So that was the kind of crowd Cathy Vega had run with. Drug users. The roommate had been wrong. Or lying. She sat right there in their apartment and swore Cathy Vega didn’t do drugs. She had enough reason to lie. She didn’t know who I was and she probably didn’t believe Cathy was dead. Thought Cathy was shacked up or strung out somewhere. It looked like Cathy Vega was just a junkie who’d been killed. And for a while I had thought she was a woman like me. Monica Fullbright had me running around like a crazy person. For what? What was it Monica wanted?

I went back to the office. I was through being lied to. I was mad at myself that I’d blown things all out of proportion. Like I’d been on the edge of hysteria. I had to take care of my own business. I had been running around trying to be a Girl Scout. I am not a Girl Scout, I am a lawyer. UCLA cum laude. I needed to sit down, be quiet and do my work. I was through chasing for Monica Fullbright, and I was through inventing stories to explain the death of Cathy Vega. She was a junkie. Plain and simple. The Peterson trial was less than a week away. At the office, mail was stacked up waiting for me. Bills. Lots of bills. I needed to do some work I’d get paid for. Harvey Kaplan walked in on me while I was sorting them.

“Were you here the other night?” he asked without looking me in the eye. He was rumpled. He was still wearing the same plaid shirt and jeans I had seen him asleep in, but had added a baseball cap, with his ponytail sticking out the back.

“Just for a little while.” I threw the DWP bill for my apartment into the trash. They would wait another month.

“Were you expecting someone? There was a guy by here a while ago, trying to snoop around your office. A bruiser. Black T-shirt. Eyes sort of crossed. Definitely a carnivore.”

“About twenty-five?” I thought immediately of the man following me.

“Older than that. Closer to thirty. Nose smashed against the left side of his face.”

It had to be Lupe Ramos’s brother. How had he found me? Had Lupe gone out on the streets? Had she gone home yet? Did she tell him about me?

Harvey was scratching at a bead bracelet he wears around his wrist. There are weird talismans from Katmandu and the Himalayas hanging all over him. He always has on at least two necklaces, tantric scapulars with people wrapped around each other like snakes.

“Harvey, have you done any cocaine cases?”

“Have I done any cocaine cases?” he said, swallowing the last word and looking dreamy, almost wistful, thinking of his past. “Sure. You think they invented it after I stopped doing criminal law?”