boardroom on the top floor of Rath-Steadman as maybe the one man who could have stood up to the old men, to Vasek Rath and Red Steadman.

“The merger in 1977 is connected to the murders?”

He nodded. “Rath-Steadman is ready to build a new assembly plant down in Long Beach. Somehow that’s connected to this.”

Jean came around the desk to him. She thought she was going to go into his arms but he didn’t want that. Without pushing her away, he pushed her away. Maybe he’d decided something. There was an anger in him this morning she didn’t understand.

“Are you going to stop now?”

“No.”

“I told you I don’t care about this anymore,” she said.

“It’s taken on its own life.”

“Why are you doing this?” she said. “Pushing my face into it?”

“I want you to know everything I know.”

“I don’t care about Rath-Steadman. I’m at peace with the idea of my father, what he did or didn’t do. I don’t want to know everything. Not anymore. I want . . .”

And she waited before she said it.

“You.”

“Your brother Carey is on the board, too,” Jimmy said.

Something broke inside her, like a support, something that held up part of the façade. He saw her crumble.

He heard himself, the way he’d said it, wondered if some part of him meant to break her. Or even drive her away.

“He doesn’t have any hand in the day-to-day operation of the company,” Jimmy said. “He’s just on the board.”

She sat in the chair.

He waited. “And he has three million dollars’ worth of R-S stock.”

“Where does he live?” she said, suddenly smaller.

“He has a house in Palos Verdes. And a penthouse in a high-rise on the harbor in Long Beach.”

He could see her pulling herself together again.

“Have you talked to him?” she said.

“No. Have you?”

She didn’t understand the accusation in it. She said, “Carey called me on some anniversary of the execution. I was at Stanford. That was the last time I talked to him. I heard seven or eight years ago that he was a lawyer, that he was living in Arizona.”

“He practiced four years,” Jimmy said, “private practice, then filed for bankruptcy. He’s had inactive status with the Arizona Bar ever since.”

She wanted out of there.

“Was there bad blood between the two of you?”

“No,” Jean said. “There wasn’t anything. There isn’t anything.”

“Where did he go to live after the murders?”

“He was eight. A boarding school in Scottsdale.”

“Why didn’t he live with you and your grandmother?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She got out of the chair.

“You never asked?”

“Why are you being this way?” she said.

He didn’t tell her, he didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She knew he’d hold her now but now she didn’t want it.

There was a full daylight moon over the high-rise Deco apartment building on Long Beach Harbor. It was a pretty building, twenty stories high with ornate bas-relief detail over the black frames of the windows. It was from the twenties, recently refurbished, reconfigured into condominiums for young professionals and widows with a sense of style. The rain had ended at noon and left behind the brightest kind of sky, a few round white clouds and a view all the way to Catalina.

The gate on the subterranean parking lifted. After a moment, a white Porsche Cabriolet came out. It stopped. The top folded back.

It was Carey Kantke.

He looked like his father, wore his hair in the same crew cut though there was probably a different name for it now. He was in his late thirties, the same age as his father at the time of the murders, the trial. He ran his hand through his short hair, checked it in the mirror and pulled out of the parking garage and onto West Shoreline Drive, turning right.

Jimmy waited and then fell in behind.

Jean had gone in to her office after they’d talked in the study. Jimmy had told her to stay there at the house behind its high walls, that things were getting weird, but she’d had other ideas. Angel’s men went with her. Jimmy thought that if they could get through these next days, with all they would hold, he and Jean might be together for a while, might have a chance. But he didn’t tell her that.

There was a stop for lunch, a sidewalk café on East Second Street, a street of gentrified shops and galleries with only a few taco stands and tiki bars left over from the old days. Carey Kantke ate alone, got up once to collapse the green umbrella that