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and placed the lot of it into the green bag.
    â€œRemind me never to have pancakes at your place,” he said.
    â€œYour loss,” she said.
    Swabbing the remaining stain with a clear liquid, she transferred the green-stained cotton into an evidence bag.
    A few more swabs produced clean cotton. She collected those as well. They went into the green bowling bag.
    â€œYou don’t seem very grossed out,” Jacob said.
    â€œI hide it well,” she said. Then she grinned. “Confession time. The vomit’s mine.”
    He laughed.
    â€œNext,” she said.
    In the kitchen, she dabbed delicately at the wood-burned message. “Good to go.”
    â€œNothing in the rest of the house?”
    â€œTwo rooms,” she said. “Bedroom, bathroom, no furniture, no movables. I went over it thoroughly.”
    He asked about the toilet and she shook her head.
    â€œYou’re positive,” he said.
    â€œQuite,” she said. “And to be frank, it’s an experience I would prefer not to relive in the retelling.”
    She hefted her hideous luggage and he walked her to the door.
    â€œIt’s been somewhat of a pleasure spending the morning with you, Detective Lev. Let’s do it again, what say?”
    â€”
    J ACOB SEARCHED the surrounding hilltop.
    No footprints, tire tracks, or other signs of human intrusion. Hostile soil and bleached stone and ground-hugging, drought-tolerant plants.
    He crab-walked around the back end of the house, moving south and east as far as he could before the slope got too severe. He estimated the drop into the canyon at four or five hundred feet. The upper third ofthat was bare dirt, nothing to grab on to if you fell. You’d build up one hell of a head of steam before you hit bottom, an impenetrable pubic tangle of chaparral and scrub oak. He doubted the hardiest K-9 could manage the descent without breaking a leg. It was terrain custom-made for disposal: set a body tumbling and go to bed that night feeling easy.
    He made a note to check a map of the area for other access points. The western edge of Griffith Park, perhaps. Still, he had to figure that any corpse thrown down there would be picked clean long before some unlucky hiker got lost enough to stumble across it.
    Justice.
    He scrambled back up to the house, the sun baking his hangover, the pain bringing the irregularities of the situation out in bold relief. It wasn’t impossible to conceive of a skeleton crew being sent to handle a murder, even an atypical one. LAPD, like every city agency, was understaffed, underfunded, overworked. Someone—Officer Chris Hammett or Divya Das; someone further up the chain—had recognized the etched characters as Hebrew, known enough to get antsy.
    Jewish victim?
    Muslim victim?
    Jewish perp?
    He imagined the brass at a hastily assembled meeting, panicked fantasies of urban ethnic war. Scrambling for ass-cover.
    Get a Jewish D.
    Do we have anyone like that?
    Good morning, Yakov Meir ben HaRav Shmuel Zalman.
    Bye-bye, protocol.
    He had a solid notion of what Special Projects meant now: shut your mouth and follow orders.
    If he ever cleared this one, would he be asked to don a yarmulke at the press conference?
    Wrap himself in his
tallis
to address the media?
    If.
Biggest word in the English language.
    Inside the house, he examined the letters burnt into the kitchen counter.
    Wood-burning stamp, battery-op? Hobbyist killer? Merit badge in decapitation?
    Would that kind of thing work to seal the neck? He’d have to ask Divya Das about it.
    He thought about her. The accent was attractive.
    Then he thought about Mai.
    Then he thought:
Get a life.
    He stepped outside and dialed his own extension at Valley Traffic. The phone rang ten times before Marcia, the normally cheerful civilian receptionist, answered warily.
    â€œI just finished packing up your stuff.”
    Mike Mallick didn’t screw around.
    â€œWhere are you sending it?” Jacob