“If it’s gonna upset her, Alex, forget it. If you can describe him in enough detail, I can get Petra or one of our other sketch-demons. And if one of those rent-a-goon outfits gives me a lead, I might not need any talent at all. Let’s get outta here.”

I walked him to the unmarked.

“Thanks for the cogitation,” he said. “The whole intimacy thing, that’s feeling right.”

“Ask Robin to draw.”

“You’re sure.”

“Go for it.”

He shrugged. “Whatever you say. I know you like to protect her.”

“She’s on a project with a deadline, I didn’t want to distract her.”

“Sure,” he said. “That was it.”

I followed him back to the station, where he called a few more security companies with no success. I used the time to check for messages.

Despite the joys of mechanization, I keep an answering service because I like talking to actual people. Lucette, one of the more durable operators, said, “Hey, Dr. Delaware. Looks like I got … five for you.”

A family court judge I’d never heard of wanted to confer about a custody case. His surname had lots of consonants and I had her spell it.

The second call was from a Glendale pediatrician who’d interned at Western Pediatric back when I was a psych fellow. She wanted advice on a failure-to-thrive infant that might be Munchausen by proxy.

Lucette said, “The other three are all from the same person, came in starting at nine, half an hour apart. And I’m talking thirty minutes precisely. Ms. Gretchen Stengel.” She read off the number. “The first two were just her name and number, the third was kind of a strange conversation. If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Strange, how?”

“She sounded pretty nervous, Dr. Delaware, so I asked her if it was an emergency. She went quiet, like she had to think about that, finally said she couldn’t honestly say it was an emergency and nowadays she needed to be honest. To me that sounded like some kind of twelve-step thing, you know? But you know me, Dr. Delaware, I’m just here to help, never put my two cents in.”

The last time—the only time—I’d met the Westside Madame was almost a decade ago.

Restaurant on the trendoid stretch of Robertson just below Beverly Boulevard. A few storefronts north of Gretchen Stengel’s short-lived boutique.

Her play at legitimacy. Lack of crime did not pay.

I’d been tagging along with Milo as he worked the death of a beautiful young woman named Lauren Teague who’d once been part of Gretchen’s call girl stable. Gretchen had just finished serving two-thirds of a thirty-two-month sentence for tax evasion. Still in her thirties, she’d come across prematurely aged, sullen, unkempt, quite likely stoned.