Good Morning, Killer

model. If the theory was that Brennan stalked these shoots, why had he been trolling the Promenade?

I flipped back through my personal calendar and noted that was the weekend when Andrew and I were supposed to ride his Harley in a police fund-raiser. But we did not ride the Harley because it had rained. It was raining all weekend. It had rained the weekend before.

I had gone swimming in the pool in the rain.

The police fund-raiser had been canceled.

The photo shoot was undoubtedly canceled, too.

Ray Brennan was hungry. His pattern had been disrupted and he had to look outside his comfort zone.

The Promenade was not his hunting field. We had been misled by our own assumptions. Juliana had not been the pattern. She had been the exception to the pattern.

I dug out the crumpled program for Arlene Harounian’s memorial service, which was still inside my jacket pocket. The two girls who had spoken about Arlene wanting to be a model were listed in the order of events as Remembering Arlene by Jane Latsky and Muriel Fletcher. Directory assistance gave me four Latskys in the area. I told young Jane I was a reporter for a local paper and wanted to know if her friend Arlene had ever attended a photo day.

Yes, said the girl, all the time. Once in a park in Manhattan Beach.

The next upcoming photo day, according to the website, would take place in a Japanese tea garden in Glendale.

They couldn’t bust me for going to a park on a sunny day.

Twenty-four

The Japanese tea garden was located in a recreation center in Glendale, at the end of a palm-lined street in a neighborhood of nicely landscaped older cottages. The park was tucked up against the Verdugo Mountains, in a shady oasis that included a public library. A table had been set up, blocking the Shinto gate. You had to sign in.

“I’m looking for Moose,” I told the wiry fellow on guard.

“Who’s Moose?”

“One of the organizers.”

“I’m the organizer,” he claimed. He was about fifty, rugged, too-tanned features and shoulder-length hair, wearing a water bottle belt and short shorts to show off his developed legs — one of those deeply California characters whose past would probably read like a parody of West Coast fads: hot tub installer, dope dealer, surfer, yoga teacher.

“Moose said he’d be here.”

There was a beat of numbskull silence, and then a mountainous person who had been standing nearby said in a deep announcer’s voice, “I’m Moose.”

“Great!” shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Just as great as you said it would be.”

So was he. About six foot four, three hundred pounds.

“See, we’re fenced in here,” said Moose, indicating the manicured garden. “No looky-loos.”

“Are all these photographers full-time professionals?”

“Amateurs. The word for this is amateurs,” he admitted reluctantly and sighed.

“They all have other jobs?”

“Like me. I have another job.”

“What’s your line of work?”

“Cleaning supplies.”

“Ahh. So, Moose, how do you become a member?”

“The models get in free. The photographers pay twenty dollars at the door.”

I had seen them in the parking lot unpacking their equipment, overweight middle-aged men wearing fishing hats and elaborate vests with dozens of pockets. Some were sporting lenses the size of the Mount Palomar telescope, others had tiny digitals. Half were white, half Asian, and they all seemed to know one another in the forgiving, easygoing way of hobbyists.

“Anybody can walk in here with twenty dollars and a camera?”

“We are totally legal,” interjected Mr. California. “We have never had an incident. Who are you?”

“She just wants to look around,” mumbled Moose.

Mr. California became distracted by trouble with a barbeque and I took the opportunity to lose myself in the strangely peaceful garden. I had already picked up flyers for other photo days from other clubs and saw there was a circuit. You could find one of these shoots every weekend at some public location somewhere in the Southland. Although that expanded Brennan’s hunting field considerably, it brought the comfort of a plan: I would go to every single shoot. I would show Brennan’s picture to everybody there. If someone turned up a credible lead, I would pursue whomever I had to pursue, at the Bureau or the local level, I didn’t care, in order to set up surveillance for the next time Brennan showed. I would do this meticulously, until my trial was over, until the last appeals were spent, until they put me in jail.

The photographers lumbered slowly and with prerogative along the winding paths, while the female models — young made-up faces bright as flowers — waited under the ginkgo trees, with their mothers, to be picked. They were all picked. This was a dance where everybody danced. Someone would position a girl and half a dozen men would shoot over his shoulder, paparazzo-style.

“Give me that laugh again!”

“Would you guys mind if I moved her into the shade?”

For twenty bucks you could get a sixteen-year-old to bend over a pagoda and stick out her butt.

It was supposed to be clean family fun. A young lady with seductive eyebrows, wearing a cheap strapless evening dress, was wrapping and unwrapping a shawl around her body, liking the attention, while a bunch of sad sacks stood around snapping. One of them, who wore a dirty baseball cap and a big bushy beard, slipped her a pair of mirrored sunglasses and shyly asked that she put them on.

I could picture Hugh Akron, all right. He would ace these geezers, a pro amongst the clueless. Ray Brennan? He’d do just fine, sidewinding through the innocent facade. And Arlene Harounian thought she could handle anything.

If I had my credentials, I could have worked the situation in fifteen minutes. As it was, all I could do was saunter around smiling and engaging folks in casual conversation, asking if they’d seen the man in the photo, using the ruse that Ray Brennan owed me some prints, occasionally taking a picture with my Ricoh to look authentic, but I was the only woman with a camera and kept getting apprehensive looks from the moms. I was not liking civilian status one bit.

“Photo day is a handy place to test out your technique,” a retired engineer named George told me.

“Great to test your equipment,” added his friend, who had an automatic camera with no settings.

“Do the models and photographers get to know each other?” I asked dully.

“Oh no, not at all,” insisted George. “This is a very safe place. There’s no direct contact. We only go by first names. We e-mail their pictures to them, but usually to a friend’s computer. You have to be careful.”

“In this day and age,” intoned his pal.

They were gray in the face with thin sloping shoulders, wearing closely related plaid shirts.

“I’m looking for Ray,” showing the picture once again. “Met him out in Riverside,” another location on the circuit. “Ray Brennan? Or he could be using another name.”

Like everybody else, they shook their heads. By now there were maybe fifty hobbyists and half as many models clustered in little groups near flowering trees and stone shrines. It was becoming sultry and humid in the tea garden. Maybe that is why the photographers were moving so languorously. Or perhaps they were all about to drop dead.

No, wait, there was some excitement by the pond, where a narrow girl in a red cowboy hat, short denim