• • •

Hood found Frank Short at the Heavy Petal on Wilshire. The shop was sunny and cool and smelled of blossoms. Frank was early twenties, tall and pale, with straight brown hair in a ponytail and a gold stud in his left ear.

Hood had him get an employee to work the front, then followed Frank to his office.

It was cramped and humid and smelled not of blossoms but of bleach. Frank spoke softly and without apparent emotion. He said he would have loved a distress sale on a good piece of ice, but mainly he was curious about Barry because it was such a cool story. Barry getting killed in the shoot-out seemed appropriate, Frank said.

“I never met him, though, you know?”

Hood nodded and watched the young man. Diffident people disturbed him.

Then there was a knock on the door and a young blond woman pushed through. She wore jeans and hiking boots and a sleeveless blue plaid blouse. Her arms were wiry and tanned.

“What,” she said, looking at Hood then Frank.

“Not a problem, Ronette,” said Frank. “You’re early today.”

“I’ve got some killer protea.”

“Uh, Ronette, meet Deputy Something-or-other. He’s interested in Barry.”

She was blue-eyed and freckled and didn’t smile.

“Ronette’s one of my suppliers. I should let her show me what she’s got. That’s all I know about the diamond guy.”

On his way to the Camaro, Hood noted the faded and slouching Growers West van parked at the deliveries curb outside the store.

He interviewed three more people on Melissa’s tell-list that day. One was a very talkative hairstylist, one was a girlfriend named DeVry, one was Melissa’s Aunt Shirl. He made notes as they talked, but nothing popped or contradicted what he knew or pointed in the direction of who might have used Melissa’s generous gossip to interrupt the diamond payoff from Barry to the Asian Boyz.

The next day he tracked down the other six, putting close to two hundred and fifty miles on his old IROC. In a traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway the car began to overheat, so Hood pulled off and found a place to park and wait awhile for the radiator to cool before he put in some fresh fluid from the trunk.

He got more names, but each new possibility was further removed from Barry than even Frank, who had never met him. Hood sensed the degrees of separation widening with every interview, wondered if he was sniffing the wrong trail. Then he worried that he might have overlooked something obvious, or maybe seen something rough and ordinary on the outside but missed the gleaming diamond within.

That Friday evening Hood was off patrol duty and he met Lenny Overbrook down in Muscle Beach. They joined the skaters and boarders and joggers and walkers northbound on the sidewalk. The ocean flashed silver and black and an old red biplane lugged a banner that said “Lose 20 lbs. in One Month-No Drugs” across the powder blue sky. The outdoor stalls offered everything from falafel to Mexican sandals to pendants with the wearer’s name hand-painted on a grain of rice. Hood smelled incense and tobacco.

Lenny Overbrook was slight and short, with a ramrod posture and a luckless face. He still had a military haircut but Hood knew he’d been discharged nine months ago, just before his own tour had ended. Lenny wore jeans and sneakers and a light jacket against the breeze.

Hood had first encountered Lenny in a Hamdaniya living room in which an Iraqi father and his three sons had been shot to death. Hood had blundered into the crime scene during the tail end of a late evening firefight, drawn by a ferocious outburst of automatic fire. In the hot, smoke-filled twilight Hood saw soldiers running from the house-six of them-and he’d yelled for their attention, but they ignored him as they vanished into the labyrinthine Hamdaniya alleys.

Hood rounded a doorway inside the house and saw a young corporal wiping down an AK-47 with his shirttail. When he was done, he placed it in the hands of a bullet-riddled Iraqi man slumped against a blood-splattered wall.

At that moment Hood knew that for the rest of his life he would be tied to this bloody young marine corporal who positioned the machine gun in the dead man’s lap then turned with a look of blue-eyed innocence. That look would come back to Hood in dream after dream after dream.

I wish I hadn’t seen that, soldier.

You see what I did.

I saw the others.

There weren’t no others.

And that was how Hood’s investigation went. That was what it all boiled down to. Lenny Overbrook from a holler in West Virginia refused to admit that there had been other soldiers with him in the Hamdaniya living room when the Iraqis were slaughtered. Nothing Hood could do had an effect on Overbrook. When Hood said that he’d seen Overbrook wipe down the AK, the man shook his head and denied that he’d ever touched the gun at all. When Hood said he’d seen six men leaving the home where the dead family lay, Overbrook said he was alone in the house. When Hood turned Overbrook over to senior investigators, nothing changed. The little corporal told the same story, day after day. In spite of the evidence and Hood’s testimony, the senior NCIS field people wanted to believe it.

Hood interviewed the soldiers in some of the door-to-door platoons but he couldn’t identify anyone with certainty-the massacre had taken place in late evening and the soldiers were running, laden with battle-rattle, their faces hidden under their helmets. During these interviews Hood learned the full meaning of contempt. The soldiers thought he was there to betray them. He sensed that there was a bullet out there looking for his back.

Hood quickly learned that the Iraqi father ran a small produce stall in a nearby marketplace. The two youngest boys helped him, and the oldest son was a journeyman auto mechanic employed by an uncle. They were nonvio lent, moderate Shiites, used to being subordinate under the old regime.

Hood also learned that Lenny Overbrook had an IQ of seventy-two, had not yet completed his junior year requirements for high school when he joined the marines on his eighteenth birthday. He’d never had a grade above a C-minus. He’d been working full-time at a filling station when he enlisted.

Even with the crude investigative tools at Hood’s disposal, it was apparent that the Iraqis-the father was forty-two years old, the sons were eighteen, fifteen and thirteen-had been shot sixty-one times with six different weapons. But Overbrook said no, that wasn’t possible because he’d done it himself in self-defense against an insurgent with an AK. He had acted alone. He had done what he thought was right. It all happened “so dang fast.”

When Hood did the toolmarks comparison on Overbrook’s dust-choked M-16, he found that only one of the sixty-seven casings recovered from the Hamdaniya home had been fired through it.

When Hood explained to him that this was a capital case, that the navy could execute him for murder if he insisted on confessing to it, Overbrook had just turned his clear blue eyes on Hood and nodded.

So Hood released him. He figured if he couldn’t even identify the six men who’d done most of the shooting, he wouldn’t allow a man who had fired one shot to take the rap for killing four people. Overbrook was willing to lay down his life for six men who ran out on him, but Hood wasn’t willing to let him.

Now, nine months later, Overbrook looked at Hood with the same calm conviction with which he had falsely confessed to the slaughter of four people.

“I want to tell the truth,” said Overbrook.

“It’s too damned late, Lenny. It’s over.”

“Nothing is over when it’s still in your heart.”

“I’m sorry it’s in your heart but you had your chance.”