Twelve years earlier I’d had a short, intense and, some would say, improper relationship with Rachel Walling. While I had seen photos of her in the papers a few years ago when she helped the LAPD run down and kill a wanted man in Echo Park, I had not been in her presence since we had sat in a hearing room nearly a decade earlier. Still, not many days went by in those ten years that I didn’t think about her. She was one reason—perhaps the biggest reason—that I have always considered that time the high point of my life.

She showed little wear and tear from the years that had passed, even though I knew it had been a tough time. She paid for her relationship with me with a five-year stint in a one-person office in South Dakota. She went from profiling and chasing serial killers to investigating bar stabbings on Indian reservations.

But she had climbed out of that pit and had been posted in L.A. for the past five years, working for some sort of a secretive intelligence unit. I had called her when I’d found out, gotten through to her but been rebuffed. Since then I had kept tabs on her, when I could, from afar. And now she was standing in front of me in my hotel room in the middle of nowhere. It was strange, sometimes, how life worked out.

My surprise over her appearance aside, I couldn’t stop staring and smiling at her. She maintained the professional front, but I could see her eyes holding on me. It wasn’t very often you got to be this close to a former lover of so long ago.

“Who was that you were with?” she asked. “Are you with a photographer on this story?”

I turned and looked back at the doorway.

“No, I’m by myself. And I don’t know who that was. Just some guy who’d been talking to me downstairs in the gambling hall. He went to his room.”

She abruptly walked past me, opened the door and looked both ways in the hall before coming back into the room and closing the door.

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really talking to him.”

“Which room is he in?”

“I don’t know that either. What’s going on? How come you’re in my room?”

I pointed to the bed. My laptop was open and my printouts of notes, the copies of the case files I had gotten from Schifino and Meyer as well as the printouts from Angela Cook’s online search were fanned across it. The only thing missing from the spread was the transcript of the Winslow interrogation, and that was only because it had been too heavy to take with me.

I hadn’t left it all on the bed like that.

“And were you going through my stuff? Rachel, I asked you for help. I didn’t ask you to break into my room and—”

“Look, just sit down, would you?”