Lloyd picked up the folder and put it in his jacket pocket. "Missing Person's Report? Family? Friends?"
"All negative, Lloyd. Herzog was a stone loner. No family except an elderly father. His landlord hasn't seen him in over a month, he hasn't shown up here or at his personnel job downtown."
"Booze? Dope? A pussy hound?"
Dutch sighed. "I would say that he was what you'd call an ascetic intellectual. And the Department doesn't seem to care-Walt and I are the first ones to even note his absence. He's been a sullen hardass since Bergen was canned."
Lloyd sighed back. "You've been using the past tense to describe Herzog, Dutchman. You think he's dead?"
"Yeah. Don't you?"
Lloyd's answer was interrupted by shouting from the downstairs muster room. There was the sound of footsteps in the hall, and seconds later a uniformed cop stuck his head in the doorway. "Liquor store on Sunset and Wilton, Skipper. Three people shot to death."
Lloyd began to tingle, his body going alternately hot and cold. "I'm going," he said.
3
The man in the yellow Toyota turned off Topanga Canyon Road and drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway, dawdling at stoplights so that his arrival at the Doctor's beach house would coincide exactly with dusk. As always, the dimming of daylight brought relief, brought the feeling of another gauntlet run and conquered. With darkness came his reward for being the Doctor's unexpendable right arm, the one person aside from the Night Tripper who knew just how far his "lonelies" could be tapped, dredged, milked, and exploited.
Spring was a sweet enemy, he thought. There were torturously long bouts of sunshine to contend with, transits that made nightfall that much more satisfying. This morning he had been up at dawn, running an eight-hour string of telephone credit checks on the names gleaned from the john books of the Doctor's hooker patients. A full day, with, hopefully, a fuller evening in store: his first grouping since taking three people for the mortal coil shuffle and maybe later a run to the South Bay singles bars to trawl for more rich lonelies.