Sheriff’s investigators followed the trail and located a Wilderness Outfitters in Santa Monica where the couple had purchased a flashlight, bottled water, dehydrated food packets designed for hikers. A 7-Eleven near Century City verified that Michaela Brand’s nearly depleted debit card had been used to buy a dozen Snickers bars, two packets of beef jerky, and a six-pack of Miller Lite less than an hour before the reported time of the abduction. Wrappers and empty cans found a half mile up the ridge from where the couple had staged their confinement filled in the picture.

The final blow was the report of an emergency room physician at Saint John’s Hospital: Meserve and Brand claimed to have gone without food for two days but their electrolyte tests were normal. Furthermore, neither victim exhibited signs of serious injury other than rope burn and some “mild” bruising of Michaela’s vagina that could’ve been consistent with “self-infliction.”

Faced with the evidence, the couple broke down, admitted the hoax, and were charged with obstructing officers and filing a false police report. Both pleaded poverty, and public defenders were assigned.

Michaela’s D.P.D. was a man named Lauritz Montez. He and I had met nearly a decade ago on a particularly repellent case: the murder of a two-year-old girl by two preadolescent boys, one of whom had been Montez’s client. The ugliness had resurfaced last year when one of the killers, now a young man, had phoned me out within days of his release from prison and turned up dead hours later.

Lauritz Montez hadn’t liked me to begin with and my digging up the past had made matters worse. So I was puzzled when he called and asked me to evaluate Michaela Brand.

“Why would I kid, Doctor?”

“We didn’t exactly hit it off.”

“I’m not inviting you to hang out,” he said. “You’re a smart shrink and I want her to have a solid report behind her.”

“She’s charged with misdemeanors,” I said.

“Yeah, but the sheriff’s pissed and is pushing the D.A. to go for jail time. We’re talking a mixed-up kid who did something stupid. She feels bad enough.”

“You want me to say she was mentally incapacitated.”

Montez laughed. “Temporary raving-lunacy-insanity would be great but I know you’re all pissy-anty about small details like facts. So just tell it like it was: She was addled, caught in a weak moment, swept along. I’m sure there’s some technical term for it.”

“The truth,” I said.

He laughed again. “Will you do it?”

The plastic surgeons’ little girl had started talking, but both parents’ lawyers had phoned this morning and informed me the case had been resolved and my services were no longer necessary.

“Sure,” I said.

“Seriously?” said Montez.

“Why not?”

“It didn’t go that smoothly on Duchay.”

“How could it?”