“Brand-new, not loaded. Idiot was a paper tiger to the end. We also found the cash Williams took from Corey. Hundred and eighteen K, Williams didn’t bother to hide it, just kept it in bank bags under the bed.”

“He was living there with Kashmeer?”

“Since leaving Oxnard. I informed her PD, he calls back an hour later, his client is now ready to ‘discuss.’ I told him my priority is finding out what happened to Merry Santos, she doesn’t give that up, she bores me. Nothing from him since. We’ll see.”

I said, “Williams leave behind any souvenirs?”

“Best I can say to that is maybe. There was a jewelry box on Brzica’s nightstand with some interesting contents. Starting with a Lady Patek with a dead battery, way too classy for Brzica.”

“Ursula was taking two watches to be fixed?”

“I called her jeweler, and he never sold her a Patek, but she could’ve picked it up somewhere else. The other stuff is trinkets, no reason for Williams to have them unless they meant something to him. I’ve sent photos to Kathy Hennepin’s family, they think one pair of costume earrings might’ve been hers. What was more probative was—get this—a stuffed baby owl that had to come from Frankie.”

“Trinkets,” I said. “That poor woman in Connecticut couldn’t have afforded Tiffany. Maybe something will come up.”

“I’ll try, but good luck after all these years. Sean did find one strong possible in New York, two and a half years ago, when Williams was living there. A Japanese woman named Yuki Yamada here on a work visa so she could be a sous-chef at a fancy fish place in Midtown Manhattan. She was found strangled and stabbed in her Lower East Side apartment. Dinner for two on the table—sashimi, et cetera—but no one made anything of it because she was a pro, the assumption was she’d set up a meal. No sexual assault, no DNA. NYPD didn’t sound fired up. The new mayor’s prioritizing traffic fatalities.”

He rotated his mouth. “There have to be others but I’m gonna concentrate on sweeping out my own stables.”

Horse analogy.

I said, “Makes sense.”

Ten days after the death of John Jensen Williams, Al Bayless called. The cameras we’d installed in the building had nabbed one would-be car thief and “a pervy-looking dude hiding behind an SUV. Any way we could hang on to the gear?”

“Sure,” said Milo. “Consider it a gift.”

Bayless said, “Two offenders. And that’s just a couple of weeks, no telling.”

“Bosses happy, Al?”

“Wish I could say they cared, Milo, but I’m happy—that steak’ll be on me.”

“Sounds good.”

“I mean it, man.”

“I know you do.”

Fifteen days after the death of John Jensen Williams, Milo and I were at Café Moghul celebrating the return of his appetite.