He’d once had a family- wife and two kids- but had lost everything. Heather, Danny, and Dawn. Taken from him cruelly. He’d resigned his military commission, spent a year doped up on antidepressants, then applied to the LAPD, where connections got him a Detective I appointment, Hollywood Division, where Schoelkopf had foisted him on Petra.

Whatever Schoelkopf knew he’d kept to himself. Uninformed, Petra tried to get along, but faced with a partner with all the warmth of ceramic tile, she soon gave up. The two of them ended up splitting chores, minimizing the time they spent together. Long, cold, silent stakeouts.

Then came a night full of terror. Even now, Petra wondered if Eric had been trying to commit Suicide by Perp. She’d never brought it up. Had no reason to.

She had not been the only woman in his life. During the Cold Heart investigation, he’d met an exotic dancer, a bubble-headed blonde with a perfect body named Kyra Montego aka Kathy Magary. Kyra was there in the waiting room, too, stuffed into too-small duds, sniffling into her hankie, examining her nails, unable to read the dumbest magazine out of anxiety or what Petra suspected was attention span disorder. Petra outlasted the bimbo, and when Eric woke up, it was her hand holding his, her eyes locking with his bruised, brown irises.

During the months of recuperation, Kyra kept dropping in at Eric’s rented bungalow in Studio City, bearing takeout soup and plastic utensils. Offering plastic boobs and batting eyelashes and Lord knew what else.

Petra dealt with that by cooking for Eric. Growing up with five brothers and a widowed father in Arizona, she’d learned to be pretty handy around the kitchen. During the brief time her marriage lasted, she’d played at gourmet. Now a nighthawk divorcée, she rarely bothered to switch on the oven. But healing Eric with home-cooked goodies had seemed terribly urgent.

In the end, the bimbo was out of the picture and Petra was squarely in it. She and Eric went from awkwardness to reluctant self-disclosure to friendship to closeness. When they finally made love, he went at it with the fervor of a deprived animal. When they finally settled into regular sex, she found him the best lover she’d ever encountered, tender when she needed him to be, accommodatingly athletic when that was the daily special.

They split up as partners and continued as lovers. Living apart; Eric in the bungalow, Petra in her flat on Detroit off Sixth, near Museum Row. Then September 11 hit and Eric’s special forces background made the department look at him in a new way. Transferred out of Homicide to the newly formed Homeland Security Squad, he was sent overseas for antiterrorist training. This month it was Israel, learning about suicide bombers and profiling and things he couldn’t tell her about.

He called when he could, e-mailed her sporadically but couldn’t receive electronic messages. She’d last heard from him a week ago. Jerusalem was a beautiful city, the Israelis were tough and tactless and reasonably competent, he planned to be back in two weeks.

A postcard picturing the Citadel of David had arrived two days ago. Eric’s neat, forward-slanting script.

P.

Thinking of you, all’s o.k.

E.

Working solo suited her just fine, but she knew it was only a matter of time before some new transfer was foisted on her.

After closing Yoshimura and Kashigian, she took a couple of days off, figuring on a little downtime.

Instead, she got a bloodbath and Isaac Gomez.

It happened the day she started painting again. Forcing herself to get up by ten and using the daylight to copy a Georgia O’Keeffe she’d always loved. Not flowers or skulls; a gray, vertical New York city scene from O’Keeffe’s early days.

Pure genius, no way could she hope to capture it, but the struggle would be good. It had been months since she’d lifted a brush and starting out was rough. But by two P.M., she was in the groove, doing pretty well, she thought. At six, she sat down to appraise her work and fell asleep on the living room couch.

A call from the station woke her up at one-fifteen A.M.

“Multiple one eighty-sevens at the Paradiso Club, Sunset near Western, all hands on deck,” said the dispatcher. “It’s probably on TV already.”

Petra flicked on the tube as she headed for the shower. The first network she tried was running the story.

A bunch of kids shot outside the Paradiso. Some sort of hip-hop concert, an altercation in the parking lot, gun-barrel poking out of a car window.

Four bodies.

By the time Petra got there the area had been cordoned and the victims were covered with coroner’s tarp. A quartet of bundles, lying at random angles under a blue-black Hollywood sky. The corner of one of the tarps had blown loose, revealing a sneakered foot. Pink sneaker, smallish.

High-intensity lights turned the parking lot glossy. What looked to be over a hundred kids, some of whom were way too young to be out this late, had been divided into several groups, shunted off to the side and guarded by uniformed officers. Five groups, all potential witnesses. The Paradiso, a movie theater-turned-evangelical church-turned-concert venue, could seat over a thousand. These kids were the chosen few.

Petra looked for other detectives, spotted Abrams, Montoya, Dilbeck, and Haas. Now that she was here, five D’s for five groups.

MacDonald Dilbeck was a DIII with over thirty years’ experience and he’d be the boss on this one.

She headed over to him. When she was ten yards away, he waved.

Mac was a sixty-one-year-old ex-Marine with silver, Brylcreemed hair and a gray sharkskin suit just as glossy. Skinny, rounded lapels marked the garment as a vintage collectible, but she knew he’d bought it new. A five-eight fireplug, Mac wore Aqua Velva, a faux-ruby high school ring, and an LAPD tie-bar. He lived in Simi Valley and his civilian ride was an old Caddy. On weekends he rode horses and Harleys. Married for forty years, Semper Fi tattoo on his biceps. Petra judged him smarter than most doctors and lawyers she’d met.

He said, “Sorry for screwing up your vacation.” His eyes were tired but his posture was perfect.

“Looks like we need all the help we can get.”

Mac’s mouth turned down. “It was a massacre. Four children.”

He drew her away from the bodies, toward the double-width driveway that led out to Western Avenue; they faced thin, early-morning traffic. “The concert ended at eleven-thirty, but kids hung around in the parking lot smoking, drinking, the typical shenanigans. Cars were leaving but one reversed direction and backed up toward the crowd. Slowly, so no one noticed. Then an arm stuck out and started shooting. Security guard was too far to see it but he heard a dozen shots. Four hits, all fatal, looks like a nine millimeter.”

Petra glanced at the nearest group of kids. “They don’t look hardcore. What kind of concert was it?”

“Your basic lightweight hip-hop, dance remixes, some Latin stuff, nothing gangsta.”

Despite the horror, Petra felt a smile coming on. “Nothing gangsta?”

Dilbeck shrugged. “Grandkids. From what we’re hearing, it was a well-behaved crowd, couple of ejections for alcohol but nothing serious.”

“Who got ejected?”

“Three boys from the Valley. White, harmless, their parents picked them up. This wasn’t about that, Petra, but what it was about, who knows? Including our potential witnesses.”

“Nothing?” said Petra.

Dilbeck covered his eyes with one hand, used the other to blanket his mouth. “These are the kids unlucky enough to be sticking around when the black-and-whites arrived. All we’ve got out of them is a relatively consistent description of the shooter’s car. Small, black or dark blue or dark gray, most likely a Honda or a Toyota, with chrome rims. Not a single digit of license plate. When the shooting started, everyone dropped or ducked or ran.”