For a moment there was no sound but his breathing and the weakening splashes of blood on cement; then Lupercio searched the barn and the house and the garage and found no diamonds.

From the house he took jewelry so that this whole mess would look like a burglary gone wrong, but he knew that Suzanne Jones would instantly see it for what it was. He took a battered leather address book from a desk in a room full of books.

Lupercio was an optimist, though as he made his covert way back to his car he admitted his problems: the police would soon be crawling all over this place, Suzanne Jones would clear out and try to sell the diamonds very quickly, the Bull would be angry.

All that, and the boy could identify him.

But throughout his eventful life Lupercio had found that chaos is opportunity. He made his plan as he drove the dirt road toward town.

“We’ll call her Allison Murrieta because we don’t know who the hell she really is,” said the captain.

His name was Patmore, and he was leading an interagency task force briefing on the armed robber Allison Murrieta. He stood in a Sheriff ’s headquarters conference room beside a television screen on a stand, with a remote control in one hand and a laser pointer in the other. There were cops and deputies from all over Southern California, FBI, even a popular Channel 4 reporter. It was Monday morning and already ninety degrees.

Hood sat in the back of the room holding a cup of coffee on his knee. Marlon had put him on the task force because they needed bodies and Hood could take the hours out of his patrol schedule. Overtime was always good. Marlon seemed fascinated by the masked robber.

Patmore cued up a series of stills of Allison’s face, taken from a video of her robbing a Taco Bell up in Van Nuys.

The first thing Hood thought was that Allison seemed to be hamming it up for the camera, then when Patmore rolled the whole video clip Hood realized she really was hamming it up. She was enjoying herself, pointing a big barreled derringer at the video shooter, who backed up squealing like a teenager on a thrill ride. Then Allison whipped the gun back at the clerk, who smiled big-eyed as he stuffed the bills into a plastic Taco Bell bag. The other clerk looked uncertain how she should react to all this, then she grinned. Christ, thought Hood, is this what it takes to entertain people anymore?

The second thing Hood thought was that Allison Murrieta looked like Suzanne Jones.

He lifted his coffee and sat back. He studied the shape of her body and her face, comparing it to what he’d seen the day before down in Valley Center. I caught you checking out my legs and just about everything else. True enough, Hood thought, which gave him some pretty clear images to work with. He wondered if Allison’s hair might be a wig. He tried to imagine her with Suzanne’s brown waves and no mask. Look at the jawline, he thought, and the forehead and the tip of her chin-what do you see?

Well, he wasn’t sure what he saw.

He remembered that Suzanne Jones had pretty hands, but Allison Murrieta wore gloves.

Patmore was saying that she was suspected of thirty-four armed robberies of various southland retail businesses in the last eighteen months, good for over twenty-five thousand dollars. In addition she was suspected of four Auto Trader scams where she set up marks dumb enough to bring cash to buy used high-end cars, such as the one up on Laurel Canyon over the weekend. These jobs had gotten her another ninety-six thousand dollars. Patmore said that Allison Murrieta had also stolen at least twenty-two high-end vehicles for the so-called export market, which meant the cars were sold whole-usually out of country-instead of chopped for parts.

“We know this because she’s left her card in place of twenty-two very fine automobiles,” Patmore said. “And God knows how many more of her cards blew away, or maybe she just ran out and had to get more printed up. In our estimation those vehicles have gotten her something in the ballpark of one million dollars. So she’s doing okay for herself. We’ve got reason to believe she’s lifting plenty of Toyotas and Fords, too, but she only brags about the high-end stuff. Oh, here’s the card she leaves.”

He clicked the remote, and the screen almost filled with an enlargement of Allison Murrieta’s card. It looked like a standard rectangular business card, but the paper was pale pink and the writing was a graceful black cursive:

YOU’VE BEEN ROBBED BY

ALLISON MURRIETA

HAVE A NICE DAY

“Ten years ago, we’d have been all over the print shops, but now anybody can make these with a PC and a printer,” said Patmore. “The card stock you can get at the big office stores.”

Next he ran another cell-phone video, of Allison Murrieta holding up a Huntington Beach Blockbuster. This time the clerk-a big boy with a bad complexion and his hands in the air-froze and backed away from the cash register. Allison Murrieta jumped the counter and bagged the money herself. The boy was backed against the far side of the employee pen, and when Allison turned her attention and gun to him, he slumped unconscious in a dead faint. She said “Shit” quietly, then straddled the kid and tried to slap him awake. The video shooter actually stepped forward to the counter to get the shot, and Allison wheeled and aimed the cavernous barrel of the derringer straight at the camera.

For just a second Hood clearly saw the imminent death and destruction that nobody in these videos except the big boy seemed to be aware of. Even Allison Murrieta looked like she was acting out a part. The clerks were supporting cast.

But Hood knew how quickly things could happen. That was the first lesson you learned in Anbar province. So you had to change the way you drew conclusions. You had to see every moment of silence as an explosion or a burst of gunfire, every quiet alley as an ambush, every piece of roadside clutter as an improvised explosive device, every helpful citizen as a suicide bomber. Allison Murrieta didn’t know any of that. The clerks didn’t either, except maybe the boy who fainted. Which was why, Hood thought, somebody was due to get killed at one of her stickups. It was a wonder it hadn’t happened yet. Then, Allison Murrieta would turn from a popular televised news bite into a murderer, and some outraged citizen or off-duty cop would take her down in the middle of one of these performances. Or try to. Hood figured the derringer was at least.40-caliber by the diameter of the twin barrels.

Patmore explained that she’d driven a different vehicle for almost every stickup-all stolen and quickly dumped. Of course they’d dusted them for prints and gone through them for hair and fiber, but no prints because of the gloves, and plenty of random hair and fiber that might or might not relate to her.

“I’m going to just let some video run here,” said Patmore. “It’s all pretty much the same. Some is taken off security cameras, some from cell phone cameras. I think what it mainly shows is that this dingbat is going to end up shooting somebody if we don’t get to her first, and the whole deal is going to turn sour.”

Amen to that, thought Hood.

Allison robbed a Pizza Hut. Allison robbed a Starbucks. Allison robbed a Burger King, another Taco Bell, a Subway, a Payless Shoes, a Circuit City and a Radio Shack. She hardly said a word, Hood noted. All you needed was a gun and a mask and people instinctively knew what to do.

Then Patmore cued up a map of greater Los Angeles. It went as far north as Fillmore and as far south as Temecula, and all the way from San Bernardino to the Pacific Ocean. There were red triangles marking the armed robberies and black squares marking the boosted cars.