She plucked it off the table that stood beside her armchair. “Yeah? Yeah, speaking.” She listened and then said, “Man, this sucks. Where was this?” Maybe she hadn’t received the worst news, but it wasn’t good. She stood pouting like a child. “Was he alone?” Her pout turned into a scowl, and Wolfman whimpered, psychically sharing her distress. “So did you get him out of there?” The answer was lengthy, and Linette grew impatient with the caller, evidently interrupting. “Listen . . . no, you listen to me. You better believe there’s a crazy bitch in this somewhere. He’s into edgy situations with sluts who have a screw loose. You better operate on that assumption.” Wolfman slumped onto his side and continued whimpering. “I want to know who the bitch was. You find her or I’ll be all over your ass in the media, I’ll never stop. This is a damn outrage. It takes thirty-six hours to get to this, to this? Thirty-six hours, when I told you it was a life-or-death emergency already Sunday night?”

She didn’t wait for a reply, but terminated the call and threw the phone across the room. It cracked off a wall and rattled to the floor.

David got to his feet. The atmosphere in the house and this woman’s unrelenting attitude were oppressive. He felt trapped.

Anger failed to age Linette’s middle-school face but made her look even younger, like a petulant child in the flush of a tantrum. “Police. The shitheads found his car in a canyon off the Ortega Highway, two hundred feet below the road, totally racked up. He’s as dead as dead gets. What the hell was he doing way the hell out there on the damn Ortega Highway, middle of nowhere? Being killed, that’s what he was doing. You know what I think? I think some crazy bitch killed him somewhere else and drove his body out there and pushed the car over the edge to make it look like an accident. When they do an autopsy, they’ll find a dozen stab wounds or a slit throat, or all of that plus his balls are missing.” She picked up an eight-inch-tall crystal obelisk from a sideboard and threw it at a wall.

The dog ran to hide under the poker table, and as if listening from another room, David heard himself offer his condolences to the woman. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Billions!” she declared. “I’m so pissed, I wish I’d killed the sonofabitch years ago instead of wasting all this time on him.”

“I’ll just let myself out.”

When she followed David to the front door, he felt pursued, not just by Linette but also by his fear of what the news about Lukas Ockland might portend.

“I am so screwed,” she said. “This is a total shitstorm. Give me your card.”

“What?”