“Oh,” she said. “Nothing’s really happening … I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Eleven, right?”

“Right.”

“Thanks again, Dr. Delaware. You’ve been incredibly tolerant.”

I returned to Milo’s office. He said, “No vehicles were ticketed that night. These are the theft stats, not as bad as I expected.”

He showed me his notes. Sixteen thousand GTAs in the city of L.A. over the past year. The three-month total was three thousand, eight hundred fifty-four. Of those, six hundred thirty-three were red. West-side red GTAs numbered twenty-eight. Ten of those had been recovered.

Milo got on the phone and questioned the detectives assigned to the eighteen open cases. Seven were suspected insurance scams, all from a section of Pico-Robertson, with the reporting individuals members of a small-time Ukrainian gang. Of the remaining eleven cars, one was a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari lifted from the Palisades, the other a comparably priced Lamborghini taken in Holmby Hills, both deemed improbable choices for the car Lilly Chang had seen because of their conspicuousness and the engine noise they’d generate.

The D handling the exotics was a woman named Loretta Thayer. She said, “If your witness didn’t hear a roar that set off the Richter scale it wasn’t one of those. Same for a red Porsche Turbo I just picked up that’s not in the files yet.”

Milo said, “Spate of red hotwheel heists?”

“Interesting, no?” said Thayer. “My hunch is they’re going to the same collector overseas, probably Asia or the Mideast.”

“Toys for some oil sheik’s twelve-year-old to roll around the desert in.”

“At that age,” said Thayer, “I was happy to have roller skates.”

Milo emailed photos of Charlene Chambers/Qeesha D’Embo to Thayer and two other detectives, asked them to show the images to their victims.

Thayer called back an hour later. “Sorry, no recognition.”

“That was fast.”

“Protect and serve, Lieutenant. It helps being on the Westside, everyone’s got a computer or an iPhone, I reached them electronically.”

No calls back from the other D’s for the next half hour. Milo worked on some overdue files and I read abstracts of psych articles on his computer.

He looked at his watch. “More I think about it, more of a waste of time the car angle seems. It could be unregistered but not stolen. Or Lilly Chang remembers wrong and it wasn’t even red—hell, maybe it was a scooter. Or an RV. Or a horse and buggy.”

I said, “Power of positive thinking.”

“Wanna hear positive? Time for lunch.”

“The usual?”

“No, I’m craving vegan. Just kidding.”

We drove to a steak house a mile west of the station, sawed through a couple of T-bones, and drove back to his office where he picked up replies from the remaining auto theft detectives. None of their victims recognized Qeesha but a D II named Doug Groot said, “It’s possible one of my victims lied.”