I shut my eyes, struggled to empty my head, then filled it with mental snapshots.

Finally, I found the image I wanted and wedged it behind my eyes.

Janie Ingalls’s brutalized body.

A dead girl, granting me momentary grace, as I lost myself in her imagined agony.

CHAPTER

12

One thing about sensory deprivation: It does tend to freshen
up your perceptions. And a plan—any plan—opens the door to
self-importance.

When I left the house, the sun kissed me like a lover, and the trees were greener under a benevolent sun that reminded me why people kept moving to California. I collected the day’s mail—junk junk junk—then walked around to the rear garden and stopped at the pond. The koi were a sinuous brocade, hyperactive, clamoring at the rock border, brought to the surface by my footsteps.

Ten very hungry fish. I made them happy. Then I drove to school.

I used my crosstown med school faculty card to get a parking spot on the U.’s north campus, walked to the Research Library, sat myself down in front of a computer, began with the in-house data banks, then logged onto the Internet and made my way through half a dozen search engines.

Janie or Jane Ingalls pulled up the Ingalls-Dudenhoffer family tree website from Hannibal, Missouri. Great-great-great-grandmother Jane Martha Ingalls would be 237 years old next week.

Bowie Ingalls connected me to a David Bowie fan club in Manchester, England, and to a University of Oklahoma history professor’s site on Jim Bowie.

Several Melinda Waters hits popped up but none seemed remotely relevant: A physicist by that name worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, nineteen-year-old Melinda Sue Waters was hawking nude pictures of herself from a small town in Arkansas, and Melinda Waters, Attorney-at-Law (“Specializing in Bankruptcy and Evictions!”) advertised her services on a legal bulletin board out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

No crime stories or death notices on either girl. Perhaps Janie’s friend had indeed surfaced, as Milo had suggested, and slipped back into society unnoticed.

I tried her mother’s name—Eileen—with no success.

Next search: Tonya Marie Stumpf. Nothing on Pierce Schwinn’s backseat playmate. No surprise there, I hadn’t expected an aging hooker to have her own website.

No data on Pierce Schwinn, either. His surname pulled up several Schwinn bicycle items and one news piece that caught my eye because it was relatively local: a Ventura weekly’s account of a horse show last year. One of the winners was a woman named Marge Schwinn, who raised Arabians in a place called Oak View. I looked up the town. Seventy miles north of L.A., near Ojai. Exactly the kind of semirural escape that might attract an ex-cop. I wrote down her name.

Logging the activities of the Cossack family kept me busy for a long time, as I caught dozens of articles in the L.A. Times and the Daily News that stretched back to the sixties.