Besides, if Ashley was anything like Susan, all she was doing between contractions was praying for them to stop.

Next Gil called another department in the hospital to get an update on David Geisler. The nurse on duty told Gil that Geisler was safely in his room, but he wouldn’t get a mental evaluation until tomorrow.

Officer Kristen Valdez, dressed in street clothes, popped her head in the door and said, “Hi, Gil. I just got off shift and wanted to see if you needed some help.”

“Thanks, Kristen,” Gil said. “Actually, I do need something that is fairly simple. That way you can get out of here and still make it down to fiesta.” He asked her to put together a folder of anything she could find out about Donna Henshaw and the Golden Mountain Ashram. She took a few notes as he talked, then went back out to the main room to work.

That left Gil to stare at the timeline on the whiteboard. He was wondering about the exact date Donna Henshaw had adopted Brianna when Joe came in saying, “Dude, I wanted you to be the first to know. My new spiritual name is Mr. Ram Inder Singh.”

“You went to their Web site and paid to get a name?” Gil asked.

“Hell, yeah. This shit is too funny to pass up. I got you a new name, too.”

“Really?” Gil said.

“Yep. You are now Mr. Baba Singh, which, in case you can’t tell, is a dork name. I have the cool name—I’m Ram.”

“How much did all of this cost you?”

“Twenty-five bucks each.”

“You spent fifty dollars to get us new names because it was funny?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“You clearly don’t have any wife or kids to support.”

“That’s exactly why I’m never getting married again. It takes all the fun out of life, doesn’t it, Mr. Baba Singh?”

Gil ignored him and looked back at the whiteboard, trying to fill in information on the timeline.

“Hey, Joe—” Gil said.

“Hey, who? You talking to me?”

“Okay, Ram. Do you remember how old Brianna was when Donna Henshaw adopted her?”

“She was twenty months old,” Joe said, “and twenty-five months when she went back to her mom. Then later she disappeared at twenty-six months on July 18.” Gil added all that information to the timeline.

“I don’t know about you,” Joe said, “but I’ve got even odds that Donna Henshaw or one of the women from the Vigilante Vagina League up there in the mountains has something to do with this.”

Gil, intent on the timeline, ignored Joe, instead thinking he should include the date Ashley met Judge Otero, who was in essence her adoption broker.

“Hey, Ram, do you have the court dates for Ashley’s speeding ticket?” Gil asked.

Joe pushed a few papers around on the table. “Okay, here it is. It looks like the first one was September third.”

“Her first one?” Gil asked. “How many times did she appear in Judge Otero’s court?”

“Umm . . . it looks like four times.”

“I thought Judge Otero said he only met her once,” Gil said. “Do you have your notes from his interview?”

“Hang on a second,” Joe said as he fumbled for his notebook, then read, “ ‘I did feel a little fatherly toward the girl the one time I met her. She came in my courtroom and told me she was three months pregnant.’ ” Joe added, “I guess the judge meant to say ‘one of the times I met her.’ ”

“Maybe,” Gil said, putting the dry-erase marker down. “Or maybe Judge Otero meant to lie to us.”

Lucy would never have guessed that Manny was a lightweight. They were only three beers into the night, and he was already sloshing drunk, telling her everything she wanted to know. Lucy, on the other hand, who had been matching him drink for drink, wasn’t even buzzed. Maybe she had discovered her superpower: drinking men under the table.

She had already gotten the names of the ringleaders out of Manny, as well as how much money they were taking in. After beer two, she had started to write everything down since Manny was beyond caring, and she checked to make sure the tape player was still recording, just in case.

“You know the worst part,” Manny was saying, “these are my people. My grandparents came here from Mexico in the 1950s. I’m taking advantage of my own people.”

Lucy didn’t even need to ask prodding questions anymore. He just kept talking. At one point, while Manny was cursing out his bosses, Nathan came over; he had finally noticed her from the