Friedman looked down at the head. Then the card. Then the numbers on the steel drawers. He yanked one open.

Inside was an intact body, naked, gray.

Exact same gray as Ellroy Beatty.

Same face.

All four of us stared.

I looked from corpse to corpse. Minor discrepancies materialized: Leroy Beatty had slightly less hair on top than Ellroy, but more on the bottom. A full white beard. No scratches on his face, but a keloid scar puckered the right jawline, probably an old knife wound.

The neat, blackened hole in his forehead looked too innocuous to have killed him. The impact had caused facial distortion-swelling around the nose, puffiness under the eyes. Bloodred eyeballs, as if he'd stared too long into the fires of hell.

Friedman's head was swiveling now, too.

"Twins," said Martinez. "Brother Ellroy, meet Brother Leroy."

Friedman turned on him. "Don't joke, Albert. What the hell's going on?"

"Good question," said Milo.

It took two hours to put it all together. Dr. Friedman left long before then, muttering about having to work with incompetents.

I sat with Milo in a morgue conference room. Detective Robert Aguilar from Newton showed up first. Young, good-looking, with a sleek black pompadour, he wore a gray pinstriped suit tailored to his trim frame. Manicured nails. He spoke very crisply, a little too fast, tried to come across light-hearted but couldn't pull it off. Milo'd told me he was new to the division, a Detective I. For all I knew, this was his first case.

Last to arrive was Willis Hooks from Central. I'd met him when he worked Southwest. A series of killings of handicapped people that had given me a glimpse of a cowardly new world.

Hooks was in his early forties, black, five-nine, heavy, with a clean head, bulldog jowls, and a thick, drooping mustache. His navy blazer had that baggy, too-long look you sometimes see with big-chested men. His shoes were dusty.

"Milo," he said, sitting down. "Dr. Delaware. Fate keeps putting us in the same room."

Aguilar watched and listened, trying, I guessed, to gauge Hooks's mood. To know with whom to align himself.

"Fate or just plain bad luck, Willis," said Milo.

Hooks laughed hoarsely and spread pudgy fingers on the table.

Milo said, "Willis, this is Robert Aguilar."

"Newton Division," said Aguilar.

"Charmed," said Hooks. "Yours is the train?"

"Yup," said Aguilar. "Ellroy Lincoln Beatty, male black, fifty-two."

"Mine's Leroy Washington Beatty, male black, fifty-two. Think they could be distantly related?"

Before Aguilar could answer, Hooks winked and said, "Mine went down around three A.M., give or take."

"Mine, too," said Aguilar.

"How 'bout that?" Hooks turned to Milo. "It appears someone's got it in for the Beatty family. Maybe we should find out if they've got any other siblings. Maybe there's some more Beatty 187's all over town-hell, this could be a Beatty Holocaust. If not, least we should do is warn them."