Organ theft.

Sterilization without proper consent.

Smartest boy.

Making his own rules. No surprise. He'd grown up seeing his father do a lot worse.

Years later, more surgical felonies?

What had Hope's role been in all of it?

But the same question: Why had Hope and Locking been targeted and not Cruvic, himself?

Still, Cruvic had to be at the core of it. Barone had shown up at the police station because Cruvic knew the walls were closing in.

Scared?

Not of the police… scared for himself. Because Locking's murder had put Hope's into focus for him.

Told him who. Why.

But why now, and not after Hope's murder?

And what had brought Cruvic out in the open?

Darrell Ballitser's attack. The news reports linking him to Hope.

First time the murderer had known of the link?

But how could that be, if the issue was unethical surgery?

I went around and around with it.

Assume Ballitser's attack had focused the murderer on Cruvic.

After that, the murderer had begun watching Cruvic… seen him with Locking? At Mulholland?

Unless I was totally off, and Cruvic had killed both Hope and Locking to keep them quiet.

But then why send his lawyer to talk to Milo?

The more I wrestled with it, the more convinced I became that Cruvic was now a target and he knew it.

Getting away with years of loose ethics until he'd finally offended the wrong person.

In collaboration with Hope and Locking.

Loose ethics… sterilization without consent… organ theft.

The house on Mulholland.

Private clinic.

Something Locking had been involved with, too…

Then it hit me.

So simple.

But where did Mandy Wright figure in? Party girl… working girl.

Days before her murder, she'd done the club scene in L.A. Before that, she'd met with Cruvic and his father in Vegas, left the casino with both of them.

Not for sex.

Another kind of freelancing.

She'd told Barnaby, “It's like acting.”

What had Milo said about Club None- big hair and perfect bodies.

Mandy would fit in.

Her companion, too?

The poor waitress, Kathy DiNapoli. Murdered simply because she'd served drinks in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Perfect bodies.

Mandy hired to pick someone up.

A special kind of john.

Slowly, inexorably, like a snake coming alive in the heat, the chain unfolded in my head.

The chain between Hope, Locking, Mandy, Kathy.

Venomous snake.

The Morry Mayhew show that Hope had appeared on- what was the name of that producer? Suzette Band. I'd promised to call her if I learned something.

The old information barter.

She'd have to make another payment, first.

34

Next stop: Mulholland Drive.

The road was beautiful in the daylight, the house behind the electric gate a brown-brick contemporary, sparkling with color around the borders- flowers invisible in the dark.

I'd kept my sweat-stained T-shirt on but had substituted jeans for the running shorts. In my hand was a bag picked up from a pharmacy in Beverly Hills an hour ago. I'd bought toothpaste and dental floss and vitamin C to get it. The Seville, parked just down the road, was old enough to pass for a delivery vehicle, I supposed. I was too old a delivery boy for most cities but L.A. was full of underachievers.

I rang the bell on the gatepost. After a moment's delay a voice came through the speaker, “Yeah?”

“Delivery.”

“Hold on.”

A few minutes later, the front door opened and a man in a black shirt and black jeans came out, stared at me, and approached in a flat-footed, plodding walk.

He was in his late thirties, short and wide, with thinning black hair on top, the side wisps tied into a barely long-enough ponytail. Bushy sideburns longer than Milo's, oily skin that shone, wire-rimmed glasses, pummeled features.

Sleepy expression, except for little piggy eyes that never left me.

The black shirt was silk, oversized, untucked, and he kept his right hand in front of him, as if protecting something. Plainclothes cops wore their shirts out to conceal guns and I supposed thugs did the same.

“Yeah?”

“Delivery for Mr. Kruvinski.”

I held the druggist's bag out.

“What's in it?”

“Medicine, I guess.”

“He gets his medicine from his doctor.”

I tried to look apathetic.

“Lemme see.”

I gave him the bag and he pulled out a small amber bottle filled with yellow tablets. The right color, but the wrong shape. My Physicians' Desk Reference chart showed Imuran as a scored doublet, these were singles. Vitamin Cs. Black shirt didn't react. As I'd hoped, not observant.

The label was a work of art. I'd steamed off an old one for penicillin, whited out all the specifics but left the pharmacy's name and address and the RX, DATE, and PRESCRIBING PHYSICIAN blanks. Photocopied it, typed in the new information, put some glue on the back, stuck it back on the vial. Pretty good job, though I wasn't ready for twenty-dollar bills.

He read the label now and his mouth pursed when he got to PRESCRIBING PHYSICIAN: M. CRUVIC, M.D. Followed by Cruvic's real license number, obtained from the medical board.

Confusion seamed his meaty forehead.

“We just got a big box of this shi- who ordered this?”

Bingo.

I tried to look stupid and peeved rather than elated. “Dunno, I just go where they tell me. You wan' me to take it back?”

Dropping the bottle back in the bag, he kept it and started for the house.

“Hey,” I said.

Stopping short, he looked over his shoulder at me. His shoulders were enormous, his elbows dimpled. Pink scalp showed through the hair; the ponytail was a sad thing.

“You gotta problem?”

“COD,” I said. “You gotta pay for it.” Keeping it going for realism; I'd already learned what I wanted to know.

Lifting his free hand, he made a skin-gun and aimed it at my face.

“Wait, bucko.”

I did. Til he got inside and closed the door.

Then I ran back to the Seville and was pulling out by the time he got back. Along with Anna the tight-faced nurse.

The two of them standing behind the iron gate, perplexed, as I got the hell out of there.

35

So much to do with the movie business is bland, mundane, characterless. The casting studio said it all.

A muddy brown lump of a one-story building on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, it sat between a Cuban seafood restaurant and a Chinese laundry. The stucco was lighter where graffiti had been oversprayed. No windows, a warped black door.

Inside was a no-frills waiting room crowded with perfect-body hopefuls of both sexes, sitting in folding chairs, reading Variety, fantasizing about fame, fortune, and cutting some obnoxious restaurant customer's throat.

The inner room was much larger, but all it contained was a card table and two chairs under cheap track lighting, and a rear wall of flyspecked mirror.

I sat in a tiny storage closet, behind the mirror, watching.

Two casting directors sat behind the table: a heavy, sloppy-looking, puffy-faced man with bad skin and greasy hair, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and grubby khakis, and a thin woman with not-bad blue eyes, wearing an obvious black wig and clad in red sweats.

Nameplates in front of them.

BRAD RABEPAIGE BANDURA

Two Evian bottles, a pack of Winstons, and an ashtray, but no one was smoking.

“Next,” said Rabe.

A hopeful entered. Audition Number 6 for the male lead.