By twenty-five, she’d aged freakishly fast, shedding enough teeth to collapse her face. In the final photo, thirty years into her criminal career and not yet fifty, she was withered and drawn with a misshapen hatchet face, bony where it wasn’t bloated and topped by a bird’s-nest of wild white hair. A roseate glow seemed to incandesce her skin, the gloss that comes from years of living on the streets.

A different variety of flatness in her eyes now: a locked-ward vacancy I’d seen so many times.

Forty-nine; I’d have pegged her at seventy.

Milo said, “No address ’cause she’s homeless. She looks pathetic, Alex. This is who scared Fellinger?”

“Maybe I was wrong and she just became a nuisance he couldn’t get rid of.”

“We’re trying to make Fellinger a psychopath killer. Why wouldn’t he fix his problem the old-fashioned way?”

“Who says he didn’t?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

He began the tortuous search for the paperwork on Fellinger’s complaint. A challenge because cases that don’t go to trial are non-events that can get discarded or filed in obscure places or simply lost. Finally, he received a verbal summary from a law student intern at the city attorney’s office.

He hung up. “You’re right, it happened at the shopping mall west of Fellinger’s building. He was lunching there and Ms. Brand was a frequent panhandler and chronic pain in the ass. The loitering laws have pretty much been destroyed by court decisions so unless she got physically aggressive there wasn’t much mall security could do. Her problem with Fellinger occurred after she’d cadged change out of other people but not him. Words were exchanged and he claims she tried to hit him, though no one else verifies that. He made a citizen’s arrest, put her down on the ground to do it, and confined her until the real cops showed up. D.A. refused to file criminally so Fellinger went the civil route, claiming Brand had exhibited ‘conspicuous socially hazardous behavior.’ That mean something to you?”

“She bothered him.”

“Ha. Brand spent forty-eight hours in County psychiatric and was released. She never showed up for preliminary hearings and Fellinger eventually dropped his complaint.”

“She irks him enough for a citizen’s arrest, then he develops a soft heart?”

“I don’t like the smell of it, either.”

Deirdre Brand’s name was nowhere to be found in any division’s victim roster nor at the crypt on South Mission Road.

Milo said, “Woman like that would be the perfect throwaway, she could be anywhere.”

I said, “Unless he reverted to type and left her out in the open to brag.”

“Along with dinner for two?”

“Maybe fastfood,” I said. “Social ranking and all that.”

CHAPTER

15

By the time I was ready to leave Milo’s office, he’d set his priorities.