Yvonne Bennett was twenty-eight years old when she died, though everyone I interviewed including two former roommates and three former boyfriends believed she was nineteen. As it was for many in Los Angeles, her life was a masquerade. She lied about her age, her past, her work history, and her profession. Of the twenty-three people I interviewed when I tracked her movements on the night of her death, three believed she was a student at UCLA, two believed she was a student at USC, one believed she was a graduate student working toward a doctorate in psychology, and one or more of the rest believed she was a production assistant, a makeup artist, a florist, a clothing designer, a graphic artist, a bartender, a waitress, a sales clerk at Barney's on Wilshire Boulevard, or a sous chef who worked for Wolfgang Puck. Though she had been arrested for prostitution twice, she was not and never had been a streetwalker. She was a bar girl. She picked up men in bars and brokered the cash before leaving the premises. Even with the arrests, she denied being a prostitute, once telling a former roommate that, though she dated men for money, she never took money for sex. This, too, was a lie.

There wasn't much in my files about Yvonne Bennett or Lionel Byrd because I hadn't spent much time on his case, eight days start to finish. Any moron could have solved it. No shots fired, no beatings given or received. The Batman cape stayed home.

I passed the pages to Pike as I read them.

At the time of his arrest, Lionel Byrd was a legitimate suspect in the murder. He had been seen talking to Yvonne Bennett earlier that evening and he had a criminal history with prostitutes two pops for soliciting and a misdemeanor assault conviction eighteen months earlier when he argued with a prostitute about her services. Byrd was still on probation when Crimmens picked him up.

A twenty-two-year-old coffee-shop barista and aspiring actor named Angel Tomaso was the last person to see Yvonne Bennett alive when she entered the alley behind his coffee shop at eleven-forty P.M. Her body was discovered at twelve-sixteen A.M. These two times created the thirty-six-minute window during which Bennett was murdered, and would prove key to the charges against Byrd being dropped.