“What would they be looking for?”

“More blood, anything out of the ordinary. It might take some time.”

“So I’d lose the car for a few days.”

“Could happen.”

“Well,” said Heubel, “I didn’t see anything anywhere else – ” He flashed a sick smile. “I looked around with a flashlight. Guess I messed up forensically.”

“Have you vacuumed the car, sir?”

“No, but my fingerprints-”

“Your prints are going to be all over the vehicle because you’re the driver. If you haven’t vacuumed and some sort of notable stain or fiber was transferred, it can be found.”

Heubel poked a finger under an eyeglass lens. “Ten percent, huh? I’d have bet ninety. Guess I’m really out of my element.”

“That’s why we’re here, sir. Would you like Detective Binchy to call for tech support?”

“Would they need to take off the door panels?”

“No, sir. They’ll use swabs, maybe do some superficial scraping, wet whatever they get in saline solution, toss in various reagents – chemicals that react with body fluids. They can do an on-spot analysis for human protein, and if it is blood, obtain an ABO typing. We’re talking a few minutes but waiting for the techs could take a whole lot longer, maybe days, so it would be best if you didn’t drive the car. In the meantime, Detective Binchy can take all your information and write a comprehensive report for our files.”

Sean kicked one shoe with the other.

Heubel said, “I do have another car to drive. Let me think about it.”

“Your choice, sir.”

“Nice to have choices,” said Heubel. “Or the illusion of such.”

As we drove away, I said, “Comprehensive report? What’s that, Sean’s punishment for wasting your time?”

“I acknowledge no such vindictiveness.”

“Planning to follow up by grounding him and taking away his Game Boy?”

He laughed. “What I will cop to is butt-covering. Guy like Heubel just might know the mayor. Last thing I need – last thing Sean needs – is cocktail chatter about how the police don’t give a crap.”

“Ah,” I said. “You were protecting the kid.”

“That’s what Uncle Milo do.”

“And who knows,” I said. “The stain could lead somewhere.”

He swiveled his head toward me. “Appeasing the rich is one thing, Alex. Conjuring up retro-Goth-neo-Mansonite vampires roaming the streets of Brentwood to butcher commodity traders is another.”

“The original Mansonites roamed Beverly Hills and Los Feliz and butchered all kinds of rich people.”

“This is a no-damage car theft perpetrated by a joyrider considerate enough to park where the owner was likely to find the damn thing.”

“Okay,” I said.

He said, “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young man.”

If Sean called in the crime scene techs to scour the Bentley, he never notified Milo.

For one week, no new murders were reported in West L.A. Cursing whatever psycho-economic-social factors were causing a peaceful autumn, Milo got to work on some old unsolveds. The murder books he looked for were missing or sketchy to the point of uselessness and he dead-ended.

On his eighth day back on the job, I phoned to see how he was doing. His captain had just relayed a directive from the police chief’s office. A rapist-killer named Cozman “Cuz” Jackson, awaiting execution in Texas, was scrambling to avoid the needle by confessing murders all over the country and promising to pinpoint the graves.

Before Texas agreed to investigate, they wanted local cops to produce some facts.

Cuz Jackson’s claimed victim in California was Antoine Beverly, a fifteen-year-old boy from South L.A. who’d vanished in Culver City sixteen years ago while selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Jackson had been living nearby at the time, in Venice, and had worked ten miles from Antoine’s magazine route, as a handyman at a Westchester animal shelter.

No sign of the Beverly file in Central Records, either. Downtown wanted Milo to search for it in West L.A. and, if he found it, recontact witnesses.

No success, so far. He said, “Time to put a fatwa on the Great Bureaucratic Satan. Let me tell you how this went down: Normally this would go to the Homicide Special boys, but they love high-profile guts and glory and this ain’t either so they lobbed a pass to West L.A. Captain figures at this point I’ll be happy with anything and tosses it to me.”

“Well,” I said, “at least there’s the novelty factor.”

“Which is?”

“A captain who takes pity.”

“Gotta go, Alex.”

The gray cloud hovering over him hadn’t cleared a bit. Maybe it was lead in his arm and residual pain.

Or spiritual erosion after two decades as a gay detective in LAPD.

That whole concept had changed, perhaps at a rate so slow it never registered in his head as progress.

As a rookie, he took pains to hide his orientation. The truth emerged anyway, leading to smirks, whispers, bursts of outright hostility. He stopped hiding but didn’t flaunt. Opened his locker more than once to find hate mail. The teamwork that forms the core of homicide work eluded him as a succession of partners heeded the whispers and requested transfers.

Making the best of the isolation, he piled up overtime and racked up one of the highest solve rates in the department. Unsure what to do with him, the department dithered to the point where civil rights advances and a jacketful of grateful letters from victims’ families made him tough to persecute.

Then an old murder brought him back to his rookie days, digging up indiscretions by the police chief, and earning him a deal: In return for not going public, he’d be promoted to lieutenant, allowed to avoid that rank’s desk duties and continue to work murders.

Shuffled out of the detectives’ room, he was stashed in a closet-sized office that had once been a storage closet, given a balky computer, the occasional assistance of untested D I’s, if no one else needed them, and told to pick his cases.

Translation: Stay out of our way and we’ll return the favor.

Another man might’ve withered. Milo took well to the arrangement, establishing a second office at a nearby Indian restaurant and closing cases with dyspeptic reliability. All the while indulging his only hobby: complaining.

His solve rate caught the eye of the new chief, a man obsessed with crime stats.

A new captain named Raymonda Grant didn’t care who anyone slept with.

Milo got a better computer, more access to backup, and continuing job flexibility.

Invitations to division barbecues never showed up in his box, but he’d never been one for socializing and it was all he could do to find time for Rick.

If life had gotten easier, he wasn’t showing it.

No doubt Antoine Beverly’s family considered their son’s case as vital as the day the boy had disappeared, but Milo’s pessimism was well founded: Sixteen years is long enough to obscure any evidence and confession-cramming’s a common death row ploy that usually leads nowhere.

Still, he should’ve been happy to work.

Or could be I was projecting because my own work, this year, was proving satisfying. Several child custody cases had actually turned out the way they should, with parents making honest attempts not to eat their young, and attorneys restraining the impulse to destroy. Sometimes my reports even ended up on the desks of intelligent judges who took the time to read them.

I fantasized about a kinder gentler world, maybe in reaction to all the brutality on the front page.

When I raised the possibility with Robin, she smiled and stroked the dog and said, “Could be one of the positive side effects of global warming. We blame it for everything bad.”

She and I were back together after our second breakup in ten years, living in the house above Beverly Glen that she’d designed and I’d found tomb-like in her absence. She’d received a six-figure commission from a dot-com mogul to build a quartet of hand-carved instruments – guitar, mandolin, mandola, mandocello – a project that would occupy her for the best part of the year.