“Once he was out, he thought of someone else,” he said. “A guy with a Ph.D. who’d been fair and warmhearted and objective.”

He looked at me. “The meeting he never made. Maybe that was the point of killing him.”

We walked back up to the house, popped a couple of beers, and sat at the kitchen table.

Milo finished his bottle and put it aside. “How’s this for ugly, Alex: What if Cherish and Malley didn’t meet at the trial. They were getting it on before Kristal’s murder. She wanted to marry him, needed to get rid of the competition. As in his existing family. So she found herself a little killer for hire and started with the offspring.”

“Cherish paid Troy to murder Kristal?”

“She knew Troy from before. She’s into psychology, went looking for a cold-eyed little psychopath and found one. Troy told you he was gonna get rich. Cherish strung him along by promising to get him out early, with some pot of gold at the end of the goddamn rainbow. Instead, she got him bumped. Six months later, phase two: Lara goes down.”

“Lara was shot with Barnett’s gun,” I said.

“So either Barnett did her himself, or Cherish, being his girl, had ample opportunity to pick the thirty-eight out of the collection. My bet’s on them both being dirty. Remember how pissed Nina Balquist was about Barnett cremating Lara instead of holding a funeral? Why be in such a rush unless you had something to hide? And if Barnett abducted Rand, he’d have to know what was going on.”

“The only problem is,” I said, “it’s eight years later and Cherish and Barnett aren’t married. Why would they go through all that for the sake of an illicit affair?”

“Hey,” he said, “relationships are tough. The passion cooled, whatever.”

“Not enough to stop the motel trysts.”

“Okay, they discovered that hot-bedding it is more fun than going domestic. Or Cherish doesn’t want to give up all that county money and the income from Drew’s moonlighting. Divorce usually hurts the woman, right? Look at Weider. Cherish keeps the house, the kids, the holy-roller persona, and has her fun on the side.”

“Could be,” I said. “It sure fits with Allison’s guess about premeditation. Troy was paid and brought Rand along as backup. Rand wasn’t in on it from the beginning, but somehow he figured it out.”

He rubbed his face hard. “Still, it’s a tough one, pinning Kristal on Barnett. Here’s a guy waited years to be a father. He went so far as to borrow money for fertility treatment.”

“Nina Balquin suspects the money was never used for treatment.”

“Barnett and Lara must’ve done something, Alex. They had a kid. If Cherish is Little Miss Hitler I can see her trying to eliminate the other chimp’s baby. But Barnett doing his own kid for her?”

I heard the question but my brain was somewhere else. His mention of Nina Balquin had flashed me back to her house. The rear wall.

I said, “Oh, my.”

“What?”

“Kristal’s baby photo. Her eyes. Big and brown. Barnett’s blue-eyed and so was Lara. I remember seeing her in court, she had huge, gray-blue eyes that she was constantly wiping because she was always tearing up. Two brown-eyed parents can produce a light-eyed child but the opposite’s only remotely possible, through spontaneous mutation.”

“Kristal wasn’t the cowboy’s kid?”

“It wasn’t until six years after they borrowed the money that Lara got pregnant.”

“Lara got herself a different kind of fertility treatment.” His smile was vicious. “Both of them fooling around but Lara left evidence and Barnett couldn’t handle it.”

“Barnett dominated and isolated Lara,” I said. “Another reason for her to go looking for love elsewhere. Any husband would be enraged by his wife having another man’s baby, but someone like Barnett- asocial, bad temper, gun freak- would’ve been especially prone to a violent reaction. He punished Lara twice. First by eliminating the fruit of her infidelity, and when that didn’t put out the fire in his belly, he got rid of her. And if he needed encouragement, Cherish was there to egg him on.”

“Pillow talk,” he said. “ ‘I’ve got a solution, honey.’ Yeah, makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“It makes stomach-crawling sense.”

“So how did Rand figure it out?” he said.

“He must’ve recalled something from the time of the murder,” I said. “Spotting Cherish with Troy shortly before the abduction. Or seeing Cherish and Barnett together. For all we know one of them went to the mall that day to make sure everything went down smoothly. Or Barnett’s involvement was more direct. Lara said she only turned her head for a minute before Kristal disappeared. What if someone Kristal knew and trusted lured her away?”

“Come to Daddy,” he said. “Then Daddy hands her over to Troy and Rand. Jesus… and Rand came to all this spontaneously, after years of sitting behind bars?”

“ Rand knew he was behind bars because he’d been part of something terrible. Isolation and maturation got him ruminating. He began to assess his share of the guilt. To try to feel like a good person. Barnett and Cherish had no reason to worry about him because he hadn’t been in on the plot. Until he began talking to Cherish. Troy, on the other hand, was an immediate threat, and was eliminated quickly.”

“What’s the name of that seminary she went to?”

“ Fulton.”

“Any idea where it is?”

I shook my head. “According to Cherish, Troy ’s buried there. She convinced the dean to donate a plot.”

“Oh, I’ll bet she did.” He laughed and cracked his knuckles. “Cherish is a word I use to descri-ibe…”

“On the other hand,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s a great house of cards, but all we really know about Cherish is that she’s sleeping with Barnett Malley.”

His face got hard. “So we find out more. That’s what life’s all about, right? Broadening one’s horizons.”

CHAPTER 28

I walked Milo to his car. “Was Kristal buried or cremated?”

“You’re thinking DNA.”

“If you ever get a sample from Barnett, it would answer the paternity question.”

“Let me tell you about DNA in the real world. We used to send stuff to the sheriff’s crime lab, but they’re backlogged till the next millennium, and they can’t get the county to pay for the latest equipment so they sometimes have to send stuff out. Department recently contracted with Orchid Cellmark in New Jersey, but it’s a priority game: sexual homicides first, then rapes, then crimes against minors. The quickest you can get something back is two to four months. And that’s after you get your requisition approved by the pencil pushers. In this case, if Kristal was buried, I’d need an exhumation order, which could take even longer than DNA analysis, especially with no consent from the surviving relative. Going that route would also mean letting Malley know he’s under suspicion.”

“Just a thought,” I said.

“On the other hand, maybe the coroner kept something from Kristal’s autopsy and I can send that to Cellmark… I’ll head over to the crypt, see if they can find something. Ciao.”

I returned to the house in order to educate myself about foster child reimbursement in L.A County, and to learn more about Fulton Seminary.

The first assignment was easy. I phoned Olivia Brickerman at home. She’s a professor in the Department of Social Work at the gracious old university across town, a battle-toughened veteran of the ground war that is California ’s social services system, the widow of a chess grandmaster, a frizzy-haired fireplug old enough to be my mother and one of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered.

She said, “You only call when you want something.”