And he lumbered off toward the crime scene.

With their suitcases and evidence carts, the SID team trailed after Graham. Richie Walters led the way, shooting left and right as he worked his way forward into the atrium, then going through the door into the conference room. The walls of the conference room were smoked glass, which dimmed his flash. But I could see him inside, circling the body. He was shooting a lot: he knew this was a big case.

I stayed behind with Connor. I said, "I thought you told me it was bad form to lose your temper with the Japanese."

"It is," Connor said.

"Then why did you lose yours?"

"Unfortunately," he said, "it was the only way to assist Ishiguro."

"To assist Ishiguro?"

"Yes. I did all that for Ishiguro - because he had to save face in front of his boss. Ishiguro wasn't the most important man in the room. One of the Japanese standing by the elevator was the jūyaku, the real boss."

"I didn't notice," I said.

"It's common practice to put a lesser man in front, while the boss stays in the background, where he is free to observe progress. Just as I did with you, kōhai."

"Ishiguro's boss was watching all the time?"

"Yes. And Ishiguro clearly had orders not to allow the investigation to begin. I needed to start the investigation. But I had to do it in such a way that he would not look incompetent. So I played the out-of-control gaijin. Now he owes me a favor. Which is good, because I may need his help later on."

"He owes you a favor?" I said, having trouble with this idea. Connor had just screamed at Ishiguro - thoroughly humiliating him, as far as I was concerned.

Connor sighed. "Even if you don't understand what happened, believe me: Ishiguro understands very well. He had a problem, and I helped him."

I still didn't really understand, and I started to say more, but Connor held up his hand. "I think we better take a look at the scene, before Graham and his men screw things up any more than they already have."

Chapter 3

It'd been almost two years since I worked the detective division, and it felt good to be around a homicide again. It brought back memories: the nighttime tension, the adrenaline rush of bad coffee in paper cups, and all the teams working around you - it's a kind of crazy energy, circling the center where somebody is lying, dead. Every homicide crime scene has that same energy, and that finality at the center. When you look at the dead person, there is a kind of obviousness, and at the same time there is an impossible mystery. Even in the simplest domestic brawl, where the woman finally decided to shoot the guy, you'd look at her, all covered in scars and cigarette burns, and you had to ask, why tonight? What was it about tonight? It's always clear what you are seeing, and there's always something that doesn't add up. Both things at once.

And at a homicide you have the sense of being right down to the basic truths of existence, the smells and the defecation and the bloating. Usually somebody's crying, so you're listening to that. And the usual bullshit stops; somebody died, and it's an unavoidable fact, like a rock in the road that makes all the traffic go around it. And in that grim and real setting, this camaraderie springs up, because you're working late with people you know, and actually know very well because you see them all the time. L.A. has four homicides a day; there's another one every six hours. And every detective at the crime scene already has ten homicides dragging on his backlog, which makes this new one an intolerable burden, so he and everybody else is hoping to solve it on the spot, to get it out of the way. There is that kind of finality and tension and energy all mixed together.

And after you do it for a few years, you get so you like it. And to my surprise, as I entered the conference room, I realized that I missed it.

The conference room was elegant: black table, black high-backed leather chairs, the lights of the nighttime skyscrapers beyond the glass walls. Inside the room, the technicians talked quietly, as they moved around the body of the dead girl.

She had blond hair cut short. Blue eyes, full mouth. She looked about twenty-five. Tall, with a long-limbed, athletic look. Her dress was black and sheer.

Graham was well into his examination; he was down at the end of the table, squinting at the girl's black patent high heels, a penlight in one hand, his notebook in another.

Kelly, the coroner's assistant, was taping the girl's hands in paper bags to protect them. Connor stopped him. "Just a minute." Connor looked at one hand, inspecting the wrist, peering closely under the fingernails. He sniffed under one nail. Then he flicked the fingers rapidly, one after another.

"Don't bother," Graham said laconically. "There's no rigor mortis yet, and no detritus under the nails, no skin or cloth fibers. In fact, I'd say there aren't many signs of a struggle at all."

Kelly slipped the bag over the hand. Connor said to him, "You have a time of death?"

"I'm working on it." Kelly lifted the girl's buttocks to place the rectal probe. "The axillary thermocouples are already in place. We'll know in a minute."

Connor touched the fabric of the black dress, checked the label. Helen, part of the SID team, said, "It's a Yamamoto."

"I see that," Connor said.

"What's a Yamamoto?" I said.

Helen said, "Very expensive Japanese designer. This little black nothing is at least five thousand dollars. That's assuming she bought it used. New, it's maybe fifteen thousand."

"Is it traceable?" Connor asked her.

"Maybe. Depends on whether she bought it here, or in Europe, or Tokyo. It'll take a couple of days to check."

Connor immediately lost interest. "Never mind. That'll be too late."

He produced a small, fiber-optic penlight, which he used to inspect the girl's scalp and hair. Then he looked quickly at each ear, giving a little murmur of surprise at the right ear. I peered over his shoulder, and saw a drop of dried blood at the pierced hole for her earring. I must have been crowding Connor, because he glanced up at me. "Excuse me, kōhai."

I stepped back. "Sorry."

Next, Connor sniffed the girl's lips, opened and closed her jaw rapidly, and poked around inside her mouth, using his penlight as a probe. Then he turned her head from side to side on the table, making her look left and right. He spent some time feeling gently along her neck, almost caressing it with his fingers.

And then, quite abruptly, he stepped away from the body and said, "All right, I'm finished."

And he walked out of the boardroom.

Graham looked up. "He never was worth a damn at a crime scene."

I said, "Why do you say that? I hear he's a great detective."

"Oh, hell," Graham said. "You can see for yourself. He doesn't even know what to do. Doesn't know procedure. Connor's no detective. Connor has connections. That's how he solved all those cases he's so famous for. You remember the Arakawa honeymoon shootings? No? I guess it was before your time, Petey-san. When was that Arakawa case, Kelly?"

"Seventy-six," Kelly said.

"Right, seventy-six. Big fucking case that year. Mr. and Mrs. Arakawa, a young couple visiting Los Angeles on their honeymoon, are standing on the curb in East L.A. when they get gunned down from a passing car. Drive-by gang-style shooting. Worse, at autopsy it turns out Mrs. Arakawa was pregnant. The press has a field day: L.A.P.D. can't handle gang violence, is the way the story goes. Letters and money come from all over the city. Everyone is upset about what happened to this fresh young couple. And of course the detectives assigned to the case don't discover shit. I mean, a case involving murdered Japanese nationals: they're getting nowhere.

"So, after a week, Connor is called in. And he solves it in one day. A fucking miracle of detection. I mean, it's a week later. The physical evidence is long gone, the bodies of the honeymooners are back in Osaka, the street corner where it happened is piled high in wilted flowers. But Connor is able to show that the youthful Mr. Arakawa is actually quite a bad boy in Osaka. He shows that the street-corner gangland shooting is actually a yakuza killing contracted in Japan to take place in America. And he shows that the nasty husband is the innocent bystander: they were really gunning for the wife, knowing she was pregnant, because it's her father they wanted to teach a lesson. So. Connor turns it all around. Pretty fucking amazing, huh?"

"And you think he did it all with his Japanese connections?"

"You tell me," Graham said. "All I know is, pretty soon after that, he goes to Japan for a year."

"Doing what?"

"I heard he worked as a security guy for a grateful Japanese company. They took care of him, is what it amounted to. He did a job for them, and they paid off. Anyway, that's the way I figure it. Nobody really knows. But the man is not a detective. Christ: just look at him now."

Out in the atrium, Connor was staring up at the high ceiling in a dreamy, reflective way. He looked first in one direction, and then another. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind. Suddenly, he walked briskly toward the elevators, as if he were leaving. Then without warning, he turned on his heel, and walked back to the center of the room, and stopped. Next, he began to inspect the leaves on the potted palm trees scattered around the room.

Graham shook his head. "What is this, gardening? I'm telling you, he's a strange guy. You know he's gone to Japan more than once. He always comes back. It never works out for him. Japan is like a woman that he can't live with, and can't live without, you know? Myself, I don't fucking get it. I like America. At least, what's left of it."

He turned to the SID team, which was moving outward from the body. "You guys find those panties for me yet?"

"Not yet, Tom."

"We're looking, Tom."

I said, "What panties?"

Graham lifted the girl's skirt. "Your friend John couldn't be bothered to finish his examination, but I'd say there's something significant here. I'd say that's seminal fluid oozing out of the vagina, she's not wearing panties, and there's a red line at the groin where they were ripped off. External genitals are red and raw. It's pretty clear she had forcible intercourse before she was killed. So I'm asking the boys to find the panties."

One of the SID team said, "Maybe she wasn't wearing any."

Graham said, "She was wearing them, all right."

I turned back to Kelly. "What about drugs?"

He shrugged. "We'll get lab values on all fluids. But to the eye, she looks clean. Very clean." I noticed that Kelly was distinctly uneasy, now.

Graham saw it, too. "For Christ's sake, what are you hangdog about, Kelly? We keeping you from a late-night date, or what?"

"No," Kelly said, "but to tell you the truth, not only is there no evidence of a struggle, or of drugs - I don't see any evidence that she was murdered at all."

Graham said, "No evidence she was murdered? Are you kidding?"

Kelly said, "The girl has throat injuries that suggest she may have been into one of the sexual bondage syndromes. She has signs beneath the makeup that she's been tied up before, repeatedly."

"So?"

"So, technically speaking, maybe she wasn't murdered. Maybe she experienced sudden death from natural causes."

"Aw, Christ. Come on."

"It's quite possible this is a case of what we call death from inhibition. Instantaneous physiological death."

"Meaning what?"

He shrugged. "The person just dies."

"For no reason at all?"

"Well, not exactly. There's usually minor trauma involving the heart or nerves. But the trauma isn't sufficient to cause death. I had one case where a ten-year-old kid got hit in the chest with a baseball - not very hard - and fell down dead in the school yard. Nobody within twenty meters of him. Another case, a woman had a minor car accident, banged into the steering wheel with her chest, not very hard, and while she was opening the car door to get out, she dropped dead. It seems to happen where there is neck or chest injury, which may irritate the nerves running to the heart. So, yeah, Tom. Technically, sudden death is a distinct possibility. And since having sex is not a felony, it wouldn't be murder."

Graham squinted. "So you're saying maybe nobody killed her'?"

Kelly shrugged. He picked up his clipboard. "I'm not putting any of this down. I'm listing the cause of death as asphyxiation secondary to manual strangulation. Because the odds are, she was strangled. But you should file it away in the back of your mind that maybe she wasn't. Maybe she just popped off."

"Fine," Graham said. "We'll file it. Under medical examiner's fantasies. Meanwhile, any of you guys got an ID on her?"

The SID team, still searching the room, murmured no.

Kelly said, "I think I got a time of death." He checked his temperature probes and read off a chart. "I register a core of ninety-six point nine. In this ambient room temperature, that's consistent with up to three hours postmortem."

"Up to three hours? That's great. Listen Kelly, we already knew she died sometime tonight."

"It's the best I can do." Kelly shook his head. "Unfortunately, the cooling curves don't discriminate well for under three hours. All I can say is death occurred sometime within three hours. But my impression is that this girl has been dead a while. Frankly, I would say it's close to three hours." Graham turned to the SID team. "Anybody find the panties yet?"

"Not so far, Lieutenant."

Graham looked around the room and said, "No purse, no panties."

I said, "You think somebody cleaned up here?"

"I don't know," he said. "But doesn't a girl who's coming to a party in a thirty-thousand-dollar dress usually carry a purse?" Then Graham looked past my shoulder and smiled: "Well, what do you know, Petey-san? One of your admirers to see you."

Striding toward me was Ellen Farley, the mayor's press secretary. Farley was thirty-five, dark blond hair cropped close to her head, perfectly groomed as always. She had been a newscaster when she was younger, but had worked for the mayor's office for many years. Ellen Farley was smart, fast on her feet, and she had one of the great bodies, which as far as anyone knew she retained for her own exclusive use.