she was not kidding.

“I am in such trouble!” she stuttered. “Where is your guy?”

She was a beautiful woman, about thirty years old, with layers of glossy brown hair and a face too decorative, too perfectly formed, with its strong dark eyebrows, squarish cheekbones and egg-white skin, to belong in a police station. You had to wonder at the natural selection that produced such a striking girl from a pair of alcoholic dirt-poor Oklahoma drifters, who, according to her, literally lived in the dirt, picking apricots and peaches in the San Joaquin Valley. Nobody at the station looked like Margaret, nobody dressed like Margaret, in a well-cut camel sheath with a shawl collar, low-slung belt and suede boots. Her usual accessories were an ID tag and a water bottle. There was a tinkle about her I would later identify as seashells. She had a business on the side: fashioning natural objects into “body adornments” that she sold to stores. She often wore her own creations. That day it might have been a concoction of abalones, or Native American bracelet charms with feathers.

“Which guy are you talking about?”

“The tech. There he is — Ramon!” she called up the stairs. “Come down here, sweetheart, I’ll show you where the circuit breaker is!”

Ramon’s work boots thundered out of the dimness and he appeared, holding a flashlight.

“I think it might be under there.” Margaret indicated an unlikely hatch beneath the staircase. “But your computers are what’s causing the problem.”

“It ain’t our computers, Chiquita,” Ramon said disdainfully. “It’s your freaking wiring,” grimacing as he pried at the warped door.

“Hope you like spiders,” I called humorously.

Ramon answered with a Spanish phrase he knew I would not understand. Margaret’s hands were still somehow all over me as we chugged upstairs. But then she was all over everyone, shouting, “Congratulations! I heard Brian made the soccer team!” to a busy secretary, or giving the thumbs-up to a baffled cadet behind the desk. The waiting area was basically a wooden pew underneath a pot of fake begonias furry with mold, the yellowing walls smudged with finger marks, as if people had been crawling up them for decades.

Lean bicycle cops and sour overweight detectives were going in and out and Margaret had a word or a touch or a hug for each. Following in her wake was like looking through a camera in which smiling fish-eye faces loomed and fell away. The smiles were tolerant, and I wondered why. She had no experience and was no help to me. Working with the locals was tricky enough — they already resented the Feds. You hoped your contact person would be a professional, but here was an individual better suited to hostessing a martini bar.

When I said something like, “What’s with that Margaret Forrester?” Andrew responded with a sharp rebuke that Margaret Forrester was a police widow. Her husband (they called him “the Hat” because he shaved his head) had been one of Andrew’s closest buddies, an undercover narcotics detective murdered by a gang; but he had been assaulted and killed while off-duty, and therefore his pension benefits were denied. Out of compassion, and because the Forresters had two young children, the department gave Margaret this job.

“I hate spiders!” she confided. “They eat my cashmere sweaters.”

I have never owned a cashmere sweater or a new gold Lexus sedan, but Margaret Forrester had these things. They lived in a tiny cottage in the wrong part of Venice, but she would throw birthday parties for the police chief at the swank Loew’s Hotel, only the select people invited. She had been, according to the careless scuttlebutt you pick up at two in the morning, stunningly ambitious for her husband, to the point of leaking stories about his cases to the press so reporters would call and include his name. But now, according to the blue code of sacrifice, we were all supposed to cut Margaret Forrester a lot of slack.

We entered a single space where twenty investigators were jammed together. A lot of them wore telephone headpieces to block out the noise. Since they redesigned our offices I missed the camaraderie of our old bull pen, but in this arrangement you had to smell your neighbor’s aftershave all day and look at the ass end of his computer monitor slopped over your desk. In fact it was hard to see where one desk ended and another began, as they seemed to work on one square surface billowing with papers and personal clutter. The walls were brick and the window blinds maroon. It felt like we had walked into a bad TV crime show from the seventies.

Our team was arriving for the briefing, talking in small edgy groups. Everyone in the field was fired up about something, hoping their little piece would complete the mosaic and be remembered as the one link that led to the safe recovery of the victim. You don’t make big salary jumps based on big scores at the Bureau; merit accrues from the steady accumulation of good choices and the intelligent analysis of details, most of which goes into a file that nobody but a supervisor will ever see. Briefings in high-visibility cases give the rare opportunity to show your moves in varsity play.

Computer techs were crawling under the table as two agents frantically tried to re-create the timeline by tacking brown butcher paper on the wall, unrolling it over notices of bake sales and group discounts to Universal Studios, while two others followed with marking pens and printouts from Rapid Start, copying in large letters the sequence of developments in the case.

Big-time federal agency.

Rick Harding strode in a few minutes short of 5 p.m., wearing a navy blue suit and wraparound sunglasses that made him look like a corporate president on steroids, sliding his briefcase down the conference table past a row of computer screens showing odd cascades of numbers.

“People?” he called.

We began to settle, in the close wood-paneled room with the soda machine droning on, next to a kitchen where someone was using a microwave. There was the black-and-white of Juliana holding on to the tree and a blown-up school portrait of her looking out in the tired ocher light, with the glassy expression of martyrs too young to have known the passion for which they died. At the last minute, Andrew appeared in the doorway. Two rookies stepped aside for the senior detective.

“Let’s start,” said Rick, ritually hanging his jacket on the back of the metal chair.

I took my place beside my supervisor. Forty-seven, a former navy pilot, Rick wore his mustache neat and blond hair clipped. He always looked tight, but today he was pretty well steamed. You could tell because he unclipped the handcuffs from his belt and started tapping them on his thigh.

We are all fussy about our handcuffs. You are issued one pair that can last your whole career if you’re smart enough not to lend them. Like any other tool, they become worn with handling and acquire an idiosyncratic feel, so you can tell which is yours just by touch. Nothing is more straightforward than a pair of handcuffs. In times of stress they are a comfort; you will often see several people in a high-intensity meeting worrying and working their little rings of power.

The only problem with handcuffs is sometimes they fall in the toilet bowl. If you are a woman, especially, this will happen when you’re in a hurry and you forget to lift them out of the back of your waistband before lowering your pants. Then you will hear behind you the unmistakable, heart-stopping sound of metal falling on porcelain.

All of us have heard it, more than once.

“What’s all this?” Rick asked of the brown paper snaking around the walls.

“Computers went down,” chorused several people.

He nodded grimly as if expecting one insult after another. “Now we’ve got a media leak, is that right, Ana?”

General groans and shifting in chairs.

“Right. The dad called channel five.”

Eunice chimed in. “He locked himself in the bathroom and used a cell phone. He believed that if he could get the daughter on TV, it would lead to her recovery.”

“Was it not explained to the gentleman there is a media blackout on this case because it might escalate the suspect?”

“Yes,” I cut in, “but he was crazed because his wife had just admitted that she had a boyfriend. She thought this guy might have taken Juliana for revenge. I asked Special Agent Jason Ripley to check him out. Jason?” I said it so harshly the poor kid jumped. He had been an agent only eight months — skinny and ginger-haired, still so eager he wore a three-piece suit every day.

“The suspect’s name is Ed Hobart.”

“He’s not a suspect yet,” I reminded Jason gently. Since when did I become a mother hen?

“The subject. Sorry.” His acne flushed pink. “Upstanding, churchgoing father of six. Mr. Hobart is a senior buyer in ladies’ fashions, who oversees a budget of five million dollars …”

My Nextel was vibrating, then the pager. It was Special Agent in Charge Robert Galloway, messaging me to return to the field office immediately.

“As for Mr. Hobart’s current whereabouts, the Seattle field office should be getting back to us within the hour …”

“Rick,” I said softly while Jason went on, “gotta go.”

“What’s up?”

“Galloway paged me twice.”

“What does he want?” Rick whispered back. “If it’s about the media leak, tell him we can handle channel five—”

We were talking with heads averted, so everybody knew something was going on. By now a lot of people packing guns had crowded into the room, including Andrew’s lieutenant, Barry Loomis, who wore a walrus mustache and a Superman tie, and Officer Sylvia Oberbeck, impassively chewing gum. She looked put together, just going on shift: heavy mascara and a freshly braided bun. At one point I tried to make eye contact, but she did not seem to remember who I was. There was the rustle of seashells, and Margaret Forrester suddenly pushed through, swinging the water bottle, stepping over legs.

“Damn! Computers still out?” Fanning herself at the collective menthol-scented body heat. “What did I miss?”

“Case closed, go home,” someone replied disagreeably.

“There’s been another development, Rick,” interrupted Special Agent Todd Hanley. He was a reliable sort. Narrow-faced, with horn-rimmed glasses, achingly serious, he wore tweedy sport coats and spoke only when it was relevant.

Maybe he was a spy.

“It also concerns the dad.”

Rick: “We are so past the damn dad.”

Nervous giggles. Bored, cynical looks.

“Just so you know, legal says Mr. Murphy has threatened to sue. Claims he sprained his back during the altercation with Special Agent Grey.”

Thirty sets of eyes went my way, including Andrew’s.

“What altercation?” I said defensively. “He tripped on a rug.”

Rick now was ratcheting the handcuffs with a rhythmic, grating sound.

“Oh, please,” I went on, “I admonished him about the cell phone, he took a swing at me and slipped on a Chinese rug. He was fine.”

“When he was barricaded in the rest room,” Rick seemed to have to ask, “why didn’t you call for backup? There was a surveillance team outside.”

“What were the ladies supposed to do?” cracked Andrew. “Bring in the artillery because the guy was taking a good, long shit?”

Amazement. Big laughs. Margaret squealing: “An-drew! I’m going to kill you!”

I wanted to crawl under the table. Don’t make this a fight!

Andrew must have stuck his head under the shower in the locker room because he looked refreshed. His thick dark hair was slicked back; he wore his shield on his hip, a hand-tooled leather gun belt and a fresh lilac blue shirt with a monogrammed cuff through which you could see the sculpted moves of his shoulders.

Still, I wanted to throttle him, especially when, as I pushed away from the table to leave, he said, “Where are you off to?” as if we were the only two people in the room.

“Back to the office.”

“What about ‘Arizona?’” It sounded like a code. People were watching us.

My gut clenched. “It’s premature to talk about ‘Arizona.’”

Margaret shook her hair and took a long throaty draw on the water. “Sounds like Ana doesn’t want to share.”

“It’s a promising lead but needs to be developed,” I said dismissively.

Andrew replied, “Bullshit.”

“It is bullshit,” I repeated, now confused. We had not discussed this. I was not ready to present some half-baked theory based on the statements of a crazy homeless person.

Rick: “Could you two clue us in?”

“Sure,” said Andrew. “The source is a transient named Willie John Black.”

It was a bad moment, as I feared it would be. Andrew’s own people guffawed and began offering comments on their encounters with Black, who apparently was famous in the world of social services for his movable collection of wire hangers, coils of nylon tied with the precision of a yachtsman, cereal boxes, gloves, strips of fabric, milk cartons and the occasional flag mounted onto a trio of bicycles tied together, upon which he had somehow secured a full-sized camping tent. They didn’t let him take it on the Promenade so he kept the thing parked in an alley across the street.

“Black puts the victim with a young white male,” said Andrew, who seemed the only one at ease in the room. He held a small investigator’s notebook, to which he did not need to refer, and spoke with an authority that held the respect of a bunch of disbelieving, overtired cops.

“We know Juliana went there to buy marijuana. I make the suspect as a dealer. He has a camera, which he uses as a cover. Black says the guy is from Arizona, so I want to use narcotics investigators on the local level to identify this individual. We should reach out immediately to law enforcement in Arizona.” Nobody spoke. Margaret Forrester — peacekeeper and liaison — was mouthing the water bottle, big eyes gone bland, as if she had nothing to do with any of this. My heart was jackhammering; I was hoping Rick would not force me to make the call.

“Sounds like a poor use of resources,” he said. “Mr. Black is obviously a questionable source.”

“That’s your judgment.”

“Of course it’s his judgment,” I said nicely. “This is an FBI investigation.”

Andrew shut me down with a cold-blooded look—“Now you’re telling me who’s in charge?”—and my overbeating heart clutched at the shock of his anger.

His lieutenant intervened: “We’ll employ our own resources to follow up on Detective Berringer’s recommendation.”

“Thank you, Barry,” said Rick.

The pager went off again.

“This is whack,” I cursed under my breath, quickly shouldering handbag and canvas briefcase.

Rick had given up on the handcuffs, which lay splayed upon the table. The mood was suddenly wilted and depressed. There was no more oxygen left in the room, and what did we have? No new ransom demands. A half-assed boyfriend and a schizophrenic.

“Keep me informed,” said my boss. “And watch your back.”

I went out through the kitchen exit to avoid passing close to Andrew.

Seven

The fog was a surprise, but along the coast it often comes up quickly. When I left the police station, sometime after six, everything smelled of water. The air wasn’t air but cold humidity that had congealed. From inside the car, the windshield was impenetrable. I let the defroster blow. According to the dashboard readout, the temperature had fallen to thirty-seven degrees.

Someone was rubbing a clear circle in the driver’s side glass. Fingernails scratched and a round face peered close, spooking me. When I lowered the window I saw that it was Margaret Forrester. With hair frizzed out by the mist and some kind of seashells on a thong around her neck, she looked like a creature hauled out of the sea, a siren, regarding me with dark eyes that seemed to shine with strange compassion. Steam curled and vanished from her small-sculpted nostrils as she considered what to say.

Finally it was just, “Drive carefully.”

“I will. You, too.”

She smiled sympathetically and reached in and patted my hand on the wheel. I grinned like a cat until she had withdrawn and the window rose again and sealed off the vaporous outside.

What was her concern? Was it for Juliana, disappeared into the dark psychic stink of America? The fog was blanking out the street lamps, making the night unnaturally dim, a guttural gray through which they shone just faintly. But sometimes the fog would be a lens, diffusing a pair of headlamps passing behind a tree so its outline would spring out, monumentally visible, each twig and leaf in flashing silhouette as if etched by a laser.

I wished for that same shocking clarity in our search for Juliana, even as I fought a growing instinct it would not occur. There was uncertainty beneath the frenzy of the briefing, a stain of helplessness that seemed to be numbing Rick. We were all giving in to the fear that we had failed. Look at us, Andrew and me, fighting in public like dogs over territory.

I dialed his pager: Code 3-AG.

Emergency.

It was ten long minutes of creeping through fog until he called back.

“Still in the briefing?”

“That’s been over.”

“I’m sorry for what happened back there.”

When he didn’t gush, Oh my darling, I’m sorry too, my instinct for compromise evaporated.

“We never talked about going with Willie John Black.” My voice was hard.

“This is not working,” Andrew decided abruptly. “Let’s forget it.”

“It’s a little late, don’t you think?” I listened to his impatient snort into the mouthpiece. “This is what I told you would happen on the beach.”

“I work independently. I don’t report to the lieutenant every time I take a crap.”

“Now you’re accusing me of pulling rank.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“But you’ve said it, about this very thing, Willie John Black. ‘What is this, pulling rank?’”

“When? When did I say that?”

“This morning, at breakfast.”

Now there was silence. I knew what he was thinking: just like a woman to start whining about personal shit.

“Andrew? We’re still together on this, am I right?”

“Sure, baby,” he said with penetrating indifference. “Doesn’t matter to me.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Kiss up to your boss, that’s cool. Just stay out of my business.” He hung up.

Sometimes the temperature drops and you are blinded. All that I could see in front of me was swirling white and not the labyrinth beyond — the sudden drop-offs, veering alley walls and bottomless puddles into which whole cars could up-end and disappear — creeping inch by inch all the way to Westwood, and the police scanner was jammed with accidents, hit dogs, frightened seniors lost at indistinguishable intersections, reports of a fire.

A bus had rammed a car in front of the Federal Building. Traffic was stalled and lights were blinking idiotic green. When I finally pulled into the parking lot, I was surprised to find it still half full. People must be waiting it out. You could see the red throat of the stuck freeway from the upper stories of the tower.

The stark brightness of the institutional lobby gave little relief from the mayhem outside, only serving as a reminder that steely measures were required to keep things in order; there was no room for soft upholstery of any kind. We were the Department of Justice, not the Department of Comfort. The elevators were sterile, and the turnstile where you swiped your card a floor-to-ceiling cage of bars that rotated loyalty and discipline in, individuality out.

We all used to work together in an open bull pen. The supervisors had window offices around the rim, the grunts labored at traditional oak desks pushed together in the center of the room, like the detectives at the Santa Monica Police Department. There were no walls or encumbrances, you could see at a glance where everybody was and who they were gossiping with, and you could feel fine about important work being done by decent people, even though most of them were middle-aged men in white shirts who kept their shoulder holsters on.

You damn well knew where you were.

Then the elders started to retire in waves, and the rest of us watched with apprehension as a generation of experience and chops walked out the door, while the technology to replace them walked in. Some android in the administrative division got rid of the oak and installed workstations covered in charcoal acoustical felt arranged in “pods” like alien seedlings, and we were all supposed to sit in front of our computer screens and germinate, nothing to look at except the constellation of pushpins on our mini bulletin boards, also covered in charcoal acoustical felt, where the messages we posted were only to ourselves.

This reduced the sound level to a few shuffles and the occasional belly laugh, and chopped up the social space into a confusing stew. Once sight lines were cut off nothing was clear. You couldn’t just look up from your desk and with one sweep register the current pecking order, or instantly see who was making it with whom. The new kids, like Jason Ripley, didn’t seem to have the time or imagination to fool around anyway. My pod was occupied by raw rookies with fast agendas who considered me an old fart even though I had only ten years in. Naturally, I distrusted them, too. In the new configuration, our time-honored FBI paranoia grew like a fungus in the dark.

I had not been back to the office since I met Andrew in the parking lot and gone straight to the M&Ms. I found myself moving through the darkened space with customary informality, like unlocking the front door and walking into your living room after a long trip. The collection of plastic trolls on my work surface was reassuringly in place, chair stowed. The in box had acquired three days’ worth of debris, the cartons of court papers and files I pulled for the ninety-day file review as untended as before. The stress I had been feeling about the review seemed remote as I zigzagged through the charcoal matrix toward the executive suite, where the lights were still on.

Special Agent in Charge Robert Galloway, originally from New York, was an expert on organized crime who brought a rock-solid street savvy to the fluid complexities of LA. For a long time he sat up there on the seventeenth floor with his dead cigars and trademark turtlenecks, steering the field office through terrorist threats and internal scandals like a captain in a season of squalls, until his wife, an elite mountain climber, left him for another elite mountain climber, and he sank into a terrible depression.

How do I know? I once saw him in his car, in the far reaches of the garage, sobbing.

After a while he seemed to regain some balance, joked about taking “herbal supplements,” which I guess meant antidepressants, but still, he could be irritable, and irrational, and susceptible to scrutiny, more sensitive than ever about the Bureau “looking stupid” in the media, which is why he’d come up with this “new politics” idea. He also had a seventeen-year-old daughter devastated by the divorce who, rumor was, had been arrested DUI.

I found him in the corner office with the soft carpeting and real furniture, behind an old-fashioned four-legged desk. A bookcase held his New York City horror show collection of Statues of Liberty, bound Playbills, NYPD mugs, a whip, a miniature guillotine, a human skull, a severed finger, possibly real, a dusty centennial quart of Guinness ale, a black wig and a replica of Poe’s cottage in the Bronx. The walls were taken up with celebrity photos: Galloway (a younger man) with the mayor, senator and Bobby Kennedy; Galloway on the tracks in front of a subway car, inspecting the remains of a jumper; signed cast photos from TV cop shows shot in New York; a plastic box containing yellowed memorabilia from the opening of Mickey Mantle’s restaurant, including a champagne glass with giddy lettering—Spavinaw, Okla! — and a matchbook signed by the legend himself.

“Glad you could make it.” He looked at his watch, a chrome Rolex. “What’d you do, take the bus?”

“Fog. It’s bad. Don’t go anyplace.”

“Where do I have to go?” shrugged Galloway.

Self-pity was now the norm. I learned to ignore it. If you attempted to commiserate about the state of his emotions, he would savage you.

“Got an alert from HQ. It’s come to their attention about the situation in Santa Monica. High visibility, especially if it goes south. They wanted us to be aware that they got three hits on VICAP, which might link Juliana Meyer-Murphy to three other missing juveniles. In each of these cases — Georgetown; South Beach, Florida; and Austin, Texas — you have a teenage girl disappearing from a youth-oriented area like the Third Street Promenade.” I had become distracted by a young woman I had never seen before who was sitting in the visitor’s chair.

“Ana Grey, meet Kelsey Owen.”

She looked like part of Galloway’s quirky collection. Bureau folks wear suits. Black, brown, navy. Kelsey Owen went for ethnic — long, tiered Mexican skirts and oversized sweaters. Once, even a straw sun hat. She was late twenties, nice skin, long curly dark hair like a folksinger’s and just chunky enough to appear nonthreatening.

We shook hands.

“Kelsey is over at NSD,” Galloway explained. “But she wants to get into the Crimes Against Children Unit.”

“You’re a new agent?”

She nodded. “This is my second year. I just love it.”

“Isn’t that great?” Galloway jabbed the unlit cigar. “Enthusiasm!”

I gave him a sardonic flick of the eyes. Enthusiasm? What the hell did he think was going on over at the command post, twenty-four/seven?

He gave me the printout from headquarters, including photographs of the other victims, aged fourteen to sixteen. They all resembled one another: dark, shoulder-length hair and smooth, hopeful faces. The others were still missing; only the girl from South Beach had been recovered alive.

“Kelsey is a trained psychotherapist. I think we should pay more attention to the psychology of the offender.”

“We do. It’s called criminal investigative analysis.”

It used to be called profiling, but the term sounded too much like racial profiling, so they figured out a way to make it incomprehensible altogether. After completing several hundred hours of advanced instruction at Quantico, I was selected to be a profile coordinator. I learned how to analyze a suspect by age, profession, marital status, sexual history, style of attack, IQ, social adjustment, appearance and grooming habits and a host of other factors in order to come up with a hypothetical portrait. Profiling is not about whether the guy was potty-trained too early. It’s a working description that narrows the field.

As soon as we had a couple of freaking facts, of course I was going to look at the psychology of the offender! I was groping for it now.

“I’m talking the causes of why things go sour,” Galloway went on. “We don’t pay enough attention to what happens in relationships.”

Relationships? This was not Galloway-speak. “Kelsey can provide some insights.”

“I really want to do what you do,” Kelsey said.

“I’ve been doing it ten years,” I replied darkly.

“I hope to learn from you,” she swooned, “and not make the same mistakes you made.”

Just the kind of insight I needed.

Galloway tapped the unlit cigar in a clean ashtray. “What’s the status over there?”

“You mean the Santa Monica kidnapping?”

“No, the Lakers game. Jesus Christ, Ana, don’t give me a lot of shit.”

Irritable.

“All the mechanisms are in place but no new ransom calls. We’re developing two suspects: one is the mom’s ex-boyfriend, the other a white male seen with Juliana on the Promenade. With the information we have right now, we believe the suspect may be a drug dealer from Arizona, which doesn’t rule out the unsubs from the east—” “Is this a high-risk victim?” interrupted Kelsey Owen. “Is she known to use drugs or prostitute herself on the street?”

I gritted my teeth. Why me?

“No, she is not high-risk, and yes, we know all about the victimology. These are questions we have asked, and continue to ask, since Day One. Believe me, we are living with it night and day.” I realized from Galloway’s narrowing expression I had better put the brakes on my Inner Bitch.

“The Santa Monica police are developing the lead on Arizona,” I said flatly and finally. “It’ll all be up on Rapid Start. Do you know how to access Rapid Start?”

“I’ll find out,” Kelsey promised brightly.

I gave her a worn-out smile; that’s what it’s like up here in the stratosphere.

“I wanted you two to meet because it’s an interesting case and I thought you would get along,” Galloway intoned. “Sisters in crime.”

I had stopped listening. I was thinking about a Subway sandwich and a bag of chips.

“And on top of that, Ana is a natural to be a mentor.”

“Listen,” Kelsey was saying, “it doesn’t have to be a formal thing—”

“What doesn’t?”

“—because I’m still officially on the national security squad, so you can copy me the material and we can have coffee whenever you—”

I was prancing like a little kid who had to pee. Don’t do this to me!

“This is really not a good time—”

Galloway was mouthing the cigar thoughtfully. “You say Santa Monica is handling the possible link to Arizona?”

“Yes.”

“I want us to do it.”

“Why?” My stomach tightened. “They’ve got a senior detective on it, very competent guy—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Galloway replied. “Headquarters is going to want no doubt about who makes this case.”

“What happened to the ‘new politics’?” I was riled. I was pissed. I did not want to have another conversation about this with Andrew. “I thought we were supposed to share.”

“Sharing is good. As long as we get the bigger piece. You have a problem?”

“I guess it’s been a while since I was in the sandbox.”

The phone was ringing. Kelsey was giving me a sisterly shrug.

“Yeah, Rick,” said Galloway, dismissing us both with a wave of the stogie. “What’ve you got?”

The surveillance team had been in place. That night it was a pair of rookies, I don’t know their names. As usual there had been little movement on the tranquil street since the last of the dog walkers, around eight. Lights were on in the Meyer-Murphy home, where day and night had merged into what Willie John Black would call a “candlelight situation,” wonderfully descriptive, if you think about it, of a halftone state in which the present and future are equally without meaning or illumination.

The first verbal report stated, “Someone is walking up the street.”

This was transmitted to walkie-talkies inside the house and recording equipment in the Bureau and command center.

“Walking slowly. Weaving. Possibly intoxicated.”

Someone muttered, “Ten-four,” to let the guys in the car know somewhere in the city another human was listening.

“I think it’s a female. Can’t tell in the fog.” More alert: “She’s heading up the path.”

In reply, Eunice Shaw’s voice from inside the house was sharp. You could sense her bearing down since the cell phone incident.

“I can see somebody out there,” she confirmed. “Who is it?”

“Coming your way,” warned surveillance.

“To the front door!”

“Can’t see shit in this fog—”

“Get out of the car,” she ordered, “right now!”

And they were, in a heartbeat, because out of the heavy mist drifted a hollow, dirt-stained face with feral matted filthy hair — a crippled figure Eunice first made as a homeless alcoholic or some demented member of the kidnap outfit — until she came underneath the exterior lamp, and Eunice saw the T-shirt was hanging open like a vest, for it had been slit down the middle, and the torso had been wound with bloody gauze.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Eunice breathed and opened the door and drew the girl inside. “Don’t be afraid, Juliana. I’m Eunice Shaw with the FBI. We’ve been looking for you, baby. Your parents are waiting for you, right upstairs.” Juliana swayed, listless, lightweight, as if about to float off her feet. She was pale and shocky. For a moment Eunice froze with hands on her shoulders, holding her upright, and made eye contact over her lolling head with one of the stupefied young male agents who had skidded through the doorway and Eunice’s black eyes were pleading and accusatory and infuriated and without being told he radioed 911 while the other agent went scuffling up the stairs to stammer to the parents that their little girl was home.

Eight

The parents were like strangers, sitting on opposite sides of the hospital corridor. The minute you saw them your heart sank.

Their anxious bickering had at least been a connection. Now, at this unimaginable moment, when they needed the comfort of rabbis and saints, these two could not even bring themselves to touch each other’s hand.

He, wearing a shiny purple jacket that said Laurel West Academy, as if it were Juliana’s swim team practice instead of a rape exam at one in the morning, hauled himself up from the seat. In the harsh light I noticed how the jaw drifted slightly to one side, as if years ago someone had taken a good and accurate slug at him.

“You all did a great job.”

“I’m glad we could be of help.”

She, back in control of her public self, had dressed in businesslike khakis with a blue sweater and spotless white tennis shoes, but looked, if it were possible, as if she had lost another ten pounds in the last twelve hours. Wordlessly, she put her arms around me, and I could feel the fragile shoulder bones.

“It isn’t over,” Ross warned. “You’ve got to get the guy.”

“Believe me, Mr. Murphy, that’s the plan.”

“Who,” said his wife, eyes communicating her private torment, “do you think it was?”

“I couldn’t speculate right now.”

“But you’ll keep us informed?”

“You’ll be informed.”

“I just want to say—,” but Ross couldn’t say it. He ducked his head and swiped at his eyes. “If I acted badly, I didn’t mean to cause any trouble … I was just trying to get my daughter back.”

I nodded, eyes stung with empathy. “It was a difficult time for everyone.”

“If there’s anything we can do for you,” he began stalwartly, “on a personal level—”

“No, no, no—” I may have blushed. “Please.”

“I understand.” He put up a meaty hand as if he were a kingpin in the Russian mafia. The fluorescent lights glinted off his gold spectacles. “Just know it’s there.”

What is? I wanted to say. The automatic doors blew open and Andrew came through on the hustle.

Ross greeted him with some kind of white suburban power handshake and a dozen claps on the shoulder of his leather jacket.

“She’s back, huh? She made it! She’s a survivor, that kid! I feel like I should be handing out cigars!”

But there was a contradictory sadness behind Ross’s bravura. We all knew, standing there, the life of this family had been kicked off track and lay twisted and skewed like a toy train, smashed by the heel of someone who resented its ordered path around in a circle; the perfect miniature town inside.

“Ana, they want you.”

Ross: “What’s going on?”

“Procedure,” Andrew explained. “They like having law enforcement in on the initial interview so the victim doesn’t have to go through the story twice. I do it all the time with rape victims, but Juliana requested a female.” I had an ungracious thought: Had he been trying to edge me out?

“I’m glad Ana will be with her,” said Lynn. “My daughter’s never even been to a gynecologist.” Her voice faltered. “And for this to be her first examination …”

“Listen,” said Ross, “we’re lucky she was only raped.”

Andrew and I exchanged a look. The guy was at the beginning of a long road.

“She did not sustain major injuries aside from the superficial cutting, but she has been sexually assaulted and brutalized,” Andrew stated emphatically. “We’ll find out to what extent in a couple of hours.”

He had my respect. He was patient but firm, and despite his often-repeated credo Bullshit makes the world go round, he was not bullshitting here. I wondered how many parents, husbands, siblings and friends of rape victims he had made this same speech to, in this same corridor, over twenty years as a cop, and if the competence and authority that went from the leather soles of his work shoes firmly gripping the floor to the priestly intertwine of his fingers resting like a bowl held out toward the family had brought any comfort at all.

“Detective? Can we talk?”

We moved aside, and I took a deep breath and asked where he was on the Arizona investigation.

“Just getting off the ground. Sent a bulletin to Phoenix, they’ll post it statewide. Why? Checking up on me?” he added, half kidding.

“No.” I smiled, glad he could joke. “This is not my idea, okay? I fought for you. But the SAC wants the Bureau to take the Arizona connection from here. He wants all the marbles, and it’s his game.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry. I hoped we never had to bring this up again.” Andrew shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me,” he said tonelessly.

I chose to believe him. “See you later?”

“You bet.” He nodded toward the doors. “Be with Juliana. Go.”

“How is she?”

“One tough cookie.” Andrew put his fists in his pockets. “He tortured her, you know.”

Juliana Meyer-Murphy, still wearing her own clothes, was sitting up beside a nurse-practitioner on a sofa in the Rape Treatment Center clinic at the Santa Monica — UCLA Medical Center. I expressed my joy and relief that she was safe, as we had been working very hard to get her back.

Many things were working on me in the first moments I met Juliana. Andrew’s caution not to identify with the victim had already gone by the wayside. She boasted none of the arrogance of her friend Stephanie Kent, but was, achingly, a child, whose first steps into the adult world had been slammed by a bully — not unlike my own experience, growing up without a father in a household dominated by my grandfather’s eccentric punishment of my mother and me, not by fists but by a kind of psychological enslavement to his authority, keeping us isolated in the one-eyed brick house on Pine Street. I still thought of the house that way: one of its two staring front windows was covered by a bush.

“A lot of people care about you,” I told the girl.

“That’s supposed to make a difference?” rasped Juliana in a strange, deep voice, like a person with emphysema.

The shock of that voice made me want to make this girl believe that somebody would care for her wounds, unconditionally.

“It does make a difference. It will.”

The nurse introduced herself. Nancy Reicher, RN, NP, it said on her tag. She was petite, with eyebrows plucked in two thin arches. She wore a knee-length white lab coat with a stethoscope in the pocket, small gold earrings and a garnet ring. Her manner was practiced without being cold. She explained again to Juliana who I was and asked if it was okay if I was present at the medical interview.

“Are you comfortable with that?”

“All right, whatever.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Everything you can tell us will help to track, apprehend and prosecute the offender.”

Juliana looked younger and less robust than in the enlarged school photograph that had been keeping watch over the command center. Here instead was a drawn, delicately featured girl whose quiet aliveness in this tranquil room struck me as one of nature’s most resounding miracles.

And again, something hopeful: we were, at least, in a rape treatment center of the kind that did not always exist, where the revolutionary message was that the hurts you cannot see are sometimes the most devastating, but that even inside the deepest hurt is the promise held, like the easy abandon of the redtail hawks, of a gorgeous liberty.

Juliana sat with head averted. She wore smudged eyeglasses with girly rainbow frames, dirt-encrusted jeans and a large zippered sweatshirt with a red wool plaid scarf (her mother’s) wound around her neck. Her brown hair was up in a careless twist that did not catch every greasy strand. Her hands and fingernails were filthy, too. I was greatly reassured that they had not allowed her to change or take a shower.

It was hard to see the expression behind the convex lenses under which her enlarged brown eyes seemed to stare, then drift away, as if they could not process such a suddenly disorganized world, even though the room had been designed to be an oasis from the impersonal passageways of the hospital, from phobias that might have been triggered by the attack. The light was low, provided only by table lamps, as in a normal setting. There was a poster of flowers above the oatmeal-colored couch, draped with a soft white woven afghan. Juliana’s body was living and breathing in this space, but her soul was folded up somewhere. In my imaginings I had invested her with sadness, loneliness, laughter, aggression, embarrassment, but now, as a person, dynamic, across from you, she projected only one wavelength, unremitting fear.

Nancy gestured. “Sit down, Ana.”

I had been unconsciously keeping my distance, as if Juliana were not a normal teenage kid but a brittle specimen that might become contaminated by human warmth and breath. Still I chose the opposite couch, to give her space. I noticed Nancy sat close, knees almost touching the girl’s. She held a clipboard thick with forms.

“I’m going to give you a complete medical examination to make sure you’re okay. But first, I’m going to ask some questions about what happened, so I know what to look for. Just tell me as much as you can.”

At this point all we knew was Juliana had been let out or escaped from a vehicle somewhere and had somehow made her way back to the M&Ms. She might have been released a block away. It might have been Van Nuys. It might have been the abductor. It might have been a friend.

Juliana said nothing. Nancy said nothing. We sat in silence for a very long time. I tried to make myself still. I looked at an orchid.

Finally Nancy tried again. “Whatever you can tell me is helpful. If you don’t remember, that’s okay.”

Juliana crossed her arms and legs.

“A few hours ago you got out of a car — was it a car?”

I could barely hear when Juliana murmured, “A van.”

Nancy said, “Okay, a van.”

“What kind of a van?” I asked. “Can you describe it?”

She shrugged. Her head was down.

We waited.

I offered some prompts without replicating Stephanie and Ethan’s description: Was the van old? New? Color? Did she notice the stereo, or some CDs lying around? It was very foggy tonight. Could Juliana tell where she was when she got out of the van?

“Can’t we just, please, get this over with? My parents are freaking out.”

Before I could respond Nancy silenced me with a look. She stood up and pulled a leopard from a shelf of stuffed animals.

“I love this guy,” she said. “He’s so soft.”

It wasn’t a new leopard. Its spots were yellowed from much handling. She handed the thing to Juliana, who clung to it greedily.

“Let’s talk a little about your general health,” Nancy began again casually. “When was the last time you saw a doctor? Are you taking any medications? How old were you when you got your period?”

She was able to get Juliana to occasionally respond with one-word answers, each time in a voice so injured I found myself staring at the plaid cloth around her neck, telepathically communicating to Nurse Nancy, It hurts!

Still she pressed gently on, asking if Juliana had consensual intercourse in the last seventy-two hours.

Juliana answered, “No.”

From her wide-eyed reaction to the question, I knew she’d never had consensual intercourse, even once. Right then, I thought I would lose it.

She had been a virgin.

My concern had been to protect her life, I hadn’t worried about the fine-tuning, but now there was another reality that hit me like a body blow, and everything came unloose inside. In one smoldering moment I saw her innocence ignite with a whoosh! like a huge gas flame; and inside that flame there had been such bright wholeness.

This would be Juliana Meyer-Murphy’s first oh-my-God experience with a man. Whatever happened during those absent days to strangle the voice out of her would now become the core image of sex this young woman would take with her through life, where the rest of us fondly, or even ambivalently, carry the saga of the first boyfriend, the parents’ bed — or the beer party, the mosquitoes and the riverbank.

Whoosh.

Nancy had seen it, too, and was assuring Juliana that her first sexual experience with someone she loves would still be special, would still be her choice. The girl was nodding, but I wondered how much she was able to take in.

“Can I have one of those guys?” I indicated the stuffed animals.

“A puppy, or a loon?”

“I’ll take the loon.”

A loon is a striped bird like a duck with a fat round body that, if soft and stuffed, fits just comfortably under the arm. I recommend holding on to one.

“Did he have sexual intercourse with you?” Nancy waited. “Did he penetrate you with something else? Each act is a different crime, okay? I’m going to ask more questions than your doctor usually asks, not only because I want to account for every crime that happened, but to help during the medical exam.” “I can’t say. After I first got in.”

“You mean, first got into the van?” I said eagerly. “When he first made contact with you?”

She was shaking her head no. I was desperate. No, what?

“Do you want to take a break?” Nancy offered with an easy smile.

“I really don’t.”

“Don’t what, Juliana? Don’t remember? That’s all right.”

“I’m not in the mood,” whispered the girl.

Nancy put the clipboard down. “We can continue this later.”

“Wait!” I cried without thinking.

Nancy turned to me with the same compassion she had shown the victim. Obviously we were both in need of guidance.

“It’s up to Juliana,” she said.

“I know, but — Juliana, honey — we really need your help in remembering everything you can—”

“I’m sorry,” Nancy said more sharply. “Juliana can decide if she’s comfortable or not or if she wants to go on.”

I had to sit there, gears spinning, waiting as Juliana continued to gnaw on the leopard’s ear like a three-year-old until it turned dark and wet. She was making speaking noises that were buried in the fur.

“What is it?” Nancy asked, leaning forward. She seemed to listen, but it was more than listening. “Tell me.”

Juliana shook her head.

“What’s your very worst fear? Your biggest concern?”

She didn’t answer.

“Juliana,” I said, and she looked at me. “I’m an FBI agent, and I carry a gun, but things still scare me — I’m not even talking about on the street but things that are inside. I still wake up, sometimes, and I’m all by myself. Man, it would be a relief to have someone to talk to.” Finally, tentatively, Juliana lowered the animal.

“I’m scared … because … I might not ever … be able to … have a baby.”

Her words, barely audible, dwindled to a mewing wisp of nothing.

We were on our way to the examination room to collect the physical evidence. Nancy said she could have a support person present, and Juliana had silently pointed to me, a gesture that flooded me with gratitude.

Just outside the doorway I touched Nancy’s arm.

I understood the enormous vulnerability of the sexual assault victim, the need for sensitivity and emotional support. But also I had a team of agents and policemen with technical backup ready to roll. If I could get hard information from Juliana about the offender or offenders — method of approach, control, display of weapons, threats, what kind of physical force — we could mobilize right now. Otherwise, Rick could rightly argue we’d recovered the victim and it would all go away.

“I need a narrative account of what happened to her,” I told the nurse quietly.

“There’s a period of time she can’t remember. It’s possible she was drugged.”

“Drugged?” Fear snagged me.

“Roofies. We see a lot of it.”

Rohypnol and GHB are two “rape drugs” you can buy on the street. Put into a drink, they will render the victim unconscious, then he or she wakes up, mauled, in another part of town with no memory of how it happened. Because these drugs can metabolize quickly without a trace, they are currently the preferred weapons in sexual assaults.

“No,” I moaned and trotted after her. “You understand why I have to ask questions.”

“She has the right to decline to answer.”

“I know all about her rights. I’m not suggesting we traumatize her further in any way. But in order for the investigation to move forward—”

“Nothing is going to happen to her that she doesn’t want to have happen,” reiterated the nurse in the same calm tone.

“I see that, but, with respect, I think we can press just a little harder, given the fact this guy is out there and likely to do it again.”

“You’re impatient, and I don’t blame you.”

The door to the exam room was open and Juliana was just inside. I could tell from Nancy’s preoccupied look she was not about to leave her alone for more than another few seconds.

“I’m asking for your cooperation,” I said urgently. “You’re the expert, you know how to get her to disclose.”

“I’m impatient, too,” Nancy said. “I want to proceed with the evidentiary exam so she can go home and be with her family. But she has the right to withdraw her consent at any point in the examination, and if she does, I will stop. She needs to feel comfortable in her medical care.” “I need to move. I’ve got a task force ready to go—”

“I don’t give a shit what you need to do,” Nancy said, still serene.

Still, every doorway holds an opportunity, and inside the exam room there were two.

Juliana’s body: a crime scene. Evidence would be recovered, as in any crime scene, and as in any crime scene, a story would be told.

Juliana’s trust: she asked me to be in here. In the long run her confidence would be invaluable.

It was another carefully muted room, not like the bus terminal where I see my gynecologist at the HMO. Pale wood. Beige-on-beige, a subtle cloud pattern embossed on the wallpaper. There was a computer in a corner and an examination chair in the center where you could sit up and look into your nurse’s eyes. Her mom would be relieved to know that Juliana did not have to lie back on a paper-covered table with stirrups.

“You’re worried about being able to have a baby.” Nancy was close, maintaining eye contact. “You’re worried about the injuries inside your vagina. I’ll have a better idea when I take a look. I’ll tell you what I see. I’ll never withhold information. I’ll always tell you the truth.” Juliana scanned the room.

“How … are you going to look?”

“Oh!” said Nancy brightly. “We’re going to see it all right here on this screen,” and she patted a monitor on a cart, which held a VCR and a video camera. “If you want to watch, I’ll explain it to you as I go. But that comes later.” Later, Nancy would explain to me it was a colposcope, a camera at the end of a long stalk that magnifies sixteen times. She would flick switches and point the lens at the pattern on a sheet covering the examination chair, slowly zooming in on a teardrop-shaped paisley, and I would watch on the monitor as the paisley became a country with green boundaries, a continent of blue, a universe of emptiness; until we were looking at the spaces between the cotton threads.

Later, we three strangers would become linked by the shared sight on the TV screen of the lacerations inside Juliana’s vagina — invisible to the naked eye but vast as crimson canyons when magnified — and deep, mysterious half-moon cuts in a row.

The livid marks of a man’s fingernails.

But now Nancy broke the seal on a rape kit and began to unpack white envelopes for evidence collection.

Step one was debris.

Step two was dried secretions.

Step three was external genital examination.

Step four was pubic combings.

There would be nine steps in all.

“Would you feel comfortable taking off the scarf?”

The girl unwound the material, revealing a necklace of watercolor bruises in wine and black.

“How did that happen?” Nancy asked without any kind of inflection, which might have indicated outrage or alarm. Obvious marks of strangulation are rare.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. Can you open that sweatshirt a little and sit here, and I’ll take your vital signs?”

The ER doctor had ordered X rays to rule out fractures of the larynx and scans to check for soft tissue damage. The bruises would be photographed, and analysis would show the suspect had used a metal chain as a ligature to strangle Juliana several times to the point of unconsciousness or almost death. When she revived, he would perform sex acts and then strangle her again.

As Nancy pressed the disk of the stethoscope to Juliana’s chest she smiled tenderly and said, “You have a kind heart.”

My knees buckled.

I felt an unreasonable amount of love for Nancy Reicher, RN, NP, with the plucked eyebrows.

“Let’s come over here and take off your clothes. We’re going to need to keep them for evidence, so afterward”—Nancy opened a cabinet—“you can go home in one of these.”

Inside were shelves of royal blue sweatshirts and sweatpants and rubber thongs in ascending sizes.

“There may be evidence on your clothes. Dirt or fibers, stuff like that. We need you to undress carefully. I’m going to put down some pieces of paper on the floor to collect anything that falls out of your clothing, and then we’re going to collect everything you have on and put it in this bag. Let’s go behind the curtain.” She drew some fabric across a track so a quarter of the room was hidden. I stood by the counter looking over the evidence packets. It would be a slow and meticulous examination. The oral cavity. The swabs for sperm. Examination of the buttocks, perianal skin and anal folds. Drawing blood to test for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The careful cataloguing, signing, dating, sealing of every piece to maintain the chain of custody.

“I need your underwear, too,” I heard Nancy say from inside the curtain. “Are you okay?”

How many times was she going to ask if Juliana was okay? I was aware that my pits were damp. I was thirsty and wanted someplace to sit down.

“Now I’m going to use a long-wave ultraviolet light called a Wood’s lamp,” came Nancy’s voice. “All kinds of stains show up that we couldn’t see under white light. We’re going to scan your body for evidence. But first I’m going to turn out the lights. Are you all right out there, Ana?” “Fine.”

The windowless room went pitch black.

Inside the curtain a purple light went on.

“I’m just going to scan your body with this lamp.”

It was hot and close and surreal in that room. Shades of purple light danced above and below the curtain like a gruesome attraction in a carnival of perversions.

“It’s like a black light,” Nancy was explaining. “Do you know if he ejaculated outside your body?”

I could not hear Juliana’s reply.

“Well, here are some dried secretions, and you can tell they’re semen because they turn yellow under the Wood’s lamp. I’m just going to swab it. Turn around for me. Thanks.” There was a pause. Then, “Would you mind if I asked Ana to see this?” Juliana’s voice was faint with exhaustion. “Yeah, sure, I don’t care.”

With the chill clatter of metal rollers, Nancy slowly swept the curtain aside, and I saw Juliana Meyer-Murphy standing naked in a violet column of light.

She had her father’s slope-shouldered slump, with his tendency to spread at the hips, but the long legs were her mother’s; soon the baby fat would go. They had put clean dressings over the area on her chest where the offender had cut meticulously with a fine instrument, crosshatching, like an etching, to draw a steady beading of blood. On the Tanner classification of sexual maturity, a five being a fully mature adult woman, Juliana would rate a four. She had no pubic hair, not because it had not developed but because it had been shaved off; you could see the raw raking furrows of the razor.

Under the tinctures created by the lamp — cobalt, ultramarine, magenta, rose — her body looked like a Romantic sculpture splattered by a madman in a purple haze. It made me feel ashamed to see her so exposed, and yet I kept on looking, because the more I looked, the more I could see the assault in progress, as if it had been conjured.

“What kind of shoes did the assailant wear?” I asked.

“I have no clue.”

“Were they sneakers? Sandals? Boots?”

I already knew the answer.

“Boots,” breathed the girl.

She was right. “Anything special you remember about them?”

“They were clean.”

“New?”

“Polished.”

I nodded.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“I was thinking you might want a forensic photographer to document this,” Nancy suggested.

“Yes, I would.”

Blunt-force injuries such as those sustained by hammers or shoes create rapid tissue compression, which results in bruising and bleeding below the skin. The contusions on Juliana’s back would have been clearly visible to the naked eye, but the impression of the weapon used to cause them would not. Now, out of the anarchistic splotching, there appeared a glow-on glow, a ghostly memo, as if sent by the offender in almost-invisible ink.

“What?” Juliana asked, craning her neck. “Where is it?”

“On your lower back,” Nancy said.

“What’s the big deal? I can’t feel anything.”

“He left a partial imprint,” said the nurse matter-of-factly. “It’s pretty clear. It’s the sole of a shoe. At some point he must have stepped on your back.”

Stamped on her back, while Juliana lay on her stomach, unconscious. Stamped, she should have said, since she had promised to tell the truth, trampled or stamped, using the full weight of the boot with his body behind it, blunt-force heavy impact.

Juliana’s mouth turned down, and she emitted a series of guttural screams.

“Get it off me! Get it off!”

A Wood’s lamp is a coherent light that causes materials and messages to luminesce. This particular message was clear as day: the offender had declared that he was a powerful and commanding man and the rest of us bugs under his feet.

Juliana wanted the impression “off!” like a spider crawling up her back, “off!”—and her cries were hideous and freakish squawks; her twisting, flailing arms kept beating us away; the curtains buckled, the lamp, discarded, rolled upon the floor, spinning wild purple rays around the darkened room.

The lug-soled design of a size-ten boot floated in and out like a wondrous charm.

Nine

Something happened to Andrew and me that night. After Juliana was released, we came back to my place and drank enough tequila to shine our own black light on those illicit dungeon doors — the ones that appear only, under the right conditions, in total darkness. Once you find them and you enter, certain things are left behind that cannot be reclaimed between two people.

Most of all, after the physical ordeal of the case, I wanted comfort. I wanted us to bleach our sins with astringent soap and scalding water, and make love, and fall asleep like new puppies in a box full of clean sheets. I wanted the relief of knowing that despite the roughneck ride we were on, we could always return to the kind of private shelter we had discovered at the Sandpiper, the very first weekend we went away together, where, at dusk, on windswept Moonstone Beach, we had walked until our fingers froze, and came back and lit candles and lay in the bathtub in the steamed-up motel bathroom, hot as a sauna, and told our secrets. I remember resting my head against a sopping towel laid over the edge, and how we faced each other, my legs inside his, the strong heavy bones of his shins buffering mine against the cool porcelain, surrendering to our nakedness and the dissolving boundaries between us, the comfortable bubbly water, letting go inch by inch, until I was able to accept, at last, his enduring offer of safety. There is no deeper luxury.

In the canyon of those forgotten hours of the night, half senseless after bearing witness to the interminable rape exam, I craved that luxurious feeling of safety again, even ran a bath, as if Andrew and I could both fit inside the half-size plastic shower-tub of the apartment in the Marina. But we were too drunk, at odds, on the job, did not have time for luxury, had seen so many borders violated it seemed useless to defend them. He turned the water off. He wanted me to do it on my knees on the floor, like a hooker. I didn’t want to; he made it a challenge; so I did, as if wild submission were the same as wholehearted surrender, as if it could take you to the center of the labyrinth. I couldn’t find where we were on the bed, up, down or across. He wanted me to slap his face. He got up and came back with a belt. It had never been like this before. When I had an orgasm, I cried. I didn’t know what it was about. He held me, panting.

Now I see why I had been so desperate to be sanctified by water, by touch. Andrew and I had become profoundly contaminated by the materials we were working with. (The Bible talks about cleansing with blood; Andrew believed it, but I have never known true atonement to work that way.) Like a chemical reagent that causes evidence to glow in the dark, the alcohol had made that contamination observable for a brief period of time, but the kind of perversity that had acted on Juliana Meyer-Murphy, and therefore on the two of us, does not go away with daylight. You carry the toxins. Maybe he was angry at being reassigned from the Arizona investigation, had to put me in my place for a lot of reasons; but there was something about the purposeful way he took us to the edge that hinted he knew all about dark places, and savage unrestraint.

After Juliana went home, we withdrew from the M&Ms’, shut down the command center at the Santa Monica Police Department and initiated a nationwide manhunt for the suspect from a war room at the Bureau.

The war room consisted of a disused space near the lavatories: two old windowed offices with the dividing wall taken out and lined with metal shelving that held somebody’s collection of administrative operations in thick unreadable binders and textbooks called The Biology of Violence and Ransom, probably not cracked since some of the World War II vets were laid to rest in the VA cemetery across the way. In a contemplative moment your eyes could travel from those shaded white markers north to the lustrous Italian marble of the Getty Museum, perched like a mythical griffin over the mountain pass.

We had our own artwork going. A real exhibition. The tattered old timeline from the command center had been reinstalled upon the wall, beginning when the 911 came in and listing every event — when the police responded, when the Bureau was called, who was interviewed, when each polygraph was done — all the way up to “Someone is walking up the street” in the fog. There were aerial photos of the Promenade obtained from the satellite facility at headquarters and location shots of the storefronts. Posted also were my hand-drawn diagrams showing the true distance and relationships between Willie John Black’s doorway and the fountains and the bench where Juliana may have met the suspect.

Then, in the Purple Gallery, we had close-ups of the bruise patterns on Juliana’s neck and the fine cutting on her chest, and a series of photographs using reflected UV light that showed the lug-soled design of the boot taken from the skin of her back. For this expertise we had to wait an extra two hours at the Rape Treatment Center while a forensic photographer fought standstill traffic all the way from a private lab called Result Associates, out in Fullerton.

I had assigned young Jason Ripley as administrative case agent, which meant he was in charge of the paper, hauling cartons of printouts from Rapid Start, trying to keep the sub files organized. We were on our knees, hands deep inside the boxes, scraping our knuckles on bristly reams of paper, when I felt a presence behind me and heard Kelsey Owen say, “Congratulations on recovering the victim. That must have been incredibly exciting.” “We got lucky,” Jason, the voice of experience, replied.

I sat back on my haunches and rewrapped the scrunchie that held my ponytail, grimacing at the time. “Gotta go.”

“Where to?”

“Rick’s office,” scrambling up and wiping the fine cardboard dust off on my jeans.

“I’ll walk with you,” offered Kelsey.

I was aching to stop at Barbara Sullivan’s, my old pal from the bank robbery squad. They still had real offices on the south side of the floor and Barbara’s was still a sanctuary. I just needed to sit in there with the door closed for fifteen minutes, talking carpet installations and flu shots, easy muffin recipes and haircuts of the stars. But now I was late and saddled with Kelsey.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“A couple of distinctive things in the Santa Monica kidnapping match the cases that came up on VICAP.”

“Why didn’t they come up before?”

“Nobody put it together. Nobody alerted Quantico to go back to the local police in Austin, South Beach and DC with what we now know.”

“But you did. I can see why Rick has a lot of faith in you.”

Fawning makes my teeth ache. Too much sugar in the Christmas punch.

“SOP,” I said dismissively.

“So how was it for you?” she asked, not going away.

“How was what for me?”

“The investigation. To confront what you were most afraid of?”

“I was afraid she’d be dead.”

I turned into the office of the kidnap squad.

Kelsey followed.

“Rick inside?” I asked the duo of wavy-haired clerks in miniskirts and high heels.

I took a chocolate kiss from a plate on the counter and smiled vacantly at Kelsey, wondering if she were going to explain to me what I was really afraid of. Kelsey Owen never would have guessed it was she. Or, I should say, Special Agent in Charge Galloway’s keen interest in her. Why would he allow a rookie to tag along unless he wanted a report? Standing quietly with soft round hands crossed, holding a file, her patience seemed feigned. The move from NSD to crimes against children could not be accomplished in one leap. Besides, she was not that savvy — worn, thin-soled boots and a long flowery skirt with the big soft sweater to pick up the teal? A gold charm bracelet that peeked below the sleeve, shyly asking to be queried over and admired? Galloway, with his herbal supplements and out-of-control daughter, was just paranoid enough these days to recruit a susceptible wannabe to be his eyes and ears on a high-profile case. I really wanted to know to whom Kelsey Owen returned at night.

She trailed me into the supervisor’s office.

“Grab the hot seat,” offered Rick.

It was so cramped in there you got about two inches of legroom from the desk. Rick was looking expectantly over my head at Kelsey.

“I thought I would sit in. The SAC said it would be a good idea,” she announced.

“Really?”

“To learn from you. And Ana.”

Rick tipped back in his chair with a questioning look. If this was Galloway’s deal, Rick wasn’t in on it.

“Karen?”

“Kelsey.”

“Aren’t you on—?”

“The national security squad.” She nodded vigorously as if to affirm the waste of her talents. “But I have a degree in psychology and I want to move over to kidnapping.”

My boss rocked his chin at me. “If Ana doesn’t have any objection.”

How could I have an objection? Balling up the foil from the kiss, I fired it into the wastebasket.

“Nope.”

Kelsey settled into the other chair, positioned against the wall where I could not see her, like the goody-goody who always sat behind you, breathing cherry drops and ambition down your neck.

“This is what we’ve got from Quantico,” I told Rick. “At my request they sat with the locals and evaluated the evidence in those rape cases again. First of all, the victimology is similar. White teenage girls with long brown hair disappear from a mall. Nice girls, never in trouble, not your liberated types. Two of them are still missing. The victim in South Beach was reinterviewed. The assault took place in a vehicle. A truck. He was into asphyxiation. When he stopped at a gas station she escaped.” “She wasn’t drugged?”

“No, but this was several years ago. I’m guessing rape drugs weren’t as widely available.”

Rick seemed to buy it.

“What if we’re looking at a serial rapist,” I went on eagerly, “and the reason nobody tagged it is he kept moving out of their territories? He’s shrewd. He manipulates these girls at the same time the police walk right by him. He knows how to fit in, not draw attention to himself, because he’s just like everybody else.” Kelsey murmured, “This gives me the chills.”

“What are the lab results on the Santa Monica kidnapping?”

“They haven’t gotten to it yet.”

“Hello?”

“I specifically asked them to cross-reference the results. Arnold Reinhold, the head of lab, says, ‘We see this stuff by the bushel basket. Maybe a thousand a year,’ imitating Dr. Arnie’s hang-loose groove. ‘The only way we’d consider it special is if you had a bunch of these cases coming in and the same person in the lab got this stuff.’ I said, ‘Come on, you wouldn’t notice if some guy was choking girls with a metal chain?’” We shared a look of cynical frustration.

“Just tell me: why a lab way out in Fullerton? With all the traffic, it’s faster to overnight the stuff to Quantico.”

“Politics,” said Rick, disgusted.

We had recently started using Result Associates instead of the FBI facility back east. Somebody must have had connections, because the Sheriff’s Department and the Santa Monica police had switched some of their cases, too.

“The good news is we recovered major physical evidence I think will be significant.”

“Such as?”

“The partial impression of the sole of a boot. On her back.”

Rick’s expression was dispassionate, but there was a silence in the room, as between the ticks of a clock, as we all ran through in our minds the picture of how a man stomps with all his might on the back of an unconscious girl.

“What kind of boot?”

“They’re checking the Bureau database of footwear impressions. Maybe a work boot. Or those thick-soled shoes the punkers wear?”

“Dr. Martens.”

“Rick, you are too hip for words.”

Rick winked at Kelsey, who paused uncertainly, taking notes.

“The victim reported the shoes were shined, so they had to have some kind of leather uppers.”

“Keeps his weapons polished.”

He winked again, but it was more of a twitch.

“What else do the propellerheads say?”

“They’re all excited about examining the reverse side of the victim’s T-shirt, but you know, that’s what gets them off.”

“Gets their rotors turning.”

“The inside of the T-shirt might retain skin cells that could be enhanced to show more of the shoe print,” I explained to Kelsey.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m still lost. When you said—”

Rick ignored her. “All of that’s a good evidentiary base.” He snuck a look at his watch. There had been an abduction of a minor to Iran that morning. “What was Juliana able to tell you about the offender? Anything about the method of approach? How hostile is this guy?” I shook my head. “She’s still in shock. I know there’s more, but her response was guarded.”

“I don’t like it,” Rick said sharply. “If this is a serial rapist, he’s going to repeat.”

“The nurse was an obstacle,” I muttered, hating myself for the lame excuse. Meanwhile, Kelsey was clearing her throat and fidgeting as if anxious to be called upon.

“When’s your next interview with the victim?”

“Thought I’d give it a couple of days.”

Kelsey was raising her hand.

Rick: “We need her narrative,” putting stuff in his briefcase. “Sooner rather than later.”

“Can I talk to Juliana?” Kelsey was standing now. “I have experience treating battered women. I know the victim’s perspective.”

“Up to the case agent.”

It was a soft toss, meant to ease my humiliation. Working like this is intimate. You throw out ideas, you have to trust. Alone, his irritation about not yet having Juliana’s statement would have been part of the normal give and take; but there was Kelsey, making notes.

“I think it’s a bad idea. Juliana has already formed a bond with me.”

“A bond,” objected Kelsey, “is not the same as an empathetic relationship.”

“I am not her shrink and neither are you, and if you think that’s what it’s about, you’ve got the wrong idea of what it means to be a federal agent.”

“That’s a somewhat dated view.”

“Dated?”

It hung there like spit on a window.

Rick: “Is the victim seeing a counselor at the Rape Treatment Center?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He snapped the briefcase. “I hope this was useful, Kelsey. I’ve got to get to the Iranian consulate.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Kelsey said when he had gone. “I thought we could work together. I’m only trying to share my expertise.”

We were standing in the outer office.

“Share this.”

I didn’t say it softly enough or turn away fast enough for Kelsey not to see that I had (unconsciously) made an obscene gesture indicating that if I had been endowed with a penis, it would right now be (symbolically) jerking off in her face.

She saw it, and I saw that she saw it.

“It’s okay,” Kelsey said, subdued. “It’s been a long, hard week and everybody’s—” She touched my arm. “I won’t bug you anymore.”

Juliana could not leave the house. She would follow into the same rooms as her mother, who, for her part, was grateful to be given her baby back, to stay home and bake cookies together and lie in bed watching videos as they had when Juliana came down with pertussis in fourth grade. She sent the nanny to Laurel West for the homework assignments — because Juliana would sob uncontrollably if Lynn were out of her sight — gently reminding her daughter that she still had to keep up in her work because colleges didn’t want to see slipping grades.

Juliana was having trouble swallowing. The family would sit down to dinner, expectant, and Lynn would put a plate of homemade lasagna airy with fresh oregano, just for Juliana’s pleasure, just to make it special, in front of the girl who would gag, push away from the table in a fit of red-faced choking, rush to stick her head out the back door and suck cool air, panicking her mom and dad as if she did have the whooping cough, ruining their hope.

The bruising had reduced to traces of ocher and the scans of her neck had come back negative for swelling or fracture. Soon she was being served just broth or a protein shake, and then she didn’t want to come to the table at all; and nobody mentioned her when she wasn’t there, the little sister not unhappy to have the parents all to herself, detailing the ins and outs of nine-year-old friendships with indignant amazement. And maybe it was a relief not to have to extend one’s patience throughout dinner, too, have a little break, a glass of wine — but why, reasoned Lynn, continue to cook these elaborate dinners at all if Juliana wasn’t able to participate? Spending the whole day in the kitchen wasn’t helping one iota, so they began to let the younger sister eat hot dogs and macaroni in front of the TV while Mom and Dad did takeout chicken, whenever, sometimes ten o’clock at night, wondering if there would always be this numbness, it had to be from sleep deprivation, their fifteen-year-old having nightmares, climbing into their bed in the dead zone of the night.

I offered family counseling at the Bureau’s expense. They said maybe.

I had to sit with Rick’s frustration because there was just no way in.

Kelsey Owen is going to have your ass,” Mike Donnato warned.

“What is she?” asked Barbara Sullivan, “his new flavor of the week?”

“Oh, he’s not sleeping with her,” Mike said wisely. “You know, Galloway’s in psychoanalysis—”

“No way.”

“That’s what I heard. Six in the morning. Four days a week.”

“How come he’s still depressed?”

“Wouldn’t you be, if you had his job? He’s a new convert to psychotherapy and I think, at the moment, he really believes it’s the Holy Grail. Kelsey’s an opportunist, and Ana is one big happy dope—”

“The golden retriever of agents.”

“Right, so it all works out. At least do something smart, Ana. When you’re close to an arrest, call the deputy DA, Mark Rauch, bring him in the loop.”

“The guy’s a vampire.”

“He’s ambitious. He can help,” said Mike. “You leave him out, he’ll suck your blood.”

These were my buddies, trying to cheer me up.

We were lounging around Barbara’s office. The place had not improved since the baby shower. Everything was curlicue cute — juvenile picture frames with snaps of infant Deirdre, figurines of angels (Barbara collected angels, I collected trolls — what does that tell you?), a haystack of pillows needlepointed by Grandma (Kiss the Princess, The Princess Is In). The personal coffeemaker, where you used to be able to get cinnamon-flavored brew, was silent; now she drank some kind of damn tea that was supposed to give you milk.

Luckily the walls were still covered with surveillance photos of bank robberies in progress, a reminder that this remained the bank robbery coordinator’s office, even if she did pump her breasts with a monstrous machine every four hours. Now there was no more sale hopping during lunch, no three-hankie “girl movies” on a weekday night, since Barbara went home to her hungry daughter on the dot of five. Although she had not lost her baby weight, Barbara still wore prim pastel suits with a single pearl on a chain around her neck; oldest of a sprawling Irish family in Chicago, she had been like a big sister until she became a mom. Gradually our lives had grown incomprehensible, and even uninteresting, to each other.

I did not realize how much I would give up by leaving the bank robbery squad and pushing over to C-1. In the old days, before the matrix, we used to have potlucks in the conference room and Mike Donnato and I would flirt outrageously, just because we knew it could never go anywhere. He was still as attractive and elegantly turned out as when he had been my senior partner and mentor. He had a law degree from Yale and wore three-piece suits and a well-barbered graying beard, even though he lived in Simi Valley. He and Rochelle moved the family out there because they were afraid of raising kids in the city. Donnato and I had a special claim to each other. We had put in a lot of miles in a crap brown Chevrolet. Barbara and I had a special claim to each other, too. Those claims do not expire. That’s the way it is in the Bureau family.

“You’re just fried because the case isn’t moving,” Mike said.

“I haven’t had time to go swimming,” I complained. “I don’t eat lunch until four in the afternoon. Everybody’s always on me, every minute of the day. Ana! Where’s this? Ana! They never called me back! Ana! Ana! Ana! I swear, it makes you want to change your name.” “To what?”

“Fritzy.”

“What?”

“I don’t know!” I was suddenly stupid with laughter, sliding off Barbara’s couch in a spasm.

They shook their heads.

“How about Ditzy?” Mike suggested, and that really put me away.

“Oh my God.” I was slumped on the floor, wiping my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. I don’t have enough to profile the offender so my criminal investigative analysis is basically nowhere, and Rick is upset.”

“What’re you missing?” asked Mike.

Certain people make you feel uplifted just by asking a question in a certain tone. By telling you with their hazel eyes, however lined and worn, there will always be enough to share: their acceptance of you, but rarer still, the willingness to see you clearly, to pause and sit with you through it, even if it’s small.

“I can’t get the victim statement. She was traumatized to the throat. It’s like he choked her into silence.”

“Was that his ritual?”

I nodded. “We’ve got the same MO on a case in Florida. You know he’s going to do it again. If he hasn’t already a dozen times.” And for a moment we fell silent.

Mike gave me a sad smile.

I smiled back. “Don’t you bozos have a robbery to solve?”

“This is still my favorite,” Mike said, tapping the wall.

Out of two hundred or so photos, he had unswervingly picked the one taken on the robbery where Andrew and I met. It was up there as a joke, and Mike had picked it because it was the most unflattering shot imaginable. As the automatic camera kept clicking away, Andrew and I had been interviewing the managers with our backs to the lens. We looked like a pair of dodoes. He had on the pretentious motorcycle jacket and his legs were awkwardly splayed like he was getting ready for a broad jump; my trousers were wrinkled and my ass looked enormous.

“Can I take this down now?” I asked.

“You can take it down when the case is solved,” admonished Mike as he left. Well, that would never be. Most bank robberies are never cleared.

“Nobody should ever see what their hair looks like from behind,” commented Barbara soothingly.

“Do you remember this?” I tapped the photo again.

It was a devilish question, since Barbara Sullivan, whom we used to call the Human Computer, has total recall of every job on the board. That’s her gift: matching new information with cold cases.

“It was called Mission Impossible,” she rattled off, “because he came through the roof, a two-eleven silent, an early-bird job that came into our office around eight-thirty in the morning, just before the branch was opening. It was in Santa Monica—” “I remember you saying right away, ‘This stinks.’”

“Well, yeah, because it was a new player who was operating. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and when we looked at the loss, it had all indications of an inside job. Remember? He held the managers in the vault?”

“He ambushed them while they were doing opening procedures. They were toast.”

Then I recalled Andrew had trained those young managers during that bank security course he gave for the police department. When he showed up, they were so relieved to see a familiar face they fell apart in his arms.

“Definitely an inside job,” Barbara was remembering. “They cut the hinges and came down through a hatch in the roof.”

The first thing we did, Andrew and I climbed up there, through a utility room jammed with old files and air-conditioning ducts. We scaled a wooden ladder and stepped out into the fresh air, already slightly giddy from the unexpected height and the profound attraction we were simultaneously feeling.

The avenues below were lined with high spindly palms. Cars filled the dealerships and rooftop garages, cars moved at a reasonable pace through the blacktop town. Walls of high-rises blocked our view of the beach but the glittery swell of the sea rose to the farthest sight line. In the low commercial buildings — salmon, tan, lime and brick — there were tiny enclaves of calm: a hammock on a patio, miniature umbrella tables.

“Had a jumper over there the other day.” Andrew had indicated a shorefront hotel. “A woman takes a room, jumps out the window. Turns out, five years ago to the day, her daughter jumped from that same room.”

Andrew was simply saying it, in a tone that knew burglars who crapped on kitchen tables, grandfathers who molested their granddaughters, suicides who cut off their own testicles, killers who strangled pregnant women with electric cords or murdered their girlfriends with table legs, kerosene or barbecue forks; a tone that comes of shaking the cockroaches out of your clothes before you enter your house at night, that knows there is no such thing as the bottom, knows there is suffering and concedes to all of it.

But doesn’t jump.

That’s what drew me to him. He knew things, and saw things, and had fashioned a way for himself to keep on looking at them, because he wanted to help. On one of our first dates, he took me to an Al-Anon meeting (his adoptive father had been an alcoholic) — not the meeting he regularly attended, because that was private to him, but a different one, in the back room of a deli, so I could see what he was about and the road he had traveled, and when we all held hands at the end and said the Serenity Prayer, it was like an aphrodisiac; I was so moved by the ability of this hard man to close his eyes in a group of people, and give in to it. I only wanted more.

The light up there on top of the bank was splendid and all-encompassing, the sun doing double flips between the pastel rooftops and the glossy blue sky, and an ocean breeze flapped Andrew’s tie and parted and reparted his black hair so I could see his scalp and the dryness of his lips, and then looking became shameful because he was looking at me, too, and I didn’t know what he could or could not see but feared he could see everything — my longing, misdirection, lonesomeness and rage — and tears gathered in the corners of my eyes, but I smiled and blotted them with fingertips as if it were the wind.

“Something new just came up on that caper,” Barbara was saying thoughtfully as she contemplated the Mission Impossible photo.

Some of us can recall that Reggie Jackson hit three home runs on three swings in the final game of the 1977 World Series; Barbara Sullivan can quote the take from every heist on the wall.

“They recovered a ski mask.”

“A ski mask?”

“The guy wore a ski mask, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, they found it — a janitor found it — kicked behind some boxes. About two months ago.”

“That branch was robbed half a dozen times,” I said. “Could belong to anyone.”

“But Mission Impossible went in through a door in the roof.” Barbara had moved to the computer. “Used a Makita drill with a diamond blade, like a knife through butter.”

“You’re amazing.”

“Then,” said Barbara, laughing at the audacity, “he climbs down a ladder to a utility room, goes out to the second-floor employee lounge and sits up there for a couple of hours watching TV until the bank opens. Life is good.” It summoned up the smell of enclosed waxy floors that had greeted Andrew and me when we cautiously entered the lounge — empty except for a TV set on a dusty Art Deco coffee table — and a stench I first made as sweat that turned out to be the dead meat aroma left by the McDonald’s the bandit ate for breakfast.

“The ski mask was found in the utility room where the ladder was, where you go up to the roof.” Barbara nodded toward the information on the screen. “Black nylon, standard-issue army surplus store.”

“You know this same guy, Detective Berringer, caught the Santa Monica kidnapping?” I said tapping the photo insistently. “We’re working together again, how funny is that?”

“How funny is that?” She had instantly picked up on my tone.

That was the devilish part. I had to tell someone. I wanted her to know. This is how we give ourselves away.

“We’re going out.”

“You’re going out with a detective?”

I nodded.

“On a case you’re both working?”

I nodded again.

Barbara, the Irish girl, said, “Oy vey.”

“Thanks for reserving judgment.”

“I’m not passing judgment. He looks pretty cute from the rear.”

“He’s hot.”

“Divorced?”

“Twice.”

“So when do I meet him?”

“Soon. Maybe. I hope. Things are a little shaky right now. But they can get better.”

Barbara was nodding, absently fingering a picture of Deirdre. Up, down, on, off. It wasn’t her game anymore.

“Tell him about the ski mask. His case, he should know.”

“I will,” I said, and forgot about it.

Ten

Since the night she walked out of the fog, we had been monitoring the use of Juliana’s home computer, thinking the suspect might try to contact her again. Or maybe in her personal communications she would reveal some sliver of the attack that had surfaced from memory. Juliana (JMM3) spent hours online, mostly in chat rooms that seemed to attract local kids. The following transcript, posted on Rapid Start, got my attention:

FD-823 (Rev. 8-26-97)

RAPID START

INFORMATION CONTROL

Case ID: 446-702-9977 The Santa Monica Kidnapping

Control

Number: 5201 Priority: Immediate

Classification: Sensitive Source: Internet Chat Room

Event time: 11:35 PM

Method of contact: Monitoring of personal computer belonging to victim, Juliana Meyer-Murphy

Prepared by: Diaz, Ramon

Component/Agency: Tech support, FBI

Transcript attached.

* * *

JMM3@aol.com 11:35 PM

YOU ARE IN CHAT ROOM TOWN SQUARE

MasterMynd: i am so fucked

LiquidFlo: what’d ur mom say?

MasterMynd: grounded don’t describe it

TruHacka03: u hear what happened to ethan?

MasterMynd: what?

Truhacka03: took his car

LiquidFlo: away?

Truhacka03: yeah, fool …

BlackStar01: be that bitch

MasterMynd: where is she?

LiquidFlo: she a ho on Hollywood Blvd

OoRaver4LiveoO: shut up you don’t know shit

OoRaver4LiveoO: is she coming back 2 school?

MasterMynd: if I see her I’ll kick her face

LiquidFlo: might help she damn ugly

MasterMynd: why would someone want to fuck that?

OoRaver4LiveoO: I’m out u guys r jerks

LiquidFlo: whining bitch

XxHipHopxx: they’re gonna expel 6 kids for weed

BlackStar01: no shit!!!

XxHipHopxx: true

MasterMynd: Who?

LiquidFlo: anybody out there know?

XxHipHopxx: Stephanie, Ethan, Kristin-??

BlackStar01: Nahid?

XxHipHopxx: yeah, the towel head

MasterMynd: and she gets off?

XxHipHopxx: she told everything on everybody

MasterMynd: we shoulda done her

BlackStar01: you first

TruHacka03: ugli people should be doomed to hell. ugli people should not go out in public

JMM3: why don’t I do you all a favor and go out and kill myself?Total online activity: 1.25 hours

An hour after reading the report, I was sitting with Juliana on the floor of her room.

“I didn’t mean it. It was just to shut them up. Please don’t tell my mother, she’ll trip.”

“I had to inform your parents, Juliana.”

“That my friends hate me?”

“These are threats.” I was holding up the transcripts. “Threats to hurt you or that you would hurt yourself. We have to take them seriously.”

“Like the school doesn’t know everybody’s smoking weed? They’re not too hypocritical? Because Nahid’s father is a Saudi prince and gave like ten million dollars for the new campus, and he drives to school in a stretch Hummer limousine?” “I didn’t know they had Hummer limousines.”

She grimaced at my grown-up ignorance, looked down at her bare feet, toyed with a flower toe ring, trying to hide her face inside the cascade of hair, wavy and dark like mine. She was cleaned up and dressed in a big white shirt and capri-length tights, and the hoarseness had mostly healed, but she was jumpy, hollow-eyed behind the rainbow glasses, like someone weakened after a bout of pneumonia. If Willie John Black’s condition were a monotone of gray, Juliana’s was a chronic spiking fever. You’re okay for a moment, an hour, half a day; then it knocks you flat.

“They don’t understand,” she said quietly. “You made me.”

“What?”

“Tell.”

“We already knew about Stephanie and Ethan. Basically they confessed, straight out. We got a warrant and found the stash in Stephanie’s locker. They brought it on themselves, you have nothing to feel guilty about.” I waited. “Is it hard at school?” She nodded silently.

“Kids say things about the attack? What do they say?”

“Mostly rude questions.” Her eyes rose warily. “Are you going to arrest those kids from the chat room?”

“We are going to investigate.”

“Don’t. Please.”

“They sent you on a fool’s errand. They did not have your best interests at heart.”

“Your point is?”

“There must be other kids at school you can be friends with. Kids who are worthy of you.”

She was picking at the rose-colored carpeting as if to pull it out in tufts.

“I just want you to know,” I continued steadily, “you have our protection. Nobody is going to hurt you, okay? Take my card again and call me if anything or anyone is bothering you. We have surveillance on your family, and that isn’t going to stop until we catch the guy.” Juliana started to gag. It was as if her throat closed up on her, an anaphylactic attack based on no invasion but the air. The impulse was to throw open the windows, flush her passageways with the sweet bright world.

“Can you talk? Talk to me. Talk!”

She shook her head. Heaved. Alarmed, I thought she had deliberately swallowed something.

But she was gasping. “I’m — okay.” So there was nothing stuck, it was the breath — a living thing, according to my lifeguard friend — being murdered again and again in some cruel posttraumatic replay of the offender’s script. He hadn’t had to kill her to bring suffering to the max; the repeated assaults had damaged Juliana’s brain so that now it triggered its own gag response. This was irony, not plan. A bonus. Anything could replicate the terror. A loud noise. Violent assaultive e-mails. Her sounds were wrenching. I was helpless to stop them, her mother downstairs would be helpless, too (only knowing these attacks would pass had kept me from calling 911), and as I rocked her with my arms around her slumping shoulders, my eyes were closed, and I was listening to a random fragment of the Serenity Prayer which had drifted into my mind—“To change the things I can … And the wisdom to know the difference”—and the image kept returning of the videotape, the contractions in the lacerated walls of the vagina, how like the fisting in her throat, this tightening animal aversion of the flesh had been Juliana’s only poor defense.

She moved away and found some tissues, and we each sat rigid in a denim beanbag chair. She wheezed quietly. I sat. With this child who was not my child. In the big house north of Montana, in the generous room with the sheer white curtains — and computer and clothes, boom box and stuffed animals — and the purple light encompassed us. We were alone together in a cone of purple light.

“What is this?”

I held a get-well card signed with smiley faces, twenty names.

“From the swim team.”

“I swim, too.”

Neighbors had been leaving things, her mother told me: a flat of strawberries by the front door.

“There is good out there,” I reminded her.

“Why did this happen? I keep asking the therapist.”

“What does she say?”

Juliana’s eyes lowered. “That it’s not my fault.”

I looked up at the dense foliage of a tree outside the window. I could see it was an avocado. The fruit would fall into the narrow space between the houses.

“The man who raped you was acting out his own scenario of power and control. It was all about him. He was brutal, overpowering, clever and deeply driven to do what he did. There’s no way you could have stopped him, he had it all planned out. You survived. Because you know something, Juliana? You have a sense of yourself. You’ve been through an experience your friends cannot ever conceive of.” “That’s not right.”

“What isn’t right?”

“Ray wasn’t like that.”

She said his name.

Eleven

I expected everyone to feel the urgency I felt, the surge of momentum that comes with a major break. There would be eager questions, and relief that someone like me, 110 percent committed, was in charge. Andrew and his lieutenant would be there, pumped. Galloway and his ASACs. I was ready for us to bear down and get this guy.

I did not expect to be ambushed.

The briefing was held in our state-of-the-art emergency operations facility. A row of clocks reported the time from the Pacific to the Zulu zone. There were banks of computers, TV screens, a radio console and one-way glass through which the proceedings could be observed. A situation board ran across the front of the low-ceilinged room, a row of chairs before it, facing the troops. It was from those chairs on that platform that Rick and I would address the investigative team.

By 8 a.m., fifty agents and support personnel were grouped around the urns of coffee and cafeteria doughnuts that had been placed on the window ledge, talking shop. To the south, beach cities and teeming flats were bleached by the bandit sun like an overlit transparency. The hot cityscape seemed to leap up and attack. It hurt your eyes, even through the tinted glass.

Everyone wore sport coats or dresses; I had on the slim black pantsuit. Andrew strolled by, unshaven, the open leather jacket over a midnight blue cowboy shirt, faded jeans and boots, wearing his resentment like the shield on his belt. Nobody but Barbara knew we were going out, but I felt embarrassed where I wanted to be proud. He’d looked pretty sharp for the briefing on his turf.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Caught a homicide.”

“Isn’t this your most important case?”

“Nothing’s more important,” Andrew agreed, deadpan.

“I’ve been trying to call you.”

“I called you back,” he said.

“Once.”

We broke it off as Lieutenant Barry Loomis came over and Andrew formally introduced me for a second time to his boss, whom you also could not miss in a room of clean-shaven straight guys — he’d be the one with the thick brush mustache and Tasmanian devil tie.

“Go get ’em,” Barry urged, as if I were some kid in Little League.

Rick and I took our seats, looking out at rows of attentive faces. Andrew, center section, gave me a lazy thumbs-up, chuckled at something Barry said. Galloway, wearing a snowy white turtleneck and holding a dead cigar, was reading from a sheaf of papers on his knee.

Projected on a screen above the platform was a yellowy composite drawing, gleaned from Juliana Meyer-Murphy, of “Ray.” It didn’t tell much: Caucasian, narrow eyes and high cheekbones, thick-necked, short matted hair. Suddenly I felt loose and coasting. After sitting with Juliana on the rose-colored carpet, writing at warp speed, I had been up until two in the morning integrating what she had been able to tell me about the assault and creating a profile of the offender, deep into the marrow of a violent sexual deviant. It seemed insane to be sitting here dressed for lunch, making eyes at my boyfriend in the third row.

“But yesterday, Special Agent Grey was able to obtain the victim’s narrative, included in your packet,” Rick was saying, “which you might want to take a moment to read. Would this be a good time, Ana?”

FD-823 (Rev. 8-26-97)

RAPID START

INFORMATION CONTROL

Case ID: 446-702-9977 The Santa Monica Kidnapping

Control Number: 5231 Priority: Immediate

Classification: Sensitive Source: Juliana Meyer-Murphy (Victim)

Event time: 2:00 PM

Method of contact: Interview in victim’s home

Prepared by: Grey, Ana

Component/Agency: Kidnap and extortion squad, FBI

Event narrative:

“The first time I met Ray was on the Promenade. I went there to get jeans. I was waiting for my mom to pick me up near Wilshire and some skaters were grinding on the fountain and this guy was taking pictures. He was older. He looked regular except he had kind of long bleached hair like a rock star and he had a professional camera, so I thought he was from a skateboard magazine. They’re always shooting commercials and TV shows on the Promenade. I didn’t think about it.”

The offender was described as being in his late twenties, about six feet tall, long legs but muscular torso, possibly a weight lifter. The victim is five feet, 110 pounds. She is very young in appearance, and it is possible the offender thought she was even younger than fifteen. She described him as wearing a black sweatshirt, baggy nylon pants and boots that were shined. (See lab report: shoe print on victim’s back.)

“He asked me if it was all right to take my picture and I said, ‘What’s it for?’ And he said, ‘I just like taking pictures of pretty girls,’ which I knew was a line so I said something like, ‘Yeah, right,’ and he apologized if he offended me and went back to the skaters and told them they’d better chill before they got a ticket. ‘They bust you for skateboarding but murderers go free,’ he said. ‘Cops are idiots.’ He lit up a cigarette and told me I should never start because smoking could kill you. He said the cops were a lot cooler in England. He started telling me about London, he used to work for an English newspaper and took pictures of Sting, and I went, ‘Is that where you got that haircut?’ and he goes, ‘Yes.’ But then I started feeling nervous in case my mom saw me talking to him, so I said I had to go and walked up to Fourth Street.”

The victim estimated she encountered the offender on the Promenade three or four times over the next few weeks. Once he was feeding the pigeons. Once he was photographing a homeless man. They would have casual conversations. “I like your sunglasses,” he told her one day. “Where’d you get them?” She named the shop and he said he knew the owner. He said he could get her a deal. He never came on to her, he did not ask her name, but she felt he was her special friend, an older person who was accepting and happy to see her while she was experiencing exclusion at her new school.

On Thursday, the 23rd, the victim had gone to a commercial venue on the Promenade called Crystal Dreams, a New Age — type store, desperately looking to buy marijuana to impress the “in crowd” at school. She was rebuffed by the owner, who claims to be “antidrugs,” and felt humiliated. As she exited the store she saw the offender sitting outside on a bench. His appearance had changed. He had cut off the long hair and was sporting a buzz cut. Despite this rough-and-tumble appearance, he seemed concerned that she not put her backpack on the ground.

“He said I shouldn’t get it dirty, it was a nice backpack, and picked it up and put it between us on the bench. I told him I didn’t care if it got dirty. He asked what was wrong. ‘I’m trying to score and that girl inside is being a bitch.’ ‘You’re trying to score what?’ he asked. ‘Weed. Do you have any?’ He laughed and lit a cigarette. ‘Let me tell you something that’s going to save your life,’ and told a story about a friend of his, a girl, who shot up heroin in the neck and died in his arms. I said that wasn’t me, and he said of course it wasn’t and pulled out this album and started showing me photographs. ‘That’s you,’ he said.”

The photos were not of the victim but of girls like her. Close in age, medium in stature, long hair, white. She reported that the shots looked professional, taken in parks or on the beach or posed with cars. All the subjects were clothed.“He told me he’d seen a lot of girls and picked me out of the crowd right away. He said I could become a model, like the girls in the pictures. I shouldn’t even think about the kids in school. ‘They’re not fit to carry your purse.’ They were jealous of my talent. He used the word ‘talent.’ I was feeling better. He said he had pictures of me in the van. I said, ‘No way!’ He said yeah, he’d taken some candids and they really turned out great. The van was in a parking structure half a block away. I took my backpack and went with him. It didn’t seem like a big deal.”

The van was parked on the roof of parking structure number five. It was older, dark green, rear double doors. The victim was not able to identify the make. Most of the parking spaces were empty and there were no other pedestrians visible.

“I felt weird being alone up there with him. I was hoping someone would come out of the elevator, but I told myself that was stupid, just a reflex that gets drummed into your head. He was very polite. He went around to the driver’s side and unlocked the doors, and I climbed in on the passenger side. There was a camera bag on the front seat, so I put it on the floor.“

As soon as I was inside his whole thing changed. He yelled at me to get in the back. He scared the crap out of me just with his voice. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. Then he took out a gun. I never saw a real gun. I think I went into shock. He said, ‘Give me your money.’ I couldn’t open the zippers on the backpack fast enough, and he started screaming at me to hurry up. I started opening my wallet, the change spilled all over. ‘How much do you have?’ I said about ten dollars and my mother’s credit card for emergencies. He stuffed everything into the place where you put the CDs. He had a bunch of junk in there. Some wire, a roll of duct tape, some loose bullets and about three knives. I was totally freaked when I saw that stuff.“

He told me again to get into the back. I guess I expected some artsy thing since he was a photographer, but inside there were filthy mattresses on the floor and the windows were covered with black paper and there was like fishnet hanging. I was really, really scared. He had the gun to my head. I was crying. He said, ‘I’m going to kill you. If you do as I say, I’ll let you choose which way you die.’ I said, ‘Please don’t, please don’t,’ and said I could get a lot of money for him, but he said, ‘Take off your clothes.’ I took off my sweatshirt. I had to pull it up over my eyes, and I was sure he was going to shoot me. But then I could see him again, and he was right there looking at me, but it was like his face was a mask. He made me take off my T-shirt. I don’t wear a bra, so he started feeling my breasts. It was disgusting and it hurt. Then he told me to put my hands out, and I did, and he put these handcuffs on me and that was the worst. I felt like I was a slave. He said if I made any noise he’d kill me. He pushed me down on my back and knelt over me and unzipped his pants. I kept crying and saying, ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ but he sat on my chest, put his penis in my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe.”

The offender was not able to get an erection.“

His filthy underwear was in my face. He said, ‘Are you a virgin?’ and I couldn’t answer so he’d grab my hair and make my head nod and he said, ‘You’re not a virgin. You’ve done this before. You love it. You’re good at it. You love it. Does this do it for you?’ and make my head nod like I was a doll. He was heavy, and I couldn’t breathe, and it went on and on. I could not believe this was happening on the roof of the parking structure. I thought I would never get out of that van alive. It was worse than a nightmare. He kept telling me what to do, like, ‘Suck on it,’ over and over and making my head nod, or banging it against the floor, and this went on and on until finally he, I guess you’d say, ejaculated down my throat and all over my face, and I started heaving like I was going to throw up and he got off me and said, ‘Spit,’ and I spit into a filthy rag, a rag you’d wipe the engine of a car with, then he rubbed it into my face and all over my breasts. I thought at least it was over, I was coughing, but then all of a sudden he put this thing, they said it was a chain, around my neck and strangled me until I almost blacked out. He did that over and over again. It was like he held me underwater. I tried to fight, but he was too strong. All I could say was, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Finally he told me to sit up and quit crying. ‘You’re my woman now,’ he said, which struck me as so stupid I started to laugh. ‘You think that’s funny?’ he said, but he was smiling. He tucked in his shirt, and it seemed to take a long time. He fussed until the buttons of the shirt were lined up with the buckle on his pants. Then he pulled a cooler out of the netting and I thought, Oh my God, what does he have in there? but it was only sodas and sandwiches. ‘Want a Coke?’ he asked like a normal person, the person he was like on the bench. While he was busy getting it, I was looking around to escape. I remembered hearing you should never, never get into a car with them, and I knew if we drove away he’d definitely kill me. I thought if I could get to the back doors fast I could jump out, even with the handcuffs, before he turned around, but then he turned around. I was still naked on top, but also smeared with oil from the rag and disgusting stuff all over me. I felt totally filthy and degraded, but I wanted to live; so I decided to do whatever he said and try to be nice to him. I made up my mind about that. He wouldn’t let me hold the Coke. He fed it to me until I drank it all. Then he said, ‘Lie down and die.’ I felt really drunk and passed out.”

After a few minutes of silence there was body movement and a couple of sighs of disgust. Handcuffs were brought out and fiddled with.

“We believe he drugged her with Rohypnol or GHB,” I told the team. “She doesn’t remember much of the rest of the assault, but we have forensic evidence — the lab report is also in your packet — that gives an emerging picture of the scenario. The big question now is, where?” “How about who?” cracked Andrew to a couple of guffaws.

I smiled. “Hopefully this guy,” pointing to the composite.

“We are fortunate the victim was taken to a rape treatment center where the evidence was collected in a correct and timely manner and the victim was given compassionate care,” added Rick. “We all know horror stories of mishandling of evidence. For reference, see the sexual assault victim questionnaire put out by the NCAVC.” Rick, I noted, was a bit of a professor.

“Ana’s going to profile the suspect, then we’ll talk about assignments based on new evidence. She’s been up day and night on this case so I think we owe her our thanks.”

Desultory applause.

I stood, notes in hand.

“We’re looking at a power-assertive serial rapist. A man whose issues revolve around being seen as masculine. He wants people looking at him. He takes care of his body. He’s finicky about it. He doesn’t like dirt. These attacks are out of anger.

“I characterize him as a serial rapist because even if we didn’t have these hits on VICAP, which may connect him to assaults in Washington, DC, Florida and Texas, statistically there is a good possibility he has raped before. His MO shows there was a definite routine to this attack. He uses a con approach to gain trust. He dresses the part, not like a tourist. He can maybe convince a child he’s a big-deal photographer, but this guy’s just blowing smoke. Once he has the victim under his control, he has no feeling or concern for her. She becomes something nonliving, a doll, as Juliana described.” The faces were interested. Kelsey Owen was taking notes.

“Our friend Ray has elaborate fantasies of domination, which he acts out like a script. Everything has to go according to this preconceived plan. Clearly, the kidnapping and rape were well thought out. He had the van outfitted for the crime. He had his rape kit, the handcuffs and wire. He buzzed his hair. I believe he was stalking the victim, creating chance encounters, waiting for the right time. The probability is high that when we catch this guy we will find a cache of pornography or detective magazines that reinforce his fantasies. As we know, fantasies are perfect, life is not. It’s likely he will do it again and again until, in his mind, he gets it right.

“The man is of average or above-average intelligence, an ‘organized’ offender, as opposed to the disorganized lust killer, who is generally of below-average intelligence, unskilled, anxious during the crime, socially clumsy and so forth. This suspect has been employed in the field of photography, which was confirmed by the lab report. Analysis of fingernail cuts left in the vagina showed traces of grease under the nails similar to that which is used in cameras. You didn’t know cameras take grease, but they do, a very light emulsion. I doubt that he was ever in England, taking pictures of Sting, but he does have professional or semiprofessional experience. I strongly feel the photographs he showed Juliana are those of his other victims, which he took as mementos. Ray has been getting away with it, experimenting and not getting caught. All of that fits into his brazenness. And since he used more force than was necessary to control the victim during the assault — she said she was frightened just by his voice — we can conclude he is deeply compelled to do these crimes. Questions so far?” Jason Ripley raised his hand. “You used the term ‘lust killer.’ Does that mean this guy will escalate to homicide, or that he’s committed homicides in the past?”

“He’s not a lust killer, but it’s very possible that a life stress could trigger him to start killing his victims, or that he goes too far and someone dies.”

“Life stress meaning …?”

“Loss of job, death in the family, anniversary event …”

“Or if he got scared and thought we were onto him?”

“Yes, we are not ready to have this exposed. Eunice?”

“How is the victim?”

“She’s experiencing rape trauma symptoms. Afraid to leave the house. Hypervigilant — overreacts to sudden noises; for example, a leaf blower will trigger a panic attack. The forced oral copulation produced an unconscious reflex where now she can’t swallow. You know the story. This is going to take a while.” “Ana, do you think she escaped, or that he let her go?”

“He could have turned her loose. He’s angry at something that wounded him in the past, right? So I think the message is, You’re going to have to live with this, just like I did. Your life will be like mine. The point is, people, we have a sadistic serial rapist operating in our area.” Rick wanted to know the results of the liaison with law enforcement in Arizona. Just the word “Arizona” made my stomach clench. “What have you got, Detective Berringer?”

“Me?” Andrew shrugged. “Nothing.” He had not taken off the jacket. His heels were stuck out in front of him.

“We’re doing Arizona,” I said quickly. “At the SAC’s request.”

“Oh.”

“They sent us a load of sex offenders. Just starting to sort through the files.”

“If you need help, let us know,” Andrew offered with audacious sarcasm. “I think we’re familiar with the alphabet down in Santa Monica. Are we, Barry?”

Lieutenant Loomis laughed. “Maybe you are.”

I had to bypass Andrew’s resentment and call on Kelsey before Galloway started wondering. She was waving both arms like she had to stop a train.

“Just so you know,” she informed us breathlessly, ‘‘‘lust killer’ is a dated term.”

There it was again. Dated.

“How would you describe it?”

“This man is homicidal,” she said, “due to a sadistic personality disorder.”

“My way is shorter.”

Got a laugh.

“Besides that,” Kelsey insisted, “I have to disagree with a lot of what you said.”

“What Ana has presented here,” said Rick, “is based on the information we now have. That could change. Even though there are over six hundred pages in Rapid Start—”

“I know,” Kelsey said, “I’ve read them all.”

Andrew was giving me the “what an asshole” look.

But Galloway was lowering his reading glasses. “I’m curious to hear what Kelsey has to say.”

My blood pressure hit the red zone.

“First of all,” she began primly, “the offender is not a power-assertive rapist.”

“He’s not.”

“Definitely not.”

People were turning in their seats to watch her with a mix of skepticism and bemusement. Most were ready for the meeting to end.

“He has a sadistic personality disorder, which means the purpose of his infliction of cruelty is not to become sexually aroused, but to cause physical and psychological pain—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted, “but sadistic rapists often do need to inflict pain in order to become aroused. Sex and torture of the victim are fused for them.”

“This attack,” she countered, “seems to fit the profile of a sadistic rape. It was calculated. He bound and humiliated her—”

“Yes, out of rage.”

“No.” Kelsey lifted her chin. “It was punishment. It was about pain. The more it went on, the more powerful he felt. As a trained psychologist, I need to say that we’re talking two fundamentally different personality structures.” “Believe me, I’m aware—”

“Well it makes a significant difference as to what he will do next.”

I had to take a breath. I had to take two. I was really, really holding back from taking her apart. But the words that came flying at me—“respect,” “experience,” “snotty little upstart”—had nothing to do with the argument at hand. We were discussing anger, after all, and I had once pulled a phone out of the wall and thrown it across the bull pen. Things did not end well.

“Maybe Kelsey can explain what she means by ‘sadistic personality disorder,’” suggested Rick. “Many of us are unfamiliar with the concept.”

Rick long ago had earned his supervisor spurs.

Now she had license to go on for another five minutes. To me it was everything wrong with specialists coming into the Bureau as a second career. They each think their area of expertise is what’s going to crack the case, all that matters is whether they, as individuals, get points, because that was the corporate culture they came from, and they’ll argue endlessly from their one little narrow point of view. They haven’t been around long enough to get the bigger picture of what it means to be an agent.

I have noticed the more specialized you are, the more pompous.

“Okay, we’ve got two opposing points of view,” Rick said at last, “which we have to look at in terms of the best interests of this case. We have to go forward without biases on either side.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. All I knew was Kelsey had created a divide in which she, suddenly, had authority. An equal say. And she wasn’t even on the squad.

“Pardon me, but this is bullshit.” Andrew was on his feet. “Why split hairs, when it’s staring you right in the face?”

It threw everybody off. Even Eunice arched her eyebrows and folded her arms skeptically.

“You want academic theory, or how about nailing this cretin?”

I heard some handcuff ratcheting, but I was thrilled. Nobody stood up for you like that at the Bureau.

After a moment Rick composed himself and asked, “Detective Berringer, would you like to share?”

Andrew said, “This guy is former military.”

Now there was interest.

“The victim says the shoes are shined, the belt buckle has to be lined up with the buttons — what do you want, dog tags? He’s former military out of Arizona. Anybody like to place a bet?”

“Just bring me his dick,” said Barry Loomis. “In a paper bag.”

Rick didn’t like wise guys, but he couldn’t argue the logic. Former military made sense. He snapped out assignments: Cross-reference the Arizona sex offenders with military police records. Check for rape charges. Look at the photography angle. Look at the cases on VICAP with this in mind.

The meeting had gone over. We moved out quickly with not a lot of talk. The overhead projector was still running, leaving the amber image of the offender to play against the screen at the front of the emptying room.

All in all, he was having a better day than I was.

Twelve

You can’t go,” I told Andrew. “I have something funny to show you.”

After the briefing I guess I just needed a little contact, so I guided him to Barbara’s office to have a laugh over the bank robbery photograph of our butts, and everything went sideways from there.

Lieutenant Barry Loomis came, too. At first there was professional chatter amongst the four of us, the requisite cooing over Barbara’s baby pictures (she gave me the nod — the detective was hot), and it was nice after the stress of the briefing just to chill, but while we were looking at the doofy surveillance photo from the Mission Impossible caper, the ski mask came up.

“They recovered another piece of evidence, did Ana tell you?” Barbara said.

Andrew looked at me inquiringly. “No.”

“A ski mask,” I said.

“Really?”

“It was kicked under some boxes — in that janitor’s room, remember?”

“Yeah? When’d they find it?”

I shrugged. “A couple of months ago.”

“Where is it now?” Barry immediately wanted to know.

“I guess at Result Associates.”

“The lab?”

I nodded.

“Why weren’t we informed?” Barry demanded.

I have found that supervisors are supervisors, even if they wear funny ties.

“They’re a little chaotic out there,” Barbara answered. “About as organized as my garage.”

“But they notified the Bureau?”

“Somehow I do remember it coming in.”

“Barbara remembers everything.”

Troubled, Andrew had turned away and was picking at a spot on the top of his head. Suddenly he refused to meet my eyes.

“We have a problem,” Barry said, all bristly. “Obviously we are out of the loop.”

“Just call the lab, and I’m sure they’ll—”

“Because it was a bank robbery,” Andrew interrupted, terse as his boss. “The chief has made bank robberies a priority—”

“And also,” Barry cut in, “there is some sensitivity to a federal agency receiving information and not the locals.”

We all knew the name of that tune.

“Why the big secret?” Andrew asked, in a voice edged with something I had not heard before. He was still scratching at the same spot on his scalp, snowy flakes appearing on the dark blue collar of the cowboy shirt.

“I just found out.”

“You knew it was my case.”

“It’s my case, too. I’ve been kind of busy.”

I did not appreciate his big hulk hanging over me. I felt defensive, like a dog that does not like its head patted.

“If it’s such a big deal,” I snapped, “let’s open Mission Impossible up again.”

“Good idea,” soothed Barbara. “Make it a positive. I don’t believe the case was ever officially closed.”

“We’ll make it right with your chief,” I promised Andrew. To Barbara: “I don’t think Mike would mind if I jumped back in on this one,” envisioning working both cases, willing to stretch, if that would fix it.

“He’d have you back on the squad in a New York minute,” she agreed.

I was waiting for a sign from Andrew that we were still okay.

“As soon as we get a handle on this kidnap deal. All right?”

“We better go,” Barry said.

I tried again. “It’ll be fine.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Andrew said finally.

Well, that was not going to fly. Not with everything else that had been going on. I snagged him on the way out, telling Barry, “I just need Detective Berringer to sign something,” and pulled him out a service door into a cement stairwell filled with unearthly moaning, the Corridor of Winds.

“What is your problem, Andrew? You have been acting really strange.”

“Man, you fucked me up, bad.”

“I did?”

“Withholding information.”

“How can you say that? I was not withholding information—”

“It is humiliating for me not to know about something that important on my case with my supervisor standing right there.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve had other things on my mind—”

“You’re a Fed, you can drop a case with no accountability—”

“What do you mean, no accountability?”

“They can move you all over the map, to fucking Timbuktu, but I live here, I don’t need this shit.”

Suddenly his heavy fist arced the air, so forcefully that I flinched. His shout wafted seventeen floors down.

“Will you cool out?” I said. “What’s going on? You yell at me over the phone that I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job, now I embarrass you in front of your boss. I mean, what am I doing that’s so wrong?” “You’re in my way.”

I lost my balance then, as if I’d suddenly looked down those seventeen stories and realized I was standing on a ledge.

“If I’m in your way … I’m sorry … I’ll get out of your way.”

“No. Look. I’m sorry.” He took my hands, drew me into a tense embrace. My eyes were open, staring at the cinder block. When he spoke again, his voice was spent. “Got to go,” he whispered hoarsely.

I stepped back. “If I’m making you so miserable—”

“It isn’t you.”

“Then—”

“Later? Okay? Barry’s waiting.”

“Okay. Listen.” Still. The contact. “That was a good idea about the suspect’s military background. And thanks for standing up for me with Kelsey.”

It took a moment for him to remember. “That? It was just such a waste of everybody’s time.”

He hadn’t been defending me; it was just politics as usual, move the boring shit along. I found myself fighting a dull panic.

“Like your cowboy shirt,” running a finger along the decorative white edging that swirled above the pockets. “Want to go for a ride? How about tonight?”

He pulled on the handle of the metal door. A helix of wind sucked it back.

“Sure, when I get off. Around seven.”

The hair on our heads flew up in the draft.

We happened to be standing together on line in the cafeteria. It was three that afternoon and I was just getting lunch.

Galloway said, “Are you and Kelsey Owen having a personality conflict?”

“Kelsey? No, of course not.”

“I think we should pay attention to what she’s saying. She gives things an interesting twist. She’s green, but I think she’s got some good ideas.”

“Me, too.”

“So why don’t you listen to her ideas?”

“I listen.”

“Didn’t look that way.”

I couldn’t focus on how things had looked as far back as that morning. I had tried to be open, or at least appear that way, but now it was past and we had moved on to the next phase, and I was numb and dumb after ten grinding days with no sleep.

“She said you never answer her e-mail.”

“You want me to hold her hand, I’ll be happy to hold her hand. Whatever you want me to do, Robert, I’ll be happy to make you happy.”

“It’s not about me being happy.”

We were at the cashier. He could have paid for me and I could have paid for him, but that’s not the way it is.

“I’m going to work in a summer camp,” he mused. “I don’t want to be the camp director, nothing like that — I’m going to be the guy with the rake, keeping the area clean, where the kids throw stuff out of the tents.”

“You don’t think the Bureau is summer camp?”

He smiled. We walked outside, and I felt sorry for him, the way the sun burned through to the roots of his curly thinning hair. Wasn’t he hot in those turtlenecks? We were each holding our cardboard tray. I had a packaged tuna sandwich and a large black coffee, which would have zero effect. We had been heading toward the main entrance, but now he stopped.

“I’m going to take a break,” indicating the outdoor tables.

My cue. “See you later.”

But he stayed put. “You think I’m pitiful.”

“I don’t think you’re pitiful, I think you’re a great leader.”

He smiled painfully. “We’re all a team. Part of the Bureau family, and that ain’t no jive.”

We were squinting at each other against the sun.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“All right.”

About this time I had started to experience blackouts, nanoseconds of sleep that, like it or not, shut down the brain. I was fading in and out, with no defenses. After the grueling and unresolved encounter with Andrew, I could not grasp what else might possibly be expected of me. The rebuke came then, through a flickering daze.

“You were a kid once, too,” I heard Galloway say.

I went up to my pod and ate the tuna sandwich. I made some arrangements, and when they were complete, left a message on Kelsey Owen’s voice mail, reporting what I had done:

“Hi, Kelsey, it’s Ana Grey. I wanted you to know that I had a talk with the SAC about your theories, and based on my conversation with him, I have gone ahead and placed three agents on undercover assignment at different S&M bars in the Valley. Actually, one is a regular black leather bar and two are dungeons run by a dominatrix, where sadomasochists go to be punished with whips and racks, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the pathology. I think if we’re looking for a sadist, we should look where sadists hang out, don’t you?

“By the way, little lady, if you think this is your ticket to profile school, think again. There’s a code around here called not ratting each other out that even the brass catches on to. You want to tell me something, have the guts to tell me in person.

“And one more thing. I take pride in my work. It’s hard, what we do — to treat people fairly, whether they’re the good guys or not. Sitting down and interviewing the victim is one thing. But to sit down and interview a rapist, or someone who has done something that, in your past, you were a victim of yourself, that’s something else. That’s a result of time on the street.

“Not everyone can do what we do. I’m the kind of person who, when I hear the national anthem, I get all teary-eyed. It’s a feeling. Patriotism. I don’t know. But whatever that feeling is, you have it or you don’t. Like I said, I will keep you informed.”

My legs were responding only stubbornly as I passed beneath the portico of the Federal Building, not letting up in their complaints of stiffness and neglect; shoulders and neck were being just as petulant, as I had not been to the pool since the case began, but we all dragged on, discombobulated body parts trying to keep up the march. The evening was muggy and overcast, and glancing at the disinterested sky, I remembered one fragment of a dream in which an owl had put its spiky wing around me.

In the Bureau garage, four male prisoners were chained to a bench. I made them for Chinese mafia. There had been rumors of a deep cover operation about to end in a bust down in Garden Grove that involved the chief of police and a string of sex parlors owned by local Asians. This must be it.

Two of them were businessmen wearing coats and ties, two looked like delivery boys in bad seventies shirts. They were sitting down, handcuffed with arms behind their backs. The handcuffs were locked to a thick chain that ran around the bench. Two agents I recognized from the white-collar-crime squad were walking a fifth prisoner, also wearing a suit, toward the cubicle where he would be fingerprinted and photographed. It was slow going because of the ankle irons.

In the doorway of the cubicle — similar to the office where the manager of a parking lot might tally the ticket stubs — was Hugh Akron, looking like a shoe salesman eager to sell you shoes, but actually he was an English photographer who was working freelance for the Bureau. It would be his job to place the prisoners up against the wall — the most nondescript wall in the world, a little dark from head grease, a nothing piece of drywall — and snap their mug shots. He also did weddings.

A tall, spidery man pushing sixty, Hugh favored oversized blue-tinted aviator glasses and bowling-style shirts made of rayon. He had been doing this a long time and it showed, in the strong knobby forearms and curved spine that thrust the narrow head forward, in the practiced joviality of a natural-born hustler. The scams he ran out of the photo lab were legendary.

“Ana of a Thousand Days! Or should I say nights? You’re at the office late.”

“Hey,” was all I could muster.

They brought the prisoner to a box and told him to kneel. The box was covered with carpeting. I wondered if it was government policy not to stress the prisoner’s ligaments; the kneeling position kept them helpless as the handcuffs were removed. The man was talking rapidly in Chinese and one of the agents kept repeating, “Do you want a translator?” Suddenly he fell silent and bowed his head. Spellbound, I watched through the doorway as Hugh Akron inked the man’s fingertips, and one by one took possession of their uniqueness on behalf of the United States government.

The man kept his face bent toward the ground. His expression, what I could see of it, was stoic.

I stayed there and watched the whole thing: the ritual humiliation of the prisoner and its mysterious, erotic pleasure.

Andrew and I never did meet up that night. I wish I had done what I said I would do and just stayed out of his way. Instead, when he didn’t call or answer his page, I went looking for him.

The dull panic was rising.

I drove my personal vehicle, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible, to Wilshire and Third, parked in a red zone and walked by the fountain where Juliana first encountered the offender. It was clever, a dinosaur made of leaves that grew on a wire form. Water cascaded from its snout and collected in a rectangular pool. There was a dark wax stripe left by skateboarders on the edge. A toddler in a pink parka was running along it now. Undercover cops mixed heavily with the crowd.

I paged Andrew a second time, called his cell, got nothing, started to walk down the center of the mix. The sounds were clashing — a keyboard player only yards away from an Ecuadorian band of flutes and tambourines. It was a downhill stroll toward the indoor mall, a palace of dazzling consumption at the very end, during which you passed every manner of marketplace come-on — a mime spray-painted silver, portrait artists, trinket sellers, discount Tshirts off a cart, henna painters and one-man bands, a guy who would carve your fortune on a grain of rice.

We had been over this territory during the kidnapping. It was familiar ground. But the nighttime masquerade suited my mood of self-pity and longing, as I kept hands in pockets, kicking it, scanning for Willie John Black or Andrew, guessing he’d go back to his witness to corroborate what we now knew about the man with the camera from Arizona who called himself Ray.

I swerved down the alleys, asking bag ladies and parking valets if they’d seen the guy who lives on a bicycle or the big cop in the black leather jacket. Nobody knew anything. I passed the bench where we had dreamed of Amsterdam, occupied now by a balding man singing “Happy Birthday” into a cell phone.

We were apart, but we would get it back. We were not rotting meat like the M&Ms, withdrawn to opposite sides of a bleak corridor. Riding the Harley, playing golf, seven-layer bean dip and the Lakers on TV, or just falling asleep, Andrew made everything better. We were alive, we had juice. We genuinely cared for each other. What could be luckier than two buddies who had great sex with no other entanglements? This was a temporary blip. Another case, another bottom-feeding offender not about to knock us out. Hadn’t we each been stung by garbage like Ray so often that we had become immune?

I felt exhilarated, on a mission, zigzagging up Santa Monica Boulevard and down Broadway, out to the Pier and along the Palisade, maintaining a pace, cleansed in cool damp air, imagining Andrew at every turn. Then I realized it was 11:30 p.m. and I had been doing this two hours, and it had stopped being fun a while ago. The going was much less dense as I trudged up the Promenade one last time, giving up the game and stopping at the police kiosk to do the rational thing, which was to ask if other officers of the Santa Monica Police Department had seen Detective Berringer.

“Who’s looking for him?” asked a uniform behind a narrow desk. There were a couple more sitting around.

I badged him. He gave me the lookover and I wondered if rumors of our affair had reached the distant outposts. Or maybe he was just curious to see a female Fed with long frizzy hair wearing a beat-up vintage denim jacket embroidered with peace signs.

“Nope. Haven’t. Have you?”

General shaking of heads.

“I think he’s mainly doing morning shifts, am I right?”

Shrugs.

“We’re working a case together. The Santa Monica kidnapping?”

Empty stares. I decided to go home.

“Tried his mobile?”

I nodded. “He was looking for a transient named Willie John Black.”

“We know Willie,” said someone else. “The guy with the bike. Usually he’s up behind Second Street. In the alley, half a block north of Wilshire.”

I felt hopeful again. “Appreciate it very much.”

“I’ll pass it on to Detective Berringer that you were here. Got a card?”

There was nothing and nobody in the alley where the cop had told me to look. A Dumpster. Evidence of a nest — trampled cloth and flattened cardboard boxes. A man’s shirt on a wire hanger hooked to the chain-link. If this was Willie’s place, he’d taken his contraption and gone somewhere else.

A shy, stealthy figure appeared, a young Hispanic busboy dumping a bag of trash. There were no residences here, just the hind sides of office buildings and a deserted parking lot. A black-running stream issued from who knew where.

I thought about foul play.

There could be plenty.

I paused, alone, in the middle of the dark alley. Out on the street, a bus was idling. A string of European tourists ambled past.

The space inside my ears was full of pounding.

Thirteen

By the following morning we had a prime suspect, Richard (Ray) Brennan. The name had come in the night before, in a fax sent by the Tempe, Arizona, Police Department.

The fax was already posted on Rapid Start when I got to the office, sometime before 7 a.m. As Galloway would say, where else did I have to go? Normally I check personal e-mail first thing — open the curtains, crack the sliding doors, let in the marine layer, look at the boats, grab some OJ and sit down at the glass dining table and plug in — but you can access Rapid Start only from the computers at the Bureau, and stress was waking me up early, anyway. Just before dawn there would be that jolt, as if dropped on the bed from a great distance, the rapid heartbeat and the racing thoughts. The circles under my eyes had gone from puffy to charred black.

We had taken the pile of sex offenders from Arizona, isolated those who were former military, and asked local police to search their files again, using our prompts. It only took one keyword—“sadistic”—to identify Ray Brennan.

FD-823 (Rev. 8-26-97)

RAPID START

INFORMATION CONTROL

Case ID: 446-702-9977 The Santa Monica Kidnapping

Control Number: 5201 Priority: Immediate

Classification: Sensitive Source: Tempe, Ariz., Police Dept.

Event time: 2:05 AM

Method of contact: FAX

Prepared by: Conrad, Angela

Component/Agency: Tech clerk, FBI

Transcript attached.

* * *

Subject: Unknown offender/serial rapist, The Santa Monica Kidnapping

From: Sgt. D. Mader

To: Special Agent Rick Harding, Supervisor, FBILA

In response to your request to cross-reference arrests of sex offenders in the Tempe, Arizona, area going back five years, I found a couple that fit your profile, which I am faxing to you, Richard (Ray?) Brennan in particular. I personally remember this case because it was out of the ordinary. Officer Kip Ward arrested Mr. Brennan four years ago on suspicion of sadistic cruelty to farm animals after finding evidence of duck feathers and crossbows in his residence where he resided with wife and five-year-old daughter at the time. Basically, the suspect wounded three ducks in a lake in a condominium complex with a high-powered crossbow. Brennan is a former marine, which also fits your profile. He was arrested five times for assault with intent to commit rape, but the cases never went anywhere. The DA declined prosecution for lack of sufficient evidence. I ask you, how does a guy like that keep getting arrested but never prosecuted? A search warrant of the Tempe residence at the time turned up 20 semiautomatic rifles and handguns along with militia literature and pornography. When he was sixteen, an elderly neighbor called police to her home on several occasions to complain Richard Brennan was spying on her, but no charges were filed and she is deceased. Brennan skipped bail on the weapons charge and left this area. Duck feathers nailed to plywood were also found in the suspect’s home. Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Sergeant Donna Mader

I sat back and watched the tender morning light stalk Los Angeles, savoring a bite of cinnamon twist and then a sip of French roast coffee. Arizona, the military background, the rape assaults all added up like aces, but it was the wonderful way Ray Brennan had spiked some innocent ducks with a steel shaft going high velocity, then nailed the trophy feathers to some random piece of plywood, that made me know he was my guy. This was the twisted, grandiose offender I knew.

I drove against traffic to the Santa Monica Police Department. It was just before 8 a.m. I figured Andrew would be there or on his way. I cannot pretend the move was wholly case-related. I was under siege and running in crisis mode: every encounter held an equal urgency, and I was powerless to stop the stream of guidelines and commands that multiplied and split inside my head. I had a stunning piece of news to present to Andrew which might in some way justify the unsettling search from the night before. That is all I hoped for.

The dewy roofs of cars ticked by as I jogged the aisles of the crowded Civic Center parking lot, skimming for the unmarked burgundy Ford. Instead I came upon Margaret Forrester, sitting in her vehicle, pounding the steering wheel and howling with rage.

Even through the rolled-up windows you could hear it — throat-scraping screams, like an infant in pain. I have never experienced such sounds. They were what you might have heard if you had woken up in primal Africa, the first human on earth, surrounded by a jungle full of hostile, incomprehensible bellowing.

She saw me approaching and popped the door of the gold Lexus sedan.

“Look what he did to me!”

She got out and stood by the car. Her face was clear red, the way an infant’s entire body turns red when it’s yelling. The door was a barrier that stopped me cold. I was forced to look.

“What?”

She wrenched the back door open, too.

I was unable to detect any damage to the car. Except for the fading scarlet patches in her cheeks, she also appeared intact, a little tousled, the short cream-colored leather skirt and long legs in slingbacks none the worse for wear.

“What?” she mimicked. “This!”

And reached into the backseat, dragging out twenty, maybe thirty pieces of fresh dry cleaning in plastic bags, which slid to the pavement in a glimmering pile.

“I have been going there six years. Then suddenly today, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Take your dry cleaning and don’t come back!’”

“Who did?”

“Sam! The dry cleaning man! I’ve been going there six years!”

Instinct told me not to ask normal questions or offer common sense (Take your laundry somewhere else) because Margaret’s eyes were darting around like little black panicked fish, and I had the sense that whatever she had done to cause trusty old Sam to blow would prove beyond reason, anyway.

“I’m sorry that happened, Margaret.”

It was as if she had been pierced with a sharp instrument. She fairly yelped with hurt.

“I don’t want your empathy! Don’t you dare empathize with me!”

“Hey, look—”

“I’m a widow and my husband died, but that doesn’t mean you can empathize with me! Don’t you dare. I don’t want your empathy. Who the hell do you think you are?”

I put my briefcase down and said, “Let’s just pick this stuff up.”

There must have been a hundred dollars’ worth of dry cleaning billowing around, drifting slowly underneath parked cars.

“It’s like this all the time,” she complained. “When I was growing up, we had nothing. But people didn’t treat you like dirt.”

I was trying to lay the clothes on the backseat, but they kept slipping off and there were too many to hang. The Nextel was suddenly as unrelenting as she. Two calls in a row from Rick. Now the pager, too. My arms were full of sticky plastic bags.

“Can you open the trunk?”

“Nobody helps,” she said. Then: “Don’t help me!”

“Fine. Whatever you want.”

I dropped the whole pile on the ground. Now she looked at me, appalled.

“Why did you do that?”

“You said you didn’t want my help.” I bent to lift my briefcase.

“Don’t go!” She grabbed my forearm. “Please don’t go,” pleading desperately. “He’s leaving us, Ana.”

These sudden shifts were scaring me — the tossing blur of shining hair and scrabbling fingers seemed out of place and vulgar in the remorseless sun. Was this a hissing fit on a bad hormone day, or could the woman be delusional?

“Who is leaving? Not your husband.”

“No, Andrew!” she cried shakily, on the verge of tears. “Believe me, he won’t stick around while the crap hits the fan.”

“What crap?”

“He’s going up north, to Fresno.”

“Fresno?”

“The Fresno Police Department. I saw a request for a recommendation he passed on to the chief. He wants to get a job up there and — just — never come back.”

She covered her mouth with her fingertips and stared at me with a look of alarm.

What sense did this make? My first thought was, no, he would never leave his father’s house. Not quit the department this close to retirement.

“You seem awfully upset about Andrew leaving. If he’s leaving.”

And what about us moving in together?

“You don’t know,” she breathed.

Margaret’s eyes were small and wounded with an aggressive kind of deprivation. Her arms were folded and her shoulders pinched as she peered out from a nest of resentment. She was hurting and would find somebody to blame — me, the dry cleaner, Andrew. She would gather her powers and punish us all.

“There’s no way you could know,” Margaret said. “You’re not inside the department. Andrew is the greatest guy on earth, but he’s fickle, very fickle, so be forewarned. He was the exact same way with me, after my husband died. I needed the comfort, understand what I’m saying?” I did, all right.

“Andrew was the only one who really, really knew me.”

Watching her. His best buddy’s sexy and ambitious wife. Margaret had retrieved a water bottle from somewhere and was taking a drink, keeping watch on me over the glinting plastic.

“I’m not going to apologize for it. You’ll be happy to know, he dumped me, too.” She kicked at the dry cleaning. “He thinks he’s angry, but my anger is bigger than his. Ha! I am the Thunder Goddess!”

“Is this a joke?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you a joke, Margaret, or just unbelievably cruel?”

The thing I resented most was how Andrew got us to fight over him in a parking lot.

“No, it’s terribly, terribly sad. I’m sad for you because you’re going to get hurt.”

“Enough.” I gripped the briefcase. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Woman to woman? You’re not the only one on his plate. It’s that Oberbeck bitch-and-a-half, too, but that’s the way they are. Senior detectives, I love them to death, but they think they’re God’s gift.”

This was something else. Not just lunacy, but lunacy with a barbed point.

“Time-out. Are we talking about Andrew Berringer and Sylvia Oberbeck?”

“Why?” she asked, terrifyingly coy. “Who wants to know?”

I turned around and walked back to my car, making sure to grind my heels as deeply and destructively into as many of Margaret Forrester’s slithery garments as possible.

Which way — the freeway, or the streets? Where was I going? To the office. Why? To talk to Rick. Rick had called me, right? He had seen the posting on Richard Brennan and wanted to pursue the lead. It was hard work thinking these thoughts, like lifting fifty-pound boxes, stacking one on top of the other. I was in some kind of a wind tunnel. A hallway. I was doing this work of thinking, stacking up the awkward facts (Margaret was jealous, crazy, unreliable), and at the end of the hallway there was Andrew.

There was Andrew and Officer Sylvia Oberbeck, whose character became instantly revised, from sensitive first responder at the M&Ms’ to dumb jock blonde with the fake fingernails and neat French braid that I could never manage, voluptuous underneath the uniform, and canny, too; she never gave it away (neither of them did), but you knew how it worked, she was there every day in the trenches, liked drinking beer and playing pool, a working-class girl with a couple of exes, as lonely and miserable and reckless as the rest of the squad, which she was probably screwing on a regular basis.

He slept with Margaret, too? After her husband died?

Was that possible? Was I nuts?

I called him.

“What’s the matter? You sound upset. Is it about the case?”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I heard you’re going out with Sylvia Oberbeck.”

“No.”

“Tell me the truth and we can move on.”

“I’m not seeing Sylvia Oberbeck. Where did you get this information?”

“Margaret Forrester.”

“Margaret is pathological.”

“I know, but she says you’re screwing Oberbeck, and also, get this, that you slept with her when the Hat died.”

“Listen to me. Ana? Are you listening?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You’re not crying, baby.”

“Just tell me the truth.”

“Do you know what we call Margaret? The Black Widow. Do you know why? Because she killed the Hat. Might as well have. Might as well have pulled the trigger on the gun.”

“I thought it was a baseball bat.”

“Whatever! She pushed that sorry bastard into an untenable situation. And he was a really good man. Work late. Move up. Volunteer for dangerous assignments. Make money. Money, money, money. She’s a greedy lying bitch, and she doesn’t like you.” “That’s clear.”

“She’s jealous as hell because you’re the boss—”

“And sleeping with you.”

“I’m sorry it came down this way. What can I tell you? This is how she operates.”

“I don’t care how she operates, all I care about is you and me. Is that pathetic?”

“Ana—”

“I can’t talk now, I have to get back. My supervisor’s calling. We have a suspect — a guy from Arizona, five arrests for rape, no convictions, name is Ray Brennan. Former marine.”

“Bingo.”

“Your idea. Good work.”

“Feeling better?”

“No.”

“What can I do for you, baby?”

“Tell me where you were last night.”

“Chasing a Spanish guy down an alley.”

“What went down?”

“Pickpocket.”

“Where? The Promenade.”

“Yep.”

“Catch him?”

“What do you think?” Andrew said. “Sixteen years old, runs like a rabbit.”

Rick said, “It’s about your ninety-day file review.”

“I turned in my files.”

“And every one of your cases says, ‘Unaddressed work due to the Santa Monica kidnapping.’”

“Be fair, Rick, not every one.”

I had not gone into the office. After speaking with Andrew, I had been able to drive no more than a mile from the police station before pulling over in tears. Now I was parked at a meter on the Palisade above the ocean, talking robotically on the Nextel, staring through the windshield into murky space.

“Where are your communications for the past ninety days?”

“They’re in hand notes.”

“But where are they in the file?”

“Who cares? What about the fax on Brennan?”

“Deal with it, and in your spare time get this assessment up to date. By the way, what is this about you wanting to open up an old case from the bank squad?”

“Nothing. I was trying to help someone.”

“The inspectors are coming in ten days.”

I forced myself to sit there, gazing at the ocean like the rest of the midmorning unemployed sleazebag degenerates in their trashy cars. I was doing work again, although this time the thoughts came easily off the conveyor belt, greased by their own logic.

Why was Rick suddenly on this? Because he had turned on me, too.

Kelsey got to him.

Through Galloway.

She had not liked my voice mail about patriotism and the American flag. Golly gee.

A Broadway tune came tap-tap-tapping along: “And good’s bad today / And black’s white today / And day’s night today …” Something-something-“gigolo.” Was that really the next line? I laughed out loud and put the tan Crown Victoria in gear. Everything was reversed, all right! “Polarized,” I think, is the term in photography.

I did go to the Federal Building — not up to the seventeenth floor to take care of the files like a good girl, but down to the subbasement of the garage, down to Hugh Akron’s darkroom.

This was now my shadow self, the inverted Ana, passing along the bare cinder-block corridor, following clusters of pipes. Soon the noise of blowers and whining car engines had faded, and acrid film developer had replaced the moldy scent of sweat coming out of the fitness center, and there was Hugh, all bones and lankiness, slicing off the edge of a photograph with the razor-sharp arm of a paper cutter he brought down with a surgical thwack!

“Ana-stasia!” He smiled.

That English charm went a long way. Rumor was he had been a pilot in the RAF and a pioneer in aerial photography, whose counterintelligence was vital to the Normandy landing, but that would put him way past seventy and doesn’t make any sense.

I have discovered Hugh Akron knows what to include and what to make sure stays out of the picture.

He always wore a Leica, eager to snap your picture, “Just for kicks,” and it was flattering, what the hell. Weeks later you’d get a black-and-white, and there you are, standing by the filing cabinet looking very documentary. The understanding was, you slipped old Hugh ten bucks in American dollars for contributing to your memory book. You didn’t really want the print, but you were not about to throw it away. Parking tickets? Play-off games? Wedgwood china? Airline discounts cheaper than cheap? Don’t ask, don’t tell, see the Brit.

The chlorine smell was overwhelming although the actual darkroom was behind one of the other doors. The counter space where Hugh worked, to a classical music station, was empty and scrupulously white.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, tan cheeks turning an appealing pink.

“I need to run a check through the DMV.”

It used to be you could run a background check on anyone who cut you off on the freeway, but there had been so many abuses the Bureau made it a censurable act to make unauthorized use of the DMV. You are not supposed to do this. You are truly not.

Hugh moved to the computer. “Case number?”

“Left it upstairs.”

“Let’s approximate.”

He typed in something. A flute concerto playing on the boom box was blowing notes of unbelievable sweetness like bubbles drifting on the cold, still, pungent air.

“Name?”

“Sylvia Oberbeck.”

“California resident?”

“Yes.”

His long fingers danced over the keys. He had already accessed the Department of Motor Vehicles database and gone through the security check using, I surmised, not his own ID.

“Driver’s license?”

“Don’t know.”

“Vehicle registration?”

“Don’t know. But she’s an officer with the Santa Monica police.”

“That helps.”

I focused on the pleasing music. It was cold and white as a morgue in there.

“You’re looking peaked. Have you lost weight?”

“Probably.”

“Well, don’t lose any more, my love. Not on that tiny frame. What are you working on?”

He knew about the Santa Monica kidnapping because he had processed location shots of the Promenade. I said we had a good suspect who was also a photographer.

“What’s his background?”

“He knows how to use a camera. He was in the marines.”

“Check Stars and Stripes,” Hugh suggested. “Might have gone in for journalism.”

“Great idea.”

Already in progress.

Finally the printer stirred and presented the results.

“Thank you.” I folded the page into my pocket. “How’s the wedding business?”

“Lovely. Do you know Vicki Shawn and Ed Brewster, the firearms instructors? I took their nuptial picture right back there, just the other day.”

I stared at the sterile row of doors. “You mean she came down here wearing a wedding dress?”

“Well of course, what did you expect, body armor? This is what I’m really excited about, however, have I shown you?”

He scooped up the picture he had cropped and gathered a dozen like it.

“What is your professional opinion?” he wanted to know, standing back and folding his hands inside the bib of the rubber apron.

A platinum blonde with large breasts was lying tummy down on a bearskin rug, ankles crossed in the air. Another strode a hobbyhorse. Another, the old barbershop pole. It was classic cheesecake, healthy girls wearing nothing but G-strings, in soft-focus studio shots with phony stars of light in their eyes, poses so quaint they would not have offended Abraham Lincoln.

“Are the fifties coming back?”

Alarmed: “What do you mean by the fifties?” He lowered the blue aviators, peering closely at the prints. “This is the hottest thing. The Internet,” he whispered. “Hit the jackpot with this lot.”

My pits were damp. I wanted to flee.

“Hugh,” I said, and his big head jerked. “You’ve got mail.”

I left the money in an interoffice envelope.

It was odd to be on the other side of deception — I had always been the snoop, after all. But it turned out I was good at it, and in this new world of upside-down loyalties and reversed color fields, I moved with remarkable confidence, able to have several conversations with Andrew that smacked of normalcy. It is different when you know what you want. You behave like a phantom, clinging to walls and molding into corners to hear what you need to hear, coax what you have to coax. Unknown to him, our next few phone calls took on a subtle but interrogatory tone. I fairly purred with newfound interest in his preferences and found out things: He wasn’t at all sure about his birthday; he might go up to see his sister in the Bay Area. The Harley would need a new muffler. Someone he had gone to high school with just died of a heart attack. He was swamped with work. Willie John Black could not be located, which was frustrating because we were soon to get a military ID of Richard Brennan. Ross Meyer-Murphy was calling Andrew every day, as he was calling me, demanding that we “get the guy.” The department had busted Laurel West Academy wide open with an expanding drug investigation that would hit the papers any day. Andrew wasn’t even getting to the gym. The most he could manage was a drink after work at the Boatyard or breakfast at Coffee Craze in the Marina, where he knew the beach ’n’ biker regulars. That’s right near me, could we meet there? I asked, guessing the answer. Well, he didn’t really get around that often.

The address on Sylvia Oberbeck’s driver’s license was a white stucco sixties apartment building in Mar Vista with a wire sculpture of three fish and ocean waves over the front entrance. I would take the G-ride because the Barracuda would have stood out in the residential neighborhood. Still, Andrew had a sixth sense on him, which I had to take into account, so instead of parking on the street I would pull into a driveway behind somebody’s car already tucked in for the night and watch the apartment through the rearview mirror.

Sylvia Oberbeck’s balcony was the one crowded with Japanese lanterns and discarded dining room chairs, an old TV. She lived alone (no other names on the mailbox). I once observed an athletic woman arriving on a mountain bike, which she hefted onto her shoulder and carried inside. She then emerged with Officer Oberbeck, and they drove off in her Mazda. This created a short-lived lesbian fantasy.

I would stay only briefly, not vibrating with tension like the rookie on stakeout I had once been, but a lazy predator on nature’s time. I was patient, collecting information. I wanted to be immaculately prepared — get it done, if it had to be done, with one swift blow.

Sunday morning I cruised by Coffee Craze and saw them together. They were sitting at a table sharing the newspaper — she in a visor with her hair in a ponytail, he wearing shades, a warm-up jacket and sweats. He sat hunched over his food, the way he does, concentrating on sawing something on his plate, glancing at a section folded back on the table. She lay back, inside the open tent of the paper, hefty legs in black exercise tights, one foot in a dirty old running shoe up on a chair.

Nothing even barely sexy was going on, and after a few nights of unremarkable surveillance, I was beginning to feel relieved. In fact, I was prepared to have a big laugh on myself. So he had been chasing a kid on the Promenade. So they were two old friends meeting for Sunday brunch. Andrew had been ducking me, but this was not a felony.

I sipped the coffee I had brought in the G-ride, almost ready to walk across the street and clap them both on the back as if it were all a happy coincidence. I watched as they split the bill and got into Andrew’s Ford, then followed at a distance as they ambled through traffic and eventually got onto the Marina Freeway, euphoric at the thought that I was just a silly, jealous girl.

The Marina Freeway is basically an access road, a short connection between the 405 and Lincoln Boulevard. It is not well traveled, especially on a Sunday morning. You could, if you timed it right, get three to five minutes of uninterrupted cruise along a straight-ahead stretch that pretty much requires minimal concentration.

And that, apparently, was the plan, for as soon as they turned onto the Marina Freeway, Sylvia Oberbeck’s head disappeared out of sight below the front seat, into Andrew’s lap, and stayed there.

The speed of the car dropped to thirty miles per hour. It began to wobble along the slow lane.

Instantly, an uncontrollable force like a conflagration consumed both me and the car as one. I revved the engine and leaned on the horn. Sped up beside them, made Andrew swerve. He saw me. I gave him the finger. Kept honking. Accelerated. He accelerated, but he couldn’t get away. We were one on one, expert drivers going ninety miles an hour in high-performance muscle cars. I pulled behind him, kissed his bumper. Drew up side by side, then gunned it and cut him off, forcing him to skid into the breakdown lane. I could see him swearing, spinning the wheel with grim concentration. Officer Oberbeck was sitting up now.

Our cars swiveled to an uneven stop in a hot rain of pebbles. I threw my door open wide.

“Get out,” I screamed. “I know you’re screwing that bitch.”

He lowered the window half an inch.

“Will you calm down? Relax. I’m driving her home—”

“Get out!” I screamed again. “Get out of the goddamned car!”

I yanked the handle, but he had locked it.

Incredibly, I was still holding the coffee cup.

“Fuck you,” I cried and threw the hot coffee at his face. He flinched as it slung across the glass, splattering through the open crack and in his hair.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Let’s just go,” said Oberbeck. “That bitch is crazy.”

“We are talking about moving in together at the same time you’re screwing her?”

He made a move to open the door, but Oberbeck pulled him back.

“Don’t!” she said. “Just get the fuck out of here,” and hit the button so the window sealed tight.

Andrew hesitated, put the car in gear.

“Move away. I don’t want to hurt you, move away from the car.”

His voice was muffled. He let her cut him off from me, and now he was looking up, expressionless, like some red-faced lying civilian, safe behind the glass.

I picked up handfuls of gravel and pelted the departing car. I threw them and threw them and threw them and threw them until they began to slow down and float like shooting stars burning out in the empty air.

Fourteen

That night the stars were obscured by a scrim of cloud. You could see airplanes, heavy with lights, marching toward LAX, and hear their booming vibration, but the sky was just a formless haze. Lying back on a beach chair on the balcony of my apartment, I wished for the enormity of the heavens to fill my sight, leave no room for anything but misty blue; to feel nothing but the soft worked cotton of my grandmother’s quilt wrapped around my body.

It was nearly 5 a.m. No lights were on behind the drawn window drapes of the opposite bank of apartments. Pale beige drapery was standard at Tahiti Gardens, which created a pleasing unity in the ziggurat pattern of jutting rectangular balconies, dark on dark. Some had plants, some had whirligigs and wicker and cats; from my corner unit I could see hundreds of insipid variations on a theme.

I had woken up at four with absolute clarity. The clarity was that I would capture and mutilate Ray Brennan. I would hammer nails into his brain. Shoot him in the kidney so he’d remain alive while strung up by his heels and slowly skinned. Why should I let you live? I would ask, and when he tried to answer I would stuff his throat with paper towels. I didn’t care for trophies — nipples, fingers, testicles or scalp — I wanted ruined pieces hacked to bits and hacked again, nerve cells active to the twitchy end, and when it ended he would become whole and I would start again with better methods — electric shock and caustic lye — again and again because fantasies are perfect.

I was sipping Baileys Irish Cream and warmed-up milk. Across the path, in the diffuse glow of vintage-looking street lamps, thousands of sailboats huddled close, sighing gently, rocking in their berths. Alternating currents lurched within my body, pitching like the tide; first calm, then whirling violent images of revenge.

A quiet ringing stirred like the wind chimes overhead. It took a moment to understand it was the Nextel, stuck inside the pocket of my robe, muffled by layers of terry cloth and quilt. Voice mail had already been activated by the time I dug it out.

“Um, hi, um, it’s me, and I was wondering if—”

“Juliana?” I cut in, puzzled.

“Oh my God! Did I wake you up? Oh my God! I thought this was your office—”

“No, no, not at all. I always get up when it’s still dark.”

“So do I.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I just wake up.”

“How come?”

“Usually a nightmare.”

“Did you have a nightmare tonight?”

Juliana hesitated. “This is stupid.”

“Nothing is stupid. Things just happen,” I told her. “I’ve been having nightmares, too.”

“Really? That is so amazing.”

“Daytime nightmares, you know?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you do.”

There was silence. I gripped the phone, as if behind the pale beige curtains everyone else was dead and Juliana my last connection to the living world.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“Really. Nothing. I was just chilling, watching some dumb movie on TV, I don’t even know what it’s about.”

“How’s school?”

“I stopped going. I hate that school.”

“What do you do?”

“Stay home and watch TV.”

“Juliana, can I ask you something personal? Are you still seeing the therapist?”

“Yes, I’m seeing the therapist.”

“How is she?”

“She’s pretty tight.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

Then there was another silence. “So,” she ventured, “is it still dark where you are?”

“Yes. It’s dark.”

“Do you know when the sun’s going to come up?”

“Well, it’s coming. You can be sure of that. Do I know when? You mean, like, what exact time?”

Her voice had become just about inaudible. “How long.”

“Hold it. Let me look.”

She heard me getting up and panicked. “Where are you going?”

“Just getting the paper.”

“What for?”

“They have it in the paper every day. Sunup, sundown, when the moon comes out, high tide …”

With the phone still to my ear I unlocked the door and lifted the LA Times off the mat. At this hour the corridor seemed cold and unfamiliar as a hotel. I was glad to turn back to the warm stillness of the apartment.

“Here it is. The sun will rise at five-twenty-three a.m. Not so long to go.”

Juliana didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You look out of your window, and I’ll look out of my window, and we’ll see who sees the sunrise first.”

“Okay.” She seemed to come to life. “The first time we see even the tiniest drop of sun—”

“The first.”

“—it counts.”

We agreed. The smallest, faintest ray of light would count.

I stayed with Juliana until dawn, when she finally became sleepy and said she was going to bed. I wished her good night even though I was about to start my day. It would not be the last time Juliana called in the secret hours of the early morning. But instead of inputting a transcript into Rapid Start, I erased the voice mail recording and kept our conversations private; held them and treasured and stroked them like the tolerant stuffed loon.

Now a different portrait dominated the investigation. We had received the marine corps photo ID of Richard Brennan. A color copy looked out at the war room, another was pinned up on my bathroom door with inked-in donkey ears, just so I could look at the bastard every day and tell him, “We will cut your heart out.” The photograph was not dissimilar to the composite, which showed short dark hair and a strong neck. Now you could see the power in the face came from the high forehead and big jaw, which conveyed a solid, all-American arrogance, like a college football player from the fifties. You expected him to be wearing a white crew sweater. The nose was pert and the mouth compressed as if he were biding his important time — I’ll stand here and let you take my picture — while the eyes half closed in drowsy contempt, as if this world were beneath consideration. Or maybe that was just the way the flash went off.

Ray Brennan fit the profile — husky, good-looking, overconfident. With longer hair and a softer attitude you understood how he could unhinge a girl like Juliana: a diamond blade slicing through a rooftop door, a knife through butter.

Instantly my range of contact expanded like a radar field to include State College, Pennsylvania, where, according to the records, Richard (Ray) Brennan was born. My working day was taken up with faxes and phone calls to Quantico and the Philadelphia field office, trying to figure out which of the cool businesslike voices I could trust with my baby, then working to get everybody on the same page with respect to the most efficient way of obtaining information. Another timeline was begun, a trail through time, that would detail the moves of Brennan’s life — lead us west to Tempe, Arizona, through the mirror maze of his psyche, to a bench on a Promenade three blocks from the Pacific Ocean, and finish at that trailer park or ratty little house in whatever mean and shabby sprawl, where we would, inevitably, take him down.

I just can’t sleep.”

“I know, Juliana.”

“What time does the sun rise?”

“Five-forty-four. But it sets at seven-ten. The days are getting longer. What are you doing?”

“Painting my nails.”

“What color?”

“Mango Ice.”

As the identity of the prime suspect came into focus, I felt myself emerging from the emotional commotion of the kidnap to the clarity of the hunt. Every day brought exhilarating twists you knew would slam into an unexpected climax — the shocking waterfall at the end of the ride. For example, we had the stats on every 1989 dark green Dodge van registered in Arizona and California. Eliminating the owners by gender and age, there were only a dozen under thirty-five and male. Improbable? You had to believe in your own logic. You had to choose a source of power, or become immobilized. That is why, when I was ready to cash out and close the books on Andrew, I chose the Boatyard Restaurant. The prosecution made it look like I went there only to humiliate him, but logic would say the opposite: after the incident on the Marina Freeway, wasn’t it a safer bet for both of us to meet in public?

He was at the bar, drinking with Barry Loomis and a couple of cronies from the department. It was a loud, bright, old-guard kind of joint that smelled of sawdust and beer-soaked timbers, where the steaks were overrated but it didn’t matter because the waitresses were slim as trapeze artists, spinning platters of creamed spinach and onion rings at an impossible pace. I think the place must have been there forty years. They say it really was Sal Mineo who carved his name into the table at the far booth.

Andrew was a regular. No wonder he liked the timeless atmosphere, since he was always bitching and moaning about how things changed. How the new recruits, who lived in far-flung developments sometimes an hour and a half away from Santa Monica, did not subscribe to drinking after shift. Hell, they even refused to work overtime, which the veterans considered to be free money. Their work ethic sucked — they wanted to go home and have fun! To them law enforcement was a two-year gig on the way to something else, no longer “a life”—while Andrew and his contemporaries had made one deliberate choice a long time ago, and stuck to it, with what he considered to be a vanishing standard of honor.

When I came up to the bar, he was retelling the legendary story of an arrest of a bunch of drug dealers in a ludicrously bad neighborhood in Compton. The dealers lived in a house with a lot of dogs behind big gates.

“We pull up to the gate and somebody says, ‘Where the hell are the bolt cutters?’ Somebody else says, ‘The sheriff will have them.’ Well, the sheriff’s car is gone. No bolt cutters. So now we’re into Keystone Kop anarchy. Guys are hopping the fence and getting hung up on the spikes. They could have been shot. Runners are going out the back door — this is what you’re talking about when you talk about two agencies cooperating,” Andrew was saying as I approached.

His look shifted instantly from unaware to cautious. Here comes another strange and unpredictable female in my life. It broke my heart to see that on a face I had held between my hands and kissed.

“Don’t worry.” I smiled. “I’m not here to make a scene.”

“Sit down, have a drink.” He offered his bar stool, made introductions to the other detectives. There was Jaeger, who looked like a three-hundred-pound beagle made of melting lard, and a rigid African-American named Winter, both in jackets and ties. They would testify against me at the trial.

“No thanks, I just wanted to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“The nine hundred dollars.”

This was not the speech about intimacy and commitment I had rehearsed in the shower, but when it sprang out, the number seemed right, a searing response to the way in which he had reduced our lovemaking and closeness and adventure and laughter to another sum in a meaningless progression of conquests.

“Oh, okay.” He laughed. I think he was drinking scotch. “I’ll give you your nine hundred dollars.”

“Good.”

“Now will you have a drink?”

“I’ll just take a check. You can postdate it, that’s all right.”

Andrew said dismissively, “Why don’t you chill?”

Barry Loomis was leaning in. “How’s it going?” he asked. “I got the fax about this scum Brennan.”

“See?” I said sweetly. “We’re keeping you in the loop.” To Andrew: “Come on, you must be making lots of overtime.”

“This is not the time and place.” Andrew’s face was turning dark, uncomfortable with his boss so close to the heat.

“Let’s just be done with it and then I’ll go.”

“Don’t go,” said Barry, looking to make it worse, whatever it was. “The Dodgers are on.”

“You want to mail it to me?” I persisted.

“What?” Barry chortled. “The results of the test?” and clapped Andrew on the back.

Clown.

“What did you spend it on?”

“I told you,” Andrew said, “the Harley.”

Barry and I rolled our eyes at each other, both long-suffering victims of our mutual pal’s obsession.

“Ohhh,” we said in unison. “The Harley.”

Andrew shrugged stiffly. “Had to fix the muffler.”

Barry nodded sympathetically. “He had to fix the muffler.”

“I know. He treats that pile of crap better than he treats his ladies—plural.”

At this, Jaeger and Winter broke up. One of them howled, “You go, girl!”

“Look,” said Andrew, hunched even farther over the bar, “I’ll call you. We’ll work it out.”

“Really?” I did not go. “When was the last time you called me?”

Barry, teasing: “What’s the matter? Why don’t you call the lady?”

“You know what?” Andrew stammered, clamping down on the violence he must have felt pushing out of his throat. He drew out his wallet, pulled some bills, and threw them in my direction while the others started to holler and hoot.

“I’m not the whore, Andrew. I don’t go down on senior detectives on Sunday morning in a car.”

Barry was bent over double, Jaeger and Winter smirking and snorting and turning away. Andrew was appalled at this betrayal, sucker-punched by his best friend, and for a moment I was ashamed. But as the fury started to work the lines of his forehead, I held his eyes: See this? This was me when I saw you with her.

But it did not make anything even or okay, it just made me sick.

“I’ll see you,” I mumbled, and turned away.

Disoriented, I threaded through the bar crowd and in between the whirling nineteen-year-old waitresses, down the hallway, past the rest rooms, to the rear lot. I hadn’t even parked back there. I just wanted to get out fast into the humid cool night air.

“Don’t fuck with the Harley.”

Hopeful at hearing his voice, I turned with disappointment to see that Andrew had left the leather jacket inside, which meant he wasn’t following so quickly because he wanted to talk or reconcile; he really thought I’d trash his bike.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “See?”

It stood unscathed inside the chain-link.

“Where’s your car?” he demanded.

“On the street. What do you care?”

“I want to know what you’re doing back here,” he said suspiciously.

My arms raised and lowered incredulously. “What do you think? Getting out of your way. Isn’t that what you want?”

“What is this bullshit about the nine hundred dollars? You had to bring that up in there?”

I put my hand on my hip. “You going to pay me, or what?”

“Is that what it all comes down to for you, too? Money? Is that the gig with women?”

I was so angry I could hardly speak. “I don’t know, Andrew, you tell me. You’re the one who slept with the biggest gold digger of all time. After her husband dies. Very classy. I gave it to you for free. Everything! Free and clear,” I screamed suddenly, in the middle of the alley.

Andrew ripped the lid off a garbage can and tried to throw it, but it was chained and the whole damn thing fell over, lobster shells and all kinds of crap, and just as ridiculously I pointed my finger at him as if lightning could shoot from it, threatening: “Stay away from me.”

It took a long drive around the Marina just to stop trembling. I pulled into the Ralph’s and stared into the lighted mirror on the visor, wiping mascara from the blackened crevices underneath my swollen eyes. Drawn to the lights and somnambulant figures beyond the windows of the anonymous market, I took a cart and walked the dead-cold aisles. Regular, bright rows of products put me in a trance.

I had carried the bags up from the garage, unlocked the door and placed them on the counter. It was ten o’clock. I went into the bedroom to change into sweats before putting the groceries away. I had just walked into the room and turned on the light when I noticed some movement in the mirror. I turned around and there was Andrew Berringer, standing in the doorway.

Fear curled inside my gut.

“What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

“Did you ever hear of knocking?”

My first thought was that my duty weapon was in my bag where I had thrown it on the bed.

“The door was open.”

“It was not.”

My heart was racing.

“How do you think I got in here?” But then he waved the whole thing off in disgust. He saw the picture of Ray Brennan on the open bathroom door. “What is that sorry son of a bitch doing there?”

“Just to keep it alive.”

“One sick puppy.”

“Him,” I joked, “or me?”

He went into the living room and sat down on the love seat and turned on the TV. My respiration calmed. I knew this man, his smells, the baseball cap collection, each one hanging on a hook above the dark wood bureau in his father’s home, an empty bachelor shrine to his dad, in Sunset Park. He had come here to talk, he said.

“Want something to drink?”

“No thanks.” He didn’t look at me. “I need safe passage.”

“You have safe passage.”

“Okay.” He swallowed. “We both know, from everything that’s happened, that it’s time to end it. I’ll pay you back the money in installments.”

“What am I, a credit card?” I tried to keep it light because I was going to cry all over again.

“I told you I was no good in the relationship department.”

“Oberbeck I can understand. Sort of. At least she’s got tits. But Margaret Forrester?”

“Good old Margaret.” His teeth were clenched. “Always stirring the pot.”

“Tell me the truth and we’ll be clean. Look me in the eyes and tell me. Be warned: I’ll know if you’re lying. I’ve been trained.”

He looked at me. He had gotten up and was leaning against the wall near the kitchen. I was standing near the fireplace.

“I didn’t sleep with Margaret Forrester.”

He held my gaze, but that doesn’t mean a thing. The only way to quantify deception is with a polygraph machine. He knew that. It was a standoff.

“She’s a ganja head,” he added after a little while. “Gets stoned two and three times a day. It’s a ‘spiritual practice.’”

“And nobody knows this at the department?”

“Let’s not get off on Margaret.”

“She said you were applying for a job in Fresno.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Don’t you ever think of getting out?”

“Are you?”

“How the hell do I know?” Then, viciously, “The Black Widow. Drove the Hat to death. I’m telling you, she’s death.”

“Like at this point I care.”

He stood up so resolutely that tears sprang to my eyes and I cried out, “Don’t go,” like a child.

“Pride is important to me,” he said sternly. “You keep beating me up.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“In front of my supervisor, my friends — I don’t know, is this a thing you have for men?”

“I love men. Is this a thing you have about women?”

He shook his head and laughed bitterly. Another impasse.

“Pride is important to me, too.” I took a step forward. “I’m sorry about the thing in the bar, I was just so hurt—”

“You’ve got to leave me alone,” he said almost desperately.

“I want safe passage, too.”

I was pleading.

“Go ahead.”

Then I didn’t know how to say it. “You’ve changed since we started going out, but especially the past few weeks. Something’s different, something’s weighing on you and it’s not just work. I never know what you’re really thinking. You’re always holding back.” “That’s what my second ex-wife used to say.”

“Why?” I replied stupidly. “Is this a pattern?”

I wanted to prolong it, know more, have another chance — I did not want to be discarded like the others — but he was picking up his keys.

“Do me a favor. Whatever you think of her, don’t blame Sylvia Oberbeck.”

“Sylvia?”

“Sylvia’s going through a bad time.”

He should not have said her name. He should not have defended her, out loud, in my house, at that moment, to me. Like some rajah he seemed to believe all the wives and girlfriends should know the score and be grateful to be poked by him.

“What do you see in that dumb blonde jock?”

“What is it with blonde? They all want to be blonde. Can’t decide which half?” He gripped the hair at the side of my head and for a moment we were face-to-face. “Dark is good, baby. Mamacita.” Then he let go. I was beyond furious.

“My grandfather was right.”

“The racist was right?”

“Yeah, he was right when he said, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re mixed race. You can pass for white, so pass. Because when you get into a fight, the first thing your husband’s going to say is, he’ll call you a filthy little spic.’” Andrew looked hurt. “I’m not calling you a spic,” he protested. “I never use that word. That’s not what I said—”

“You’re right. You should leave.”

“I’m leaving.” He was gentle now, and soothing, as he had been with the distraught bank tellers. I had seen more sides of him than a carousel. “Just so we’re straight.”

“Straight on what?”

“What we have … is a working relationship.”

“Right,” I snorted. “I wish. Unfortunately, the Santa Monica kidnapping is not the only thing we’re working on.”

He gestured, confused. What was I talking about?

“Mission Impossible,” I replied with contempt, as if he were the dumbest fuck on earth.

“That will go away. Barry already forgot about it.”

“Not on our end. I officially reopened the case and got creamed for it, by the way.”

He had stepped toward me and we were facing each other again, only a few feet away. His hips were square, his hands hung down, deceptively relaxed.

“Why did you reopen the case?”

“To help you out, you stupid shit! You say you’re in trouble with your boss, the chief of police made it a priority, so here is me, going out of my way to go back to a case that I’m not even on anymore, in order to do something nice, because you were so upset—” “I was pissed.” His fingers flexed.

“Well, maybe we’ll know something. Close it out and be done.” I crossed my arms. “The lab is doing the DNA.”

“On what?”

“The ski mask they found.” God, when would he get it? “Maybe there’s dried saliva on the mask. Hello?”

He grabbed my collar and held it, tight enough to choke, and fairly lifted me off the ground and put his rock hard knee against my pubic bone and pummeled up and down.

“What are you doing to me?” he said.

I gasped. It was like his knee was penetrating to my bladder.

“Get out of my life. Get out of my business. Stay away from my pussy.”

He let me go, and I kicked him.

“You bitch!”

He backed up, clutching his groin.

“Get out of here!” I roared, but instead he sprang forward and grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the deep rose coffee table. The edge went into my back and my head snapped. I kept on kicking, and he backed off and was groping himself and spinning around and saying, “You bitch! You bitch!” I rolled off the coffee table. I could feel warm blood down my leg as if he had ruptured something inside. My intestines hurt and I retched. I was hunched over holding my stomach.

I had instinctively moved in front of the couch, keeping the coffee table between us.

“Stay over there,” I warned.

Andrew veered forward.

Inside the drawer of the deep rose coffee table was the Colt.32. I pulled it out and aimed the gun at Andrew.

“If you don’t leave right now I’ll shoot you.”

He looked at me with reddened eyes, leaning over, cupping his groin. The only light in the room was from the TV. He came at me. He kept coming. I fired once, wounding him in the torso.

A small-caliber round, especially with old hard-ball copper-jacketed bullets sitting in there from the time my grandfather had given me the gun, does not produce big holes. Still, I found it hard to believe he was coming at me again, but he was. I fired and he tackled me, and the shot went into the wall. We flew backwards over the coffee table and halfway onto the couch. The gun went off for the third time, hitting him in the thigh. We wrestled for control of the barrel, slippery with blood and meat. His big heavy body was on top of mine, and I saw his leg dripping blood. Then he just stood up and got off me. He walked out the front door and left it wide open.

I staggered into the kitchen. I walked around in a circle, dazed, then I thought, Where is he going? and ran down the hallway after him.

Andrew was already outside at the carport. He had one hand pressed against his rib cage and with the other he was awkwardly trying to open the door.

“What are you doing, Andy? Please stop, Andy. Andy, wait. Please let me call the paramedics—”

He never spoke. Somehow he had gotten the gun. I didn’t realize it, but I had known, disoriented in the kitchen, something was wrong because I was no longer holding the gun. Now he tossed it into the passenger seat. I was gripping the top of the driver’s door. We had a little tug-of-war, I tried to pull it open, but he was stronger and jerked it out of my hands and slammed it and drove away. The glass was streaked with blood. We must have been out there less than a minute. Nobody saw us and nobody heard the low-velocity shots over the sounds of the TV.

I went inside and locked the door to my apartment and stood there. My insides were burning. I went into the bathroom and urinated blood.

My ankle hurt. My head hurt from where it concussed against the coffee table. I came back into the living room. There was glass all over my floor. I picked up three bullet casings. I put a pad in my underwear to absorb the blood and lay down on the couch. I needed to call somebody. I lay there in a stream of blood and tears, thinking someone would come and take care of this, but nobody came.

I swept up the glass. The sun had come up by then. I crouched in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and then crawled out, clutching my gut like some primitive thing. Then I got dressed and went to work.