“Why would Chapman feel remorse for something that never happened?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a mind reader! This whole thing is insane. Not a word in the papers for twenty years, and all of a sudden someone cares?”

Milo consulted his pad. “How’d you learn about Chapman’s death?”

“Mother included it in her weekly letter.”

“How’d you feel about it?”

“What do you think? I felt terrible,” said Hansen. “How else could I feel?”

“You felt terrible, then just forgot about it.”

Hansen rose out of his chair. Spittle whitened the corners of his lips. “What was I supposed to do? Go to the police and repeat some far-fetched, stoned-out story? I was twenty-two, for Christ’s sake.”

Milo flashed him a cold stare, and Hansen slumped back down. “It’s easy to judge.”

“Let’s go over the details,” said Milo. “The girl was raped in the basement. Where’d Chapman say they killed her?”

Hansen shot him a miserable look. “He said there was a big property next door to the party house, an estate, no one living there. They brought her over there. He said she was unconscious. They took her into some wooded area and started talking about how they needed to make sure she didn’t turn them in. That’s when it got . . .”

“Bloody.”

Hansen covered his face and exhaled noisily.

“Who’s ‘they’?” said Milo.

“All of them,” Hansen said through his fingers. “The Kingers.”

“Who exactly was there? Names.”

“Vance and Luke, Garvey and Bob Cossack, Brad Larner. All of them.”

“The Kingers,” said Milo. “Guys you don’t see anymore. Guys you’re not worried about being your neighbors.”

Hansen’s hands dropped. “Should I be worried?”

“It does seem odd,” said Milo. “For three years you’ve been living in L.A. but you’ve never run into them.”

“It’s a big city,” said Hansen. “Big as you want it to be.”

“You don’t run in the same social circles?”

“I don’t have any social circle. I rarely leave the house. Everything’s delivered—groceries, laundry. Painting and taking Mother to the doctor, that’s my world.”

I thought: Prison.

Milo said, “Have you followed the others’ lives?”

“I know the Cossacks are builders of some kind—you see their names on construction signs. That’s it.”

“No idea what Vance Coury’s been up to?”

“No.”

“Brad Larner?”

“No.”

Milo wrote something down. “So . . . your buddies took the nameless girl to the property next door and things just kind of got bloody.”

“They weren’t my buddies.”

“Who did the actual killing?”

“Luke didn’t say.”

“What about the rape? Who initiated that?”

“He—my impression was they all joined in.”

“But Chapman wasn’t sure if he participated or not.”