Danny drove to a bar in Chinatown. After two shots of house bonded, he knew this was his last day as Homicide brass: when he told Considine Ted Krugman was shot, he’d be shot back to the West Hollywood Squad, packing some large blame if Ellis Loew thought he’d jeopardized the chance for a successful grand jury. He could keep looking for HIM on his off-hours—but there was a good chance Felix Gordean would talk to his golf buddies Sheriff Biscailuz and Al Dietrich and he’d get dumped back into uniform or jail duty. He’d made an enemy of Gene Niles and pissed off Dudley Smith and Mike Breuning; Karen Hiltscher wouldn’t play pratgirl for him anymore; if Niles could prove he B&E’d 2307, he’d be in real trouble.

Two more shots; warm wisps edging out the gloom. He had a friend with rank and juice—if he could make up for blowing his decoy job, he could still ride Considine’s coattails. A last shot; HIM again, HIM pure and abstract, like there was never a time when he didn’t exist, even though they’d been together only a few weeks. He thought of HIM free of Reynolds Loftis and last night with Claire, taking it back chronologically, stopping at Augie Duarte dead on a stainless steel slab.

The facial cuts. Jump forward to last night’s file work. His instinct: the killer knew Marty Goines’ pal—the youth with the bandaged face—and drew sexual inspiration from him. Jump to Thomas Cormier, whose wolverines were overfed—worshiped?— during the summer of ‘42, Sleepy Lagoon summer, when zoot sticks were most in use. Cormier’s interpretation: a neighborhood kid. Jump to Joredco. They hired youths, maybe youths out of skid row day labor, where they didn’t keep records. The burn boy was white; all the high school referrals were Mex and Jap, except for the non-play retard. Maybe the workers he talked to never met the kid because he only worked there briefly, maybe they forgot about him, maybe they just didn’t notice him. Jump forward to now. The burned-face boy was a burglar—Listerine Chester Brown tagged him as burglarizing with Goines circa ‘43 to ‘44, his face bandaged. If he was the one who stole Thomas Cormier’s wolverine some eighteen months after his summer of ‘42 worship, and he was a local kid, he might have committed other burglaries in the Bunker Hill area during that time period.

Danny drove to Rampart Station, the LAPD division that handled Bunker Hill felonies. Mal Considine’s name got him the squad lieutenant’s attention; a few minutes later he was in a musty storeroom checking boxes of discarded occurrence reports.

The boxes were marked according to year; Danny found two grocery cartons stencilled “1942.” The reports inside were loose, the multi-page jobs stapled together with no carbons in between. There was no rhyme or reason to the order they were filed in— purse snatchings, muggings, petty thefts, burglaries, indecent exposures and loiterings were all lumped together. Danny sat down on a box of ‘48 reports and dug in.

He scanned upper right corners for penal code numbers— Burglary, 459.1. The two boxes for ‘42 yielded thirty-one; location was his next breakdown step. He carried the reports into the squadroom, sat at an empty desk facing a wall map of Rampart Division and looked for Bunker Hill street names to match. Four reports in, he got one; six reports in, three more. He memorized the ten north-south and eight east-west blocks of the Hill, tore through the rest of the pages and ended with eleven burglaries, unsolved occurrences, on Bunker Hill in the year 1942. And the eleven addresses were all within walking distance of Thomas Cormier’s house and the Joredco Dental Lab.

Next was dates.

Danny flipped through the reports again quickly; the time and date of occurrence were typed at the bottom of each first page. May 16, 1942; July 1, 1942; May 27, 1942; May 9, 1942; June 16, 1942, and six more to make eleven: an unsolved burglary spree, May 9 to August 1, 1942. His head buzzing, he read “Items Stolen”—and saw why Rampart didn’t put out beaucoup men to catch the burglar:

Trinkets, family portraits, costume jewelry, cash out of purses and wallets. A deco wall clock. A cedar cigar humidor. A collection of glass figurines. A stuffed ringneck pheasant, a stuffed bobcat mounted on rosewood.

More HIM, more not Loftis HIM. It had to be.

Danny tingled, like he was being dangled on electric strings. He went back to the storeroom, found the ‘43 and ‘44 boxes, looked through them and got zero Bunker Hill trinket jobs—the only burglary occurrence reports for those years denoted real 459.1’s, real valuables taken; burglary reports resulting in arrest had already been checked City- and Countywide. Danny finished and kicked at the boxes; two facts kicked him.

The killer was ID’d as middle-aged; he had to be connected to the wolverine-worshiping burglar—a youth—who was emerging from today’s work. Chester Brown told him that Marty Goines and his burned-face accomplice B&E’d in the San Fernando Valley ‘43 to ‘44; station houses out there might have occurrence reports—he could roll there after he muscled a certain Commie stagehand. And summer ‘42 was the height of the wartime blackout, curfew was rigidly enforced and field interrogation cards were written up on people caught out after 10:00 P.M.— when the wolverine lover was most likely prowling. If the cards were saved— Danny tore the storeroom apart, throwing empty boxes; he sweated out his booze lunch, got sprayed with cobwebs, mildew and mouse turds. He found a box marked “FI’s ‘41—’43,” thumbed back the first few cards and saw that they were—amazingly—in chronological order. He kept flipping; the late spring and summer of ‘42 yielded eight names: eight white men aged nineteen to forty-seven stopped for being out after curfew, questioned and released.

The cards were filled out slapdash: all had the name, race and date of birth of the interrogee; only half had home addresses listed—in most cases downtown hotels. Five of the men would now be middle-aged and possibles for HIM; the other three were youths who could be the burned-face boy pre-burns—or—if he was tangential to the case—Thomas Cormier’s neighborhood kid wolverine lover.

Danny pocketed the cards, drove to a pay phone and called Jack Shortell at the Hollywood squadroom. The squad lieutenant put the call through; Shortell came on the line sounding harried. “Yeah? Danny?”

“It’s me. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, except I’m getting the fisheye from every City bull in the place, like all of a sudden I’m worse than worse than poison. What have you got?”

“Names, maybe a hot one right in the middle. I talked to that Cormier guy and hit Joredco, and I couldn’t put them straight together, but I’m damn sure our guy got kissing close to Cormier’s wolverines. You remember that old burglary accomplice of Marty Goines I told you about?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I’ve got a line on him, and I just about think he plays. There was a bunch of unsolved burglaries on Bunker Hill, May to August of ‘42. Mickey Mouse stuff clouted, right near Cormier and Joredco. LAPD was enforcing curfew then, and I picked out eight possible FI cards from the area—May through August. I’ve got a hunch the killings stem from then—the Sleepy Lagoon killing and the SLDC time—and I need you to do eliminations—current address, blood type, dental tech background, criminal record and the rest.”

“Go, I’m writing it down.”

Danny got out his cards. “Some have addresses, some don’t. One, James George Whitacre, DOB 10/5/03, Havana Hotel, Ninth and Olive. Two, Ronald NMI Dennison, 6/30/20, no address. Three, Coleman Masskie, 5/9/23, 236 South Beaudry. Four, Lawrence Thomas Waznicki with a K-I, 11/29/08, 641 1/4 Bunker Hill Avenue. Five, Leland NMI Hardell, 6/4/24, American Eagle Hotel, 4th and Hill Streets. Six, Loren Harold Nadick, 3/2/02, no address. Seven, David NMI Villers, 1/15/04, no address. And Bruno Andrew Gaffney, 7/29/06, no address.”