No sense searching for a mentally ill homeless woman who could be anywhere. And though he still wasn’t convinced Grant Fellinger was his killer, the lawyer would be the focus of a three-man surveillance carried out by himself, Binchy, and Reed.

“Kiss the woman, pet the pooch, enjoy the steaks.” He turned toward his monitor.

I said, “How about a copy of Deirdre Brand’s last mug shot?”

“You planning to look for her yourself?”

“If time permits.”

“How?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“Your educational level, you could be spending time more profitably.” But he pressed the Print button.

That night, in my office, I organized my own priorities. During holidays and sometimes at random times, Robin and I deliver food and clothing to homeless people too independent or paranoid to enter shelters and soup kitchens, so I knew some of the places where the forgotten congregate.

Communicating with psychotic people can be tortured, and for all its affluence, the Westside of L.A. has too many fetid hideouts to canvass in a week. But I figured I’d start with a few freeway underpasses, see where that led.

The following morning, just as I was about to let Robin know I was leaving, I thought of something: Milo had searched the coroner’s records for a file under Deirdre Brand’s name. But people like her didn’t carry I.D.

If her corpse had come into the crypt unidentified, a check of the fingerprint database could’ve pulled up a match to her arrest records. But when the bodies pile up, steps can be overlooked.

I phoned a friendly face at the coroner’s, an investigator named Gloria Mendez. She said, “Hi, Alex, I’m out in the field. Literally, vacant lot in East L.A., billowing weeds, looks like Kansas in The Wizard of Oz.”

“Gang shooting?”

“Good guess. Fifteen-year-old nails a sixteen-year-old because the other kid had the nerve to live two blocks south. What’s up?”

I told her.

She said, “No, we always run prints. With a criminal record, we’d know who she is.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“On the other hand, I don’t want to give you false hope but sometimes even when matches do come up they don’t make it into the files immediately, all the backlog. The person to call is Martha Shisick. I don’t have her extension offhand but she’s always at her desk.”

“Thanks for the tip. How do you spell Shisick?”

“Not sure, she’s got lots of consonants. But if you log onto our site then onto Records, she’ll be listed. If you catch her in a mood, use my name.”

Senior Data Processor Martha P. Szcyszcyk listened to my request without interruption then answered guardedly. “Gloria said to use her name to butter me up, huh?”

“She did.”

“Let me get this straight: You’re a civilian psychologist, not part of Behavioral Sciences.”

I began to explain my relationship with Milo.