“No,” he said, “I don't know him, either. Are they therapists?”

“No.”

“Then what would they have to do with the conference?”

“Nothing that I know of, but maybe they had something to do with de Bosch. Myra Paprock was working as a real estate agent at the time, but before that she was a teacher in Goleta. Maybe she moonlighted at the Corrective School. This was before she married, so her surname would have been something other than Paprock.”

“Myra,” he said, rubbing his lip. “There was a Myra who taught there when I was consulting. A young woman, just out of college . . . blond, pretty . . . a little . . .” He closed his eyes. “Myra . . . Myra . . . what was her name—Myra Evans, I think. Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what it was. Myra Evans. And now you're saying she was murdered . . .”

“What else were you going to say about her, Bert?”

“Excuse me?”

“You just said she was blond, pretty, and something else.”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “I just remembered her as being a little hard. Nothing pathologic—the dogmatism of youth.”

“Was she rough on the kids?”

“Abusive? I never saw it. It wasn't that kind of place—Andres's force of personality was enough to maintain a certain level of . . . order.”

“What was Myra's method for maintaining order?”

“Lots of rules. One of those everything-by-the-rules types. No shades of gray.”

“Was Dr. Stoumen like that too?”

“Grant was . . . orthodox. He liked his rules. But he was an extremely gentle person, somewhat shy.”

“And Lerner?”

“Anything but rigid. Lack of discipline was his problem.”

“Harvey Rosenblatt?”

“Don't know him at all. Never met him before the conference.”

“So you never saw Myra Evans come down too hard on a child?”

“No . . . I barely remember her—these are just impressions, they may be faulty.”

“I doubt it.”

He moved his jaws from side to side. “All these murders. You actually think . . .” Shaking his head.

I said, “How important was the concept of “bad love' to de Bosch's philosophy?”

“I'd say it was fairly central,” he said. “Andres was very concerned with justice—he saw achieving consistency in our world as a prime motive. Saw many symptoms as attempts to accomplish that.”

“The search for order.”

Nod. “And good love.”

“When did you become disillusioned about him?”

He looked pained.

I held my gaze and said, “You said Katarina pressured you to speak at the symposium. Why would a faithful student have to be pressured?”

He got up, turned his back on me, and rested his palms on the counter. A little man in ridiculous clothing, trying to bring color to his world.

“I really wasn't that close to him,” he said. “After I began my anthropology studies, I wasn't around much.” Taking a couple of steps, he wiped the counter with one stubby hand.

“Your own search for consistency?”

He stiffened but didn't turn.

“Racism,” he said. “I heard Andres making remarks.”

“About who?”

“Blacks, Mexicans.”