"I can try… long as I stay at Starkweather."

"Two more weeks."

"Yes, but if there's something you think I can… Are you saying this Pelley is what Peake's little speeches are all about? Pelley's been communicating with Peake? Sending him messages, and Peake's babbling them back at me?"

"I wish I knew enough to theorize, Heidi. Right now I'm simply looking into everything."

"Okay… I'll do what I can." Sharp tug of the ponytail. Looking troubled, she opened the door. Milo and I walked her downstairs to the street. Her car was parked at the curb, half-lit by a streetlamp. Old, dented Chrysler minivan. A bumper sticker read, "Climbers Get High Naturally."

Milo said, "What's the highest mountain you ever tackled?"

"I'm more of a wall person than a mountain person. Sheer surfaces, the more vertical the better." She smiled. "Promise you won't tell? The best one wasn't exactly legal. Power station near the Nevada border. We did it at three A.M., then parachuted down."

"Adrenaline high," said Milo.

"Oh, yeah." She laughed, got in the van, and drove away.

"Got your junior G-woman on the job," I said. "I think she's found a new source of adrenaline."

"Yeah, she's a little hyper, isn't she? But at least someone's cooperating… So, what do you think about Peake's latest soliloquy?"

"If there's some deep psychological meaning, it's eluding me."

" 'Choo choo bang bang.' " He laughed. "Talk about loco motives."

We returned to the Robbery-Homicide room. A Dunkin' Donuts takeout box dominated Mile's desk. He said, "Shouldn't you be getting home to Robin?"

"I told her it might take a while."

He studied the notes he'd scrawled in the interrogation room. "Heidi," he said. "Our little mountain girl. Too bad everything she's come up with is probably worth a warm bucket of spit… 'Choo choo bang bang.' What's next? Peake reads selections from Dr. Seuss?"

He rubbed his eyes, stacked some papers, squared the corners with his thumbs.

"You think it was poor judgment?" he said. "Asking her to check on Pelley?"

"Not if she's discreet."

"Worse comes to worst, Swig finds out, gets all huffy. He can't afford to make too big a deal of it-bad publicity."

"Anything new on Pelley's whereabouts?" I said.

"Zilch. Ramparts was notified by the P.O., so there's something positive. Other than that, the P.O. wasn't very helpful. Caseload in the hundreds; to him, Pelley was just another number. I doubt he could point him out in a crowd."

He pulled a folded sheet out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. LAPD Suspect Alert. Pelley's vital statistics and a photo so dark and blurry I couldn't see it being useful for anything. All I could make out was a round, clean-shaven Caucasian face smudged with indeterminate features. Thin, light-colored hair. Serious mouth. The crime was failure to report.

"This is what they're using?" I said, placing the paper on the desk.

"Yeah, I know-not exactly Cartier-Bresson. But at least they're looking. I did some looking, too. Driving around the neighborhood, checking out MacArthur Park, Lafayette Park, alleys, con bars, some other bad-guy spots I know. Visited the halfway house, too. Old apartment building, cons out in front, some Korean guy running the place-sincere enough, told me he'd been a social worker in Seoul. But he barely speaks English, and basically all he does is warehouse the residents, do random drug tests maybe four times a year. Counseling consists of asking the cons how they're doing. The ones I saw hanging around didn't look at all insightful. As for Pelley, all the Korean could say was that he'd been quiet, hadn't caused problems. None of the cons remembered a damn thing about him. Of course."

He reached for a piece of stale cinnamon roll. "He could be a thousand miles away by now. I didn't do much better with Stargill's investment records. The Newport money managers wouldn't talk to me, and they informed him I'd been asking around. He calls me, all irate. I tell him I'm just trying to clear him, how about he voluntarily gives me a look at his stock portfolio. If everything checks out, we call it a day. He says he'll think about it, but I could tell he won't."

"Hiding something?" I said.

"Or just guarding his privacy-everyone gets privacy, right? Even guys who cook and eat babies. Everyone except citizens who get laid out on steel tables, some white-coat peeling off their face, doing the Y-cut, playing peekaboo with their internal organs. No privacy there."

Chapter 20

Robin didn't stir when I slipped into bed beside her at one A.M. Visions of Peake's crimes and the knowledge that I hadn't helped Milo much kept me up for a while, heart beating too fast, muscles tight. Deep-breathing myself into an uneasy torpor, I finally slipped off. If dreams intruded, I had no memory of them in the morning, but my legs ached, as if I'd been running from something.

By nine A.M., I was drinking coffee and catching what passes for TV news in L.A.: capped-toothed jesters hawking showbiz gossip, the latest bumblings of the moronic city council, the current health scare. Today, it was strawberries from Mexico: everyone was going to die from an intestinal scourge. Back when I'd treated children, the news had frightened more kids than any horror flick.

I was about to switch off the set when the grinning blonde gushed, "And now more on that train accident."

The story merited thirty seconds. An unidentified man had lain across the MetroRail tracks just east of the city limits, squarely in the path of an empty passenger train. The engineer spotted him and put on the emergency brake, but not in time.

Choo choo.

I called Milo.

He picked up right away. "Yeah, yeah, the little train that couldn't. Probably nothing. Or maybe Peake really is a prophet and we should be worshiping him instead of keeping him locked up. Nothing much else on my plate, so I called the coroner. The deceased is one Ellroy Lincoln Beatty, male black, fifty-two. Petty criminal record-mostly possession and drank and disorderly. The only thing that intrigued me was that Beatty spent some time in a mental hospital. Cama-rillo, thirteen years ago, back when they were still open for that kind of business. No mention of Starkweather, but you never know. The accident happened in Newton Division. I wish Manny Alvarado had the case, but he retired and the new guy isn't great about returning calls. I figured I'd head over to the morgue before lunch. Feel free to join me. If it gets you hungry, we can have lunch later. Like a big rare steak."

"Basically, the head and the lower extremities," said the attendant. He was a short, solidly built Hispanic named Albert Martinez, with a crew cut and goatee and thick-lensed glasses that enlarged and brightened his eyes. The crucifix around his neck was gold and hand-tooled, vaguely Byzantine.

The coroner's office was two stories of square, smooth, cream stucco, meticulously maintained. Back in East L.A. Back at County Hospital. Claire's old office was a few blocks away. I hadn't realized it before, but she'd come full circle.

"The rest of him is pretty much goulash," said Martinez. "Personally, I think it's amazing we got what we did. The train must have hit him at what-forty, fifty miles per?"

The room was cool, immaculate, odorless. Empty steel tables equipped with drain basins, overhead microphones, a wall of steel lockers. A junior high student would recognize all of it; too many TV shows had dimmed the shock. But television rarely offered a glimpse at the contents of the lockers. Dead people on TV were intact, clean, bloodless props resting peacefully.

I hadn't been down here since internship, wasn't enjoying the experience.

"How'd you identify him?" said Milo.