Milo nodded. “Ten years. Reyn showed up when he was twenty-five.”

“At my mother’s condo. Tattooed and drunk and he’d put on about sixty pounds. She wouldn’t let him in. He didn’t argue but he kept hanging around on her street. So Mom called Cop Daughter. When I saw him, I was shocked— believe it or not, he used to be a nice-looking guy. I gave him some cash, set him up at a motel, told him to sober up and move to another city. The last part he kept.”

“Reno.”

“Next I heard from him was two years later, needing money for bail. I can’t tell you where he was in between.”

“Bad decisions,” I said.

“He’s never been violent,” said Marcia Peaty. “Just another one of those revolving-door dudes.”

Milo said, “His peeper bust could be thought of as scary.”

“Maybe I’m rationalizing but that seemed more like drunk and disorderly. He’d never done anything like that before, hasn’t since— right?”

“People say he stared a lot. Made ’em uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, he tends— tended to space out,” said Marcia Peaty. “Like I said, he was no Einstein, couldn’t add three-digit sums. I know it sounds like I’m giving a mope a free pass but he didn’t deserve to get shot by that banger. Can you fill me in on how it happened?”

Milo gave her the barest details of the murder, leaving out the whispering phone calls and Vasquez’s claim of harassment.

She said, “One of those stupid things,” and sipped a half inch of martini. “Banger going to pay?”

“He’ll get something.”

“Meaning?”

“Defense is gonna paint your cousin as a bully.”

“Reynold was a booze-soaked loser but he never bullied an ant.”

“He have any kind of love life?”

Marcia Peaty’s hazel eyes narrowed. Speed-trap gaze. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“D.A. wants a clear picture of what he was like. I can’t find evidence of any love life, just a collection of young girl videos.”

Marcia Peaty’s knuckles whitened around her glass. “How young?”

“Barely legal.”

“Why does any of that matter?”

“Reynold worked as a janitor at an acting school. A couple of female students were murdered.”

Marcia Peaty blanched. “Uh-uh. No way. I worked Vice long enough to know a sex criminal when I see one and Reynold wasn’t— and that ain’t family denial. Trust me on this, you’d best be looking elsewhere.”

“Speaking of family, let’s talk about your other cousins.”

“I mean it,” she said. “Reyn wasn’t wired that way.”

“The other cousins,” said Milo.

“Who?”

“The Dowds. You were at Nora Dowd’s house the other day, told a neighbor you were her cousin.”

Marcia Peaty slid her glass toward her left hand. Then back to her right. Lifting the pick skewering the onion, she twirled, put it back. “That wasn’t strictly true.”