“If you're ready-”

“I don't know what I am but why waste time? It's… you know about the basic details?”

I nodded.

“There was really no warning, Dr. Delaware. He was such a…”

Then she cried.

Then she spilled it out.

“Nolan was smart,” she said. “I mean seriously smart, brilliant. So the last thing you'd think he'd end up being was a cop- no offense to Rick's friend, but that's not exactly what comes to mind when you think intellectual, right?”

Milo had a master's degree in literature. I said, “So Nolan was an intellectual.”

“Definitely.”

“How much education did he have?”

“Two years of college. Cal State Northridge. Psychology major, as a matter of fact.”

“He didn't finish.”

“He had trouble… finishing things. Maybe it was rebellion- our parents were heavily into education. Maybe he just got sick of classes, I don't know. I'm three years older, was already working by the time he dropped out. No one expected him to join the police. The only thing I can think of is he'd gotten politically conservative, real law-and-order. But still… the other thing is, he always loved… sleaze.”

“Sleaze?”

“Spooky stuff, the dark side of things. As a kid he was always into horror movies, really gross stuff, the grossest. His senior year in high school, he went through a stage where he grew his hair long and listened to heavy metal and pierced his ears five times. My parents were convinced he was into satanism or something.”

“Was he?”

“Who knows? But you know parents.”

“Did they hassle him?”

“No, that wasn't their style. They just rode it out.”

“Tolerant?”

“Unassertive. Nolan always did what he wanted-”

She cut the sentence short.

“Where'd you grow up?” I said.

“The Valley. Woodland Hills. My father was an engineer, worked at Lockheed, passed away five years ago. My mother was a social worker but never worked. She's gone, too. A stroke, a year after Dad died. She had hypertension, never took care of it. She was only sixty. But maybe she's the lucky one- not having to know what Nolan did.”