“Fine. But now we're back to the same old question: what's your link?”

“Has to be the conference. The killer's gotten severely paranoid—let his rage get out of control. To him, anyone associated with de Bosch is guilty, and where better to start than a bunch of therapists paying public homage to the old man? Maybe Stoumen's hit-and-run was no accident.”

“What? Major-league mass murder? The killer's going after patients and therapists?”

“I don't know—I'm just grasping.”

He heard the frustration in my voice. “It's okay, keep grasping. Doesn't cost the taxpayers a dime. For all I know we're dealing with something so crazy it'll never make sense.”

We rode for a while. Then he said, “De Bosch's clinic was private, expensive. How could a janitor like Shipler afford getting treatment there?”

“Sometimes private clinics treat a few hardship cases. Or maybe Shipler had good health insurance through the school system. What about Paprock? Did she have money?”

“Nothing huge, as far as I can tell. Husband worked as a car salesman.”

“Can you get hold of their insurance records?”

“If they had any, and haven't been destroyed.”

I thought of two motherless grade-school children and said, “How old, exactly, were Paprock's children at the time of her murder?”

“Don't remember exactly—little.”

“Who raised them?”

“I assume the husband.”

“Is he still in town?”

“Don't know that either, yet.”

“If he is, maybe he'll be willing to talk about her, tell us if she was ever a therapy patient at de Bosch's clinic.”

He hooked a finger toward the rear seat. “Got the file right there. Check out the address.”

I swung around toward the darkened seat and saw a file box.

“Right on top,” he said. “The brown one.”

Colors were indistinguishable in the darkness, but I reached over, groped around, and came up with a folder. Opening it, I squinted.

“There's a penlight in the glove compartment.”

I tried to open the compartment, but it was stuck. Milo leaned across and slammed it with his fist. The door dropped open and papers slid to the floor. I stuffed them back in and finally found the light. Its skinny beam fell on a page of crime-scene photos stapled to the right-hand page. Lots of pink and red. Writing on a wall: a closeup of “bad love” in big, red block letters that matched the blood on the floor . . . neat lettering . . . a bloody thing below.

I turned to the facing page. The name of Myra Paprock's widower was midway through the intake data.

“Ralph Martin Paprock,” I said. “Valley Vista Cadillac. The home address is in North Hollywood.”

“I'll run it through DMV, see if he's still around.”

I said, “I need to keep looking for the other conference people to warn them.”