“This thing is at least twenty-four-hours cold. I want to know everything Detective Galletta has over at LAPD. I want to know more than Galletta has. Do you think you could —”

“On it,” he said, and was gone.

It wasn’t a bogus assignment I’d given him, though. I really did need to get current, and if that meant Page would be out of my hair for a while, all the better.

I pulled out a blank sheet of paper and scribbled a few questions I’d been pondering on the ride in from LAX.

M. Lowenstein-Bell—how did someone get inside the house?

Does this killer have some kind of hit list? An established order? Are there other less-obvious connections between the victims? Don’t there have to be?

The most common formula in my profession is this: How plus why equals who. If I wanted to know Mary Smith, I had to consider the similarities and differences—the combination of the two—from site to site on every one of the murders. That meant a stop at the Lowenstein-Bell residence.

I wrote, E-mailer? / Perp?

I kept coming back to that point. How much intersection was there between the killer’s personality and the persona in the e-mails? How honest, for lack of a better word, was Mary Smith’s writing? And how much of it, if any, was misdirection?

Until I could figure that out, it was like chasing two suspects. If I was lucky, my next appointment would shed some light on the e-mails.

I wrote another note to myself. Tool sets?

Most pattern killers had two sets of tools, as did Mary Smith.

First were the tools of the actual murder. The gun was a sure thing here. We knew she used the same one each time. We weren’t as sure about the knife.

And a car had to be considered. Any other way of getting in and out seemed unfeasible.

Then there were the “tools” that helped her satisfy her psychoemotional needs.

The children’s stickers marked A or B, and the e-mails themselves. Usually, these were more important to the killer than the actual weapons. They were her way of saying “I was here” or “This is me.”

Or, possibly, and this was the troubling part, “This is who I want you to think I am.”

In any case, it was a kind of taunting—something that could be taken as “Come and get me. If you can.”

I scribbled that last thought down, too.

Come and get me? If you can?

Then I wrote down something that kept sticking in my craw—Truscott. Appeared six weeks ago. Who is James Truscott? What is his deal?