She unsnapped one overall strap, then the other, letting the baggy denim collapse around her feet, and stood there in T-shirt and panties.

Half turning, hands on hips, she looked back at me. “How 'bout giving me something, big boy?” she said, in a Mae West voice.

The dog grumbled. Robin cracked up. “Quiet, you! You're wrecking my timing.”

“Now it feels like a home,” she said, snuggling under the covers. “Though I do prefer our little love nest, be it ever so humble. So what'd you find out today?”

My second summation of the day. I did it quickly, adding what Milo'd told me about the murders and leaving out the gross pathology. Even sanitized, it was bad, and she turned quiet.

I rubbed her lower back, allowing my hand to linger on swells and dimples. Her body loosened, but only for a moment.

“You're sure you've never heard of those other two people?” she said, stilling my hand.

“I'm sure. And there doesn't even seem to be any connection between the two of them. The woman was a white real estate agent, the man a black janitor. He was twenty-six years older, they lived on opposite ends of the city, were killed in different ways. Nothing in common but “bad love.' Maybe they were patients of de Bosch.”

“They couldn't be old patients of yours?”

“No way,” I said. “I've been through every one of my case files. To be honest, I don't see the patient angle as too likely, period. If someone has a hangup with de Bosch, why go after the people he treated?”

“What about group therapy, Alex? Things can get rough in groups, can't they? People lashing out at one another? Maybe someone got dumped on badly and never forgot it.”

“I guess it's possible,” I said, sitting up. “A good therapist always tries to keep a handle on the group's emotional climate, but things can get out of control. And sometimes there's no way to know someone's feeling victimized. Once, at the hospital, I had to calm down the father of a kid with a bone tumor who brought a loaded pistol onto the ward. When I finally got him to open up, it came out that he'd been boiling for weeks. But there was no warning at all—till then he'd been a really easygoing guy.”

“There you go,” she said. “So maybe some patient of de Bosch's sat there and took it and never told anyone. Finally, years later, he decided to get even.”

“But what kind of therapy group would bring together a real estate agent from the valley and a black janitor?”

“I don't know—maybe they weren't the patients, maybe their kids were. A parents' group for problem kids—de Bosch was basically a child therapist, wasn't he?”

I nodded, trying to imagine it. “Shipler was a lot older than Paprock—I suppose she could have been a young mother and he an old father.”