“Before your call, I’d never heard of Santa Rosa,” Warringer said. “I Googled it. Looks like a nice town.”

“Yeah, it’s really a city now. Getting bigger all the time.”

“You get many homicides?”

“Enough.”

“Mostly armed robberies here. Last few years, we’ve had a real meth problem. Anyway, good luck with your investigation.”

“Thanks again for your help.”

“Glad to do it… By the way, maybe I don’t need to say this, but with this mom of your victim, you’re going to need kid gloves. Know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Mahler said. “Kid gloves.”

Chapter Fifteen

(i)

(WEDNESDAY, 11:20 A.M.)

Coyle sat on a stuffed chair facing the two young women. He’d knocked on the door a few minutes earlier and roused them from bed. Now they slouched on a sofa, dressed in tank tops and flannel pajama pants, one rubbing her eyes and the other raking fingers through her hair. The forensic tech who had come with Coyle, Bailey Perkins, stood beside his chair.

The smaller of the two women asked, “Was Lisa really that girl they found in the park?” Her name was Molly. She had close-cropped hair and a shiny piercing on the side of her nose. She took a cigarette from a pack on the sofa and lit it.

“Elise Durand,” Coyle said. “The victim was Elise Durand.”

“She was trying to change her name to Lisa,” the other woman, Kira, said. “She hated the name Elise and made us call her Lisa.” She propped dirty bare feet on the end table, letting her tank top rise above her waist to show a roll of pale belly fat.

In the morning light pouring through a bay window, the room had a worn, partied-out look. Plates of dried pizza lay on the floor, empty beer cans balanced on the arm of a loveseat. A thick candle had melted over a coffee table, its waxen trail stabbed with cigarette butts. The walls were bare except for an area above the sofa where an Indian bedspread was stretched and pinned at the corners. The air smelled of stale smoke and garbage.

Coyle, who had prior experience being the first to tell a stranger that a relative or friend had died, watched the women’s faces. They gazed back with weary boredom.

“How long did you live together?” Coyle asked.

“Six months.” Molly shrugged. “We moved in last summer. Lisa was already here, with a girl named Jessica. When Jessica moved out, Lisa put a notice on the website for junior college housing and we answered.”

“You’re students?”

The girls nodded. Molly blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

Coyle looked up at Bailey. She was a few years older than the girls on the sofa, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore narrow, dark-framed glasses. Her arms were wrapped around the black shoulder bag she took to crime scenes. She studied the two girls intently.