Good Morning, Killer

Fifteen

I went up in the elevator and got off and used my card to access the revolving entry. I passed through a smudged white door that led to the Corridor of Winds and out to the matrix. Setting the briefcase down, I took off the blazer and hung it on a wooden hanger that went on a peg beneath a brass plaque that said Special Agent Ana Grey on a square column of dark wood — a masculine touch, like the posts on a booth in a bar and grill, that marked our territories.

My personal territory that day was a region of numb, disbelieving shock. The ritualized motions of entry and claim did nothing to make it familiar. This was not a place I could have imagined, nothing I had been trained for, a scenario so extraordinary the conscious mind could not hold it all at once, but like a poor clay pot in a fiery kiln, cracked in two. I always thought of working for the FBI as a privilege to serve my community — yet here I was, sitting in my senior-rank ergonomic chair (the chair was a cheap knockoff), scheming like a criminal: You cannot appear upset. You cannot appear to have prior knowledge of what happened to Andrew.

Although I may have seemed to be scrolling through e-mail, I was frantic. My head turned. The chair swiveled. It was early, but I could not stop watching for the arrival of Rick and the troops. Would they provide safe passage — or the opposite? If they knew, they would have no choice. It would be moi kneeling down on the carpeted box in the office in the garage, hands cuffed behind my back, while Hugh Akron hovered lasciviously with the ink pad. Suddenly it seemed a spectacularly bad idea to be there. Leave.

I got as far as the bathroom.

“Put cold water on your face,” my grandfather would command, after he had made me cry. I would weep for an hour during his violent verbal tirades. I hardly remember what they were about — boys, virginity — but I would cower on the narrow bed while he stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes and ranting. If my hands weren’t clean before dinner, he would spoon dirt from a potted plant onto my plate. He was not crazy, nor a drunk. He was, as far as I can figure it, a rage-aholic, addicted to the power of his own anger. Once, when I was late coming home from a date, he surprised me at the front door with a crack across the head.

“Go. Put water on your face.”

Dismissed, I would slink off with mongrel gratitude.

Years later, I had authority and carried a gun; I had long surpassed the status my grandfather held as lieutenant in the Long Beach Police Department, but in the mirror now saw only turbulent red-faced chaos, a guilt-ridden mess for which Poppy would have only had contempt. “You messed up, stupid.” I willed the tears to stop and when they would not, smacked my own temple with the heel of my hand. I did it again, alone in the tidy rest room.

When I emerged, Barbara Sullivan was coming right at me with bright alert eyes. She had just arrived at work, loaded with shopping bags and cartons to be mailed.

“Do you believe it? Deirdre’s already outgrown her six-month stuff. I have to return all these gifts!” she sang, and swept into her office as if I had replied; as if I were not paralyzed with fear of what she might have seen in my face, macabre and chalky-looking from the powder I had hurriedly pressed over swollen eyelids and hot cheeks.

I don’t know what impression I gave. But then I had truly become my shadow self, and shadows are tricksters with canny ways of deception. So maybe Ana Grey was standing there beaming, and maybe when Ana settled back at her workstation, others registered a generous sigh of pleasure in sharing her friend’s joy.

It seemed a good idea to be looking at something. Files. I counted twelve that needed cleaning up for the ninety-day review, including extortion, an inmate who was stabbed at the Veterans Administration hospital (crime on a government reservation), threatening letters to a software company and three cases of movie stars being harassed by stalkers. The inspectors would pull a document at random and expect it to have met the standards. They would not pay attention to content, only form. The Bureau is all about standards. Standards of behavior. Standards of protocol and language and law.

I was feeling nauseous. Barbara had been, just, too carefree. She had not stopped for conversation. Not asked about the Santa Monica kidnapping, nor what was up with Andrew, not invited me for morning tea. This was not her pattern. Andrew must have told them and she knew. Everybody in the Bureau knew. They were getting ready for the takedown and they would do it here, where I was containable. Should I sit it out, or escape through the Corridor of Winds?

Another blackout was coming, and I couldn’t fight it. Instead of escape, I dozed in the chair, wondering if offenders shut down in the midst of crimes; if the Mission Impossible Bandit, at the peak of excitement, having made it through the roof and on his way, had not also been overwhelmed by a contradictory torpor; if he had not lain down and slept a while on the warm, waxed linoleum floor of the employee lounge, while the ticking minutes unlocked the vault.

The phone on my desk jerked me awake. It was Dr. Arnie from the forensic lab.

“You told me to put the pedal to the metal on the rape so we cross-referenced the chemicals in the paint flake with particles of soil found on Juliana Meyer-Murphy’s clothing. Might have something for you.”

I reached for a pad.

“She was probably taken to a post — World War Two house in a loamy area of the coast.”

“What do you mean, loamy area?”

“Well, loam is soil that’s generally a mix of sand, clay, silt and organic matter.”

“I know what loam is, it’s the area I would like more clearly defined.”

“You mean, where the house was that he took her?”

“Yes. Where the house was that he took her!”

“That would be an older residential section, not too far inland, most likely on the Pacific coast, judging from the plant material, which is mainly—”

“Arnie.” Struggling. “The Pacific coast of the United States is almost a thousand miles long.”

“You might like this better. About the shoe print on her back. Turns out to be an outsole lug pattern on a combat-style boot manufactured in New Hampshire, sometime in the past two years, sold under the name Climbers. Total order seventy-five thousand pairs. I know what you’re gonna say: Hold it, Dr. Arnie! This is what you give me? One boot in seventy-five thousand pairs that walked in an area approximately one thousand miles long, sometime in the last two years? This is what I say to you: I can reduce the possible number of boots that could have made that particular impression to six-point-two-five pairs!” Hearing nothing in reply, Dr. Arnie continued talking to himself:

“Out of seventy-five thousand pairs, they made ten thousand in size ten, for which four hand-engraved molds were needed. That would be twenty-five hundred left and twenty-five hundred right outsoles from each size-ten mold. The possible left or right outsoles sharing class characteristics of the molded outsole would therefore be twenty-five hundred …” The numbers came at me like enemy fire. They drilled holes in my head.

Where was Andrew? Had he made it to a hospital? Had he told them? Was he dead? Was that possible? Him, inert? I know what dead is. Could I have done that? What a colossal mistake, pulling that gun. What a horrible, tragic, unbearable bungle. Stupid. I messed up, all right. What did I think? He was Ray Brennan coming at me? What was I aiming for? Ray Brennan’s face on the bathroom door?

“The same pair of left and right outsoles, bearing the same crime scene impressions, will occur six hundred and twenty-five times out of ten thousand …”

I wanted to stand up and scream. An unseen hand reached around from behind and clamped itself over my mouth.

By evening of that day in hell, I had still heard nothing. No grave message from the Santa Monica Police Department. No burly pair of homicide detectives showed up for a private talk.

As an investigator, I’d had to learn patience. It was a skill I worked hard to achieve, since I have the metabolism of a hummingbird — dart here, dart there, get the gist and be gone. Now I forced myself to slow down and ask, What do I really know?

Andrew had been wounded but had gotten into his car and driven away. Our trainers tell us if you are seriously injured and you know it within fifteen seconds, you are likely to survive. It takes a lot to bleed out. Even a critical trauma can be survived if you get to an emergency room within that first golden hour, and the hospital was fifteen minutes from my apartment.

He would seek medical treatment. He would be identified.

The police would know.

It would be easy to find out: call Margaret Forrester on a ruse about the kidnapping and she would spill it, whatever it was.

Like a bad scene from a bad movie, I picked up the phone and let it drop.

Okay, call someone else over there.

Picked it up and let it drop.

I couldn’t do it. I was too afraid of knowing, although one fact was unavoidable: Andrew had driven off with my gun.

I left the office at six-thirty-five and drove home, aware of nothing until I was suddenly unlocking the front door. Nobody had been inside, which was good luck, as any rookie would have known she was walking into a crime scene.

There were glinting pieces of glass I had missed with the vacuum cleaner. Furniture was still slightly askew, and come to think of it, there were bloodstained clothes in the laundry hamper. If you missed all that, there would be a bullet hole in the white swinging door between the kitchen and the pantry, which might as well have had a huge black arrow pointing to it.

It was hopeless. All the forensics guys had to do was come in here with Luminol and the details of the struggle would fluoresce in the dark like the answer in the window of a magic eight ball. In a fit of despair I moved to the phone to turn myself in and get it over with. All I wanted was for the headache, like screws in an iron mask tightening over the facial bones, to stop.

I walked around the coffee table (more glass granules on the soles of my shoes) and sat down wearily on the couch where Andrew had thrown his weight on top of me and I had pummeled him with my legs. The absence of that struggle made me feel light-headed. But no, it was the sudden absence of him, as if he had been sucked backward out of my life as quickly as he had been rocketing forward, into the future — a home, shared; a partnership taking root. I missed his loud opinionated criticism of the Dodgers; his puppy love for the Lakers; the puffed-up hyperbole about his job (“I know all my geese are not all swans”); the way he would slice a roll the other way and butter each side and put it back together because that’s the way his dad did it; the boasting (“I hitched through Argentina and never had to pay for a hotel room”) mixed with self-deprecation (“You can pick my brain. Not much to pick”); the long, wonderful back rubs; the way he adored my body with his large sensitive hands.

As I hovered, weightless, knowledge came to me that we were too close to go out this way; that stunned awful look he’d thrown as we wrestled for the car door meant to say he was as bewildered as I at how far things had gotten out of hand. I have noticed our destinies are wound around our physical selves: Andrew was built big, big enough to absorb heavy body blows — his, and those of traumatized victims of crime he had comforted during the wearing routine of twenty years of homicide investigation. I sensed that he would take this blow, as well. If he had been sitting across from me in this mess, I know he would have felt just as disoriented, as responsible as I. Neither one of us could have told you what had been true during those scrambled seconds, but we might have said this: We cared for each other. And we shared a code.

Nobody was coming to get me because Detective Andrew Berringer had not turned me in.

I wanted it to be true. It would mean an ending of such happiness.

Lifted by the hope that he was actually protecting me, that we were still in this together, I rose from the couch and settled into the familiar depression in the rattan chair. The laptop sat on the glass table. I believed this was what Andrew was somehow telling me to do, yet logging on to the Bureau website created the most toxic self-loathing of the entire ordeal. I was planning to use classified material on detecting bloodstain evidence to cover up the crime. As it was loading, I came as close as ever to swallowing the gun. It would have made a pretty picture, with the FBI logo shining on the computer screen.

Between the supermarket and a pharmacy in the Marina I was able to get everything I needed. At a hardware emporium it cost almost a hundred bucks for wire brushes, nylon scrubs, wood putty, pine oil cleaner, garbage bags, disposable gloves and a rented rug shampooer.

There was not much blood splatter. I was able to scrub it up with ice water, cleanser and bleach, and then I put on Marvin Gaye and steamed the carpet and washed the floors. It is amazing how much dirt came up. Buckets of black water poured down the sink until the gold flecks in the floor tile winked. I scoured the coffee table and the walls. Threw the cotton bamboo cushion covers into the washing machine. Washed the sliding glass doors. Sprayed the kitchen tile a million times with mold remover, polishing it shiny with rolls of paper towels.

All this time I kept checking the clock, as if knowing the hour were reassurance that I was proceeding on course.

There were so many things to get rid of! The doormat. The vacuum cleaner bag. I unscrewed the swinging door with the bullet hole, and the hinges, loaded three bags of trash onto a disposable tarp in the trunk of the Barracuda and distributed the evidence in haphazardly chosen Dumpsters. Then I came back and sanded the marks where the hinges had been, and puttied, and sanded and puttied again. Tomorrow I would repaint the door frame.

At intervals, by the clock, I would call Andrew because there would have been another of those big black arrows pointing to the sudden halt in communication, and left a couple of messages: “Hi, it’s me, just checking in, give me a call.”

Since I could not go to a doctor without documenting my injuries, I took some old antibiotics and leftover Tylenol with codeine. There was fever and my pelvis ached. Peeing was agony. The toilet bowl went red. I waited until after midnight to sneak along the empty hallway, removing traces of the blood trail with my trusty brush and bucket. It took working until 4 a.m. to do all that housework because I was moving slowly and had to rest.

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: Culver City Police Department

Event time: 11:27 PM

Method of contact: CDVDB (California Domestic Violence Data Base)

Prepared by: Ripley, Jason

Component/Agency: Kidnap and extortion squad, FBI, Los Angeles

Event narrative:

A seventeen-year-old female calls 911 to report her mother’s boyfriend is beating up the mother. Officers find only the girl at home. Suspect she has been abused also, but she vigorously denies it and denies even making the complaint. Report attached.

CULVER CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

Culver City, California

Domestic Crime Unit

Complaint Intake

1. NAME Santos Roxy Angela

Last First Middle

2. ALIASES none

3. STREET ADDRESSES 3340 Keyes Drive Palms CA

4. RACE (check all that apply) Black White Hispanic Asian American Indian Other

5. DATE OF BIRTH 4/23/80

6. HEIGHT 5’6”

7. WEIGHT 123 pounds

8. HAIR COLOR Blond

9. OCCUPATION High school student

10. AFFILIATIONS WITH GROUP OR ORGANIZATION THAT MIGHT BE RELEVANT TO THIS CRIME? No

11. VICTIM mother, Mrs. Audrey Santos, age 35 OCCUPATION Cashier EMPLOYER Home Depot

12. OFFENDER Carl Vincent, age 30 OCCUPATION Lab Technician EMPLOYER unemployed

13. PREVIOUS ARRESTS unknown

14. TYPE OF ATTACK unknown

15. WEAPONS USED unknown

16. FREQUENCY OF ATTACKS unknown

17. HOSPITALIZATIONS unknown

Responding Officers: Stewart and Salerno

Officer’s Statement: Upon arrival at the home, the complainant denied making the 911 call that Carl Vincent, the mother’s live-in boyfriend, had attacked her mother, and instead refused to make a statement. Several broken bottles were found in kitchen garbage. Complainant denied they were result of a domestic dispute. Stated that her mother and the boyfriend were at the movies. Officers left the premises at 12:40 AM.

“Did you see this report?” asked Jason Ripley.

It was the following morning, no news of Andrew. I was sitting rigidly in the ergonomic chair, mind flip-flopping between chaos and a vacuum of black.

“What report?”

“A teenage girl in Culver City says the mother’s boyfriend is hitting the mother. Then she retracts the statement.”

I did not respond.

“You didn’t see this thing on Rapid Start, first thing this morning?” he asked incredulously. “I beat you! First time, ever.”

“I’m entitled to a late night,” said my shadow self with a leering grin.

The idea of the boss on a date seemed to embarrass the young man, and he began talking rapidly about his wife.

“Lunaria is like that, she’s a night bird, loves to party. I’m a farm boy, up with the cows.”

I nodded. I was supposed to know all the ins and outs.

“She’s still back at Princeton. Studying for the bar.”

“Right.”

“I think we’ve been together six days since I was transferred out here.”

Then I remembered: Jason had married chewing tobacco and whiskey money. His new father-in-law was CEO of some megacorporation that relocated from Illinois to Montvale, New Jersey. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar wedding had been covered by Vogue. In exchange, the family kept the girl close. Another of life’s mysteries. Jason was a shy farm kid, earnest as a mallet, but he was also no dummy, and as he handed over the printout of the report, my eyes fell with charity on the strawberry blond freckled skin below his rolled-up sleeve. If he were still an agent two or three years from now, he would also most likely be divorced.

“We might have something here,” he said of the 911.

My brain was frozen. “Why?”

“It’s within striking distance of the Promenade.”

“Mmm, twenty minutes away. With no traffic.”

“Brennan could be using an alias — Carl Vincent.”

“That’s it? That’s ‘something?’”

“No, no,” said Jason self-consciously. “I have a — theory.”

He used the word tentatively, as if he had not yet earned the right.

“Okay.”

“What if Brennan split from Arizona when the cops came after him for shooting ducks? He came here for a reason, whatever reason, we don’t know.”

“We don’t know.”

“No. But we’ll find that out.”

“Good.”

“Meanwhile,” Jason continued, “he’s a manipulator. He finds another roost. See,” he said excitedly, “here’s my theory: I think the girl is the one getting beat on.”

“Did the officers find evidence of abuse?”

“I don’t know, but I have a call in to Child and Family Services. She’s close in age to Juliana. I just think she’s protecting this fool.”

“Afraid of him?”

Jason nodded earnestly and pulled up a chair. We sat knee-to-knee, amidst cartons of files and odd discarded office debris, like a broken Venetian blind lying underneath the next desk.

“Here’s another thing. Brennan enacts his ritual to relieve some life stress, right? Well, it says here this guy is an unemployed lab technician. It could be a photo lab. Maybe he’s unemployed because he got fired.”

The young agent was leaning forward, elbows on thighs, light blue eyes fixed on mine. Suddenly I felt foolishly affected, almost teary, because of the fact that Jason Ripley once had been a ginger-haired little boy and left his mother and learned to tie a tie. That’s how whack I was.

“I think it’s worth talking to the girl,” he continued seriously.

“Convince me. Then we’ll both take a ride.”

It was a weak lead and I didn’t care what he did with it. I was feeling stoned, sleep-deprived, and the low abdominal pain was coming back. He stood uncertainly.

“Is the case still alive over at Santa Monica?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think they’ll give us someone else? Or are they out of the picture by now?”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked even more uneasy, not sure if I had been mocking him all along — if there were substance to his theory, or if he’d made a mistake in bringing the report to my attention. I let it play. This would be a little test. Either young Jason would work his butt off to prove his point about the connection between this young girl, Roxy Santos, and Ray Brennan, or he would back off and fade away. New Jersey or the stars.

“I mean,” he pressed on, “we might need someone else over at the police department because of what happened to Detective Berringer.”

Chemical material burst inside my chest.

“What happened to Detective Berringer?”

Quick. An alibi. What did I say about being late last night?

“He was shot.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think it was yesterday? Or maybe the day before?”

“How is he?”

Before Jason could answer, I began to cough. Dry throat. Closing up. Don’t retch. Breathe.

“Are you okay?”

I gulped the last of some cold, sugary coffee, wiggling my fingers to show everything was fine.

“Berringer?” I gasped.

“In the hospital,” Jason answered.

“Wow. That’s terrible. How is he?”

“I don’t know—”

“How did it happen?”

“Armed robbery.”

“No kidding.”

“He was off duty and a couple of guys just came up to him.”

“Catch the guys?”

“No.”

“How do they know it was armed robbery?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Andrew said that?”

“That’s what he said in the hospital.”

“Sorry, I don’t know why I’m smiling, there’s nothing funny about this.” I tried to suppress a giggle and look fierce. “How come nobody told me? I thought I was senior agent on this case.”

That made him nervous again.

“Sorry about that, I definitely should have come to you right away. I heard them talking in the radio room—”

“It’s okay,” stroking his arm. “Now I know.”

Now it was safe to call Lieutenant Barry Loomis.

“I can’t believe it,” I said over again.

“Things are still touch-and-go.”

“Can I see him?”

“He’s in intensive care,” said Barry. “They’re only allowing family.”

That would be his sister down from Oakland. Did Andrew say he had a brother, too? Somewhere in Florida? The euphoria that had lifted me plain off the floor at Jason’s news that Andrew was not only alive, but claiming he had been the victim of a robbery, and we were going to get through this thing, crashed. Now there were frightened family members waiting in a hospital corridor.

“You said he drove himself to the hospital.”

“He did, but he collapsed. They rushed him into surgery. One of the bullets pierced his lung.”

“Oh my God.”

“That was okay,” Barry went on, “but then he had a cardiac arrest in the ER.”

“No!” I shouted.

Barry was saying things like, “Take it easy. He’ll make it. He’s as tough as they come—”

“I’m sorry, it’s just so—”

“It’s a shock.”

“Why didn’t anybody call me?”

“At a time like this,” he said stiffly, “you tend to close ranks.”

“But he’ll pull through?”

“He’s in a coma, Ana.”

The pain in my kidneys. Everything. I was just undone.

“They don’t know,” he went on. “They’re watching him. Real close. He might have to have heart surgery later on. They found some underlying situation, I’m not exactly clear on that.”

I couldn’t speak. He let me be with it.

“You okay?”

“I’m okay,” I managed. “Thanks, Barry. So, look. Any suspects?”

“Not yet. He hasn’t been able to say a hell of a lot.”

“Did you recover the gun?”

There was a pause. “No such luck.”

“Stay in touch, okay?”

“You got it, hon.”

What’s the matter?” Barbara asked as soon as I walked into her office.

“Andrew was shot. As if you didn’t know.”

“I don’t know. How could I know?”

“Jason knows. The girls in the radio room know.”

I sank to the couch. Barbara went down on one knee, putting herself below me, as you would not to agitate a child, and asked very gently what happened. I told her about the armed robbery and intensive care but then came a round of tears no amount of head slamming was going to stop.

Soon Mike Donnato was in the room and the door was closed and the two of them were beside me on the couch; their hands were quiet on my hands, their voices low and steady.

These were professionals.

“Are you serious about this guy?” asked Mike.

“I care about him.”

“Doesn’t sound like a match made in heaven,” Barbara said.

“Well, it blows hot and cold.”

Mike: “As it were.”

Barbara smacked him. “All I can say is, Ana dear, you better know where you were that night.”

I winced. “Not funny.”

“Irish humor.”

“He’ll be all right.” Mike shifted his head so I could see the constancy in his eyes. “The bullet wounds sound like no big deal.”

“What about the heart attack?”

“Same thing happened to my uncle,” he said stalwartly. “Eighty-three years old, goes in for a hernia operation and his heart stops. Major alcoholic, so you’d think, End of story. Well, he’s in Vegas, as we speak.” “In a pickle jar, in Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” said Barbara.

“He was a good uncle to me.”

“Why? Because he took you out and got you laid when you were twelve?”

“Actually,” said Mike, “we didn’t have sex in our family.”

“You still don’t,” observed Barbara.

“That’s not entirely true.”

“They have a chameleon,” was my contribution through a swollen nose. “And the chameleon just had babies.”

“See?” said Mike.

“I think there’s a cable channel devoted to exactly that sort of thing,” Barbara replied. “Why don’t you go home, girl?”

“That would be worse.”

I never wanted to go back to that apartment again.

“Sit here,” said Mike. “I’m going to get you an iced vanilla blended.”

“Can I have one, too?” called Barbara as he left. Her phone was ringing. “Nicest man in the world.”

I knew that.

“Yes, she’s in here.” Pause. “Ana, it’s for you.” Her eyes were sober. Her whole body was sober as she moved to give me the phone. “It’s the lieutenant from the Santa Monica police.”

“I just spoke to him, two minutes ago.” Panicked. “Is it about Andrew?”

She sat down close and put her arm around me.

“Barry?” I whispered.

“Since you asked about the weapon, I thought you’d want to know. Just got word. We think we found it.”

“You found it? Where?”

“In Andy’s car.”

“In Andy’s car? How could that be?”

“I don’t know, he sure as hell didn’t shoot himself, but it’s a thirty-two, same size as the slugs.”

“Well, that’s good news.” I turned to Barbara with a madcap grin. “They recovered the gun!”

Sixteen

The automatic doors swung open, I walked into the deserted lobby, and my knees went out like rubber bands. Eight-fifteen at night is not the time to be visiting a hospital. Not when the rest of the world is washing its dishes and doing homework, families coming together after the day. Night shift in a hospital is the time for separation and good-byes, for facing the hours of darkness, in whatever bed, alone.

Bad things happen in a hospital at night. Knife wounds, sick patients taking turns for the worse, walleyed weirdos on the graveyard shift of the nursing staff. What you did not care to know during the day, you definitely do not want to know now, lost in a maze of empty corridors smelling of institutional mashed potatoes and gravy, buildings and parking structures cloaked in shadow; no escape. To run out of here screaming would put you right into the arms of the dark.

Eight-twenty-three p.m. Visiting time at the ICU would be over in seven minutes. I picked up the pace, although I did not want to see him. I did, and I didn’t. I had come late hoping at least the family members would be gone.

Two Santa Monica uniforms, obese Detective Jaeger from the Boatyard bar and a couple of other brown-suited old-timers, were standing around the nursing station with their hands in their pockets, chewing the fat in low, irreverent tones: “—Because he was stupid enough to get into a hot tub and make sexual remarks to subordinates.”

“The picture will come clear.”

“No it won’t. Not with this guy. He’s the fair-haired prince.”

“Princes don’t pick up their own droppings.”

We eyed each other until slowly my identity came into focus somewhere in Jaeger’s dog skull. An upward nod of the jowls signaled it was okay to approach the group.

“Has Andrew said anything more about the assailants?”

Jaeger shrugged. “Couple of guys in a parking lot.”

“He’s in a coma,” one of them said.

“I know.”

There was a moment of shared heartache.

“What do the docs say?”

“Not much.”

“They haven’t ruled out brain damage. He was without oxygen for some time.”

“Hopefully,” said another, “he hasn’t lost too many IQ points.”

I hesitated, looking at the door. You couldn’t see much through the glass.

“Go on in. They know when you’re there.”

I nodded but did not move.

Jaeger made eye contact and said purposely, “We appreciate you coming, Agent Grey.”

A nurse gave me a gown, and I pushed into a bright room of half humans, half machines. It was not a bad thing to have been seen here tonight by four cops, said my shadow self.

There was a curtain surrounding the bed. I parted it and looked.

He was terribly bruised, as if he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I hadn’t been prepared for that, picturing him somehow white and still as marble. But he was bruised where they had shoved an eighteen-gauge needle into his arm, where they’d pounded his chest, in the areas around the wounds, where he’d hit the floor when he fainted. Plastic tubing formed aerobatic curves above the sheet, rising from arterial lines, draining the bladder and the chest; you could see the expelled blood as it bubbled in an enclosed container.

His eyes were covered with gauze and his skin looked pasty. I touched his fingers, puffy and loosely curled. They were neither hot nor cold. The monitors that stood guard over his vital processes clicked along. Three balloons were tied to the end of the bed.

The sorrow that I felt was ferocious. It fueled the searing pain in my own abdomen. Bending over him, half in spasm, I whispered, “Oh, baby, what did we do to each other?”

I wanted to lie down beside him, kiss him, but there was no place to lie down or kiss. A respirator tube was taped over his mouth and the steel rail was up on the side of the bed.

The curtain opened. It was Margaret Forrester, dressed in black.

“He’s not going to make it,” she said.

A chill passed through me, one of those supernatural moments where you shudder at something you can’t explain.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I could ask the same question.”

“Obviously because he’s one of our own.”

“In that case, I came on behalf of the Bureau,” I replied evenly. “To show our concern.”

At least we were not going to reenact the scuffle in the parking lot over the man’s hospital bed. Still, I did not like her deep eyes on me. She was clutching a circle of twigs with rawhide strings and feathers hanging down.

“What do you have there?” I had noticed things went better when they had to do with her.

“A Native American dream catcher.” Her chest heaved in two big gulps. “So he doesn’t have … bad dreams.”

“He doesn’t know a thing,” I said darkly.

“NO!” she barked, so loudly that I flinched. Then, “Don’t you leave me!” shaking a finger at Andrew. She could cycle up and down faster than a slide whistle. Now she hung the dream catcher on a cardiac monitor, where it would no doubt be removed.

“That looks really nice there, Margaret.”

She squinted at her reflection in a metal band around the machine.

“Look at me,” grabbing her hair and parting it to the roots. “I’m getting old. Did you know Andrew and my husband were best friends? They were in a Friday night poker game together.”

“I heard.”

“Wes and I went to Victoria Island up in Vancouver together on our honeymoon and stayed in the most elegant hotel. We had afternoon tea, and went out on those pedal boats? Wes wore somebody’s white suit. Not that I thought life would always be like that … But I’ve got two young children.” She shrugged as if having two young children were suddenly a big surprise. “Wes should be standing here beside me, right now, today,” pounding the bed rail. “Today. Instead of me being a widow.” “Don’t do that.”

She was shaking the tubing, the bed.

The curtains swept open all the way and a male nurse came barging through. He was a big soft gay fellow wearing maroon scrubs, a long ponytail and three or four silver bracelets, looking somehow miscast, and peckish about having to play the role.

“Visiting hours in the ICU are now over. You’re not supposed to be in here, not with two people and not without a gown.”

Squirt bottle at the ready, he was about to do something to Andrew’s eyes.

“What’s that?” murmured Margaret.

“What’s that?” echoed the nurse, with a disdainful glance at the dream catcher.

He lifted the gauze, revealing dark purple bruises on Andrew’s lids.

“Don’t touch him!” Margaret shrieked.

“Drops,” said the nurse, showing her the bottle. “To keep his eyes from drying out?”

“Don’t hurt him!”

“I think we should go,” I said.

“Are you a relative?” he asked Margaret, over his shoulder, but she had retreated through the curtains to a chair and was drawing up her knees.

The nurse slapped the bottle down on a tray and went out of the cubicle and grabbed her wrist.

“No, dear, we are not getting comfortable, we are leaving.”

“Help him!” moaned Margaret, rocking back and forth.

“I don’t have to deal with this,” he sighed.

“Hang on,” I said and hustled outside, where Jaeger and one of the other detectives were still standing around, having snitched free coffee from the nurses’ lounge.

“We’ve got a situation.”

They looked up with alarm.

“Margaret Forrester,” I told them. “Flipping out.”

They caught the scene through the window: Margaret huddled on the chair. The nurse on the phone to security.

“We’ll take care of it,” Jaeger said, ditching the cup. “Thanks.”

As they headed into the ICU, I fled, through the warren of hallways and down three flights of stairs. I was impressed by their patience — how they had shouldered the thing without question, the way you would an offbeat family member with recurring difficulties, the causes of which you had long stopped trying to guess.

It was the third day, unbearable in its mind-numbing similarity to the last two. I had barely slept, worried about the gun. How would it fit into the robbery scenario? Where did my grandfather get it? Who’d he steal it from? Was it traceable? What about fingerprints?

Nothing happened. No second shoe dropped. Andrew’s condition remained unchanged. I was back in my pod looking a shade paler and more withdrawn, less able to imagine a successful resolution: I would get off but he would be a vegetable. He would be a vegetable and I would be convicted. He would recover but remain an invalid. He would recover and point the finger.

Jason, however, was all keyed up.

“Look at this! Look at this!” he kept saying, shaking a piece of paper in my face.

“I can’t see if it’s up my nose,” I snapped.

Jason had done his homework and discovered that Carl Vincent, the unemployed lab technician accused by the teenager, Roxy Santos, of beating her mom, owned a green 1989 Dodge van. The van was registered to the same Mar Vista address. Whether Carl Vincent could be Ray Brennan was an urgent question; even more pressing was the escalating anxiety to get out of the office.

I told Jason, “You passed,” and we left without telling Rick or giving a heads-up to Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch’s office, as Mike Donnato had advised. I did not want obstacles.

It was a quick drive to the Palms District, originally a grain-shipping center that had followed the Santa Monica railroad across flat agricultural fields. After World War II, those flatlands were developed into tracts of cheap single-family houses built for returning soldiers. Those were boom years, when the new lawns matched the crew cuts of the new dads who mowed them: young working-class vets could afford to raise a family, and every maple-lined avenue seemed to end at the utopian gates of MGM Studios.

The Santos girl and her mother lived in what used to be one of those tracts. It was still working class, but most of the 1940s standard-issue single-family cottages had been torched to make way for sixties apartment buildings on aqua stilts with carports. A Montessori school caught my eye, an oasis surrounded by tall pines. Bright plastic tugboats and picnic tables were placed around the courtyard of a graceful old Mission-style lodge. Across from the school stood one of those forties-era specimen cottages with a spindly porch and metal awnings, trash on the lawn and pigeons on the roof. It looked abandoned, and I wondered why the corner property had not sold. Something was not right: the windows had been boarded up but there was a new green AstroTurf doormat. That’s why. A recluse probably lived there, lost in dreams of dancing in the Technicolor musicals that were made just forty years ago and blocks away.

“What kind of soil do you think these houses were built on?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You grew up on a farm.”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I laughed. Jason reddened at his own joke.

“Dr. Arnie says a paint chip found in Juliana’s clothing indicates she was taken to an older house on loamy soil. It had floral wallpaper.”

We were sitting in the Crown Vic across from the Santos residence, a vintage stucco apartment building with green fiberglass balconies and giant birds-of-paradise. It was about six inches away from the adjoining structure, a shoe box on legs.

“No old flowered wallpaper in there,” said Jason restlessly.

“Mylar,” I suggested, but I don’t think he knew what that was. I observed his squirming. “Let’s get something to eat.”

A neighbor had told us the Santos family was on a church retreat up in Lake Arrowhead and would be back that night. We had been on surveillance more than four hours by then, endlessly circling the sights: a mustard-colored strip mall, junk shops, plumbing outfits and used car lots, up Overland and down Pico. We must have passed that pile of lime green and zebra-striped beanbag chairs in front of a futon store twenty-five times.

But we had located a Jack in the Box, with a Plexiglas security window through which you inserted your money and received your grub like a hamburger bank. It put another attitude on the ’hood.

“Is this where you want to be?” Jason asked.

“Jack in the Box?”

He grinned and crunched some fries. “The C-1 squad.”

“I worked my butt off to make C-1.”

“Really?”

He sounded surprised, like those broad-shouldered college kids in the fast lane who swim the fifty in less than thirty seconds. What’s the big deal?

“When I was coming up, the hottest assignment in the country was the Los Angeles bank robbery squad. I was lucky enough to start from there, but it was still a long haul.”

“I really admire the way you do your job.”

He said it forthrightly.

“Thank you.”

“I mean, you know how to negotiate the bullshit.”

“Bullshit makes the world go round.”

“When you started out, how did you prove yourself?”

“Well.” I had never considered it quite like this. “Made sure I was first through the door.”

He nodded.

“You can’t show weakness.”

“I got that.”

“Never once, or it will come back to haunt you for your whole career.”

“That’s not what they say when they talk about the Bureau family.”

“We are a Bureau family, but let it come out one time that you’re weak and see what happens. Male or female, doesn’t matter. Once it’s out there, they start looking for a pattern. Do you volunteer to go to the back door, or the front? Do you put yourself in a situation where you’re less responsible than the others? If your assignment is to be in charge of putting stuff in the evidence log — and if you say, I don’t know if I could do that—you’re finished.” I did not tell Jason, but that is what happened to Barbara Sullivan. Why they took her off the street.

His eyes were narrow behind the mirrored sunglasses.

“You spend your life in an office,” he said bitterly. “When do you get the chance?”

“Looking for a chance?”

“Looking for something,” he sighed.

I smiled empathetically and glanced at my watch. This was working out well. I had not thought about Andrew in twenty minutes.

“What do you think that thing you are looking for might be, Jason?”

At 10:48 p.m. an older green Dodge van pulled up to the apartment building. It had a dent on the left side.

“Did Juliana say the van was damaged?”

“Don’t know,” said Jason.

I was sitting up straight now, trying to get comfortable as the last of the codeine pills wore off. My eyes hurt and my back was sore, as if I had the flu.

The van sat there a minute and then a dark-complected woman got out the driver’s side. She had a skinny black ponytail and was wearing running pants and a sweatshirt. She looked like a cannonball, big in the bust with a round stomach, and she carried an oversized cup with a straw. She put her head down and worked with determination, sipping the drink as she went around and opened the rear doors.

“Call for backup!” Jason hissed, fingers twitching toward the radio.

“Not yet.” I wanted this takedown all for myself.

“Right, right. We don’t want to look like idiots.”

“Move your butts,” the woman was saying.

Two young boys and a teenage girl climbed out. One of the boys started for the apartments.

“Stay here,” called the mother.

“I’m tired.”

“So am I,” she said.

“I want to go to bed.”

“Get your sleeping bag. Help out.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Get your sleeping bag. I don’t want to say it again!”

The boy kept going toward the building.

“If you don’t get your sleeping bag right now,” said the mother, “you can sleep on the floor.”

She tossed the cup into the street and started pulling stuff out of the van.

The teenage girl was saying nothing. She had an oval face, ordinary, wore low-riding jeans and was emaciated-thin, tiny breast buds pointing through a tank top too slight for this fifty-degree night. She was holding a plastic laundry basket filled with toys and clothes, a cigarette between two fingers. She had no affect. She just waited.

“Is that someone else in the van?” I said. “On the passenger side?”

We strained to see in the greasy lamplight.

“If Brennan comes out,” I said, “I will approach him and you back me up.”

Jason waggled in the seat.

We had shifted into high alert. I was aware of the pounding of my heart. I wondered if the camouflage cave was still intact in the back of the van, if the woman was complicit, kept the kids in handcuffs on the long drive to the religious retreat.

“Roxy,” she called, sliding the doors shut, “go get your brother.”

The girl pivoted obediently on one hip.

“Come back here, cootie head,” she said lazily, “or I’ll beat your brains in.”

The little brother taunted back. “You’re ugly. You wear stupid shoes.”

“Mom,” she repeated with the same lackadaisical scorn, “he called me ugly.”

I tried to see in the shadows. Were those bruises around the girl’s neck?

The mother did not answer, nor did she attempt to discipline the son, who had ducked inside the apartment building, but heaved a knapsack over one shoulder and picked up two duffel bags. Used to defeat, to carrying the burdens.

The passenger side door of the van opened and a muscular young man climbed out.

“Go for it,” I ordered, but as we made for the door handles someone right outside my window said, “Special Agent Ana Grey?”

I jolted off the seat.

A heavyset man wearing a sport coat and tie was holding up a badge.

“Please identify yourself,” he said.

Jason was already out of the car, demanding, “Who are you?”

“Chill,” I said, looking back and forth to the van.

“Are you Special Agent Grey?” he repeated.

“Excuse me,” said Jason. “What’s the problem? We are FBI and that is very possibly our suspect getting out of the van.” He’d flipped his badge open and held it out impatiently over the roof of the car. “Are you here to help, or to screw everything up?” “Take it easy,” I told Jason. “I am Special Agent Grey. What’s the problem?”

Across the street the man, about thirty years old, wearing baggy pants and an undershirt, was peering at us nervously from the other side of the Dodge, shifting on the balls of his feet.

“Sergeant Pickett, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, special team. Agent Grey, you are under investigation for attempted murder. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please keep your hands in plain sight. Are you armed?” “What the fuck?” Jason wanted to know.

“Put your hands out the window.”

“We’re working a kidnap case,” I said. “The Santa Monica kidnapping, did they inform you of that? We are looking at a rape suspect—”

“Ana?” Jason asked, drumming the roof, twisting toward the suspect. “What is going on? I thought this guy was—”

“She’s under arrest for trying to kill her boyfriend,” said Sergeant Pickett, adding venomously, “He’s a cop.”

“You guys are nuts,” Jason was insisting. “This is Special Agent Ana Grey! She’s one of the top … the top … agents that we have.”

“We are cooperating with the FBI, so just put your little prick back in your pants. Believe me, your supervisor knows all about it.”

“There goes Brennan!”

And the kid took off, sprinting across the street to where the man had leapt a fence and disappeared.

There were more units now, doors opening, a pair of officers running after Jason.

“Tell them he’s FBI!” I shouted.

The sergeant wet his meaty lips. He had shoulders. Flat up the back of the head. You would not mistake him for a ballet dancer.

“I’m still waiting for you to put those hands out that window.”

He had a job to do.

I could not, up to that point, unclench my fingers from around the steering wheel. I could not offer up my wrists. But he would not tell those bozos they were chasing a federal agent until I did.

“Let’s not make this harder on ourselves.”

“Okay, just don’t mess up my manicure.”

I thrust both fists out the window and immediately the handcuffs ratcheted shut.

“Thomas?” he said into the radio. “This is Pickett. The suspect is secure over here, but her partner is pursuing a rape suspect—”

“—Special Agent Jason Ripley.”

“Special Agent Jason Ripley,” he repeated. “No, that’s the guy from the FBI, genius, help him out.”

An acid ball was rising up from the depths of my gut and expanding until my throat went numb.

Pickett holstered the radio. “Please get out of the car.”

The door opened and I stumbled out. The Santos family was lined up on the curb looking on with glazed expressions as if watching the greatest TV episode of all time. People in the stucco minarets had come out on their balconies. There was intermittent laughter and jeering shouts at the police action in the street.

The sergeant took the weapon from my belt and patted me down.

“We are working a case,” I repeated. “That female adolescent over there may have information—”

“I got to cuff you in the back, turn around.”

I hesitated.

He didn’t.

A sudden jerk on the upper arm twisted my back so it went into a spasm like lightning from hell. The legs went out from under me and I collapsed.

I was proned out, facedown in the gutter. My head turned to rest on a cheek and I caught sight of Jason, now running the other way, gesturing to the sheriff’s officers, who seemed to have finally gotten the picture, jacket open and tie flying as he turned in a disbelieving circle of frustration. His bewildered eyes met mine and I moaned and tried to scrabble to my knees to beg his forgiveness, I don’t know what, but the sergeant flattened me with one hard cut and my nose rebounded off the asphalt as he recuffed the hands behind my back.

A low-rider had gotten past the perimeter and I could feel the vibration in the ground of its hammering bass. Pickett leaned in close, whispering a stream of filthy brutal threats. A nova was exploding in my kidneys and I didn’t care.

Seventeen

Pickett took a corner fast. Hands cuffed, I slid helplessly along the vinyl bench seat, which stank with an animal stink like fur. We had left the helicopters behind, but the radio still bubbled with confused dispatches from scattered posses chasing the slipstream of Ray Brennan.

“Nice going on the takedown, guys.”

Neither he nor his partner would reply. After a little while I said, “My cop boyfriend came after me. Did you know that before you tried to break my arm?”

“I know that if I were you, I would not make any further statements until I saw my people,” Pickett said in a monotone.

After that we hit the freeway and there was no more talk. I watched as factories and dwellings, streetlights, cranes and billboards, roofs, palm trees and riverines of cars slipped by, passing the window of the sheriff’s car in a smear of black-and-white, a movie shot you’ve seen a thousand times, gaining momentum like a train; leaving behind ten years of work and service to an ideal, until all the constructions that had lined the road blurred into a single run-on image.

The world was lost to me.

When I saw Galloway’s and Rick’s cars parked outside the Sheriff’s Department substation, I knew the past few days of anguish in suspended animation were over — and immediately longed for them to return. We entered by a side door that opened directly into the jail.

There were no windows, of course, and when the doors shut they remained shut, leaving no airflow, so you had the sense of walking into a large overlit supply closet. It was a cramped area dominated by a sprawling desk buried beneath logbooks, printouts, overflowing wire baskets and several TV monitors rotating surveillance shots of empty corridors. The cinder-block walls were painted lemon, trimmed with industrial turquoise.

“Ma’am!” called Pickett. “We have a house guest.”

It took a moment to locate the custody assistant in the forest of rules and reminders that were curling off the walls, but there she was, a small head of dark hair parted neatly down the middle, hidden behind the desk. She looked up and smiled, a young Persian woman in a dark olive civilian uniform.

“Yes sir!” she answered, echoing the tease in the sergeant’s voice, which had implied just the opposite of what he said: Not a house. Not a guest.

We stood aside as the custody assistant used an enormous old-fashioned brass key to unlock the booking cell, an empty ten-foot square rimmed all the way around by a smooth metal bench. Pickett walked me in and removed the handcuffs.

“Want a drink of water?”

“Sure.”

There was a plastic pitcher on a ledge outside the booking cell. The custody assistant poured a cup, then I was shown to an interrogation room the size of a pea, where Galloway and Rick were waiting. The ASAC sat on the other side of a brown-grained typing table while Rick stood against the wall. On the table was a yellow pad.

It was 12:35 a.m., still early enough for the faces of my bosses to hold the contours of the day. Rick wore a windbreaker and jeans. I imagined him getting the call, strapping on the gun, leaving his wife and two young girls and driving in from Thousand Oaks at ninety. Galloway looked like he had never taken off his work clothes, dressed in a white turtleneck and houndstooth sport coat, fingering a dead cigar. Both were tense and alert.

“Hi, guys,” I mumbled, sitting down.

Pickett closed the door and the three of us were locked into the most uncomfortable space I have ever known.

“I don’t know what to say. Sorry to bring you down here.” My voice left me. “This time of night.”

“Whatever happened,” said Rick, “we know the stress you’ve been under. We’ve all been there.”

“I’m really sorry about Brennan. He got away? Clean away?”

“We’ll find him. How are you?” Galloway asked.

“Not too good. We had a fight and Andrew kneed me in the groin. I think I have a really bad bladder infection,” and winced as I finally allowed the pain to roll up.

“We’ll make sure you see a doctor.”

“Okay.”

“Have you made any statements to anybody?”

“Not really, no.”

“There will be an OPR investigation,” said Galloway. “We want you to talk to the shooting team.”

I looked up. “Will that be you, Rick?”

C-1 usually investigated agent-involved shootings.

“I don’t know. It’s a bizarre situation. Since you — since we work together.”

“We’ll get a directive from headquarters,” Galloway said smoothly.

“I’m sorry, my mind is still going a mile a minute about Brennan. We had the takedown, it wasn’t Jason’s fault, it was the situation of two agencies going in opposite directions. The Sheriff’s Department showed up and everything went bad …” Rick’s hands were behind his back and pressed against the wall at rest position. His mustache and squared-up bulk made him look like a fireman, ready to rescue you.

“Ana,” he said, “stop. You’re out of it now. We’ll follow up.”

“All right,” I said reluctantly and took a sip of water. It was cold, with ice. “What do they have?”

“Your fingerprints on the gun. The fact it was fired recently. Matching bullet wounds in Detective Berringer’s body.”

It was like being buried under truckloads of heavy dirt. First one truckload. Then another and another.

“Despite what Andrew said?”

Galloway stirred. “The armed robbery bit? Well, he was out of it at the time, he was on morphine, then he slips into a goddamn coma.”

“You sound like a prosecutor,” I said, half joking.

“That’s what you’re going to face.” Galloway inclined his head and caught me in a penetrating stare. “I wish you’d come to me first.”

I didn’t answer. Then, “How long have you known?”

Galloway looked down at the cigar. You could smell the bitter wetness, like a puddle of dead leaves.

“There have been telephone calls across the top.”

Now I stared at him, deadpan.

“Santa Monica Police Department didn’t want to embarrass us, because we could turn around someday and embarrass them, so a political decision was made. When the arrows started lining up, a discussion took place above the investigator level. Their commander called me and explained the way it was starting to look to them, how they wanted this to stay confidential, but still keep the Bureau in the loop. At that point we were all stepping pretty lightly.” “Until?”

“Well, until forensic evidence from the gun.”

“How did you know it was mine?”

Galloway looked impassive. “As I say, your name had come up.”

“From Andrew?”

“We don’t need to get into that.”

“I’d like to know.”

Galloway and Rick exchanged a look.

“Your attorney will be able to tell you,” said Rick.

I folded my arms. We had hit a wall. Now I understood why they were ready and alert. A bulletin was out for my arrest and they had been waiting for the call that my car had been located.

Galloway said, “How did you think you would get away with it?”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“You were reacting?”

“Look, guys, I would never say this to anyone else … This is really hard … but, okay, I just thought … It sounds pretty dumb now … I thought we had a lovers’ quarrel, I mean, a big lovers’ quarrel, but that at the end of the day, Andrew wasn’t going to give me up,” and sat there, slumped and miserable.

Rick’s body flinched against the wall.

“He didn’t give you up, Ana.”

“He didn’t?”

“The tip came from a female employee of the Santa Monica Police Department.”

“What’s her name?”

Before Galloway could intervene, Rick said, “Margaret Forrester.”

I laughed. I just laughed.

“She have a hard-on for you?”

I shrugged. How do you describe someone who gets herself banned from a dry cleaner?

“She’s very pretty and very crazy.”

“That could work to your advantage.”

It was hard to listen. Hard to think.

“How is Andrew doing?”

“He’s awake and talking.”

“Really? That’s fantastic!”

“Well,” said Rick, scratching his cheek, “maybe.”

“Oh come on, you think he’s going to flip? Tell me you don’t believe in true love.”

Rick just chuckled. “My impression of him was that he had a major chip … But I can see what you saw in the guy.”

“Thank you.”

After a moment Galloway said, “There are always two sides, Ana. We want to hear yours.”

“With respect, I think I need an attorney.”

“Yes, you do.”

“What attorney,” I said, “would you recommend?”

“Devon County.”

County was a former cop turned lawyer who represented law enforcement personnel, all the big high-profile cases. Police corruption. Murder.

“You must think I’m in big trouble.”

They were waiting.

“I’ll give Mr. County a call.”

“We’ll do our best to cooperate with him.”

“Thank you.”

“And get you out of here ASAP.”

“Thank you.”

“Get you a doctor.”

“Great.”

Now Galloway paused. “You know you can’t come back to work until this is resolved?”

I nodded.

“We have to take your weapon and credentials.”

“I understand.”

Galloway drew the pad closer. “Are you ready to make your statement? Want to take a break?”

I hung my head.

“I just want to apologize for whatever disgrace I have caused the Bureau.”

Galloway smiled gently. “Don’t give away the store.”

Over here,” said Pickett, when they had left. We stood before an old wooden cabinet. He pulled a slip from a drawer.

“Special handling,” he told the custody assistant. “The lady is an FBI agent.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“Special handling,” I said. “Is that good, or bad?”

Pickett didn’t answer, concentrating on the form. The pen paused.

“Any ‘observable physical oddities’?”

“Me,” I asked, “or you?”

He snorted.

“Not usually this much fun around here, is it?” I quipped.

They took my fake lizard belt, scuba watch accurate to fifty feet, amethyst ring and gold loop earrings, the leather purse and contents, minus my credentials, which had been plucked out for Galloway and Rick. They might as well have removed my spleen. I signed for my possessions, then we moved to a computer/scanner to enter my fingerprints into the files of the Department of Justice, Sacramento and county.

“You guys are high-tech. All we get are ink pads.”

The custody assistant was spraying a screen in the control panel with window cleaner.

“She can roll a perfect set,” said Pickett.

The young woman smiled shyly. I was staring at the machine as if it were a huge hypodermic syringe. When I was a kid I once ran out of the doctor’s office before he could give me a tetanus shot.

“Ana.” Pickett shrugged with that big-eyed cop look I knew so well. “We got to do this.”

Afterward, we went back into the booking cell so I could call Devon County.

“Make as many calls as you want,” he said. “It only works collect.”

There was one battle-scarred phone with an unduly short cord, to prevent death by hanging.

They put me in a four-bunk cell. There were no other arrestees, but even if there had been, they would have kept me isolated. That’s what they meant by “special handling.” They did not mean the seatless stainless steel toilet or the mattresses made of fire-resistant polymer, or the ham and cheese sandwich and warm apple juice. Those were standard. Knowing the price of wounded pride, they had also put me on suicide watch.

I could not bear to touch the mattresses so I sat on the edge of a lower bunk. The ceiling was very far away. They put it high up to make you feel helpless and small. I thought of Juliana, holding on to the stuffed leopard.

I knew nothing. How long I would be here. If I would go to prison. If the famous attorney would get the message and be paged and take the case and show up. I didn’t even know the time.

I sat in the badness. There was no other place to go. I sat and rocked and whinnied and pleaded with God to make the terrible feelings go away, but they gripped me in the windpipe with caustic despair. There was nothing else. No voices to distract, just a deep infant panic for which I do not believe we have yet devised a comfort, one that could possibly equal that annihilation. I had no religious words so I stared at my socks.

I stared at my socks against the ugly turquoise floor and imagined, for diversion, the powers of the colposcope, that with my sight I could penetrate the creamy cotton weave, see through to the spaces. Suddenly I ached for Juliana and the closeness of our morning conversations. Why had I not reached out more? Called her, sometimes. Tried to help.

Juliana, of everyone, would know me, right now.

Eighteen

By ten in the morning the temperature in the Valley had risen to ninety degrees and swimming in Mike Donnato’s unheated pool was like swimming through razor blades — the dead cold chill of the water and the hot sun slashing.

I glided back and forth — four strokes, flip … four strokes, flip — across the tiny oval. This was what my world had shrunk to: fifteen feet of icy chlorination. In the current freak show that was my life, I had been turned into a seal, whooshing and snorting empty circles in a tank.

Believe me, I was grateful. Devon County had gotten the bail reduced, from half a mil to one hundred thousand dollars, after arguing successfully that I was not a flight risk, nor, since this had been a crime of passion, a danger to the community. As a condition of the bail agreement, I would be on home detention under the supervision and responsibility of the FBI. Good friend and former supervisor Mike Donnato had volunteered.

As shocking as the daily dive into the frigid water was the realization of how a legal maneuver had taken me through the mirror, made me prisoner, incomprehensibly, of Mike Donnato’s life, and the choices he had made, from marrying Rochelle to having three kids to buying this house way out in the Valley.

“Why don’t you take a nap?” Mike had suggested during the long rush-hour slog back from jail.

I lay on the half-lowered passenger seat, staring up at the beige interior, body tissue swaying subtly on the bones. That might have been the low point: humbled and inert, in Mike Donnato’s station wagon.

The trees had filled in since I’d been there last, the ocher two-story postmodern had already increased in value by a third. We pulled in at sunset, the twin round windows reflecting like rosy moons, the development bathed in uncertain light. I had been condemned, of all things, to suburbia.

He guided me like a regular guest, between the faux Greek revival columns that framed the doorway, to the floral-scented living room, and soon a glass of red wine, trusting me with a long-stemmed goblet. He dumped a pile of catalogues from the mailbox on the coffee table and went upstairs. Someone was home from school. Soon I heard a halting clarinet.

Devon County was a former LAPD detective who had become a federal prosecutor and then gone into private practice. Over the years there had been a small growth industry in our town of cops going to law school and then representing their own, mainly because the policeman’s union often paid for representation. Devon was smart and capable, and, most of all, he was not a press whore. What everyone at the Bureau respected was how he kept a low profile in a potentially tabloid case where a state senator had been shot and wounded by his male lover, a senior federal agent out of our Sacramento field office who nobody had known was gay. Although he could have made the national news every night, Devon County considered it in the client’s best interest to keep that story out of the papers.

I first glimpsed Devon County through the heavy mesh of the booking cell. He was a hefty guy, overweight, with a shaved head and goatee, looking more like a con than a cop. It was barely dawn; he wore a sweatshirt and baggy warm-up pants; you might have thought he was out for a run, except for the crutch. He had become a lawyer because he had been forced to retire from the department on disability after a horrific crash during a high-speed chase. He made legendary use of the crutch in the courtroom.

There was to be no more “special handling.” Devon would remain outside the cell, I would be inside, and we would speak through yellowed mesh. When I protested there would be no privacy, Devon said that’s the way the lawyers liked it.

“You know why they have this double screen?” he asked. “So you can’t spit on your attorney.”

“I’d laugh if I knew how.”

“We’ll try to improve the jokes.”

“Devon,” I said right off, “you have women on your staff. Shouldn’t I have a woman represent me?”

He shook his head confidently. “You would suffer the backlash of the prosecution’s theory.”

“You already know the prosecution’s theory?”

“They will claim the obvious, which is you went after him in a fit of jealous rage. ‘Fatal attraction.’”

“Not true—”

He held up a hand. “Not now. You need a strong, macho guy as a counterpoint to all the cops they’re going to parade out, and I’m as close to macho as we’re going to come up with in the middle of the night on a Thursday.” Nor was he unhappy they had made me wait “while suffering unduly” for medical care. Another bullet in the macho ammo belt. I was feeling better after a couple of painkillers and a shot of penicillin from a spiffy young Asian doctor with beautiful shoes. They even gave me a cup of raspberry Jell-O. The bare outdated first-aid room in the jail had seemed like a Club Med vacation.

“You understand that you are being charged with attempted murder. You are looking at potential penalties of twenty-five years to life.”

Incomprehensible.

“Apparently the condition of the victim, Detective Andrew Berringer, has been upgraded to stable.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

“Stop!”

I cringed.

“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” He was speaking intently, close to the mesh. “We need to have a truthful, but very delicate discussion. The best way I can help you is if we talk about what happened very carefully.” “I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, you need to preserve your ability to use me as witness on my own behalf. You can’t put me on the stand if you know I would perjure myself.”

“Good. So let me ask the questions in my own peculiar way. This is not a tell-me-what-happened. It’s not like interrogating a suspect, all right? We have to do this surgically.”

“You’re talking to a pro,” I assured him. “Although it might not appear that way, under the circumstances.”

“I never forget who I’m talking to,” Devon said.

He produced a leather binder and a Cartier pen with a blue stone in the cap. In the following weeks, I would watch that stone as it whipped legal arabesques around my words.

“If the police were claiming that you were in apartment ten in Tahiti Gardens at nine-thirty p.m. Monday night, would they be wrong?”

“No, they would not be wrong.”

“If they claimed you fired a weapon at Detective Andrew Berringer, would they be wrong?”

“They would not be wrong, but — could I ask one thing?”

He waited.

“Is there some legal way I can stay involved with my kidnap investigation?” I told him about the Brennan case and how close we had come to capturing him.

“Not when you’re suspended from the Bureau, darlin’.”

“The Bureau’s going to drop the ball.”

“Nothing you can do about it.”

“Any way I can stay in touch with the victim?”

“Why would you want to stay in touch with the victim?”

“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl. Her world just ended. I don’t want to personally let her down.”

“Have you been very close to this little girl? Helped her through …” He gestured with the pen, indicating spirals of unnamed suffering.

“Yes.”

He wanted to know more. After I described our morning talks and how Juliana had opened up to me, his belly jumped and he belched like a bald, satiated Roman emperor, and went back to the shooting.

“If the police were to claim you were a frustrated, jealous woman who was trying to avenge a betrayal by her lover, would you have some other explanation? Yes or no?”

The blue-stoned pen tapped against the pad.

“Yes or no?” he prompted.

“Can we stop playing games and can I just tell you—”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“What would be your explanation?”

“I wanted to stop him.”

Devon nodded encouragingly.

“You wanted to stop him from what?”

“From hurting me any more. Physically hurting me.”

“Would that involve some kind of self-defense on your part?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Would it be true to say you shot him in self-defense?”

I had seemed to lose direction, lost in some elastic loop of time.

“Yes.”

“Did you feel in physical danger?”

“I just wanted him to leave.”

“Did he leave?”

“No.”

“What did he do?”

“He attacked me. He wouldn’t stop. I kicked him in the groin and he backed off, and I warned him, but he came back at me. I dropped to the gun. I warned him again. I started shooting. We fought over the gun, and he got it away from me. He never stopped once he started coming at me, and I kept pulling the trigger.” “So he kept coming.”

“He did.”

“Even when you warned him, showed him the gun?”

“That’s right.”

“Even when you shot him, he didn’t run, or take evasive action?”

“No.”

“Nothing was going to stop him.”

I was unaware of everything except Devon’s rapid breath on the other side of the mesh, intimate as a priest’s.

“Why,” I said, faltering, “didn’t he stop?”

“I think it’s very possible,” Devon answered, “Detective Berringer went to your apartment with the intention of killing you.”

“Killing me?”

“You thought it was the other way around?”

“I was the one with the gun.”

“Yes,” said Devon, “that was the surprise.”

After a moment I shook my head, as if waking from a dream.

“You’re kidding, right? This is one of those outrageous legal arguments—”

“You can’t be objective,” Devon said. “I can. All I hear is you blaming yourself. It is absolutely not out of the question that this cop, who is used to violence, possibly depressed, despondent, getting older, close to retirement, financial problems, high on drugs, who knows what, finally resents the demands made on him by all the women in his life, and goes over there and takes it out on someone.” “Very creative,” I said tiredly. “You should be a writer,” totally forgetting that Devon County was also a celebrity author with two thrillers on the best-seller list.

I climbed out of the pool, dizzy with all that flip turning. It was just a few steps from the scorching patio to the cool kitchen, with its light cabinets and vinyl daisy tile and microwave as big as a boxcar. The refrigerator had cold water in the door. Inside the walk-through pantry there were marshmallows and chocolate bits you could chug out of the bag, and a shelf of neon-colored breakfast cereals.

The boys drank Gatorade and powdered fruit punch; there were flats of sodas and wholesale sacks of chips in the garage. All this was new to me, and I was as curious about the stand-alone freezer stocked with chicken nuggets, hot dogs, twelve-pack Klondike bars, whole chickens and racks of ribs as I would have been visiting a family in Japan. I never realized you could buy such huge tubs of peanut butter or cans of soup big enough for the entire fourth grade.

Mike Donnato had taken care of his mother until she died, in this house, of stomach cancer. There were far-flung siblings, but Mike was the only one with the courage to stick it out. She had lived in one of those extra back rooms with a fireplace and TV that nobody really uses, except to dump unfolded laundry and discarded pets. There was a mossy reek from the terrarium that held the baby chameleons; the carpeting, a cheap oatmealy remnant, felt cold underfoot, some dankness having to do with the plumbing.

“Who farted?” was the standard greeting from the Donnato boys.

It was a room without hope to begin with — thinly walled, sliding glass doors opening to a useless jag of the yard, an odd space looking at the back fence. This was where I slept, on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Mike’s parents’ effects, which were touchingly arranged as they had been in the hobby room of their big home in Glendale: Dad’s preoccupations in one half, Mom’s on the other. So you had a Bernina sewing machine, an ironing board and bins of fabric and envelopes of clothing patterns on one side; then a bench with a magnifying glass and all manner of fly-fishing materials and magazines. There were other oddities — a rocking horse, a white cabinet I had not opened, valuable-looking antique wicker chairs, jug lamps, vinyl records (A Swingin’ Christmas), framed art posters from the seventies, and the kinds of novels people don’t read anymore: Lord Jim, Catch-22, Shogun, Cancer Ward, The Black Marble, War and Remembrance. If I didn’t feel bad enough, I could wallow in the ash-cold remnants of two extinguished lives.

“Free on bail” was not the way I would have put it. I was free to wander through the living room, lie on the beat-up burgundy-colored sectional (if I wanted to vacuum the cat hair), or sit in Mike’s reclining chair and look at cable on a big blurry-screened TV. I could pace the hallway, passing the bedrooms in about four seconds — no daylight, nothing on the walls, except the kids’ doors plastered with Police Line Do Not Cross tape and puzzles that spelled their names, Kevin, Justin, Ian.

I was free to sit on the small deck with the standard grill and white plastic umbrella table, and look up at a patch of milky sky, and know this was a preview, an aperitif, of prison life. I missed my lifeguard friend. I missed the shower talk and the redtail hawks that sailed above the pool in perfect freedom.

Andrew? I didn’t know who he was anymore.

The highlight of the day would be the call from the law firm, usually with more bad news.

I learned, one standard-issue hot ’n’ hazy valley morning, that the deputy district attorney prosecuting my case would be Mark Rauch, and realized, way too late, the devastating mistake I had made in not involving Mark Rauch in the Santa Monica kidnapping, not paying respects, not providing a political opening for which he might show gratitude, or at least mercy. This might have been the reason Rauch maneuvered to be assigned to this case — or more likely, he saw it as a high-profile opportunity to continue to build a citywide presence for a mayoralty run. So much for keeping us out of the press. The words “slam dunk” were being bandied about the courthouse.

“He’s a scary guy,” I told Devon.

“Why?”

“Hold up a mirror. He has no reflection.”

“He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like you and me.”

“I’ve seen him work. If you call making little kids cry on the stand ‘work.’”

“Come on now, keep that candle burning.”

“Say again?”

“That pilot light of competition. I know you’ve got it in you; maybe it’s low right now, but don’t let it blow out.”

“Is that what the game is for you, Devon?”

“Oh, I’ve got my competitive streak. I like to know I can beat you at something.”

For a moment I felt myself coming alive.

“What if I nailed Ray Brennan?”

“Who is Ray Brennan?”

“The serial rapist I told you about. The case I was working on when—”

“There are seven reasons why you can’t go there,” he said with such gravitas I believed he had already counted.

“Wouldn’t it prove worthiness of character if I went out and found the son of a bitch?”

“It would be a violation of the bail agreement.”

“That’s minor, compared to—”

“Let it go,” he said firmly. “There are other trained and competent people who will continue your work and bring this creep to justice, okay? I know how it is to sit out there alone and have revenge fantasies—”

“It’s not a fantasy, it’s my job.”

“This is your job: focus and prepare. Things are about to get very real.”

I taped the picture of Ray Brennan over the fireplace in the hobby room.

Now it felt like home.

Sub: Hang in there

From: B.Sullivan@FBILA.com

To: 70Barracuda@hotmail.com

Just to let you know I am thinking of you and hoping you’re doing okay. My heart goes out to you, it must be so difficult to face what you are facing. Your friend is out of the hospital. I’ll come and see you soon.

Love,

Barbara

Subj: Santa Monica Kidnapping

From: J.Ripley@FBILA.com

To: 70Barracuda@hotmail.com

Don’t worry, the ball is still in play. Here’s a recap: Brennan remains at large. We obtained a warrant to search the Santos apartment. In answer to your question, yes, we did check the shoes, first thing. We did not locate the actual lug sole boots, but we did recover size 10 athletic shoes that, according to Dr. Arnie (what a nut), match the wear pattern from the shoe print on Juliana’s back. So Carl Vincent IS Brennan. He ditched the situation in Arizona to come here and go hunting. The picture is coming clear of Brennan’s deal with Mrs. Santos. She is an abuser, in and out of the Program, lost the kids for a while. Social services has volumes on her. The kids come from different dads. Brennan worked in Thrifty drugstore, in the photo department. Met Roxy and got friendly, cultivated her, like Juliana. Mother claims he’s a great provider. That’s a good one. Fired for stealing. Mother denies he molested Roxy. Claims they are all religious. Total denial. Anyway, easy ducks for Brennan. Sorry for your troubles. Everyone here backs you up.

Sincerely,

Jason Ripley

Subj: Hang in there

From: B.Sullivan@FBILA.com

To:70Barracuda@hotmail.com

Look at it this way: at least you are missing the 90-day file review. Galloway is in his office with a migraine.

Subj: Santa Monica Kidnapping

From: J. Ripley@FBILA.com

To: 70Barracuda@hotmail.com

Just to keep you posted: Brennan’s father was also former military but he and the mom were divorced. According to Mrs. Santos, Brennan grew up somewhere around Culver City, maybe the post-war housing you told me about? Could that be the answer to the question of why he returned—to old stomping ground?Yes, as you suggested, we are searching the homeless shelters for transient named Willie John Black. Possible Brennan is hiding out with him or others.

Sincerely,

Jason Ripley

Subj: Hang in there

From: B.Sullivan@FBILA.com

To: 70Barracuda@hotmail.com

Sorry, have to cancel our visit. Two bank jobs yesterday and the baby has a cold. Miss you.

B.

Mike Donnato’s wife, Rochelle, was a very efficient person who used hot rollers and who, God knows, could track the roasts in the freezer and the kids’ activities, both of which she penciled in on a calendar that hung in a nook completely devoted to scheduling. She was a good lady, a scuba instructor, who besides holding down a full-time job in a management firm, which she got after going back to law school, volunteered with a program to teach underprivileged kids to scuba dive. She had been an FBI wife for seventeen years, during the days when postings changed year to year. Their oldest boy had gone to four different schools.

“What happened?” she asked one night in the kitchen.

“I can’t talk about it.”

“I understand, but this is family.”

“My lawyer would kill me. You know lawyers.”

“If we’re not family,” squirting pink dishwashing liquid into a baking pan, “who is?”

Devon had been adamant. “Don’t talk to anybody. If someone contacts you claiming to be a private detective, you say, Call my attorney. If it’s 60 Minutes on the phone, hang up. I’ve seen it time and time again. Many cases are won by the prosecution, not because of evidence they have at the beginning, but by what the defendant says to so-called friends and family.” A natural athlete, Rochelle looked great in nothing but sweat shorts and a little tank top. Her arms were shapely, and she liked her tight gold bracelets. She had an ankle tattoo from surfing days and was fussy about her long red nails — would never pry open a lid without using a gizmo, or wash the pots without big blue rubber gloves.

“You know I’m grateful to be here.” I touched her hard freckled shoulder. “If you guys didn’t take me in, I don’t know where I’d be.”

“Mike thinks the world of you.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“He has total faith.”

Bubbles were rising in the pan. The kitchen smelled like gardenias on a sugar high.

“I’m glad, because it’s going to be a battle,” I said. “Being a woman FBI agent is bad news.”

“You’d think it would be just the opposite.”

“You and I would,” trying to seal a very watery bond. “But females on the jury will resent the fact that I’m—relatively—young and free, and sleeping with this hunky cop, and males will think I’m a ball buster.” Rochelle turned with an indignant pout. “He came after you.”

“That’s true. I can say that much. Where does the spaghetti pot go?”

She pointed with a dripping rubber finger. “Underneath.” Then, “I don’t see why women have to be so jealous of each other.”

“Laws of the jungle.”

“Look how many hours you and Mike spent together when you were partners — I didn’t have a problem with that.”

There was an earsplitting crash as all the metal lids in the cabinet where I had been fumbling with the pot fell down, scattering like cymbals.

“Sorry.”

“And I work with men,” Rochelle went on. “My boss is a man, we’re together all day and after work for drinks with clients — I mean, get a grip.”

“Well,” I said, on my knees, trying to fit the lids back into a special rack, “usually these jurors are older. Another generation.”

“You may not even go to trial.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Berringer is a big strong guy. You’re pleading self-defense?”

“I’ve got to go into Devon’s office and work that out.”

“They would drop the charges if your boyfriend said forget it.”

“Not with Mark Rauch running for mayor.”

“Still.” Rochelle pulled off the gloves and slapped them in the dish drainer where the baking pan lay, gleaming and steaming. “What if Berringer stated it was a lovers’ quarrel, none of your business, over and out? Do you even know what your boyfriend thinks?” I closed the cabinet and stood. “I don’t know anything.”

She was already making the boys’ lunches for the following day. A whole new meal had appeared on the counter: cheese, bologna, iceberg lettuce, plastic bags.

“Can I help?”

“I’ve got it. Years of practice,” she added, which made me feel annoyed.

“Well, anyway”—I smiled—“it’s been great to hang out with you. Except for the circumstances.”

“I agree.” She smiled back, whirling the cap off the mayonnaise. “When this is over, and you can talk—because talking is a prerequisite — you’ll have to join my book group. It’s a great group of girls, you’ll love it.” I realized she was afraid of me. Let’s face it, she had an unstable individual on her hands, awakening in the early hours, liable to get the dry heaves any hour of the day. When I wasn’t heaving I was crying, long emotionless jags in the hobby room. I was down to 104 pounds. Rochelle had shared some tranquilizers, which laid you down in a cradle of bliss for a while, then tossed you out on your ass.

Hours before dawn, spaced on pills that were rejecting me, I would pace the empty kitchen muttering, “What do I do now?” desperate to call someone, but the whole country was asleep, even Donnato, asleep with his wife. Tenderness for him sometimes swelled so hard I had to close my eyes and bear down, but I was practiced at trammeling my feelings for Mike.

Rochelle knew, and it made her afraid, but she sheltered me anyway, because Mike had given her no choice.

Loyalty.

Juliana called the cell phone one of those mornings. I did not tell her where I was nor, at first, what was going on.

“Um, well, this is minor and stupid, but, my swim coach wants me back on the team. And I don’t want to do it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a joke. My times are so bad.”

Although speaking to Juliana off the record during the investigation of her case had not exactly been kosher, talking to her now felt very not right.

“The only reason,” she was going on, “is they’re all in a conspiracy to get me back to school.”

“What conspiracy?”

“My parents. The vice principal.”

“Maybe it’s time.”

How long could I stay on the phone without violating someone or something? With Devon’s constant haranguing all I could see was Mark Rauch subpoenaing the phone records and jumping on the fact I had been talking to a vulnerable young rape victim at four in the morning, after I was suspended from the Bureau. Who knew what he would make of that, but it would not be an ice cream soda.

“I don’t want to go to school.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Kill myself,” Juliana said.

I closed my eyes and went into hostage negotiator mode.

“Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”

“Don’t trip.”

“I have to trip.”

“I didn’t call to get yelled at!”

“I’m not yelling. Am I?”

“Yes, you are.”

“I don’t mean to yell.”

“You’re the only one who understands.”

Is this what children do? Force you to see the excruciating difference between your real self and who you are pretending to be, you think, for them?

“I—” My voice faltered, which was not hostage negotiator mode. “Juliana, I really, really care about you. Anything you say to me is all right. I’m here for you.”

From the quality of the silence I could tell she was fighting tears.

“When people talk about killing themselves, they very often mean it. I need to know what’s going on with you.”

“It’s just an expression, for God’s sake! I’m not an idiot. I would never do anything like that. Don’t you think I know what everyone — my parents — went through just because of the rape? I would never do that. It has nothing to do with what I’m talking about!” “What?”

“The swim team.”

I glanced at my watch.

“Then what’s the problem with the swim team? The real problem?”

“The blocks,” she admitted at last. “I would almost kind of do it … if they didn’t make me get up on the blocks. It never used to be a thing.”

“But getting up there now, it bothers you?”

“The water’s far away.”

“I know it is.”

“I’m afraid if I … I’m afraid I’ll be scared and they’ll laugh at me.”

“Can you talk to your coach? Ask if it’s okay to start in the water. Hold on to the wall. You don’t have to race right away. You don’t have to start from the blocks,” I said, “just go for the practices, go down the ladder, one step at a time, how would that be?”

Later that morning, Devon County called. “Ana?” he said. “It’s time to come to Jesus.”

Nineteen

From the bronze-and-steel lobby to the unobstructed view of Beverly Hills, everything about County, Carr, Levinson and Grant said, We’re rich and really happy about it!

The conditions of release on bail allowed for meetings with my attorney and I entered their swank offices as if having been let out of a cave. Maybe it was a design statement, but diamonds were everywhere — diamond patterns in the sage marble tile, diamonds etched on frosted glass, inlaid in maple cabinets, part of the ironwork coffee tables. The chairs in the waiting room were covered in silk, velvet pillows on the couch. If this was coming to Jesus, sign me up.

The jewels of the kingdom were not shared with the help. A tired-looking young woman assistant in a tattered sweater and jeans led the way to a corner office where Devon sat behind a huge trestle table fit for a warlord. Since I had seen him during that predawn visit in jail, he had gone from ghetto to glitz, a vision of hip efficiency in crisp white shirtsleeves and buffed scalp. The table was loaded with expensive, highly detailed model cars. Cars lined the windowsills and cars rolled by, outside the windows, on Santa Monica Boulevard. There were too many cars in the world, anyway, and considering Devon had almost lost his life in a car, you had to wonder why he would surround himself with a fetishistic collection of reminders.

I sat in a cockpit of an armchair made of soft Italian leather.

“It’s a long way from the homicide desk, Detective.”

Devon smiled. “Ten years ago you could have told me a mojito was a male prostitute.”

“You mean a mojito is not a male prostitute?”

“A mojito is a rum drink.”

“Oh.”

“Apple martinis are out. Mojitos are the new LA thing.”

“You travel in the right circles, Devon.”

His gaze drifted to the immediate view. Ten-million-dollar estates belonging to new Hollywood and old aerospace were deftly tucked between neat rows of palm trees adumbrating toward the hills.

“You think as an investigator you’ve seen it all.” He shook his head. “You would not believe what I see.”

“The level of greed?”

“The fucking and sucking.”

I guessed we were talking about the same thing.

“The hardest part for you,” he continued, in one peculiar segue, “will be to see Detective Berringer for the first time in court. You need to prepare for that.”

“What should I do? Stare at his picture and give myself electric shocks?”

“I mean it, Ana.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“You’re feeling defensive.”

“No I’m not.”

“I can tell from your body language.”

I looked down and uncrossed my legs. In fact, the idea of seeing Andrew in court had made my stomach cramp.

“Better?”

“You’ve never been on the other side, is what I’m saying. Never sat at the defendant’s table. The DA is definitely going to call Andrew Berringer. And this man, who you know intimately, is going to basically accuse you in open court of attempted murder.” I reached for a water bottle left by the tired assistant and drank as if it could give me strength. In the soft field of Mediterranean daylight created by the large windows, Devon, with his white shirt and shining dome of a head, seemed hyperdefined, like a figure out of context in a dream. Those figures often appear bearing a message.

“Whatever Detective Berringer says, you do not show emotion of any kind. It is very important,” Devon insisted, “if I am to defend your freedom, to know I’m not going to see you reacting in any way. I don’t want you looking at him with anger, or rolling your eyes when you don’t like something, or — doing like you’re doing right now — shaking your head like I’m a moron.” “I don’t think you’re a moron.”

“I need you to do nothing except take notes on a pad. If there’s something you need to relate to me, write it down. I don’t want anyone who might be observing this hearing to assume that you have a bias either way.”

“I’m shaking my head, Devon, because that’s impossible.”

“What is?”

“For me to sit there and listen to whatever bullshit the DA is going to come up with.”

“Forget the DA. You know how that’s played. Let’s focus on Andrew. He’s the one who can push your buttons.”

I said nothing.

“Am I right?”

“Well, he did. Apparently.”

Devon took a breath to observe me in silence. Our eyes held, like infrared devices connecting and adjusting, sharing information. We were framing the relationship. Who was in charge? How far would the other yield?

“If you can’t keep it together in the courtroom, the ramifications will be — well, let me remind you. Sometimes clients need to hear it again: Your life is on the line.”

Devon let his thick lids fall in a slow, deliberate blink. He wanted me to sit with it, but instead everything I’d been holding back suddenly spurted out.

“I’m pissed at him for getting me into this position, I’m upset with myself for going there, I feel guilty, upset, ashamed,” smacking a fist on the cockpit chair, “and I’m tripping, because on some level, I still love the guy! So, I don’t know! You tell me! What am I supposed to do?” “Put on your game face,” my attorney advised.

That I understood. From years of interrogation, I understood.

“All right,” I said, and took a moment to drop the emotionality, or at least stuff it back into its sack. “Game face on.”

He nodded and picked up the pen.

“Detective Berringer is a hundred pounds heavier than you, correct?”

“Yes.”

“At least seven inches taller?”

“Nine inches taller.”

“Have you seen him before in a state of rage?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever have moments in your relationship when you feared for your safety?”

“I have.”

“Talk about those.”

Having rendered all this easily, I suddenly discovered I did not wish to reveal more. If there was a pattern of impulsive violence in Andrew’s behavior, I had not seen it and certainly did not want to admit that failure now. Here in the corner office, in the uncompromising light of success, I had a deep, vital need to appear as competent and accomplished as Devon.

So I smiled with professional accord and lied.

“Andrew can be opinionated, but whatever minor incidents there might have been, they were nothing you would tag.”

Devon was looking at my feet. Always position the suspects so you can see what they are doing with their feet. Often the feet will be dancing to a different tune than the one playing upstairs. Mine were pointing out the door — what does that tell you?

“Give me an example,” Devon pressed, “of something minor.”

“Driving fast,” was the first thing that came to mind. “A lot of people drive fast when they’re angry, even though we do our best to—”

“Andrew drove fast when he was upset.”

“Angry.”

“How fast?”

“I don’t know. Ninety? A hundred?”

“This was where?”

“On the Ten, out near Indio. We were coming back from riding dune buggies.”

“What set him off?”

“We had a fight.”

“Can you recall what the fight was about?”

“Girls. If we were going to still see other people. I wanted to get it clear. You know, where we were. He told me to stop nagging.”

Devon’s blue-jeweled pen kept looping across the yellow pad.

“What else?”

“What else?” I spread my arms. “I was not dating some psychotic maniac.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Andrew has a manifesto, in a frame on the wall. ‘The Homicide Investigator’s Oath,’ it says. ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’ This is a guy who truly believes he is working for God.”

“Give me another minor incident.”

“Once upon a time, Andrew shot a rattlesnake.”

I folded my arms defensively, although I was giving Devon exactly what he wanted. Even through my resistance I could see he was one smart lawyer. The resistance came of my desire, even at this late hour, to protect the truth about who Andrew Berringer was — the poignant facts of his humanity that would not be evident in the skewed furniture in the Marina apartment, nor the broken scree of a mountain track.

“We were hiking the San Bernardino Mountains. We see a rattlesnake lying across the trail. He, of course, has to poke it with a stick. I’m telling him not to, but he’s like a little boy, he just won’t quit, and then all of a sudden he takes out his weapon and shoots the damn thing.” “Was it attacking him?”

“No. It was just lying there.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him he was a fucking Neanderthal and turned around and started running down the trail.” I had been crying but did not share that with Devon. “He called after me, but I kept going and basically he chased me all the way down. It was not fun.” “Was he trying to catch you? Hurt you?”

“I didn’t let him catch me. By the time we got down we were completely wiped and had nothing to say to each other. We broke up for about three weeks after that.”

“When Andrew acted like this, what did you make of it?”

I frowned, trying to sort it out, holding on to our most private moments, the way a child hides a clear glass marble in her hand, believing that it is not glass but crystal, powerful and made of magic.

“Andrew had a short fuse when it came to anger. Like me, I guess. I thought it was a good thing we were so much alike.”

“If you were so much alike, what were you doing rolling over a coffee table, trying to kill each other?” Devon wanted to know. “Let’s go back. Tell me what happened in your apartment from the moment you opened the door.” “I didn’t open the door. He got in. Somehow.”

“With a key?” suggested Devon.

“Didn’t have a key.”

“A duplicate he made without you knowing?”

The idea chilled me. “That would be upsetting.”

“Yes, it would.”

I told Devon that Andrew had been agitated when he arrived. The lawyer wanted to know what we fought about. It built, I said, small rocks skittering, the way arguments do: The money he owed me. The scene in the bar. Me going after him and Oberbeck. Me intruding into his life.

“What was the straw?”

“The straw was the bank robbery. We recovered a ski mask and were checking out the DNA. This was his case, that he could get major credit for, but when I told him I reopened it on my end, he went ballistic. That’s when he came over the table at me.” Outside, the traffic glided silently by. The afternoon light had cooled since I’d first entered the office, and the hunched figure of my attorney against the softly glowing cityscape seemed muted as well. The firebrand inquiry had burned out, leaving one core question: why?

“My gut says the intensity of this was not about him being pissed because you didn’t like his girlfriend,” Devon said slowly. “There was a threat he perceived as so serious he was willing to kill you to wipe it out.”

“You keep saying that, but—”

“He kept coming after you, even when you showed him the gun. As a cop, that is nothing I would ever do. You wouldn’t normally throw yourself at the shooter, would you?”

I had to admit, “No.”

“No!” Devon put down the pen. “Unless you were unhinged.” He paused. “Or desperate.”

“Desperately what?”

“Scared.” Devon shrugged in his white shirtsleeves. “Andrew Berringer was trying to kill you, and you responded in the only way possible, which was self-defense. That is what we need to prove.”

I lay back in the chair, spent. “Go ahead,” I said, with an ironic wave of the hand.

“I’m planning to subpoena Juliana Meyer-Murphy.”

“What does Juliana have to do with this?”

“We might need her as a character witness.”

“She’s a fifteen-year-old victim of rape who is suffering from posttraumatic stress — she can’t even go out of the house!”

“She will help your case.”

“Drop it.”

“I will not.”

“You know what, Devon? I’m starting to lose my game face here.”

“I can see that.”

“What would it be like for her if someone she trusts, an FBI agent for God’s sake, turns out to be an accused criminal, like the guy who raped her, who she also trusted—”

“If this goes to trial,” he interrupted, “she will see it on TV. The whole fucking world will see it on TV.”

“I spoke to her!” I said triumphantly. “This morning! Six and a half minutes on the phone! They could claim witness tampering. You can’t go there!”

Devon shook his head dismissively.

“Look, I’m not pretending there are not other implications with having this young lady on the stand. We can’t call her as a character witness in a preliminary hearing where the purpose is for a judge to decide whether there is enough evidence to warrant a jury trial, but we can have her up there for an innocuous reason that goes to the prosecution’s burden of proof. And we can hope, because she’s young and emotional, that during cross-examination she will blurt things out about how terrific you are, how you got her through the worst time in her life …” “So now we’re exploiting a rape victim.”

“If this kid will do something for you, I want to use her, you bet.”

“What if, on cross-examination, the DA takes her apart and she’s even more traumatized?”

“Ana, when I was a cop, I put rapists in prison. I’m not insensitive and I don’t want to hurt anyone, but my sole focus and ethical duty is to my client and my client only, and frankly, I’m not concerned if she has to see a therapist a few times more, we’ll pay for it, so what?” “I don’t think I have ever been more offended in my life.”

“You don’t have to go along with it.” He waited, eyes downcast. “You see, we are now at the point where this begs the fundamental question of the relationship between the defense lawyer and client.”

By then it must have been five o’clock, the energy of the city draining the other direction, away from the daily battles toward resolution and home. He wasn’t exactly putting it on the line, but he was forcing a calibration. Where did we stand? Did I trust his judgment enough to override my feelings for Juliana?

“You’re saying if I don’t want to do this, you won’t force it?”

“My sole concern is in walking you out of that courtroom. If we can’t go down the Juliana road, we’ll find another way. But as I said, I think she can help you and it’s important.”

I thought about it for several silent moments until Devon picked up one of the model cars and began spinning its wheels.

“Is that a Porsche you’ve got there?”

He nodded and spun some more. “A Boxter S.”

“Why don’t you have a Barracuda?”

“My clients give these to me. I guess I never had a client who owned a Barracuda.”

I waited. Finally I told him: “All right. You’ve got one now.”

His eyes rose.

“Call Juliana and ask if she wants to testify. The best thing for her would be to make that decision herself.”

“Thank you,” Devon said, and a palpable tension left the room.

I sucked the warm, half-empty water bottle.

“How much will the prosecution give us on Andrew?”

“His statement, which is whatever they decide it should be. We can’t depose him until the trial. In other words, not much. They sent over a preliminary list of witnesses”—he tossed me a copy—“including someone you know from the Bureau, Special Agent Kelsey Owen?” “Kelsey is going to testify against me?”

“She is being subpoenaed.”

“Holy cow.”

“What does she have on you?”

“I don’t know!” I was really fried. “Nasty voice mails. Obscene gestures. That I’m an asshole because I didn’t want her taking over my case?”

“There are two sides to every asshole.”

I chortled. “The jokes are getting better.”

“That’s good.”

Devon had taken out a paintbrush and opened the little doors and was dusting the interior of the Porsche.

“How are you going to prove your theory that Andrew was trying to kill me?”

“Investigate him and everyone around him. I’ve got a string of great PIs who work for me — former cops, an ex — financial reporter who’s very good on the computer stuff. We’ll look at everything — his marriages, cases. I’m intrigued by that bank robbery.” “You mean what was going on in the police department at the time—”

Devon was nodding. “—that made that particular heist so damn important to everybody.”

“And the people he works with at the Santa Monica police?”

“Everyone, at least going back five years. Their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, kids, vendettas, paybacks, who owed what to whom, their mortgages, car payments, bank accounts.”

“Follow the money,” I suggested.

“That’s my credo,” Devon affirmed. “The sign on my wall.”

Twenty

Afterward, waiting for the elevator, a soundless voice cajoled me, Why didn’t you tell him about the Sandpiper motel? It’s a private matter that would not be usable in my defense. How do you know, aren’t we talking about Andrew, who he is? Devon would have discarded it, and I didn’t want to see that, his cynical dismissal. What you don’t want to see is your own face in his mirror—but the voice was silenced as the bronze doors of the elevator parted and my reflection split in two.

I never did tell Devon — and maybe it was a mistake — how our modest plan to drive up the coast to Cambria had to be postponed three times due to one or the other’s work emergencies, and how each time I was relieved. How I’d been afraid, after not knowing Andrew very long, that cutting loose on the open road would be a lot different from the occasional night at his dad’s house or my apartment, taking us further away from the security of our professional identities, safely cocooned in LA. Twenty miles out of town I was already wondering at the individual who had apparently shed his detective’s shield for the persona of some petty delinquent.

“If it’s good to you, it’s gotta be good for you,” Andrew had said, cracking a beer he’d dug out of the cooler.

“You’re crazy.”

“Just now figuring that out?”

He smiled, drank, put the icy can between the tight thighs of his jeans.

“I have complete confidence in your ability to drive,” I said brusquely, to show no fear. “Under normal conditions.”

“If you’re nervous we can go back.”

“I’m good.”

He shrugged. “You won’t be the first, baby. Usually they don’t make it past that big rock over there.”

“Who’s the one who is nervous?” I inquired.

“Who?” he asked, completely baffled. Obviously, not him. He was taking the curves out of Leo Carrillo Beach at sixty, palming the wheel with one hand. “Be glad we’re not on the Harley, Miss Feebee Chicken.”

“Sorry, but I have a strong survival instinct,” I said, and pried the beer from between his legs, giving it an extra twist against his bulge.

“Do that again.”

“Later. Maybe.”

I let the brewski trail behind us out the window while he whined, “Oh man, what a waste!” and thought, My sentiments exactly, figuring I was on a one-way weekend pass with yet another unreconstructed sixteen-year-old male.

Oh well, at least the sex would be good. I undid my sandals and put bare feet (pedicured for the occasion) up on the warm dashboard; the road had turned straight and the sun was flat on our windshield as we shot north past Oxnard, Santa Barbara and Goleta, picking up local oldies stations that carried blaring news of used car sales and bluegrass festivals. When we passed a sign for San Francisco, he flashed that irresistible grin and said, “Why not?” and I laughed because I guess I was relieved he liked me enough to imagine heading north forever, leaving those cocoons behind all busted open, our friends and supervisors left to guess who in hell was in there, anyway?

“It’s because I grew up in Long Beach.” I was trying to explain why heading in a northerly direction always made me feel positive, while going south on the freeway was vaguely nauseating. “Not good memories.”

Andrew glanced over. “No pressure, you don’t have to talk about it.”

“It’s okay. I was brought up by my mom and my grandfather, who was with the Long Beach Police Department. He was a lieutenant.”

“So we’re both from cop families,” announced Andrew with mock elation. “Equally screwed up.”

“Did your dad take you around in the squad car?”

“Sure, but mostly we hit the bars.”

“Seriously?”

“I used to do my homework in the Boatyard while Dad had his complimentary afternoon rosé. Ate in the kitchen with the Mexican help. No, listen, I thought it was very cool. What about your grandpa? Nice guy?”

“Not really.”

“So your mom was—”

“Lost.”

“And there was no dad in the picture?”

“No dad in the picture.” That seemed the simplest way. I squinted at the horizon to steady the queasiness in the gut that sprang even at the memory, like a tapeworm. “My dad was from El Salvador. My grandfather didn’t like him much.” “Got it.”

“It was the fifties. White girls didn’t have brown babies. Even light brown. Even light-light brown, passing for white.”

“One more generation, and everybody in LA is going to look like you. Ana, you’re beautiful,” Andrew said. “I’m sorry to say it, but Grandpa was a jerk. Didn’t know what he had in his own house. I can only imagine — what was your grandfather’s name?” “I called him Poppy.”

“—what Poppy must have thought of you becoming a Fed.”

I laughed. “I think he was in shock. I was supposed to be a teacher.”

“I can see you as a teacher.”

I shook my head. “No patience.”

“Do you like kids?”

“They’re kind of a foreign country. What about you?”

“Had a few close calls.” He smiled remorsefully. “But I’ve avoided giving any child the misfortune of having me as his dad.”

“You are so wrong,” I said with conviction. “You’d make a terrific dad.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re trying to get me into bed.”

“I’ve been trying for the past hundred miles.”

He chuckled. “I like you. You’re funny.”

“That’s good, because you’re funny-looking,” I said, pulling on his ear for no reason. “I don’t know why you don’t think you’d make a good father. I’ve seen you work,” thinking of the bank managers he had comforted so freely. “You’re a natural caregiver.” He made a face. Didn’t like the word.

“What about your mom and dad?”

“My mom and dad?” he echoed as if he had not considered them in years.

Then he seemed to forget all about it, involved with the road which was straight as a ruler, fussing with the radio, searching for a water bottle rolling on the floor.

That’s when he finally said, “I’m adopted,” and I heard the effort in his voice to keep it light, but there was no mistaking the shakiness beneath. He’d thought about it before he told me and now he wasn’t sure.

“So growing up, we were both alone, in a way.”

“My adoptive parents were very loving,” Andrew said quickly. “The most loving people in the world.”

My fingers tightened on his knee.

“I couldn’t do enough for my dad. Could not do enough,” he added bitterly, and I did not yet know the source, that his dad had been a terminal alcoholic for whom it was not possible to do anything. “You had your mom,” he said so wistfully that it moved me deeply.

“She was … I guess today you’d say depressed, but really she was young and brokenhearted because she couldn’t be with my father.”

“Ah, fuck ’em,” Andrew interrupted suddenly. “They did their best, right?”

We drove in silence.

“I’m okay with it,” I said after a while.

“Your family?”

I nodded, tautness in my throat.

“We think that,” Andrew said, “but there’s an animal level to things that we can never change.”

The sun had fallen to the west, level with the road, so that bright orange rays bored at the sides of our faces and the curve of our eyes. Andrew flipped the visor over to the driver’s side window, but it did nothing to block the insistent ginger light that flooded the inside of the car.

“How do you live with it? The animal level?”

“I’ve had some nightmares,” he answered, “that are pretty interesting,” and beside us, endlessly to our left, the green ocean burrowed, turned, and groaned with its own weight, restlessly settling and unsettling, seeking the stillness it constantly destroyed.

The Sandpiper Inn was a perky little motel on Moonstone Beach, scrupulously clean, window boxes jammed with pansies and geraniums. There was a decent heated pool surrounded by pine trees and set far enough from the road so all you heard was the cawing of crows and the hum of the pumps. A cheerful old salt wearing a chewed-up watch cap signed us in, urging coupons for Hearst Castle and whale watching.

“Good to see you again,” he nodded to Andrew.

We carried our bags into the room and each sat on one of the two queen beds and asked the other what we wanted to do, as it was still the afternoon. I was up for running into the village, getting a nice bottle of white wine and some goat cheese and crackers, coming back here and pulling down the shades and scootching under the covers. His idea was to watch the basketball play-offs on TV.

Alone in this determinedly adorable room, with no distractions, the differences between us seemed unbridgeable: he was too old, too closed off, never went to college, divorced too many times; his loyalty was of a soldier to other soldiers, his self-discipline enormously self-absorbed, I decided, as he lay back with a yawn and clicked on the play-offs, while I sat on the edge of the other bed, really grumpy about not having that glass of wine, and began to count the hours until we could, without too much humiliation, leave. If we got back early tomorrow afternoon, there would still be time to do laundry, get on the treadmill, go to sleep and punch the reset button Monday morning. The odds of working another bank robbery case with Santa Monica police detective Andrew Berringer were nil.

I threw off the cheap thin blanket from where I’d attempted to burrow into the second bed.

“I’m going to take a walk on the beach.”

To my surprise Andrew said, “I’ll come with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Unless you want to be alone.”

“No, of course not. Come along.”

And now I was annoyed because I did want to be alone, since I rarely have a whole afternoon to walk by the water and think about all the wrong choices I have made.

Although the beach was across the highway we had to drive to get there. It was not a beach but a nature preserve, where wooden stairs descended to an outcrop of black rock. It was low tide and white surf rose and spilled over the tide pools. There were wooden signs describing the migration of shorebirds. We followed a trail through a pine forest padded with silence and emerged at a lookout from which you could see unobstructed views of the teal-dark sea.

It was too cold to stand there, but we stood there, fingers stiffening in our pockets, letting the wind roar over our ears and stream our hair, pour down our nostrils and chill our lungs, scouring the cells of our blood with fresh oxygen as the brutal tide brought in and took away new life from the small carved worlds of sea anemones and starfish.

“Look how nature keeps everything clean.”

“Imagine what this coast was like a hundred years ago,” Andrew agreed.

“How do the guys in the tide pools hold on? Tons of water falling on their heads, twenty-four/seven.”

“They have suckers.”

“I know, but still—”

“Hey,” said Andrew, shoulders hunched against the spray, “those guys don’t have a choice.”

“And we do?”

“Sure we do.”

“Here’s the thing, Andy.” I turned so my back was to the ocean and tried to put my elbows on the wooden railing but kept getting nudged off by the wind. “You told me yourself. You come off shift, you take a shower. Two showers, sometimes, you said, to get the cooties off — the TB bacillus from the homeless person, the dog shit from the backyard of a methamphetamine laboratory—” “So?” He ducked his head to wipe a tearing eye.

“My question is, how do you cleanse the soul?”

“The soul?”

“The stuff we were talking about coming up here. Your dad. My grandfather. How do we ever get past it?”

“You’re out of my realm of expertise.”

“No, I’m not.”

I squinted up at him although hair was whipping across my sight. My heels were planted and I really wanted to know how much he knew. Had twenty-plus years of being a cop washed through him, or had it put meat on his bones? Why was I attracted to this unconventional, craggy face and husky fighter’s build that overwhelmed me in ways I did not always like? What was he made of? I could get past the petty disconnects if I knew. We were standing on a platform at the end of the world, and I wanted to know if the trip had been worthwhile.

“You see it every day on the street,” I prompted. “Good and bad. Hell and redemption—”

“It’s not that simple,” Andrew replied. “Black-and-white.”

“What is it, then?”

He shook his head. “It’s a job, stop analyzing. I’m freezing. Let’s get something to eat.”

He took me to dinner in a nicely restored brick building on the main drag. Part restaurant and part retail store, it sold hand-knit sweaters and local jellies and jams, and served up one hell of an olallieberry cobbler, which we shared from a steaming crock, melting with vanilla ice cream. Andrew knew the waitress, a middle-aged teacher who worked two other jobs in order to live in Cambria. She asked when he was going to retire and move up. “It’s just a shot away,” he joked, quoting the Rolling Stones.

I smiled and sipped my decaf. It was clear to me this was Andrew Berringer’s patented getaway romantic weekend, for those girls nervy enough to make it past the big rock at Leo Carrillo Beach. All right. We would be making love (glancing at my watch) within the hour, and then I would simply walk away and become part of the crowd.

I was still smiling while Andrew retrieved the coconut-scented candle he seemed to know was kept in the armoire drawer and closed my eyes and let it happen while his thick fingers cleanly worked the tiny buttons of my white silk shirt. We knelt on the bed and kissed, and there arose in me an easy affection for the guy; I understood him, I thought — a loner who knew what he did and did not want in his life. Although I had been there only a couple of times, the way he ordered things inside his father’s house — baseball cap collection, weights, garden tools, pots and pans — stayed with me. It seemed a wishful gesture from a man whose daily task was to pull people out of the muck.

He drew me down on top of him and said things that took us away from Cambria, California, to an indeterminate meeting place where isolation and kindness merge. It was a lovely ride and there were no toll payments. We took care of each other.

As we dozed in the wavering white candlelight, Andrew’s barrel chest began to heave, at first in small convulsions, then uncontrollable sobs. He lay flat on his back and sobbed.

“What’s the matter, Andy?”

He could not answer. Wherever he was, he was in there, deeply. His hands lay palms-up, empty, and his knees and feet were splayed, body open to the grief that seemed to fall on him like rain.

“Talk to me, baby,” stroking his wet cheek.

All he could do was put a heavy hand over mine and press my palm to his heart as if to say, Don’t go, but the lowing animal intensity of his strangled voice, the repeated cries and inability to stop were scaring me by degrees, as the warm serenity of our lovemaking was slowly chilled by layers of rational thought insisting through a drowsy haze that something was seriously wrong.

He began to shiver. It was cold in the room. I covered his body with the brittle blanket and got up and pulled on a T-shirt and fussed with the thermostat. Instantly a gas fireplace in the corner roared into flame. When I turned, Andrew had gotten out of the bed and was standing at the open door, buck naked, staring out at the parking lot.

I laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Where are you going, buddy?”

“You can hear the ocean.”

He seemed so completely dream-bound that my anxiety rose to a panic. My fingers tightened around his hard wrist, breast up against his arm, legs braced, as if he might slip loose and run.

“Listen,” he insisted.

A rhythmic whisper carried from across the road, tiny, like a fountain in the neighbor’s yard.

“I’ll bet that water’s chilly.” I was thinking of jellyfish, billowing and diaphanous in the bitter gloom. “I’ll bet it’s fifty degrees.”

It was getting damn chilly standing in the open door, half starkers. The other rooms were dark. The motel office was closed, but rose-colored lights strung along the roof were shining in the mist, and the sky was powdered with stars.

“What is it, hon? Do you want to get some air?” I asked. “Let’s get dressed and take a walk.”

It did not matter that it was one in the morning. We could pick up the highway at an unspecified point, like the beginning of that movie where a woman is running along the white line of a darkened road, wearing nothing but a raincoat.

Andrew’s hands moved over his sticky groin.

“I have to take a shower first.”

“How about a bath?”

We turned from the doorway.

“Did I tell you that my dad committed suicide?” he said.

He was fifty years old, a strapping, handsome guy — had the boat, the house on the lake, everything going for a beautiful retirement except one thing: when he drank, he did it to excess.”

We were wedged into the motel bathtub, facing each other, his legs on the outside, mine on the inside. My feet were on his belly. He rubbed the puckered soles absentmindedly as he spoke. My thumb massaged his ankle. The shower curtains were pushed back carelessly and the door was closed, mirrors dripping with steam. The only source of light was the coconut candle on the vanity, now half melted into the shape of a woeful ghost.

“On a Saturday night he went out with some pals to this place that used to be down in Venice, isn’t anymore — a whole group of guys met, a number filtered out, Dad stayed, another group filtered in. They drank until the place closed and went in two cars to another party supposedly somewhere up in the Palisades Highlands.

“On the way over there, the other car, the one his friends were in, starts driving erratically, and a third car, driven by civilians, starts honking and getting into the mix, so at a stoplight, they all stop — everybody stops — and my old man gets out. He’s this big guy, right?” Andrew paused to cup hot water, let it draw down his reddened face.

“So my dad instructs the civilian driver to pull over. He was always a team player, standing up for his buddies, you see. He goes up to the driver and he’s got his gun out. Big, big mistake. He’s going to pull this guy out of the car. He’s not in uniform, he’s drunk, the civilian doesn’t know what’s going on, his friend cell phones the cops. They have a vehicle in the area, and they swing over in seconds, and they seize my dad. Take him into custody.” “Where was this?”

“Pacific Palisades. LAPD.”

I nodded.

“In trying to get the story from a bunch of inebriated witnesses, all they focused on was that my dad had a gun and tried to pull this guy out of the car. So they book him for attempted car jacking and put him in jail.

“I’m a rookie, I’m living with two roommates in a dive off Pico, and I get the call from my lieutenant on a Sunday morning. ‘Your father’s in jail.’ Not only in jail but on a felony charge. You have to remember, nothing like this ever happened to my dad. This is like Sandy Koufax robbing a bank. It just doesn’t happen. Turns out, they called the office, verified his status as a captain in the Santa Monica Police Department, and now I go over there to bail him out.

“He’s okay, he’s sobered up, a little chagrined but not majorly, or so I think,” Andrew said, wagging a reproachful finger. “So we go and have breakfast at Rae’s, and I drop him off at his house and go play basketball. That’s what I do. I play basketball.” He took a jagged breath.

“When I go back to the house later on, I find he’s penned a note, indicating that he wants me to have all his possessions”—Andrew’s voice cracked—“because I’ve been such a good son … And he says he’s going down to the beach.” He waited. I held on to his shins.

“So I call the department and I say, ‘You’ve got to find him, he’s going to blow his brains out,’ and they did find him at the end of a strand, he’s sitting on a rock, two uniforms approach and talk to him, and he’s not responding, and he pulls out his service weapon, and he did kill himself.” Again he lifted cupped hands like a chalice and water ran down his face.

“I’m so sorry.”

“All his life my dad wanted to be a police officer. He thought that at the end of his career he would go out under a veil of shame, and he couldn’t live with that. It got to the point very quickly where he decided to take his own life.” “It wasn’t only that.”

“What?”

“How did he feel about retirement?”

“He wanted to retire. Planned for it for years.”

“You can still be afraid of what you want.”

Andrew just sighed, exhausted.

“You have to forgive yourself, Andy.”

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

“You’re a loving son. Remember that.”

“Oh, he wasn’t even my real dad, why should I care?” Andrew smiled ironically and quickly tweaked my toes, to show it was a joke, a painful joke. “Who are you?” he mused. “How did you come into my life?” and whispered my name just to hear how it sounded now that everything was different, and slipped farther, chest-deep, into the warm suds, sloshing water on the floor. We stayed so long in that common pool that when we slept entwined in each other’s arms that night, it was as if we had become transparent to each other.

Twenty-one

Devon County simply lied to Juliana, assuring her she would not have to talk about the rape on the stand, and so, after several more conversations involving her parents, she agreed to appear for my defense at the preliminary hearing. Juliana said she would do anything to “help me out” (that’s the way Devon put it to her), but the deal was sealed when he promised to send a limo to pick them up. The girl wanted to know if the limo had a TV. Luckily, I was not aware of any of this, as I had been banned from talking with Juliana until it was over.

The Honorable Wolfson H. McIntyre presided over the courtroom that was to become our theater, our coliseum, on the fifth floor of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Judge McIntyre, who was about seventy years old, with a ruddy beak enlarged by rosacea, wore a bow tie that was pressed tightly against his Adam’s apple by the yoke of his black robes. He had sparse white hair parted on the side and combed in ridges. He would not be the trial judge, if we went to trial. All he did, all day long, for the past quarter of a century, was preside over preliminary hearings. He was the traffic cop, sending folks this way and that. Final destination? No interest.

But that did not mean you were going to get away with anything. Judge McIntyre was tenaciously anal, which made him a great traffic cop. He reminded me of an art history professor I had at UC — Santa Barbara. A pompous egomaniac who wore a three-piece suit at the podium, I had once surprised him in his office, slumped at his desk in a worn cardigan sweater, lining Ritz crackers up in a row and ritualistically squirting each one with a rosette of American cheese product from an aerosol can. He had looked up with rheumy, accusatory eyes … and you did not want to think about it any further than that.

Judge McIntyre’s windowless courtroom was paneled in dark oak beneath square modular ceiling lights, which illuminated everything with democratic pallor. We had an American flag and a California flag. We had the Great Seal of the state. An exit sign and a thermostat switch on the wall. I spent a lot of time staring at that naked, proletarian switch. It spoke to me, in eloquent detail, of exactly what it would be like to be in prison.

I was not in my right mind during the hearing. Could a doctor remain sane, forced to operate on himself? Facing charges in a courtroom before a judge was the cruelest reversal so far in this unlikely pageant, which would turn into a full-blown Roman circus, should I be held to answer those charges at a jury trial. Meanwhile, we were doomed to be part of the sideshow.

The judge had a twin brother who sat in the back of the courtroom. It was explained to me the brother came every day to bring the judge his lunch, and sure enough, there were two identically folded brown paper bags on the floor near the gentleman’s polished Oxford shoes. He wore a tweed jacket with leather buttons and sat straight and calm, head up like an eagle, while his brother fussed over pages on the bench, getting dandruff all over his black robes, the brother’s hooked nose pointing north, the judge’s pointing south, like two faces of destiny.

The judge had a clerk who was so obscenely overweight his belt floated around his belly like a hula hoop. His shirt was too short, so when he turned around you could see his butt crease. We had an audience of twitchy high school students on a field trip, prodding and smirking, while the middle-aged male teacher read Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Then there were the watchers, a boozed-out clan of bowlegged cowboys and cowgirls wearing dress boots with taps who also brought their lunches, and the other defendants and their families awaiting hearings, including a young male with four sticking-out braids who hunkered down in the seat and kept his hands in his pockets while his lawyer discussed with the mother the possibility of drug rehab instead of jail.

“This place is a zoo today,” said the mother, wiping her forehead.

“Gotta do something about this justice system,” muttered the son. “Something wrong with it.”

“That’s what Judge Judy says.”

The son snorted and shook his braids.

“Just think,” said the mother, cuffing him, “what kind of justice you’d get with Saddam Hussein!”

Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch made his entrance through a side door, pushing a trolley laden with stacks of books and files like a man with an awesome and holy burden. Those tablets could have been made of stone the way he huffed and puffed, in a detached Scandinavian way. A bully in an austere town out of a Swedish art film is how I saw him, the angry kid without a mother who keeps punching the other kid until there is blood in the snow. He was over six feet tall, forty, flattop hair, wearing a blue suit with an iridescent blue tie. There were dark manic rings beneath the eyes, and he moved with the lanky urgent stoop of a preacher crackling to put things right.

Detective Andrew Berringer followed in his wake, looking grim and uncomfortable in an olive double-breasted suit as if, I feared, his stitched-up wounds were aching under whatever bandages they still keep on several weeks after surgery. I wasn’t supposed to look, but I could not help watching how he walked so heavily, listing to one side, thinner, slower, paler, sapped. Despite our preparations, his presence was jolting and I think I gave a little cry, as I felt Devon’s hand compress my forearm, tighter, telling me those tears had better not run down my cheeks, so I kept my eyes wide and stared at the thermostat switch until they absorbed.

In contrast to Rauch’s dark melodrama, Devon was playing the wounded policeman hero, a role he had fine-tuned over the years. The handicap sticker on his mondo black BMW assured great parking spaces, and he had no objection to being pushed in a wheelchair when the family went to Disneyland. People in wheelchairs went to the head of the line, he told me, so his kids could always get on the rides first.

It was therefore no ethical leap for him to assign two young attorneys to solicitously carry the briefcases while Devon hobbled ahead, and for them to make a big show of settling the maestro, opening books and fetching water as if he were some ailing Marlon Brando, laying his crutch as reverently as a vintage carbine M1 on top of the defense table.

I wondered how the judge facing south and his mirror image facing north would view these charades and turned to see the one sitting with the spectators was smiling with delight.

Rauch was in fact carrying the burden of the day. The prelim is a mini trial heavily weighted by the prosecutor’s presentation. It is his job to convince the judge the charges are compelling enough to warrant a jury to hear them. Usually the defense does not put on witnesses, which meant Juliana Meyer-Murphy would not be called unless we were pushed to the wall. Since the judge would not allow a pure character witness to testify, Devon’s ploy was to use Juliana to corroborate times — and then edge into how I had saved her life. Just knowing she was downstairs waiting in the cafeteria with her mom caused shivers of apprehension on her behalf and a gushy, emotional gratitude.

The bailiff called the court to order. As the attorneys sniffed and pissed (Devon yawning ostentatiously during Rauch’s opening statement), a cold disappointment seized my heart. Smart and skilled as they were, they were about as inspiring as two mongrel dogs squaring off. You knew exactly what was going to happen. The ruffs went up, the growls and snaps. Justice had nothing to do with it. This was blood sport, and the goal was to win at all costs.

I had my game face on, and my heart was hammering. Andrew, on the other hand, was looking more and more relaxed, joking with the prosecutor, with whom, as a detective testifying in a criminal court, he would have often waltzed to the same tune. Although forbidden to look at him, I was still foolishly hoping he would sneak a helpless glance at me, and when there was not the slightest subtle nonverbal acknowledgment, I felt a flare of anger and betrayal, as Devon’s theory that he had attempted to murder me began to work on this paler, more languorous Andrew, who was seeming somehow not quite so delicate as cunning.

“Is that him?” whispered one of the courthouse secretaries who had gathered in a giggly group in the front row. “He is pretty cute.”

You still look good, Andrew, I agreed, darting my eyes away. You could still do it to me, old pal.

The girls in their nylon dresses and cheap platform heels were all aflutter with their game. When hunks were sighted anywhere in the building they would call one another and duck away from their desks and rush courtroom to courtroom to check out the goods, their flushed childlike excitement revealing how much they did not yet know about men and women.

CRIMINAL COURT OF LOS ANGELES

PRELIMINARY HEARING

DEPARTMENT C

444-8743—Bailiff — H. Solanas

The Honorable Wolfson H. McIntyre

Attempt 187

Transcript of Proceedings page 4

BERRINGER: I told her I wanted to do the right thing.

RAUCH: What was the right thing, Detective Berringer?

BERRINGER: To end the relationship. I knew it would be hard for her because she had become dependent on me.

RAUCH: Can you give us an example?

BERRINGER: She’d call all the time when I was on duty. Show up at my house. Have a breakdown and come to me for solace — which I was happy to give — but then it started to get crazy, and I realized, this woman is obsessed, she’s making it impossible.

RAUCH: What kind of breakdowns, Detective?

BERRINGER: Angry, saying she was depressed and life wasn’t worth living, she didn’t want to be a federal agent anymore.

RAUCH: How did you react to that? When she said she wanted to kill herself because things were bad at work?

DEVON: Objection.

JUDGE: I can hear what the witness is saying without embellishment from you, Mr. Rauch.

RAUCH: Sorry, Your Honor.

BERRINGER: I worried about her. I talked to her about not quitting her job. I said we’d break the case. But it got to the point where I couldn’t deal with it inside myself anymore. Toward the time of the shooting incident, I was becoming extremely uncomfortable with the relationship.

RAUCH: Have you witnessed this sort of behavior before, in your professional life?

BERRINGER: Sure, I’ve seen depressed people, suicidal people, schizophrenics, alcoholics, the whole gamut.

RAUCH: Did Agent Grey fit any of these categories?

DEVON: Your Honor, Detective Berringer does not hold a degree in psychiatry.

JUDGE: Get to the point, Mr. Rauch.

BERRINGER: I think I can short-circuit this, Your Honor.

JUDGE: Do us all a favor.

BERRINGER: Ana was having a lot of trouble at work. We were both involved in a very stressful case. It was a case of rape and kidnapping of a juvenile, and it would be upsetting to anyone. It was upsetting to me. The victim was brutalized, we believe by a sadistic serial rapist, and quite frankly, the Bureau wasn’t getting anywhere close to solving this thing, and Ana was the lead agent, so she was under a lot of pressure. I understand that, I really do.

RAUCH: As a law enforcement professional, you’ve been there?

BERRINGER: I’ve been there, but she couldn’t handle it. She was falling apart.

RAUCH: What did you observe?

BERRINGER: As I stated, she became obsessed with me.

RAUCH: Why you?

BERRINGER: Well, I’m such a handsome guy. Sorry, Your Honor, I don’t mean to joke, it’s not a joke by any means, but — I don’t really know. I was there, I guess. We were working together. You know how it is.

RAUCH: You mean the long hours, the forced intimacy …

BERRINGER: She’s an intelligent, attractive woman, and I guess — we got along. We understood each other. We were both uninvolved, free adults, and we knew what we were doing — or at least, I thought she knew. It was just a casual thing.

RAUCH: Did Agent Grey agree it was casual?

BERRINGER: I don’t know.

RAUCH: Can you go back to this obsession? Give us more examples, if you would, please.

BERRINGER: She’d show up at bars, where I went to unwind after work with my fellow officers, and she was … demanding …

RAUCH: Are you all right, Detective?

BERRINGER: Yes. I’m sorry, I—

RAUCH: Take a moment. Is this testimony difficult for you?

BERRINGER: Give me a minute.

RAUCH: I’m surprised, Detective. You often testify in court. In fact, that’s part of your job. Is this case different?

BERRINGER: I’m fine, let’s go on.

RAUCH: Why is it different, Detective Berringer? Is it because you cared about Ana Grey?

JUDGE: We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess.

RAUCH: Are you ready to resume, Detective Berringer?

BERRINGER: Yes, I apologize, Your Honor.

JUDGE: No need. Go on.

RAUCH: You were giving an example of Ana Grey’s obsession with you.

BERRINGER: Ana said she wanted the nine hundred dollars back that she loaned me to fix my Harley. She picked the time to tell me this while I was at the Boatyard Restaurant in Santa Monica with my fellow officers, relaxing after work. She confronted me in front of them and the other patrons. It was embarrassing for the Santa Monica Police Department, which I take a lot of pride in, and to me personally. She verbally abused a woman friend of mine, also a police officer, who was known to everyone at the table, and made remarks about this woman’s character that were potentially damaging to her professional reputation.

RAUCH: This is Officer Sylvia Oberbeck?

BERRINGER: Officer Oberbeck.

RAUCH: What is your relationship to Officer Oberbeck?

BERRINGER: We are friends, colleagues, we came up together, she’s an excellent policewoman, and I have the highest respect for the way she does her job.

RAUCH: Are you romantically involved?

BERRINGER: We have been. In the past.

RAUCH: Did Ana Grey know you were romantically involved with Officer Oberbeck in the past?

BERRINGER: Yes.

RAUCH: What was her reaction?

BERRINGER: She went out of control.

RAUCH: What do you mean by “out of control”?

BERRINGER: She followed Officer Oberbeck and me in her car — her official Bureau car — and tailgated us up to speeds of one hundred miles per hour on the Marina Freeway. She pulled up behind us to the bumper of my car. She was very aggressive, revving her motor and honking the horn, forcing us onto the shoulder. When she got out of her car she was agitated. She said, “I know you were fucking this bitch and this is a perfect example.” Officer Oberbeck was terrified. I was pretty scared myself. She was pounding on the window and throwing rocks and ultimately tried to scald Officer Oberbeck with hot coffee.

RAUCH: I’m sorry, I’m lost, you were on the freeway and she had hot coffee …

BERRINGER: She had a cup of coffee in her hand when she got out of the car and she threw it.

RAUCH: What happened to Officer Oberbeck?

BERRINGER: The window was closed, it didn’t touch her, but that’s an example of how out of control Ana was. Completely out of control.

RAUCH: Was she out of control the night you came to her apartment to break it off?

BERRINGER: At first she was sad, upset, whatever, said she couldn’t take it, we had to make this work out, it was the only good thing she had left in her life.

RAUCH: What did you say?

BERRINGER: I said, baby, I love you, I care about you, but that’s just not going to happen. That’s not where I am right now. I’ve been married twice, I want my freedom, I told you from the beginning.

RAUCH: How did she respond?

BERRINGER: Again, she became more and more agitated. She’d been crying for a while — excuse the expression — she was really pissed off.

RAUCH: Officer Berringer, why did you go to Agent Grey’s apartment that night?

BERRINGER: She paged me.

RAUCH: Where were you?

BERRINGER: I needed to do some cardio training, so I was running the steps in Santa Monica Canyon when the pager came through. The signal wasn’t strong enough — reception isn’t good in the canyon — but I was eighty-five percent sure it was her, because she’d been trying to call me all day, so I ignored the page and finished the workout, and as I’m driving in my car, on Ocean Avenue, I became aware of someone pulling up in back of me, fairly close, putting on their brights. At this point I assumed it was Ana because I’d had that experience before, of her following Officer Oberbeck and me. She pulled up beside me, made eye contact, and gave me a hand motion that meant, Follow me. She then pulled in front of me and I proceeded to follow her to her apartment in the Marina. She pulled into the garage, and I pulled into the visitor’s spot outside her place, and we walked in together. She went into the kitchen to get something to eat. She wore running tights and running shoes and a spandex top and a jacket on top of that and she had her hair pulled up. She said, “Hi.” I said, “Hi. What’s going on?” And we had a general conversation. She offered me a drink, I said no. She said, “What’s going on, where have you been? I’ve been paging you.” She wasn’t being aggressive at that point. I said I’ve got things on my mind. She said, “Like what?” I said I wasn’t comfortable with the relationship anymore. She put her arms around me and told me she wanted to move in together. I told her that wasn’t in the cards.

RAUCH: Then what?

BERRINGER: She started blaming me for everything that was wrong in her life. She got on this theme of everyone screwing her over, including everyone at work. She said I was screwing her over and she was tired of it. I saw things going south real quick and I didn’t want a confrontation. Her arms were still around me. I said, “What do you want me to do?” She said we could start over. I told her no.

She became infuriated. She was breathing hard. She was tense all over and you could see her going off the scale, the most upset I’ve ever seen her. Then she came back to me for the last time. “What are you trying to tell me?” she said.

I didn’t have anything else to say, so I started walking toward the exit, and she turned away in the other direction, to the coffee table. I never made it to the door. I was looking back to see what she was doing. I wanted to make sure nothing was going to be thrown at me. She bent down and stood up and suddenly there were two bright flashes, and it was as if someone shot me with a drug. I don’t remember hearing the gun.

RAUCH: But you knew you were shot. What were you thinking?

BERRINGER: I was thinking, I know I can win this.

RAUCH: Can you explain why you thought that?

BERRINGER: It might sound corny, but Teddy Roosevelt said, “Those who are willing to enter the arena are always preparing themselves for the battle.” I’m a police detective and I take my job seriously and I like to think I’m always prepared. First of all, you know your body’s going to help you out. Fear is your body responding in a high state of arousal. Fear is okay. What you want to avoid is panic and indecision.

RAUCH: You did not panic?

BERRINGER: I thought, Okay, this is just like in training. Everything was moving slowly. It was like when I was knocked unconscious once when I got hit riding the Harley. Everything was woozy except I had this incredible tunnel vision. All I saw was Ana taking aim with the gun for round two.

RAUCH: And you were how far away from Agent Grey?

BERRINGER: I was almost to the door. I was in the dining room area. She was back near the coffee table, near the fireplace on the other side of the room.

RAUCH: So you were at least fifteen feet apart.

BERRINGER: Correct.

RAUCH: Go on.

BERRINGER: I felt a burning along the lower right side and noticed my shirt was just beet red, full of blood, and I ran toward her.

RAUCH: Why did you run toward her and not out the door?

BERRINGER: That’s my training. In my training guns are made for distance. You run from a knife but not a gun. I could have gotten hit in the back. I tried to get the gun from her. I kept saying, “Don’t shoot me. Why are you trying to kill me?” I got my hand on a piece of the gun, but she was pulling away. She fell over the table between the table and the couch. I’m still maintaining a piece of the gun, the barrel. I stumbled over the table myself and ended up wedged between the table and the couch. She was lying down and I was kneeling with one leg on the couch. The gun went off again, to my right thigh, above the kneecap. I said, “You’re going to kill me, I’m going to die.” I was feeling pretty bad. I’ve seen people die for a lot less than what I had. I was feeling like I’m getting ready to check out. I ended up with the gun and went toward the exit of the residence. She remained crouched in a fetal position, to see if I’d turn the gun on her — which I didn’t — and I went out to my car.

I opened the car door and got in. I reached over to close the door and she followed me out there and wouldn’t allow me to close it. I said I had to get help. She said, “Where are you going? Stay here, I’ll take care of you.” I just started to drive, I figured she’d get out of the way, and I guess she did because I closed the door and drove away from her location.

Everything was like a dream, from the time I was shot. I felt as if I were getting ready to die. I saw I had the gun and it was pointed toward me on the seat. It scared me but I couldn’t do anything about it, I just kept driving, started to recognize where I was. I was wheezing, sucking air, couldn’t breathe very well. I saw the hospital and pulled in. From that point on, I have no idea what went on. I think I passed out in the ER.

I’ve had a lot of injuries from sports and street duty, but this was the most painful of my life. I had a tube draining blood from my lung into a bucket. Tube in my throat. Tube in my nose. I didn’t get any sleep. It was the most miserable time I had, ever. It was just terrible.

RAUCH: Do you remember what you told investigators at the hospital when they asked what happened, how you were shot?

BERRINGER: For the first three days I was on constant medication because of my injuries, and for a while I went into a coma. I wasn’t fully aware of what I said until I got out of the hospital a week later. I couldn’t remember anything.

RAUCH: You said you were shot in a holdup that went bad. Why did you say that?

BERRINGER: I have no idea. It must have been the drugs.

RAUCH: At what point did you tell the investigators you were shot by Ana Grey?

BERRINGER: I never told them it was Ana.

RAUCH: You never told them it was Ana Grey who fired at you three times in a row?

BERRINGER: I never gave her up.

RAUCH: Is that because, until the end, you were doing your best to protect Ana Grey? Because you cared about her, Detective Berringer?

BERRINGER: The police department investigators and the FBI already had information that implicated her when they questioned me.

RAUCH: You mean, you were shot and Ana Grey was immediately a prime, number one suspect?

BERRINGER: I didn’t say that. I don’t know how their investigation was going.

RAUCH: Thank you, that’s all.

The court stenographer’s fingers worked at a rhythm of their own. From the same fashion era as Judge McIntyre, she wore a white blouse, a blue blazer, a pleated skirt with polka dots and white high heels. After his performance, Rauch’s shoulders hung at an exhausted angle, drooping like a Dickensian scrivener’s. Andrew’s face was pasty and filmed with sweat. The judge turned his head like a turtle inside its tender jowls.

In the rear of the courtroom, his brother watched with patient, kindly interest.

On cross-examination, Devon tried to impeach the witness, using incidents I had told him to paint Andrew as an angry, burned-out peace officer prone to violence — one hundred pounds heavier, nine inches taller — who had attacked a petite female with intent to inflict great bodily harm because he was angry at women, having never been able to sustain an intimate relationship or marriage. He meant to silence me — why else would he have charged a loaded gun? I had defended myself, according to my training.

Devon emphasized that in the struggle I, too, had been critically injured, with a severe pelvic infection that could still possibly lead to sterility. Andrew was surprised by hearing that, said he had not known, and deftly used that surprise to express regret at his actions.

Even as Devon maneuvered himself elaborately back into his seat, grimacing with effort, we knew the argument had not worked. Andrew had come across as affable and sincere. The women-hating thing just did not play. We had hinted at darker motives but had no proof.

What we did not know was that I was not the only one in that courtroom who was trapped between the good face of the law and the bad. Andrew had become ensnared by the shooting in a way that went beyond the events in my living room. Although for one teetering moment he had shown conflicting emotions up on the stand, he had regained his resolve, for he must have known the only way for him to survive, as I had scrawled in frustrated silence to Devon across the yellow legal pad, was to bury me in a pack of “LIES!!”

The ER doctor, a knockout Brazilian woman, slender and beautiful as a model although she said she was running on four hours of sleep, described Andrew’s injuries and how they were treated. She confirmed he had been receiving heavy doses of morphine when he stated that he had been shot by bandits, but later, even when he was lucid, she said she never heard him mention my name in connection with the shooting.

“True or false?” I wrote facetiously on the pad.

As Devon predicted the very first night, the prosecution rolled out a chorus line of cops unanimously insisting I was jealous, violent and obsessed with Andrew Berringer. The guys who had been in the kiosk testified I had been “emotionally distraught,” searching for Andrew at midnight on the Promenade. We heard outrage from Detectives Jaeger and Winter about how I’d humiliated Andrew in a public restaurant, and then, remorseful, “bullied” my way after hours into the ICU. Lieutenant Barry Loomis, sporting the walrus mustache and a Betty Boop tie, described me as “behaving in a manner that was suspect” when we spoke on the phone while Andrew was in the hospital. He said “bells went off in his head” when “out of the blue” I guiltily asked whether the weapon had been recovered, although on cross-examination admitted anyone in law enforcement would want to know the same thing. In his version of the confrontation in the Boatyard, I came at the senior detective like a bloodsucking harridan. He omitted the fact that he had been teasing Andrew and egging us on.

“Loomis just killed us,” Devon whispered, and as soon as we broke for lunch, he hobbled out ahead of the crowd, to personally escort Juliana Meyer-Murphy and her mother. She would be our first witness after the prosecution wound up its case.

Andrew and I avoided eye contact or any other kind of contact during the awkward scramble from the courtroom. I was very engaged with the zippers on my briefcase, anyway.

A small crowd had gathered in the corridor, looking out a window. In the street, five stories below, a car in the middle lane had unaccountably flipped over on its roof. There were no other wrecks, no barricades or obstacles or pedestrians that might explain how a two-thousand-pound vehicle could turn completely upside down.

“Do you think that’s a Honda?” someone said.

“Could be. My wife just bought a Honda. She loves it.”

“Have you seen the new ones?”

“No, are they pretty much like the old ones?”

I had no appetite. I went back and sat in the empty courtroom. Twenty long minutes later, Devon’s associate entered alone.

“Where’s Juliana?”

“Oh,” said the jumpy young attorney, who had not yet learned from the master how to lie, “no problem.”

“Where’s Devon?”

“I think he’s grabbing a cup of coffee.”

“Is there a hang-up?”

“No, not at all. Just a last-minute pep talk. They’ll be up in a minute.”

The associate smiled the vacant, noncommittal smile of a subordinate covering badly for his boss.

“Do me a favor? If Devon shows up, tell him I went to the ladies’ room.”

I walked demurely through the doors, then hit the stairway.

There was only one place to get coffee inside the building, and that was the dilapidated cafeteria, but when I arrived out of breath the grill was closed and the place half deserted.

Afraid I had missed them, I was about to run back upstairs but noticed through the rear doors of the cafeteria there was a patio. Sure enough, a cappuccino cart. A few courthouse workers sitting on wire chairs were taking their breaks, bent over sliding leaves of newsprint or sitting back with heads tilted toward the sun, hands wrapped around the universal paper coffee cup.

Juliana, wearing dark glasses and a heartbreaking little pink suit, legs crossed, long dark hair blown out straight and looking about twenty-five years old, was sitting in the shade with her mother. Devon had pulled a chair close and was speaking intimately. Juliana’s arms were folded and she appeared to be staring straight ahead, turning guardedly as I neared.

“Hi, Juliana. Great to see you.”

“Good to see you, too.”

“Ana,” said Devon, “you’re not supposed to be here.”

“I just want to say thank you. Can’t I say thank you?”

“No, you cannot be seen talking with a witness!”

But I was already shaking Lynn Meyer-Murphy’s hand. I think it was the first time I had smiled in about a month and the fresh breeze blowing through the courtyard smelled like spring.

“Thank you for coming and for bringing Juliana. I know this is hard for her and I really, really appreciate it.”

“Ana,” said Devon, standing up so his chair moved back with a scrape, “go back upstairs.”

A long time ago I had stood on the threshold of the Meyer-Murphy home, shaking the hand of a woman wearing mismatched clothing who was deeply in shock. Her eyes squinted and her affect was blank, but after a brief moment’s nod toward her discomfort, I was impatient to get inside and go to work. Now it was Lynn’s face that was composed, and her fingers that withdrew first and went to the calfskin shoulder bag and took out the car keys.

“Are you leaving?”

“We’ll be up in a minute,” Devon assured me.

“What’s the matter, Juliana?”

“I’m having a panic attack,” replied the girl.

I saw her rigid carriage was effort, not composure. Her face was flushed and beneath the defiantly crossed arms her chest was heaving.

“It’s okay. It will pass,” she said bravely.

“Ask for a recess,” I told Devon. “The witness is ill.”

“Juliana wants to go for it now,” my lawyer replied urgently.

“I’d rather get it over with,” Juliana said, breathing through her nose.

“What do you think?” I asked her mother.

“I’ve been told to let her make her own decisions,” she said in a voice that was raw with self-pity.

Lynn was also wearing a suit, royal blue, and the two looked as if they should be lunching at Café Pinot, except for the obvious anger crackling between them that made it hard to imagine them even sitting at the same table. Despite her equanimity, Lynn was clutching the car keys so tightly her knuckles had turned pink.

“But she’s sick,” I protested.

“I’m not sick. It’s just a panic reaction to being in a big room in front of people. It’s a feeling, not a fact. The fact is, I’m safe. I’m safe here,” Juliana repeated, apparently as she had been taught.

“Let’s roll,” said Devon, looking at his watch. “This judge likes to go home at four.”

Juliana and her mother stood up.

“No,” I said, “no. Thank you, but no.”

“No, what?”

“I don’t want Juliana to testify.”

Devon, used to all manner of sudden turns, adroitly steered into the skid.

“I know how protective you feel of Juliana, and you’ve spoken very touchingly of your concern that she’ll be further traumatized by going up there and talking to the judge—”

“She’s in no shape to do this.”

“She wants to. Don’t you, Juliana?”

Juliana nodded, clutching a tiny black handbag in front of her, as if about to fall off her feet.

“Listen to what this young woman is telling you.”

Devon stood with one hand on the round wire table to take the weight off his bad leg. The awkward posture thrust his upper body forward, made him look gracelessly eager.

“Do they know the prosecutor has a right to cross-examine?” I said. “Do they know he can question her about the rape? He’ll make her relive it and he’ll put the blame for being raped, for being kidnapped by Ray Brennan, on her.” “No,” said Lynn, looking back and forth to Juliana. “Nobody told us that. What would that have to do with—”

“I am acting in your best interest.” Devon’s voice was raised, he was plenty steamed. “I am defending your freedom. That’s what I do. It’s in your best interest to have Juliana on the stand, testifying on your behalf.”

“And how you get her there doesn’t matter?”

Devon spoke deliberately, sarcastically, annunciating every word: “She-says-she-can-do-it.”

“She has no idea. You’re putting her up against Mark Rauch? No,” I said. “No way! He’ll malign her character,” turning back to Lynn, “so the judge won’t take what she says seriously. I can’t believe you weren’t briefed on this! He’ll make her look like a pot-smoking disenfranchised spoiled Westside kid looking for kicks who got in over her head. Who’s been bullied into testifying by the big bad scary FBI agent and her lawyer. Maybe it will set her back, maybe it won’t, but look, I shot the guy, there’s no question that I shot him—” “Shut up, Ana,” said Devon County, former LAPD. “You’re fucking yourself, excuse my language.”

Juliana shrugged. Her mother looked confused.

“You’d rather go to trial?” asked Lynn, dubious. “Because, well, that’s what Mr. County said. He said, if the judge thinks you shot this policeman for a not very good reason — you’ll go to trial, right? And maybe go to jail.” A thousand replies sprung up at once. “I’ll take that risk.”

“We have to get back,” interrupted Devon, grabbing his crutch and making for the glass doors. Awkwardly, he held them open, challenging us to follow. Only Lynn walked on ahead.

“Mom?” called Juliana, waiting uncertainly, holding on to the mini purse.

She turned. “It’s up to you.”

“Since when has anything ever been up to me?” Juliana catcalled back.

Lynn’s lips compressed and her eyes were blinking rapidly.

“You told me to stay out of your life.”

“Ladies?” Devon implored.

“He’s talking to you,” Lynn repeated, in a voice as jagged as a shard of glass, suddenly a weapon capable of cutting.

It seemed impossible this same woman had sat on the kitchen floor and wept for her lost daughter.

“Lynn,” I asked, “what’s going on?”

She straightened her back and fixed her sunglasses. But before she could reply, if she were going to reply, Juliana said, “My parents are getting a divorce.”

The lazy sunshine, relaxed figures, polished fruit and chrome fittings on the espresso machine parked between two shaggy trees made a hopeful frame for an urban oasis, but it wasn’t, really, not for these two. Where there had been connection, now there was emptiness. Where there had been a family with all its gnarly, snotty, tear-filled, heated, cleaving, lustful, playful, painfully shared aliveness, now we had disembodied individuals hurtling into space.

You see, the actions of Ray Brennan had caused this to happen to the Meyer-Murphy family.

We are drawn to the nexus of violence. Everybody’s hot to reconstruct the crime scene — crawl inside the bore and ride the spiraling projectile; pilot the factors that brought so-and-so together with so-and-so at such-and-such a time and place. I have noticed small attention paid to the aftermath, the shock waves released into the human atmosphere, more deadly than the original event because they have a wider range; an infinite range, if you think about the physics.

“I am so sorry about your marriage, I cannot say.”

“A long time coming,” Lynn Meyer-Murphy sniffed.

“Mom?” said Juliana. “What should I do?”

“It’s up to you,” she repeated, tiredly this time. She was worn out by it and had nothing left. “I know you care for Ana and you want to help. That’s very admirable. I’ll support you. Whatever you want to do. I have a Xanax in my purse if you need it.” In response, Juliana raised her chin and marched toward the door that Devon County patiently still held open.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s not for a fifteen-year-old to decide to put herself in harm’s way,” and stepped in front of Juliana and put my hands on hers. They were quivering with the tension of holding on to the purse.

“Please go home,” I told her gently. “If you want to do something, do that for me.”

Then I took her in my arms and told her that I loved her.

Upstairs, I put my forehead against the marble wall of the corridor, imploring Devon, “Why did you do that?”

“I came very close to firing you,” he said.

“The feeling was mutual.”

“Take it easy,” he said, echoing my own words to Lynn the first day of the kidnapping: “We’re only at the beginning.”

It was like a doctor telling you there are only five rounds of chemotherapy ahead.

“This morning was pure hell, Devon.”

“I know.”

“And now I get to be beat up by that poser Kelsey Owen. She’s nothing.” I felt weak and close to tears as I thought of Juliana and her mother, already on the freeway, driving away in the silent depths of the limo, “Nothing.” “Owen? Your friend from the Bureau? She wasn’t called.”

I rolled my head off the wall. “She wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Then who is their final witness?”

It was Margaret Forrester, and she had dressed for the occasion, in a tight-waisted black suit, black sheer hose and heels. The suit was not new, it had wide shoulder pads, but she looked intriguingly attractive, thick brown hair framing her cheekbones and one of her more dramatic creations — a choker of pink shells and purple stones — breaking up the black. Her nails were red. She sat up straight. She was the Thunder Queen.

Andrew did not return to the courtroom after the break so he did not hear her testimony, although he certainly would know what she was going to say.

Transcript of Proceedings page 205

FORRESTER: My job entails a lot of responsibility. I’m the widow of a police officer, and I have two small children at home, so I have to be thinking about a lot of things all day long. You have to be a “people person” and know a lot of rules and procedures and the way a police station operates.

RAUCH: In your job as police liaison with the FBI you worked with Special Agent Grey on the Santa Monica kidnapping. What was your experience?

FORRESTER: Difficult.

RAUCH: Difficult, how?

FORRESTER: She was demanding. Always wanting to do things her way. She had no understanding of how hard it is to do my job.

RAUCH: You’ve worked with FBI agents before.

FORRESTER: Yes.

RAUCH: Was Ana Grey any different?

FORRESTER: No offense to the nice people I’ve met at the Bureau, but Miss Grey had a chip on her shoulder. She thought she was better than you.

page 215

RAUCH: Was it common knowledge at the police station that Ana Grey and Andrew Berringer were dating?

FORRESTER: I was shocked, but I wasn’t surprised.

JUDGE: He’s asking you if other people knew, not your personal reaction.

FORRESTER: Yes, Your Honor, it’s a fishbowl, everybody knows everything in a police department. I said I was shocked because Detective Berringer is such a quiet guy, a guy’s guy, and usually goes out with quiet women, but I wasn’t surprised because I’d seen Miss Grey get her fingers into anything she wanted.

Cross-Examination page 249

COUNTY: Mrs. Forrester, your late husband and Detective Berringer were good friends, correct?

FORRESTER: Best of buddies. They did everything together.

COUNTY: How was your husband killed, Mrs. Forrester?

FORRESTER: He was attacked by a gang.

COUNTY: And did you receive any payments on his death?

FORRESTER: He had life insurance.

COUNTY: What about his pension?

FORRESTER: We were denied any pension my husband accrued after eighteen years of service.

COUNTY: Why is that?

FORRESTER: They ruled that he did not die in the line of duty.

RAUCH: What is the purpose of this line of questioning?

COUNTY: The relationship between Detective Forrester and Detective Berringer goes to the attitude of this witness. Mrs. Forrester, did you have a sexual relationship with Detective Berringer?

FORRESTER: No! Of course not!

COUNTY: After your husband died?

FORRESTER: No.

JUDGE: Take it easy, Mrs. Forrester.

COUNTY: It would be understandable that you would seek comfort with someone who knew you well, almost as well as your husband.

RAUCH: He is berating this witness.

JUDGE: Go on.

COUNTY: Do you recall an incident in the parking lot of the police station during which you were very upset because of an altercation with a dry cleaner?

FORRESTER: He was extremely rude to me.

COUNTY: The dry cleaner was rude and you were angry and you encountered Ana Grey.

FORRESTER: I don’t remember any of that.

COUNTY: You dropped your dry cleaning, and she picked it up. Do you remember the incident?

FORRESTER: I’m not sure.

COUNTY: Is it true in the parking lot, when you were very upset about the dry cleaner who told you never to come back to his shop, you told Ana Grey that Detective Berringer was sleeping with Officer Sylvia Oberbeck?

FORRESTER: I thought she should know. Anyway, like the other gentleman said, it was “common knowledge,” I was not letting the cat out of the bag.

COUNTY: I see. You were only repeating what everybody knew.

FORRESTER: That’s right.

COUNTY: And did you also tell Special Agent Grey what everybody knew, which was that after your husband died, you had an affair with Detective Berringer, and that he would ultimately leave her as he had left you?

FORRESTER: No! Absolutely not! That is an insult, you are attacking me, you are attacking me and nobody is doing anything about it.

JUDGE: We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess.

COUNTY: Your Honor, I’m almost done, and then we can wrap it up for the day.

JUDGE: Do you think you can answer the questions, Mrs. Forrester?

COUNTY: Didn’t you say to Ana Grey, of Andrew Berringer and Officer Oberbeck, “I slept with him before that bitch,” or words to that effect?

JUDGE: Mrs. Forrester? Answer the question.

FORRESTER: She’s lying, she’s a liar, she is out to get me and I have no idea why.

COUNTY: Really? I think that statement should be reversed because, Mrs. Forrester, aren’t you the one who told the investigating officers Ana Grey shot Andrew Berringer? Aren’t you the one who first pointed the finger at Ana Grey?

FORRESTER: They asked if I had any thoughts on the subject.

COUNTY: You had “thoughts.”

FORRESTER: Yes, I did.

COUNTY: But no facts.

FORRESTER: I knew.

COUNTY: Were you there at the time of the shooting?

FORRESTER: No.

COUNTY: Did you have any direct knowledge of the shooting?

FORRESTER: No, I didn’t.

COUNTY: Then you couldn’t know. You guessed, is that right? You conjectured. You wished. You were jealous. You wanted revenge because this big strapping handsome detective was finished with you, and his current squeeze was Ana Grey. You told the police not out of knowledge but spite, is that correct?

RAUCH: I’m sorry, we have to stop—

COUNTY: That doesn’t make you a very objective source about Special Agent Grey’s behavior, does it?

JUDGE: I think this witness has had enough, Mr. County.

We stood in the corridor. The upturned car was gone, and traffic was jammed up as usual in the late afternoon. Devon’s cell kept ringing and he kept ignoring it. The two other attorneys were talking on their phones down the hall.

“The prosecution’s case was overwhelming,” I said. “The judge did not buy ours.”

“Don’t worry, the jury will. This was just practice.”

“Practice!”

“We know a lot more about their witnesses. We know how Andrew comes across in the courtroom—”

One of the young attorneys interrupted in a hurry. “Devon? Breaking news.”

“What’s up?”

“They found a body.”

I almost laughed. This, after all, was the criminal defense attorney’s gruesome stock and trade. Bodies here, bodies there. Must mean another client!

“Teenage girl,” he was saying, “in a park in Mar Vista. The crime scene guy is saying sexual assault.”

The door to the courtroom opened slowly, and Judge McIntyre and his twin came out and our little group stepped back.

“Good evening, Judge,” said Devon, and his associates echoed the courtesy.

“Good evening,” said the judge. Dressed in street clothes now, he looked like any number of anonymous older men who wear hats and go about their business with a certain air, a burden of knowledge, that says they may have had experiences that belong to a different time and place, but they have understood those experiences in a way that we, still in the midst of life, have not.

Slowly, Judge McIntyre led his twin by the hand. His brother, it was now apparent from the lopsided shuffle and darting eyes, was mentally retarded and needed guidance through the world.

Twenty-two

The river oaks had been planted in two rows, shading a dirt road that still ran along the far reaches of the park. Their slender trunks all tilted in the same direction, and the shape of their foliage was vertical and tall; as if once upon a time a family of gnomes fleeing an evil wind had become frozen in flight, and their stubby legs had been turned into tree trunks and their tangled masses of hair into leaves whooshing fearfully up.

It was spooky, this dark grove at the edge of the playing fields, out near an old white stucco wall long covered with tents of ivy. Blown leaves and granular red dirt had accumulated near the foot of the wall, forming a dry mulch thick enough to dig through, unlike the hard-packed earth of the baseball diamond whose backstop sat at the edge of the oak shadow.

A six-year-old boy chasing a foul ball had discovered the victim between the trees and the wall. In this narrow space, the killer could have worked unobserved all night. When the crime scene folks carted the leaves away, shovel marks were visible like uniform bites around the edge of the grave. The killer was meticulous. He had come prepared — yet the grave was shallow, as if meant to be discovered. This showed ambivalence about the death. The clothed body was curled on its side in a green trash bag that did not quite reach over the head, so long thick brown hair extruded in a bunch. The hair was the oddity that caught the boy’s attention, visible through the leaves. He had thought it was the tail of a dead animal, encrusted with flies and blood.

Her name was Arlene Harounian, sixteen years old. From the condition of the body the coroner estimated she had been dead four days. She lived in a worn-down working-class city called Inglewood, about six miles from the park, an hour bus ride and a world away from Laurel West Academy and the Third Street Promenade. The father reported her missing, and a detective, already working three homicides, had been assigned to the case. Arlene had been especially beautiful, with dark tanned skin that added to her exotic look, a wide smile and confident, infectious energy. She was a popular honor student with a 4.0 grade-point average, who also played basketball and ran track, described by friends as “independent” and “a person who knew what she wanted, which was to go to college and make a difference.” Newspaper photos showed grief-stricken classmates hugging one another on the steps of the high school. Arlene had been the kind of kid who could recharge a cynical, burned-out teacher just by walking into the room.

Everyone on my legal team had the same thought: What if Arlene Harounian were another victim of Ray Brennan? Although there was no obvious link between them, she and Juliana Meyer-Murphy were similar in age and appearance, and the coroner was talking sexual assault. If the two were connected, her death could yield important facts that might have bearing on the charges against me. I was hoping it was Brennan just so we could nail him. That is the warped agony of the serial crimes investigator: sometimes the only way to move forward is for the offender to do it again.

While Devon’s office pursued their sources, I pounded Jason Ripley with e-mails and phone messages until finally he agreed to meet in the park where the body had been found.

It was a Saturday, ten days after the crime scene had been released, which meant the tennis courts were busy and slow-pitch softball games back in play. Jason could have been another gangly new dad coming through the crowded picnic area in which every table held a different multiethnic birthday party, scrawny ficus trees enveloped by a haze of smoking hamburgers and roasting skewers of yakitori and chorizo.

When we made eye contact, instead of breaking into the usual shy-but-eager grin, Jason ducked his head deeper under the bill of his cap.

“How’s it going?” he asked somberly.

“It’s going.”

“Sorry for your troubles.”

I nodded. He put a running shoe up on the seat of the picnic table, and we stood there awkwardly. What I really wanted was a big soft hug.

“So,” rubbing his farmer’s freckled hands together, “how can I help?”

I squinted over the acres of playing fields to the small, twisted procession of river oaks and what had been hidden there, diagonally across from tables full of toddlers reaching eagerly for birthday cake.

“Let’s take a walk.”

Jason glanced at the site uneasily. “I’ve got to get back to the office, got a ton of three-oh-twos.”

“Sure,” I said, surprised to feel how much his terseness stung. “What are we getting from the lab?”

“In terms of what?”

“Cause of death?”

“Haven’t gotten the autopsy results.”

“Why not?”

“Backed up, as usual.”

“Give me a break, it’s a high-profile case.”

“All I can tell you is what they tell me.”

“I like it,” nodding with mock approval. “Where did you learn to put on the spin?”

Jason reddened.

“Okay, then, what’s the buzz? No reason we can’t gossip, talk about what you’re hearing in the halls.”

“The buzz is sexual assault.”

“Any links to Brennan?”

“Nothing confirmed.”

“If there were,” I asked with a tight smile, “would you tell me?”

“Ana, you know, I’m kind of in a tough position here.”

“Where? Who’s listening?”

An ice cream truck had backed into the picnic area piping idiotic circus music over and over.

“I just can’t …” His lips curled in against his teeth, a sign of refusal if there ever was one. “I just …”

“You feel disloyal because you’re talking to me? About our own case?”

“It’s not exactly your case,” he muttered, “or mine, really, anymore—”

“I’m only on suspension.”

“But if you go to trial …”

“If I go to trial that’s another deal, but meanwhile, girls are getting murdered and what the hell is the Bureau doing about it? That’s what I want to know. What is the status? Because I learned from experience that when the lead agent doesn’t keep the pressure on, the whole thing evaporates. So is anyone still tracking Brennan? Is anyone going to put this case next to the Santa Monica kidnapping and the hits we got in VICAP — Washington, Florida and Texas — or, when there’s another sexually assaulted body of a teenage girl, am I going to spend the rest of my life pacing around Mike Donnato’s kitchen like some demented bride of Frankenstein, saying, I told you so?” Jason laughed. “You’re a real character, you know that?”

“It’s not about me, it’s about the Bureau. You want to be loyal to the Bureau, help me keep working this case, because all indications are this guy is into a cycle of repeating.”

“We don’t even know if it’s Brennan,” Jason began.

I found myself rubbing my face all over with my fingertips, like putting on cold cream or taking off a mask.

“So why did you come here? To tell me you can’t tell me anything?”

“I came because I like you,” he blurted. Then, “I don’t know what went on with you and your boyfriend — I’m just hoping it all works out for you in the end.”

“And …?”

“And … nothing.”

He was leaning one forearm on the bent knee that was up on the table, looking at me sideways, trying to hide behind the green sunglasses.

I waited.

“They want you to back off,” he said finally. “They want you to go away. You shot a cop, no matter what the circumstances.” He added quickly, “You’re a problem, and they want it gone.”

“Is this a message from Rick?”

“I’m just trying to explain why I can’t share information. I know you care a thousand percent, but until your court case is resolved — and believe me, everyone is pulling for you — it’s just too political.”

The guise was gone, as Jason seemed to vent on behalf of the whole field office. “We’ve got so much shit coming down. Bank robberies are up, the spy scandal, the ‘alleged terrorist’ who died in custody, the ‘misplaced’ assault rifles — how could that happen? Hackers busting into our secure files. Everywhere you look, the Bureau is taking another hit.” “Can we get away from this clown music?” I said of the ice cream truck. “It’s driving me nuts.”

The young agent straightened up. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

I put my bag on my shoulder.

“What about Brennan?”

“Brennan is over,” Jason said firmly. “We recovered the victim of the Santa Monica kidnapping,” holding up a hand to stop my protest. “That was our job. We did our job. If the locals want our cooperation, cool, but it’s their homicide. That’s how the brass sees it.” “How do you see it?”

Jason shrugged. “I feel for you. I feel for the girl. It’s hard.”

“You know, we’re about ten blocks from Brennan’s apartment,” I said after a little while. “I drove through the neighborhood on the way over. Strange mix. You’ve got the old abandoned houses, the apartment buildings … I’d love to talk to Mrs. Santos after this,” nodding toward the oak trees. “See how safe she feels right now for Roxy.” Jason’s foot thumped, but he did not take the bait. He was changing. I had actually watched him change, that was the amazing thing, like all the new agents who come in looking like Clark Kent until they realize all those other Clark Kents are getting in the way. The ginger-haired little boy had grown up.

“Remember what we talked about? Proving yourself?” I asked. “It’s hard these days, even knowing how. What’s important? What’s political? Are you the good son who’s loyal to the organization, or do you go out on a limb for what you believe? Don’t worry about it, Jason. Either way, you’ve got a great career ahead of you. Two different paths, is all.” “That’s not at all a fair evaluation,” he called after me.

I walked toward the parking lot, past an empty swimming pool and a brand-new roller-hockey rink. It must have been a youth league tournament because the bleachers were filled with cheering parents on their feet with fervor and excitement; the high protective mesh strung with red, white and blue balloons.

Is this Dr. Arnie, the mad magician of Fullerton? Hi! It’s Ana Grey!”

I was lounging at the white umbrella table in Mike Donnato’s backyard, sipping a mint-flavored mojito, which I had fashioned from a recipe in the LA Times, the morning sun just creeping across the deck.

Hip, all right.

“Ana,” said the lab director, “I’ve been meaning to get back to you.”

“No problemo. I know you’re under it.”

“Hello? Am I talking to the real Ana Grey, or is this a clone? The nice clone, who doesn’t put your testicles in the wringer the minute you don’t have an answer in twenty-four seconds?” “Am I really that bad?”

“On a good day. On a bad day, you don’t want to know from it.”

“Speak to me of shoe prints.”

“Don’t you love shoe prints?”

“I do,” wondering if they were drinking mojitos over at the crime lab, too. Maybe everybody was. The entire Southland. Starting around breakfast. They contain lime juice, a good source of vitamin C. “Did you recover any shoe prints from the homicide in Mar Vista?” “Of course we got shoe prints. What do you think, we’re incompetent?”

“What size?”

He clicked computer keys. “Ten.”

“Like Ray Brennan.”

“Your guy, Brennan?”

I could hear the surprise. “Is it a match?”

More anxious clicks. “The problem is, the outsoles are different and we couldn’t get the wear characteristics off the impression on the skin of that first rape victim. It was a herringbone pattern from a tennis shoe we recovered in the park.” “But the same size?”

“Correct. And, obviously, he asphyxiated her, wasn’t that the ritual?”

“He did? The new victim?”

“Where have you been?”

“Out of town.”

I had called Dr. Arnie on the odds that news of my preliminary hearing situation had not yet reached Fullerton. Propellerheads live in a parallel universe from ours; parallel to most.

“We sent a full report to the Bureau last week.”

“Last week?”

“Sometimes we do our job.”

Jason’s look came back to me, the averted eyes behind the green lenses.

“But you’re not prepared to say it’s Brennan?”

“Not conclusively. Look, I’m sure it’s all up on Rapid Start.”

“I’m not in the office.”

“Want me to fax our report to you?”

“You’re an angel.”

I placed the glass with the spent mint leaves in the water and watched it float.

Three hundred tiny lights from three hundred candles grew brighter as the sun sank behind the gymnasium building. The memorial service of Arlene Harounian was held late on a cloudy afternoon in the football field of the high school, where a stage had been outfitted with microphones and floral arrangements. The stage was big enough to hold the school orchestra, which played with heartbreaking finesse. The kids were good. They had accomplished something.

Silently they stood and carried their instruments off and the madrigal singers filed to the microphones, like everyone else wearing ordinary teenage grunge, boot-cut jeans and wind pants and baggies and Tshirts, underdressed for the gathering chill. It had been sunny in the morning. The few dozen grown-ups there, old enough to have read the weather report, came wrapped in scarves and winter coats.

The singers lofted into “Ave Maria,” and I began rooting around in the pockets of my leather jacket for tissues. Man, why was I there? To tap into that spring of grief that ran underground, seemingly always just beneath my feet? There must be a river of sadness below the pavement of our cities. One after the other, for at least the past hour, friends and teachers had stood at the podium and universally described Arlene Harounian as a girl with unusual promise, whose smile “lit up the world,” who “wanted you to feel better.” White doves were released and her basketball jersey retired. The team showed it to us from the stage, horribly laid out flat inside a frame.

Her parents sat on folding chairs with the other siblings and did not speak. The father had a wild head of madly blowing black hair and big teeth that snapped shut like a nutcracker into a stupefied smile. The littlest sister read a poem Arlene had written in seventh grade called “I Am,” which they printed in the program: “I am purple sunsets / I am the sick child who wonders why / I am a bell / I am a big sister who sometimes wants to be a little baby / I am a leaf …”

A history teacher called for the study of nonviolence, a boy played a keyboard solo. Two girls holding each other for support took turns recounting how fine-looking Arlene was, but how practical about her gifts. She had determined to become a model in order to pay for college. They wanted to be models, too, but she was the one who actually went out and had a portfolio made. It was dark by then. The little paper cups on the end of the candles, which sheltered the flames from the wind, glowed in the evening like homespun orange lamps. My fingers were caked with melted wax from turning the candle to keep it alive. Here and there the cups would catch on fire and be stomped out. Nobody giggled. A screen had been raised, and someone clicked a laptop, and we were watching a montage of slides and rap songs that told us all about Arlene Harounian’s life, from a dark-haired tyke on a bicycle to a confident young woman in a lacy cutoff top holding on to a tree and arching her back, but whose look into the camera said, I’m in charge, not you.

Then it was as if that kid with the keyboard had come back for an encore, ringing out chords of dissonance and rage. I sat up straighter and straighter, as if the conviction growing inside would fill the stadium, as if everybody must know, as I knew then, that the amateur modeling photos we were looking at on the screen were the work of Ray Brennan. All the loveliness of Arlene swirled like a crescendo of discordant notes into an artifact not of her, but of what had taken her, and that was the greatest injustice of all.

Even before I reached my car, the cell phone was ringing.

“The judge handed down his decision,” Devon said.

I did not even hold my breath.

“The judge is holding you to answer. He has found reasonable suspicion that you committed this crime, and you are held to answer for attempted murder.” He paused. “Ana?”

“We’re going to trial,” I repeated.

“No surprise,” Devon rolled on smoothly. “We expected this. We’ve heard their witnesses, and now we punch holes in every single one. It’s clear Andrew Berringer was lying. And I have investigators going after Margaret Forrester, there’s obviously a screw loose there. You’ll be happy to know Mark Rauch has already come back and asked the judge to raise bail.” “On what basis?”

“Now that you know you’re facing trial, you’re supposedly a greater flight risk. It’s a bogus argument, of course—”

“Devon?” I said calmly. “I’m fairly certain of the fact that Ray Brennan killed Arlene Harounian. The girl who was found in the park. She was his most recent victim, and I’m sure there are more. Let me call you back.”

I stood unconcerned in the middle of the parking lot as cars zigzagged and honked. In the stadium they were taking down the screen and carrying off the floral arrangements. The father had stepped down, clutching his wife’s hand. Awkwardly tucked beneath his other arm was a basketball signed by the team.

Brennan had photographed both Juliana and Arlene. He had posed them the same way, according to his own ritualized and private reasons, holding on to a tree with their butts sticking out. The photo of Juliana we had up in the command center was identical to this one, of Brennan’s latest victim.

Juliana looked scared.

Arlene looked assured.

I had found stillness.

Twenty-three

If I were working the case, I would jump all over the photography angle. I would show Ray Brennan’s picture to everyone in Arlene Harounian’s life until we could pinpoint how and where they met. I would redraw Brennan’s “hunting field” to a twenty-five-square-mile grid on the map in the command center — west to Culver City, south to Manhattan Beach — and all the eager new agents would say, Ahhhhh.

But I was not working the case. I had been held to answer, and the trial was coming now like a pair of headlights when your power steering has died. A sense of fatalism replaced whatever moxie I had felt in court. Devon might wave his crutch, but nothing would stop Mark Rauch’s head-on prosecution now.

Also, the story broke in the papers: fbi agent to stand trial in love shooting — Veteran Agent Ana Grey Allegedly Wounded Police Detective Boyfriend in Marina Del Rey Apartment. As my lawyer kept reminding me, the slightest violation of bail would be a public relations jackpot for the other side.

I returned to the prison of the hobby room, with the brown carpeting that had the flat cracked nap of an old sheep and smelled like an old sheep, and sat on the checked sofa and stared at the empty fireplace. We had lost our motion to prevent cameras in the courtroom. The trial would be televised, and after that, even if the verdict were not guilty, my career would be over. The Bureau did not deal in damaged goods.

There was no longer a reason to leave the house or even get dressed. Aside from a call or two from the law firm every day, I would sit on the couch in my pajamas and make obsessive checklists concerning the Santa Monica kidnapping. I would meditate on Brennan’s watery picture over the mantle, then reconstruct the assaults on Arlene and Juliana, noting time and date, location of the victims, method, physical evidence, laboratory findings, and make spiderlike diagrams showing possible connections between Brennan, Arlene and Juliana.

There was one promising link. The lab report faxed by Dr. Arnie said tiny chips had been found in Arlene’s hair — the same sandwich of floral wallpaper between two layers of old paint that had collected in Juliana’s clothes. Both girls had been taken to the same 1940s-era house “in a loamy area near the coast.” The link that did not make sense was that one of the girls was dead.

Killing the victim did not fit Brennan’s known pattern. He had wounded the ducks; strangled Juliana to the point of unconsciousness and let her go. Why? Guilt? Torture? Ambivalence? Another clue was the grave. If he had meant to hide the body, he would have done that. If he had meant to show it off, he would have done that, too. This was hasty and halfhearted — maybe, I scribbled, because it was not part of the plan. Perhaps she had asphyxiated accidentally during the sex act. His ritual is interrupted. Suddenly, he finds himself not in control of the game. He swallows the rage and reverts to his military training — a quick burial, leave ’em by the trail, go on to accomplish the mission.

That compulsive drive — to finish the act at all costs — might prove stronger than the intelligence that had protected him so far, the canniness that had allowed him to set up his victims (it could be dozens, including those from back east, never put together by local law enforcement because he would move out of their territories — attack and withdraw to safety).

He would be overwhelmed by the uncontrollable need to find another girl.

Now.

Who could I tell? Who would listen? All connections with the Bureau had been stripped. There were no more encouraging e-mails; hell, nobody even returned my calls. When it was announced that we were going to trial, Galloway must have come down hard. I couldn’t talk to Mike. For weeks we had stalked around each other in the confines of the house, avoiding mention of the case. He was my final sanctuary. I would not put him in a position of disloyalty now.

It was about two in the morning and I was awake, as usual, barreling through an old Donald L. Westlake mystery, dug up from the dad’s side of the hobby room, although not even a hilarious band of thieves could distract for long. I put the book down and finally, with restless despair, threw open the white cabinet that had been standing as an enigma all this time amongst the old possessions of Mike’s parents. Inside was a jewel box of sewing notions: a hundred rolls of thread lined up in rainbow order on hooks set in Peg-Board. There were drawers of bobbins, scissors, glue and markers. Scraps of crocheting and spools of ribbon, each in their places; a clear box just for Christmas glitter and felt.

Here was a marriage. Mike’s dad had built this cabinet for his mom, I was sure. He had made a place for her pleasure and her work, and she had done her work, and there were the garments, hanging on a rack — half-made blouses with the patterns still pinned. I sat down on the rancid carpet and allowed myself to become lost, handling old cellophane packets of bindings (twenty-five cents each), unrolling silver lace, finding peace, like an orphan, in the fairy-tale world of the phantom parents. It scarcely mattered whose parents they were, so deep was the yearning to be comforted. I dug into the cool layers of the button bin, letting them sift through my fingers like stories.

Then, emboldened, I pulled out a drawer in the sagging file cabinet that held the trout-fishing magazines. Burrowing into the one spot in the left side of the couch that still had spring, in the light of the fat brown-shaded lamp, I studied yet another watercolor rendering of a steelhead trout. Over and over these magazines showed the trophy, and it was always the same trophy. And what about those hours tying flies beneath the magnifying glass, only to have most of them, and the trophy, lost? What could I, as an investigator, learn from this?

I went back to the fishing magazines. Then I discovered that hidden behind them, way back in the file drawer, was a pile of Playboys dating from the sixties. The top cover (Miss February) was coated with a perfect layer of dust, as if the secret stash had lain untouched for thirty years.

Miss February’s interests were “tennis and kittens.” For the centerfold, she wore a G-string sewn with tiny hearts and stroked a white fluffy cat. She had enormous pinkish breasts that barely fit on the page. She’d be a grandmother now. What I loved most were the one-inch ads in the back of the magazine that whispered to the anxieties of the male psyche: “Helps you overcome false teeth looseness and worry”; “Bill Problems?”; “A Timely Message to the Man with Hernia”; “How to Speak and Write Like a College Graduate”—and a classic pictorial essay on “Favorite Valentine’s Day Gifts,” featuring Playboy bunnies and red satin sheets. Then I saw the photo credit.

There was a soft knock on the door.

“Come in.”

It was Mike.

“Saw the light on, so I thought …”

He handed me a cup of milk and a bag of chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts.

I said, “Wow.”

“What are you doing?”

“Snooping into your parents’ lives. Did you know your dad read Playboy?”

Mike took the magazine looking somewhat confused.

“Am I shattering your illusions?”

He broke into a grin. “God bless the old man.”

“Look who took the pictures,” I said excitedly, pointing to the photo credit. “Hugh Akron.”

“Our Hugh Akron?”

“Got to be. Do you think he’d want to have this?”

“What? This magazine?”

“For his personal collection.”

“Sure, if he wants to buy it, the slimy tea bag. He ripped me off for Lakers tickets. The scalpers were selling them for less.”

“How does a creep like Hugh Akron get girls to take off their clothes?”

Mike was lost in the magazine.

“Where does he find them?” I went on. “These cute twenty-year-old girls? You know, he still does this stuff? Cheesecake, on the Internet. Did he ever show you?”

Mike abstractedly shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

I dipped a chocolate chip cookie in the cup and sucked out the milk. “My grandfather read Playboy. Those were the days when they put centerfolds up at the police station.”

Mike lowered the magazine and kind of nodded, as if he had been only half listening. He was wearing plaid cotton flannel pants; mine were the same navy blue skivvies from Quantico I’d had on for days. I pulled the sweater close around my chest. As he stood there unmoving, I became uncomfortably aware of both our sex parts loose inside our pajama bottoms.

“Would you mind listening to something?”

“Sure.”

He fished a microcassette from his pocket and flickered it in the air.

“From the answering machine. The one in the hallway,” he insisted. “Right when you come in the door.”

I nodded, wondering why the location of the answering machine was important at two in the morning.

He sat down on the opposite side of the couch and fitted the cassette into a small tape recorder.

“Wacko bitch. Why didn’t you take a two-by-four and do a Sam Shepard, do something to yourself big-time? If you had the guts, you’d shoot yourself with a service revolver and claim you wrestled the gun away. You could strangle yourself and leave marks. If you had the guts. Do you have the guts?” “Who is that?”

“I don’t know.”

The tape chattered along on fast-forward.

“I saw you in the courtroom. I thought you looked at me kind of hot. I’m up for anything, sweetheart, and I know you can show me the way. Do you think I have ulterior motives? I don’t have ulterior motives. Ask me if I do. I’d love to hear your sexy voice …” Eventually it clicked off.

“How many are there?”

“Seven.”

“Seven?”

“Now they’re coming two times a day.”

“Did you put a trap on the phone?”

“I will, but they won’t call again.”

“Why not?”

“They know that’s exactly what I’m going to do. These are cops, Ana. This is intimidation.”

It was late, my brain running slow. “Andrew’s homies, you think?”

He shrugged. “Got to be someone who knows where you are and how to get an unlisted number.”

“Screw them.”

“Right, except that Ian”—referring to his middle boy, aged ten—“took that message off the machine.”

Chocolate burst inside my mouth, the last taste of bittersweet.

“I am so sorry, Mike.”

“I have to ask you to leave.”

The world stopped then. I tried to nestle deeper into the arm of the couch.

Mike said, “I’m sorry. This is just too close to home.”

I nodded, stunned. My only thought was, I will go to jail.

“Is it Rochelle?”

He admitted, “She’s upset.”

“I hope I haven’t—”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Nothing to do with that.”

He stayed on his side of the sofa. We looked away with embarrassment at what had been left behind a long time ago, when we were partners chasing bandits.

“You’ve gone way beyond the call of duty as it is.”

His eyes filmed and so did mine. He was a decent man, trying to do the decent thing. “We’ll figure out another place for you to go,” he promised.

“Depends if Devon can renegotiate release terms and conditions.”

We were silent. There had been a moment, when his marriage went bad, I had thought it would be Mexico. Lobsters and tequila and an endless beach.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’ve been up thinking about it,” he said.

“Family is family,” I replied on cue. “I love your kids, I don’t want them exposed to this crap.”

Suddenly Mike stood and ripped down Ray Brennan’s picture.

“Hey!” I said.

“This is crap! I don’t want it in my house!”

“You’re right,” I said, taking the crumpled photo from his hand. “This is bad, bad, toxic stuff. We can’t let it contaminate your family.”

He gestured helplessly.

“The problem is, this guy kills girls. I know he did the one who was found in the park.”

Mike rubbed his hair. “Which one who was found in the park?”

His ignorance of the latest murder confirmed what Jason said: the Bureau had dropped the case.

“Another victim, named Arlene Harounian. She was asphyxiated, possibly during the sex act. Ray Brennan took her picture, just like Hugh Akron takes pictures of girls, promises them modeling careers—”

“You have to give this up.”

“I know Brennan photographed both victims. The question is, where? How does he find them? How does he get them to pose? Because, I’m telling you, he’s going to take another girl.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Mike suddenly. “I have to be up in three hours.”

I told him I would be out by the weekend.

The next day Mike called from the office.

“Hugh Akron says there’s a thing called photo swap meets. They have them every two weeks, at different locations around southern California. They’re like swap meets, where photographers and models get together. It’s supposed to be legit. He says that’s where he goes to meet models, and he’d be pleased to take me along.” “You declined.”

“There’s an organization.”

Mike gave me the website.

I understood that it was a parting gift.

Subj: RE: PHOTO DAY

From: moose@sunshinephotoclub

To: 70Barracuda@hotmail.com

Dear Ana,

Don’t call it a “swap meet,” we are not a “swap meet,” since “swap meets” are places where photographers trade and sell camera equipment. No shooting is done at a “swap meet.” Our club sponsors Photo Days, which are actual photo shoots, for photographers and models. Are you interested in modeling? The female models are admitted free. All of our models are female, as men don’t like to take pictures of other men. Our next Photo Day is this Sunday. Click on the link. It’s a lot of fun. I would like to welcome you personally. Please provide a physical description of yourself.

This would be one of those subcultures where you’d want to put on rubber gloves before typing a reply.

I downloaded the Sunshine Photo Club’s calendar of events. Counting back every Sunday for two months, I got to the week of Juliana’s abduction. There was a Photo Day scheduled that Sunday in Veterans Park. Juliana had been taken the following Tuesday. She had never mentioned a photo shoot. She did not say she wanted to be a model. If the theory was that Brennan stalked these shoots, why had he been trolling the Promenade?

I flipped back through my personal calendar and noted that was the weekend when Andrew and I were supposed to ride his Harley in a police fund-raiser. But we did not ride the Harley because it had rained. It was raining all weekend. It had rained the weekend before.

I had gone swimming in the pool in the rain.

The police fund-raiser had been canceled.

The photo shoot was undoubtedly canceled, too.

Ray Brennan was hungry. His pattern had been disrupted and he had to look outside his comfort zone.

The Promenade was not his hunting field. We had been misled by our own assumptions. Juliana had not been the pattern. She had been the exception to the pattern.

I dug out the crumpled program for Arlene Harounian’s memorial service, which was still inside my jacket pocket. The two girls who had spoken about Arlene wanting to be a model were listed in the order of events as Remembering Arlene by Jane Latsky and Muriel Fletcher. Directory assistance gave me four Latskys in the area. I told young Jane I was a reporter for a local paper and wanted to know if her friend Arlene had ever attended a photo day.

Yes, said the girl, all the time. Once in a park in Manhattan Beach.

The next upcoming photo day, according to the website, would take place in a Japanese tea garden in Glendale.

They couldn’t bust me for going to a park on a sunny day.

Twenty-four

The Japanese tea garden was located in a recreation center in Glendale, at the end of a palm-lined street in a neighborhood of nicely landscaped older cottages. The park was tucked up against the Verdugo Mountains, in a shady oasis that included a public library. A table had been set up, blocking the Shinto gate. You had to sign in.

“I’m looking for Moose,” I told the wiry fellow on guard.

“Who’s Moose?”

“One of the organizers.”

“I’m the organizer,” he claimed. He was about fifty, rugged, too-tanned features and shoulder-length hair, wearing a water bottle belt and short shorts to show off his developed legs — one of those deeply California characters whose past would probably read like a parody of West Coast fads: hot tub installer, dope dealer, surfer, yoga teacher.

“Moose said he’d be here.”

There was a beat of numbskull silence, and then a mountainous person who had been standing nearby said in a deep announcer’s voice, “I’m Moose.”

“Great!” shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Just as great as you said it would be.”

So was he. About six foot four, three hundred pounds.

“See, we’re fenced in here,” said Moose, indicating the manicured garden. “No looky-loos.”

“Are all these photographers full-time professionals?”

“Amateurs. The word for this is amateurs,” he admitted reluctantly and sighed.

“They all have other jobs?”

“Like me. I have another job.”

“What’s your line of work?”

“Cleaning supplies.”

“Ahh. So, Moose, how do you become a member?”

“The models get in free. The photographers pay twenty dollars at the door.”

I had seen them in the parking lot unpacking their equipment, overweight middle-aged men wearing fishing hats and elaborate vests with dozens of pockets. Some were sporting lenses the size of the Mount Palomar telescope, others had tiny digitals. Half were white, half Asian, and they all seemed to know one another in the forgiving, easygoing way of hobbyists.

“Anybody can walk in here with twenty dollars and a camera?”

“We are totally legal,” interjected Mr. California. “We have never had an incident. Who are you?”

“She just wants to look around,” mumbled Moose.

Mr. California became distracted by trouble with a barbeque and I took the opportunity to lose myself in the strangely peaceful garden. I had already picked up flyers for other photo days from other clubs and saw there was a circuit. You could find one of these shoots every weekend at some public location somewhere in the Southland. Although that expanded Brennan’s hunting field considerably, it brought the comfort of a plan: I would go to every single shoot. I would show Brennan’s picture to everybody there. If someone turned up a credible lead, I would pursue whomever I had to pursue, at the Bureau or the local level, I didn’t care, in order to set up surveillance for the next time Brennan showed. I would do this meticulously, until my trial was over, until the last appeals were spent, until they put me in jail.

The photographers lumbered slowly and with prerogative along the winding paths, while the female models — young made-up faces bright as flowers — waited under the ginkgo trees, with their mothers, to be picked. They were all picked. This was a dance where everybody danced. Someone would position a girl and half a dozen men would shoot over his shoulder, paparazzo-style.

“Give me that laugh again!”

“Would you guys mind if I moved her into the shade?”

For twenty bucks you could get a sixteen-year-old to bend over a pagoda and stick out her butt.

It was supposed to be clean family fun. A young lady with seductive eyebrows, wearing a cheap strapless evening dress, was wrapping and unwrapping a shawl around her body, liking the attention, while a bunch of sad sacks stood around snapping. One of them, who wore a dirty baseball cap and a big bushy beard, slipped her a pair of mirrored sunglasses and shyly asked that she put them on.

I could picture Hugh Akron, all right. He would ace these geezers, a pro amongst the clueless. Ray Brennan? He’d do just fine, sidewinding through the innocent façade. And Arlene Harounian thought she could handle anything.

If I had my credentials, I could have worked the situation in fifteen minutes. As it was, all I could do was saunter around smiling and engaging folks in casual conversation, asking if they’d seen the man in the photo, using the ruse that Ray Brennan owed me some prints, occasionally taking a picture with my Ricoh to look authentic, but I was the only woman with a camera and kept getting apprehensive looks from the moms. I was not liking civilian status one bit.

“Photo day is a handy place to test out your technique,” a retired engineer named George told me.

“Great to test your equipment,” added his friend, who had an automatic camera with no settings.

“Do the models and photographers get to know each other?” I asked dully.

“Oh no, not at all,” insisted George. “This is a very safe place. There’s no direct contact. We only go by first names. We e-mail their pictures to them, but usually to a friend’s computer. You have to be careful.”

“In this day and age,” intoned his pal.

They were gray in the face with thin sloping shoulders, wearing closely related plaid shirts.

“I’m looking for Ray,” showing the picture once again. “Met him out in Riverside,” another location on the circuit. “Ray Brennan? Or he could be using another name.”

Like everybody else, they shook their heads. By now there were maybe fifty hobbyists and half as many models clustered in little groups near flowering trees and stone shrines. It was becoming sultry and humid in the tea garden. Maybe that is why the photographers were moving so languorously. Or perhaps they were all about to drop dead.

No, wait, there was some excitement by the pond, where a narrow girl in a red cowboy hat, short denim jacket and low-riding jeans was placing one red high heel on the lower rung of a bridge, causing a reaction amongst the photographers like goldfish to crumbs.

“Smile, honey! Pose!” shouted a strained woman’s voice.

“Are you the mom?”

Of course she was the mom, who else would have laid out a blanket piled with head shots?

She looked not much older than her daughter, ruddy face, wide at the hips, an infant over one shoulder, a toddler wearing a butterfly costume prancing along the path.

Like they said: family.

“I’m Sonoma’s mother,” she said self-importantly. “Sonoma has her own website.”

She gave me a card. Her nails were long and white and sparkled. The only sparkly thing about her.

“I tell my girls, use your looks while you have them. You won’t have them forever.”

The butterfly had scrambled onto a rock, hands clasped to her chin, flashing a demented smile at a guy with a mustache and a tripod.

“You don’t mean the little one,” I couldn’t help saying. “Losing your looks at three?”

“Oh no,” said the mother, “Sonoma and Bridget. That’s what I say to them.”

She pointed with the toe of her running shoe at the glossies on the blanket. Sonoma was blonde. Bridget had long dark hair, like Juliana’s. There were dozens of shots of them in halters and short skirts. It made you appreciate actual models.

“Bridget is Sonoma’s sister?”

“Eighteen months apart. I have to be careful they don’t get competitive. They like to dress the same, but I tell them, you should each develop your own look.”

“The cowgirl look.”

“They do it different every time. They love it,” she assured me. “We all the time go on a shopping spree before we come to one of these.”

It turned out they lived in the desert, three hours away. The drive was no problem. This was, according to her, how the actress Heather Locklear got started.

“Last week Bridget earned a hundred fifty dollars.”

“Really?”

“Through an agency on the Internet. They get paid twenty-five dollars an hour, two hours minimum. I make sure I’m always at the photo shoot,” she said firmly. “And it has to be nonglamour, not lingerie.”

“Is Bridget here?”

“No, she’s working with one of the gentlemen.”

I looked around for another doll in a cowboy hat.

“Where?”

“She went with him for a little while,” the mom explained, shifting the infant to the other shoulder.

“Where did they go?”

“To his studio.”

“You said you’re always present at a photo shoot.”

My heartbeat had kicked up to a hundred thirty.

“I am,” she said haughtily, “but I have the babies.”

I was angry enough to nail her to a tree. She never went on shoots. And you know Bridget never got the hundred fifty bucks; it’s how mom kept the girls tied up inside her own spandex dreams.

“Is this the photographer?”

The lady peered at Ray Brennan’s picture.

“That kind of looks like him, but this man’s name is Jack.”

“Kind of, or is it? He might have changed his hair color, or his facial hair. He’s six feet tall, weighs about two hundred, in good shape.”

I might not have the creds, but I had the attitude, and it was rattling her.

“Let me ask Sonoma.”

I stood there, knowing. It was like suddenly being encased in ice.

Sonoma minced over, walking on toes to keep the high heels from sinking into the sweating grass. She was the older one, not so pretty close up.

“What is the problem, Mom?” she snapped, looking at the picture. “That’s Jack. Who else would it be?”

“Don’t use that mouth,” the mother whined. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“It’s chill,” the girl told me. “My sister knows him really well.”

“How well?”

“He’s come here before.” Then, less certain, “I know she’s talked to him …”

I realized why the other photographers claimed not to have seen the hard face of Ray Brennan in their garden. They had not wanted to see him. He was forty years younger, stronger, pumped with male vitality, capable of getting real girls to do the real thing.

“Bridget left with this man? How long ago?”

“Half an hour. Forty minutes.”

“They’ll be right back,” the mother assured me.

“Where is the studio?”

They looked at each other.

“—Somewhere close.”

“—Five minutes away.”

“—He said it was at his mother’s house.”

It was not supposed to be this way. Not without an arrest plan, or a warrant, for God’s sake. Not without backup. I sped down the 134 Freeway while punching the address book on my personal cell phone.

Donnato.

Jason.

Barbara.

Galloway.

Vernon.

Eunice.

Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail.

Donnato was at a wedding with his Nextel turned off, but where the hell was everybody else? What did they do on Sunday afternoons? Damn, they were probably all at the ceremony — it was Vicki Shawn and Ed Brewster, the firearms instructors who had posed for Hugh Akron in their wedding clothes. I roared out loud with frustration. It would take too long to go through the rigmarole with some rookie on the switchboard. I needed to connect in the next two minutes with somebody who knew the Brennan case.

Fingertips on the wheel, I reached back with my other hand and felt around the rear seat for the envelope of files concerning the preliminary hearing. The files were in folders, which took the finesse of a bomb squad expert to extract from the envelope at eighty-five miles per hour in a convertible. Glancing from the gyrating road to the pages flapping in the open air, I located the list of witnesses, and there was Kelsey Owen’s home phone number.

I guess she was not invited to the wedding, either, because she picked up on the first ring.

I explained as concisely as I could: Ray Brennan had taken a teenage Juliana look-alike from a photo shoot less than an hour before.

“Where are you?” she shouted.

“Almost to the Ventura Freeway. They said he took her to a studio in his mother’s house. I’m guessing his mother’s house is somewhere around Culver City or the park—”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I didn’t mean for it to go down like this—” I was yelling.

“It’s okay, Ana. Calm down. You’re doing good. I’m here and I’m going to help you. Tell me, clearly and slowly, what you want me to do.”

“Go to Rapid Start. Either on his military record, or on one of the three-oh-twos, it’s going to say his mother’s maiden name. You’ll need it when you run the title search because the parents were divorced—” “I can’t go to Rapid Start from here!” she interrupted, trying to stay calm. “I’m home, remember? You called me at home!”

“—He’s got this girl, and he’s at the killing house. He has to finish the ritual—” The cell was cutting out. “How fast can you get to the office?”

Her reply was garbled.

“What?” I said. “What did you say?”

“—West. Keep going west.”

Twenty agonizing minutes later Kelsey called from the office, just as I was curving onto the 405.

“Look,” she said, “I need to say that I take responsibility for what’s been going on—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, the tension between us — I’m wondering if you’ve been feeling it too — I’ve been sad about it, and I just wanted to say—”

“Screw that! We are so past that!”

“Are we, really? Because I need you to know I was never going to testify, no way. You see, I do understand about loyalty, and if they called me, I was going to be a hostile witness and they—”

“Yes, yes, we are totally cool. I’m sorry, too!” I bellowed over the screaming wind. “I really, really am. Just give me what you’ve got!”

His mother’s maiden name was Connors. Lilly Connors. The title to the house was in her name. It had taken Rapid Start about a half a second to retrieve it.

Step by step, I walked Kelsey through the procedure, while simultaneously accelerating the Barracuda over an overpass like a toy race car that defies gravity on the loop-the-loop. By the time I was peeling off at National, she had run an emergency property search and come up with the address in Mar Vista. His mother’s house. Where Ray Brennan had grown up.

The moment I pulled up, I wanted to bang my head against the dashboard.

It was a house I had seen before, when Jason and I were on surveillance. I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

It is like that, often.

It was the house on the corner, across from the Montessori school, a small stucco bungalow sun-scorched to indiscriminate gray, with a porch supported by thin white posts — a suggestion of a porch really — and rotted concrete steps. A rusted TV aerial was perched on top of a sloping roof. The lawn was dead, the place had looked abandoned, but there was a bright green AstroTurf doormat. I remember thinking when Jason and I were there the first time that something was not right.

I have noticed when the hairs go up on the back of your neck, and you think something is not right, something is not right.

There were two windows on the porch side, two on the left where a front bedroom might be. The windows were not boarded up, as I had hastily assumed, but blackened in, with paint.

I had been looking at Ray Brennan’s darkroom.

His roving abduction-mobile was parked out front.

“I see the van. I’m at the address,” lifting the latch on a chain-link gate. “I’m going in.”

“Wait!” cried Kelsey over the phone in my ear. “Culver City police are responding!”

“He’s got a girl in there, now.”

“Are you armed?”

“They took my gun, remember?”

I was heading up the weedy path.

“If he’s into it and you interrupt him, he’ll go into a rage and he’ll—”

“Where are the cops? The cops aren’t here! He’s doing her, you think I’m going to stand outside and wait? I’m going to distract him,” and cut it off.

I pulled back the creaking screen door and knocked on the peeling wood until my knuckles hurt, then picked up a piece of cinder block and banged. Finally there were footsteps.

“Who’s there?”

I said: “Do you believe the Bible is only a book?”

“What the hell?”

The door opened.

It was Brennan. He was wearing clear oval glasses, a studious look that went with the dimples you could not see in the photographs. His light brown hair was military-short, and he wore a tank top and baggy camouflage shorts and the polished boots. Hunting. Behind the glasses, his lucent eyes went to the curb, where a unit from Culver City police had just pulled up, siren whupping quietly.

“What’s going on?”

I did not turn. I tried to maintain eye contact and just stay still until he could be subdued.

“Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.”

I heard the latch on the gate unlock behind me.

“Ray?” someone called.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Culver City police. We just want to talk to you.”

“Bullshit!” he shouted. “This is CIA harassment!”

“Now come on Ray, we’re just local police—”

Then he had me in a headlock, up against his chest, a knife to my throat. I could smell his personal sweat. His forearm was rock hard and gritty, his skin on my skin.

The uniforms on the pathway froze.

“I’ll kill the bitch.”

“Take it easy, Ray.”

“Try me, assholes.”

“No problem,” said one of the cops, lifting his hands to show they were empty. “Hear that, buddy? You’re the man.”

Ray Brennan pulled me inside and kicked the door shut.

Twenty-five

He started yelling his head off and threw me across the floor.

“Goddamn son of a bitch! Oh, you goddamn bastard!”

My hip hit first, I tried to roll with it, slammed a shin into the bulging leg of a sofa. The floor was rough old redwood with protruding nail heads here and there. Where my jeans had snagged, blood was darkening the denim; my palms had turned abraded and raw.

In the small daylight coming through random scratches in the black-painted windows, I could see we were in a tiny living room, empty except for a green fleabag couch. The walls had mostly been stripped, but flayed sheets of wallpaper still curled away from the studs — delicate garlands of flowers on stiff old-fashioned backing. Paint chips had collected near the baseboard. The house smelled cold, as if it had been empty a long time. Our footsteps echoed. There were white beams in the ceiling with rows of hooks — for plants.

Ray Brennan had dead-bolted the front door and was pacing and cursing, suddenly wheeling and stabbing the knife halfway into an exposed beam.

“Take it easy.”

“Shut up, bitch.”

Slowly, watchfully, I got to my feet. Immediately my hip flexor gave out, causing an excruciating buckle of the leg.

“If I were you, I’d stay away from the window.”

“Oh, shut up. I was raised by nuns, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

“That’s not why—”

“Shut up.”

He was coming fast with fist cocked and I was cornered, just managing to twist away as the blow grazed my shoulder, bouncing my temple against the denuded plaster as I scuttled behind the couch. Now they would find paint chips in my hair, too. Infuriated, Brennan picked up one end of the couch and tossed it.

If he rapes me, I’ll survive. I’ll let him do it and survive.

“They have night vision!” I shouted hoarsely. “The police snipers! They can see through the windows!”

It was a lie (night vision works only at night) and he knew it—“Bullshit!”—but it distracted him enough so I could move farther behind the angled end of the couch and maybe start a dialogue that showed I cared about his welfare.

“Seriously,” I managed between chattering teeth. “Stay down.”

He nodded several times as if listening to someone else not in the room—Okay, okay—then squatted low and crab-walked like a Russian dancer to the wall space between the windows. I saw how young and lithe he was, younger than Juliana had described, young as a recruit who signs up to save the world.

“I know who you are—”

“Me? I’m Superfuck.”

A wave of nausea spiraled up my gut. The hip gave out again. I was not certain I could remain standing.

“… the schedule,” he was saying.

“Is someone back there? I thought I heard something.”

A phone began to ring.

The mistake the Culver City police had made was calling him Ray. You never wanted to call him Ray. You wanted to ooze respect. You called him “sir.”

“Are you going to answer the phone, sir?”

“Sit the fuck down.”

I sank to my haunches and drew up my knees. The phone, an ancient black rotary, sat on the floor between us. Its rings were coarse and jangling, as if dragged through the wires from another epoch. I held my breath, as the echo of each became another lost opportunity for connection to the outside.

Brennan was sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out so I could stare at the lug soles of his boots. He was playing a high-speed game of mumblety-peg, flipping the knife so it landed perfectly, pulling it out and flipping again, making small quick cuts in a circle on the soft redwood planks.

He had spent a lot of time at this, activating and reactivating his obsessions.

The ringing stopped.

My breath was coming fast and shallow. I told myself I was not alone. Culver City had witnessed the abduction and called for SWAT, which would first set a perimeter. They would soon have the house surrounded, although their positions would not be visible all the way around, giving the illusion of escape through the back. The snipers would maintain a low profile on the roofs.

Meanwhile, Culver City and LAPD would be huddling, trying to figure out what they were looking at. How many hostages? What do we know about this guy? It appeared they had the phone number and were trying to open a negotiation. Let’s hope the Bureau had gotten there by now with a six-hundred-page history of Ray Brennan and his alleged acts. That should tell them his ritual had been interrupted, he was in a panic, and the ringing would only agitate him more.

As desperately as I concentrated on what they would do, I hoped they were focusing on me. I hoped Galloway, or Rick, or someone was out there saying that despite recent events in her personal life, we have a trained negotiator inside with that piece of shit: we should trust that if she is alive, she will follow procedure, so let’s all play this by the books.

“How are we doing, sir? Is everything okay?”

“What do you think?” he asked sardonically.

“I don’t know, sir. You tell me.”

“I’m being torn to pieces.”

“You’re feeling torn apart?”

“—Yeah, now that you brought the whole miserable world with your stupid religious bullshit—”

“I’m sorry that happened. Is there anything I can do for you now?”

“Go away.”

“Let’s go together.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“Let’s walk out of here, right now. Nothing bad has happened yet.”

He sneered and picked at wood grains with the flashing point of the knife.

“Is that a KA-BAR knife?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You must be former marine.”

“I served my country. I love my country.”

“You love your country,” I mirrored approvingly. “You know what? I love my country, too. My name is Ana. What can I call you?”

“Me?” He looked incredulous, as if I had asked a different question. “This is my private property. I’m not the one violating someone’s private rights and busting into their own home with a bunch of cops.” There was a thump and a crash and breaking glass. Brennan and I both scrambled to our feet. The sound had come from the back of the house.

He got up on his toes and roared, “Stay away from me!” throat cords straining.

“It’s not them,” I said calmly. SWAT would not breech, not yet. “It’s not them! Listen.”

There was no more banging, just guttural inhuman sounds trying to get out of someone’s throat, then silence.

“Maybe we should check that out.”

“It’s the other one,” he said.

“You mean there is somebody else in the house?”

“There’s a girl. She’s back in the studio. I was going to kill her,” he stated flatly, “but she begged me to let her pray first.”

“I see. So there’s a girl back there, and she sounds pretty much okay, like nothing bad has happened yet. It doesn’t have to happen, sir—”

The phone again.

“—You can make it stop right now.”

But the phone wouldn’t stop. Brennan had shied away from it sideways, as if he were wired on something. Angel dust? Chain-smoking marijuana for eight days straight?

“It’s just the phone.”

Bridget was in one of those rooms, possibly dying on me. The only way I could help her was to keep in control of myself although I could feel the situation breaking loose and fragmenting with the metal-on-metal shriek of a nightmare out-of-control merry-go-round going tilt, beginning to lift up off its rotors.

“It’s just the phone,” I repeated. “You can answer it or not. You have the choice.”

Give it up! I thought-beamed to the negotiators outside. Brennan was in a state of acute stress, frozen still like a terrified animal.

My eye was on my leather purse, which had been thrown into a corner. Inside the purse was the cell phone. I took an unauthorized step toward the bag.

He lunged, I twisted, but he grabbed me around the waist. We wrestled into the hallway until he threw me down in a narrow kitchen — open cupboard doors and shelves littered with dry blown leaves and pebbles and white enameled cabinets streaked with rust. Again my head slammed. He got his hands around my throat. I surprised him with a quick release, knocking his arms apart, but did not kick or grab because I did not want him to feel attacked; he would overpower me in an instant with a mindless homicidal fury.

“No sir, don’t do it, I’m with the FBI.”

I scrambled toward the front room, he dug his fingers into my back, my waistband, I rolled and broke the hold, but then my strength was ebbing, something I had not imagined in fantasies of kung fuing through the air.

“I’m a federal agent, I can help you—”

I kept up evasive action as best I could, trying to get to the purse, writhing away by inches, dragged back, trying to get him to hear me.

“Sir! Don’t mess! I’m a federal agent, you’ll get the death penalty, I’m a federal agent—”

I must have said it, choked it, twenty times even as he climbed on top of me and put his thumbs on my eyes in some bullshit marine move, and I slammed his inner elbows so his torso fell on mine, his spit all over my face, and he reared up again and I saw myself dead on the floor in that putrefying kitchen with cockroaches swarming the drain, and my mind kept repeating, It’s only pain, and, The wisdom to know, the wisdom to know—until suddenly he stopped and said, “It’s no good.” Oh God, what was this? Was I saved because Ray Brennan could not get an erection? Could that be true? The same thing that happened with Juliana in the van? Saved? By some crazy, unbelievable irony? Saved, by impotence?

It wasn’t that. It was crazier: “I just can’t hurt you if you’re going to fight.”

I waited, thoughts pinwheeling, breathing the breath of this stranger.

“Then can we … get up, please?”

He shifted off me and I hand-over-handed my way up the cabinets and would have vomited in the sink if it weren’t for the cockroaches.

I had reason to believe he had hit his upper limit and would now press the reset button and regain control. I knew a lot about Ray Brennan. Had this been an UNSUB I would have lost my urine when he pulled me through the door, but this was old home week, reuniting with the crazy brother whose psychotic breaks and hospitalizations you know so well. I just can’t hurt you. Unless you are drugged unconscious, or playing dead, like a doll … or really dead.

Juliana said: “He banged my head as if I were a doll.”

Sometime in there the phone had stopped ringing.

“This is what is going to happen,” I said in the stillness. “Sir? Do you hear my voice?”

He had retrieved the knife from where it was sticking upright in the floor.

And I had my leather bag.

“The negotiator wants to talk to you. That’s why they’re calling. His job is to get you out of here in one piece.”

I did not mention Bridget. This was Ray Brennan’s moment in the sun.

“They want to talk to you, sir. They know I’m in here. I’m one of them, and you know, because you’re former military, that we take care of our own. It comes down to this: if I’m not alive, you’re not alive.” Brennan had stopped his slow advance, knife in hand, and shook his head, as if shaking off a dream.

“Run that by me again? You’re telling me you’re not one of those nuts who tries to get you to believe in Jesus?”

He had taken a while to dial it in, but that was fine; I had managed to reach unobtrusively into the bag and hit 911.

“I talk to God,” he was saying, “so I don’t need your crap.”

“I don’t sell Bibles. I’m a federal agent.”

The phone inside the bag was lit. The screen was active. I was betting the farm that a well-trained emergency operator had picked it up and stayed on the line and that we now had an open channel to 911. Someone would be listening and relaying information to the team of negotiators, ten or twelve of them sitting in a squad car or having commandeered a neighbor’s kitchen table, roughing out their situation board, putting together a picture they could convey to SWAT.

“If you’re from the FBI, where’s your gun?”

“I’m not armed. Obviously.”

“Your badge.”

“Don’t have it.”

“And I’m Warren Beatty.”

“They took away my credentials.”

“I’m supposed to believe you?”

“Look — okay—” I used the old negotiator’s line: “Do you want me to lie to you, or do you want me to tell you the truth?”

“Hell, I can’t tell one from the other at this point,” and broke into a grin that was free of anger or guile.

“The truth is, I shot my boyfriend.”

He laughed, and I saw the appealing, easygoing world traveler Juliana had met on the bench.

“No shit?”

I smiled and spread my hands. “I’m not jiving you, man.”

“Was he screwing another woman?”

“Basically.”

Brennan shook his head. “What’d you shoot him with?”

“A thirty-two.”

“That don’t do nothing. You should’ve called me.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“You didn’t kill him?”

“He’s alive and well and testifying against me.”

“So”—the suspect wasn’t stupid, he could put two and two together—“what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been after you, sir, for a long time.”

He liked that.

“I didn’t know I was so important to the FBI.”

“You have created a lot of interest in our office, sir.”

I did not want to feed his grandiosity even more by letting him know that the whole world was there — the suits from Culver City, LAPD and Santa Monica, as well as our SWAT team chief and the highest-ranking supervisors in the Los Angeles field, all gathered in a makeshift command center, all focused entirely on him.

And soon we would hear the helicopters from the local news.

I smiled at Ray Brennan, genuinely, and don’t know why. Perhaps because I saw his desperation, in the skittering tiptoe strut between the front windows and back, checking here, checking there, like a rat constantly smelling the air. Perhaps because, beyond whatever happened to me, I knew the way it would end for him: what SWAT guys call a “head shot,” quick and sweet.

I also knew the psychology of the bond between assailant and victim and so discarded what I was feeling for him, which was compassion. How could that really be? The naked house was unnerving — opposite to what a house should hold — and it was clear he had grown up exactly in this cold-wall emptiness, mother with a wooden tit. It was more than passing strange — Ray Brennan in his phantasmic tank top and camis, and I in black T-shirt and nail-torn jeans, standing almost casually together like strangers at a cocktail party who have just hit on a connection: I shot my boyfriend. He kills girls. What now?

We were not completely strangers. Over the long pursuit and struggle, had we not come to know each other well — both outsiders, way beyond the norm? Would those civilians in the crowded apartment buildings all around us, spooning mush into the mouths of babies, counting dollars from their minimum wages, ever breathe the pure oxygen of risk, of going over the edge, knowing superhuman power over other human beings, dancing easily across enemy lines because they were smart, smart, smart?

Ray Brennan smiled genuinely back, as if this were true and complete, and we were man and woman of a different race.

Like strangers at a cocktail party, we were lying to each other and ourselves. The difference was that I knew this, and he did not.

“Inadequate personalities,” a New York City police negotiator once told me, “need to be told what to do.”

“Show me the other girl.”

He indicated with the knife that I should go ahead down the hall.

“On the left,” I said for the folks I hoped were listening. “That would be the north side of the house. Is that your studio? I bet I know why. Because of the light. Artists’ studios will generally face north,” I reiterated as clearly as possible, but the babble halted as we entered the studio and my breath caught in my throat: “You’re quite an artist, sir.”

For the next five and a half hours I sat on a metal chair, hands bound behind my back with flex cuffs, in a room white and clean as an operating theater. It was an ordered sanctuary where time made sense because time had been turned into action that was repetitive and understandable; you could contemplate the passing of the weeks in the razor-straight rows and rows of photographs of sexual assaults. The dates were right there, printed with bold precision, in the right lower corner of each shot.

Bridget, the girl from photo day, had apparently fallen off a chair and hit a rack of lights, which crashed while we were in the living room. She had been lying unconscious on her side in a mess of broken glass when we entered. She was still fully dressed, in cowgirl garb identical to her sister’s — denim jacket, tight jeans and red high heels — dark hair half covering her face. She had been bound wrists to ankles and gagged with her own red kerchief. Small rivulets of blood from superficial cuts made by the broken glass crisscrossed her forehead and ran down the side of her nose. A black Stetson hat and a small leopard purse stood on a counter beside a six-pack of Coke. One can had been removed. I saw the cooler Juliana had described on the sanded and finished floor.

Brennan crossed his arms and fingered his elbow skin and gave an appraisal of the quarry: “This one is an eight. Maybe an eight and a half. My preferred type has fuller lips. But she was trusting, the most innocent creature,” he said thoughtfully, gazing down at the sleeping girl.

“I’m concerned about her. Are you?”

“What for?”

“Well, is she all right? She’s bleeding, and she looks like she was drugged.”

“She’s happy.”

“You think she’s happy?”

“Yeah.”

“It makes you happy to look at her like that?”

“Not really.”

“Should we do something to make her look better, sir?”

“I’ll take care of that,” he said.

“You know, if you’re hungry, the folks outside will get you something. Pizza. Anything you want. All you have to do is pick up the phone.”

“That’s okay, I brought my lunch.”

“Is it in the cooler?”

“Yeah.”

And so it went, a hiccupping conversation, alternately dreary, charged, flat and hostile. They talk about “seeing the face of training” during situations of high alert, and I did. I saw the smooth kind face of the singer Harry Belafonte, who resembled our hostage negotiation training officer, whose name I had forgotten, and heard the trainer’s gently ironic voice—“Don’t forget to ask the guy to come out”—and it was a secret refuge to remember the time he admonished our class to set fitness goals: “Here is my challenge to you: If I don’t lose twenty pounds in six months, I’ll shave my head.”

So the face of “Harry” was with me in the photo studio, where the studs had been drywalled and painted over, and on the drywall was pinned Ray Brennan’s collection of photographs, some from magazines, some glossy and fresh, some downloaded from the Internet, of female suffering inflicted by the mutilation of female anatomy or, in close-up, of Brennan himself in the act of anal or vaginal penetration, or demonstrating his famous strangulation techniques. There were rows of chains and belts neatly hung on the same portable rack I had seen in the Bureau darkroom that Hugh Akron used for strips of negatives.

If your hands were tied and you had run out of tactic options, “Be a good witness,” Harry had said.

Two cameras were set on tripods trained on the chair from which Bridget had fallen.

I could not look closely at the pictures because if I had seen what he had done to Juliana (it was documented, on the south wall), I would have gone into my own mindless homicidal rage. I had noticed — and narrated into my purse — that the back entrance to the cottage was barricaded on the inside by a security gate. He had foreseen the possibility of escape. The mission, I repeated to myself, was to keep him calm until SWAT could make the shot.

So I asked endless questions about photography, digging around in the brainpan for scraps of photographic factoids. The name Walker Evans bubbled up. Which did Brennan prefer, digital or film? Film, we agreed, was for the serious professional. Did he know crime scene examiners still went for the old four-by-five-inch cameras? You got the best detail. Brennan’s work, I observed without looking at it, was “Impressive.” “You mean I’m a sick fuck.”

“Is that how you see yourself?”

He scoffed and shook his head. “What would any normal person think?”

“They’d think you care about your collection.”

“You know how much money these shots are worth?”

“You tell me.”

He whistled, as if the sum were too shocking to say. “A lot of sick fucks out there.”

“But this is your stuff. It’s special to you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The next time they call, maybe you should answer the phone.”

“What for?”

“So they don’t bust in here and torch it.”

He considered this, as I considered whipping the remaining rack of hot explosive lights into his smug, clean-shaven face.

“When you shot your boyfriend, Ana, was it a turn-on? Did you get aroused?”

“No.”

“Sure you did. Let’s face it, you’re a little girl. You brought down a buck. Don’t tell me it wasn’t a thrill.”

“It wasn’t a thrill.”

“Can I share something?” Brennan was sitting against the wall again, with the lug soles in my face. “Big hair is out.”

“You think this is big hair? I don’t have big hair, it’s just wavy.”

“I prefer a ponytail, with the ears showing, and tiny studs. What did your boyfriend like?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know! That’s the problem, right there! And you say you two were in looove?” he crooned mockingly, flipping the knife between his legs.

“I cared about him.”

“Of course you did, you’re a good person, you have exuberance for life, I can tell that.”

“Can you?”

Talking about Andrew made me sweat; a couple of dozen cops and FBI people listening.

“Did you like it when he made love to you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Did you tell him that you liked it?”

A voice jumped out of my throat. “Shut up!” I screamed. “It’s none of your business!”

He startled, on his feet and going to the pistol in his belt.

“Shut up? You’re telling me to shut up, lowly bitch?”

“You know what I would like?” I said fiercely. “I would like my boyfriend to come in here and beat the crap out of you.”

Wrong, all wrong, you are totally off the track—

“That’s not about to happen, is it?” Brennan replied, and now he was pissed.

Wrong, to get him all worked up with a male challenge. What are you doing? That is exactly wrong—

The phone rang.

As if they knew! As if they were listening on 911 and heard it escalate and tried to cut it off.

“Answer it,” I whispered. “Your collection.”

He ticked the barrel of the gun back and forth at my face and went into the living room and picked up the phone.

“How are you?” the negotiator said on the tape.

“Leave me alone.”

“I’m just curious to know, how is everybody in the house?”

“Everybody’s fine.”

“How is Ana Grey?”

“Ana?” he smirked. “Ana is not in a position to talk right now.”

“Besides you and Ana, how is everybody else in the house?”

“I’ve got two!”

“You’ve got two ladies?”

“Yeah, that’s right!”

“Why don’t you let one of them go?”

“No way!” said Brennan. “No way ever. You’re going to have to come in and get me.”

It was night by then, and the grinding roar of helicopters vibrated the bones in my head. Outside, beyond the perimeter, the media waited with turned-off lights; they’d flood the place when there was action. SWAT could see Brennan now with night vision, and I was tormented at why they did not take the shot while he was in the living room, edging the metal chair closer to where my bag lay on the floor, trying to poke it open with my feet. Brennan was back before I could see if there was glow on the blue faceplate, if it still held charge, or if I were talking to the dark.

“Did you tell them what you want?” I asked tiredly. From the booming headache that had begun even before the helicopters, I was certain that I had a concussion.

He did not answer. He was crouched between the painted-over windows, sunk into some inner negative space, features gone flaccid and eyes dull.

“I want everyone to go away.”

When a suspect wants something he will say it over and over. Brennan had wanted nothing, over and over. They would have noted on the situation board, NO DEMANDS, and worried because that was not good. Keeping us here — Bridget still knocked out on the floor — was not good, either. It meant he was going to finish.

“Sir, I’m curious to know what’s going on with you, and if there’s some way I can help.”

He held up a hand. “Ana,” as if we were old pals, “stop. I know exactly what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“Trying to create a psychological profile of me.”

“Give me a break,” I said, “I can’t even spell it.”

He smiled. “I know I’m a freak.”

Then, for some reason, he took off his shirt.

I did not like that, at all.

I did not like seeing the thin, hard physique and the pinched nipples. I didn’t know what that message was supposed to be.

“So you and your friends in the FBI have been looking for me?”

Did he need more strokes?

“You’re a priority, sir.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t think it would go down like this.”

I acknowledged my situation: “Fantasies are perfect. Life is not.”

He smiled at that, too.

“There’s my baby. Now she’s getting up.”

Bridget’s eyes had opened to a dull stare. The blood on her face had flaked dry.

When the phone rang again, he went to answer quickly.

“Bridget!” I hissed. “Are you okay? The police are here. We’re going to get you out.”

Then Brennan came back, pouting.

“They said no.”

“No to what?”

“All I wanted was to see my sister.”

“They wouldn’t let you see your sister?”

He shook his head. Hard-asses. They had probably admonished him for breaking contact. Tried to reestablish the rules. I was hungry and my head was throbbing. In despair, I could only support the choices they had made.

“That’s it, then. They’re not going anywhere. As long as we’re here, they’re here.”

“You told me to tell them what I want.”

“Yes, but you have to give them something in exchange.”

“You see, it’s all a stupid game, like Russia and the United States.”

“What’s going on with Bridget?”

She was awake but not moving. Pink froth gathered at her mouth.

“She’ll be paralyzed for a little bit longer,” he said, kicking her leg. “Then she’ll be fine.”

“The difference between you playing their game or not,” I said quickly, to distract him, “is you on death row, or not.”

Bridget had begun to moan.

“I love my sister.”

“Let me talk to them. I want to tell them what an exceptional job you’ve done in keeping everyone safe.”

He looked up with sad eyes, meant to uncork my sympathy. If you had met Ray Brennan on the street, your heart would have been touched by his core loneliness.

“My sister understands. She forgives my sins.”

“Right,” I stuttered, imagining what role his sister had played — or been forced to play — in this tragic madness. “She knows who you are.” I tried to wet my lips. “You’re a good person who … who … I don’t know, sir, but something happened … Something really bad … But it happens to all of us, in some way. Did you know that?” Big fat tears of humiliation and exhaustion had escaped and were rolling down my face. If I could crawl over to where he was sitting in the other metal chair and embrace him, he would stab me in the heart.

“—It happens to us all.”

“Like you and your boyfriend?”

“Me and Andrew,” I confessed.

“Andrew.” His lips began to quiver as if I had held out a sweet. “You miss him?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t you who did it.”

“No,” I said, and he agreed: it wasn’t him who did things, either.

He watched me, with bright and curious eyes.

“Do you think,” he asked, after a moment, “God forgives everybody?”

I sniffed and wiped my nose on my shoulder.

“Yes,” I said, “yes I do, and I think, sir, that now we’re really friends, okay? Because you and I have been to places none of these other people are going to see … So let’s help each other out, as friends.”

His eyes, behind the oval lenses, still held the question.

“Yes,” I declared with all my soul, “God forgives you, but you have to ask. You have to show God you’re sorry. I know you’re sorry, so — let’s show him. Let’s walk out of here … like you know your sister would want you to do.” “I have work,” he said uncertainly.

“Let’s help each other out. Let’s go now. God is listening.”

“How long will I be in prison?”

“Um, well, you’ll have to accept some responsibility for your actions, sir, but I know the judge is going to be lenient when he sees how serious you are about making this right.”

Docile and repentant now, he freed my hands and helped me rise stiffly from the chair.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have done that to you. I’m sorry for my crimes.”

“You’re doing the right thing, sir. I’m proud of you, I am. We’re all going to walk out of here. I’m going to call them on the phone and tell them. Then we’re going to walk out the door. There’ll be a couple of guys right outside who will tell us what to do and where to go. Okay? We just do what they tell us. Are you with me?” “Let’s do it,” he said with a lift of the chin.

“Put your weapons down, sir. Place them down on the floor, over there, away from the girl.”

Brennan squatted and laid the KA-BAR knife and pistol on the ground.

“Thank you, sir. Now back away, please.”

He did, and I snatched up the weapons, light-headed and delirious with a sudden total body rush.

“They’ll shoot me.”

“They won’t shoot you because we’re going to do everything slow and easy. How’re you feeling?”

“Weird.”

“That’s okay. It’s all pretty weird when you think about it.”

I tried not to hurry as he shuffled ahead to the front room. When I picked up the heavy receiver of the old black phone the primary negotiator was right on the line.

“Is the suspect armed?”

“Negative. He’s here with me, by the front door. I’m telling him that we appreciate the fact he’s going to surrender,” I said over the phone, “and I told him there will be some people out there by the front door—” Then he turned and sprinted back down the hall.

I screamed, “RAY!” and fired clumsily, and missed.

The front door flew out, ripped off its hinges by a cable that had been strung between the doorknob and the winch of a truck lurching backward on command. I kept out of the way as our tactical SWAT team, like Ninjas from hell in their Danner boots and black Nomex flight suits, and black balaclavas that secret the face, armed with H&K MP5s and Springfield 1911.45s, batons and wicked knives, blew past the uncleared doorways in a hostage rescue speed assault to the hot spot which they knew, from my description, was the studio, in back on the north side. At the same time a second team charged through the brittle blacked-in windows with an implosion of splintered sashes and flying glass, dominating the house from both directions, and the air was filled with concussive flash-bangs set off to disorient the subject, and then screaming—“Drop the knife!”—and he did, a hair’s-breadth nanosecond before he would have been such a pouffy head shot, before the honed edge of the kitchen knife he had pulled from the cooler could kiss Bridget’s throat.

He never did finish his business.

Although the cops wore shirtsleeves and the neighborhood crowd was in Tshirts that mild night, I was so cold my teeth were chattering. They put me in a patrol car with a blanket around my shoulders, where I kept fumbling and dropping the cell phone until a kindly paramedic dialed the number.

“We got him,” I said.

On the other end there was a yelp, and then Lynn Meyer-Murphy burst into sobs.

“Juliana! Juliana!”

The phone clunked down and she seemed to have forgotten about the call altogether as her cries receded to a distant point in the house, and there was ambient noise — a dishwasher, maybe — and I hugged my knees under the blanket and smiled.

“Ana!” It was Juliana’s bright lilt. “You got him? Oh my God!” she squealed as if she had just won a car. “Is he dead?”

“He’s not dead, but he is in custody, and he is not going anywhere for a long, long time. You’re safe now, baby. You’re safe.”

Twenty-six

The following day I picked up a message from the dad, Ross Murphy, apologizing for not calling immediately, but he was late getting the news as he was no longer living with the family in the Spanish house on Twenty-second Street. He thanked us and thanked us again for capturing Ray Brennan, said he was proud, just unbelievably fucking proud, to be living in America, and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation deserved all the credit in the world, and then some, and vowed to make that fact publicly known because “Nobody gets it,” although, apparently, now he did. The bewildered hurt in his voice told you that he did.

The sweetness of victory barely lasted twenty-four hours, when Devon County summoned me to his Beverly Hills office to say that I was going to jail because my participation in the takedown of Ray Brennan had been in violation of the bail agreement.

I was skeptical. “Do you know the meaning of the words ‘Oh, please’!?”

“You were not supposed to leave the Donnato residence,” Devon replied severely. “You were not supposed to be working that case. You were suspended from the Bureau, remember?”

“Yes, and I’m going to get a letter of censure and be dinged big-time for violating Bureau policy, but, oh, please! If I didn’t knock on that door he would have done her.”

“Others could have done the knocking.”

“Not really. Nobody else was there!”

“You were warned.”

“I was warned?” I hauled out of the leather cockpit armchair. “What is this, prep school?”

In fact Devon was tapping a pencil against the hood of a miniature BMW and frowning.

“Why did you have to be the first one in?”

“It was personal.”

“With you, everything is personal.”

“Damn right. He had her picture on his damn wall.”

“Whose damn picture?”

“Juliana Meyer-Murphy!”

“Good.” Devon bounced the pencil so hard it flew out of his hand. “And she really came through for you at the preliminary hearing.”

“Ohhh, no,” I warned. “Don’t go there unless you really want to piss me off, and I’ll walk out so fast—”

“—You’re not walking anywhere.”

“—I told you not to call her as a witness—”

“—And I told you that you were looking at fifteen years.”

I picked up the pencil from the floor and slammed it down on his desk.

“I wanted that creep dead, or in jail, all right?”

“Well,” he said primly, “you achieved your goal.”

We glared at each other.

“Why am I on the defensive? You know, when we were in court at the prelim, I saw this kid, African-American, who was there with his mom on a drug charge. ‘Something wrong with this justice system,’ he said, and she hit him upside the head. Let me tell you, that boy is my bro now.” Devon pushed the BMW away in disgust. It hit the Porsche.

“It’s a no-brainer, Ana! Rauch doesn’t have a choice; this would be a slam dunk for any prosecutor. You violated bail on an attempted murder charge. Try to see that clearly. You handed it to him! The attempted murder charge is entirely different from the Santa Monica kidnapping. You don’t get extra credit for solving that case just because—” “The credits are nontransferable,” I interrupted sarcastically.

“That’s right. They’re nontransferable.”

We were at a dead end. I was going to jail because I had saved two lives. Devon sighed with deep irritation. I stared defiantly out the window.

“Rauch wants you in custody now. It’s newsworthy, coming on the heels of the arrest of a serial rapist.”

“Great.”

“He’s going for a warrant, the SOB.”

Devon raised himself up from the chair and loped slowly across the room.

“Hip bothering you?”

“Stress.”

“Tell me about it.”

We stood close together, mesmerized by the sparkling traffic; so close, the surface of my skin could sense the tight muscle mass of his worked-out upper body, and at the same time, the effort it took to balance his lower withered side without the crutch.

“Why don’t we sit?” I took his arm in a gesture of reconciliation. Lowering to the couch side by side, we were once more allies in the long winter of a treacherous campaign.

“The best use of our energy,” he said, “is to prepare for trial. Our task right now is to discredit their witnesses. The background reviews are on my desk. Take a look, see if anything pops.”

I sprung up and got it.

There were reports from Devon’s private investigators on the ER doctor who had testified, the thoracic surgeon, Lieutenant Loomis and two other Santa Monica detectives, Margaret Forrester, the Sheriff’s Department stiff who would no doubt say I resisted arrest …

“Margaret Forrester does okay for a police widow,” I said, staring at the bottom line on her IRS form.

“She’s got that business on the side.” Devon rubbed his bald pate. “What is it, jewelry?”

“Seashells. ‘Body ornaments.’ She nets thirty-eight thousand dollars a year?”

“Her stuff is carried by some big stores. Fred Segal. Barneys.” He caught my look. “Surprised?”

“I didn’t think Margaret could get it together to do something like that.”

“She had help getting started. Look at the financial statements.”

I sat beside Devon and his manicured fingertip showed me where. Fourteen months ago Margaret had made a deposit of $52,674 into a money market account.

“Where did she get the dough?”

“Her husband’s pension.”

“Are you sure?”

“The dates connect — the deposit was made a few months after he died.”

“But she stated in court that she was not eligible to receive his pension.”

Devon had both hands on a quad to support the leg while it stretched.

“The husband was killed by a gang.”

“He was killed off-duty, and they never proved it was a gang. It was never crystal clear to me how exactly the Hat died.”

“We’ll get it clear.” Devon made a note, glanced at his watch.

“How long do I have before the marshals show up at the door?”

“We’ll file for a hearing. It will be postponed.”

“How long,” I insisted, “can you keep the balls in the air?”

“I can’t say for sure—”

“Because Mike Donnato kicked me out of his house.”

Devon stopped writing. “When did this happen?”

“A couple of days before the Brennan thing went down.”

I told him about the threatening phone calls and Mike’s kids.

“You’d have to ask for new terms and conditions anyway.”

Devon looked seriously unhappy now. “I hate giving Rauch another fat one over the plate. Can you find someone else of equal stature to stay with?”

“You mean someone else from the Bureau who will vouch for me?”

Devon looked up. The blue stone in the pen matched the intensified blue of his eyes. He meant it. He was not being ironic.

“Is there anyone?” he asked.

Instead of ducking suavely into the Bureau garage, I had to wait in the visitors’ section of the outdoor parking lot, signal flashing, while a family of Russian immigrants squeezed into a slouching old yellow Mercedes sedan in the midst of a whopping intergenerational argument. I gave a toot and eight stormy faces glared at me with unified indignation. I guess that ended the argument.

Sprinting up the steps to the US Federal Office Building, I was ambushed once again by the same stomach-tightening anticipation I had felt every day on the job. Of course, they would not have let me past reception. Nor could I have tolerated the looks of rank curiosity, had I run into people I knew, hustling in a group to a meeting, peering out from behind an attachment they took for granted, or even begrudged, while I wanted nothing but to belong. Better to stay outside, lost in the impersonal scale of the flat-faced building, another ordinary citizen wearing ripped-in-the-pocket Levi’s and running shoes, entitled to the safeguards of democracy.

The Human Computer would take lunch between twelve and one, hurry across the sunshiny plaza into the fumes of the garage and down the cinder-block passage to the ancient and pungent gym. Now that I thought about it, why should hardworking agents be condemned to that claustrophobic space? Even the franchise health club across the street had a view of Wilshire Boulevard. They should do better. They deserved it.

They.

“Barbara!”

She was carrying the black Lancôme tote bag we both had gotten “free” the day we ditched work and went to Robinsons and spent hundreds of dollars on makeup.

“Mother of God!” she gasped. “You scared me.”

“Can I walk with you? Pretend I’m a homeless person.”

“Don’t make me feel guilty.”

“For what?”

“Not calling you.” She squinted against the sun. “I’m sorry. With a new baby your life isn’t your own.”

“Hey.”

We avoided each other’s eyes.

“Outstanding job on the serial rapist,” she said finally.

“Thank you. Deirdre good?”

Barbara’s face lit up. “Almost walking. Cruising on the furniture, you know …” Then her voice dropped, as if I wouldn’t know. “So where are you off to?”

“Jail.”

She laughed. “Oh, come on!”

“No joke. Mark Rauch is arguing to revoke bail as we speak.”

“Why on earth—?”

“Violation of the agreement. Because I went after Brennan.”

“What a crock.”

People kept padding by. Overweight men wearing windbreakers and carrying briefcases. Tiny Asian grandmothers in black. Suddenly I knew I could never ask her to take me into her home.

“Well … I just wanted to say hi. See your smiling face.”

She saw the hurt and put her arms around me. “I feel so bad for not calling.”

“Don’t,” I sniffled. “You’re not the only one.”

“Tell me. Quickly. How are they going to argue? I have to interview another new baby-sitter, or else I’d—”

“It’s okay. Another time.”

“No! I don’t care, she’ll quit in a month when her boyfriend gets back from Tibet.”

“Tibet?”

She blocked my way. “I want to hear.”

“It’s over for me, Barbara. I’m looking at hard time, for real.”

She insisted on that zany Catholic optimism. “What is Devon County doing for you, right now?”

“Background checks on witnesses.”

“So he’s just getting started!”

I snorted. “It’s great bedtime reading. The dirt on the dirtbags. Remember that Margaret Forrester, the dame Andrew slept with — one of many — at the Santa Monica police? I told you about her.”

“Kind of.”

“She’s the one who ratted me out.”

“Jealous?”

“A nutcase. Turns out she’s making a ton of money selling seashell jewelry to yuppie stores …”

“Aside from the police job?”

“She was awarded $52,674 when her husband died in the line of duty, although apparently—”

Barbara pushed the blowing hair out of her eyes. “When was this?”

“A year and a half ago. Why?”

She had that Barbara look.

“It’s a funny number, that’s all.”

“How funny?”

The Human Computer is never wrong about numbers. Never wrong about anything that has happened during a bank robbery, if it is in our files, in the last five years.

“That’s the same take as the Mission Impossible caper.”

“The exact amount the suspect took from the bank?”

Barbara nodded, brows furrowed with concentration.

“There was more in the safe deposit boxes, but he didn’t find it or he didn’t have time …”

The details of the robbery would have continued to spit out like runaway ticker tape if I had not stopped them by suddenly gripping her arms.

“Oh, Barbara,” I whispered.

Barbara ditched the baby-sitter and came with me to the apartment in the Marina because, she said, it would not be a good idea to go back there for the first time alone.

The key turned happily, as always, in the brass faceplate that was worn yellow in the spot where the rest of the keys had hit every day for the past ten years. These are the marks we leave on the world.

“They wouldn’t trash it,” Barbara kept promising during the drive, but still I pictured desolation and ruin left by the crime scene techs. When we got there I hesitated with the key, giggling foolishly, because I was afraid that once we opened the door the loss would be overwhelming.

All that was missing was a piece of carpet, a neat surgical square out of the center of the living room where there must have been bloodstains, but there were black fingerprint powder smudges left on the walls, and the furniture had been moved and put back in a haphazard way. It looked as if they had been messing around in the garbage disposal. Like Juliana overcome by brutal flashbacks, I was hit with spiking memories of the destruction that had happened here, as if nameless obliteration were still shaking the floor, as if Andrew and I had been citizens caught in some mistaken blitz: What in the name of God did we do to each other?

“Don’t cry,” said Barbara briskly. She dropped her purse on the glass dining table and strode to the windows and yanked the curtains back. “Let’s get some air in here.”

When the light swept in, and the white-hot view of the brilliant boats and the sharp smell of kelp and gasoline, I saw the place was still mine — the bamboo furniture I had chosen, the TV with its trusty remote — but were I ever to live there again, room would have to be made now for a smoky melancholy. I could not even look in the direction of the coffee table and the couch.

“Where do you keep your plastic bags?”

I pulled out the drawer for Barbara, who was brave enough to open the refrigerator. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this. You do what you have to do,” she instructed, holding out the Baggies.

I stared at the box with the certainty that we had reached the end, the place in the river so treacherous it could not be crossed.

“I can’t do this to him.”

“Do you want your home back? How about your freedom? He’s more than ready to take your freedom away from you.”

In the bathroom, the bars of soap were shriveled and dry and the towels were gone, taken for evidence. I had to hold on to the wall as the image came of Andrew and me playing in the shower before work, teasing who would get to rinse their hair first, bending to lather his strong long toes and legs, working my way up, warm water pulsing on my back.

As I stared into the mirror it seemed to fog up with that very steam, and then, as if I had wiped that steam away, I saw in an arc of clarity, Andrew and me. Our hair was wet, cheeks ruddy, his big naked shoulders inches higher than mine; we were ritually washed for the workday, but no longer playful — rather, patient and solemn, as we had never really been. I steadied myself and the impression faded. Two toothbrushes still hung in the holder. One green and one blue. His and hers.

Andrew had bought the green one, fastidious Andrew, who kept a change of clothes in the car, whose tools were always clean and hung in rows. Solitary Andrew, whose mind worked like a clock, with ruthless omission of whatever it is that must be left out.

Ruthless?

I removed the green toothbrush and slipped it into the plastic bag, allowing myself to hear only the part of my mind that was quickly calibrating which route would be fastest to the forensic lab in Fullerton this time of day.

Twenty-seven

The azaleas in front of Andrew’s house were trimmed as usual into perfect ovals of red, white and pink, like mounds of psychedelic candy brightly pulsating along the path to the door. The path was newly wet and fragrant with cedar chips still moist in the shade of a mimosa tree, whose featherlike leaflets trailed languorously in light ocean airs. Everything would be in working order — the tight screen door, the chiming bell — and it would take several more seconds for him to unsnap all the locks and chains. In those seconds we could still turn back.

But then he was standing there, with nothing between us, vivid and three-dimensional in the immediate plane: greasy day-off hair, old sweats with cutoff sleeves, as if popped there whole. Behind him I could sense dark wood and cool rooms, and the poignant scent of gardenias was blowing across the interior through open patio doors.

“What’s up?”

I could have handled the cop face much better, the shut-down superior detachment, but instead he was giving off uneasy suspicion, as any home owner would, to find an unpleasant character from the past unexpectedly on his doorstep.

“Can I talk to you?”

There it was, the scan, the intuitive check for psychotic unpredictable vibes. No, he decided, it was just Ana, as surprisingly flesh-and-blood ordinary as he.

“Want to come in?”

“Are you in the middle of something?”

“Just working out.”

Stiff-legged, I crossed the threshold and hovered by the back of a couch, fingers scratching at the cracked leather.

“Want something to drink?”

“I’m fine.”

Twenty-pound barbells had been taken from the rack near the sliding glass doors and were resting on the dhurrie rug.

“Sorry to interrupt.”

“I wasn’t exactly on a roll. Hard getting back.”

“I know what you mean,” and let it fade.

He was still shockingly underweight. His cheeks were stubbled and gaunt, the biceps that showed out of the cutoffs were not Andrew’s iron signature, but belonged to a different man, a sick man, the flesh of the muscles deflated and pale.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, and willed myself not to flee.

“Sure I can’t get you something? Coffee? Juice?”

“Maybe just some water. My throat is kind of dry.”

“It’s dry,” he agreed. “Come on in.”

The kitchen was just the same — spotless Mexican tile and family-size jug of dishwashing liquid on the wiped-down aluminum sink. Plants in the window, a white embroidered valance above the plants. The reason the curtains went so well with the house was they had been his mother’s, still starched by the same cleaning lady.

He pulled a bottle from the pantry and tore off the cellophane.

“Oh. Did you want ice?”

I shook my head and drank the water.

“Look, I don’t know how to say this.”

“I can’t drop the charges,” he interrupted. “Even though you got Brennan. It’s in the prosecution’s hands.”

The sincerity and swiftness of it caught me off guard, as if he had been waiting for me to show up just to say this.

“I wouldn’t even suggest that.”

“Once it got rolling, there was nothing I could do.”

“Of course. I know.”

“I never gave you up.”

He had begun to breathe hard and through the nose with little snorting sounds and his finger pointed at my heart.

“I did not give you up. I wouldn’t do that.”

“It didn’t matter anyway, because—”

“Yes, it does. It does matter. Even at the hospital. When they came to me, ready to go out and kick ass, I still gave them cock-and-bull about who did it.”

“I know, and I’ll never forget.” My voice broke, and I had to clamp my fingers over my lips. “Anyway, there was Margaret.”

“There was Margaret,” he affirmed with no attempt to hide the bitterness.

“She told them it was me.”

His voice was thick. “She thought she had something to protect.”

“You?”

“Whatever. Who knows what’s in her mind?”

“Also,” I went on perversely, “they recovered the gun, so you had to know, sooner or later, they’d come to me.”

“Just like old times,” said Andrew. “You’re listening but you’re not hearing.”

“What’s the matter?”

Abruptly the color had drained from his face. He reached for a bottle of pills. There were many bottles, collected on a tray.

“Are you all right?”

He took the water bottle and gulped some tablets, then squatted and put his head between his legs. I went down beside him and stroked his hair, his bristly cheek.

“Hey? Hey, partner. You okay?”

He allowed himself to slide all the way down until he was sitting on the linoleum. I hunkered beside him.

“Good thing you keep your floors clean.”

We rested there until his breathing calmed.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve got a heart condition. Nobody knew about it until I almost bought the farm.”

“In the ER?”

“Yeah.”

“See? That’s why it was a good thing I shot you. Otherwise, you’d never know you have a heart condition.”

“You really fucked me, baby. It hurts to get shot,” he said, and slapped my thigh with an empty laugh.

Fear had begun its paralyzing creep. I had not been afraid like this even in the house with Brennan.

“What does the doctor say?”

“It’s called IHSS — idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis. See, the old fart can still learn new words.”

“Congratulations. What do they mean?”

“There’s a thickening in the walls of the heart that blocks the flow of blood. No symptoms, won’t show up on a physical exam, it’s only when you’re under stress and shock and your blood pressure falls to a dangerous point that it becomes significant.” “Well … we just won’t let that happen again.”

“I’m supposed to have no salt, no booze, no sex.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“The medication wipes out your sex drive. Can you imagine me, without a hard-on twenty-four hours a day?”

I smiled.

“Here’s the other thing.” He paused for the worst of it: “No bike.”

“No way!”

“If I got into an accident on the bike, it could happen again, I could have another ‘cardiac event,’ so I’m not supposed to ride the Harley.”

“But you will.”

“I don’t know if I will. This kind of shit makes you old.”

He was lolling the back of his head against the cabinets, looking up, one transparent tear crawling down his cheekbone.

“I feel,” he said, “like I’m at the bottom of a well.”

I put my arm around him.

“We fucked up, Andy. We fucked up really bad.”

“I’m the one,” he said, “I’m the one who fucked it up—”

“No—”

“Can you forgive me? Please forgive me. I want to make an amend to you,” he cried desperately. “If I hurt you in any way—”

“Yes—”

“If I caused you to suffer because of my actions—”

“Yes, I forgive you.”

“I made a mistake, Ana—”

“Forgive me, too. I did something terrible, I don’t know how I could have, actually, aimed a gun at you, I’m not capable of it, it must have been—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay—”

Then we were holding on to each other as tightly as humans can grip.

“We were meant for each other,” he whispered and we cradled and rocked.

“Oh God, Andy, this is really, really bad.”

He stroked my hair. “What is it?”

“I need safe passage.”

“You have safe passage, baby doll.”

I had to get my breath. I had to find my voice. It was 1:47 p.m.

He waited, slow and easy. “Go ahead.”

“I know you robbed that bank. Mission Impossible. It was you.”

He lifted his head and smiled sadly.

“You know, huh?” and touched my chin. “How do you know?”

“I ran the DNA on the ski mask. You dropped the ski mask, you stupid dope.” I hit his arm, but I was weak as a kitten. “Your DNA is a match to the DNA in the dried saliva on the mask.”

“Pardon my ignorance, but how did you get my DNA? Did you sneak in here in the middle of the night and cut my hair?”

“Your toothbrush,” I said softly. “The one you always kept in my apartment. It was still there.”

“My toothbrush.” He shook his head in ironic acknowledgment of all the petty bullshit that makes the world go round. He sighed and we released each other.

“Andrew—”

“It’s okay. I would have done the same thing.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You just said you would never give me up.”

“If I were facing attempted murder? And I wanted to prove self-defense? The guy came at me because I had the goods on him? You bet I would,” but it was bravado because now he was afraid, too, I could feel it.

“Nothing would have happened if we didn’t have that fight—”

“I came at the wrong person,” he shrugged.

“I never would have put you together with the ski mask. I never would have had a reason—”

“Shhh. It’s done. It’s survival.”

“Survival is ugly.”

He laughed. “So is a newborn baby. You think you arrived on this earth any different?”

The house was immensely quiet. All the clocks had finally stopped.

“We’ve run out of time, Andrew.”

He nodded. “You’re wearing a wire?”

“No, I’m not wearing a wire. But I’m armed.”

“Right.”

“I told them to give me half an hour.”

“I’ll make you a deal.” He smiled faintly. “You and me. Take the money and run.”

“I wish. I really, really wish.”

“Let’s go. Come on. It’s not too late. You know you want it.”

“I want it, all right.”

“I can get the money. We can go right out that back door now. They never cover the back door—”

I laughed.

“—One of the most common tactical mistakes.”

The look in his eyes was meant to be hopeful, but his rakish despair was breaking my heart.

“Oh, Andrew, this is so making it worse. Don’t try to do this now. Don’t try to — oh, God, I just want it all to go away.”

“We can, baby.”

“What are you talking about, anyway? You gave the money to Margaret. Why her?”

“I was practically a godfather to her kids. Cute little kids. The boy’s a natural athlete.”

“Is that why you robbed the bank?”

“She got screwed by the department,” Andrew said. “She should have been compensated when the Hat died.” He sounded tired. “The guy had almost twenty years in.”

“So you robbed a bank?”

“Somebody had to take care of the kids.”

“Really? I think not. I think she was blackmailing you. Emotional blackmail.”

“For what?”

There was knocking at the door. I startled. No, wait, stop — it was too soon and too late at the same time.

“Listen,” I said with crazed desperation, “you can make a good deal.”

He replied with a doleful look. “I used a weapon in the commission of a bank robbery. That’s twenty-five years, no questions. And I’m a cop.” He shook his head.

More knocking, harder now.

“Ana? You okay? Andrew! It’s Barry. It’s me, buddy. We’ve got to talk.”

We smiled at each other. He had automatically locked the door.

“I hope he brought a tape recorder because I’m only going to say it once.” Andrew put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad it’s me, not you. Going to prison.”

“I’ll stand by you,” I promised. And then I felt a great liberation, as if an old, worrisome question had been resolved.

“Andrew, let’s get married. I love you.”

He kissed me, hard.

He would not surrender in his father’s house. He would not surrender to his buddies, knowing it would be something they could not live with afterward. Out of deference, because he was a cop’s cop, they gave him a break and took his weapons, and we all followed in a caravan — my car, him in his car with Lieutenant Barry Loomis, and two vans of Santa Monica officers, over to the closest strip mall we could think of that would be in Los Angeles County, out of the jurisdiction of the Santa Monica police.

It was one of those neighborhoods where the haze is always hanging low, scouring the eyes and the hoods of dented cars with patched-up ten-year-old paint jobs, where wide commercial avenues, built for a dense mix of fast food and retail, instead are empty and scrawny as cheap Christmas trees. Everything seems to be on a slant. Signs are broken or defaced. Figures do not walk upright, unless they are mothers dragging double loads of grocery bags; buses don’t stop very long and drivers keep their eyes straight.

There was a Laundromat and a Lucky supermarket, a used record store, a bright blue Caribbean restaurant with beaded curtains and exuberantly painted suns and moons and fiery cockatoos.

Andrew’s car pulled into the center of the lot. It was mostly empty, the middle of the afternoon, except for indigents who were lounging at the outdoor tables at McDonald’s. Too early for the hookers. Barry got out quickly, turning his anguish into clipped, efficient movements, getting on the radio and telling everybody where to go.

The vans had rolled in and the guys were keeping their distance, waiting for the LAPD captain to arrive.

“Ana!” Barry snapped his fingers. “Andrew wants to say good-bye.”

Why don’t you go back to the seventies? I wanted to say to him and his ridiculous mustache. I don’t need orders from you about when and where I should talk to Andrew Berringer, sashaying past the uniforms, who were still trying to make sense of what was going on.

Andrew was sitting alone in the car, fingers drumming the steering wheel.

“How’re you doing, babe?”

“I’ve had better days,” he said.

“I am serious. I want to marry you.”

He snorted. “Is that your ambition now? To be a prison wife?”

“I don’t care. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He gave me an unreadable look. “Do I have safe passage?”

“Always,” I assured him, and waited for the question.

It was not an answer that he wanted but a promise.

“One last time?”

“Don’t say that.”

We kissed through the open window, then he turned the ignition.

“You better not do that.”

He had me by the neck—

“Andrew!”

— and pulled me halfway inside the car and with the other hand, he steered.

“Andrew! Please! Stop!”

It was a muscle car, in seconds we were going in treacherous, widening circles.

“Stop the car!”

My feet were lifted off the ground, yet I was pinned through the window by his desperate strength.

“Kill me,” he said.

We were going faster, wider, a death spiral.

“No, I won’t, I love you—”

But it didn’t stop anything or change anything. Figures were scattering and weapons were drawn and there were shouts, “Get down, get down! Police action, get down!” Andrew’s teeth were clenched, but with effort, not rage. Our foreheads banged, I bit my tongue.

“Kill me. Please, just do it.”

There was shouting. Gunfire. They blew out a tire and the car veered crazily.

He pulled tighter so I could not breathe. My body flew like a rag doll as he relentlessly and with purpose kept doughnuting the car in wilder circles. The glass façade of the supermarket came rushing at us, gleaming shopping carts and spinning women grabbing babies. “It’s all right,” he said, and I pulled the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer and his eyes were closed so I closed mine, and point-blank put it in the only place where I could reach, against the side of his rib cage, underneath the armpit, and fired.

His hands dropped. His head slumped forward. He lost all animation, his foot put no pressure on the gas. The car slowed and coasted into a parked truck and I rolled free, to stare up at the empty sky. Andrew’s buddies tried to cover the hole, but the contact shot had penetrated the aorta and spinal column. He did not have fifteen seconds to imagine that his life might continue; that the wound might not be grievous, his case might be dismissed or won, or that he could save his partner or his father, or be given any other kind of freedom, any kind of chance. In an instant, oblivion, not love, had flooded his chest.

Twenty-eight

The sky was growing lower, as if it would touch the ground and reclaim the planet, sucking up the horizon and everything that lay before it in streaming tunnels of ashen cloud. Whippy branches of ocotillo cactus jerked in spasms in a sweeping wind-colored brown. Raindrops sleeted the windshield, and then it went dry. I detested California.

We were moving at a good clip down the slick highway — a sheriff’s van, the prisoner in an unmarked sedan and then the coroner. We were hunting bodies. Andrew’s funeral had been the day before, but the harvest was not done. There were still more corpses in the ground for the digging, or at least that is what Ray Brennan had boasted to his cell mate.

I was free. The DA dropped the charges based on Andrew’s confession, taped in the living room just before his surrender, in which he stated that he had attacked me with intent to commit bodily harm because I had knowledge of the Mission Impossible bank robbery. Our relationship was falling apart at the time, he said, and he was fearful that I would expose him.

Andrew took sole responsibility for the heist, providing details of how he had planned it, all the way back to the class he gave on bank security. He trained those two managers so when he appeared as a robber wearing a ski mask, they would unwittingly follow his commands. He used a weapon to threaten them, so he would not have to speak; so they could not recognize his voice. He had severed the hinges in the rooftop hatch weeks before, waiting until he knew there would be a large delivery of cash. Since Andrew had taught the opening procedures, he knew exactly how many minutes he had inside the vault and how long it would take for the police to respond. He expected a take of over a million dollars, but all he finally put in the trunk of his official car before driving to the police station to report for work that morning was $52,674 because the rest had been locked in empty safety deposit boxes overnight. He had given the money as a gift to Margaret Forrester to care for her children in the aftermath of the death of his best friend.

Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch was forced to concede that I had responded to the attack in self-defense, and except for the obligatory blast from Galloway for violating policy, and serving time off without pay, reinstatement at the Bureau had all the drama of renewing your driver’s license. There were mumbled condolences, mostly avoidance, taking refuge in the work. Now I was rolling in the sedan with Ray Brennan and Special Agents Todd Hanley and Jason Ripley on a tip from the snitch who had been placed in Brennan’s cell, a giant three-hundred-pound murderer named King Tut.

King Tut had been a popular and lovable custodian, a really sweet guy, who bludgeoned two kids to death with a shovel when he found them having sexual intercourse in the high school parking lot after a basketball game. King Tut had sad, puzzled eyes like an elephant who does not understand what he did to deserve being an elephant. You might mistake the look in those eyes as kindly, when actually they just rolled around in their sockets like wet black marbles, expressing nothing. When you had two head cases locked up together, neither could read the other anyway, like blind men batting sticks.

Brennan had to brag, had to tell his secrets. Not a surprise. Nor would I have been surprised if the things he told King Tut contributed to the coronary that ultimately felled the big guy. King Tut read the Bible daily and so did his wife, who told the prison minister her husband had been put in a cell with the devil, and could he please do something about it?

Brennan told King Tut he had raped twenty-seven girls and women and been forced by circumstances beyond his control to murder three. We already had leads on eight more victims and corroborating evidence on the young woman who had been abducted from the Georgetown mall, so twenty-seven was not an impossible number. Brennan described sadistic dreams and visions that made King Tut sweat as he repeated them to us in an air-conditioned interrogation room. He went through an entire carton of Kit Kat bars. Brennan claimed to have taken jewelry from the victims and buried it with the three bodies out in the desert near the military base at Twentynine Palms. That would have been sacred ground to him.

The Sheriff’s Department had driven the prisoner to the alleged burial site twice before. Each run had to be orchestrated in advance so the fact this one fell the day after Andrew’s funeral was one of those random kicks in the head the universe occasionally deals.

The night before he was to show us the bodies, Brennan refused to eat and became so agitated in his cell they called off the search, but then he calmed down and slipped into some kind of zombie zone. In the car, he slumped over, sleepy and mute in handcuffs and leg irons, as if neutralized by whatever antipsychotic cocktail the docs cooked up. His hair was matted. He had not shaved.

I fingered the tiny metal box in my pocket that held dirt from Andrew’s grave. I had stolen it, after the thousand-man entourage of police officers and media people and girlfriends and family were gone, after watching the spit-and-polish parade to the cemetery from a doughnut stand across the street, a landmark from the fifties with a sagging sculpture of a doughnut on the roof. When you looked closely, the painted fabric that covered the wire had weathered off the frame, as if these biting desert winds had zipped a hundred miles west to pick off any remaining life, until it had become the gesture of a doughnut more than anything else.

The big clock had begun to tick again as I sat in that plastic chair, half smothered by the heavy bouquet of sugar and coffee and yeast, in the heat of the sun intensified by the plate glass window. If I can make it through this second, I can make it through the next; the duty weapon sat on my hip like a living thing.

All I wanted was to be beside him, inside that coffin.

My foot was tapping to an inaudible tune like the bagpipes beyond the glass I could not hear. Margaret Forrester and Officer Sylvia Oberbeck were at the grave site, dressed in black, and I did not begrudge them. It was not that Andrew Berringer had been heartless or insatiable — he had needed us, all three. Margaret was the hellcat, Oberbeck his friend — and I? I was Andrew’s mirror, we were mirrors for each other, like twins, who simply know. I just had to look inside myself to see what Andrew wanted and why he’d set it up the way in which he had, but as I explained to him from the doughnut shop, he had to understand the ball was in my court now. It was his game and he had left me with the goddamn ball.

The pillbox had belonged to my mother. There was a rose enameled on the lid. She used it to carry saccharine tablets to sweeten her coffee, and I associate the box with the waxy scent of red lipstick that would spiral out of its mysterious cylinder, that could transform her worn face into that of a movie star. Funny, isn’t it? Now we know saccharine causes cancer, and my mother died of cancer, but she would drop those minuscule pills into the wide black pool of her coffee with such élan — and sometimes I would do it for her, fascinated by the miniature tongs that came with the box for that purpose. The tongs were lost now and the box filled with dirt, and I held it in my pocket on the drive through the desert.

Jason Ripley was in the back with me and the prisoner, Todd Hanley was up front with the driver. Nobody talked much during the two-hour ride. I did not think it would ever get easier with Jason, but it didn’t matter. Neither of us needed the other anymore.

We made a pit stop at a gas station that was the only service for fifty miles. It was part general store — racks of white bread, huge bags of ice — and part tourist trap, with bins of quartz crystal and fossils and skeletons of small desert animals in plastic bags. There were real scorpions inside crystal paperweights.

I headed for the ladies’ room, thinking about the kind of person who would catch those nasty scorpions, took down my khakis and heard the unmistakable sound of stainless steel on porcelain. My handcuffs had fallen into the rest stop toilet bowl. Well, that clinched it. Fishing them out, I knew I would soon be over and done with it all.

We went half a mile down an unmarked road to a place where two boulders met, for no reason, at a right angle. They did nothing to block the wind and scree, which blasted from every direction so our hair whipped madly and we had to shout, and the cold cut through our parkas, as if Brennan had brought us to the cauldron source of all winds.

The dogs squinted against the blow and their ears were up and they trotted the area, pawing the sand where it had been dug before. Brennan pointed here and there and stood with shoulders hunched, a stream of snot running from his nose. Motorists doing ninety with their windshield wipers on might have gambled one or two seconds on a glance at the small circle of vehicles; we were out there while the rain came and went, while lightning raked the charcoal clouds moving in from Arizona, while six more holes two feet deep were dug by the sheriff’s men, and Brennan went down on his knees weeping and saying he was sorry that we could not find his stash.

Finally the rain was pelting hard enough that we retreated to the car, wet as the dogs. Brennan sat between me and Jason, quiet, his head sagging, shoulders stooped.

“What’s up, Ray?”

He did not respond.

“Disappointed? We’re disappointed, too,” I said. “We thought we could trust you, Ray. After driving out this far. You know, you don’t show us some results, we’re not taking you out for an airing anymore. Is that the game?” “It’s not a game,” he said. “I just don’t know exactly where it is. Could I lie down? I’m feeling very stressed right now,” and laid his head in my lap.

Brennan’s hands were still cuffed and he was in ankle irons. His face was turned away so all I could see was oily hair, dark at the roots, spiked in all directions, and a small perfectly formed reddened ear.

“Sit up, pal,” said Jason, reaching for his collar.

Brennan dug his teeth into my thigh and hung on like a pit bull.

I screamed and pulled him off and slammed his forehead against the back of the front seat. In a moment Brennan was out of the car, facedown in the sand with two deputies kneeling on his back.

“The son of a bitch tried to bite her,” Jason gasped breathlessly.

“I’m okay.”

His teeth had not penetrated the heavy khakis.

Jason was peering at me from underneath his whipping hair. He wanted me to find his eyes and mark the message there.

“Get him up,” Jason said.

They hoisted Brennan to his feet. He was spitting mealy-colored gunk and shouting hoarsely that we were all spying for the CIA.

Jason spun from the hips and while they held him, smashed a fist full-force into the side of Brennan’s nose, and blood and teeth spurted out as if from a squirt bottle.

Then the young agent turned to see what I thought of this action. His breath was coming hard, and his face was red and shiny with rain. He wanted to know if it were done now, if his initiation were complete.

I would have answered that there was no beginning or end to this. The intimate desperation I had shared with Brennan in the house had meant nothing but a tactic in an arrest. He and I and Jason and Todd Hanley were just interchangeable parts and would encounter one another in different guises again and again. I would have told him that, sooner or later, everything you care about ends up in the crapper.

“Over here!” someone yelled, and we slogged to where one of the shovels had overturned a black nylon strap. Lifting carefully, we found it was attached to an old discolored day pack, barely recognizable as yellow.

“That belongs to Willie!” I shouted.

“Willie who?”

“The transient we interviewed on the Promenade! He knew Brennan!” I was pointing, using sign language over the scream of the wind.

I thought of Willie’s stained white beard, how he had painfully lowered himself in the doorway of the old bookstore. The sad, lost look in his flat eyes. With icy fumbling fingers I unbuckled one of the pockets. Inside was a handful of sparkly girlie hair clips and ponytail scrunchies, cheap beaded bracelets and dime-store rings.

“This stuff isn’t Willie’s!” I shouted. “It’s Brennan’s trophies. From his victims, like he said!”

“Where is Willie?” Jason shouted back. “Is he out here? Did Brennan kill him, too? Is he dead?”

I did not answer but watched as Jason, carrying the pack, lumbered through the blustery sandstorm to the van where Brennan was receiving first aid for the injury he had suffered by falling down on a rock.

I turned to the open desert, its monotone mauves blurred by rain.

“Willie!” I bellowed. “Wil-lie!”

And lifted my arms and stood up on my toes and felt the wind under me.

The house was near the Venice canals, in a funky working-class pocket. It was, amongst Spanish shacks and Victorian clapboards, a two-story remodel painted blue, with all sorts of adornments hanging off the eaves — whales and wind chimes and snowflakes and a whole school of angelfish. Carved into a wooden oar were the words Welcome to the Forresters. A boat was still hitched to a trailer in the drive. On the porch a table was laden with young plants in flats from a nursery; above them, an American flag. On top of a pole, like a totem, sat a pelican with head tucked. I wondered how they’d gotten a sculpture up there, but then the wind ruffled its feathers and I saw that it was a real bird.

“Who’s there?” Margaret Forrester demanded, impulsively opening the door before hearing a reply.

The air had a swampy, cabbage smell, which must have carried from the languid, slow-moving channels that ran beneath arched bridges to the sea. People who lived in the expensive houses on the canals kept rowboats and canoes. But that upscale neighborhood was several blocks away.

“Ana Grey, with the FBI.”

“I know who you are.” She stepped out. “What are you doing here?” Then she saw the police.

“We have a warrant for your arrest.”

She folded her arms and laid her weight back on one hip.

“Is this about the guava trees?”

“It’s not about the guava trees.”

“—Because I’ve had it up to here. Have you met my neighbors? Obviously you have. I’ve told them if the fruit falls on their side, keep it, what is the problem? These are the oldest continually producing guava trees in Venice!” “You are under arrest as an accessory in the murder of your husband.”

The eyelids began to flutter, the eyeballs circling uselessly as if cut loose from their stalks. She whimpered like a child.

The police captain said, “Ma’am?”

Now there were sharp intakes of breath as if she had found herself in a gas chamber.

“I’m sorry. I was up until five a.m., working in my garden.”

The captain said, “What is it, a moon garden?”

“She has guava trees,” I explained.

“I’m going to read you your rights,” he began.

Margaret cried, “Andrew is the one who killed my husband. But he’s dead, too, so what is the purpose? Why are you doing this to me?”

“What did Detective Andrew Berringer have to do with the death of your husband?” I asked, although I knew.

I knew because during preparation for the trial, my attorney had obtained the coroner’s report on the death of Wes (the Hat) Forrester. He’d had it reviewed by an expert in tool and weapon marks, who found significant discrepancies in the stated cause of death. Lividity showed the body had been killed in one place and moved to another. Also, there were two kinds of wounds. One was consistent with a whack from a baseball bat to the back of the head; the second looked more like a hit from the riser of a stairs. The riser had caused a subdural hematoma, which had killed him. The baseball bat came later. The expert stated there was no bleeding in the margins of that wound, which meant Margaret or Andrew had hit him over the head to make it look like gang revenge after the heart had stopped pumping.

“Your husband came home and found you two together.”

“We were together.” She nodded, unaware of what she was confessing. “The detective and I—”

“In bed.”

“—And they got into an argument, two big angry men. Their faces were this far apart, I couldn’t stop them, it was terrible.” Her voice twisted up and she grabbed her own hair. “Stop that, Margaret!” she scolded herself. “I don’t want to be like this anymore!” During the fight the Hat had fallen down the stairs, hit his head and died. Andrew and Margaret panicked, covered it up, but made a mistake. They did not pay close enough attention to the time. They waited too long to move the body. What went on between them — arguments, declarations, deals — during those minutes or hours cannot be known. But afterward, even after he gave her all the money from the bank job, the Thunder Queen was not assuaged. She wanted Andrew, and he wanted out. He thought a million bucks in cash would buy his freedom, but things did not work out that way, and when Margaret was threatening to come apart all over the map, he tried to appease her with more money. My money.

“Mom!” called a voice, and a little boy was at the door staring at us with resentful impatience. He had a faint milk mustache and buzzed hair and was eating a croissant. A TV was going in the background and the sounds of a video game. He wore a soccer uniform and had strong legs. “Mom!” he demanded. “When are we going?” The captain had finished his recitation. “Please turn around, ma’am,” he said.

“Please, please, don’t do this to me.”

The boy ducked back inside the house.

The captain and I exchanged a look. “Do you own any firearms?” he asked.

“I’m a widow,” Margaret wailed. “My husband was a policeman, just like you. It was an accident. It was an accident.”

“What was an accident, ma’am? Your husband falling down the stairs, or his skull being smashed with a baseball bat?”

The sharp inhales had become vocal sounds, like braying. She stepped back from our approach, and her body went stiff and her eyes went wide with the most God-awful desperation.

“You’re going to jail, lady.”

“No!”

“I’m going to ask you to cooperate, ma’am,” said the captain. “Out of deference to your deceased husband, we’d rather not drag you from the house in front of the neighbors, do you hear me? But we will if we have to. Think about your children, okay, Mrs. Forrester? Who is going to stay with them? You got a family member we can call?” “Ana,” she said. “Help me.”

Two officers were coming up the steps.

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” I put myself in her face. “Andrew never gave you up.”

“What is the purpose?” she said, and her legs buckled.

“He never gave you up.”

They held her upright.

“No please,” I said to the officers, “let me.”

I unhooked my handcuffs off the back of my pants and felt their weight and the smooth familiar heft of a useful and reliable tool and put them on the woman’s wrists and listened as they ratcheted shut with a delicate sound, like the winding of a clock.

“Remember,” I told the captain, “I want those back.”

Bright plastic flags strung over the entrance to the pool snapped and pulled in the canyon breeze. I was used to getting there by 7 a.m. for the workout anyway, but by seven-fifteen on the morning of the swim meet there was no place to park within half a mile, and you had to walk all the way up from the beach. I was shocked to find the pool deck jammed with four or five hundred children and adults on blankets and beach chairs cheek-to-jowl, extended families from as far away as La Canada who had moved in for the day and brought all the comforts, from thermos jars of steaming rice to beading projects for the younger siblings doomed to remain bored and dry the rest of the day.

It was disorienting to find my comfort zone overrun, like walking into the wrong apartment identical to yours. Added to the reassuring scent of wet concrete, for example, was the splatter of sausage from an open grill, where the dads were turning out big fat pancakes.

It was becoming futile to keep searching for Juliana in the milling crowd of shivering children and grim adults who crowded the event schedules as they were posted. The swimmers were indistinguishable in their caps and goggles and there were so many of them warming up, the pool looked like a frothing overpacked aquarium. The PA system cut in and out and the chaos of high-pitched voices was torturous. The odds, I had known starting out that morning, were that Juliana was not ready and would not show.

Since I had been back on the job there had been only one or two calls. It seemed she no longer needed to talk. She was in school and her parents were still split; yes, she had new friends — but her tone was guarded, as if she finally had stuff going important enough to keep safe in a private treasure box. The fear, however, could not always be contained. Sometimes, she admitted, the nightmares could still be so bad she would find herself out of bed and writhing on the floor.

I did not share my own nightmares with Juliana. I did not tell her how every day I looked into the mirror that was Andrew and me, and every day I was surprised. I had not guessed that either one of us was capable of what we had done, but every day I saw that same reflection. “Good morning, killer,” I would say, and in that way, we would always be joined.

The national anthem blared, and the meet began. The sun had risen, and people were taking off the heavy jackets. The deck had begun to steam. Somehow every part of my body had already gotten wet — pants legs, soft lambskin boots — and there were meltdowns amongst the contestants. A petite blonde girl about eight, wearing a navy team suit with a bolt of lightning on the chest, was curled up in a towel on a beach chair, sobbing.

“She just doesn’t want to,” shrugged the embarrassed mom.

It was itchy to be wearing street clothes with the water so close and beckoning. Only a few weeks ago I had started to swim with the team again.

“Welcome back, Ana Banana,” said my lifeguard friend, standing up in the next lane. In goggles and white cap, he had looked like a grandma who had somehow been endowed with broad glistening male shoulders.

“Been a while,” I said, breathing hard.

He nodded. “The water senses it.”

I laughed harshly.

But he was serious. “When you’re flailing, the water senses it,” he said, and dove neatly under.

Girls twelve years old and older were being called for the one-hundred-yard freestyle, and out of the mob of competitors that had gathered at the west side of the pool for their starts, I noticed something interesting. Two swimmers were helping a third to the blocks. They were all wearing glossy violet suits, and other members of the same violet team were pushing past the judges seated at lane one to shout encouragement. The girl who was going to swim the race held on to the arms of her mates and very carefully, one foot at a time, climbed up onto the tilting platform, from which she stared down at the water with knees locked. You could almost see them quaking. I knew that body.

Shoving through the crowd to the edge of the pool I shouted, “Go, Juliana!” She couldn’t hear me, but I kept on shouting, “Go, baby, go!”

Her skin was mottled white and blue. She bent over and pulled the cap down, and pressed the goggles firmly to her face, and the whole team of teenage girls — lumpy, long-legged, talented or not — was screaming, “Go, Juliana! Juliana, you can do it!” A lot of folks had come out here to cheer for Juliana.

“Swimmers, take your mark,” came the announcement.

In the tense space between the silence and the buzzer a few excited shrieks erupted from the team, and then there were shushes, and Juliana’s whole body was trembling, her fingers stretched behind her like fluttering wingtips, in a crouch so tenuous it looked as if she might simply fall over. The distance before her was unbroken; the water still, and knowing.

Above us, the redtail hawks traced their arcs of freedom.