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  "He wanted the brass. A semiauto ejects to the shooter's right. He would follow her in as she fell, look to his right for the shell. He couldn't have heard the case hit the door because the gun just went off. Even a silenced auto is going to make a noise. He wouldn't have noticed the nick in the paint. That was our luck. He didn't find his casing immediately, so he pulled the girl out of the way, shut the door and looked again. But he still struck out, because he was looking in the wrong part of the apartment. Even if he'd thought of a ricochet, what are the chances of him looking into the flower vase? It was all the way to his left."

  Zamorra was nodding. "The trouble with that is, it works for Man Friend Number Two, also. If he's connected with Man Friend Number One, then he cleans the place and looks for his brass. If he's not connected, he likes all the fingerprints Man Friend Number One must have left, but he still wants his casing."

  "How does he know what his partner touched?"

  "He goes with the obvious."

  Merci followed this one as far as she could. One path, many forks, one fork at a time. "Nobody plans a murder but leaves his fingerprints on the silverware. If we find a load of good prints, that means two guys, not working together. Two sets of footsteps. Two guys. Just like Coates said."

  Zamorra looked down at the body outline like he'd never seen it before. He cocked his head like one of Mike's bloodhounds. Uncocked it, kept staring.

  "What."

  "I'm pulling out walls, putting in windows."

  She said nothing. She figured it was like Hess seeing things that weren't there.

  "You know," he said, "just trying to get past my own bad ideas."

  "I know about that."

  "Two guys. Just like Coates said," he repeated her words verbatim. Something in the tone told her he was lending credence to their earwitness for the first time.

  Stoned or not.

  "But why?" he asked. "Why kill her?"

  "I've been thinking about that ever since I saw the money wallet. In fact, I wondered if that might be part of the answer."

  "You lost me."

  "He's aware of us. He left the money to make us wonder."

  "That's far-fetched." Zamorra looked at her uncomfortably, then

  She felt the rage blast through her, clear and clean as the winter sun coming through the slider.

  She didn't say it, but what she was thinking was: I got my partner killed because I thought a psychopath was too stupid to come after me. Far-fetched. Bastard used my gun on Hess. Almost got myself killed, too, and sometimes I still want to trade places with him.

  With his back still toward her Zamorra shook his head, then said something she didn't hear.

  She tried to keep the anger from her voice, something she was never much good at. "Say it again, Paul. I'm a big girl. We can't work together if we can't talk."

  "I said you were right," he said gently. "Nothing seems far-fetched from a guy who just shot a girl in the heart."

  She could see him in profile against the window, looking at her from the side of his bloodshot eye.

  "Sorry," said Merci.

  "Accepted. I am, too."

  "I'm sorrier."

  "No, I'm much, much sorrier."

  She was relieved he actually got her joke. She smiled to herself and sighed. "Sometimes I think I got problems, until I look at the cases I work."

  "Me, too. Then I look at Janine."

  Janine was his wife.

  They stood between the kitchen and the dining room, Merci reading her notes on the Coates interview. "This bothers me," she said. "Some kind of struggle here, according to Coates. First a thump, then another, but a sustained one. He said it was a minute or two later. I figure the first thump was Aubrey hitting the floor. If a struggle ensued, who the hell was it between?"

  "Coates said it was like furniture being moved."

  The cabinet under the sink was open, the door handle screws were half torn out of the wood. The second drawer was all the way out, the runners were bent so bad it wouldn't close.

  Merci knelt, looked at the damage. "Lots of strength, to pull screws and bend metal. But Aubrey's peacefully laid to rest twelve feet away, two minutes earlier, if we believe Coates. No visible bruises or abrasions, nothing under her fingernails, nothing on the body that points to a fight. So who's our killer fighting with in here, his conscience?"

  "There's our two Man Friends again."

  "The Man Friends weren't here at the same time, if Coates is right."

  Zamorra looked at her long, then shrugged. "What he says doesn't fit the evidence. The thing is, you get loaded and your time-space judgment goes straight to hell. You think twenty minutes is going by while you have meaningful thoughts. Really, five seconds went by while you tripped out."

  Merci considered the distance from body to kitchen. "Even if Coates was off, even if the struggle happened right after the first thump, it wasn't Aubrey in a struggle. Shot in the heart and fighting for her life, she doesn't lose one drop of blood on the kitchen floor?"

  "Where's that leave us? Someone else up here when Man Friend Number One left?"

  "It's possible."

  "A third guy. Wasn't invited to dinner. Nobody heard him come or go. Hid in the bedroom? Jumped out to rescue her when she got shot?"

  Merci was listening but didn't answer. She was flipping through to the CSI report, looking for reference to a good shoe print that Lynda Coiner found on the kitchen floor. There were three prints left by the same shoe, with a back-slanting series of treads that looked to be like big commas. The tails tapered toward the heel. The heel had a central circle with spokes leading outward to the edge.

  O'Brien had photographed it in reflected light, then lifted a big print using fingerprint dust and a sheet of white paper. They could match an impression if the detectives could come up with a suspect shoe. It looked to be a size twelve, probably not a dress shoe due to he pronounced tread pattern. And very likely a soft sole and not a hard one because of the clarity of the print left on the hardwood floor.

  Zamorra was on the same page. "This shoe print," he said. “It doesn't fit with what Coates said either. The big guy, the size twelve, was supposed to be a hard-soled shoe or boot. Mr. Snappy-Dressed Businessman coming home to his family. I think our earwitness little too stoned to keep things straight."

  "He liked her," Merci said. "He's trying to help her by helping us.”

  "If he wants to help us he could just admit he's a little foggy on some of this. You know, a half-assed witness is worse than none at all sometimes."

  Merci just shook her head. "I know that. But I want to know happened here. I mean I really want to know."

  Zamorra knelt and looked at the loose handle of the still-open sink cabinet, then to the drawer that was pulled out and stranded on its bent runners.

  "I do too," he said, almost like it surprised him.

  Merci wondered what it must be like to investigate a murder while your wife was dying. There was a time when she had believed she could use her will to keep people from dying, but now she didn't. Zamorra didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd believe in that. It was naïve.

  What she came up with was that Paul must want to run away times, to make his own hurt stop. When Merci was in her greatest pain—after Hess and her mom died, after a monster named Colesceau had almost killed her, right after Tim, Jr., was born—she pictured a small house on a Mexican beach, with bright purple bougainvillea potted on the deck and herself sitting there in the shade.

  She imagined that beach house in Mexico now, then she was in Aubrey Whittaker's kitchen. What did Aubrey Whittaker picture, when the paying guys were doing their thing? A house with a beach? Eternal fire?

  "The fingerprints," Paul said, like he'd come to a conclusion. "And her little black book. There's going to be a straight line in there, somewhere. And it's going to point right at this creep."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Merci sat with Tim on her lap and let Clark clear the dishes. The house was cold this
December, and she could feel the draft on her ankles through her socks. Past the windows she could see, in the beams of the yard lights, the big patio with the baby's trike and the barbecue, the cats on the wall and the orange trees beyond. The lot was surrounded by the grove and the grove was surrounded by housing you couldn't see until you walked right up to them. She'd rent house for its privacy, and because it was cheap.

  Tim had on a knit cap, half against the cold and half because he looked cute in it. It reminded her of Hess, Tim's father, because worn a hat the last couple of times she had seen him. Tim, Jr., looked like Hess. It was hard to think of him without thinking of all that gone wrong.

  She banished Hess from her thoughts, trying to be gentle about it.

  "Poker night," said Clark. She knew it was poker night because her father was washing the dishes fast, eager to make his eight o' game. It was Clark and his old retired friends from the Sheriff Department. Every Wednesday.

  "Win lots," she said absently. Her mind was on the work of the day, no matter how hard she tried to forget it. "Hey, we homicidals got our Christmas bonus today."

  "Your very own unsolved?"

  "Mine's from nineteen sixty-nine. A woman named Patti Bailey. I brought it home for pleasure reading tonight."

  Clark was scrubbing away at a saucepan. He was a tall, lean man with nice gray hair and glasses. She watched him scrub. Merci wondered at what year a man entered the age of sharpened elbows. Hess had sharp elbows, even though he had been built heavy and her father was built slender. Clark looked back over his shoulder at her.

  "Buy a novel if you want pleasure."

  "You remember it?"

  "Barely. I was just starting burg-theft in sixty-nine. I think Rymers and Thornton got that one."

  "They still around?"

  "Thornton's up in Arrowhead, I think. Rymers died."

  "How?"

  Clark turned again. When he smiled the lines in his face changed direction and he looked sweet and wise. "Stroke."

  Merci said nothing. Her dad was always telling her to leave her work at work. To leave alone the things she couldn't change. To understand that not every death in the world was a homicide she needed to solve. To get a life—a contemporary phrase he'd started using, which hugely irritated Merci.

  He also wanted her to marry Mike McNally, have another baby, be a stepmom to Mike's boy, Danny, be a mom instead of a mom cop. To Clark, being a cop was just a job, a concept that Merci had never understood.

  To her it was a life. When she looked at her parents Merci couldn't see where she'd gotten her single-mindedness and her drive. Who knew how Tim, Jr., would end up, if things like that could just barrel right into your soul.

  • • •

  While Tim pulled the ears and chewed the nose of a stuffed panda, Merci read the Patti Bailey file. The body was found in an orange grove culvert near the corner of Myford and Fourth, in unincorporated Orange County. Gunshot. The year was 1969.

  The panda flew across the bedroom. Tim waddled in hot pursuit.

  Myford and Fourth, thought Merci. Odd. It was just a couple miles from here. Now it was called Myford and Irvine Boulevard. She wondered if Brighton had shuffled the deck to give her something close to home, then wondered why he'd bother.

  The dicks were Rymers and Thornton, just as her father had remembered. A kid had found the body in the ditch; his dad called the sheriffs. The responding deputy was one Todd Smith.

  Merci looked at her son. He was gouging at the panda's eye grunting happily.

  Patti Bailey was a plain looking woman. Twenty-three, petit brown hair pulled behind her ears. She had heavy eyelids and a crooked smile in her mug shot. Merci thought it took a lot of guts to smile for a mug, or maybe a lot of alcohol or dope. Her impression of the year 1969 was that everybody was loaded and disrespectful to authority. She was only four at the time, so it was just speculation.

  Bailey had been arrested three times for prostitution, tried and convicted once. She'd dodged marijuana and barbiturates charges dismissed, same judge. Two tumbles for possession of heroin: eighteen months in all.

  While Tim throttled and cooed at his panda, Merci read through Todd Smith's report. Bailey was found by the kid on the evening of August 5. Smith got there at 6:30 p.m. and found the woman facedown on the slope of the culvert. All she had on was a bra and a pair of shorts.

  The medical autopsy found no conclusive signs of rape. No sign of struggle. There was THC in her system, nembutal and .08 blood alcohol. She'd eaten peaches and chocolate chip cookies less than an hour before she died. She'd been dead about twenty-four hours before the kid found her.

  Merci looked quickly through the crime-scene and autopsy photos. The autopsy had been performed in a funeral home because the county had had no facilities of its own back then. The photos struck her as most homicide photos did: The victims looked so disrespected, so brutally dismissed. What could you have done to earn such contempt? She’d been shot from behind and up close. The bullet entry was a clean hole and the exit tore open a crudely triangular flap at the bottom. Went through her heart—right atrium. The M.E. said maybe a .38 or maybe 357 Magnum, which was the same diameter but considerably faster. Any number of more exotic calibers could have made the same hole.

  Merci cringed when she looked at the bullet-path study, in which the deceased Patti Bailey lay on her side with a long dowel pushed through the middle of her torso. She looked like something spiked for a barbecue.

  Merci turned over the pictures and sighed.

  Tim now had his toddler's hair comb and was styling the fur on the panda's head. More like hitting it with the comb. He was talking to his customer, a series of bright syllables and occasional words that formed his sincere and expressive babble. He was smiling. From this angle, he looked like her.

  Go into cosmetology, she thought, open a salon and make people pretty.

  It struck her as strange that while she would trade little on Earth for her job, she wanted none of it for her own son. Maybe Tim will see it like Dad does, she thought: It's all just a way to pay the bills. Be a banker, a sales guy, a lawyer. Take pictures of mountains or models. Play ball. Why see all this?

  Because people die every day who aren't supposed to, and the assholes who do it shouldn't go free.

  There it was. Inelegant but true.

  It looked to her like Rymers and Thornton had done what they could. No murder weapon. No witnesses. Not much evidence collected: some partial shoe prints in the soft soil of the orange grove and a short list of drug-suppliers and johns who might or might not have had a reason to kill Patti Bailey.

  The case stayed active for two years, open for eight more, then it was filed in the unsolved cabinet. Until now.

  Merry Christmas.

  • •

  Mike McNally called right after Tim went to bed, as he did almost every night.

  "I'm really sorry about today," he said.

  "It's okay."

  "Look, we're going to get another girl to help on the outcall owner. But I know where to find him, and you should, too."

  Merci wrote down the name and the home and business addresses: Goren Moladan, Newport Beach and Dana Point.

  "He's got the assaults on the girls," said Mike. "But he did his time and his probation, so he's clean right now. I don't think he knows we’re going inside on him."

  "We'll do what we can to keep it that way."

  "You guys must have gotten prints all over the place in Aubrey Whittaker's place, I mean."

  "She made dinner for someone that night."

  Mike said nothing for a moment. "Well, something's going to pop then. You think it was the shooter?"

  "That's the percentage."

  "Domiciles are full of latents though. I mean, a lot of people come and go."

  "Yeah. Coiner says it was crawling with loops and whorls."

  Mike was quiet again for a beat. She could hear his bloodhounds, Dolly, Molly and Polly, barking in their run.

  "Merci, I'
m really sorry for jumping in your face today. I was just disappointed. We agreed to set Wednesdays aside for movies with the kids. You know, with the old men at poker night. I was just counting on seeing you. I know you're tired."

  "It's really okay. It just surprises me when you get so absolutely pissed off so quick. You remind me of me."

  The joke fell flat. Mike tended not to get jokes other than his own, which were often dumb. He'd lay them on you like a six-year-old handing you a toad. This horse sits down at a bar, the bartender looks and asks, why the long face? And so forth.

  She could hear him breathing. Then she heard the old furnace kick on in the basement, the shudder of the ducts and the hiss of warm air through the floor vent. One of the cats slunk in, then out.

  "Merci, have you thought about what we talked about?"

  Her heart sank. "Sure."

  "And?"

  She tried to compose herself. "I'm still not ready, Mike. It doesn't feel right. It feels too soon."

  "We can make it whenever you want. Wait a year. It's got to be right for both of us. What's important is we start planning. Otherwise it'll never happen. The years, man, they just keep speeding up."

  "Let's wait."

  Another silence. There seemed to be an endless river of them lately. She felt punished.

  The dogs were still yapping in the background. She could imagine Mike's face drawn in disappointment, his blond forelock hanging disconsolately down, his eyes blue and wide.

  "Because of what happened with Hess?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  "It's not me?"

  "I love you, Mike. I respect you. It's not you."

  "You put off a good thing long enough, maybe it just goes away. It says that right in the Bible. 'Hope deferred is a sadness to the heart.' "

  She felt her anger and guilt collide. Careful now. "I don't want you to be sad."

  "I meant your heart, too."

  "I know. It's coming along, Mike. Things are going to be okay."

  "I'll stick with you."

  "I need that."

  "You've got it. Stick with me, too."

  "I will."

  Another pause. "See you tomorrow, girl. Danny and the bloodhounds love you, too."