And I’ve got things on my plate. Little odd jobs, the kind you hate.

“That’s true,” she said. “But just say the word.”

“The word is I love you.”

“That’s three words.”

“Picky picky.”

She laughed. Finally. I uttered a few pleasantries, and she did the same. When we hung up she sounded okay, and I figured I faked it pretty well.

Milo claimed to want “alone time,” but I figured he’d be nosing around on the fringes of the LAPD bureaucracy.

If the call from Personnel and/or the encounter with the toothy Paris Bartlett did have something to do with his raking up the Ingalls case, that meant he—we had been tagged, were being watched.

Marlene Baldassar as the source didn’t sit right with me, and I thought about the trail we might’ve left.

My solo activities had consisted of the call to Larry Daschoff, dinner with Allison Gwynn, computer work at the Research Library. None of that was likely to attract attention.

Together, Milo and I had interviewed Marge Schwinn and Baldassar and Georgie Nemerov. I supposed either woman could’ve reported the conversation, but neither had been hostile, and I couldn’t see why they’d have bothered.

Nemerov, on the other hand, had grown antsy when talking about his father’s murder and Willie Burns’s skip. Nemerov’s bail bond business gave him close ties to the department. If John G. Broussard had been part of a fix, the department would care.

A third possibility was Milo’s solo work on Janie Ingalls had attracted attention. As far as I knew that had been limited to phone work and unearthing old files. But he’d worked at the West L.A. station, sneaked around Parker Center.

Thinking he’d been discreet but he could’ve invited scrutiny—from clerks, other cops, anyone in a position to witness him nosing. John G. Broussard had sent a clear directive to tighten up discipline among the rank and file. The new chief had also waged war on the blue code of silence—talk about irony. Maybe cops informing on cops was the new LAPD zeitgeist.

The more I thought about that, the more it made sense: Milo was a pro, but he’d taken too much for granted.

Procedurally, he’d been outed.

That made me think about his continuing vulnerability. Twenty years in the department with one of the highest solve rates in Homicide, but that wasn’t enough, would never be enough.

For two decades he’d functioned as a gay man in a paramilitary organization that would never be free of gut-level bias and still hadn’t acknowledged the existence of homosexual cops. I knew—everyone knew—that scores of gay officers patrolled the streets, but not a single one had gone public. Neither had Milo, in a strict sense, but after those first brutal years of self-torment he had stopped hiding.