While Scoppio worked the wonderful world of personal injury, the house he’d shared with Lara Rieffen and Doreen Fredd got tossed by Moe Reed, Sean Binchy, and a Sheriff’s crime scene tech.

No remnant of Fredd’s residence, no blood beyond a few pinpoints under the bathroom mirror, probably shaving-nick spritz. No indication anything violent had ever taken place in the bungalow. The tech swabbed and pulled up prints and left.

Binchy and Reed found the gun box right where Rieffen had said it would be. Resting on top was a black plastic case housing the .22 S&W, serial numbers filed off but probably accessible chemically.

Binchy drove the gun to the ballistics lab. The final report would take time, but the analyst saw enough to opine that the bullets from Backer and Escobar came from the same weapon.

Reed’s meticulous room-by-room produced an arsenal under the bed: three rifles, a shotgun, boxes of ammunition. Maybe Rieffen had been telling the truth about bad dreams.

Both her prints and Monte’s showed up on the murder weapon. The longer-barreled gun inserted in Doreen Fredd’s vagina could be any of several in the collection but a Charter Arms Bulldog did show up, fitting Dr. Jernigan’s guess.

The top drawer of a desk in a spare bedroom held newspaper accounts of the lynx hair episode, along with Rieffen’s med school acceptance letter, well thumbed. Baggies of prescription tranquilizers and crystals of what looked like methamphetamine showed up in a bottom drawer.

A pantry cupboard was filled with heavy-duty muslin bags crammed with packets of bills.

Reed calculated the total three times. $46,850.

“Checked both credit cards for expenditures since they got back from Washington, Loo. They’ve been to dinner three times, he’s a bad tipper, total charges were $146.79. Nothing else substantial pops out on the cards, just a hundred or so in piddly charges. But I did find some matchbooks from three Indian casinos in his nightstand, so that could account for the rest.”

“You’re slipping, Moses.”

“Sir?”

“Those dinners, what’d they eat for dessert?”

“Hopefully humble pie, Loo.”

At four fifty-six p.m. two middle-aged Hispanic women in casual clothes rode away from the law firm in a battered Nissan, followed by a younger blonde, identified as Kelly Baird Englund, daughter of the senior partner and a lawyer herself, in a powder-blue Jaguar convertible. Seconds later, Daddy Bryan Baird, corpulent in a bad blue suit, waddled to his black Mercedes. Ed Habib, in no better haberdashery, steered his black Lexus LX haphazardly while talking on the phone, followed by Owen Garroway, patrician in pinstripes, handling his black Porsche Cayman with aplomb.

“Black’s the new black,” said Gayle Lindstrom.

No sign of Carlo Scoppio and that hadn’t changed by five fifteen.

Lindstrom fidgeted. “Maybe he tried to contact Rieffen, couldn’t reach her, somehow found out she was in lockup.”