“Nah,” said Kleffer. “Hope to hell he didn’t.” He rocked on his feet. “If what you’re thinking is true.”

He returned to work.

Milo said, “Stealing another guy’s girlfriend to make up for poor knife skills.”

I said, “His knife skills failed on TV but they’re good enough for his extracurricular interests. And Kleffer could be wrong about Williams not having any girlfriends in New York. There could be a crime scene or two in Manhattan—”

“I checked for similars.”

“You know as well as I do that NCIC doesn’t catch all the relevant details. In an isolated case, why would dinner for two be seen as important? All it would imply is a killer the victim knew well. Even if investigators did find it interesting, they might want to hold it back.”

He thought about that, produced his cell. “Sean, how’s your time situation?… good, I need you to call every precinct in Manhattan, nothing shows up there, try Brooklyn. Find out if they’ve got any unsolved murders with our dinner-for-two angle. Not just food at the scene, a table actually set up … because we got a new suspect who lived there for a few years … Fellinger’s assistant, Williams, I’ll tell you about it later … try Connecticut, too—specifically New Haven.”

On the way back to the station, he checked the Corey sisters’ latest credit card activity. Still in Vancouver, one purchase: tampons.

I said, “They’re not spending big so they’re definitely staying with someone. Maybe Ursula has relatives in Canada.”

“Maybe, but I’m sure not gonna ask Richard. Speaking of which, what do you make of the dinner scene at Ursula’s house? She wasn’t one of Williams’s slaves. She was a contract hit.”

“Williams sees himself as an artist, so he signs his creations.”

“Sick bastard,” he said. “And now he probably does have the Santos girl … or had. Apart from BOLO’ing his van, if he’s even still driving it, what the hell else can I do?”

I said, “Williams is gone but as far as we know Corey’s still in his condo in Oxnard. Give Nguyen the new facts and get him to say Corey killing the horses and terrifying his daughters is grounds for a search warrant. Then toss the condo for Corey’s cash-stash and anything that links him to Williams. Same for the warehouse downtown where he trucked the contents of Ursula’s house. With evidence, you can leverage him for info on Williams’s whereabouts.”

“Assuming he knows.”

“All we can do is assume. You search and find nothing, you can always beat the truth out of him.”

He laughed and got Nguyen on the phone. The deputy D.A. said, “I like horses as much as anyone but that ain’t even close.”