Hoping they watched TV. Hoping they were that stupid.

A nanosecond of silence.

A hoarse “Huh?”

“Police, motherfuckers,” he repeated, louder, reaching down in his chest to produce his lowest baritone growl. Reaching into another pocket, he drew out his pen case because it was dark and around the right size. He pressed it to his mouth, said, “This is Officer Gomez calling for backup. I’ve got three juvenile two-eleven suspects. Probable narcotics violation as well. I’ll hold them here.”

“Fuck,” said the heavy one, sounding breathless.

Isaac realized he hadn’t even called in an address. Could they be that stupid?

Skinny looked at his knife. Grim little urchin face. Deliberating.

The second one, the one who hadn’t spoken or done anything, edged away.

Isaac said, “Where you going, shit-face?”

The kid took off and ran.

And then there were two. Better odds. Even with the blade he might be able to escape with just a flesh wound.

Chunky was bouncing on his feet. Skinny had edged back but made no move to leave. The dangerous one, not enough fear in his chemistry. And he had to be the one with the knife.

That was why he had the knife.

Isaac brought out his pen case again. Held it this time, in an outstretched arm. Walked toward Skinny pointing the stupid thing and ordered, “Drop that fucking nail-file, junior, and get the fuck down on the ground before I shoot your ass. Do it!”

Chunky turned heel and ran.

Skinny kept contemplating the odds. Threw the knife at Isaac.

The blade whizzed by his face, just short of his left eye.

He said, “You’re toast, motherfucker,” and the kid bolted.

He stood there in the silence. Putrid silence; they’d left behind their stink.

Waiting until he was sure they were gone before he began breathing normally. He went to retrieve his briefcase. Collected the errant paper, stuffed the rest of it back in. Then he sprinted the block to his building, ran around to the side, chest tight, stomach churning, chilled by the post-adrenaline shakes.

He leaned against the stucco, feet ankle-high in the weeds that grew there. Dry-heaving, he thought that would be it.

It wasn’t. He vomited until the bile burned his throat.

When all his dinner was gone, he spit and headed toward his building.

Tomorrow, before he took the bus to the Hollywood station, he’d visit Jaramillo.

Once upon a time, before the Burton Academy, before all the strange, wondrous, terrifying turns his life had taken, he and Jaramillo had been friends.

Maybe that would count for something.

Kurt Doebbler’s weirdness stuck in Petra’s head and after a few more days of nothing on Paradiso, she found herself thinking about him.

It was just after noon; no sign of Isaac.

No word from Eric. And the mellow-voiced Dr. Robert Katzman hadn’t called her back.

Why hadn’t Doebbler complained about Ballou’s drunken incompetence?

The more she thought about how shoddily the case had been worked, the less confident she felt about the integrity of the original file.

Like the blood scraped from Marta Doebbler’s car- O negative. And Doebbler was O positive. According to Ballou.

How much was that worth?

She paged through the file, finally found a note of the sample in a small-print coroner’s addendum.

She decided to track it down.

The coroner’s clerk was sure he had it. Till he didn’t. He transferred her to a coroner’s investigator, a young-sounding guy named Ballard.

“Hmm,” he said. “I guess it could be in the bio division of your evidence room. Over at Parker.”

My evidence room.

Petra said, “You guess.”

“Well,” said Ballard, “it’s not marked as leaving here, but it’s not here, so it must’ve gone somewhere, right?”

“Unless it’s lost.”

“For your sake, I hope it isn’t. Parker had some evidence problems a while back, remember? Lost samples, spoilage.”

She hadn’t heard about that. Yet another snafu that had somehow evaded the evening news.

“Anywhere else it could be?” she said.

“Can’t think of any. Unless it was sent up to Cellmark for DNA analysis. But even then, we’d keep some here and mail them a sample. Unless there wasn’t enough to be divided up- yeah, that could be it… okay, here it is. Two centimeters by one and a half. That’s about three-quarters of an inch by half an inch. Says here it was attached to a square of vinyl auto upholstery. Meaning it was thin, all we probably got were a few flakes. I guess it’s possible Cellmark got the whole thing. Why do you want it?”

“For fun,” she said, and hung up and phoned Sacramento.

The Department of Justice lab had no record of receiving any bio sample from Marta Doebbler’s murder. Parker Center’s Evidence Room hadn’t logged it in.

Big-time screw-up, but get anyone to admit it.

Time to take a closer look at the other June murders.

In Geraldo Solis’s murder book she found an interesting notation by Detective Jack Hustaad: According to Solis’s daughter, the old man had been expecting a cable repairman the day he’d been bludgeoned.

No sign Hustaad had followed up.

She phoned Wilshire Division and learned that, unlike the Hollywood cases, Solis had been transferred after Hustaad’s suicide. But not until two years after the murder had gone down. Hustaad must’ve held on to the file all that time, including a three-month lapse between his medical leave for cancer treatment and his suicide. A week after Hustaad’s funeral, Solis had been passed to a DI named Scott Weber.

Weber was still at Wilshire and Petra reached him at his desk.

He said, “I never got anywhere on it. How come you’re asking?”

She told him about a possible cold-case similarity, talked about the wound pattern on Marta Doebbler, made no mention of the other murders or June 28. Weber wanted to hear more but when she gave him a few details, he lost interest.

“Don’t see any match,” he said. “People get hit on the head.”

Not that often fatally. According to my expert.

“True,” she said.

“What do you figure for the weapon on yours?”

“Some kind of pipe.”

“Same here,” said Weber. “Any physical evidence on yours?”

Just a missing blood sample. “Not so far.”

Why was she being evasive with another detective? Because she still wasn’t comfortable with all this.

“Anyway,” said Weber.

“One question. There was a note about a cable repairman- ”

“You have a copy of the file?”

“One of our interns, doing research, pulled it and made a copy.”

“From here?” said Weber.

“I think from the duplicate at Parker.”

“Oh… yeah, it could be duped, being cold and all that.”

“The cable call,” she prompted.

“There was a cable call on yours?” said Weber.

“No, I was just wondering if that led anywhere, but obviously- ”

“You’re wondering if I followed up on it.” Weber laughed, but the sound wasn’t friendly. “I did. Even though it was two freakin’ years later. Solis’s cable company had no record of any visit. I talked to the daughter, turns out she maybe remembered something about the old man maybe saying something. Turns out no one saw any cable truck near the house. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Petra. “Sorry if I- ”

“I couldn’t get anywhere on it,” said Weber. “It’s in the icebox.”

No cable appointment. Did that mean a phony call had led Geraldo Solis to expect a visitor? If so, that could be a match to the phone booth call that had lured Marta Doebbler from the theater.

Cable appointment at midnight?

Petra recalled an incident in her own life that had spooked her. Two years ago, in the midst of a one-week vacation, a doorbell ring at eleven P.M. had jolted her out of bed. Some joker claiming to be a UPS deliveryman. She’d told him to go away, he’d persisted, said he needed a signature on a package. She’d grabbed her gun, tossed on a robe, and cracked the door. Found a haggard, brown-clad zombie. Actual UPS guy, with an actual package. Cookies from one of her sisters-in-law.