about this until we work out a plan for handling the press.”
Susan fingered the necklace. “Sure, but someone like this, everyone’ll know before you can say senseless murder. ”
“Exactly. We’ve got a narrow window of opportunity. Detective Bishop’s calling the brass right now, trying to get a plan. We’re also going to need to inform Cart Ramsey. Any idea where he lives?”
“Calabasas,” said Susan.
Petra stared at her.
The photographer shrugged. “It was on that tabloid show. Like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Sitting in the Jacuzzi, drinking champagne, a little putting green. Her in some beauty pageant bathing suit competition or something, then, after he beat her up, with a black eye, split lip. You know, before and after.”
“A beauty queen,” said Petra.
“Miss Something. They showed her playing the saxophone. Look where her talent got her-hey, here’re the dogs.”
Two K-9 officers, one with a German shepherd, the other with a chocolate Labrador, took instructions from Stu and started up the slope above the parking lot.
Captain Schoelkopf was in a meeting at Parker Center, but Stu managed to get patched through. When Schoelkopf found out who the victim was, he let out a stream of profanity, ending with a warning not to “F-up” (Stu’s cleansed translation). Doheny Drive was a jurisdictional mess, cutting through L.A., Beverly Hills, West Hollywood. A lucky break: Lisa’s apartment was LAPD territory and uniforms were dispatched. A maid was working there and she was detained. With no knowledge of other relatives, Stu and Petra’s immediate assignment was to notify the ex-husband.
Now they watched as the dogs circled and sniffed and made their way upward methodically, toward a wooded area, thick with cedar and sycamore and pine, fronted by outcroppings of boulders. A stone ridge, midway up the slope, some of the rocks graffitied, most worn smooth and shiny. The Labrador was ahead, but both dogs were moving fast, closing in on a particular formation.
Something up there? thought Petra. No big deal; this was Griffith Park-there had to be tons of human scent all over the place. Pulling tire marks from the parking lot was useless for the same reason. The asphalt was one giant mural of black rubber.
Soon they’d be heading out to Calabasas. Sheriff territory. That edged the whole thing up another notch on the complication scale.
Cart Ramsey. What a name-had to be a fake. His real one was probably something like Ernie Glutz, which would play havoc with the Mr. Rockjaw image.
She rarely watched TV, but she was vaguely aware Ramsey had knocked around on the tube for years. Never achieved major stardom, but the guy did seem to work pretty steadily.
A bland type, she’d always thought. Was he capable of this kind of brutality? Were all men, given the proper circumstances?
Her dad had once told her it was a lie that only people murdered. Chimpanzees and other primates did, sometimes just to dominate, sometimes for no apparent reason. So was bloody homicide aberrant behavior or just basic primate impulse taken to an extreme?
Pointless, time-filling conjecture. Head-game horseshit, her brother Bruce used to call it. Though not the oldest of the Connor boys, he was the biggest, the strongest, the most aggressive. Now an electronics engineer for NASA in Florida, he thought anything that couldn’t be measured with a machine was voodoo.
When she’d finally confessed her new police status to the family, Dick, Eric, and Glenn had been stunned, muttering congratulations and telling her to be careful. Bruce had said, “Cool. Go out and kill some bad guys for me.”
The cop with the shepherd came out in front of a boulder pile and said, “You’d better take a look at this.”
Nature had arranged the rocks in a tight U, like a backless cave. The boulders were high-seven or eight feet tall-and there were cracks where the rocks pressed up against each other, invisible from below, but Petra could look between them and see the parking lot clearly.
Perfect vantage point for an observer.
And there’d been someone there observing. Recently.
The floor of the U was a soft bed of leaves. Petra was no forest ranger, but even she could see the body- shaped compression. Nearby was a piece of wrinkled yellow paper, darkening to brown translucence where grease had saturated it.
Food wrapper. Specks of something that looked like ground beef.
The shepherd had sniffed out bits of shredded lettuce, barely wilted, amid some dry leaves a few inches from the paper.
Petra sniffed the wrapper. Chili sauce. Last night’s taco dinner?
Then the dog began nosing frantically at one corner of the U, and Stu summoned a tech over to check it out.
“Probably body fluid,” said the shepherd’s handler. “He acts that way when he smells body fluid.”
Alan Lau came over. Petra noticed he had nervous hands.
A few minutes later, the field kit results: “Urine. On these leaves.”
“Human?”
“Human or ape,” said Lau.
“Well,” said Stu, “unless some chimp got loose from the zoo and bought himself dinner, it’s probably safe to say Homo sapiens.”
Lau frowned. “Probably. Anything else?”
“Any other fluids?”
“Like blood?”
“Like anything, Alan.”
Lau flinched. “Not so far.”
“Check it out. Please.”
Lau returned to swabbing, dusting, probing. Susan Rose was summoned back to take pictures of the rocks. Petra sketched them anyway, then drifted away.
All that scientific work going on, but it was she who had the next find.
Twenty feet above the rocks, where she’d gone to explore because there was nothing for her to do and the dogs had moved on.
But they’d missed something, half concealed by leaves and pine needles. Flash of color beneath the green and brown.
Red. At first she thought: More blood, uh-oh. Then she bent and saw what it was; looked around for Stu.
He was back at the car, talking on his cell phone-the minuscule one his father the retired eye surgeon had given him for Christmas. Petra beckoned Lau. He sifted and found nothing around the red object, and Susan snapped away. They left, and Petra gloved up and picked it up.
A book. Thick, heavy hardcover; rebound in red leatherette. Library call number on the spine.
Our Presidents: The March of American History.
She flipped it open. L.A. Public Library, Hillhurst branch, the Los Feliz district.
Checkout card still in the pocket. Not much action on this one. Seven stamps in four years, the most recent nine months ago.
Stolen? Deacquisitioned? She knew the library got rid of stock all the time, because back in her starving artist days she’d filled her bookshelves with some great rejects.
She flipped pages. No deacquisition stamp, but that didn’t prove anything.
Petra’s mental camera began snapping. Had some homeless guy with an interest in U.S. history found himself a nice little natural lean-to where he could read and eat a taco and take a leak in the great wide open, only to witness a murder?
But no grease on the book, so maybe it had no connection to the person who sacked out behind the U-shaped rocks.
