The third was a whodunit, an eighty-five-year-old woman named Elsa Brigoon found bludgeoned in her apartment on Los Feliz Boulevard.

That one took up most of the ninety days, a lot of it spent chasing false leads. Elsa had been a drinker with an abrasive personality who quarreled at every opportunity. She’d also taken out a hundred-thousand-dollar term life-insurance policy on herself last year, and the beneficiary was a do-nothing son caught in a stock-market bind.

But none of that panned out, and Petra finally put the case to rest by running meticulous checks on every habitue of the apartment complex. A handyman hired by the landlord turned out to have a record of indecent exposure, sexual assault, and burglary, and his eyes jumped to Mars when Petra interviewed him in his filthy downtown SRO. Subsequent, skillful interviewing by Detective II Connor brought the jerk around.

Three for three. Petra ’s overall solve-rate was approaching the champ’s- Milo Sturgis’s over in West L.A. – and she knew she was fast-tracking to DIII, might make it by year’s end, was sure to incur lots of envy among her colleagues.

Good. Men were…

No, enough of that. Men are our biological partners.

Oh, Lord…

Day Ninety, she decided that bitterness was eroding her soul and resolved to be positive. Returning to her easel for the first time in months, she tried painting in oils, found her sense of color wanting, switched to pen-and-ink and filled pages of bristol board with tight, hyperrealistic faces.

Children’s faces. Well drawn but tacky. She ripped the drawings to shreds, went shopping.

She needed to go for color, one look in her closet made that painfully obvious.

Her casual clothes consisted of black jeans and black T’s and black shoes. Her work duds were dark pantsuits: a dozen black, two navy blues, three chocolate browns, one charcoal. All slim-cut to fit her skinny frame, all designer-labels that she purchased at discount outlets and the Barney’s warehouse sale and last-day markdowns wherever she found them.