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only.”
    Allen nodded. “Because it’s a good dump site. Easy to reach, but a couple miles from the nearest homes. A closed gate, but no real security. Good visibility in both directions, lots of notice if anyone does decide to drive past. Let’s get some more people out here to keep digging.”
    “You think there’s more?” Mazzucco said. “More from this guy, I mean.”
    Allen was looking at the ragged gash in the victim’s throat again.
    “I guarantee it.”
     
6
     
    Allen swigged from a bottle of tepid water as she sat on the hood of the gray department-issue Ford Taurus and watched them digging on the hillside. They’d been out here almost three hours now, and it was a little after noon. She was thinking about details. About how funny it was how you could still remember so many details about something you’d seen years ago, assuming that something left enough of an impact on you.
    “Something on your mind?”
    She started at the voice. Mazzucco was behind her, his jacket removed, arms folded on top of the roof of the car.
    She screwed the lid back on the bottle and swallowed the last gulp. “What do you mean?”
    “You think they’re going to find more bodies up there? Courtesy of this guy?”
    “Yeah, I do. Don’t you?”
    “Why?”
    “Why do you think? It’s an optimum dump site, and that wasn’t the work of a first timer. A rookie could see that, Jon.”
    It was true. Everything they’d seen so far pointed to the body being the latest victim in a series, not a one-off killing. The torture wounds showed patience, deliberation, confidence. Restraint, even, if that wasn’t an oxymoron. He’d been careful to keep the girl alive for a while. The killing stroke had been delivered with experience and with absolute resolve in one attempt. More than one person had commented on the professionalism of the grave. Luck was the only reason this body had been discovered. Add it all up and everything pointed to this being the work of an experienced killer.
    But it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth required more consideration before she let anyone in on it, even the man she trusted most in the department. All she knew was that there would be more.
    “You’re right,” Mazzucco admitted. “I’d have told them to keep digging myself. I don’t think they’d have needed to be told, to be honest. But the way you said it, the way you were staring at the body . . . It wasn’t just an educated guess. It was like you know .”
    Allen smiled and shook her head, feeling guilty as she did so. “Headache’s making me pessimistic. Maybe they won’t find anything.”
    “Maybe,” he repeated, looking unconvinced.
    Allen, uncomfortable with the expression on Mazzucco’s face, turned away to gaze back up at the hill. The body was still in place, covered with a sheet. Soon it would be transported to the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office for postmortem.
    “The missing girl,” Allen said. “Sarah Dutton, wasn’t it?”
    “Sarah Dutton.”
    “You think it’s her?”
    “I haven’t seen a picture, but she fits: slim, white, brunette, twenty-two years old.”
    “Mulholland’s close by,” Allen said, drawing on her limited knowledge of LA geography. She pointed roughly north: “It’s over there, right?”
    Mazzucco smiled as though she was doing okay for a fresh transplant. “Sure, but we have to go around the long way. Mandeville dead-ends just before you get to Mulholland.”
    “Okay. Let’s go talk to the father.”
     
7
     
FORT LAUDERDALE
     
    If I’m looking for you, it could be for any one of a hundred reasons.
    Perhaps you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, or are planning to. Perhaps you took something that didn’t belong to you. Perhaps you haven’t done anything wrong, but someone would like to know you’re okay. The one constant is that I find the subject—the subject doesn’t find me.
    The job Conrad Church had asked me to do had been a straightforward proposition at the