They looked at him with stoic alertness as he came up the steps toward them. The night was hot and still, and in the near distance the two illuminated freeways rose against the darkness like monuments.

Hood caught the leader’s eye and nodded. He remembered the guy’s name from the department gang book: Kyle Ko. Hood had seen him several times in a popular Garvey Avenue Internet cafe, always with a different pretty girl.

“Sorry your friends got killed,” said Hood. “I was the one who found them. I’m Hood.”

“Too bad you didn’t find them when they were still alive, Hood.”

The two others were younger. Kyle looked at them, and they moved down the catwalk out of the light, toward the window where Hood had first looked down on the massacre.

Kyle was midtwenties. He was tall and slender with a short brush cut and a loose silk shirt for the heat. Hood now saw that Kyle looked like the dead car painter, the guy who was very young.

Hood asked him for a smoke and leaned in when the lighter clicked and flamed. The smoke went to his brain in a once familiar way.

“What happened in there?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

“That would get us exactly nowhere.”

“We talked all day to people like you.” Kyle flicked his cigarette butt off the catwalk, and Hood watched it pop and sparkle on the asphalt below. “And it got us nowhere, all right.”

Hood told him he’d never seen the Wilton Street Boyz with Mara Salvatrucha, wondered if they’d gotten together for some business.

Kyle shrugged and looked out at the freeways.

Hood played his only real card. “Sorry about your brother. I’ve got two. Older.”

Kyle looked at him.

“Talk to me,” said Hood. “I can’t put ten dead men out of my mind. I bet you can’t either.”

“He was fifteen years old.”

Hood watched Kyle and listened to the drone of the cars elevated in the night beyond them.

“And he followed you into the gang life even though you told him not to.”

Kyle locked eyes with Hood. “Cohen owed us seventy-five grand. Gambling. He brought us diamonds instead. MS-13 found out about the transaction. Either they took the diamonds or you people did. So Mark died for nothing.”

“There weren’t any diamonds when we got here.”

“There were plenty of diamonds before you got here. Tony called me from the office. Cohen brought them in a red backpack at ten-fifty P.M.”

“We turned this place over more than once. No gems.”

“That’s interesting, then, isn’t it?”

“Where were you?”

“Business or pleasure, you know-what’s the fucking difference?”

One of his Internet cafe beauties, thought Hood. Add some more guilt over his little brother’s death. Of course it was very possible that Kyle was lying and he’d carried off the loot himself.

“Maybe you came by an hour after the call,” said Hood. “You were wondering why Tony hadn’t bothered to update you. You sized it up quick, took the red backpack and split.”

“I wouldn’t be here now.”

“This is exactly where you’d be.”

“Maybe that’s what happened, Deputy. If so, then good for me. I’ll drop twenty thousand on Mark’s funeral, give the rest to the Girl Scouts.”

Then the idea hit Hood that MS-13 was tipped to the payoff either by Barry-who could promise them, say, half the diamonds he owed the Asian Boyz-or by one of the Boyz who knew the score and had a grievance. Gangs had internal problems just like any other organization. Kyle obviously knew the score and was conveniently out with one of his girlfriends.

Kyle was still staring at Hood, mad-dogging him, which was not something a Sheriff’s deputy got very often. Hood wondered if Kyle was hearing his thoughts. But Hood couldn’t see Kyle leading his little brother into a thing like that.

“Don’t stare at me like a damned mule,” said Hood. “I’m trying to help you.”

Kyle looked away and lit another cigarette.

“Cohen was greedy and afraid,” he said. “This is a bad combination. He gambled away most of his money, then came to us. We helped him and he gambled away more. When he had no more cash, he said diamonds came cheaper to him than dollars. He made us the offer. But he invited MS-13 to take half and make sure not a Wilton Street Boy was left alive. That was his idea of friendship and honest business. Salvadorans? They’ll do shit like this. But they didn’t know how tough and smart the Boyz are. Even the fifteen-year-old. It got out of control. But one of them must have survived. He figured the cops were on their way, so he got away with the rocks and his life.”

Hood dropped the cigarette butt and ground it through the metal ramp with the toe of his duty shoe. He looked out at the young gangsters down the catwalk. Kyle had just said out loud what Hood had been thinking since he saw the bloody mess, but it still wasn’t sitting right. The abandoned weapons and the dead men’s full wallets and the five-thousand-dollar watch left on Barry Cohen’s wrist still had him wondering.

“A witness saw an old Lincoln Continental parked off Emberly last night. Black, good condition, driver talking on a cell phone. Sound familiar?”

“Not me. I got that Suburban.”

Hood looked back at the parking area. “Maybe Barry had trouble keeping a secret.”

Kyle shook his head in disgust, blew smoke. “One night at Caesars Palace he tried to tell his girlfriend everything but I stopped him. If you got half an ounce of bourbon inside Barry, you couldn’t shut the guy up. He loved bourbon. Worry out loud. That was his favorite thing to do-worry out loud. No telling what he said to people. Dangerous asshole. Cost me a brother and seventy-five grand and I’ll piss on his grave the first chance I get.”

“I need the girlfriend’s name and number.”

“Melissa something.”

In the office Kyle dug a business card out of the desk and flew it across to Hood.

Lupercio walked along the stream that ran behind Suzanne Jones’s property. He had a fishing rod in one hand and a container of worms in the other. A straw cowboy hat shielded him from the sun. The small bass in the stream were easy to catch and toss back, and he did this while he picked his way upstream watching the Jones compound.

Across a small tan meadow there was a main house, a detached garage, a barn and four small casitas. They were all painted soft pink, except for the red barn. There was a grassy swale between the buildings and an enormous oak tree in its center with two rope swings hanging side by side from a low branch and three wooden picnic tables in the shade. The paint on the buildings was fresh, and there were flowers in beds alongside the house and garage.

A teenaged boy in a trucker’s cap roared up a half-pipe on his skateboard, caught air on the free fall and extended his legs at the last minute to crunch down, keep his balance and zoom up the opposite side. The skate run had two half-pipes and a couple of vertical walls and a slalom course. It looked homemade. It was painted putty gray, and it crawled with a snake’s nest of spray-painted graffiti that Lupercio, once fluent in all the languages of the L.A. taggers, couldn’t make much sense of. Over the years, the skateboarders had stolen the old gangland swirls, then the advertisers had stolen them from the boarders. At first it had surprised Lupercio that the style of a full-on, leave-or-die turf tag you might find in Compton could show up a year later on a TV commercial for teenagers’ skateboard shoes. Now the boy flew up the half-pipe for the third time and wiped out. Lupercio watched him hit then roll down the last few feet and sit for a second panting in the ferocious heat. The boy looked at him because he knew he was being watched, then sprung up, fetched his board and started in again.

From the shore of the pond another boy, half the size and age of the first, was fishing. His movements were relaxed but practiced, and when he flung the lure out and up, it sailed through the air and plopped halfway across. Then he stood still for a moment and let the lure sink before reeling it in a few feet at a time. Then he’d wait again. Over and over. Lupercio recognized the patience of the fisherman because he had it, too.