Hood heard the low murmur rise up from the audience-they were impressed by Allison’s success, by the sheer numbers she had run up. Hood noticed that Marlon was shaking his head in wonder.

“That’s a lot of activity,” said Marlon.

“Maybe you can see a pattern,” said the captain. “Shelly, you do these radius plots for bank jobs, don’t you?”

Hood watched the FBI woman nod. “There’s nothing directional in this one,” she said. “Nothing that looks like a pattern of entry or exit. It’s more round, which usually makes us look at the center. That would be, what, Pomona, Fullerton?”

“Yeah, about that,” said Patmore.

“Did you plot time of day?”

“Right here,” said Patmore. “You’re dealing with the big boys, Shelly.”

Chuckles, scattered applause, one “eee-haw.”

The time-of-day map was just like the first one, but above each red triangle or black square was a date and time.

The roomful of law enforcers went quiet for a moment.

Hood saw patterns, general as they were. The jobs were pulled close to freeways-not hard in greater L.A. Almost nothing at rush hour. Heavy on Saturdays and Sundays, light on Mondays, hardly a Friday at all.

“She knows the traffic,” said Shelly. “She avoids rush hour and likes the weekends.”

“Easier getaways,” said Patmore.

“Look at all the three o’clocks and eight o’clocks she’s pulled,” said Shelly. “Just before, then right after the crush. That’s good timing. Just enough traffic to get lost in.”

Hood remembered what Suzanne Jones said: It’s an hour and forty minutes this time of night, without traffic.

He looked at the time-of-day map. It was a big area, but there were roads all over most of it. Thousands of miles of roads, hundreds of miles of freeways. That was the thing about L.A.-in just two hours, at the right time, you could be way up Highway 395 or Interstate 5 to the deserts north, or just about make the Arizona border to the east, or be sitting in a cantina in Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico.

Or be back to your family in Valley Center.

“I’m going to change gears here,” said Patmore. “I brought in Dave Boyer from NBC because he’s… Well, Dave, maybe you should just tell it.”

Hood had watched Dave Boyer on and off for the last five years. Boyer was an affable, wide-faced ex-quarterback for USC. He did mostly local color, human interest and an occasional exotic adventure. Boyer had talked to Hood once about a “young deputies back from the war” story that never aired. Hood always thought he was a good reporter: fair and curious, reluctant to incite fear.

Boyer came up and introduced himself, then pushed a disc into the player below the monitor. Patmore gave him the laser pointer and remote.

“I got this FedEx last Friday,” said Boyer. “From our friend Allison. Let me know if you can’t hear it in the back.”

Boyer pushed something on the remote, then crossed his arms and stared down at the floor.

Allison appeared on-screen, black hair loosened from the usual ponytail, crystal-studded mask in place. She was sitting at what might have been a hotel room desk, visible from the waist up. The window or mirror behind her was draped with what looked like a wine-colored blanket or bedspread. She wore a tailored Western-cut blouse, black satin and long-sleeved, with red piping along the pocket slits and mother-of-pearl buttons. Her earrings were gold hoops. The pendant around her neck looked to be diamonds and rubies. Her gloves were black and shiny enough to look wet. An ivory-handled derringer lay on the desk in front of her.

“Hi, Dave, I’m Allison Murrieta, as I’m sure you noticed. Love your reporting. I especially liked it when you went to Indonesia and got attacked by the Komodo dragon, but I’m glad you weren’t hurt. I thought the big-wave surfing story from Baja was good, too, how the surfers risk their lives for not much money. I did not care for the La Brea Tar Pits story because I find the pits boring and smelly.”

Her voice was electronically scrambled but understandable. The effect was eerie and B movie at the same time. It was an octave lower than it should be, thought Hood.

“But we’re not here to talk about you, are we? I’ve been watching your network’s coverage of me, as well as the other networks, too, and I want to set the record straight. I am the great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Joaquin Murrieta. Our family tree has been accurately recorded. Joaquin was born in 1830 in Mexico and I was born in 1976 in Los Angeles. I am a physical and a spiritual descendant. He was hunted down and shot dead in 1853. They cut off his head, put it in a jar and displayed it for money in Northern California cities. Two other men were shot and beheaded along with him, because the posse wasn’t sure which one was Joaquin. The posse was led by the so-called last of the Texas Rangers, a guy named Harry Love, of all things. The behead ings were not done purely for profit and cruelty, though there was certainly some profit and cruelty in it. Back then, before widespread photography and refrigeration and fingerprinting, it was common to cut off a dead man’s head so they could ID him later. The man who actually cut off Joaquin’s head was named Billy Henderson, and he was self-admittedly haunted by Joaquin’s headless ghost until the day he died. In every appearance as a ghost, Joaquin told Billy that he would not rest until he got his head back.”

With this, Allison ran a gloved index finger across her throat.

“Think about that,” she said. “What they actually did to him.”

Then she cleared her just-cut throat and shook back her hair.

Hood wondered if it was a wig, and if so, where did you go to in L.A. to get a good one? Or in Valley Center.

“They say that Joaquin’s head was lost in the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but this is not true,” said Allison. “It was actually stolen by his great-grandson, Ramón-or Raymond, if you must-and passed down the generations to me. I have it now and keep it in a cool place where I live. His face is still very handsome, just as the books say he was. Frankly, his color isn’t good. But the main trouble is his long black hair fell out decades ago and now it’s just like black grass at the bottom of a lake. Historians have disagreed on the preservative medium-some claimed it was brandy, others said whiskey, others said medicinal alcohol. I don’t know what it was at first, but I can tell everyone this: Joaquin came to me in a brown liquid that smelled slightly of alcohol and meat, so I switched it out for a premium brand of rubbing alcohol and now he looks a lot better. I was extra careful with his hair.”

History, thought Hood.

A history teacher.

The room was quiet. From Hood’s point of view in the back, he saw dozens of capable and dedicated law enforcers all looking at a TV screen from which a masked outlaw held them to a fascinated silence. It was reality television-a real person with a real gun.

Allison signed off:

“Okay, Dave, I’ve got plenty to say about the way they treated Joaquin all those hundred and fifty years ago, but I’ve also got some cars to boost and some chain stores and fast-food outlets to rob, so I’m going to say good-bye for now.

“Oh, as you know, I’ve been donating a generous percentage of my earnings to various southland nonprofit organizations. The following organizations will vouch for receiving cash donations from Allison Murrieta, unless of course they’ve pocketed the money: the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club, the Olivewood Home for Children in Orange, the Assistance League of La Cañada /Flintridge, the Laguna Club, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Project Concern in San Diego, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Amnesty International, the Heart Association and-I love this one-the Los Angeles Police Foundation!

“Now, obviously, you can put this video of me on TV if you want. I might even do a Channel Four interview with you sometime. The public is ready for me. Your ratings will spike. Just let me tell them and you and everybody else out there not to mess with me while I’m working. I get a little nervous sometimes when I’m onstage and that little derringer is loaded and the trigger is light and I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Don’t any of you try to be a hero. Stay out of my way.