“Donald Michael Lee, the man with three first names,” Frames read from his laptop. “No fixed address—big surprise. Five arrests in the past six months: intoxicated in public, threatening behavior, intoxicated in public, intoxicated in public, and the ever-popular intoxicated in public. He’s been on his own since 2007. Lives in the park. Has a tarp set up in the hills above the campground.”

“Any weapons on him?”

“Not that I could tell. But he’s wearing, like, twenty-seven sweaters and carrying a trash bag filled with all kinds of shit.”

“What’d he say about the victim?”

Eden looked at her notebook. “He said, ‘I saw the mummy lady.’ He repeated it over and over.”

“Did he see how she got there?” Mahler asked.

“He said he saw three men. They took the body out of a car trunk and carried it to the bench. He called them ‘little men.’”

“Little men?”

“It sounded like that. It’s not easy to understand what he says. He’s missing a lot of teeth. We asked him to describe who he saw, and he just kept saying he saw the mummy lady and the little men.”

“Where’s he now?”

Frames rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Social Services. We drove him over this morning. You’re going to have to hose out the back seat of that car or buy a new one. The guy smells like a barnyard.”

“In Cantonese, the expression fai-dee-la means ‘hurry up.’” Coyle read from his laptop.

“What the hell’s Cantonese?” Frames asked.

“It’s a Chinese dialect.” Coyle looked up. “I watch Chinese movies sometimes, and I’ve heard the word ‘la’ before. It means hurry. I put fai-dee-la into an online translation site, and it says ‘hurry up.’”

“So you think a homeless guy in Santa Rosa, California, happens to speak Chinese?”

“I don’t know. We don’t know much about the guy. But why’s he say that one word?”

“Maybe it’s what he heard,” Eden said. “Maybe one of the men carrying the body said it. It would make sense, right? Whoever it was, they were in a hurry.”

Frames snorted. “How many people speak Cantonese?”

Coyle looked on his screen again. “It’s the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Seventy million worldwide.”

“Well, that narrows it down.”

“I checked Partridge’s statement.” Rivas opened his notepad. “The bartender at the Tap Room said Partridge came in around nine thirty, stayed until ten forty-five. Came in alone, didn’t talk to anyone. Left alone.”

Frames pointed to the photo of the car on the whiteboard. “But if he’s inside that Mercedes at four a.m., that still gives him lots of time to meet up with the victim somewhere else and end up in the park with the hooded guy.”