Private

“We don’t want any of your bullshit,” Del Rio said into Martin’s face. “Tell us about Shelby or after I beat your brains in, I’ll personally tell your unfortunate wife about your unfortunate visits to the spa.”

“Hey! What’s with you?” Martin squealed.

I heard the bleeping of a security cart coming up the roadway in our direction.

Martin was going red in the face as Del Rio wrung the next few words out of him. “ Shelby was in love with some guy. Not her husband, okay?”

“Rick,” I said, grabbing him from behind, “let him go.”

“Who was this guy she loved?” Del Rio said, shaking the director.

“I don’t know. It was a rumor with a few of the other girls. Shelby never mentioned it herself.”

I wrenched Rick off Zev Martin and apologized as Rick stalked off toward the car.

“Are you okay?” I asked Martin.

“Fuck no,” he said, running his hand around his throat.

“ Del Rio is a vet,” I said, leaving out that he was also an ex-con. “He’s suffering from PTSD. I’m very sorry.”

“I should have him charged with assault,” Martin said, as the studio cop cart parked at the curb.

“I could be wrong, but I don’t think you want any more attention drawn to this situation,” I said.

I avoided looking at the security cop and walked back to my car. I got in and slammed the door.

“It better not be that Shelby was in love with you, Jack,” Del Rio muttered. “ ‘Close friends,’ I think you called it.”

I started up the car and said to Rick, “What the hell is wrong with you? Did you take yourself off your meds?”

He was curled up against the passenger door. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Have you ever sleepwalked?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I wake up, I’m behind the couch, or in the closet, or outside on the lawn. I have no idea how it happened. I have nightmares, bad ones.”

“Take the rest of the day off, Rick. Go home and get some sleep before you get us killed.”

Chapter 57

JUSTINE SIPPED room-temperature coffee from a cardboard cup.

The cop she’d tracked down, Lieutenant Mark Bruno, was sitting behind his desk in an office overlooking the homicide division bullpen. Bruno was somewhere around forty years old, stocky, thoughtful. Five years ago, he’d been one of the detectives working the Wendy Borman murder case in East LA.

“Wendy had been dead a day when she was found in that alley,” Bruno was saying. “It had rained. That just added to the tragedy. Whatever trace might have been left on her body was washed right down the tubes.”

“What’s your theory of the case?” Justine asked.

“More than a theory. There was a witness,” he said. “Somebody saw the abduction.”

Justine started and sat up straight in her chair. “Wait. There were no witnesses.”

“Yeah, there was. The papers didn’t carry the story because, for one thing, the witness was eleven years old. A girl, Christine Castiglia. Her mother wouldn’t let her talk to us for long, and what she saw didn’t actually amount to much.”

“I’m desperately seeking a lead,” Justine said. “I need whatever you’ve got, however insignificant it may seem.”

Bruno said, “Nobody ever put Wendy Borman together with the schoolgirls. You’d make a good cop-if you could afford the precipitous drop in pay.”

“Thanks,” Justine said. “But I could be wrong about this angle.”

“Well, you just keep sticking your neck out,” said Bruno. “I’m not one of the cops with a hate-on for you, Dr. Smith.”

“Justine.”

“Justine. I don’t care who catches the son of a bitch. In fact, now I’m rooting for you. Obviously, we need all the help we can get.”

Justine smiled. “Tell me about Christine Castiglia.”

Bruno swiveled his chair a hundred eighty degrees, opened a file drawer behind him, and took out a spiral notebook with “Borman” written on the cover in thick caps. He swiveled back around and rubbed his forehead as he flipped through his notes, saying, “Uh-huh,” from time to time before he looked up again.

“Okay, I remember most of this pretty well. Bottom line, Christine and her mother, Peggy Castiglia, were in a coffee shop on the corner of Rowena and Hyperion. The girl is facing Hyperion and she sees two guys throw a girl into a van-”

“Two guys?”

“That’s what she said. She couldn’t be sure that the abducted girl was Wendy Borman. And we couldn’t establish Wendy’s time of death close enough to say if she was killed within the time the Castiglias were eating.”

Bruno sighed. “But she saw two guys. In effect, that was pretty much the beginning and end of our investigation. Nothing else was turned up.”

“Was Christine able to give a description of the men? Of either of them?”

Bruno shuffled through the pages and came up with an Identi-Kit approximation of a young man with curly hair and glasses. His features were regular, almost bland. Not much help there.

He turned the book so Justine could see it.

“This drawing tells me Christine didn’t get a good look at his face,” Bruno said. “The perp had dark hair and glasses, and that’s all she saw.”

“Too damn bad, huh?”