The C.I. raised the male victim a bit higher, studied, lowered him with tenderness. The investigators I’ve seen are generally like that: respectful, swimming in more horror than most people encounter in a lifetime, never growing jaded.

She stood, brushed dust off her trousers. “She’s not wearing panties and his penis is out. Obviously, there’s no erection so there’s no way they’d stay … connected. But there is a crusty whitish stain on her thigh, so even if they were posed, looks like they consummated.”

Kneeling again, she pulled the man’s crumpled jeans high enough to search his pockets. “Okay, here we go.”

Hefting a blue vinyl wallet secured by a snap button.

Milo gloved up. “No car keys?”

“Nope, just this. Let me tag and then you can go through it. I didn’t see any civilian cars parked on the street, maybe it started as a jacking?”

“And everyone ran up here and these two started getting it on?”

“I was thinking an intended jacking, the bad guy changed his mind?”

Milo shrugged.

“Sorry, Lieutenant. For shooting my mouth.”

“At this point,” said Milo, “I’ll take anything I can get.”

“I’m new on the job,” she said. “I’m sure there’s nothing I can teach you—guess it’s time to flip them. I’ll do a liver temp and see if we can close in on TOD.”

Moments later, she was cleaning off the meat thermometer.

Milo said, “And?”

“Probably somewhere during the last twelve hours, I’m sure the docs will be able to tell you more.”

The male victim’s face was a husk of the handsome, smiling visage on the driver’s license in the blue vinyl wallet. Desmond Erik Backer, thirty-two years old last February, five eleven, one seventy, brown and brown, apartment on California Avenue in Santa Monica, an address that put it three blocks from the beach.

The wallet held two hundred dollars in fifties and twenties, two gold credit cards, a couple of wheat-colored business cards, a photo of a little blond girl around two wearing a lace-trimmed, red-velvet dress. TAG Heuer sport watch around left wrist, no other jewelry. No pale stripe of skin suggesting a wedding band, removed discreetly or otherwise.

Milo showed me the handwritten inscription on the back of the child’s portrait. Samantha, 22 mo. No one else would’ve caught the twitch in his eyelid.

He flipped to a business card. Desmond E. Backer, AIA, Gemein, Holman, and Cohen, Architects. Main Street in Venice.

“Nice watch,” he said, checking the back of the TAG for an inscription. Blank. Checking the leather label on the jeans. “Zegna.”

The C.I. said, “But her dress looks a little low-rent, don’t you think?”

She inspected the label. “Made in China, polyester … short and snug. Could she be a working girl?”

“Anything’s possible.” Milo returned the wallet. As he bagged, took notes, he continued to study the bodies.