Judge Malcolm Burris' lips drew wide in a tortured line and, with a soft, mewing sound, he toppled over behind the bench. Defense attorney Greg Markham rushed forward and found the judge kinked sideways clutching his stomach. Little moans slipped through Burris' clenched teeth.

"Call 911! Call 911!" Markham shouted,

The courtroom filled with muted shrieks and layers of voices: "What happened?" - "Is he dying?" - ". . . heart attack?"

A pair of deputies roughly pushed Markham aside. Slapping dust from his trousers, he paced back to the defense table where Tom Travis waited patiently.

"Is he dead?" Travis asked, glancing at Burris' up-pointed toes. Travis's tone was little different than one he might have used to ask the waiter if the sea bass was frozen or fresh.

With frost-gray eyes and a trim, salt and pepper mustache, Tom Travis had the kind of face that might have been worn by a Special Forces Colonel who had survived a lifetime of black ops, or a faded private eye who had loved and lost too many times but maybe, just maybe, had the heart for one last romance, both of which were movie heroes Tom Travis had played at one time or another.

Travis had gotten his start in a failed project to revive the TV western. The show died at the end of the first season but that was long enough to get Tom the lead in a new cop series that was canceled halfway through its second year. Seemingly charmed, Travis's publicist managed to cage him a cover on TV Guide the week before the last episode aired. He started shooting his first starring movie role two months later and never looked back.

Travis picked up a spiral pad and doodled mindlessly as paramedics pushed through the crush. Soon the image of a jet plane firing rockets at a mangled tank began to take shape. It had good perspective, lots of energy. One or another of Travis's paintings, battle scenes, prize fights, all macho stuff, were usually on display at Ramona's on Rodeo Drive. Word was that when he was short of money he would knock one out in an afternoon.

"Pocket change," he once smirked off-camera to a talking head from Entertainment Tonight, but for the last ten years the prices had been slipping. Now, with Travis on trial for capital murder, the market had re-bounded to it's old level of $50,000 a painting. But Travis wasn't doing any oils from his cell in the County Jail.

Sleek, Markham decided, that was the word to describe Tom Travis. Fashionably thin with a sharp angled nose and chin, a trim mustache, short dark hair, thin fingers, clever hands. Sleek like the spies and assassins, gamblers and gigolos he had imprinted onto miles of celluloid over an almost thirty year career.

Maybe that's the problem, Markham mused for the hundredth time. The jury was so used to seeing Tom Travis with a scowl on his face and blood on his hands that they walked into court already half-convinced that he was the monster who had first cheated on and then strangled his eight month pregnant wife. He had killed on film so many times, what was one more murder on his resume?

Markham turned at a clatter behind him. White-faced and hesitant, the jury was being herded from the room. A couple of them glanced uneasily at Travis who, oblivious, continued sketching shattering armor and roiling flames, as if death and destruction were the most normal things in the world. Sensing the weight of the jurors' eyes, Travis turned toward them and smiled. Embarrassed, they quickly looked away. Travis gave Markham a happy smile as if to say, "My fans."

Staring at the contempt painting the jurors' faces, the thought, They're going to send him to death row, trickled like acid through Markham's brain.

Chapter Two

Steve Janson stared at the refrigerator in the corner of his tiny apartment. It held five cold, long-necked beers, one fewer than yesterday. Behind him the muted TV flickered in a wash of color. For another moment he considered downing today's allotted beer in four long gulps. Clenching his fingers he turned back to the couch.

Colonial Indemnity's lawyer needed his review of the plaintiff's deposition by noon tomorrow. Steve grabbed his red pen. Images swirled on the TV, grabbing Janson's attention. Head down, Greg Markham appeared and shoved his way through a forest of microphones. Cynthia Allard's face edged into view, babbling mutely into the camera. "Trial of the Decade", "Movie Star Murder", "Sensational Details," Janson knew all the sound-bites by heart.

Frowning, he hit the remote. When she had worked for the D.A.'s office Allard had been a competent prosecutor and a decent enough person, easy on the eyes too, as the Old Man used to say. Now she was just another Talking Head. And what am I? Janson asked himself sourly. A disbarred, no suspended, attorney reviewing whiplash cases for a bunch of insurance lawyers. Frowning, Steve glanced at the refrigerator then jerked around at the trill of his phone. He sucked in a hasty breath. It was probably Gustovson wanting an update on the deposition.

"Janson."

"Steve, it's Greg Markham. You got a minute?"

Speak of the devil. . . .

"How's it going, Greg?"

"You going to be home for a while?"

"What's up?"

"I'd like to talk to you about my case. How about it?"

Janson glanced at his watch, a quarter to four. He had about half an hour's work left on the file.

"Four-thirty okay?"

"I'll be there." The phone went dead. At this time of day the drive from Santa Monica was a bitch and Steve wasn't surprised that it was almost a quarter to five when Markham arrived.

"Thanks for seeing me on such short notice," Greg said, extending his hand.

"Anything for the guy who kept me out of prison."

"They couldn't convict you. You know that."

"They tried."

"Ted Hamilton tried, but he was only going through the motions. The most he really thought he could get was your disbarment."

"Thanks to you, that didn't happen either."

"I could have gotten you off Scott-free if you'd been willing to fight it all the way through to the end."

"I needed it to be over. I couldn't let drag out for another year. You did what I asked you to. I told you to settle with the State Bar for something short of disbarment and you did. It's done." Steve grabbed a couple of beers and handed one to his guest. "So, how is Ted Hamilton? Are you kicking his ass?"

"What do you think?"

"He's a jerk and you're not. Enough said."

Markham frowned and shook his head.

"Unless something happens, we're cooked."

"When's the last time Ted Hamilton beat you?"

"The jury hates Tom Travis. Hates him!" Markham took a long pull on his beer. "He cheated on his pregnant wife and lied to his mistress. A mistress, I might add, that the jury loves as much as they hate Tom."

"Okay, your guy's a prick, but--"

"He's not just a prick. He's a lying, deceitful, cheating, arrogant, spoiled jerk of a prick, and they're going to stick it to him and smile when they do it. Nothing I've said or done is going to make the slightest bit of difference to that jury. They're like the fat couple in the buffet line, just rubbing their hands and waiting for their chance."

"Look, Greg, you know the facts of life as well as I do. I used to be a Deputy D.A. I did criminal trials for six years and you've been doing them for fifteen. You've got the evidence you've got. You do the best you can with it and then its out of your hands."

"That's a great philosophy when your client is guilty, but the D.A. has very little real evidence that Travis actually did it. No fibers, no blood, no witnesses, no DNA, no prints. All they've got is that the electrical cord around her neck could have come from a lamp he used to own or from any of a hundred thousand other lamps. That and the fact that he's a cheating bastard and that his wife is dead and his step daughter is missing. It's guilt by the process of elimination. It wasn't a robbery. It probably wasn't a rape gone wrong, so what's left? Obviously, the lying, cheating, bastard husband did it! Shit, that's a good enough reason to send a guy to death row, isn't it?" Markham angrily paced the tiny room, his bottle already empty.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I need your help."

"What good can a disgraced, semi-disbarred, lawyer do you? Do you want me to sit at the defense table and put the evil eye on Ted Hamilton? Do you think that maybe my being there will piss off Old Man Burris so much that he'll make a reversible error?" A bitter laugh escaped Steve's lips.

"I want you to find me something that will get me a hung jury."

"How am I supposed to do that?"

"I'll give you everything I've got --- police reports, interviews, forensic reports, lab tests, crime scene photos, autopsy reports, Grand Jury testimony, everything. You were a cop for nine years before you became a prosecutor. You know how to run an investigation. The line cops will still talk to you on the QT. They like what happened to Alan Lee Fry. Find me something the detectives missed."

"Like what?"

"Like what? Like a witness they didn't interview, a piece of evidence they never examined, a tip they never followed up on. You know they took one look at Tom Travis and wrote 'The son of a bitch did it' on page one of their Murder Book. They never looked at anybody else. Anything that pointed another way went to the bottom of the pile as a waste of their time."

Steve eyed his empty bottle and carefully placed it on the edge of the coffee table.

"Why didn't you have somebody do this already?"

"I did but he wasn't you."

"Who?"

"Ben McGarrey out of the Foster Agency."

"McGarrey was on the Homicide Squad for ten years before he went private. If he didn't find anything there was probably nothing to find."

"He just went through the motions, documenting his hours. He's not you."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning you're a single-minded, determined son-of-a-bitch who won't let go of something you really want no matter what it costs you." Markham glared at Steve, then, embarrassed, turned away.

"Thanks. I'm glad to know that's the kind of person you think I am." Janson's tone was as dead as ashes. He headed to the fridge for another beer.

"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

"No, you did. -- It's fine. Think what you want. It doesn't matter because I couldn't help you even if I wanted to."

"It would only take--"

"It would take me, what, a week just to read the files and another week,  maybe two to actually do anything? You can't be more than four or five days from going to the jury."

"You didn't hear?"

"Hear what?"

"Your former father-in-law, the Honorable Malcolm Burris, collapsed on the bench this afternoon."

"Is he--"

"No, he'll recover. Hot appendix. It burst before they could get him to the hospital. He wasn't in the best of health before so he'll be out for a couple of weeks, three at the outside. The trial's in recess until he gets back."

Janson gazed blindly out the window. Markham hadn't a clue what bladed memories were crawling through Steve's head. "Two thousand dollars a day plus expenses," Markham said in a hopeful tone.

Janson gave a weary laugh. "So, all those rumors about Tom Travis being broke are crap?"

"I put a hundred fifty thousand in my trust account for costs the day I took the case. I need your help, Steve."

"And I owe you for getting me only a two year suspension of my license to practice law instead of being flat-out disbarred, right?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You do remember what got me kicked out of the legal community?"

"Let's not go there."

"Let's not go there? You come into my house and ask me to help you get your wife-beating, cheating, lying, scumbag, prick client off the hook and you don't want to 'go there'? My wife was murdered, Greg, murdered! Her god damn head was cut off and . . . ." Janson froze and turned away. "And I . . . ." the words caught in his throat. Steve sucked in a harsh breath and tried again. "And now you want me to help Tom Travis get away with murdering his wife? And you tell me, 'Let's not go there?'"

"He didn't do it! My prick of a client is innocent, just like your wife was innocent--"

Janson moved quickly for a big man. In an instant he had lifted Markham clear of the floor. "Don't you ever mention Lynn and that God Damn cheating Tom Travis in the same breath!" Steve shouted. He held Markham suspended for a full two seconds before finally dropping him to the couch and storming away.

For a moment Markham sat there, frozen, then adjusted his lapels, tucked in his disarrayed shirt, and headed for the door.

"How do you know he's innocent?" Steve called from across the room.

"The cops had more than a year and an unlimited budget and the only evidence they found was that she was strangled with a cord that might have come from one of his living room lamps, that and the fact that Travis is an lying, adulterous, cheating, bastard, so he must be guilty. He's not that smart. If he had done it, he'd have left a lot more evidence behind, trust me."

"So now he's innocent by reason of stupidity?"

"He's innocent because the law says he's innocent unless he's proven guilty. That's supposed to mean something to us."

"To us? Lawyers? Yeah, well, they kicked me out of the club."

"You let them kick you out of the club because you wanted it all to go away!" For a long second Markham stared into Steve's blazing eyes, then turned away. "Fine, whatever." The hinges on the front door squeaked.

"I'll do it," Steve called.

Markham slowly turned around.

"What?"

"I owe you. I'll do it."

"Don't do it because you owe me. Do it because--"

"Now you don't want my help unless it's for the right reason? Do you think Tom Travis will care why I took the case if I manage to find something that gets him a hung jury? I said I'd do it. Isn't that good enough for you?"

"Yeah," Markham said after a long pause. "I guess it is. Thanks."

"This squares us, Greg. I do this and we're done."

"Yeah, I know," Markham said and quietly shut the door behind him.

Chapter Three

The bell rang a little before ten. A burley man in brown khaki looked up at Steve from a paper-stuffed clipboard.

"You . . . Steven Janson?"

"Yes."

"Okay, I've got a delivery for you from . . . the law offices of Gregory Markham." The deliveryman peered past Steve into the apartment. "Where do you want it?"

"Put it in the living room. I'll figure it out later."

The driver made a little grunt and turned away. Two minutes later he returned with a hand-truck stacked with four cream-colored boxes. Block black letters were carefully stenciled on the narrow sides of each:

"FORENSIC REPORTS - I"

"WITNESS STATEMENTS A-J"

"MEDICAL REPORTS"

"WITNESS STATEMENTS K-R"

Without a word he wheeled the stack inside and deposited it next to the couch then headed down the hallway for another load, passing a second worker approaching with four more cartons. There were eleven in all by the time the deliverymen were done.

"Sign here," the driver ordered and shoved the clipboard into Janson's hands. Steve scrawled his name. As he handed the pad back he noticed a tattoo of a broken cross in faded blue ink beneath the deliveryman's right ear. An omen? A moment later the man was gone.

Steve stared at the three stacks of boxes and imagined the awful truths they contained. Five minutes later he was still staring as if his mind was stuck like a needle in an old record. According to the index the police reports had been packaged in chronological order. Deciding that he might as well start at the beginning. Steve extracted a packet of stapled pages.

On December 31^st the year before last two detectives had visited Tom Travis' Beverly Hills home in response to a report that his step-daughter, Sarah, age three, and his wife, Marian Travis, eight and a half months pregnant, had both disappeared.

*     *    *

Simon Katz let his partner, Jack Furley, take the lead while Simon limped along behind. Margie had started her "See the doctor about your knee" mantra again this morning, driving him out of the house before he could finish his breakfast. Now at ten o'clock at night each step felt like a dull knife was sliding beneath his kneecap.

From the sidewalk Simon studied the wall surrounding Travis's mansion. Eight feet high, constructed of cemented field stones, it looked like something built to deflect a mob of angry villagers. A far cry from Simon's three bedroom ranch-style out in the Valley. Furley pressed a button and said "Los Angeles Police Detectives" into the microphone. A sharp click sounded and the carved teak gate slipped open. A hundred feet across the lawn a two and a half story beam and stucco house blotted out half the night sky.

What did the property taxes on something like this run, Simon wondered, eighty thousand, a hundred thousand a year? "Jack, slow down," Katz snapped. Furley was already thirty feet ahead on the winding slate walkway. Barren rhododendrons framed an arch over the double-wide front doors. Furley waited for Simon before ringing the bell. A stocky, mid-forties Hispanic woman in a tan maid's uniform appeared almost instantly.

"I'm Detective Furley. This is my partner, Detective Katz. We're here to see Mr. Travis."

"Yes, he is waiting for you," she said, her face a worried mask, and led the way deep into the house. Furley seemed fascinated by the marble statues and gilt-framed paintings. They passed one room containing a six foot high fountain in the form of a circular waterfall. Katz limped doggedly on.

They found Tom Travis in a leather massage chair in front of a 70 inch flat-screen. Some kind of gangster movie was playing, Pacino in Scarface or maybe the second Godfather film. Travis flicked the remote before Katz could figure out which.

"Guys, thanks for coming." Travis shook hands with Furley, giving him a big smile. "Get you anything, coffee, whatever?"

"No thanks," Katz said.

"You hungry? Delfina could fix you up a steak sandwich."

"Thanks, nothing," Katz snapped before Furley could accept. Travis shot Furley a questioning look and the young detective hesitated, then gave his head a quick shake.

Without asking, Katz lowered himself onto a leather couch. "You said there was a problem about your wife?" Furley took out his pad, ballpoint poised to take notes.

"Yes, maybe," Travis said, giving Katz a quick, embarrassed smile. "I hope not." Through the windows brief flashes of fireworks flickered across the distant sky. "I came home around six and she wasn't here." Travis paused. Katz just stared at him. "We were supposed to go somewhere, New Year's Eve, you know, and, well, she's not here and the house is dark."

"What about the maid?" Furley asked. Katz kept his face blank though in his head he was shouting, 'Shut up and let him talk!'.

"She had the day off. When it got past seven and Marian still hadn't come home I called Delfina and asked her to come in."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you want the maid to come in?" Katz asked.

"In case I needed something." Katz and Furley stared as if Travis had been speaking in tongues. "Well, obviously, I had to stay home and wait for Marian so I would need someone to make dinner and then clean up."

Katz paused for a beat, then started again.

"Uhhuh. . . . Have you checked with your wife's friends, family?"

"Delfina handled that. . . . Delfina?"

The maid appeared in the study doorway.  "Yes, Mr. Tom?"

"Delfina, the policemen want to know who you called about Mrs. Travis."

The maid looked back and forth between the two detectives, finally settling her gaze on Katz. "I call her father, her brother, her friend, Miss Leslie. No one has seen her."

"Is this unusual, Ms. Travis not being home for dinner?"

"She is very tired now, with the baby. She never stay out. She take naps."

"She has a baby?"

"Soon, soon. Maybe two weeks. She is gordo," Delfina made a gesture with two hands in front of her stomach, "Big. It makes her tired." Furley scribbled another note. "Besides, she never stay out this late with Sarah."

"Who's Sarah?"

"My step-daughter," Travis cut in, "Marian's daughter from her prior marriage."

"She is three. A beautiful child," Delfina added, half in tears.

Katz gave Furley a quick guarded look.

"What was your wife scheduled to do today?" Katz asked.

"Delfina," Travis held out his tumbler and rattled the half melted ice, "while you're up." The maid hurried over and took the glass. "Sure she can't get you guys something?"

"Maybe later," Katz said, muzzling Furley with a sharp glance. "About Mrs. Travis's plans for  the day. . . ?"

"Uhhh, not sure. You know how it is," Travis said, turning to Furley. "The wife's always yakking at you. After a while you just say 'yes, dear' and go back to the game." Travis shrugged. "I don't know. Shopping, I guess. She loved to take Sarah shopping. The kid's got more shoes than the Dodgers starting line-up."

"Where were you today?"

"In the desert."

Confused, Katz looked at Furley, got a quick head shake, and turned back to Travis. "What were you doing in the desert?"

"I just got a new dune buggy. Christmas present to myself. This is the first chance I've had to take her out for a test drive."

"I'll need a time line for my report."

"Uhhh, sure. Okay, I hooked up the trailer to my Hummer and pulled out, oh, I don't know, maybe eight, eight-thirty this morning. I drove to Templeton in San Bernardino County. Got there around ten-thirty. Had an early lunch and hit the desert around noon. Quit about four and got back here around six. That's about it."

"Did anybody see you there?"

"Am I a suspect?"

"A suspect for what?"

"I don't know. It just sounds like you're asking me for an alibi or something."

"We're just getting all the details."

"Yeah, sure, I understand. Sorry. I guess I'm more upset than I want to admit. I should know better. I've played a cop ten, twenty times at least. I know how it works. Okay, well, sure, I saw some people but I don't know their names."

"Did you pay for anything with your credit card?"

"Just gas on the way back. Everything else I paid cash, but I always save my receipts." Travis handed Katz a plain envelope marked "Dune Buggy Research Expenses". Inside was the register tag for lunch at the El Jefe Restaurant, a receipt from the State of California Bureau of Parks and Recreation for the $20 entry fee to the Double Peaks Off-Road Vehicle Recreation Area, and an ARCO pump printout for nineteen gallons of premium gas.

"Why did you save these?"

"In my bracket you take every tax deduction you can get."

"This was business trip?"

"Research. I might play a dune buggy racer in my next film." Travis flashed another quick smile. "At least as far as the IRS is concerned, that's my story and I'm sticking to it."

Katz flicked his eyes and Furley hurriedly copied Travis's comment, word for word. They spent half an hour longer questioning Travis and the maid but learned nothing significant. Travis signed a consent for a trap on his phone, gave them his contact numbers and promised to call if he heard anything from his wife. A babble of noise erupted outside and red and white flashes lit the sky.

"Happy new year," Furley said in a flat tone.

"Hell of a way to spend New Year's Eve, Marian and Sarah missing like this. You think they're okay, don't you? It's probably just car trouble or something, right?" Travis looked expectantly at Furley then frowned and drained his glass.

Ten minutes later Katz and Furley were following the twisting walk back to the street. A few distant pops tattooed the night.

"Why didn't you let the maid fix us a sandwich?" Furley complained when they reached the gate. "I'm starving."

"Listen, you never take favors from a suspect. You're already on his turf. You don't make it worse by accepting his food."

"How many times has somebody given you a cup of coffee on the job?"

"A glass of water, a cup of coffee, a Coca Cola, okay, but you never break bread with a perp. You've gotta learn that, Jack."

"When did he become a perp?"

"Did he seem like a broken-hearted husband to you?"

"Not so much. "

"You ever had a millionaire just happen to save a cash register tape for a ten dollar lunch?"

"That could be for the IRS, like he said."

With a grunt Katz settled into the Crown Vic's passenger seat.

"Sure, and OJ was framed."

"I'm just saying--"

"Jack, listen to me. This is not going to end well. Running this case is going to be like slogging through twenty miles of rain-soaked shit and it isn't going to be pretty when we get to the end." Katz glared at the eight foot high wall. "Let's get the hell out of here. My knee's killing me."

*     *     *

Steve dropped the report and closed his eyes. Would he have been better off if Lynn had just disappeared, if her body had never been found, if he had never gone after the monster who had killed her? A vision of Alan Lee Fry's face filled his head.

Chapter Four

Somehow you expect the important events in your life to be highlighted with signs and portents like the scene in the movie where the cop notices the lipstick-stained cigarette next the body and the music swells. In that instant the hero knows who the killer is and that she's there, in the dark behind him with her pistol centered on his spine. But in real life our turning points slip past us unnoticed until it's too late for us to do anything but remark later on what we have lost.

It had been just such an ordinary day when Alan Lee Fry had showed up at Steve Janson's cubbyhole at the D.A.'s office. Janson was the paperwork monkey on the Headless Killer case, preparing the dozens of subpoenas and search warrants the detectives needed in order to narrow the list of suspects. Phone records, bank records, credit card purchases, auto repair invoices, DMV transfer forms, orders for the collection of DNA samples, the scud work that a lawyer has to do to keep a major case moving forward all fell on him. If he was lucky and the cops caught the guy, Steve's supervisor might let him second or third chair the trial. He might even get to cross examine a couple of witnesses.

At about eleven Steve was distracted by the beep of his phone. "Mr. Janson, there's a Mr. Alan Lee Fry here to see you."

"What's he want?"

"He says it's about the Headless Killer case."

"Does he look like a nut or a reporter?"

"I don't think so."

"Okay, send him back."

A few moments later a slender dark-skinned man about thirty years old appeared in Steve's doorway. "Mr. Janson?"

Steve gave the guy a brief glance -- dark gray sport coat, burgundy silk shirt, gray slacks, black shoes, Italian, expensive.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm Alan Lee Fry." He said as if his name carried a deeper significance which was so self-evident that no further explanation was required -- I'm Alan Lee Fry, the richest man in the world, or I'm Alan Lee Fry, the President of the United States.

"Yes?"

Fry stepped into Janson's tiny office and plopped into the only chair. "You ordered the police to search my home," Fry said in an accusatory tone. Steve frowned. He didn't order the police to do anything. He had probably processed the paperwork that facilitated the search of Fry's home.

"The Superior Court ordered the search of your home, Mr. Fry." The unsaid words,  So What? floated like smoke in the air.

"Then why is your name on the papers?"

How dare you inconvenience the incomparable Alan Lee Fry? his tone seemed to demand.

Steve could have taken a deep breath, smiled and carefully explained that he was merely the Deputy D.A. who presented the cops' search warrant request to the Judge. That would have been the polite thing to do. But Fry's tone irritated Janson and challenged him in some unconscious, primal way. Unbidden, hormones dripped into Steve's blood and he found himself spoiling for a fight as if another, more violent man, had suddenly invaded his body.

"What's your problem Mr. Fry?" Steve snapped.

"Your police officers made a mess of my house!"

Steve bobbed his head in mock regret. "Sorry to hear that." As if I care.

"What are you going to do about it?"

"You can file a claim with the City Attorney's office for any damage." For all the good that will do you.

Fry glared and for a moment Steve wondered if he was going to get physical, then, in an instant Fry changed. His shoulders slumped, his head pulled back.

"So, there's nothing you can do?" he asked in a smarmy tone that, if anything, enraged Steve even more.

"Obviously the detectives thought you might have evidence that was relevant to their investigation. I processed their request for a warrant. The judge signed it. They did their search. That's pretty much how things work." So, stop wasting my time.

"I understand," Fry said with a sudden, saccharin smile. "I'll handle this another way."

"You do that. Claim forms are on the Internet at the L.A. City Attorney's web page. The Board of Supervisors will have six months to rule on your claim. After they reject it, you can sue the County if you want to." Good luck with that.

Fry's face went cold and flat. "Beautiful woman," he said, nodding at the photo on the corner of Steve's desk.

"What?"

"Your wife?" Fry pointed at the picture of Lynn standing under a tree in Griffith Park.

"Mr. Fry--"

"I noticed your ring." Fry gestured to Steve's plain gold band. "Any children?"

"I think you should . . . ." Steve began, rising.

"No, if you had children, you'd have pictures of them, a man like you."

"What do you mean, 'A man like me'?'"

Now it was Fry's turn to stand.

"You're very territorial, aren't you, Mr. Janson? You protect what's yours."

"You need to--"

"I understand that. I'm very territorial too. Of course, I don't have a beautiful wife, like you do. I've never been very lucky with women." Fry sighed. "No, for me, my work and my home are what I care about. I don't like having either of them violated, defiled by you and your cretinous thugs. I--"

"Get out of her, now!"

Fry paused a heartbeat, then smiled with all his teeth. "I understand how you feel, Mr. Janson. Unfortunately, I don't think you understand how I feel. But you will."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"The City Attorney's web site you said, for the claim forms? I'll make my claim, don't doubt that for a moment."

Fry gave Janson another smarmy smile and then walked out.

This was the point, Steve later decided, when a benevolent God would have tapped him on the shoulder and given him a wink or a nudge. But eerie music did not swell, no lightning bolts split the sky. Instead the sun still shined, the birds still chirped, and the phone was silent for the rest of the day.

No one from the DMV called and warned Janson that someone calling himself Lawrence Adams had claimed that Steve had dented his car in the Bloomingdale's parking lot. No one told him that they had given Mr. Adams Steve's home address. The manager of his apartment house didn't notice the well dressed man who knocked on Steve and Lynn's door. The technicians at the police crime lab didn't rush to process the items seized from Fry's home. If they had they would have discovered blood and tissue matches to evidence left on the first two of the Headless Killer's victims. But the sample sat in their overcrowded In-Tray.

So, Steve filled out his papers in nerve-deadening solitude, left a message on Lynn's cell saying that he would be late, and around nine finally returned to a home that after that night he would never set foot in again.

Chapter Five

Steve opened his eyes and forced himself to leaf through the folders in the first box of police reports. It held months of interviews generated while the police went through the motions of looking for a missing person whom everyone believed was dead. The files contained statements from witnesses swearing that they had seen Marian Travis in San Diego, Reno, Vancouver, Saint Louis and points east. She had supposedly bought gas in Tacoma, a burger in Baton Rouge and rented a sail boat on Maryland's Eastern Shore. One psychic had reported her dead and buried near a large body of water. In another's vision her lifeless body was covered with rocks ten feet west of a tall pine tree.

Janson skipped them all, flipping almost four months forward to the next bit of forensic solid ground, the fifth search of the Double Peaks Recreational Preserve. Steve let his mind slip past the report's stilted police jargon, translating Simon Katz's cold words into a flickering movie in his brain.

*     *     *

The road was packed dirt and meandered through a valley formed by two crumbling shale cliffs. Katz and Furley followed a San Bernardino County Sheriff's Cherokee, choking in its trailing plume of alkali dust. Katz's window vibrated to the rhythm of an unmufflered engine a quarter mile to the east.

"People do this for fun?" Katz muttered as their Crown Vic bottomed out in a dry wash.

"Not in a car like this. We need one of those bad boys." Furley pointed at a bathtub-sized ATV bounding over a stretch of low dunes.

The Cherokee pulled into blade scraped parking lot. Katz had finally given in to necessity and today was wearing Sears sneakers and jeans instead of his customary baggy brown suit.

The deputy, Harley Kress, stepped out and poured himself a cup of coffee from a chrome Thermos. "You want some?" he asked. Katz tried to identify Kress's accent, some kind of a flattened twang. Blond and rangy, all elbows and knees, the deputy slurped half his coffee in a gulp. "You think we'll find her today?" he asked Furley, then glanced at the sky. Somewhere above a National Guard plane with ground-penetrating radar and thermal imaging was flying an imaginary grid.

"We've covered sixty percent of the park. If she's here. . . ." Furley shrugged and shaded his eyes, searching the sky for the buzzing black dot. Of course, Katz reminded himself,if Travis wasn't the killer, they were wasting their time. But what were the odds of that?

"Not like the old days, I guess," the deputy said, nodding at Katz.

"I've never searched the desert for a body before."

"I mean the gizmos they've got now, GPS, the stuff in that plane up there." The deputy waved vaguely at the pale sky. "That guy knows exactly where he is, where he's been and where he's goin', down to a couple of feet. Try and search fifty wild acres without somethin' like that, and well Hell, good luck to ya."

Katz nodded, muttered something innocuous, and scratched a line in the dust with the toe of his new shoe. Gizmos. The bastard, son-of-a-bitch Tom Travis had murdered his wife and their unborn baby and left them out here in this God-forsaken wilderness and all this kid wanted to talk about were the latest toys from Circuit City.

A squawk sounded from Kress's radio. "Baker Four, this is Eagle One. Over."

Harley pressed a plastic box the size of a jumbo Hershey bar to his lips. "This is Baker Four. GA Eagle One. Over."

"Thermal's showing a point of interest nine hundred meters northwest of your position."

"On the move, Eagle One. Hang on." The deputy jumped into the Jeep and waved at Katz and Furley. "You guys will have to ride with me the rest of the way."

The Cherokee bounded over rocks and scrub occasionally taking a detour around boulders and the banks of dead streams too steep to traverse. "Baker Four, turn twenty degrees to your left," the pilot ordered, then refined his directions yard by yard until they reached the site.

"You see anything?" the pilot asked once they were on foot.

To Furley the patch of desert looked no different from any other piece of dirt a mile in any direction. Ahead of them a twenty foot high ledge of mud-colored rock showed through the side of an eroded slope. More rocks, red, brown, burnt orange and dark gray littered the earth at the base of the hill, turning to sand and tussocks of wild grass all the way to the broken streambed behind them. A huge, lonely boulder, twenty feet high, stood to their left almost at the edge of the bend in the dry creek. In its shadow lay an eight foot oval-shaped litter of rocks in colors from ashes to chocolate.

"Just some rocks. Why don't you go get back on your grid while we take a look. Over."

"Roger, Baker One," the pilot said, slipping back into protocol. "Out."

"Okay, boys, let's move these guys." The deputy smiled and grabbed a pitted gray stone the size of a loaf of bread.

"Put on your gloves!" Katz ordered.

"I can take it." Kress smiled and held up a calloused palm.

"I'm sure you can, deputy, but this is a potential crime scene. First we take photographs with yardsticks in them for reference. Then we sketch and measure. Then, wearing gloves, we move the rocks to a specific location for forensic analysis if needed."

For moment the deputy froze then carefully replaced his stone. Fifteen minutes later they had exposed a ten foot by ten foot patch of gray sand. Furley took three more pictures then handed Kress a shovel.

"Scrape, don't dig!" Katz shouted before Harley could turn his first spade full of earth. The deputy frowned but did what he was told. This was the fifth time they had come out here and the third time they had used the National Guard plane. On each expedition they were assigned a different deputy. By the time they were done, Katz figured he and Furley would have trained half the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department in proper forensic procedures.

"Huh!" Harley muttered and knelt close to the ground. Barely eight inches down the shovel's blade had snagged something then slipped free. Kress reached down, then pulled. A piece of grimy plastic ballooned, shedding puffs of gray dust.

"Jack, get a picture!"

"Is this her?" Harley asked, not believing his eyes.

"Back up!" Katz pulled brushes and small garden tools from a bag. Together he and Furley removed enough dirt to confirm they had an adult female body then called it in over the deputy's radio.

Harley carefully approached the excavated grave and peered down at the corpse, then backed away.

"I guess you've seen a lot of them," he said to Furley, "DB's." Jack didn't reply. Harley turned toward Katz and shook his head. "Gee, Marian Travis. I can't believe we found her."

"That's not Marian Travis," Katz said almost under his breath.

"Huh? You mean that's some other poor--"

"That's just what's left of the container Marian Travis came in," Simon said wearily. "Marian Travis, the human being, was lost forever the instant she died. That over there is just a bag of bones."

An hour later a helicopter dropped the Sheriff's forensic team and all their gear. It took them eight hours to fully expose, photograph, and remove the body. Every handful of sand was sifted, every rock photographed.

Katz and Furley were still there when Marian Travis's corpse was lifted from her shallow grave, a lamp cord still knotted around her neck. A slight swell distended her belly containing the body of her unborn child, a little girl the coroner later reported.

Secretly, Simon Katz named her Rachel and for her, secretly, he wept.