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Zamorra
was sitting again, coat folded across his lap.

Merci leaned forward.
"This is what you're going to do. You're going to call up Aubrey's guys on
the computer and print them out on the printer. When I interview them I'll say
I got their names from Aubrey's little black book. I'll keep my newspaper and
television friends out of here, when they want to know what the victim did for
a living. I won't whisper Epicure Services in anyone's ear. You'll lose
Aubrey's business for a few weeks, because her guys might become a little shy.
But then, she's dead, so you've lost her business anyway. When her friends get
hungry again, you'll have someone else tall, young and eager for all the hot
crap their money can buy. Right?"

Moladan
looked at Zamorra again, then back to Merci.

"Things
can be looked at in this way." "Philosophize later, creep. Print
now."

J
ames Gilliam, Director of Forensic Services, had left
an emphatic message on the While-You-Were-Out pad on Merci Rayborn's desk:
See
me immediately, bring Zamorra.
He had left the same message on her voice
and E-mail.

Gilliam,
excitable as a stone, had something hot.

Zamorra apparently
got the same message. On their way down to the lab he told Merci that he might
have to leave the powwow early. Janine was undergoing a procedure the next
morning and he needed to arrange some things. He'd have time after to hit the
Bay Club and check Moladan's story.

"I hope it goes
well," Merci said. Lame, she thought. But Zarmorra was vague about
everything so you had to be vague right back. It was only through the constant
department buzz that Merci had learned Janine's diagnosis: brain tumor. Zamorra
had never actually said those words to her.

"It's
an experiment," he said.

She waited for
elaboration and got none. The word "experiment” sent a little shiver up
her spine. This was the most forthcoming her partner had ever been, so there
was no use pressing it.

"Let
me know, Paul, if there's anything I can do."

"There
isn't."

She
wanted to tell him about Hess and Hess's cancer, how he had been beating it
even though the stats had said it would kill him. Back then—two years, three
months and twenty-four days ago—she had believed that her hope and will could
change things. Now she didn't. But she believed you needed to hope and will
anyway, just in case. Although just in case wasn't going to do Paul or Janine
Zamorra any good at all right now.

They took the stairway
down. She listened to the sound of Paul's hard-soled brogues on the steps,
comparing the noise to the cushioned
thump
of her duty boots. She wore
the boots with almost everything except a skirt because they were stable and
comfortable and looked badass. Three pair. Man Friend Number Two could have
been wearing duty boots, she thought.

The December wind
whipped up through the stairwell and she felt the cold air on her face. The
naked black sycamores by the courthouse shivered. Merci buttoned up her windbreaker
and jammed her hands in the side pockets.

"I liked the way
you handled Moladan back there," she said. Something to cheer Paul up,
get his mind off things. "Whatever look you had on your face when he went
rabid, it worked."

"I
was thinking about Janine."

What do you say to
that? She imagined what Moladan must have seen in Paul: a dark, slender,
hate-faced man who'd just slipped off his coat to more easily draw down or
thrash the living shit out of him. Zamorra had transferred in from Santa Ana
P.D. a few years back. Santa Ana was a tough city. He had arrived with an aura
of danger about him—rumors about punching out homeboys three at a time,
something about the Golden Gloves gym up in Westminster, about a temper you
didn't want to see. His dad was a junior state something-or-other weight champ.

When Merci first met
Paul she thought his quiet manners and physical stillness were some kind of
shtick. After a while it came to seem authentic. He was just quiet and didn't
move around a lot and if that made people uncomfortable, it was fine with her.
When he opened doors for women he made it look cool. So when Sheriff Brighton
asked her what she thought of partnering up with Zamorra she said okay. He was
dark and solitary, but that was better than being a macho windbag like some
cops tended to be. In the three months she'd been working him, Merci felt as if
she knew Paul Zamorra only a tiny bit better than when she'd first met him. She
knew he had nice trim suits but not of them.

The mystery was good,
though, because she believed most people were more interesting with their
secrets intact.

"Nice call on the
Eastern European accent," said Paul. "It had him thinking."

• • •

Gilliam let them into his
office and shut the door. This was new. Usually he walked them through the lab,
showed them hair and fiber samples under the scopes; the print cards on an
overhead projector; the bullets and casings; the sketches for bullet-path
reconstruction; the tape lifts for gunshot residue; the dummies and samples for
bullet impact reconstruction; the knives and blunt instruments; and the
autopsied body if wanted to see it. Gilliam wanted them to see everything.

He sat behind his
desk in a fresh white lab coat. He had a close file in front of him and a
doleful expression on his face.

"Thanks for
coming," he said. "I'll go through the early lab stuff and the
medical autopsy right here in the office. After that, we've got a problem to
discuss. I think it's a problem."

Merci said nothing.
She'd never seen Gilliam so glum. He always avoided meeting her eyes with his
own because he thought she was attractive, something that had taken her five
years to understand. She didn't know what to do about that, except to ignore
the problem and respect the man. She could live with secrets; words were what
threw her.

"Fine,"
said Zamorra.

"Let's
start with the body," said the director.

Aubrey Whittaker had
died of massive coronary failure due to shot. The bullet had entered and exited
the right ventricle, making centimeter entry tear and a 1
1/2 centimeter
exit passage. Missed the ribs, the sternum, missed the vertebrae. Death was
almost instantaneous judging from the lack of edema at the entry and exit
wounds and the level of blood histamines. The projectile shock was prodigious,
Gilliam said: The impact was great enough to burst capillaries in her eyes.
From the tearing of the dress, the blast destruction of flesh and the tattooing
of unburned powder around the entry wound, Gilliam said it was either a Zone 1
or a Zone 2 gunshot—contact or near contact with the body. She had eaten within
two hours of expiration: chicken, a mixed green salad with pine nuts and
tomato. No alcohol. No drugs. No evidence of recent sexual activity, forced or
otherwise. No evidence of strangulation, blunt force trauma, maiming or
torture. No signs of struggle.

"We
found four very light abrasions, one almost directly over each shoulder cap,
one in the middle of each lower armpit. Ante or post mortem—we can't say. They
were very difficult to see until we hit them with ultraviolet."

Merci
tried to picture the scene, then wrote in her blue notebook:
drag marks.

"Now,
for the guns and ammo," said Gilliam. He opened his file to read from the
criminalist's report. "You can check with Dave Sweetzer for follow-up, but
here's the gist of his findings."

The
shell casing found by Lynda Coiner was a ,45-caliber Colt; center-fire, of
course. This information came from the headstamp on it. The cycling toolmarks
indicated an extractor and ejector, thus a semiautomatic.

"Dave
makes a big note here for you guys," said Gilliam, "that the casing
wasn't new. It had been fired before and reloaded at least once. Keep that in
mind when you make your case for the DA."

"We're thinking
sound suppressor," said Paul.

"So
is Dave. There wasn't enough powder tattooing to match the tearing of the skin
or the silk. The sooting isn't enough, either. And the bullet wiping—that's the
ring of material around the hole where he looks for the lubricants—that wasn't
pronounced as it should have been in a contact shot. He suggests that two or
three extra inches of a baffle would account for all that. Not to mention that
nobody in an apartment house heard a forty-five go off. Of course, a forty-five
caliber Colt is a good candidate for a sound suppressor. It's subsonic by a
couple hundred feet per second, so there's no sonic crack to deal with. The
bullet hole in the plate glass is consistent with a forty-five bullet. From the
exit wound and the straight flight path Dave's thinking a hard, jacketed
round."

Merci made a note of
this as Gilliam continued.

"Of
course, we can't prove a bullet from that casing was the one that killed the
woman. We can't prove a bullet from that casing went through the plate-glass
door. We can't prove the bullet that killed the woman ever
went
through
the plate glass. We've got no bullet. From what I understand, it's somewhere
out in the ocean."

She
hadn't seriously considered it at first, but now she wonder how you could
retrieve such a thing. The dive team? If she could bullet-path projection,
maybe. How deep was the water a half a mile or more out, where the bullet would
finally hit?

She
cursed herself for not being able to dredge up a bullet in the vast gray
Pacific.

Gilliam
looked at Merci with absolutely the oddest expression she’d ever seen from him,
then back down at the criminalist's report. Did he really think she should have
come up with that bullet?
What the fuck is going on here?

"No
fingerprints or conspicuous anomalies on the brass," Gilliam said.
"So, let's get on with the other physical evidence, shall we?"

They
had analyzed carpet fibers found on the kitchen floor that didn't originate
from Aubrey Whittaker's apartment or her car: beige in color, a polyester/nylon
blend. Gilliam said they appeared to be of an ordinary commercial type used by
a number of carpet manufacturers. Such a carpet would be relatively inexpensive
and relatively common. Gilliam could be more specific later, when they'd had
time to compare samples more exhaustively.

Merci
made a note, but common beige carpet was about as helpful a witness who saw two
arms, two legs and a head.

They
had analyzed animal hairs: two from the kitchen floor, from the dining-room
table, one from a kitchen counter. Gilliam they couldn't tell goat hair from
poodle hair in any absolute biological way, it was simply a matter of what
looked right. His guess was a dog, horse or cow. Two were black; two were light
brown; two were white. Each was between
1 and 2 centimeters in length.

"Bring me an
animal and we'll take it from there."

Merci
made a note to check if Aubrey had liked to ride, and to find out if any of her
acquaintances were around horses, cattle or dogs.

Gilliam flipped a
page in his file, then looked at Merci again. We got some fibers off of the
woman's dress after we unzipped her, before we took the photos and X rays.
They're a black wool and Orion mix, definitely not from her dress. Possibly a
sweater or outer garment of some kind, possibly a scarf or muffler, maybe even
a cap or gloves. If they don't match up with something she owns, then we can
look to the suspect. The fibers range from two to three centimeters long."

Merci wrote:
whole
closet, check dry cleaners.

"The
shoeprint from the kitchen is a good one," Gilliam said. "Not real
heavy, but clean. You can see the sole pattern, the nicks on the heel. Size
eleven or twelve. The woman was a female size ten, by the way. We can put a guy
inside her place, on that floor, if we can get the shoe. We ran it past our
manufacturer's catalogues but nothing's come up yet. The problem is, sole
patterns change all the time, but shoes can last for years. Decades, if they're
not worn much. And they're manufactured everywhere from here to China and back.
We might never find it."

Gilliam
said the sole pattern and print shape pointed to a work boot or outdoorsman's
shoe of some kind, a shoe made for traction and longevity.

Then
he leaned back, took a deep breath and sighed. "On to the
fingerprints?"

"Is that where
our problem is, James?" asked Merci.

He considered.
"Depends on how you look at it."

"Then let's look
at it."

Gilliam fingered the
file, closed it, then began.

The
lab had sent the fingerprint cards through the normal channels: AFIS, a federal
registry; CAL-ID, which was state. Prints—as the detectives probably knew—were
pulled from the apartment surfaces, the doorknobs and light-switch plates, the
dining-room tabletop,
etc.
More specifically, they were also pulled from the
dinner flatware left on the table and the food containers and cookware that
hadn't been rinsed or washed.

"We
eliminated all the victim's prints before we sent the cards through," said
Gilliam. "That's one of the reasons it took a while to get to the
registries. In fact, we've still got some prints we haven't sent through yet.
It takes time to view each one by eye and compare it to the sets we took off
the girl."