I left the house at fifteen minutes after four the next morning, leaving Lucy warm in my bed.

Earlier that night, when she had come to me after work, we decided that she would live with me for the two weeks that Ben was away. We had gone down the mountain to her apartment, and brought back clothes and the personal items she would need. I watched Lucy place her clothes in my closet, and her toiletries in my bath, letting myself toy with a fantasy of permanence. I had lived alone for a long time, but sharing my house with her seemed natural and unforced, as right as if I had shared myself with her my entire life. If that's not love, it's close enough.

We ate take-out from an Italian place in Laurel Canyon, drank red wine, and listened to the swing sounds of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on the stereo.

We made love on the living-room couch, and after that, as she traced the scars on my body in the bronze glow of candlelight, I felt a wetness on my back. When I looked, she was crying.

"Luce?" As gentle as a butterfly's kiss.

"If I lost you, I'd die."

I touched her face. "You won't lose me. Am I not the World's Greatest Detective?"

"Of course you are." I could barely hear her.

"You won't lose me, Lucille. You won't even be able to get rid of me."

She kissed me then, and we snuggled close and fell asleep.

I worked my way down the dark mountain curves under a sky that was clear and bright and empty of stars. No fire now. No heat now. The heat was waiting for later.

When I first came to Los Angeles, I was fresh out of the Army and accustomed to using the constellations to chart my passing. The L.A. skies are so bright with light that only the most brilliant stars are visible, and those are faint and murky. I used to joke that it was this absence of stars that caused so many people to lose their bearings, but back then, I thought answers were easy. Now I know better. Some of us find our way with a single light to guide us; others lose themselves even when the star field is as sharp as a neon ceiling. Ethics may not be situational, but feelings are. We learn to adjust, and, over time, the stars we use to guide ourselves come to reside within rather than without.

Man. I'm something at 4 A.M.

At four-forty I left the freeway for empty downtown streets and a pool of yellow light called Tara 's Coffee Bar. Two uniformed cops sat at the counter, along with a dozen overweight, tired men who looked like they worked in the printing plant for the Times. Everyone was scarfing eggs and bacon and buttered toast, and no one seemed worried about cholesterol or calories.

The only man there wearing a suit said, "You're Cole, right?" Soft, so that no one else could hear.

"That's right. Thanks for meeting me."

Jerry Swetaggen hunched over his coffee as if it were a small fire, keeping him warm. He was a big guy like Rusty, with a pink face and ash-blond hair. He looked younger than he probably was, sort of like a bloated fourteen-year-old who'd been dressed in a hand-me-down suit. The suit looked as if it hadn't been pressed in weeks, but maybe he'd been up most of the night.

"Did you get the Garcia file?"

He glanced at the two cops. Nervous. "I could lose my ass for this. You tell Rusty. You guys owe me big for this."

"Sure. Coffee's on me." You'd think I was asking for government secrets.

"You got no idea. Oh, man, you don't even come close to having an idea."

"So far, the only idea I'm getting is that I could've slept in. You get me a copy of the Garcia file?"

"I couldn't get the file, but I got what you want, all right." Jerry's hand floated to his lapel as if something lived up under the rumpled jacket and he wanted to let it out. He glanced at the cops again. Their backs were made broader by the Kevlar vests they wore under their shirts. "Not in here. Get the coffee, and let's walk."

"What's the big deal? What's up with Karen Garcia that has everybody so weird?"

"Get the coffee."

I put two dollars on the table and followed him out. A warm breeze had come up, pinging us with tiny bits of grit.

"I didn't get a copy for you, but I read it."

"Reading it won't help. I wanted to compare it with another copy I have."

"You already got a copy? Then why'd I have to risk my ass?"

"The copy I got might have been doctored. Maybe something was left out, and I want to know what. Might just be a little thing, but I don't like it that somebody's jerking me around."

Now he was disappointed. "Well, Jesus. You want numbers? You want charts and graphs? I can't remember all the shit in Lewis's report."

"What I want is to know if there was anything about her murder that the cops would want to hide."

Jerry Swetaggen's eyebrows arched in surprise. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"I figured you were already on to this, coming after Garcia. Rusty owes me, man. You owe me, too."

"You've said that. What do we owe you for?"

"The skin section identified fourteen separate particulates at the entry wound. They're running a spec analysis now – it takes forty-eight hours to cook through the process – so Dr. Lewis won't have the results until tomorrow. But everybody already knows they're gonna find the bleach."

"The bleach?" Like I was supposed to know what that meant.

"The plastic gives them that. It's always on the plastic."

I stared at him. "White plastic."

"Yeah."

"They found white plastic in her wound." There was no mention of plastic particulates in the autopsy report I'd read. No mention of bleach.

"The plastic comes from a bleach bottle that the shooter used as a makeshift silencer. They'll probably find adhesive from duct tape on it, too."

"How do you know what they're going to find?"

Jerry started for the lapel again, but the two uniformed cops came out. He pretended to brush at something, turning away.

"They don't even know we're alive, Jerry."

"Hey, it's not your ass on the line."

The shorter cop shook himself to settle his gear, then the two of them walked up the street away from us. Off to fight crime.

When the cops were well down the street, Jerry brought out a sheet of paper that had been folded in thirds. "You want to know what they're hiding, Cole? You want to know why it's so big?"

He shook open the page and held it out like he was about to blow my socks off. He did.

"Karen Garcia is the fifth vic murdered this way in the past nineteen months."

I looked at the paper. Five names had been typed there, along with a brief description of each. The fifth was Karen Garcia. Five names, five dates.

I said, "Five?"

"That's right. All done with a.22 in the head, all showing the white plastic and bleach and sometimes little bits of duct tape. These dates here are the dates of death." Jerry smacked his hands together as if we were back East someplace where the temperature was in the thirties, instead of here in the eighties. "I couldn't sneak out the report because they're kept together in the Special Files section, but I copied the names and this other stuff. I thought that's what you'd want."

"What's the Special Files section?"

"Whenever the cops want the MEs to keep the lid on something, that's where they seal the files. You can only get in there by special order."

I stared at the names. Five murders, not one murder. Julio Munoz, Walter Semple, Vivian Trainor, Davis Keech, and Karen Garcia.

"You're sure about this, Jerry? This isn't bogus?"

"Fuckin'-A, I'm sure."

"That's why Robbery-Homicide has the case. That's why they came down so fast."

"Sure. They've had a Task Force on this thing for over a year."

"Is there any way I can get a copy of the file?"