I went to the library after leaving Lawton Cross because I no longer could call on Keisha Russell to help me with clip searches. Her call to Sacramento to run a check on me when I had asked her to simply run a clip search on Martha Gessler was the warning. Her journalistic curiosity would lead her further than my requests, to places I didn’t want her to go.

The main reference desk was on the second floor. I recognized the woman behind the counter, though I had never spoken to her before. I could tell she recognized me as I approached. I used a library card where a police shield used to do. She read it and recognized the name.

“Do you know that you have the same name as a famous painter?” she asked.

“Yes, I know.”

Her face flushed. She was midthirties with an unattractive hairstyle. She wore a name tag that said Mrs. Molloy.

“Of course you do,” she said. “You must know that. How can I help you?”

“I need to look for stories that were in the Times from about three years ago.”

“You want to do a key word search?”

“I guess so. What is that?”

She smiled.

“We have the Los Angeles Times on computer going back to nineteen eighty-seven. If what you are looking for was published after that, all you have to do is go online on one of our computers, type in a key word or phrase, like a name, for example, that you think is in the story and it will search for it. There is a five-dollar-per-hour fee for accessing the newspaper archives.”

“Fine, that’s what I want to do.”

She smiled and reached beneath the counter. She handed me a white plastic device that was about a foot long. It looked like no computer I had ever seen.

“How do I use this?”

She almost laughed.

“It’s a pager. All our computers are being used at the moment. I will page you as soon as one becomes available.”

“Oh.”

“The pager doesn’t work outside of the building. It also does not emit an audible page. It vibrates. So keep it on your person.”

“I will. Any idea how long it will be?”

“We set one-hour use limits, which right now would mean one won’t be available for another thirty minutes. However, people often don’t require the full hour.”

“Okay, thank you. I’ll be nearby.”

I found an empty table in one of the reading rooms and decided to work on the case chronology. I got out my notebook and on a fresh page wrote down the three key dates and events I knew.

Angella Benton—murdered—May 16, 1999

Movie set heist—May 19, 1999

Martha Gessler—missing—March 19, 2000

I then began adding the things I was missing.

Gessler/Dorsey—phone call—?????

And after a few moments I thought of something else that might help explain something that bothered me.