“No, but it’s easy to find. Coldwater north, about a mile past Mulholland on the west side of the road there’s an unmarked private road that leads up to a gate.”

“Your research included driving up there?”

“I’m an empiricist.”

“Some rep called you, huh? Wouldn’t it be something if it was Wedd?”

“It would,” I said.

“You’ve already thought about that.”

I wished him well, got out of the car.

He said, “Hooray for Hollywood.” Roared away.

CHAPTER
35

My research on Premadonny had involved more than I’d let on to Milo.

After the call from the stars’ rep, I’d picked among millions of Web citations. Bios composed early in their careers aired bins of dirty laundry. Everything subsequent was P.R. pap programmed as carefully as a laugh track.

Clips from their films left no question about their physical perfection. A Renaissance artist would’ve submitted to indignity, if not outright torture, in order to paint them.

Prema Moon came across as a competent, occasionally impressive performer who could amplify or lower her sexuality as if equipped with an erotic rheostat. The only mention she made of her children was on a press release announcing her “hiatus from film work in order to concentrate on being a full-time mom.” Donny Rader lent his support to that move, calling his wife “the ultimate earth mother, protective as a mama lion.”

Rader’s acting was surprisingly one-note. His default mannerisms were the slow, theatrical lowering of hooded eyes and the tendency to slur his words.

The man who’d requested the appointment had begun talking in a choppy, agitated delivery but had shifted quickly to mumbly diction.

I replayed a few of Rader’s clips, heard the same elisions, over and over. If not identical to the man on the phone, awfully close.

Had it been a worried father phoning me about his child but choosing to hide that fact? Because A-list celebs weren’t supposed to do things for themselves?

Or was there a deeper motive for the deception?

Whoever the “representative” was, he’d skated away from naming the child in question, assuring me I’d find out soon enough then hanging up. His tension had been notable, and that could mean an especially worrisome problem.

I’d keyworded premadonny children.

Millions of hits on the parents but almost nothing on the kids.

An image search pulled up a solitary photo gone viral: a shot taken a few months before in New York of Prema and her kids attending a Broadway Disney musical.