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surveillance of the big man had just gone into high gear. As a chief investigator for the City Attorney’s office, it was Reddick’s job to investigate the validity of civil claims made against the LAPD, and in that role, he’d been following Andrews around now for almost a month. It was the most boring work Reddick had ever done.
    Among the many injuries Andrews was claiming to have sustained in his late night waltz with the police was a spinal contusion that had left him partially paralyzed on the right side of his body, and he’d been hobbling about, first on crutches, then with the aid of a cane, ever since leaving the hospital. In twenty-six days of surveillance, Reddick had yet to see the big man move an inch without the benefit of one or the other, the crutches or the cane, making him about as exciting to watch for eight hours a day as an ant farm.
    Still, Reddick was convinced that Andrews’s partial paralysis was just a sham, a mere gilding of his actual injuries designed to make $11,000,000 in damages seem woefully insufficient, and Reddick had not lost hope that he would be there, digital video camera in hand, when Andrews finally let his guard down and proved it.
    Today was the day.
    Every man had a weakness, a passion over which he had limited control, and Andrews was no exception. He had a vice that had been calling him for over nine months now, something he could not properly indulge in while pretending to be handicapped, and this was the day it broke him down, led him to risk everything just for a momentary taste of its bittersweet rewards. For some, the mistress who could not be denied was blow; for others, rock or smack. Gambling or alcohol, porno or phone sex.
    For Orvis Andrews, it was bowling.
    Three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, four days after Andy Baumhower’s mini-van had exchanged sheet metal with Reddick’s Mustang, Andrews limped into Arrowhead Lanes way the hell out in Lancaster and rolled six games. Reddick sat at the opposite end of the near-empty building and, lower back aching for the fourth day in a row, discreetly aimed a compact video camera at the black man as he bowled four 200-plus games and one in the high 190s, after starting off slow with a 145. And all with a house ball and his right arm, the one the LAPD was supposed to have rendered useless.
    Reddick hoped Andrews hadn’t already spent that eleven million.
    Meanwhile, seventy miles to the south of Bakersfield, an amateur bird watcher named Angela Cromartie was walking along a stretch of the LA River in Silverlake when she spotted something with her binoculars that was most definitely not a Blacknecked Stilt. It was a man’s leg, protruding from the shadows engulfing a storm drain opening in the north wall of the basin. She thought it had to be something else, a pile of old clothing with a shoe jutting out of it at an odd angle or something – but no. She kept the binoculars trained on it until she was sure: It was a man’s leg, fully clothed, and it wasn’t moving.
    It didn’t have to belong to a corpse. There were dozens of other explanations for it. But as she pulled her cell phone from a wind-breaker pocket and started inching her way up to the storm drain, moving as if through slabs of mud, she couldn’t make herself believe a single one of them.

SIX
    T he next morning, Thursday, the story was on page twenty-two of The Los Angeles Times . It was only four paragraphs long.
    It said that the body of an unidentified Caucasian male, age approximately fifty, had been discovered in the LA River near the Atwater area of Los Angeles late Wednesday afternoon. An Eagle Rock resident named Angela Cromartie had stumbled upon the fully clothed corpse while walking the river and alerted authorities. Cause of death was unknown pending toxicology tests, but a police spokesperson told reporters the body, which investigators estimated had been in the river about a week, showed no obvious signs of foul play.
    Reddick never saw