Bones

She stuck out her tongue. “Saving a few bucks. It hurt me to see the pearl displayed that way, but people can be strange. She sure was.”

“Had her own ideas.”

“Not the type you’d think would appreciate something of this quality.” She touched the chain. “So does your wife get to be ecstatically happy before you go do something naughty?”

“Any flexibility on price?”

“Hmm,” she said. “For you I could take off ten percent.”

“Make it twenty and you’ve got a deal.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Fifteen’s the best I can do. When you consider what a large diamond costs, it’s an incredible bargain.”

“I don’t really know much about pearls-”

“But I do and trust me, it’s worth it. Seventeen off’s the absolute rock bottom. You’re lucky it’s me and not my husband. At that price, there’s barely any profit and when Leonard comes in and finds out what I did for you, he won’t be happy.” Touching my wrist with warm, smooth fingertips. “And guilt gifts for him are no picnic.”

Robin’s big brown eyes expanded like kaleidoscope disks. “What did you do?”

“Impulse buy.”

“I’ll say-it’s gorgeous, baby, but way too big for me.”

“Looks fine to me.”

“When would I wear it?”

“We’ll find an occasion.”

“Really, Alex, I can’t.”

“Wear it once. You don’t like it, back it goes.”

“You are something.” Several moments in front of the mirror later: “I love you.”

“Fits your skin tone perfectly.”

“It’s so wrong for me… huge.”

“You got it, flaunt it.”

She sighed. “Darn.”

“You really don’t like it?”

“Not that kind of darn,” she said. “Darn if I’m not going to make it work.”

A long dinner at the Bel-Air, wine, and lovemaking K.O.’d me hard enough for a decent night’s sleep. But memories of the pearl against Robin’s chest brought me fully awake. Now the necklace was displayed on our bedroom dresser and when I peeked out the kitchen window, her studio light glowed.

I tried Milo again, finally connected to his cell, asked if he’d reached Alma Reynolds.

Instead of answering, he said, “Just got a call from my crime scene buddies. Travis Huck’s room in the mansion was clean, but they found blood in his bathroom drain. Type AB. We’ve got no typing on Huck, so theoretically it could be his. But you know how rare AB is, what’s the chance of two people turning up with it?”

“Who’s the first?”

“Simon Vander. Medical examiner called Simone and got confirmation. Daddy was always getting hit on to donate. Reed also talked to Simone and she’s going to give a DNA sample, see if that can be linked. She’s freaking out, pretty much over the edge. Wouldn’t surprise me if Aaron Fox shows up, offering to help us poor dumb yokels. Mean-while, I’ve got a call in to His Holiness. This should be enough to name Huck a flat-out suspect, get a full- court press on the search.”

“No blood anywhere except the drain,” I said. “Sink and shower?”

“Just the sink, Alex. Which is totally consistent with the bad stuff happening elsewhere, Huck spotting a stain on his clothes and deciding to wash it off. He was careful to scrub the sink itself. In fact, the level of clean in his room is just as suspicious as if luminol had turned the place purple. The place was gone over. What the bastard didn’t figure on is our taking the plumbing apart.”

“Is that routine procedure for the techies?”

“It is when I tell them to do it. I’m thinking the Vanders were lured to S.F., he picked ’em up at the airport, did them somewhere in Northern or Central California, buried the bodies, drove back to L.A. and kept up the loyal- employee facade.”

“All those forests up the coast.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I said, “A lust thing for Nadine would explain facing the bodies east. Look to the Orient.” His breath quickened.

“What?”

“I’m getting that feeling, Alex-stuff coming together. Listen, I gotta keep all my lines open in case Zeus calls from Olympus. If you want to help, see if you can come up with a hypothesis as to where Huck’s hiding.”

Travis Huck as Prime Suspect made the six o’clock news and the papers.

A renewed rush of sightings kept Milo and Moe Reed and two other detectives busy for the next forty-eight hours.

Nothing panned out.

I tried to work up a guess as to where Huck might be burrowed, looked at maps, drew blanks.

After two days of looking at her pearl, Robin locked it in the safe.

I drove to Alma Reynolds’s apartment, spotted her VW, knocked on her door.

“Who is it?”

“Alex Delaware.”

“You are stalking me. Go away.”

“Six thousand bucks for a pearl,” I said. “Mom would be proud.”

The sound she emitted could’ve been rage or fear.

Silence said she hadn’t taken the bait.

I sat parked up the block for nearly an hour. Just as I was about to give up, she hurried out of her building, got in the yellow Bug.

I followed her to a Washington Mutual on Santa Monica Boulevard. She stayed in the bank for another forty-two minutes, then drove to the ophthalmologist’s office building but, after a brief pause, kept going, headed back to Pico, stopped at a Korean barbecue on Centinela.

Glass window in front, easy to follow the action.

I waited until her order arrived.

Massive plate of ribs, mug of beer.

I said, “Celebrating?”

She gasped and sputtered and for a second I thought it was Heimlich time.

Chewing furiously, she swallowed. Her teeth ground. “Go away.”

“Just because the pearl’s in a safe-deposit box doesn’t mean you can keep it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mom might be proud of your taste in googaws, but would she approve of the financing?”

“Get the hell out of here.”

“You put up with Duboff for years, see yourself as his rightful heir, and I take no issue with that. The problem is how he got the money. Even if it can’t be linked to a crime, the IRS is sure to be interested.”

She lifted a rib, and for a second I thought she’d use it as a weapon.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“It’s not about you,” I said. “It’s about four other women.” I touched the rib. “Bones.”

She turned a bad color. Shot up and ran to the bathroom.

Five minutes, ten, fifteen.

I went back, found both lavs empty. A rear door led to an alley that stank of garbage. By the time I’d returned