“They stole a car. The girl drove. They managed to get out of the city, found themselves on Highway 1, hid out in a remote canyon in the hills above Malibu. At night, she sneaked into residential neighborhoods and scrounged in garbage cans. She tried to take care of him but his feet got worse and the pain caused him to shoot up that last hit of heroin. He lost consciousness, stayed that way for two days. Somehow she cared for him. At the end, she was trying to feed him grass and leaves. Gave him water from a nearby creek that added an intestinal parasite to his miseries. When I saw him in the burn ward, he weighed ninety-eight pounds. All that, and he’d withdrawn cold turkey. His survival’s nothing short of a miracle.”

“So you became his doctor,” I said. “And Schwinn’s. And eventually, the two of them connected. Was that by design?”

“I listened to Bill’s story, then Pierce’s, eventually put it all together. Of course, I never told either of them about the other—Pierce still thought of himself as a detective. Looking for Bill. Eventually—after much work—I got Bill’s permission and confronted Pierce. It wasn’t easy but . . . eventually they both came to understand that their lives were interwined.”

Matchmaking. Just as he’d done with Schwinn and Marge. The grand physician. Giving.

“You waited until it was clear Burns had nothing to fear from Schwinn,” I said. “Meaning you learned the details of Janie Ingalls’s murder. But all of you agreed not to pursue it. You became part of the cover-up. That’s why you offered me all those apologies.”

“Alex,” he said. “Some decisions are . . . these are shattered lives. I couldn’t see any other way . . .”

“Schwinn changed things,” I said. “Changed his mind about keeping the secret. Any idea why he grew agitated about the murder during the weeks before his death? Why he sent out the murder book?”

“I’ve asked myself all that so many times, and the best I can come up with is the poor man felt he was going to die and had an urge to make peace.”

“Was he sick?”

“Nothing I could diagnose, but he came to me and complained about feeling weak. Shaky, out of focus. A month before his death, he began experiencing crushing headaches. The obvious possibility was a brain tumor, and I sent him up to the Sansum Clinic for an MRI. Negative, but the consulting neurologist did find some abnormal EEG patterns. But you know EEGs—so crude, hard to interpret. And his bloodwork was normal. I wondered about some late-term amphetamine sequelae. He’d been drug-free for years, but perhaps the self-abuse had taken its toll. Then, a week before the night terrors began, he blacked out.”

“Did Marge know about any of this?”