This killer. Pattern. The kid was convinced of one dark hand behind all six cases. Ah, impetuous youth.

As Petra began the short drive back to Wilcox, Isaac said, “Something else took place on June 28. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. June 28, 1914. Essentially, that began World War One.”

“There you go,” said Petra. “Someone’s declared war on the good folk of L.A.”

It was the wound pattern that snagged her.

Six P.M. As predicted, she’d hit the wall on Leon sooner rather than later. She phoned a nearby Mr. Pizza and called out for a small deep-dish with everything on it.

Across the room, Isaac remained at his corner desk, scribbling, punching his laptop, jotting down notes. Making a big show out of being inconspicuous. When the pie came, she went over and offered him a slice. He said no thanks, tailed her back to her desk, hung around as she opened the greasy box.

Petra selected a slice and began picking cheese off the pointed end.

Isaac said “Have a good evening” and left the station.

She poured herself more coffee, played with strings of mozzarella, picked up one of the files. Drank and ate and began to read. Getting grease on the folders. Being a little cavalier about it.

Until she came to the autopsy reports.

Six autopsy reports written by six separate coroners. The language was nearly identical.

Compression injuries of the occipital skull.

Hit from behind.

In every autopsy report, the weapon was described as heavy and tubular, approximately 77 centimeters in diameter in three murders, 75 in one, 78 in two. Which was close enough, given varying bone densities in people of different ages and sexes.

Two pathologists had been willing to speculate that the bludgeon was metal or hard plastic, because no imbedded wood fragments had been found.

What had been found was lots of blood and bone frags and gobbets of brain matter.

To Petra the weapon sounded like a length of pipe. Seventy-seven centimeters matched three inches on her old-fashioned ruler. Nice, hefty chunk of pipe.

Deep compression injuries, all that gore.

Someone- if there was a someone- liked braining people.

She started with the detective she knew still on the job.

Neil Wahlgren, the D on the Curtis Hoffey case. All she’d heard was he’d transferred somewhere in the Valley.

It took a while, but she located his extension at Van Nuys Auto Theft. Petra’s job trajectory had been just the opposite, from chop shops to chopped humans, and she wondered why Neil had switched.

He was away from his desk, but the V.N. desk officer gave her his cell and she reached him.

“Hey,” he said. “Barbie from Ken and Barbie, right?”

Remembering Petra and Stu Bishop. Those had been good days.

“That’s me,” she said.

“Hey,” Wahlgren repeated. He had a hearty voice that sounded genuinely warm. Petra recalled him vaguely as a big, ruddy Nord with a bulbous nose. The kind you imagined ice-fishing and quaffing whatever ice fishers quaffed.

“Chasing chrome?” she said. “No more d.b.s?”

“Ten years of d.b.s was enough. Give me a nice boosted Lexus with GPS any day. What’s up?”

“I’ve been looking at some cold cases and came across one of yours. Curtis Hoffey.”

Right away Wahlgren said, “Male pross, hit over the head.”

“That’s the one.”

“Messy.”

“Messy in terms of crime scene or detection?”

“Both. Couldn’t make an inch of progress,” said Neil. “Which is no surprise, I guess, a vic like that. Twenty years old and from what I could gather he’d been on the streets since twelve. Poor kid probably serviced the wrong john, but there was no talk on the street and no prior similars.”

“I might have one- emphasize might,” she said. “Someone was combing through old files and came up with half a dozen head-bashes that match in terms of wound pattern and weapon guestimology.”

She paused. Should she go all the way, give him the June 28 tie-in? No, too weird. Not at this point- the guy worked Auto T, anyway, why would he care?

Neil said, “That so? Well, I didn’t hear anything about that at the time.” Defensiveness had crept into his voice.

Petra said, “No way you could, it’s probably nothing.”

“Who found it?” said Wahlgren.

“An intern. Who else would have the time?”

“What, one of those Eagle Scout types, all gung-ho?”

“Yup. So who caught it after you left?”

“Don’t know. Schoelkopf said he’d handle the transfer. He still there? Still being a total asshole?”

“Still here,” she said. “If he did transfer the case, there’s no record.”

“No surprise,” said Neil. “Even at the time he didn’t want me spending too much time on it, said we needed to pay attention to gang murders, this was a ‘West Hollywood case.’ You know what I mean.”

“Gay.”

“Gay hooker, low probability of closing it, and the city council was making noise about gang stuff. You get a whodunit with no serious forensics, no relatives or politicians breathing down your neck…” Neil trailed off.

“Sure,” said Petra.

“The truth was, Schoelkopf was right. About it being a likely dead end.”

And you didn’t care to test the assumption.

“So Curtis had no family?” she said. Using the vic’s name. Wanting Neil to think about Hoffey as a human being, at least for a moment.

“No one claimed the body. He got bashed up pretty good. If I never see another one like it, I’ll be none the worse off.”

Jewell Blank, the fourteen-year-old girl murdered in Griffith Park, had relatives, but according to Detective Max Stokes’s notes, they hadn’t been helpful.

The mother was Grace Blank, twenty-nine, single, a barmaid, living with her boyfriend, Thomas Crisp, thirty-two, an unemployed trucker and “biker type.” Neither had seen Jewell for over a year, since she’d run away from their double-wide on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Neither, it appeared, had searched for her with any enthusiasm.

Twenty-nine years old meant Grace had given birth to Jewell when she was fifteen and Petra had a good idea of what came with that.

Another kid in Griffith Park. That made Petra’s stomach knot up, as she thought of Billy Straight. Same background, same escape. Billy had lived in the park, like a feral child, scrounging Dumpsters for food and narrowly avoiding death. But for a happier ending, he could’ve been sitting on a cloud next to Jewell Blank.

Petra had rescued Billy. For the first year, after his grandmother took him in, they’d stayed in touch- regular phone calls, occasional outings. Now, Billy was fifteen, nearly six feet tall, and a prep-school junior. On his way to Stanford, Mrs. Adamson confided. She’d already talked to the dean.

It had been months since Petra had heard from him. Which was probably good, at least from his perspective. His life was in order, what use would he have for the police?

She found no record that Jewell Blank’s case had been transferred to another detective.

Max Stokes appeared to have worked the case hard, getting help, as it turned out, from Shirley Lenois. The two veteran detectives had scoured the streets, interviewed scores of other runaways, checked the shelters and the churches and the agencies.

Jewell had squatted, on and off, in some of Hollywood’s last remaining abandoned buildings and was known to her street-kid peers as “stuck-up,” an assertive panhandler, an adroit shoplifter. No one could say if she’d prostituted herself for money, but she had slept with boys for drugs.

Multi-drug user: weed, pills, meth, acid, Ecstasy. Not heroin, though, everyone agreed. Needles scared Jewell. Petra returned to the autopsy report, avoiding the photos of the little girl’s head. No needle tracks. The tox screen revealed significant levels of cannabis, alcohol, and pseudoephedrine, probably from an OTC decongestant.