"Scams, murder, movies," I said. "No known address. Need a closer fit?"

Milo shook his head. I felt sparked by what we'd just learned but he seemed dejected.

"What is it?"

"First Derrick offs his parents, then his brother, probably for Cliff's share of the eighty grand. This is professional evil."

"What was left of Cliff's share," I said. "Like Castro said, they probably chewed right through it. Maybe Derrick chewed faster."

"Derrick the dominator… arrogant, just like you've been saying."

"Good criminal self-esteem," I said. "And why not? He does bad things and gets away clean. And maybe he had practice with family elimination."

"The Ardullos," he said. "Spurring Peake on-well, your guesses have been pretty right on, haven't they?"

"Aw shucks," I said. "Now all we need to do is find Derrick. Let me get back on the line with the psychiatric board."

"Sure. I'll hit Pimm again. And Park City. Maybe Derrick tried a land scam there, too."

"If you want, I'll give you some other possibilities."

"What?"

"Aspen, Telluride, Vegas, Tahoe. This is a party boy. He goes where the fun is."

The dejected look returned. "Those kinds of record checks could take weeks," he said. "The guy's right here, polluting my city, and I can't put a finger on him."

It took several calls to learn that psychiatric tech licenses were granted for periods ranging from thirteen to twenty-four months. Individual names could be verified, but sending the entire list was unheard-of. Finally, I found a supervisor willing to fax the roster. Another twenty minutes passed before paper began spooling out of the sorry-looking machine across the room.

I read as it unraveled. Page after page of names, no Crimmins, no Wark.

Another alias?

Griffith D. Wark. Scrambling a film maestro. Manipulative, pretentious, arrogant. And strangely childlike-playing pretend games.

Seeing himself as a major Hollywood player. The fact that he'd never produced anything was a nasty bit of potential dissonance, but the same could be said of so many coutured reptiles occupying tables at Spago.

Psychopaths could deal with dissonance.

Psychopaths had low levels of anxiety.

Besides, there were other types of productions.

Blood Walk.

Bad eyes in a box.

Something else about human snakes: they lacked emotional depth, faked humanity. Craved repetition. Patterns.

So maybe Wark had co-opted other major directors. I was no film expert but several names came to mind: Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Huston, John Ford, Frank Capra… I scanned the tech list. None of the above.

But Wark was D.W. Griffith's middle name. What was Hitchcock's?

I called the research library at the U, asked for the reference desk, and explained what I needed. The librarian must have been puzzled, but odd requests are their business and, God bless her, she didn't argue.

Five minutes later I had what I needed: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. John no middle name Huston. Frank NMN Capra. George Orson Welles. John NMN Ford; real name, Sean Aloysius O'Feeney.

Thanking her, I turned back to the tech list. No Capras, four Fords, one Hitchcock, no Hustons, no O'Feeneys… no obviously cute manipulations of Hitchcock or Ford…Then I saw it.

G.W. Orson.

Co-opting a genius.

Delusions were everywhere.

Chapter 31

"Citizen creep," said Milo, looking at the circled name.

"G.W. Orson got licensed twenty-two months ago," I said. "That's about all I could get except for the address he put on his application form."

He studied the address slip. "South Shenandoah Street… around Eighteenth. West L.A. territory… only a few blocks from the shopping center where Claire was dumped."

"The center's far from Claire's house, so why would she shop there? Unless she went with someone else."

"Crimmins? They had a relationship?"

"Why not?" I said. "Let's assume Orson-and Wark-are both Crimmins aliases. We have no employment records yet, but Crimmins is a psych tech, so it's not much of a leap to assume he works at Starkweather, or did in the past. He ran into Claire. Something developed. Because they had two common interests: the movies and Ardis Peake. When Claire told Crimmins she'd picked Peake as a project, he decided to find out more. When Crimmins learned Claire was uncovering information potentially threatening to him, he decided to cast hex in Blood Walk."

"Kills her, films her, dumps her," he said. "It holds together logically; now all I have to do is prove it. I canvassed the shopping center, showed her picture to every clerk who'd been working the day she was killed. No one remembered seeing her, alone or with anyone else. That doesn't mean much, it's a huge place, and if I can get a picture of Crimmins, I'll go back. But maybe we can get a look at him in person."

He waved the address slip. "This helps big-time. First let's see if he registered his 'Vette."

The call to DMV left him shaking his head. "No G.W. Orson cars anywhere in the state."

"Lives in L.A., but no legal car," I said. "That alone tells us he's dirty. Try another scrambled director's name."

"Later," he said, pocketing the address. "This is something real. Let's go for it."

The block was quiet, intermittently treed, filled with plain-wrap, single-story houses set on vest-pocket lots that ranged from compulsively tended to ragged. Birds chirped, dogs barked. A man in an undershirt pushed a lawn mower in slo-mo. A dark-skinned woman strolling a baby looked up as we passed. Apprehension, then relief; the unmarked was anything but inconspicuous.

Years ago, the neighborhood had been ravaged by crime and white flight. Rising real estate prices had reversed some of that, and the result was a mixed-race district that resonated with tense, tentative pride.

The place G.W. Orson had called home twenty-two months ago was a pale green Spanish bungalow with a neatly edged lawn and no other landscaping. A FOR LEASE sign was staked dead center in the grass. In the driveway was a late-model Oldsmobile Cutlass. Milo drove halfway down the block and ran the plates. "TBL Properties, address on Wilshire near La Brea."

He U-turned, parked in front of the green house. A stunted old magnolia tree planted in the parkway next door cast some shade upon the Olds. Nailed to the trunk was a poster. Cloudy picture of a dog with some Rottweiler in it. Eager canine grin. "Have You Seen Buddy?" over a phone number and a typed message: Buddy had been missing for a week and needed daily thyroid medication. Finding him would bring a hundred-dollar reward. For no reason I could think of, Buddy looked strangely familiar. Everything was starting to remind me of something.

We walked to the front of the green house, stepping around a low, chipped stucco wall that created a small patio. The front door was glossy and sharp-smelling-fresh varnish. White curtains blocked the front window. Shiny brass door knocker. Milo lifted it and let it drop.

Footsteps. An Asian man opened the door. Sixties, angular, and tanned, he wore a beige work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, matching cotton pants, white sneakers. Creepily close to Starkweather inmate duds. I felt my hands ball and forced them to loosen.

"Yes?" His hair was sparse and white, his eyes a pair of surgical incisions. In one hand was a crumpled gray rag.

Milo flashed the badge. "We're here about George Orson."

"Him." Weary smile. "No surprise. Come on in."

We followed him into a small, empty living room. Next door was a kitchen, also empty, except for a six-pack of paper towel rolls on the brown tile counter. A mop and a broom were propped in a corner, looking like exhausted marathon dancers. The house echoed of vacancy, but stale odors- cooked meat, must, tobacco-lingered, battling for domir nance with soap, ammonia, varnish from the door.