She’d sent me a necktie for Christmas. I’d reciprocated with a Victorian garnet brooch. I still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. From time to time it bothered me that I couldn’t seem to hold on to a relationship. Sometimes I wondered what I’d say if I was sitting in The Other Chair.

I told myself introspection could rot your brain, better to concentrate on other people’s problems.

It was Milo who ended up providing distraction, at nine a.m. on a cold, dry Monday morning, one week after the hoax settlement.

“That girl you evaluated— Mikki Brand, the one who faked her abduction? They found her body last night. Strangled and stabbed.”

“Didn’t know her nickname was Mikki.” The things you say when you’re caught off guard.

“That’s what her mother calls her.”

“She’d know,” I said.

* * *

I met him at the scene forty minutes later. The murder had taken place sometime Sunday night. By now, the area had been cleaned and scraped and analyzed, yellow tape taken down.

The sole remnants of brutality were short pieces of the white rope the coroner’s drivers use to bind the body after they wrap it in heavy-duty translucent plastic. Filmy gray plastic. Same hue, I realized, as cataract-dimmed eyes.

Michaela Brand had been found in a grassy area fifty feet west of Bagley Avenue, north of National Boulevard, where the streets cut under the 10 freeway. A faint, oblong gloss caught sunlight where the body had compressed the weeds. The overpass provided cold shade and relentless noise. Graffiti boasted and raged on concrete walls. In some places the vegetation was waist high, crabgrass vying for nutrition with ragweed and dandelions and low, creeping things I couldn’t identify.

This was city property, part of the freeway easement, sandwiched between the tailored, affluent streets of Beverlywood to the north and the working-class apartment buildings of Culver City to the south. A few years back, there’d been some gang problems, but I hadn’t heard of anything lately. Still, it wouldn’t be a place where I’d walk at night, and I wondered what had brought Michaela here.

Her apartment on Holt was a couple of miles away. In L.A., that’s a drive, not a walk. Her five-year-old Honda hadn’t been located, and I wondered if she’d been jacked.

For real, this time.

Too ironic.

Milo said, “What’re you thinking?”

I shrugged.

“You look contemplative. Let it out, man.”

“Nothing to say.”

He ran his hand over his big, lumpy face, squinted at me as if we’d just been introduced. He was dressed for messy work: rust-colored nylon windbreaker, wash-and-wear white shirt with a curling collar, skinny oxblood tie that resembled two lengths of beef jerky, baggy brown trousers, and tan desert boots with pink rubber soles.