"No I wouldn't. You think women are a pain in the ass. If I flirted, you'd pat me on the head and make me go away."

He wouldn't take the bait on that one but he did reach over and pick up the phone, dialing Identification and Records.

"This is Dolan. Have Emerald bring me the files on Laurence Fife. " He hung up and leaned back again, looking at me with a mixture of speculation and distaste.

"I better not hear any complaints about the way you handle this. If I get one call from anyone-and I'm talking about a witness who feels harassed or anyone else, including my men or anybody else's men-you're up shit creek. You got that?"

I held up three fingers beside my temple dutifully. "Scouts honor."

"When were you ever a Scout?"

"Well, I was a Brownie once for almost a week," I said sweetly. "We had to paint a rose on a hanky for Mother's Day and I thought it was dumb so I quit."

He didn't smile. "You can use Lieutenant Becker's office," he said when the files arrived. "And stay out of trouble."

I went into Becker's office.

It took me two hours to sort through the mass of paperwork but I began to see why Con had been reluctant to let me look because just about the first thing that came to light was a series of Telexes from the West Los Angeles Police Department about a second homicide. At first, I thought it was a mistake-that communiques from another case had been inadvertently sandwiched into the wrong file. But the details nearly leapt off the page and the implications made my heart go pitty-pat. An accountant named Libby Glass, Caucasian, female, age twenty-four, had died from ingesting ground oleander four days after Laurence Fife died. She had worked for Haycraft and McNiece, a business-management firm representing the interests of Laurence Fife's law firm. Now what the hell was that about?

I flipped through copies of investigators' reports, tying to piece together the story from terse departmental memorandums and penciled summations of telephone calls flying back and forth between the Santa Teresa and West Los Angeles police departments.