He moved over to the property files, ran searches on the Cossacks, Walt Obey, both Larners. John G. Broussard.

Obey’s holdings were protected by a cadre of holding companies, a firewall that would take weeks, if not months, to break through. Same for the Larners and the Cossacks, although a few pieces of real estate were held privately by each duo. In the case of the Larners it was half a dozen condos in a Marina del Rey building owned jointly by father and son. Sixteen strip malls in low-rent exurbs were registered to the Cossack brothers.

The boys living together, working together. How touching.

Nothing was registered to Sister Caroline.

Shifting gears for a moment, he pulled up Georgie Nemerov’s records. The bail bondsman and his mother co-owned a single-family dwelling in Van Nuys that Milo recognized as the family home from twenty years ago, and a six-unit apartment in Granada Hills, also jointly registered to Ivana Nemerov. Whatever Georgie had or hadn’t done, building a real estate empire didn’t seem part of the equation.

John G. Broussard and his wife—Bernadelle—had held on to the house in Ladera Heights as well as three contiguous lots on West 156th Street in Watts. Maybe the chief’s or his wife’s parents’ place, an inheritance.

Once again: no empire. If John G. was trading for something, it wasn’t land. Unless he was embedded somewhere in Walt Obey’s corporate acreage.

He ran searches on Melinda Waters and mother Eileen and came up empty, was thinking about what else to do when the records clerk came over and told him the building was closing. He left and drove up and down Temple Street, past the place where Pierce Schwinn had spotted Tonya Stumpf strutting. The block was a Music Center parking lot now, filled with its daytime load of municipal workers’ and litigants’ vehicles, due to the Court Building down the street. Lots of people, lots of movement, but Milo felt out of it—out of the rhythm.

He drove toward home, slowly, not caring about rush-hour toxins, street-work delays, notably stupid driving by what seemed to be fifty percent of his fellow commuters. All the urban niceties that usually drove up his blood pressure and made him wonder why the hell he’d chosen to live like this.

He was sitting at a red light at Highland when his phone rang. Alex’s voice said, “I got you. Good.”

“What’s up?”

“Maybe nothing, but my source—the woman Michael Larner molested—called me again, and I met with her last night. Seems the day Larner made his move on her, he was angry about Willie Burns. Enraged, talking to someone about Burns. Willie had been gone from Achievement House for a few days so it sounds like Larner found out who Burns was, was steamed because Burns disappeared.”

“Enraged,” said Milo.