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Gray’s Laurel Canyon home. They had their job cut out for them. The building was a wanna-be mansion, a seven-thousand-square-foot, three-story collection of nooks and crannies perched high up along the canyon wall.
    Goodman huffed and puffed up and down three sets of stairs and counted fourteen rooms, at least three of them of fices. The largest office, at the rear of the ground floor, looked out on a slab of rock that surrounded a black-sand pool constructed to resemble a natural pond beneath a fake waterfall.
    Maddie must have needed a map to get around the place,
Goodman thought. Assuming she spent time there. He knew the kinds of hours TV people put in on the job. In the long ago, he’d been a technical assistant on a horseshit cop show, a thankless task since none of the information he provided was ever used. But it had helped send one of his kids—was it the one from his first marriage, or from his second, he could never remember—to college.
    He paused at the threshold to a tiny study that the lab people had yet to invade. He was perfectly happy to wait for them to do their thing before he did his, but the messiness of the room intrigued him. Someone, possibly Maddie Gray but more likely her killer, had torn through it, opening drawers, scattering papers on the carpet, and yes, best of all, popping the lock on a filing cabinet. Definitely the killer.
    Goodman squinted at the distant cabinet, hoping it wasn’t just a trick of the light that the metal around the lock appeared buckled. He was about to enter the room for a closer look when Detective Gwen Harriman joined him, a lopsided grin on her suntanned face.
    “Hey, pops,” she said, “some pad, huh?”
    Though he was approaching retirement age, Goodman was more amused than offended by the “pops” business. The previous year, when Harriman first joined Robbery-Homicide, they’d had a short romance. It had ended with him telling her to go out and find somebody her own age. Looking at her, with her red hair cut short now, curling around her sweet face, he was sorry she’d taken his advice. “The floor plans are a mite confusing,” Goodman told her, “but this sure beats my little apartment all to hell.”
    “I sorta like your little apartment,” Gwen said.
    “At least you could tell right away if it was a primary crime scene,” he said. The team had been going over the Gray house for nearly two hours without turning up enough evidence to indicate that its owner definitely had been murdered there.
    “This room saw some action sure enough,” Gwen said, scanning the study. “But no rough stuff. Furniture’s too neat. Chairs are in place. No blood.”
    “It’s a likely theft scene,” Goodman said, moving toward the violated cabinet.
    “Now, pops, you’re old enough to know the techs haven’t dusted in here yet.”
    “Never could resist a busted-open drawer,” he said.
    “Well, let me tempt you with something even more irresistible.”
    Goodman rewarded her with a suggestive Groucho Marx eyebrow wiggle.
    “That’s cute,” she said. “Like Tom Selleck in the TV show about the private eye.”
    He sighed at the gap between their points of reference.
    “Anyway, we got a room downstairs shows signs of a struggle. Wanna see?”
    “Lead the way,” he said.
    The room was just off of a formal dining area. It was surprisingly bright, considering there was only one window and the walls were a deep dark green, broken by paintings of flowers in white frames. The polished wooden floor was bare. There were two stuffed chairs and a sofa, all covered with the same white material. A butler’s table near the window contained various bottles of booze, a small ice chest, and an assortment of cocktail glasses. A middle-aged woman from the crime lab whose name he thought was Marcella sat on the wooden floor collecting scrapings.
    “Blood drop,” the woman told him. “More over there on that thing.” She pointed to a metal sculpture, an orb, resting on