“One body, female.” Crumpling the juice carton, he created a waxed paper pancake that he pulled out like an accordion, then compressed. “And for my next number, ‘Lady of Spain.’ ”

A dozen more pieces of roast before he said, “Female, and from her figure, young. Then again, this is L.A. so maybe all that tone came courtesy of surgery, let’s see what the coroner has to say. No purse or I.D., the blood says she was done right there. No tire tracks or footprints. No jewelry or purse and her duds were expensive looking, some designer I never heard of. Patrice Lerange. Ring a bell?”

I shook my head. “Robbery?”

“Looks like it. She had on fancy undies, too, silk lace—Angelo Scuzzi, Milano. So maybe she’s European, some poor tourist who got waylaid. The shoes were Manolo Blahnik, that I heard of.”

He chewed hard and his jaw bunched. “Looks like we’re talking two killers. The C.I.’s found shotgun pellets and wadding in the wound but also a .45 cartridge on the ground and the slug behind her, exactly where you’d expect it to be after blowing out the back of her skull.”

He ate more roast, contemplated a rare piece, put it aside.

“The major damage was to the face with a little pellet spray at the top of the chest. But they left her hands intact, so I’m not sure the face thing was hiding her identity, just plain old evil.”

“Your money or I shoot,” I said. “On second thought, I shoot anyway.”

“Goddamn savages … I know the face can mean personal, but this could come down to a really ugly jack. Hollyweird at night, all those spacey Euro types are wandering the streets, thinking they’re gonna catch movie stars. If she was a tourist, she could’ve wandered into the wrong neighborhood.”

“Where was she found?”

“The Palisades, less than a mile short of Topanga. Bad guys had any consideration it woulda been the sheriff’s problem.”

I said, “That’s a ways from wrong neighborhoods, and expensive clothes don’t say naive tourist. Maybe she got waylaid on the Strip, or somewhere else on the Westside.”

“Wherever she started, she ended up far from the city. We’re talking mountains, ravines, open space, not much traffic. Maybe that was the point. She was left just off the road, a spot where the descent isn’t that steep. I’m figuring the bad guys walked her out of the car, took her goodies, had target practice.”

“Bullet and pellets.”

“All in the face. Almost like a ritual.”

“Who found her?”

“Some eighty-nine-year-old retired Unitarian minister combing for fossils.”

“Fossil hunting at four a.m.?”