therapists?'
'I don't know- I'm just grasping.'
He heard the frustration in my voice. 'It's okay, keep grasping. Doesn't cost the taxpayers a dime. For all I know we're dealing with something so crazy it'll never make sense.'
We rode for a while. Then he said, 'De Bosch's clinic was private, expensive. How could a janitor like Shipler afford getting treatment there?'
'Sometimes private clinics treat a few hardship cases. Or maybe Shipler had good health insurance through the school system. What about Paprock? Did she have money?'
'Nothing huge, as far as I can tell. Husband worked as a car salesman.'
'Can you get hold of their insurance records?'
'If they had any, and haven't been destroyed.'
I thought of two motherless grade-school children and said, 'How old, exactly, were Paprock's children at the time of her murder?'
'Don't remember exactly- little.'
'Who raised them?'
'I assume the husband.'
'Is he still in town?'
'Don't know that either, yet.'
'If he is, maybe he'll be willing to talk about her, tell us if she was ever a therapy patient at de Bosch's clinic.'
He hooked a finger toward the rear seat. 'Got the file right there. Check out the address.'
I swung around toward the darkened seat and saw a file box.
'Right on top,' he said. 'The brown one.'
Colors were indistinguishable in the darkness, but I reached over, groped around, and came up with a folder. Opening it, I squinted.
'There's a penlight in the glove compartment.'
I tried to open the compartment, but it was stuck. Milo leaned across and slammed it with his fist. The door dropped open and papers slid to the floor. I stuffed them back in and finally found the light. Its skinny beam fell on a page of crime-scene photos stapled to the right-hand page. Lots of pink and red. Writing on a wall: a closeup of 'bad love' in big, red block letters that matched the blood on the floor… neat lettering… a bloody thing below.
I turned to the facing page. The name of Myra Paprock's widower was midway through the intake data.
'Ralph Martin Paprock,' I said. 'Valley Vista Cadillac. The home address is in North Hollywood.'
'I'll run it through DMV, see if he's still around.'
I said, 'I need to keep looking for the other conference people to warn them.'
'Sure, but if you can't tell them who and why, what does that leave? 'Dear Sir or Madam, this is to inform you you might be bludgeoned, stabbed, or run over by an unidentified, revenge-crazed psycho?'
'Maybe one of them can tell me the who and why. And I know I'd have liked to have been warned. The problem is finding them. None of them are working or living where they were at the time of the conference. And the woman I thought might be Rosenblatt's wife hasn't returned any of my calls.'
Another stretch of silence.
'You're wondering,' he said, 'if they've been visited, too.'
'It did cross my mind. Katarina's not been listed in the APA directory for five years. She could have just stopped paying dues, but it doesn't seem like her to just drop out of psychology and close up the school. She was ambitious, very much taken with carrying on her father's work.'
'Well,' he said, 'it should be easy enough to check tax rolls and Social Security records on all of them, find out who's breathing and who ain't.'
He reached Hilgard and turned left, passing the campus of the university where I'd jumped through academic hoops for so many years.
'So many people gone,' I said. 'Now the Wallace girls. It's as if everyone's folding up their tents and escaping.'
'Hey,' he said, 'maybe they know something we don't.'
• • •
The strip-mall at Olympic and Westwood was dark except for the flagrant white glare from the minimart. The store was quiet, with a turbaned Pakistani drinking Gatorade behind the counter.
We stocked up on overpriced bread, canned soup, lunch meat, cereal, and milk. The Pakistani eyed us unpleasantly as he tallied up the total. He wore a company shirt printed repetitively with the name of the mart's parent company in lawn green. The nametag pinned to his breast pocket was blank.
Milo reached for his wallet. I got mine out first and handed the clerk cash. He continued to look unhappy.
'Whatsamatter?' said Milo. 'Too much cholesterol in our diet?'
The clerk pursed his lips and glanced up at the video camera above the door. The machine's cyclops eye was sweeping the store slowly. The screen below filled with milky gray images.
We followed his gaze to the dairy case. An unkempt man stood in front of it, not moving, staring at cartons of Half-and-Half. I hadn't noticed him while shopping and wondered where he'd come from.
Milo eyed him for a long moment, then turned back to the clerk.
'Yeah, police work's strenuous,' he said in a loud voice. 'Got to shovel in those calories in order to catch the bad guys.'
He laughed even louder. It sounded almost mad.
The man at the dairy case twitched and half turned. He glared at us for a second, then returned to studying the cream.
He was gaunt and hairy, wearing a dirt-blackened army jacket, jeans, and beach sandals. His hands shook and one clouded eye had to be blind.
Another member of Dorsey Hewitt's extended family.
He slapped the back of his neck with one hand, turned again, tried to match Milo's stare.
Milo gave a salute. 'Evening, pal.'
The man didn't move for a second. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and left the store, sandals slapping the vinyl floor.
The clerk watched him go. The cash register gave a computer burp and expelled a receipt. The clerk tore off the tape and dropped it into one of the half-dozen bags we'd filled.
'Got a box for all this?' said Milo.
'No, sir,' said the clerk.
'What about in back?'
Shrug.
We carried the food out. The gaunt man was at the far end of the lot, kicking asphalt and walking from store to store, staring at black glass.
'Hey,' Milo called out. No response. He repeated it, pulled a cereal variety pack out of one of the bags and waved it over his head.
The man straightened, looked toward us, but didn't approach. Milo walked ten feet from him and underhanded the cereal.
The man shot his arms out, missed the catch, sank to his knees, and retrieved it. Milo was heading back to the car and didn't see the look on the man's face. Confusion, distrust, then a spark of gratitude that fizzled just short of ignition.
The gaunt man hobbled off into the darkness, fingers ripping at the plastic wrapping, sprinkling cereal onto the pavement.
Milo said, 'Let's get the hell out of here.' We got into the Fiat and he drove around toward the back of the mall where three dumpsters sat. Several empty cartons were piled up loosely against the bins, most of them torn beyond utility. We finally found a couple that looked and smelled relatively clean, put the bags in them, and stashed the food in back of the car, next to Myra Paprock's homicide file.
• • •
A sliver of moon was barely visible behind a cloud-veil, and the sky looked dirty. The freeway was a stain
