“Har-de-har-har.” Colin had heard that one before, from almost every cop who knew what a geologist was. Before he could say so, his telephone rang. He picked it up. “Ferguson.” He listened for a moment, then seemed to sag in his seat. “Shit,” he said heavily. “Are they sure? What’s the location?” He wrote down an address on the sheet that held the words Huckleberry Tuff, then slammed the handset into the cradle.
Gabe Sanchez might not make original jokes, but he could sure read between the lines. “Another one from the Strangler?” he asked.
“Looks that way. Mildred Szymanski, seventy-seven, found dead in her place. Nobody saw her, she didn’t answer her door for three days, and the neighbors finally called us. Bedroom’s a mess-looks like she put up a fight. She’s naked from the waist down.”
“Jesus.” Sanchez reached for his smokes again. If he had lit up, Colin wouldn’t have said a word. But he jerked his hand away instead. “Mildred. Nobody’s named Mildred any more. Who the fuck gets his jollies raping little old ladies?”
“This guy does,” Colin answered. “It’s in one of the apartment buildings near San Atanasio Boulevard and Sword Beach Avenue. Wanna come with me?”
“Sure. We can damn near walk,” Sanchez said. Colin nodded. The scene of the crime was only a few blocks from the cop shop.
As soon as they got outside, Sanchez did light a Camel. He smoked in quick, furious puffs, and stamped on the half-smoked cigarette when they got into one of the department’s unmarked cars: a Plymouth that had seen better years. It wheezed to life when Colin turned the key.
The Sunbreeze Apartments had seen better years, too. They’d probably been a cool place to live when they went up in some 1970s real-estate boom. Now they looked more like the Sun-bleached Apartments. Lots of serious armor, added on as things went downhill, secured the entrance and the gateway to the underground parking garage. Two black-and-whites were parked in the no-parking zone out front, their red and blue lights flashing.
Colin pulled in behind one of the cop cars. A uniformed officer started to wave the Plymouth away, then recognized him. The guy grinned sheepishly. “Sorry about that, Lieutenant.”
“No sweat, Malcolm,” Colin said as he and Gabe Sanchez got out.
When reporters talked about San Atanasio these days, they called it “working class.” That meant most of the chatter Colin heard from looky-loos was in Spanish. Some was in Tagalog, some in Korean. And some was in English. The people who used English as their native tongue were up near the late Mildred Szymanski’s age. They’d liveere a long time, and hadn’t let all the changes to their town push them to places like Torrance and Redondo Beach.
An ambulance arrived, with the coroner’s car right behind it. Dr. Ishikawa and a photographer climbed out of the car. The guys in the ambulance sat tight. They wouldn’t be able to take the body away till the police and the coroner finished their jobs. Ishikawa waved to Colin. “Another one?” he called in a harsh, grating voice.
“Haven’t been inside yet,” the lieutenant answered. “I just got here, too. But that’s what the call sounds like.”
A tall, skinny bald man with tufts of white hair sticking out of his ears stumped up to Colin. “You catch the son of a bitch who done this, you hear?” he said.
“Sir, I’ll do my best,” Colin told him. What else could he say? A TV news van started sniffing for a parking space. “Keep those clowns outside,” Colin growled to Malcolm. He hurried into the apartment building, Gabe Sanchez at his heels. He hated scenes of violent death. But he hated dealing with the blow-dried vultures who gorged on them even more. And he was given to telling the truth as he saw it, which endeared him to neither reporters nor his superiors.
A glance at the mailboxes told him Mildred Szymanski had lived in apartment 251. A glance at the body on the bedroom floor in the apartment told him the South Bay Strangler likely had struck again. Sooner or later-probably sooner-he’d have to talk to the newshounds after all.
III
“Well, we’re here,” Colin said as he pulled into the driveway. San Atanasio was only a few minutes away from LAX. Colin despised the airport. Who in his right mind didn’t? But the trip back and forth was easy enough.
Rain drummed on the roof of his middle-aged Taurus and splashed off the windshield. In the passenger seat, Kelly Birnbaum grinned a crooked grin. “Why don’t we ever meet when it’s sunny?”
“Hey, it’s February. Even L.A. gets rain in February. Sometimes, anyhow,” Colin said.
“I know,” she admitted. “It was coming down even harder in Norcal, I’ll tell you that.”
He thumbed the trunk button. “Head for the porch. I’ll grab your bag.”
“Such a gentleman.” Her eyes twinkled.
Several raindrops nailed his bifocals before he could get under cover himself. He wasn’t wearing a cap now, the way he had in Yellowstone. He wiped off most of the water with a hankie and undid the dead bolt and the regular lock. Then-a gentleman-he held the door open for Kelly. “Go on in.”
She did. “It’s so big,” she marveled.
“It’s just a house.”
“When you’ve lived in dorms and grad-student apartments and tents as much as I have, a house looks humongous. I freak out when I visit my parents down here, and their place is smaller than this. You’ve got it all to yourself, too.”
“Yeah,” Colin said tightly. “Marshall visits sometimes. His room still has his junk in it. The rest… It’s mine, all right, such as it is.”
Kelly caught the edge in his voice. “Sorry. I’ve got foot-in-mouth disease.”
“Don’t worry about it. If I didn’t have this place all to myself, I wouldn’t have pried your phone number out of you when we started talking there by the lake, and I’m darn glad I did.” He set a hand on her shoulder.
She moved closer to him. “Me, too.” She looked around some more. “Everything is so neat. Books, DVDs, CDs-they’re all where they belong. I have to paw through piles of trash to find anything.”
“Navy hangover,” he said with a shrug. “Want something wet?”
“A beer, I think. But give me the tour first.”
“Okay. You’ve got to remember, most of the stuff on the tables and the shelves and all is Louise’s taste.” That taste ran to sad-faced icons, enamelware boxes, and figurines that nested one inside another. Colin didn’t know why his ex had wanted to make the place look like a cheap imitation of the Hermitage, but she had. Thinking back on it, some of the pieces hadn’t been so cheap. Way too late to worry about it now.
“Well, Russian art is something different, anyway,” Kelly said diplomatically.
One upstairs bedroom had a closed door with yellow tape reading POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS! running from the top left corner to the bottom right. “Marshall’s,” Colin said dryly.
“Duh!” Kelly winked at him.
Colin’s study was next door, with his computer and more bookshelves. It looked out on the backyard. Some wet sparrows and mourning doves pecked seed from a tray feeder.
“I like this,” Kelly said. “It feels like you.”
“No saints on the wall here,” Colin replied, which might have been agreement. He also had a work niche in the master bedroom, the next stop. He’d been using it more since he didn’t need to worry about waking up Louise by turning on a light at odd hours. Kelly didn’t seem to care about that. She was looking at the bed. Colin needed no grad school to work out why. “If it bothers you, there’s still a bed in what used to be Vanessa’s room. All the bedclothes are new since-well, since. Same old mattress, though.”
She thought about it for a few seconds. Then she said, “That should be okay. Now what about that beer?”
They went downstairs. The kitchen was also humongous, at least if you listened to Kelly. As Colin poured a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales (he’d drunk Bud, but going with Kelly had opened his eyes to the notion of good beer), he said, “I know why you say that all the time.”