The Murder Book

'How's Oregon?'

'Green, pretty. Mostly I've seen soundstages.'

'How's Spike?'

'He's good… adapting… I miss you.'

'Miss you, too.'

'Alex?'

'Uh-huh?'

'What's- are you okay?'

'Sure… so tell me, are sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll what they're cracked up to be?'

'It's not like that,' she said.

'Which part? The sex or the drugs?'

Silence. 'I'm working really hard,' she said. 'Everyone is. The logistics are incredible, putting everything together.'

'Exciting.'

'It's satisfying.'

'I'd hope so,' I said.

Longer silence. 'I feel,' she said, 'that you're very far away from me. And please don't be literal.'

'As opposed to metaphorical?'

'You're angry.'

'I'm not, I love you.'

'I really do miss you, Alex.'

'Nothing's stopping you from coming home anytime,' I said.

'It's not that simple.'

'Why not?' I said. 'What, it's turned into a heavy metal tour, shackles and chains?'

'Please don't be like this, Alex.'

'Like what?'

'Sarcastic- veiled. I know you're mad at me, and that's probably the real reason you didn't call me back right away, but-'

'You leave, and I'm the bad guy?' I said. 'Yes, the real reason we missed each other was I was in no shape to talk to anyone. Not anger, I just got… hollow. After that I did try to call but like you said, you're busy. I'm not angry, I'm… do what you need to do.'

'Do you want me to quit?'

'No, you'd never forgive me for that.'

'I want to stay.'

'Then stay.'

'Oh, Alex…'

'I'll try to be Mr. Cheerful,' I said.

'No, I don't want that.'

'Probably couldn't pull it off anyway. Never been much of a performer- guess I wouldn't fit in with your new buddies.'

'Alex, please… oh, damn- Hold on! They're calling me, some sort of crisis- dammit, I don't want to sign off like this-'

'Do what you need to do,' I said.

'I'll call you later- I love you, Alex.'

'Love-you-too.'

Click.

Good work, Delaware. For this we sent you to therapist school?

I shut my eyes, struggled to empty my head, then filled it with mental snapshots.

Finally, I found the image I wanted and wedged it behind my eyes.

Janie Ingalls's brutalized body.

A dead girl, granting me momentary grace, as I lost myself in her imagined agony.

CHAPTER 12

One thing about sensory deprivation: It does tend to freshen up your perceptions. And a plan- any plan- opens the door to self-importance.

When I left the house, the sun kissed me like a lover, and the trees were greener under a benevolent sun that reminded me why people kept moving to California. I collected the day's mail- junk junk junk- then walked around to the rear garden and stopped at the pond. The koi were a sinuous brocade, hyperactive, clamoring at the rock border, brought to the surface by my footsteps.

Ten very hungry fish. I made them happy. Then I drove to school.

I used my crosstown med school faculty card to get a parking spot on the U.'s north campus, walked to the Research Library, sat myself down in front of a computer, began with the in-house data banks, then logged onto the Internet and made my way through half a dozen search engines.

Janie or Jane Ingalls pulled up the Ingalls-Dudenhoffer family tree website from Hannibal, Missouri. Great-great-great-grandmother Jane Martha Ingalls would be 237 years old next week.

Bowie Ingalls connected me to a David Bowie fan club in Manchester, England, and to a University of Oklahoma history professor's site on Jim Bowie.

Several Melinda Waters hits popped up but none seemed remotely relevant: A physicist by that name worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, nineteen-year-old Melinda Sue Waters was hawking nude pictures of herself from a small town in Arkansas, and Melinda Waters, Attorney-at-Law ('Specializing in Bankruptcy and Evictions!') advertised her services on a legal bulletin board out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

No crime stories or death notices on either girl. Perhaps Janie's friend had indeed surfaced, as Milo had suggested, and slipped back into society unnoticed.

I tried her mother's name- Eileen- with no success.

Next search: Tonya Marie Stumpf. Nothing on Pierce Schwinn's backseat playmate. No surprise there, I hadn't expected an aging hooker to have her own website.

No data on Pierce Schwinn, either. His surname pulled up several Schwinn bicycle items and one news piece that caught my eye because it was relatively local: a Ventura weekly's account of a horse show last year. One of the winners was a woman named Marge Schwinn, who raised Arabians in a place called Oak View. I looked up the town. Seventy miles north of L.A., near Ojai. Exactly the kind of semirural escape that might attract an ex-cop. I wrote down her name.

Logging the activities of the Cossack family kept me busy for a long time, as I caught dozens of articles in the L.A. Times and the Daily News that stretched back to the sixties.

The boys' father, Garvey Cossack, Senior, had received intermittent coverage for tearing down buildings and putting up shopping centers, working the zoning board for variances, mixing with politicians at fund-raisers. Cossack Development had contributed to the United Way and to all the right diseases, but I found no records of donations to the Police Benevolent Society or any links to John G. Broussard or the LAPD.

A twenty-five-year-old social-page picture showed Cossack Senior to be a short, bald, rotund man, with huge black-framed eyeglasses, a tiny dyspeptic mouth, and a fondness for oversize pocket squares. His wife, Ilse, was taller than he by half a head, with dishwater hair worn too long for her middle-aged face, hollow cheeks, tense hands, and barbiturate eyes. Other than chairmanship of a Wilshire Country Club charity debutante ball, she'd stayed out of the limelight. I checked the list of young women presented at the ball. No mention of Caroline Cossack, the girl who never changed her clothes and might've poisoned a dog.