"Or just guarding his privacy-everyone gets privacy, right? Even guys who cook and eat babies. Everyone except citizens who get laid out on steel tables, some white-coat peeling off their face, doing the Y-cut, playing peekaboo with their internal organs. No privacy there."

Chapter 20

Robin didn't stir when I slipped into bed beside her at one A.M. Visions of Peake's crimes and the knowledge that I hadn't helped Milo much kept me up for a while, heart beating too fast, muscles tight. Deep-breathing myself into an uneasy torpor, I finally slipped off. If dreams intruded, I had no memory of them in the morning, but my legs ached, as if I'd been running from something.

By nine A.M., I was drinking coffee and catching what passes for TV news in L.A.: capped-toothed jesters hawking showbiz gossip, the latest bumblings of the moronic city council, the current health scare. Today, it was strawberries from Mexico: everyone was going to die from an intestinal scourge. Back when I'd treated children, the news had frightened more kids than any horror flick.

I was about to switch off the set when the grinning blonde gushed, "And now more on that train accident."

The story merited thirty seconds. An unidentified man had lain across the MetroRail tracks just east of the city limits, squarely in the path of an empty passenger train. The engineer spotted him and put on the emergency brake, but not in time.

Choo choo.

I called Milo.

He picked up right away. "Yeah, yeah, the little train that couldn't. Probably nothing. Or maybe Peake really is a prophet and we should be worshiping him instead of keeping him locked up. Nothing much else on my plate, so I called the coroner. The deceased is one Ellroy Lincoln Beatty, male black, fifty-two. Petty criminal record-mostly possession and drank and disorderly. The only thing that intrigued me was that Beatty spent some time in a mental hospital. Cama-rillo, thirteen years ago, back when they were still open for that kind of business. No mention of Starkweather, but you never know. The accident happened in Newton Division. I wish Manny Alvarado had the case, but he retired and the new guy isn't great about returning calls. I figured I'd head over to the morgue before lunch. Feel free to join me. If it gets you hungry, we can have lunch later. Like a big rare steak."

"Basically, the head and the lower extremities," said the attendant. He was a short, solidly built Hispanic named Albert Martinez, with a crew cut and goatee and thick-lensed glasses that enlarged and brightened his eyes. The crucifix around his neck was gold and hand-tooled, vaguely Byzantine.

The coroner's office was two stories of square, smooth, cream stucco, meticulously maintained. Back in East L.A. Back at County Hospital. Claire's old office was a few blocks away. I hadn't realized it before, but she'd come full circle.