“Why would there be another crime or a fire, Doyle?”

“There wouldn’t, I’m just saying.”

“Saying what?”

“I like to be prepared.”

“If I search your car, Doyle, am I going to find anything criminally useful—or flammable?”

“No way.”

“Do I have permission to search your car?”

Hesitation.

“Doyle?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Let go of him, guys, so he can give me his car key.”

Milo rummaged in the Taurus, came back. “Nothing iffy, Doyle, but I’m gonna have these officers bring you to my office so we can chat some more.”

“I didn’t do nothing, Lieutenant. I can’t leave, I’m on the job—”

“The job’s temporarily suspended, Doyle.”

“What about my car? I leave it there, I’ll get a ticket.”

“I’ll put a sticker on the windshield.”

Bryczinski’s eyes watered. “If I don’t work, company’ll can my ass.”

“We’ll talk at the station, Doyle, everything works out, you’re back here today. But don’t mess with neighbors.”

“He ain’t a neighbor, he’s a maniac. Claims he owns the place and tried to hit me upside the head when I told him to buzz off.”

“Charles Ellston Rutger.”

The man cleared his throat for the third time, smoothed back thin white hair, cast a derisive look.

His houndstooth sport coat was high-grade cashmere with working leather buttons, suede elbow patches, and a cut that said tailor-made, but the lapels were several decades too wide. Knife-pressed cream slacks broke perfectly over spit-shined oxblood loafers. His shirt was once-blue pinpoint oxford faded to lavender-gray and frayed along the rim of the collar. A gold gizmo shaped like a safety pin held the collar in place, elevating the Windsor knot of a pine-green foulard patterned with bugles and foxhounds. More fabric erosion fuzzed the tie. Same for a canary-yellow pocket square.

Charles Rutger’s driver’s license made him sixty-six. Skin as cracked and dry and blotched as the seats of a convertible left open to the elements would have made me guess older. He’d lied about his height and weight, adding an inch or two, subtracting the fifteen pounds that strained the buttons of the sport coat. The white hair, slicked back, waxy and furrowed by comb marks, was topped by a yellowish sheen. Heavy eyelids were specked with tiny wens.

South Pasadena address, not the fashionable part of that city, an apartment unit. The single vehicle registered in his name was a fifteen-year-old maroon Lincoln Town Car. The very same sedan parked haphazardly near the fence.

“Bit of a drive from South Pasadena, Mr. Rutger.”

“This is my homestead, I can get here in my sleep.” Plummy voice, vaguely mid-Atlantic, explicitly disapproving.

“You say you own this property?”

“I don’t say it, basic decency says it. When I heard about what happened, I rushed right over.”

“How’d you find out?”

“The news. Of course.” Charles Ellston Rutger tugged his lapels straight.