I said, “When was that, Carly?”

“A couple days ago. No, wait-three days.”

“Uh-huh. You remember who called?”

“Ah, a detective, he said. Timmons?”

“Crimmens?”

“That’s it.”

At least Crimmens had done his due diligence.

I tried the coffee shop next and heard exactly the same thing. Crimmens had called for Tomaso, but the current manager had never met Angel, had no idea how to reach him, and was pretty sure Tomaso had left the job more than two years ago because that was how long she had worked there. I hung up and went back to copying the file.

Angel Tomaso had not been my witness. Crimmens had located and interviewed him two days after Yvonne Bennett’s murder, but I didn’t begin working on the case until almost ten weeks later. The prosecution had been required to share their witness list with Levy under the rules of discovery, along with all the necessary contact information for those witnesses. I came to these pages as I copied the file, and found a handwritten note I had made with a different name and number for Tomaso.

When Crimmens first identified Tomaso as a witness, Tomaso was living with his girlfriend in Silver Lake. By the time I contacted him at the coffee shop ten weeks later, Tomaso had split with his girlfriend and was bunking in Los Feliz with a friend of his named Jack Eisley. Though Tomaso’s work and cell phone numbers were good at the time, I had interviewed him at Eisley’s apartment and still had Eisley’s address and number. I finished copying the file, separated the original from the copy, then brought Eisley’s number to my desk.

Three years after the fact, the odds were slim, but I called Eisley’s number. His phone rang five times, then was answered by a recording.

“This is Jack. Leave it after the beep.”

“Mr. Eisley, this is Elvis Cole. You might remember me from three years ago when I came to see Angel Tomaso. I’m trying to locate Angel, but I don’t have a current number. Could you give me a call back, please?”

I left my cell and office numbers.

Progress.

Maybe.

Doing something left me feeling better about things, though not a whole lot. I was heading for the door with Levy’s copy of the file when the phone rang. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but the ringing seemed unnaturally loud.

I returned to the desk.

The phone rang again.

I hesitated, then felt stupid for waiting.

“Elvis Cole Detective Agency.”

Silence.

“Hello?”

All I heard was breathing.

“Hello?”

The caller hung up.

I waited for the phone to ring again, but the silence remained. I went home to watch the news.

7

THE SUN was lowering as I traced the winding streets off Mulholland Drive toward home. I live in a house held fast to the steep slopes overlooking Los Angeles. It is a small house on the lip of a canyon I share with coyotes and hawks, skunks and black-tailed deer, and opossums and rattlesnakes. More rural than not, coming home has always felt like leaving the city, even though some things cannot be left behind.

My house did not come with a yard the way flatland houses have yards. It came with a deck that hangs over the canyon and a nameless cat who bites. I like the deck and the cat a lot, and the way the lowering sun will paint the ridges and ravines in a palette of purple and brass. The termites, I can do without.

When I rounded the final curve toward home, Carol Starkey’s Taurus was at my front door, but Starkey wasn’t behind the wheel. I let myself in through the kitchen, then on into the living room, where sliding glass doors open onto my deck. Starkey was outside, smoking, the hot wind pushing her hair. She raised her hand when she saw me. Starkey never just dropped around.

I opened the sliders and stepped out. “What are you doing here?”

“You say that like I’m stalking you. I wanted to see how it went with Lindo.”

She snapped her cigarette over the rail. The wind caught it, and carried it out into the canyon.

“We’re in the hills, Starkey. This is a tinderbox up here.”

I studied the slope long enough to make sure we weren’t going to be engulfed by an inferno. She was watching me when I looked up.

“What?”

“So how did it go?”

“The leading theory seems to be I misread the time frame when Bennett was murdered. Not only me, but the original investigating detectives.”

“Uh-huh. That possible?”

“It’s always possible, but these guys don’t think it’s important enough to double-check the key witness. They decided it doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. What Lindo told me sounds pretty good.”

“That doesn’t excuse the loose ends. These guys are in such a hurry to close the case they’re not even waiting for all the forensics to come back.”

We lapsed into silence for a moment, then Starkey cleared her throat.

“Listen, Marx might be a jackass, but Lindo’s good. A lot of the people working on this thing are good. Either way, that old man had the book. He was all over that book. You can’t forget that.”

She was right. Either way, Lionel Byrd had an album of photographs that could only have been taken by a person or persons at the scene when the murders were committed. A book and pictures Byrd and only Byrd had touched.

“Starkey, let me ask you something. What do you make of the pictures?”

“As in, what do I think the pictures mean or why do I think he took them?”

“Both, I guess. What kind of person takes pictures like this?”

She leaned on the rail, staring out at the canyon. Starkey wasn’t a trained psychologist, but she had spent a large part of her time at CCS profiling bomb cranks. The people who built improvised explosive devices tended to be serial offenders. Understanding their compulsions had helped her build cases.

She said, “Most of these guys, they’ll take hair or a piece of jewelry or maybe some clothes as a way of reliving the rush. But pictures are a deeper commitment.”

“What do you mean?”

“These women were murdered in semi-public places. He didn’t take them into the desert or some soundproof basement somewhere. They were killed in parking lots or near busy streets or in parks where someone could happen by. Grabbing an earring or a handful of hair is easy-you grab it and run-but he had to stick around to take the pictures. He chose high-risk locations to make his kills, then increased the risk by staying to take a picture when someone might see the flash.”

“Maybe he was just stupid.”

Starkey laughed.

“I think he got off on the complexity. He was tempting fate by taking the pictures, and each time he got away with it he probably felt omnipotent, the same way bomb cranks feel strong through their bombs. The rush isn’t so much the actual killing-it’s the getting away with it.”

“Okay.”

“Did Lindo talk to you about the composition?”

I shook my head. Lindo hadn’t mentioned the composition, and I hadn’t thought about it. The pictures had all looked pretty much the same to me.

“A picture isn’t a part of the experience like a more traditional trophy-it’s a composition outside of the experience. The photographer chooses the angle. He chooses what will be in the picture, and what won’t. If the picture is a world, then the photographer is the god of that world. This dude got off by being God. He needed to take the pictures because he needed to be God.”

I couldn’t see Lionel Byrd feeling like a god, but maybe that was the point. I tried to imagine him stalking these women with the clunky, out-of-date camera, but I couldn’t picture him with the camera, either.

“I don’t know, Starkey. That doesn’t sound like Byrd.”

Starkey shrugged, then looked at the canyon again.

“I’m just sayin’, is all. I’m not trying to convince you.”

“I know. I didn’t take it that way.