"You sure? I don't mind."

"I'm sure."

"Okay, well, whatever; your call."

I started back to my car, but she stopped me.

"Hey, Cole?"

"What?"

"I read the articles. That was some hairy stuff, man, what you did saving that boy. Congratulations."

I walked away without answering, but stopped again when I reached the yellow tape. Diaz had joined O'Loughlin and Pardy as the coroner's people bagged the body.

"Diaz."

She and Pardy both turned. Rigor had frozen the corpse. The techs leaned hard on the arms to fold them into the bag. A hand reached out from the dark blue plastic like it was pointing at me. They pushed it inside and pulled the zipper.

"When you get the ID, let me know."

I left them to finish their job.

Chapter 3

E arly in the fall, three men stole my girlfriend's only son, Ben Chenier. An ex-LAPD officer named Joe Pike and I saved the boy, but many people died, including the three kidnappers. Bad enough, but those three men had been hired by Ben's own father and were not your garden-variety criminals-they were professional mercenaries wanted under the International War Crimes Act. What with all the bodies, Joe and I faced felony charges, but the governments of Sierra Leone and Colombia interceded along with-get this-the United Nations. The lurid nature of a father contracting the abduction of his own child fed a wildfire of sensationalist journalism, but even before the worst of it, Lucy Chenier concluded that life with yours truly was not worth the risk, so she took her son and went home. She was right to leave. Being with me wasn't worth a four A. M. phone call saying a murdered stranger claimed to be the father I never knew. I drove back to my house through a light rain, pretending my life was normal. When I reached home, I made scrambled-egg burritos, then turned on the early news. The lead story reported that the Red Light Assassin had struck again. The RLA had been killing traffic cameras for several weeks, and the camera death toll was now up to twelve, each camera snipered dead-center through the lens with a .22-caliber pellet gun. Web sites devoted to the Red Light Assassin had been set up; T-shirts bearing slogans like FREE THE RED LIGHT ASSASSIN sold on every freeway off-ramp; and all of it had come about because the city had installed traffic cameras to ticket rush-hour motorists who slid through the red. Which, in L. A.'s killer traffic, meant everyone. The news anchor tried to keep a straight face, but her co-anchor and the weather guy goofed on the rising "body count," and had themselves in spasms. No mention was made of the nameless man found murdered in a downtown alley. Murdered people were common; murdered cameras were news.