"Tsk, tsk. How's Mr. Dog?"

"He doesn't like the water but he's developed a taste for sand- literally. He eats it."

"Charming. Maybe you can teach him to shit adobe bricks, cut your masonry costs."

"Always the practical one, Milo."

It had been a nomad year.

Thirteen months ago, just before Jobe Shwandt had started climbing through bedroom windows and ripping people to shreds, a psychopath high on vengeance had burned my house down, reducing ten years of memories to charcoal. When Robin and I finally mustered the strength to think positively, we began plans to rebuild and looked for a place to rent.

The one we found was on a beach on Malibu 's far west end. Old rural-route Malibu, nudging up against the Ventura County line, light-years from the glitz. The recession made it affordable.

Had I been smarter or more motivated, I might have owned the place. During my hyperactive youth, working full-time at Western Pediatric Hospital and seeing private patients at night, I'd earned enough to invest in Malibu real estate, buying and selling a couple of land-side apartment buildings and turning enough profit to build a stocks-and-bonds portfolio that cushioned me during hard times. But I'd never lived at the beach, thinking it too remote, too cut off from the urban pulse.

Now I welcomed the isolation- just Robin, Spike, and me, and patients willing to make the drive.

I hadn't done long-term therapy for years, limiting my practice to forensic consultations. Most of it boiled down to evaluating and treating children scarred emotionally and physically by accidents and crimes and trying to untangle the horror of child-custody disputes. Once in a while something else came along, like Lucy Lowell.

The house was small: a thousand-square-foot gray wood saltbox on the sand, fronted on the highway by a high wooden fence and a double garage where Robin, after deciding to sublet her storefront in Venice, had set up her luthier's shop. Between the house and the gate was a sunken garden planted with succulents and an old wooden hot tub that hadn't been serviceable for years. A planked footbridge was suspended over the greenery.

A rear gate opened on ten warped steps that led down to the beach, a rocky spit tucked into a forgotten cove. On the land side were wildflower-blanketed mountains. The sunsets were blindingly beautiful and sometimes sea lions and dolphins came by, playing just a few feet from shore. Fifty yards out were kelp beds, and fishing boats settled there from time to time, competing with the cormorants and the pelicans and the gulls. I'd tried swimming, but only once. The water was icy, pebble-strewn, and seamed by riptides.

A nice quiet place, except for the occasional fighter jet roaring down from Edwards Air Force Base. Lore had it that a famous actress had once lived there with two teenage lovers before making the Big Movie and building a Moorish castle on Broad Beach. It was documented fact that an immortal jazz musician had spent a winter shooting heroin nightly in a rundown cottage on the east end of the beach, playing his trumpet to the rhythm of the tide as he sank into morphiate peace.

No celebrities, now. Almost all the houses were bungalows owned by weekenders too busy to recreate, and even on holiday weekends, when central Malibu jammed up like a freeway, we had the beach to ourselves: tide pools, driftwood, and enough sand to keep Spike licking his chops.

He's a French Bulldog, a strange-looking animal. Twenty-eight pounds of black-brindled muscle packed into a carry-on body, bat ears, wrinkled face with a profile flat enough to write on. More frog than wolf, the courage of a lion.

A Boston terrier on steroids is the best way to describe him, but his temperament is all bulldog- calm, loyal, loving. Stubborn.

He'd wandered into my life, nearly collapsed from heat and thirst, a runaway after his mistress died. A pet was the last thing I was looking for at the time, but he snuffled his way into our hearts.

He'd been trained as a pup to avoid water and hated the ocean, keeping his distance from the breakers and growing enraged at high tide. Sometimes a stray retriever or setter showed up and he romped with them, ending up winded and drooling. But his new appetite for silica more than made up for those indignities, as did a lust for barking at shorebirds in a strangulated gargling tone that evoked an old man choking.

Mostly he stayed by Robin's side, riding shotgun in her truck, accompanying her to the jobsite. This morning, they'd left at six and the house was dead quiet. I slid open a glass door and let in some heat and ocean noise. The coffee was ready. I took it out to the deck and thought some more about Lucy.

After getting my number from Milo, she'd taken ten days to call. Not unusual. Seeing a psychologist is a big step for most people, even in California. Somewhat timidly, she asked for a 7:30 A.M. appointment that would get her to Century City by 9:00. She was surprised when I agreed.

She arrived five minutes late and apologizing. Smiling.

A pretty but pained smile, rich with self-defense, that stayed on her face almost the entire session.

She was bright and articulate and full of facts- the small points of the attorney's legal wranglings, the judge's mannerisms, the compositions of the victims' families, Shwandt's vulgarities, the yammerings of the press. When the time came for her to leave, she seemed disappointed.

When I opened the gate to let her in for the second session, a young man was with her. Late twenties, tall, slender, with a high brow, thinning blond hair, Lucy's pale skin and brown eyes, and an even more painful version of her smile.

She introduced him as her brother, Peter, and he said, "Nice to meet you," in a low, sleepy voice. We shook. His hand was bony and cold, yet soft.

"You're welcome to come in, take a walk on the beach."

"No, thanks, I'll just stay in the car." He opened the passenger door and looked at Lucy. She watched him get in. It was a warm day but he wore a heavy brown sweater over a white shirt, old jeans, and sneakers.

At the gate Lucy turned to look back, again. He was slumped in the front seat, examining something in his lap.

For the next forty-five minutes, her smile wasn't as durable. This time, she concentrated on Shwandt, intellectualizing about what could have led him to sink to such depths.

Her questions were rhetorical; she wanted no answers. When she began to look beaten down, she switched the topic to Milo and that cheered her up.

The third session, she came alone and spent most of the time on Milo. She saw him as the Master Sleuth, and the facts of the Bogeyman case didn't argue with that.

Shwandt had been an equal-opportunity butcher, choosing his victims from all over L.A. County. When it became apparent that the crimes were connected, a task force involving detectives from Devonshire Division to the Sheriffs substation in Lynwood had been assembled. But it was Milo 's work on the Carrie Fielding murder that closed all the cases.

The Fielding case had brought the city's panic to a boil. A beautiful ten-year-old child from Brentwood, snatched from her bedroom in her sleep, taken somewhere, raped, strangled, mutilated, and degraded, her remains tossed on the median strip that bisected San Vicente Boulevard, discovered by joggers at dawn.

As usual, the killer had left the crime scene impeccable. Except for one possible error: a partial fingerprint on Carrie's bedpost.

The print didn't match the little girl's parents' or those of her nanny, and neither was it a mate for any swirls and ridges catalogued by the FBI. The police team couldn't conceive of the Bogeyman as a virgin and went looking through local files, concentrating on newly arrested felons whose data hadn't yet been entered. No leads emerged.