“How do I know you’re not some maniac?”

“I’ll give you my number at the police station and you can verify.”

“How do I know you’re not giving me some phony number?”

“Feel free to look it up. West L.A. Division, on Butler—”

“I should do all the work?”

“Ma’am,” said Milo, “I appreciate your caution but I need to talk to Bettina.”

Silence.

“Mrs. Sanfelice—”

“She went to T.G.I. Friday’s.”

“Which one?”

“All the way in Woodland Hills, I don’t know the address. She likes the burgers, you’d never catch me wasting gas for that.”

“What was she wearing?”

“How would I know?”

“She doesn’t live with you?”

“She sure does, ’cause she still don’t have no job. That don’t mean I pay attention to her clothes.”

Click.

He phoned Detective Moe Reed, asked for DMV statistics on the intern.

The young cop said, “I was just about to call you, Loo. Prints on Backer and the female vic got run through AFIS but unfortunately nothing kicked back …”

“I already knew that.”

“You did?”

“It’s been that kind of day.” He spelled Sanfelice’s name.

Seconds later Reed said, “Sanfelice, Bettina Morgana, thirty years old, five five, hundred and ten, brown, brown, wears corrective lenses, no wants or warrants. Here’s the address.”

Living at Mom’s when she’d had her license renewed three years ago.

“Anything else, Loo?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Milo hung up. “I hear intern, I figure a college kid. She’s way past that, unemployed, stuck with that loving maternal entity. Like you said, emotional vulnerability. Ol’ Des had a helluva nose.”

The 101 freeway was starting to clog up so I took Ventura Boulevard to Woodland Hills. The T.G.I. Friday’s was like any other, which is the point.

Chain restaurants are easy targets of ridicule for expense-account gourmets, documentary filmmakers living off grant money, and trust-fund babies. For folks saddled with budgets and faced with a world that seems increasingly unpredictable, they’re temples of comfort. Milo and I had grown up in the Midwest and we’d both flipped burgers in high school. The smell of the grill still evokes all sorts of memories. How I react depends on what else is going on in my life.

Today, the aroma was pretty good.

Milo inhaled deeply. “Home sweet bacon.”

The interior was vast, chocked with corporate oak, stenciled mirrors, not-even-close-to-Tiffany lamps, red-shirted servers mostly hanging around because of the three p.m. off-hour.

A bar ample enough to intoxicate half the Valley ran the length of the room. The layout made it easy to spot every customer: a scatter of bleary-eyed truckers with no idea what time it was, a mom and a grandmom teaming up to handle a whining kid in a booster chair, two young women in a booth midway down, sipping tall pink drinks and picking at a plate of fries.