I’d seen an identical device in postmortem photos of another man, a well-known contract killer. NSA had intercepted communications indicating that a certain North African despot intended to assassinate a professor at American University in Cairo whose writings, the dictator felt, blasphemed the teachings of Mohammed, peace be upon Him. Arrangements were made through a network of cutouts working for German intelligence to have the killer check into a luxurious boutique hotel on the banks of the river Nile the night before the hit. There, he was told, two runners-up from the Miss World pageant would be waiting in bed for him — an allexpenses-paid pre-assassination assignation, courtesy of the appreciative dictator. Alpha’s orders were to take the would-be assassin alive so our interrogators could identify and roll up his handlers. The plan didn’t quite work out that way. He smelled a trap in the hotel parking lot and went for his gun. Echevarria shot him dead. The body was stashed in a rental car and flown to Dover Air Force Base, where the bomb was discovered during autopsy, removed and analyzed extensively.

We learned later that the Russians had implanted such weapons in perhaps as many as a dozen intelligence assets without their knowledge during appendectomies, hernia repairs and other routine surgical procedures requiring general anesthesia. The theory was that these assets could then be maneuvered within lethal range of targeted foreign enemies while arousing little suspicion because they appeared otherwise unarmed. Packed with highly explosive G2ZT, a nitrogen-based tetrazole refined in the laboratories of a Stuttgart-based chemical weapons conglomerate Deiter-Becker-Deutsche, the explosive could then be detonated by radio signal from as far away as a half-mile. The bomb itself was said to have a killing radius of ten meters.

“Suicide bombers who don’t know they’re suicide bombers,” Czarnek marveled. “What will they think of next?”

“Back in the day, nobody in their right mind wanted the job,” I said. “Now, they grow on trees. Amazing what seventy-two virgins’ll buy.”

Morning overcast had given way to wispy cirrostratus and anemic sunshine by the time we left the coroner’s office. An afternoon storm was moving in. Maybe this one would bring real rain.

Czarnek said he wanted to interview Bondarenko’s widow and wanted me to go with him.

“She knows you,” the detective said. “She might be more willing to talk with you there.”

I didn’t relish the idea of having to be there when he informed her that her husband was dead, and told him as much. Czarnek offered to buy me lunch in exchange. The best Italian food in Los Angeles, he said. Who was I to say no?

We took surface streets skirting the Golden State Freeway up to the working class enclave of Lincoln Heights on the eastern fringes of Chinatown, a five-minute drive. To the north, the undulating peaks of the San Gabriels wore a fresh dusting of white. The snow line ran in precise parallel to the dun-colored elevations below, as if some giant artist had drawn it with a straight edge across the south face of the mountains. Czarnek wheeled across opposing traffic lanes and into a small lot next to an Italian deli made of cinder blocks. Two unmarked detective cars and four LAPD black and whites were already parked there.

An Italian lady who looked to be about as old as Mrs. Schmulowitz sat on a stool behind the cash register. She smiled at Czarnek as we walked by like she knew him. The tables were covered with red and white checkered plastic cloths and occupied by cops hunched over sausage sandwiches and plates heaped high with steaming pasta primavera, all talking and laughing. A few glanced at us as we walked in, nodding politely to Czarnek, then sizing me up as if to say, “Who’s the perp?”

We waited inside the door for a spot to open up.

“Popular place,” I said.

“We get a discount, half off,” Czarnek said. “Used to be, a cop couldn’t pay for a meal in this town, but those days are long gone.”

Two bellied detectives vacated a table in the rear near the kitchen and ambled past, toward the cash register. The one who wasn’t paying the check rolled a toothpick out of a dispenser on the counter.

“Where’s that crazy partner of yours?” he said to Czarnek.

“Mental health day.”

“How’re things up in Valley Bureau?”

“Can’t complain,” Czarnek said.

“Beats working for a living.”

“Does most days.”

“Keep your powder dry, Keith,” the detective said as he pushed open the door.

“You do the same, Manny,” Czarnek said.

The old lady behind the cash register handed us each a plastic laminated menu and gestured toward the open table. There was a plastic potted geranium on it and a candle in an old Chianti bottle, its sides caked with dried candle wax like frozen, multicolored waterfalls. We waited until the busboy finished wiping down the tablecloth, then sat.

Czarnek spat his gum in a paper napkin. The waitress waddled over with two green plastic water glasses and a red plastic basket lined with a green paper and piled with warm garlic bread. I ordered the eggplant. Czarnek went with chicken piccata and a side of fried mozzarella sticks.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said of his choice in appetizers.

“Hey, I quit cigarettes. You gotta croak of something.” He got out a pen and a thin reporter’s notebook. “I need to know what you know about this Russian connection to Echevarria,” he said.

I told him what I knew of Bondarenko’s ties to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, of Carlisle’s plans in Kazakhstan with Tarasov, the Russian oilman, and Tarasov’s own purported ties to Russian intelligence. I told him about Janice Echevarria’s husband, Harry Ramos, and the possible interest Ramos shared with Tarasov and Carlisle in the Kashagan oil field. I described the nonchalant way in which Carlisle had reacted when I told him I knew that Echevarria had been to Kazakhstan a week before his death, and Carlisle’s flip-flop, how he’d first paid me to brief the LAPD on Echevarria’s true work history, then demanded I stop asking questions.

Czarnek looked up from his notepad.

“How much did he pay you?”

“Twenty-five large.”

The detective sat back in his chair like I’d just informed him the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real. “Jesus,” he said, “if that were to ever make it into open court…”

I ate some garlic bread and licked the olive oil off my fingers.

“Why do you think Carlisle wants you to back off?” Czarnek said.

“Theory one: He’s afraid my digging around might blow his chances of scoring big in Kazakhstan. Theory two: He’s somehow involved with Tarasov in Echevarria’s murder.”

“What about Baskin Robbins’ murder?”

“That’s theory number three.”

I didn’t volunteer my theory number four: that Carlisle feared I might incriminate his daughter and assistant, Miles Zambelli, in an ongoing murder investigation. While I doubted that Savannah’s one-night stand prompted Zambelli to kill Echevarria in some kind of jealous rage, I couldn’t very well tell Czarnek about their tryst without implicating them both. I may have been bitter over what my ex-wife had done to me years before, but I wasn’t that vindictive. I let it go.

“Carlisle’s personal assistant banged your ex-wife,” Czarnek said matter-of-factly. “That’s why Echevarria walked out on her. But I assume you knew that already, right?”

“Savannah must’ve told you.”

“She told me about her father paying you to talk to us, too.” Czarnek reached for the bread basket. “I don’t see Zambelli capping Echevarria. Not the type, not on paper, anyway. Now, this Russian, that’s a different story. Echevarria’s son, too. We got multiple witnesses that put the kid at Echevarria’s apartment the night before. They were arguing, him and his old man.”