Milo returned to checking out young white faces.

The end product: eighteen possibles.

Schwinn regarded the list and scowled. “Names but no numbers. We’ll still need a fucking roster to track her down.”

Talking low but his tone was unmistakable and the receptionist a few feet away looked over and frowned.

“Howdy,” said Schwinn, raising his voice and grinning at the woman furiously. She flinched and returned to her typewriter.

Milo looked up Janie Ingalls’s freshman photo. No list of extracurricular activities. Huge, dark hair teased with abandon over a pretty oval face turned ghostly by slathers of makeup and ghoulish eye shadow. The image before him was neither the ten-year-old hanging with Mickey nor the corpse atop the freeway ramp. So many identities for a sixteen-year-old kid. He asked the receptionist to make a photocopy, and she agreed, grudgingly. Staring first at the picture.

“Know her, ma’am?” Milo asked her as pleasantly as possible.

“No. Here you go. It didn’t come out too good. Our machine needs adjusting.”

Ellen Sato returned, freshly made-up, weak-eyed, forcing a smile. “How’d we do?”

Schwinn bounded up quickly, was in her face, bullying her with body language, beaming that same hostile grin. “Oh, just great, ma’am.” He brandished the list of eighteen names. “Now how about introducing us to these lovely ladies?”

Rounding up the Melindas took another forty minutes. Twelve out of eighteen girls were in attendance that day, and they marched in looking supremely bored. Only a couple were vaguely aware of Janie Ingalls’s existence, none admitted to being a close friend or knowing anyone who was, none seemed to be holding back.

Not much curiosity, either, about why they’d been called in to talk to cops. As if a police presence was the usual thing at Hollywood High. Or they just didn’t care.

One thing was clear: Janie hadn’t made her mark on campus. The girl who was the most forthcoming ended up in Milo’s queue. Barely blond, not-at-all voluptuous Melinda Kantor. “Oh yeah, her. She’s a stoner, right?”

“Is she?” he said.

The girl shrugged. She had a long, pretty face, a bit equine. Two-inch nails glossed aqua, no bra.

Milo said, “Does she hang around with other stoners?”

“Uh-uh, she’s not a social stoner—more like a loner stoner.”

“A loner stoner.”

“Yeah.”

“Which means . . .”

The girl shot him a you-are-a-prime-lame-o look. “She run away or something?”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” said Melinda Kantor, “maybe she’s over on the Boulevard.”

“Hollywood Boulevard?”

The resultant smirk said, Another stupid question, and Milo knew he was losing her. “The boulevard’s where the loner stoners go.”

Now Melinda Kantor was regarding him as if he were brain-dead. “I was just making a suggestion. What’d she do?”

“Maybe nothing.”

“Yeah, right,” said the girl. “Weird.”

“What is?”

“Usually they send over narcs who are young and cute.”