“I had my suspicions. You’ve been looking stepped-on. And you haven’t been talking about her the way you usually do.”

“Thus spake the detective.” I walked over to my desk, began straightening papers without purpose.

He said, “Hope you guys work it out. The two of you were good.”

“Try to avoid the past tense,” I said sharply.

“Oops again. Mea culpa. Mia Farrow.” He beat his breast but looked genuinely abashed.

I went up to him and patted his back. “Forget it, big guy. Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Like murder. I went digging today, came up with some interesting stuff.”

“Dr. Snoop?” he said, adopting the same protective tone I’d used on Maura.

“The library, Milo. Not exactly combat duty.”

“With you, anything’s possible. Anyway, you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine. But not on a dry mouth.”

We went back into the kitchen, popped a couple of beers, and opened a package of sesame breadsticks. I told him about Sharon’s fantasy childhood- the East Coast society background that resembled Kruse’s, the orphanhood that echoed Leland Belding’s.

“It’s as if she’s collecting fragments of other people’s histories in order to build one of her own, Milo.”

“Okay,” he said. “Other than her being a stone liar, what does that mean?”

“Probably a serious identity problem. Wish fulfillment- maybe her own childhood was filled with abuse or abandonment. Being a twin played a part in it too. And the Belding connection is more than coincidence.”

I told him about the War Board parties. “Secluded Hollywood Hills houses, Milo. The one on Jalmia fits that bill. Her mother works the party pad circuit. Thirty-five years later, Sharon’s living in a pad.”

“So what are you saying? Old Basket Case was her daddy?”

“It would sure explain the high-level cover-up, but who knows? The way she twisted the truth has me doubting everything.”

“Cop-thinking,” he said.

“I checked out a couple of books on Belding- including The Basket-Case Billionaire. Maybe something in there will be useful.”

“The book was a scam, Alex.”

“Sometimes scams are laced with a bit of truth.”

He chewed a breadstick, said, “Maybe. How’d you find it, anyway? I thought the damn thing was recalled.”

“I asked the librarian about that. Apparently, large libraries get advance copies; the recall order only applied to bookstores and commercial distributors. Anyway, it’s been buried there since ’73, very few checkouts.”

“Rare show of good taste on the part of the reading public,” he said. “Anything else?”

I recounted my meeting with Maura Bannon.

“I think I convinced her to back off, but she’s got a source at the coroner’s.”

“I know who it is.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Your telling me clears something up. Few days ago there was this third-year med student from S.C. rotating through the coroner’s office. Asking too many questions about recent suicides, seemed to be snooping around the files. My source told me about it. He was worried it was someone from the city, spying around.”

“Is he still snooping?”

“Nah, rotation’s over, kid’s outta there. Probably just a boyfriend angling for some white-knight sex from Lois Lane Junior. Anyway, you did right to cool her off. This whole thing keeps getting weirder and weirder and the fix is in heavy. Yesterday, at the Kruse place, Trapp shows up before the crime scene crew arrives, all evil smiles, wanting to know how I caught the call when I’m still officially on vacation. I told him I’d come in early to the squad room, was working at my desk clearing some paperwork when an anonymous call came through reporting foul play at the Kruse address. Total crap, wouldn’t have fooled a rookie. But Trapp didn’t pursue it, just thanked me for my initiative and said he’d take over from here.”

Milo growled, cracked his knuckles. “Asshole co-opted me.”

“I saw him on the news.”

“Wasn’t that a display? Bullshit augmented by horseshit. And more to follow: Word has it Trapp’s pushing the sex maniac angle. But those women weren’t positioned like any sex murder victims I’ve ever seen- no spread legs or sexual posing, no rearranged clothing. And, as far as my coroner source can tell, given the state of the bodies, no strangulation or mutilation.”

“How did they die?”

“Beaten and shot- no way to tell which came first. Hands tied behind the backs, single bullet to the back of the head.”

“Execution.”

“That would be my working guess.”

He took his anger out on a breadstick, crunching and wiping crumbs off his shirt. Then he finished his beer and went to get another one from the fridge.

“What else?” I said.

He sat down, tilted his head back and poured brew down his throat. “Time of death. Putrefaction’s no exact science, but for that much rot to go down in an air-conditioned room, even with the door open, those bodies had to be lying there for a while. There was gas bloat, skin peel, and fluid loss, meaning days, not hours. Four to ten days is my source’s theoretical range. But we know the Kruses were alive last Saturday, at that party, so that narrows it to four to six days.”

“Meaning they could have been killed either after Sharon died, or before.”

“That’s right. And if it was before, a certain scenario rears its ugly head confirming your theory about Rasmussen. I called the Newhall sheriffs station about him. They knew him well: ugly drunk, chronic troublemaker, very short fuse, multiple assault busts, and he did kill his dad- beat him to death, then shot him. Now we know he was getting it on with Ransom, but not as an equal, right? He was a major maladjust, probably had half her IQ. She was manipulating him, playing with his head. Let’s say she had some major beef against Kruse and mentioned it to Rasmussen. She wouldn’t even have had to be direct- as in go and kill the bastard. Just hint around, complain about how Kruse had hurt her- maybe use hypnosis. You said she knew hypnosis, right?”

I nodded.

“So she could have used it to soften Rasmussen up. Angling for some white-knight pussy of his own, he went and played Lord High Executioner.”

“Killing his father all over again,” I said.

“Ah, you shrinks.” His smile faded. “The maid and the wife died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He stopped talking. The silence put me somewhere else.

“What’s the matter?”

“Seeing her as a murder contractor.”

“Just a scenario,” he said.

“If she was that cold, why’d she kill herself?”

He shrugged. “Thought you might be able to fill in that one.”

“I can’t. She had problems, but she was never cruel.”

“Fucking all those patients wasn’t an act of charity.”

“She was never overtly cruel.”

“People change.”

“I know that but I just can’t see her as a killer, Milo. It doesn’t sit right.”

“Then forget it,” he said. “It’s all theoretical bullshit, anyway. I can spin you ten like it in as many minutes. And it’s about as far as we’re gonna go, given the state of the evidence- too many unanswerable questions. Like are there phone records tying Rasmussen to Ransom between the time the Kruses died and the time she died? Newhall to Hollywood is a toll call. Normally, that would be easy to trace, except when I tried, the records had been pulled and sealed, courtesy of my employers. And who reported Ransom’s death in the first place? Normally, if I wanted to know that, I’d just take a peek in her file, but there ain’t no goddam file. Courtesy, my employers.”

He got up, rubbed his hand over his face, and paced the kitchen.

“I drove up to her house this morning, wanted to talk to her neighbors, see if any of them had made the call. I even figured out who lived across the canyon and visited them to see if they’d seen anything, heard anything, maybe a peeper with a telescope. Zilch. Two of the four houses in hercul-de-sac were unoccupied- owners out of town. The third’s owned by this free-lance artist, old gal who does children’s books, shut-in, bad arthritis. She wanted to help. Problem is, from her place you can’t see what’s going on in Ransom’s- just the driveway. No good view from any of them, matter of fact.”