“Watch the alcohol, son,” said his father as he turned off the light.

Before falling asleep, Hood decided on law enforcement.

Now Hood sat in the trailer in Anza Valley that served as the Growers West office. It was late morning. Through the windows he could see a tan meadow and rocky hills and the greenhouses battered by the desert wind, their white skins hanging in shreds.

Hood looked out at the ruined greenhouses. They were difficult to comprehend because he was still back in Madeline’s courtyard. It was two days later and he still hadn’t really come away from it yet. He felt like he had left something important there but he didn’t know if there was a word for it, let alone a way to get it back.

Ronette West lit a cigarette and looked at him with annoyance. “I already told you I’ve never heard of Suzanne Jones. So you just drove all the way down here to hear it again.”

“I ran a records-and-warrants check on you before I made the drive,” Hood said.

“I’m clean.”

“You’re on work furlough for felony possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. You’ve got a pager on your ankle.”

She exhaled a mouthful of smoke at him. “I’m not using anymore. Are you threatening me?”

Hood shook his head and pictured Lupercio’s tiny boot prints in the blood on Madeline Jones’s courtyard.

“You sure are dreary for someone who grows flowers,” said Hood. “Aren’t they supposed to make you happy?”

“I am happy. I don’t like cops. You guys badgered me into selling that coke to you. Week after week after week. You literally pressured me into it. To a fucking narc.”

“You’d have sold it to someone else.”

“I needed capital to keep my business afloat. But I kicked, I’m clean, and I don’t know Suzanne Jones.”

“But you knew about Barry Cohen’s problem.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Frank’s a talker and I’m a listener. It was like a soap opera. Melissa blabbed to him and anybody else in earshot. She wanted her ten grand back.”

Hood had the idea that Suzanne wouldn’t talk to Ronette West about gambling debts and diamonds. But someone else might.

He took a DMV picture of Suzanne Jones from his wallet and set it on the desk in front of Ronette. She stubbed out her cigarette in a Raiders ashtray.

“Allison somebody,” said Ronette.

“Tell me about Allison,” said Hood.

“She showed up in a new red Kompressor. Said she lived in Valley Center, wanted to grow some tropicals.”

“Greenhouse flowers?”

“That’s what I said. She wanted to see how you do it. Which, believe it or not when you look outside, I actually know a lot about. I was in county lockup for a week last winter, worst storm of the year. Worst week of my life. My entire business got blown away and I was sitting in a cell, thanks to you… people.”

Ronette sat back and crossed her arms. She looked out the windows, and Hood followed her gaze to the ruined screens of the greenhouses, the PVC frames splintered by the storm, the irrigation lines dangling. There were stacks of empty black planting trays everywhere, like tossed poker chips. Only one greenhouse appeared whole and perhaps functional, and Hood figured it was where Frank’s protea had come from.

“Did you talk to Allison about Barry Cohen?”

“I mentioned him. She was easy to talk to, you know? We kind of hit it off. She felt bad about how fucked up my greenhouses got and I told her right off how they got that way. I mean, she could see the damned pager on my leg. Then she said something about money solving legal problems and I said unless money is the problem. And she said only lack of money is a problem and I thought about Frank’s story and I made a crack about running out of money and using diamonds instead. It went from there. Barry, the gambling, the Asian gangsters, the pissed-off girlfriend and her ten grand. Allison wanted to know more. So.”

“So?”

“So. I put her in touch with Melissa,” said Ronette. “Then I shut my mouth and washed my hands of that whole thing. I was trying to rebuild this business, you know? Next thing I hear Barry’s gunned down up in L.A. somewhere-I read it in the papers.”

“Give me Allison’s numbers.”

Ronette came up with a phone number and that was all.

“Good luck,” said Hood.

“It’ll start when you get off my property.”

Melissa met him in the Nordstrom cafe in Beverly Hills. She had come from a manufacturer’s show. Her dark hair was weaved through with faint lavender streaks that matched her nails.

Hood asked about the woman who Ronette West put in touch with her.

“Oh,” she said, sipping her coffee drink and blushing beneath her makeup.

“Start with her name,” said Hood.

“Allison. I never asked her last name.”

“Did you meet her?”

“Never. We only talked on the phone.”

“How much did you tell her?”

“Hardly anything.”

“Melissa, if you lie to me again I’ll arrest you right here. This is a promise.”

“I told her everything.”

“Did you meet her?”

“No. That’s the truth.”

“She knew the time, the place?”

“Yeah. Everything.”

“How long did it take Allison to get your ten grand back?”

“A few days.”

“Cash?”

“In a market bag. She called and left it on my driveway.”

Hood volunteered to check credentials at the press conference Monday evening because he was no longer working two assignments.

He’d never seen so many reporters for a law enforcement news conference. Not only were the national networks and local affiliates here, but PBS, all of the big cable news outfits, several of the small ones, ten or so radio networks and stations, student newspapers and radio from half a dozen Southland universities, and maybe twenty print writers and photographers. They came from as far south as Tijuana and as far north as Portland, Oregon. Many of them were from towns and cities that Hood had never been to.

He stood at the entrance to the big room and checked the names off a master list. Well over half of the media participants weren’t on the list because they hadn’t come to a LASD press conference until now.

But no one was going to miss the story of Lupercio Maygar and the trail of blood he was leaving across the Southland, and of the vanished L.A. schoolteacher wanted for questioning as a possible witness.

So he logged in the reporters and gave them temporary passes. There was an oddly festive atmosphere. Hood gathered that the Monday conference was good timing for what must be a slow local news week. He signed in a lovely blonde from a Bakersfield radio station, but when he said he’d grown up there, she looked at him pityingly and said she was from Boulder.

When the media had all been admitted and the room was nearly full, Hood found a seat near the back. His legs were still stiff from dune climbing and running in the Bakersfield desert. He could still taste human blood, though he reasoned that this was his imagination and memory playing a trick on him. But his body was the least of it. His soul felt filthy, and the faces of Officers Jackson and Ruiz-which Hood hadn’t seen clearly until the Sunday papers-waited at the center of it. Ruiz was DOA at a Bakersfield hospital. His HIV test had come back negative.

Besides all this Hood was inordinately focused on the fact that Jackson’s riot gun had never been fired. Two shotgun blasts had killed the men, but Lupercio had not taken their weapon and used it against them. Hood had seen it in Jackson’s hands. Since that moment he’d fastened onto this anomaly like a life raft. He had used part of his bleary Sunday to read every page of Wyte’s jacket on Lupercio. There was not one mention of the man ever using a shotgun. When Hood tried to picture Lupercio trotting across the desert and into Madeline’s home with a shotgun, he couldn’t quite see it. A shotgun wasn’t an assassin’s tool. It was efficient but loud, difficult to conceal, effective only at close range. Reviewing the Bakersfield PD crime scene report, Hood saw that the shot pattern had expanded rapidly-more rapidly than even a sawed-off barrel and an open choke would suggest. It was as if the shells weren’t fired through a gun barrel at all, but from some truncated handheld contraption. A zip shotgun? Possibly. How about through his fingertips, like lightning bolts-one more example of Lupercio’s black magic? But two shotgun blasts had killed the officers, this was a fact. Each charge contained number six shot, which Hood knew was typically used for large birds such as pheasant and was fabulously destructive on a human up close. It was also a fact that no empty shot shells had been recovered.