as the woman in the photograph. The site's brick-and-mortar location was on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
This was apparently what Lilly and Robin had done. The page listed the office's hours as Monday through Saturday, nine to five during the week and ten to three on Saturdays.
Pierce wrote the address and hours down on his notepad. He was about to disconnect from the site when he decided to call up Lilly's page once again. He printed out a color copy of her photo on the DeskJet. He then shut down the computer and disconnected the phone line. Again a voice inside told him he had gone as far with this as he could go. As he should go. It was time to change his phone number and forget about it.
But another voice -a louder voice from the past -told him something else.
'Lights,' he said.
The office dropped into darkness. Pierce didn't move. He liked the darkness. He always did his best thinking in the dark.
5
The stairway was dark and the boy was scared. He looked back to the street and saw the waiting car. His stepfather saw the hesitation and put his hand out the car window. He waved the boy forward, waved him in. The boy turned back and looked up into the darkness. He turned on the flashlight and started up.
He kept the light down on the steps, not wanting to announce he was coming up by lighting the room at the top. Halfway there one of the stairs creaked loudly under his foot.
He stood frozen still. He could hear his own heartbeat banging in his chest. He thought about Isabelle and the fear she probably carried in her own chest every day and night after night. He drew his resolve from this and started up again.
Three steps from the top he cut the light off and waited for his eyes to adjust. In a few moments he thought he could see a dim light from the room up ahead of him. It was candlelight licking at the ceiling and walls. He pushed himself against the side wall and took the last three steps up.
The room was large and crowded. He could see the makeshift beds lined against the two long walls. Still figures, like heaps of rummage sale clothes, slept on each. At the end of the room a single candle burned and a girl, a few years older and dirtier, heated a bottle cap over the flame. The boy studied her face in the uneven light. He could see that it wasn't Isabelle.
He started moving down the center of the room, between the sleeping bags and the newspaper pallets. From side to side he looked, searching for the familiar face. It was dark but he could tell. He'd know her when he saw her.
He got to the end, by the girl with the bottle cap. And Isabelle wasn't there.
'Who are you looking for?' asked the girl.
She was drawing back the plunger on the hypodermic, sucking the brown-black liquid through a cigarette butt filter from the bottle cap. In the murky light the boy could see the needle scarring on her neck.
'Just somebody,' he said.
She looked away from her work and up to his face, surprised by his voice. She saw the young face in the camouflage of oversized and dirty clothes.
'You're a young one,' she said. 'You better get out of here before the houseman comes back.'
The boy knew what she meant. All the squats in Hollywood had somebody in charge.
The houseman. He exacted a fee in money or drugs or flesh.
'He finds you, he'll bust your cherry ass and put you out on -'
She suddenly stopped and blew out the candle, leaving him in the dark. He turned back to the door and the stairs, and all his fears seized up in him like a fist closing on a flower. A silhouette of a man stood at the top of the steps. A big man. Wild hair. The houseman.
The boy involuntarily took a step back and tripped over someone's leg. He fell, the flashlight clattering on the floor next to him and going out.
The man in the doorway moved and started coming at him.
'Hanky boy!' the man yelled. 'Come here, Hank!'
6
Pierce awoke at dawn, the sun rescuing him from the dream of running from a man whose face he could not see. He had no curtains in the apartment yet and the light streamed through the windows and burned through his eyelids. He crawled out of the sleeping bag, looked at the photo of Lilly he had left on the floor and went into the shower. When he was finished he had to dry off with two T-shirts he'd dug out of one of the clothing boxes. He'd forgotten to buy towels.
He walked over to Main Street to get coffee, a citrus smoothie and the newspaper. He read and drank slowly, almost feeling guilty about it. Most Saturdays he was in the lab by dawn.
When he was finished with the paper it was almost nine. He walked back to the Sands and got into his car, but he didn't go to the lab as usual.
Fifteen minutes before ten o'clock Pierce got to the Hollywood address he had written down for L.A. Darlings. The location was a multi-level office complex that looked as legitimate as a McDonald's. L.A. Darlings was located in Suite 310. On the glazed glass door the largest lettering read ENTREPRENEURIAL CONCEPTS UNLIMITED.
Beneath this was a listing in smaller letters of ten different websites, including L.A.
Darlings, that apparently fell under the Entrepreneurial Concepts umbrella. Pierce could tell by the titling of the site addresses that they were all sexually oriented and part of the Internet's dark universe of adult entertainment.
The door was locked but Pierce was a few minutes early. He decided to use the time by taking a walk and thinking about what he was going to say and how he was going to play this.
'Here, I'll open it.'
He turned as a woman approached the door with a key. She was about twenty-five and had crazy blonde hair that seemed to point in all directions. She wore cutoff jeans and sandals and a short shirt that exposed her pierced navel. She had looped over her shoulder a purse that looked big enough to hold a pack of cigarettes but not the matches. And she looked as though ten o'clock was definitely too early for her.
'You're early,' she said.
'I know,' Pierce said. 'I came from the Westside and I thought there'd be more traffic.'
He followed her in. There was a waiting area with a raised reception counter in front of a partition that guarded an entrance to a rear hallway. To the right and unguarded was a closed door with the word PRIVATE on it. Pierce watched as the woman walked behind the counter and threw her purse into a drawer.
'You'll have to wait a couple minutes until I get set up. I'm the only one here today.'
'Slow on Saturdays?'
'Most of the time.'
'Well, who is watching the machines if you're the only one here?'
'Oh, well, there's always somebody back there. I just meant I'm by myself up front today.'
She slid into a chair behind the counter. The silver ring protruding from her stomach caught Pierce's eye and reminded him of Nicole. She had worked at Amedeo for more than a year before he happened upon her in a coffee shop on Main Street on a Sunday afternoon. She had just come from a workout and was dressed in gray sweatpants and a sports bra, exposing a gold ring piercing her navel. It was like discovering a secret about someone of longtime acquaintance. She had always been a beautifully attractive woman in his eyes but everything changed after that moment in the coffee shop. Nicole became erotic to him and he went after her, wanting to check for hidden tattoos and to know all of her secrets.
Pierce wandered around the confines of the waiting room while the woman behind the counter did whatever it was she had to do to get set up. He heard a computer start booting up and some drawers opening and closing. He
