“Pieter van Dort, a Dutch smuggler. They hanged him on June 28, 1748. Thomas Hickey, a Colonial soldier convicted of treason, was hung in 1776. There’s not much more until 1971, when Joseph Columbo, a New York mafioso, was gunned down. Ten years later, Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, a founder of the Iranian Islamic Party, was killed in a bomb explosion. Though I suppose his being a bad guy would depend upon your political persuasion.”

“Anything of a more wacko criminal nature? A Ted Bundy, a Hillside Strangler?”

“No, nothing like that, sorry,” he said. “In terms of historical events, there’s been plenty of misery on June 28, but no more than any other day. At least I can’t find any statistically significant difference. History’s based on tragedy and upheaval, as well as on the accomplishments of notable people.”

He rolled the papers into a tight tube, drummed his thigh. “I can’t believe I missed similarities in the weapon dimensions.”

“Stop beating yourself up,” said Petra.

She switched on the radio, tuned to a station that played harder rock than she was accustomed to. Filled her head with thunder-drums and guitar feedback and screaming testosterone-laden vocals, until the mountains got higher and static buried the noise.

June 4.

She drove faster.

They were well past Angeles Crest now, zipping past canyon after canyon at eighty-five miles an hour, passing low, gray-brown bowls of high-desert to the east. A small-craft airport hugged the freeway, followed by scatters of white-box storage buildings and factories. Then tracts of red-tile-roofed houses in the distance, laid out neatly in the dirt. Between the structures, Petra spied tiny green lawns, the occasional turquoise pool. Lots of space between developments. Antelope Valley was booming but there was still plenty of room to move.

A sign heralding the approach of Palmdale came into view and Petra pronounced the city’s name.

Isaac said, “It used to be called Palmenthal. Founded by Germans and Swiss. It got anglicized around the turn of the century.”

Petra said, “Really.”

“As if you needed to know that.”

“Hey,” she said. “Education’s good for the soul. Where do you pick up stuff like that?”

“I had an advanced geography placement in high school, mostly independent study. I researched several cities in L.A. County and the surrounding areas. It was a surprise, you’d think everything had Hispanic roots, but many places didn’t. Eagle Rock- that used to be called the Switzerland of the West. Back when the air was good.”

“Ancient history,” said Petra.

He said, “Extraneous information tends to float in my head and sometimes it seeps out through my mouth.”

“And sometimes,” she said, “you come up with interesting stuff.”

She exited at the first Palmdale exit, checked her Thomas Guide, and drove toward the address on Conrad Ballou’s retirement forms, around three miles east.

Knowing about Ballou’s alkie-burnout history, she figured him to be living in a depressing pensioner’s SRO or worse, and the first few neighborhoods she passed were pretty sad. But then the environment took a swing upward- the same kind of tile-roofed tracts she’d spotted from the freeway, some big houses, gated enclaves.

Ballou’s place was a medium-sized Spanish house in a pretty development named Golden Ridge Heights, where the trees- palms and paper-barked things- had grown sizable and some of the lawns sported mature shrubbery. Lots of motor homes and motorcycle trailers, pickups, and SUVs. The streets were wide, clean, and quiet, and the houses had rear yards that looked out to desert panorama. Sharp-edged mountains served as a backdrop. Too quiet for Petra’s taste, but she imagined warm, silent, star-studded nights and thought that might not be too bad.

She pulled to the curb and crows scattered. A ten-year-old Ford half-ton sat in Ballou’s driveway. The neighbors on both sides sported basketball hoops over the garage, yards that were more cement than grass. Ballou’s place was done up beautifully with creeping dwarf junipers, impeccable mounds of mondo grass, lush Sago palms, and little cross-cut tubes of bamboo lining the pebbled walkway. A length of bamboo dipping toward a stone pot served as a fountain and the water trickle was a continuous soprano.

A Japanophile?

It didn’t look like an alkie’s place. Maybe the pension office’s data bank was out of date, as was so much LAPD data. She should’ve phoned first before wasting the time and the gas. Now she’d look like a doofus in front of Mr. Genius.

Japanese letters were etched into the teak panels of the front door, above a weathered brass knocker shaped like a fish. A carp- koi- the type Alex Delaware kept in that cute little pond of his.

Petra used the knocker. The man who opened the door was short, bandy-legged, lean but for a protruding belly that hung over his belt buckle.

Koi belt buckle.

Sixty-five to seventy, with a shaved, sunburnt head and drooping white mustaches. He wore a denim work shirt, jeans, red suspenders, and lace-up boots. A white handkerchief flapped from his rear pocket.

He looked Petra and Isaac over, rubbed his hands together as if he’d just finished washing them.

Clear eyes, pale blue, no booze-blear. Sharp eyes, actually.

He said, “I only sell on the weekend.”

“Detective Ballou?”

The man’s hands stopped moving. Now the eyes were twin specks of granite. “Been a long time since anyone called me that.”

Petra showed him her I.D.

He shook his head. “I’m out of all that. Breed and sell fish and don’t think about the past.” He started to step back into the house.

Petra said, “Marta Doebbler. Ever think about her?”

Conrad Ballou moved his jaw around. “Can’t say that I do. Can’t say that I give a damn about any of that.”

“It hasn’t been that long, sir. Six years. I’m looking into some cold cases, including Doebbler. If I could pick your brain…”

“Nothing to pick,” said Ballou, rubbing his bald head. “According to the shrinks the department sent me to.” He looked ready to spit. “I could’ve saved them the trouble. I wasn’t nuts, I was a drunk. Thank God I didn’t kill anybody.” He shook his head. “They should’ve tossed my can out long before they did. Damn department.”

“So you miss police work,” said Petra.

Ballou glared at her. Smiled. Laughed. “You like fish?”

“To eat?”

“To look at. C’mon in. And bring the intern with you.”

The house was rescued from tract-cliché by a trove of Asian furnishings. Vegetable-dye rugs, rosewood tables, porcelain vases and planters, paper screens on the walls, all portraying brocaded koi.

Way too much stuff for the space and to Petra’s eye, nothing pricey. The kind of gaudy, overlacquered stuff you could pick up in any Chinatown or Little Tokyo tourist trap.

Ballou led them past all that, through rear double doors and out to the backyard. What had been a backyard. Every inch of the quarter-acre space had been converted to fish ponds. Sheets of mesh on stakes roofed the entire area, casting shade, cooling the desert air. Beyond the water was a high bamboo fence and a neighbor’s RV.

Lots of burbling, but the ponds weren’t attractive like Alex’s. These were simply rectangular cement tanks, a dozen of them, arranged in a grid with a walkway between them. Not clear like Alex’s, either. Green water, soupy. The only movement on the surface was created by aeration tubes.

But when Conrad Ballou approached the first pond, the surface broke and scores- no, hundreds- of little golden and pinkish fishy faces popped through, flapping, gulping, gasping.

Ballou pointed to the nearest wall where bright blue plastic bins were piled in a heap next to a mess of nets. Nearby stood a gumball machine. Instead of candy, the glass bell was filled with little rust-colored balls, half the size of a pea.