“Bullshit. He wants hops and malt,” said Milo. “Looks like he's closed a few taverns in his day.”

“There's a marketing opportunity for you,” I said. “Brew a hearty lager for quadrupeds. Though I'm not sure you could set your criteria too high for a species that imbibes out of the toilet.”

He laughed. I managed a smile. Both of us trying to forget the videotape. And everything else.

“There's another possibility,” I said. “Maybe Hewitt's voice wasn't lifted from the video footage. Maybe he was taped simultaneously by someone at the mental health center. Someone who happened to have a recorder handy the day of the murder and switched it on during the standoff. There'd probably be machines lying around the center, for therapy.”

“You're saying there's a therapist behind this?”

“I was thinking more of a patient. Some paranoids make a fetish of keeping records. I've seen some lug tape recorders around with them. Someone who'd been bearing a grudge since seventy-nine could very well be highly paranoid.”

He thought about that. “Nutcase with a pocket Sony, huh? Someone you once treated who ended up at the mental health center?”

“Or just someone who remembered me from the conference and ended up at the center. Someone tying me in with bad love—whatever it means to him. Probably anger at bad therapy. Or therapy he perceived as bad. De Bosch's theory has to do with bad mothers letting their kids down. Betrayal. If you think of therapists as surrogate parents, the stretch isn't hard to make.”

He put down his bottle and looked at the ceiling. “So we've got a nut, one of your old patients, gone downhill, can't afford private treatment so he's getting county help. Happens to be at the center the day Hewitt freaks out and butchers Becky. Recorder in his pocket—keeping tabs on all the people talking behind his back. He hears the screams, presses RECORD . . . I guess it's possible—anything's possible in this city.”

“If we're dealing with someone who's been stewing for a long time, witnessing Becky Basille's murder and the SWAT scene could have set him off. Hearing Hewitt screaming about bad love could have done it, too, if he'd had experiences with de Bosch or a de Boschian therapist.”

He rolled the bottle between his palms. “Maybe. But two nuts with a “bad love' fixation just happening to show up at the same place on the same day is too damned cute for my taste.”

“Mine, too,” I said.

He drank some more.