Bad eyes in a box.

Something else about human snakes: they lacked emotional depth, faked humanity. Craved repetition. Patterns.

So maybe Wark had co-opted other major directors. I was no film expert but several names came to mind: Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Huston, John Ford, Frank Capra.... I scanned the tech list. None of the above.

But Wark was D.W. Griffith's middle name. What was Hitchcock's?

I called the research library at the U, asked for the reference desk, and explained what I needed. The librarian must have been puzzled, but odd requests are their business and, God bless her, she didn't argue.

Five minutes later I had what I needed: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. John no middle name Huston. Frank NMN Capra. George Orson Welles. John NMN Ford; real name, Sean Aloysius O'Feeney.

Thanking her, I turned back to the tech list. No Capras, four Fords, one Hitchcock, no Hustons, no O'Feeneys ... no obviously cute manipulations of Hitchcock or Ford... .Then I saw it.

G.W. Orson.

Co-opting a genius.

Delusions were everywhere.

Chapter 31

"Citizen creep," said Milo, looking at the circled name.

"G.W. Orson got licensed twenty-two months ago," I said. "That's about all I could get except for the address he put on his application form."

He studied the address slip. "South Shenandoah Street... around Eighteenth. West L.A. territory ... only a few blocks from the shopping center where Claire was dumped."

"The center's far from Claire's house, so why would she shop there? Unless she went with someone else."

"Crimmins? They had a relationship?"

"Why not?" I said. "Let's assume Orson-and Wark-are both Crimmins aliases. We have no employment records yet, but Crimmins is a psych tech, so it's not much of a leap to assume he works at Starkweather, or did in the past. He ran into Claire. Something developed. Because they had two common interests: the movies and Ardis Peake. When Claire told Crimmins she'd picked Peake as a project, he decided to find out more. When Crimmins learned Claire was uncovering information potentially threatening to him, he decided to cast hex in Blood Walk."

"Kills her, films her, dumps her," he said. "It holds together logically; now all I have to do is prove it. I canvassed the shopping center, showed her picture to every clerk who'd been working the day she was killed. No one remembered seeing her, alone or with anyone else. That doesn't mean much, it's a huge place, and if I can get a picture of Crimmins, I'll go back. But maybe we can get a look at him in person."

He waved the address slip. "This helps big-time. First let's see if he registered his 'Vette."

The call to DMV left him shaking his head. "No G.W. Orson cars anywhere in the state."

"Lives in L.A., but no legal car," I said. "That alone tells us he's dirty. Try another scrambled director's name."