When it came to his patients, Mitchell Bloom was an old-school Freudian notetaker, scribbling on a pad while they poured out their souls on his couch, not a laptop or a voice recorder in sight. He’d been using the same type of classy stenographer’s pad for years—leather-bound, the pages a pale aqua. He bought them in bulk from an office supply chain, and in his home office, he kept the used-up ones in a locked cabinet, each notebook labeled with a patient’s name. More than once at her parents’ home, Robin had seen Mitchell opening the cabinet when on the phone with a patient, thumbing through one of these books as he listened.

Robin had expected to find a page filled with her father’s illegible doctor’s scrawl. But when she opened it, she saw a phone number with a 213 area code. She recognized it from the caller ID at her office, three days earlier. Knew it without having to double-check. Quentin Garrison’s number.

Below it, her father had written three names in careful capital letters, with arrows drawn from one to the next, from the bottom up. And though she wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, it gave her the most overwhelming feeling, as though each name were a wave sweeping over her, knocking her down.

QUENTIN GARRISON

KATE SHARKEY

APRIL

ROBIN SAT BOLT upright in bed, the remnants of a nightmare running through her head—a spray of bullets, a wash of blood. She couldn’t remember any more of it than that. Light streamed into the room. She was alone in bed, Eric long gone. The house silent. She checked her phone. 9:00 A.M.

She rubbed her eyes, confused, but only for a few seconds—only until she saw the folded-up piece of lined, pale aqua paper on her nightstand, and then it all came crashing back.

Last night, she’d jogged back to her car and sped all the way home, heart racing, eyes bolted open.

Once she got back to her house, she’d taken out her laptop and looked up everything she could regarding the Cooper/LeRoy murders. Wikipedia entries about each of the twelve victims—among them a teenage couple on prom night, a property master for TV shows who volunteered for children’s charities in his spare time. A young police officer. An elderly man and his paid caregiver. A four-year-old girl . . .

Each killing more senseless than the previous, the couple’s motives a complete mystery. Robin had looked online for The Inland Empire Killers: ’Til Death Do Us Part, but had only been able to find one three-minute clip: Gabriel LeRoy—the TV actor version of him—shooting a bound and gagged middle-aged man who lay prone at his feet. A slick of bright red blood on the floor. The TV actress version of April Cooper squealing with delight. “Get him, baby.”