Supervolcano: All Fall Down

III

The door to Marshall Ferguson’s room had a strip of yellow police tape running diagonally across it. CRIME SCENE-DO NOT CROSS was printed on it in big black block letters. Like any newly returned college graduate living in a house with his father and his father’s new wife, he was sensitive about his privacy.

Unlike some, he realized they were sensitive about theirs, too. And they didn’t pry. He could even smoke dope in there if he didn’t make it too obvious he was getting wasted. For somebody whose dad was a cop, that was a small, or maybe not such a small, miracle.

About the only thing his father required of him was that he sit in front of his computer for a couple of hours every day, working on whatever he was working on. “Look,” Colin Ferguson said, “I know turning into a writer doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t happen if you don’t work at it, either. So you’ll work.”

Marshall resented that, but not as much as he might have. He was old enough to have got past the teenage thing of being sure anything his old man said was bullshit just because his old man said it. But he did bristle when his dad suggested-no, ordained was the better word-that he pay a third of whatever he made as rent.

“What happens if I get a fat book contract?” he asked. Two sold stories, and he had big ambitions-or dreams, anyhow.

“Then we dicker,” Dad said at once, which tossed a bucket of water on Marshall’s sparking temper. His father went on, “Look, I’m not trying to screw you. I’m just trying to remind you that you’ve got some obligations. You’re allegedly a grown-up, after all.”

“Thanks for that allegedly. I appreciate it,” Marshall said.

“Figured you would.” Dad didn’t even blink. Trying to top him at sarcasm was a losing game. He eyed Marshall. “Other thing is, if I get sick of nothing coming in after a while, you’ll start looking for a job or you’ll find yourself somewhere else to stay.”

“How long is a while? Who gets to decide?”

“I decide how long it is.” Colin Ferguson answered both questions at once. He even explained why: “After all, I’m the guy paying the mortgage.”

What am I supposed to say to that? Marshall wondered. He almost asked if Kelly was paying rent. Fortunately, he had the sense not to. For one thing, she was married to Dad. For another, she had a paying job at Dominguez Hills. So all Marshall did say, after that brief pause for thought, was, “Okay.”

His father had inhaled. Dad was braced for an argument, all right, and ready to blow Marshall out of the water. Now he exhaled again: he’d got dressed up, and he didn’t have any place to go. He sent Marshall a crooked grin. “You are growing up, aren’t you?”

Marshall was convinced he’d been grown up for years now. Whenever he tried to say as much, his old man gave him the horse laugh. Since they’d come through this exchange without the fireworks that might have soured things between them, he let it go without offering Dad such a juicy target. “Whatever,” he said, and left it right there. The less you came out with, the less you’d regret later on.

Then his father caught him by surprise: “I bet I know where you’ll be able to make some money, anyhow. Not enough to live on, but some.”

“Oh, yeah? Where?” Marshall wondered what kind of harebrained scheme was dancing through Dad’s beady little mind.

Only it turned out not to be so harebrained after all. “Taking care of your half-brother, that’s where,” Colin Ferguson answered. “Your mother will be looking for somebody to do that, I’m sure, once she runs through however much maternity leave they give her.”

“Huh,” Marshall said thoughtfully. Whatever he might have been looking for, that wasn’t it. “I’m. . not sure I want to do that. I. . don’t know how much I want to have to do with Mom these days. And taking care of, of that kid?” He didn’t even want to say Teo’s name. Teo, after all, had stolen Mom away from Dad and screwed up the family. That was how he’d seen it at the time, anyhow. Little by little, he’d come to realize things weren’t so simple (which was another part of growing up). The first approximation still ruled his gut, though.

His father sighed. “Well, it’s your call. If you don’t want to, I sure won’t try and make you. But it’s not like I’d mind or anything. I. . wish your mother the best in spite of everything. I don’t want her back. Too much water over the dam for that. But I do wish her the best. And she’ll need the help. Better if she gets it from somebody she knows, somebody she can trust, and not somebody she hires off a supermarket bulletin board or from Craigslist or somewhere.”

“I’ll think about it.” Marshall hadn’t expected to say even that much.

“Thanks. You do that.” Dad gave him another one of those lopsided grins. “Five gets you ten taking care of a baby gives you something new to write about, too.”

“Hot shit!” If Marshall sounded distinctly unenthusiastic, it was only because he was. He didn’t let Dad beat him to the punch line, either: “That’s what I’d be writing about, too, isn’t it?”

“Hot shit and cold shit and piss and spit-up and all kinds of gross stuff,” his father agreed. “But there’d be other stuff, too. Getting to know your half-brother, and him getting to know you, when you’re old enough to be his father.”

“I guess.” Marshall didn’t want to think of it in those terms. If he was old enough to be his mother’s son’s father. . Somewhere, a goose was walking on old Oedipus’ grave. The idea creeped him out bigtime.

Maybe that showed on his face, because his father said, “I’ll let it go. You don’t have to make up your mind right away. One thing you should do, though, if you’re even halfway thinking about it, is poke around online and see what kind of money child-care providers or whatever they call ’em make. If you do decide to take it on, you’ll want to get what you deserve.”

“Makes sense,” Marshall said. To his relief, Dad did leave him alone then. He chewed on it for a while, chewed on it without deciding one way or the other. He had Mom’s number on his phone, of course. He could count on the fingers of one hand how often he’d used it since his folks broke up. Odds were she wouldn’t even recognize his number if he did call her again.

The baby might be stillborn. It might be kidnapped by Gypsies-or even by Roma, if you wanted to be PC about baby thieves. All sorts of things might happen to keep him from needing to make up his mind. He might even sell some more stories. If he sold enough, he wouldn’t need to worry about playing nanny to his mother’s bastard.

Writers find inspiration and incentive wherever they can. Any excuse for sitting down in front of a keyboard and monitor instead of doing something-anything-else is a good one. Marshall was still very new to the game, but he’d already figured that out. And, for the next several days, he wrote a hell of a lot more than usual.

Bryce Miller had a fancy new Ph.D. in classics from UCLA, with all the rights and privileges appertaining to the doctorate of philosophy. Chief among those privileges, it seemed, was the privilege to starve.

He’d saved money from his TAships and research assistantships. His only real vice was books. As vices went, it was a cheap one. His old car was paid for. His apartment wasn’t expensive. So he starved slowly, an inch at a time, instead of in a hurry.

He scoured the online Chronicle of Higher Education, Craigslist, monster.com, anything that might possibly land him an academic job. He sent out zillions of resumes, by e-mail and snailmail both. Nobody wanted anything to do with a new-minted classicist, even one who could also teach ancient history.

He wasn’t fussy. He was desperate. If he ran out of money before he landed something, he’d have to move back in with his mother. Boomerang kids were a phenomenon of his generation before the supervolcano blew. There were more of them now, with the economy still on its back with its feet in the air and X’s where its eyes ought to be. The idea humiliated him all the same. He wasn’t a little boy any more, dammit, no matter how much his mother wanted to keep him one.

He sent his c.v. to every Catholic school in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. If anybody needed a Latin teacher, a Catholic school was likeliest to. Most of them didn’t answer his queries. The ones that did either already had a Latin teacher they liked or didn’t want any.

And so his alarm went off before six one morning. He had to get out of bed to turn it off: a sensible precaution for anyone who slept as soundly as he did. He hopped in the shower, gulped bread and jam and coffee for breakfast, and drove downtown to the offices of the Department of Water and Power.

They had, or so their online ad said, an opening for a grant writer. The requirements were a bachelor’s degree and three years of writing experience. He’d published his first poem almost exactly three years earlier. Fortunately, they didn’t ask how much he’d made from his writing. Even if you put a cash value on the copies the journals paid in, his total earnings would barely touch three figures.

But they didn’t. He’d got through that round of vetting. And here he was, at the DWP, taking a test along with several dozen other worried-looking people. The men and women ranged from his age up to their early sixties. Maybe a civil-service job wasn’t exactly what they had in mind, either. It beat the hell out of no job at all, though.

They took the test in what looked like the lunchroom, though the food-serving part was closed off. Everyone had a stock of number-two pencils. It might have been the SAT all over again.

In came a plump woman in a burgundy polyester pantsuit his mother would have loved-he couldn’t think of anything worse to say about it. She carried a fat manila envelope. “I’m Stella Garcia,” she said. “I will be administering this assessment instrument. Before we begin, I want everyone to put their cell phone on the table in front of you, upside down and in the off position.”

There were more ways to cheat on exams now than there had been back in the day, even if you did call them assessment instruments. Had anyone brought more than one phone? Would it help? Bryce hadn’t. He wasn’t hardened enough to this game. Besides, he had only one.

Mrs. Garcia-her ring flashed under the fluorescents-passed out the exams facedown. “Do not turn them over and begin until I tell you to do so,” she said. “You will have two hours precisely to complete them.” She checked her own cell phone for the time, even though there was a clock on the wall behind her. “Begin!” It was eight on the dot, or near enough.

Bryce put his name, address, and e-mail on the front page of the booklet, then dug in. It was like the SAT English test: grammar, analogies, taking the meaning from passages. Only the passages were mind-numbing bureaucratese, not the fairly straightforward stuff on the SAT.

He didn’t care. He aced standardized tests. He always had. And he could read bureaucratese, even if he didn’t write it well. He filled in bubble after bubble.

One poor shlub strolled into the lunchroom at half past eight. Mrs. Garcia gave him a booklet and made him put his cell where she could see it. Bryce didn’t figure him for serious competition.

But what about the woman who handed in her test at five to nine? Was she brilliant or hopeless? She walked out of the room before Bryce could make up his mind.

He finished about nine twenty. He was the sixth, or maybe seventh, to turn in the exam. Another guy handed his in a moment later. They walked out together. “What did you think?” the other guy asked once the door closed behind them. He was forty-five or so, heavyset, and needed a shave. He hadn’t showered before he came in, either.

It had been easier than Bryce expected. He didn’t want to say that, so he shrugged and answered, “Who knows? How about you?”

“I did the best I could,” the older man said, which also might mean anything. He went on, “Hope I land the job. I’m gettin’ awful sick of pork and beans, know what I mean?”

“Oh, man, do I ever!” Bryce said. “Not much out there these days.”

“Not much? There’s fuckin’ nothin’,” the other guy said. “Good luck to you, Jack-but not too much, no offense.”

“Yeah, well, back atcha,” Bryce replied. They swapped wry grins.

It was raining when Bryce went to his car. The only rain L.A. was supposed to get in later summer was the occasional thundershower when the monsoon slopped over the mountains from the desert to the east. This wasn’t like that. It was chilly. Clouds blanketed the sky. It felt like December or February.

He turned on his wipers and his lights. He made sure he remembered to turn the lights off again when he got back to his apartment building. Calling AAA to come out and give you a jump was a pain in the ass.

Waiting in his mailbox were a couple of bills and a letter from a no-account university in Florida. It was a form rejection. He didn’t even remember applying for a job there, but that proved nothing much. He’d sent out a hell of a lot of resumes, all right.

He carried the depressing snailmail up to his place. If he wanted to apply to some school in Minnesota or the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, he might have a decent chance of landing something. But he wouldn’t have wanted to live in Minnesota or Michigan even before the supervolcano went boom. These days. . Los Angeles was getting what would have been unseasonable rain. Minnesota and Michigan were getting what would have been out-of-season snow, though not all of what they’d got this past winter had ever melted. If you were into sled dogs, they weren’t bad places to go. Otherwise? He shook his head. Next to those places, even moving back in with his mom looked, well, not so bad.

When he called Susan, he got her voice mail. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Classes at UCLA had already started. That didn’t matter so much to him, not any more, but it did to her. She was finishing her diss on the eleventh-century Holy Roman Empire. And she had a TAship, so she was probably ramming The Epic of Gilgamesh down the undergrads’ throats right this minute.

At the tone, he said, “Well, I took the DWP test. I guess I did okay. Call when you get a chance. Love you. ’Bye.”

As he stuck the phone back in his pocket, he shook his head again, this time in slow wonder. Had they really been going together for three years? Longer than that now. He’d had a few random dates after Vanessa dumped him, but nothing that was going anywhere-till he met Susan Ruppelt. They’d just clicked.

One of these days, he’d ask her to marry him. He had no doubt she’d say yes. But he wanted to be able to support her before he did. Fathers-in-law with jobs-hers was a mechanical engineer-tended to look down their noses at unemployed sons-in-law.

She called back about four that afternoon. “Hi, hon,” she said. “So it went all right?”

“It didn’t seem that hard. Not as bad as the SAT,” Bryce answered.

“How many other people were taking it?” she asked.

“Bunches. Fifty, maybe seventy-five. It was in this big lunchroom thing.” Bryce sighed. Every job that got advertised drew swarms of people. He did his best to stay hopeful: “They’ve got to pick somebody. Maybe it’ll be me.”

“I hope it is.” Susan paused. “I guess I hope it is. I mean, you worked so hard, doing what you wanted to do. Seems a shame if you don’t get to use it.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Bryce said. “That’s pretty much what my chairperson told me when I turned in the thesis. Hey, it was fun while it lasted.”

“Yeah.” Every day brought Susan closer to banging her head against the same wall. She tried to look on the bright side: “Like you said, somebody’s going to get that job. You know how things are at the universities. When somebody retires or dies, half the time they just close the damn position. More than half.”

“Tell me about it!” Bryce said bitterly. How many times had some classics department’s chair or, more often, boss secretary signed a letter saying their slot wouldn’t be filled after all? More than he cared to remember-he knew that.

“Well. . Something good will happen. People got through the Great Depression. We’ll get through this.” Susan had a sunny temperament. She sometimes needed it, too, to put up with Bryce’s spells of gloom.

“We didn’t have the whole planet screwing us to the wall then, though,” he said now. “It was just bank failures and stuff.”

“They wouldn’t have called it just,” she said.

“That’s ’cause they hadn’t seen this,” he returned. But she kept trying to cheer him up, and he let her think she had. Making her worry less about him actually did make him feel-some-better. It was convoluted, but it was there.

Two days later, he got an e-mail from the DWP asking if he could come back for an interview and more testing on the following Monday. He wrote back that he could. He’d made them think twice about him, anyhow. He’d already sent his confirmation before he wondered how much he honest to God wanted a real-world job.

More than he wanted to live with his mother ever again. That pretty much settled that.

“Yes, this was a large eruption, even by supervolcano standards-nearly six hundred cubic miles,” Kelly Ferguson told her class at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “This was just about the size of the first Yellowstone eruption, more than two million years ago, and almost as big as the Mount Toba blast in Indonesia seventy-five thousand years ago.” She paused. “Anybody remember how many times the Yellowstone supervolcano blew between that first big boom and this last one?”

Anybody remember? was a prof’s shorthand for How many of you did your reading? A couple of tentative hands went up. Kelly pointed at one of them. The owner of the hand, a big, broad brown guy she guessed was a Samoan, said, “Uh, two?”

He didn’t sound very sure, but he was right. She beamed at him. “Good!” she said.

He looked relieved. If she remembered how he’d done on the last quiz, he had reason to look that way. The State University was California’s second tier, behind the University of California. Students here came in two kinds: the ones who couldn’t get into the UC system, and the ones who couldn’t afford it. Some of the latter bunch were as good as anybody who did get into the University of California. The others. . mostly weren’t. Kelly’d done enough TAing to know the kind of work UC students did. Too many of these kids couldn’t come close to that standard.

Well, you did what you could with what you had. She went on, “Both those other eruptions were still enormous. Even the smaller one ejected about sixty-four cubic miles of rock and dust and ash. That’s four times the size of the blast from Mount Tambora, back two hundred years ago, and Mount Tambora’s the volcano that gave the United States and Europe what they called the Year Without a Summer.” She glared out at them. “And anybody who mixes up Mount Tambora and Mount Toba is in big trouble, you hear? Mount Tambora is still there. One of these days, it’ll go off again. What used to be Mount Toba is Lake Toba now-the volcano blew itself to hell and gone. One of these days, it’ll go off again, too, but I pretty much promise we won’t have to worry about it. We’ve got enough other things to worry about.”

The kids laughed nervously, for all the world as if she were kidding. They scribbled notes. Some of them just recorded what she said, so they could listen to it again before the test. She’d always thought putting the material into her own words helped make it hers. She still did, but she’d come to see not everybody worked the same way. Recording sure was easier than taking notes.

“Okay,” she said. “The smallest Yellowstone eruption was four times the size of the one from Mount Tambora-and Mount Tambora was pretty big for an ordinary volcano. How much bigger than that ‘little’ supervolcano eruption was this last one?”

She waited. She’d told them how many cubic miles of ejecta the Yellowstone supervolcano’d belched this last time. Now they had to remember that or find it in their notes and make the calculation. Calculators and cell phones came out. Doing math in your head wasn’t quite so obsolete as writing in cuneiform, but it came close.

A girl in the front row indignantly hit what had to be the CLEAR ERROR button. Either she’d made a mistake or she didn’t believe the answer she’d got. A skinny black guy tentatively raised his hand. Kelly nodded to him. “Nine times?” By the way he said it, he had trouble believing it, too.

But Kelly nodded again. “That’s right,” she said. The girl in the front row looked disgusted, so she must have thought a right answer was wrong. Well, it was pretty unbelievable, all right. “If you spread the ash and dust and rock evenly all over California, it would be about twenty feet deep.”

The ones who wrote wrote that down. Of course, the ejecta weren’t spread evenly. Lava and pyroclastic flows-the really dense stuff-stayed relatively close to the supervolcano caldera. But relatively was a relative term. Jackson, Wyoming, lay maybe sixty miles south of what had been the southern edge of Yellowstone National Park. Today, it was as one with Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of these centuries, it would probably astonish archaeologists.

There was a hell of a funny book, one whose author she couldn’t remember, called Motel of the Mysteries. It was all about the stupid conclusions excavators with no cultural context would jump to when they dug up a twentieth-century motel. It also made you wonder how much of what you thought you knew about ancient Egypt was nothing but bullshit. Well, Jackson-and a good many other towns-would give future diggers their chance at dumbness.

A girl who could have been anything and probably was an L.A. mutt-a little bit of everything-raised her hand. “Question?” Kelly asked.

“Uh-huh,” the girl said. “Somebody told me you were, like, in Yellowstone when the supervolcano went off. Is that right?”

“Um, no,” Kelly answered. “If I’d been there then, I wouldn’t be here now. Trust me on that one.” The class laughed nervously. She decided she needed to say more: “I was part of a team of geologists doing research in the park while the supervolcano was ramping up. A couple of helicopters flew us out when things started looking really scary. We’d just landed in Butte, Montana, about two hundred miles away, when it blew. I was on the runway-I mean, we’d just landed. The earthquake knocked me over, and then the wind-the blast wave, if you want to think of it like that-blew out most of the windows in the terminal, blew me down the strip, and knocked my copter over on its side.”

“From two hundred miles away?” the girl said. “Wow!”

“Wow,” Kelly agreed. “Yeah, from two hundred miles away. It’s-what? — eight hundred miles from Yellowstone to L.A., and you guys heard the blast here, right?” She knew Colin had. Hell, they’d heard it across the whole country. They’d heard it in Western Europe.

“We felt the quake, too,” the girl replied. “We felt it before we heard the boom.”

Kelly nodded. “You would have. Earthquake waves travel faster than sound.”

“I thought the world ended,” the skinny black kid said. “Way things’re at right now, maybe I wasn’t so far wrong, either. Snow in L.A.? If that ain’t the end of the world, what is it? Anybody know for sure how long the cold weather’s gonna last?”

Regretfully, Kelly shook her head. “Anywhere from a few years to a few hundred years. No one can tell you any closer than that. We’ve never had a supervolcano go off before when we were equipped to study it.”

The big Samoan guy raised his hand. When Kelly pointed to him, he asked, “While you were in that helicopter just before the big eruption, were you, like, y’know, scared?”

“No shit!” Kelly blurted.

The undergrads burst into startled laughter. They didn’t expect that kind of language from a prof, even one who wasn’t all ancient and dusty. But what else could you say when somebody sent you a really silly question? Maybe they’d decide she was a human being after all. It might be too much to hope for, but maybe.

“You’ve got to remember, the hot spot under the supervolcano has been active a lot longer than it’s been under Yellowstone-under what used to be Yellowstone.” Kelly had loved the park, loved hiking in it, loved the geological formations without a match anywhere in the world. All gone now. The ecosystem would be tens-more likely hundreds-of thousands of years healing. “It started up under northeastern Oregon seventeen or eighteen million years ago. As the North American tectonic plate slid along on top of it, it erupted every so often across Idaho till it got to where it is now. The Snake River Valley follows the path of the eruptions pretty well.”

A few of the kids looked impressed. Kelly knew damn well she was. A single geological feature active across so much time. . The hot spot that created the Hawaiian chain had been around even longer. So had the collision between India and Asia that pushed up the Himalayas. Not a whole lot of things like that.

“There are a couple of museums in Nebraska full of beautifully preserved rhinoceros bones from eleven or twelve million years ago. The animals died around a water hole and got buried by the ash from one of the blasts when the hot spot was under Idaho.” Kelly’d known about Ashfall Historical Park for a long time. You heard of it when you studied the Yellowstone supervolcano. Funny, though, that Bryce Miller’d seen bones from that excavation when he was in Lincoln. Funny also that Kelly, as Colin’s new wife, should get to be friends with his daughter’s ex-live-in. Rocks weren’t the only things that laid down strata. So did relationships.

It was ten till twelve. She let the class go, warning them they’d get another quiz Friday. They gave the predictable groans as they trooped out.

She hoped she’d find an open gas station before she got home. If she didn’t, she’d have to see how the bus lines worked before she left tomorrow. She’d have to see how long getting here by bus took, too. L.A. buses sucked-a technical term. But you did what you had to do. . if you could do anything at all.

There’d been a boom in apartment buildings in San Atanasio-hell, in the whole South Bay-in the 1970s. Colin Ferguson, who’d lived there a long time, remembered when they were still pretty new. The two-story courtyards with the pools and the rec rooms and the underground parking garages had had an almost Jetsons kind of cool.

Well, platform soles and leisure suits weren’t what they had been when you could wear them without irony. Neither were those apartment buildings. They got old. They got shabby. They got run-down. Young people on the way up stopped living in them till they could afford to buy a house.

Some of the folks who’d moved in a long time ago got old along with their apartments. Poorer people moved into other units. These days, the papers (when there were papers-the supervolcano’d almost finished the job the Net had started) always called San Atanasio a working-class community. That was the polite way to put it, anyhow.

This particular building had a bronze plaque out front that said MARSEILLE GARDENS. The stucco was faded and cracked and chipped. It needed a new paint job. The newest paint on it was a patch where someone had halfheartedly covered up graffiti. That must have been a while ago; fresh spray squiggles writhed across the cover-up.

The entrance and exit to the parking garage both reminded Colin of tank traps. There was a security door to get into the lobby and another one up the flight of stairs from the lobby to the courtyard.

Colin sighed as he got out of the unmarked cop car that was a privilege of his rank. “Another gorgeous spot,” he said.

“Oh, hell, yes, man.” Sergeant Gabe Sanchez scratched at his salt-and-pepper mustache. He kept it as bushy as regs allowed, and then a little more besides. Officious superiors got on his ass about it. Colin couldn’t have cared less. Gabe made a hell of a good cop. Next to that, what was some face fuzz? Jack diddly, that’s what.

A black-and-white had got there ahead of them. The red, yellow, and blue lights in the roof bar flashed one after another. In the glassed-off lobby, a uniformed cop was talking to a tiny, gray-haired woman who broke off every once in a while to cover her face with her hands. Seeing Colin and Sanchez, the cop waved. Colin nodded back.

Gabe Sanchez sighed. “Gotta do it,” he said.

“I’ll go in. You take a minute,” Colin told him. Gabe sent back a grateful look. He lit a cigarette as Colin climbed the stairs to the lobby. San Atanasio was as aggressively smokefree as any other SoCal city. There would have been stereophonic hell to pay had the sergeant lit up inside the car. He smoked now in quick, fierce puffs. Colin knew he’d come along as soon as he got his fix.

When Colin walked into the lobby, the cop wearing navy blue said, “Lieutenant, this is Mrs. Nagumo-Kiyoko Nagumo. She’s the one who called 911. Her sister is in apartment, uh”-he glanced at the notes he’d been taking- “apartment 71.”

“Thanks, Pete.” Colin turned to Mrs. Nagumo and showed his badge. “I’m Lieutenant Ferguson, Mrs. Nagumo. Your sister’s name is Eiko Ryan?” There were still some Japanese in San Atanasio. There’d been more before a lot of them headed south to Torrance and Palos Verdes as blacks and Mexicans moved in. Quite a few had intermarried with whites. Some of the resulting names were a lot more amusing than this one.

Mrs. Nagumo said, “That’s right. We were supposed to have lunch today. I called her. She didn’t answer. I came over to see if she was okay. She’s lived here ten years now, since her husband passed away.”

“I see.” Colin wondered how many times he’d heard stories like this. The Ryans had probably had a little tract house somewhere not far from here. After he died, even a little house might have seemed too big. Or the memories there might have hurt too much. But if Eiko Ryan wanted to stay independent, a place like this would have seemed pretty good. “What happened when you got here, ma’am?”

By the way Pete shifted from foot to foot, he’d already asked her that. Well, tough. “I buzzed. She didn’t let me in. I rang for the manager. He knows me. He let me go in. I knocked on her door. Still nothing. I went back to the manager and asked him to open the apartment. I was afraid maybe she’d fallen or something.” She was of an age-and her sister would be, too-where a fall was liable to mean a broken hip.

When she didn’t go on, Colin gently prodded her: “What happened then, Mrs. Nagumo? Oh-and when was the last time you did talk with your sister?”

“It was last Friday. When we set up lunch. This is Wednesday, so-five days ago. Mr. Svanda, he complained, but he always complains. He did what I wanted him to do.” Chances were, most people did. Mrs. Nagumo couldn’t have been taller than four feet nine, but she had immense dignity. Her grief was all the more stark on account of it. “He opened the door. . and we found her. In the bedroom. I called 911 then.” A tear ran down her wrinkled cheek.

“Did you or Mr., uh, Svanda touch anything inside the apartment?” Colin asked. He wondered why he bothered. If this was another South Bay Strangler case, the bastard never left prints. He’d been raping and murdering little old ladies all through this part of L.A. County for years now, and nobody’d laid a glove on him.

“Nothing much, anyway,” Kiyoko Nagumo said. “We watch TV. We know about fingerprints-oh, yes.”

“Okay.” Colin fought a sigh. Everybody watched TV-and everybody thought the cops always caught the bad guy right before the closing commercials. Real life, unfortunately, could be a lot messier and less conclusive. And real-life cops took the heat when it was.

“I’ve got a pretty good statement from her, Lieutenant,” Pete said as Gabe Sanchez came up the stairs to join them. “If you want to have a look at the crime scene before the forensics guys and the coroner get here-”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Colin said resignedly. Mrs. Nagumo started crying again. Hearing about the coroner must have reminded her her sister was dead.

The door up into the courtyard was open. People milled around there, the way they always did after something bad happened. A grizzled fellow limped up to Colin and Gabe. Like anyone with an ounce of sense, he knew cops when he saw them.

“I’m Oscar Svanda,” he said. “My wife Glinda and me, we manage this building. I let Mrs. Ryan’s sister into her place, and then we seen the poor lady’s body.” He crossed himself. He looked green around the gills, and well he might. Civilians rarely saw things like that, and rarely knew how lucky they were not to.

“Gabe, why don’t you take Mr. Svanda’s statement?” Colin said. “I do want to have a look at the apartment.”

“Okay. I’ll catch up with you.” Gabe pulled a notebook from an inside pocket of his blue blazer. “You want to spell your last name for me so I make sure I have it right, Mr. Svanda. .?”

The other uniformed officer from the black-and-white stood at the door to apartment 71. She looked a trifle green herself. “Your first Strangler case, Heather?” Colin asked, understanding that all too well.

She managed a nod. “’Fraid so, Lieutenant.”

“Well, welcome to the club. Now you see why we hate the son of a gun so much,” Colin said grimly. Heather nodded again, this time with more conviction.

He walked inside. The furniture was that furnished-apartment blend of tacky and functional. The Naugahyde covering on the dinette chairs had orange flowers; the couch and chair were upholstered in industrial-strength fabric with a really horrible red, white, and black plaid. But everything was scrupulously clean and neat.

A faint but unmistakable odor led him into the bedroom. Eiko Ryan had been there two or three days, all right. Her long flannel nightgown was hiked up to her waist. Alive, she might have been an inch or two taller than her sister-which would have done her a hell of a lot of good trying to fight off the bastard who’d killed her.

Colin clasped his hands behind his back to make sure he didn’t touch anything. It wouldn’t matter, but he did it anyway. Habit was strong in him, and got stronger as he got older.

He heard some kind of commotion outside. He feared he knew what kind, too. Sure as hell, Heather called, “The reporters are here, Lieutenant.”

“Oh, joy,” Colin said, and went out to meet the press.