Three of five rooms on Altair were filled with mementos. Nice view of the Hollywood sign from a corner of the deck. White Lexus in the garage.

The Bentley had been moved from the LAPD motor lab to the same department-sanctioned tow yard where Kat Shonsky’s car had been ignored.

I said, “Maybe the chief can use it as his official ride.”

Milo said, “Harness a couple of thoroughbreds to the front bumper, be perfect.”

Ansell “Dale” Bright’s medicine cabinet yielded nothing stronger than aspirin and over-the-counter sinus remedies.

Under the sink was a polished black-walnut box filled with ampules of synthetic testosterone. Its bird’s-eye maple mate held plastic-sealed hypodermic needles.

“Pumping himself up?” said Milo. “To go with a dress?”

I threw up my hands.

He finished his Martini and told me about the passports under half a dozen aliases, the trove of documents that traced Bright’s path from New York to London, then Paris, Lisbon, back to England, Ireland, Scotland. Final stop: Zurich.

Trammel Dabson was another pilfered identity. Same DOB as Bright and the unfortunate Nicholas Heubel.

The original owner of the identity, an infant buried in the Morton Hall Cemetery in Edinburgh.

Bright had done a gravestone rubbing, mounted it in a scrapbook.

One of fifteen scrapbooks.

Chronicle of a life lived in costume.

The souvenirs weren’t limited to paper. In a small basement cut into the hillside behind the house, Milo discovered a trio of footlockers filled with firearms, knives, two acetylene blowtorches, stout rope, surgical gloves and tools, scalpels, probes, tissue spreaders, vials of poison.

Newspaper clippings from foreign papers created another chronology.

Unsolved murder of the landlord of a rooming house in the Eleventh Arrondissement of Paris.

Disappearance of an Oxford publican with a famously nasty disposition.

An article in Portuguese yet to be translated. But the grainy snapshot of a heavyset woman and the recurrent word “assasinato” said plenty.

The Brentwood house had served as a front and yielded nothing of forensic value. Upscale address for the social life Bright-as-Heubel had hoped to live as a financial advisor. Soraya Hamidpour had a client “from the industry” ready to move in.

Access to Bright’s computer was easy. No encryption and his password was “Bright Guy.”

His hard drive contained mostly financial files — algorithms for trading, performance histories, linkups to bourses around the world — and a scatter of sadistic pornography.

In a separate folder were five drafts of a prospectus “Nicholas St. Heubel, III” had composed and dated two years previous. Plans to start Hydro-Worth, a hedge fund emphasizing oil commodity trading. Bright had appended a puffed-up bio, lied about attending Eton, Harvard, and Wharton, termed himself “a brilliant tactician and financial soothsayer.”