“So let’s save the department the expense of a polygraph until we have more reason to think that Wenderhole was directly involved.”

“In his condition, he’s not going anywhere.”

“So that brings us to Melinda Little. She was home when her husband was murdered. Do we think that she hired someone to kill him?”

“She’s the joker in the deck,” Oliver said. “She could have hired Banks, she could have hired Goldberg, she could have even talked Goldberg into doing it for free. But for all the reasons we said before, I don’t think she did it.”

Marge said, “Also, bank records don’t indicate any large transfers of money going in and out of the account immediately before or after the murder. Even after she got the insurance money, the amount of cash taken out was steady—no big lump sums paid in cash or suspicious-looking checks.”

“It looked to both of us like the money was slowly being drained to pay for her gambling habit,” Oliver said.

Decker said, “So with those three out of the picture and with Leroy Josephson dead, I think we’ve taken this as far as we can. Hollywood has more immediate reasons for wanting to find Banks. They’re also looking for Goldberg, since the MP report was filed in their division. Until we can locate one or both, all we can do is wait.”

WAITING USUALLY MEANT for someone to make a mistake. That could mean a day, a week, a month, a year, or never. After two weeks had passed with nothing to propel the case forward, Strapp told Decker to call up Genoa Greeves and give her an update.

Strapp said, “Make it sound like we’re on top of it.”

“We are on top of it,” Decker said. “We’re just at a standstill.”

“Don’t tell her that. Tell her an arrest is right around the corner.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“See that you do.”

The woman came down two weeks after Decker’s phone call. This time, she was all casual, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and sneakers. Her face was free of makeup, she was unadorned by jewelry, and her hair was braided. No purse, just a briefcase. She extended a hand to Decker. “You’ll have to excuse the informal dress. I just got off the plane.”

“Traveling is hard enough without having to worry about how you’re dressed. No matter what the airlines say, it just seems to get worse and worse.”

“I flew privately,” she said.

“Ah…of course.” He ushered her into his office. “Thanks for coming in.”

“No problem.”

“And thanks again and again for redoing the station house’s computer system. We at West Valley are the envy of the rest of LAPD.”

“All this advance technology doesn’t seem to help you solve cases,” she said.