LITMIR.BIZ

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door. “You’ve got to stop taking in every piece of broken furniture you see, Billy.”

      “They’re antiques, and keep your voice down. You’ll wake the new kid.”

      “What new kid?” Rick squinted into the poorly lit room. He could hear the old man but couldn’t see him past two bookshelves, a tall boy and some kind of rickety bureau.

      “Found him this morning at a bus stop.” The words came from somewhere near the pantry door. “Kid didn’t get on when the bus came. Didn’t have any money. He tried to sell me a watch. I offered him a hot meal instead. Figured a good night’s sleep wouldn’t hurt, either.” A smile entered his tone. “I smell real pretty perfume out there. Would it come from that detective you saw tonight?”

      His vocal cords might wobble, but nothing else about Billy Ruby had changed in the nearly twenty years Rick had known him. He took in strays—people, animals and objects. He cleaned them up, gave them a sense of worth and sent them back out into the world. He trusted easily, missed little and took it in stride if one of his tougher human challenges failed.

      A Saint Bernard with a kinked tail wandered over to drool on Rick’s boot. He gave a deep bark and wove a path to the far corner.

      “It’s after midnight, Rick. I don’t take that as a good sign.”

      Hunched over his computer, Billy didn’t look up. At ninety-six, he was the oldest person Rick knew. He wore his store-bought teeth with pride and had more hair than most men half his age, long hair that fell halfway down his back in a thin white braid. He was part African American, part Native American, part French Creole and part Swiss. It never failed to make Rick smile when Billy threw that last thing in. A neutral country, Billy Joe Ruby was not.

      Rick thought back briefly to his youth. He’d fallen in and out of trouble—mostly in—before meeting the old man. With patience, luck and a whole lot of late night talks, Billy had helped a tall, skinny, scared kid from Bakersfield finally get his head screwed on halfway straight.

      At the moment, Billy was regarding a group photo, taken on what appeared to be a college campus. Rick set one hand on the back of his chair, the other on the makeshift desk and bent to study the shot. “Let me guess. You’re helping me with this case.”

      “I was a Fed myself once, don’t forget.”

      “You sorted files, Billy.”

      “Before, during and after the war. Read a lot of them while I was at it.”

      “Pretty sure that’s illegal.”

      “Only if you get caught.” He tapped a weathered finger on the screen. “I’d guess that’s Vanessa Connor.”

      Out of a group of twenty girls, he’d nailed her straight off.

      At Rick’s doubtful sound, the old man laughed. “What? It’s not so tough to figure. I know what her three dead friends look like, so I eliminated them. Got rid of the cute ones and the four or five who’re hunkered down into their sweaters. No confidence. Left me with about six choices. She’s the prettiest, and she has the best eyes. Smart eyes. Like yours.”

      “Uh-huh.” Rick sent him a slow grin. “There’s a list of names, isn’t there? You read it and counted, left to right, bottom row.”

      “If I did, she’s still got smart eyes, and since you smell like a summer garden, I’m thinking she wears nice perfume. She gonna let you help keep her alive?”

      “Probably, but only because her captain wants it, and they’re tight.”

      Billy peered at him through a pair of thick spectacles. “You wanna talk about it?”

      “No.”

      “Thought not. Do you good, though, if you did. Bottling doesn’t work.”

      “I’m not bottling.”

      “Did you kiss her?”

      “My business, Billy.”

      “You’ve never kissed any other woman you’ve worked with. And you just met this one.”

      Suspicion moved in. “Why don’t you sound surprised?”

      “Because I figured it would happen. Been waiting for the day to come. You saw her and thought, ‘Oh, man, I’m in trouble.’ You’re pushing at the feeling because it’s wrong right now. Could mess you up. Could land her in a grave. Still, that old feeling just won’t budge. You kissed her, figured that’d get it out of your system. Doubt if it worked, but you’ll tell yourself it did—or will soon enough.” He smiled. “I like smart eyes.”

      So did Rick, which, as Billy had pointed out, was a very big problem and one he’d have to deal with fast. For the moment, he simply changed the subject. “Someone took a shot at her tonight.”

      Billy’s breath whistled out. “Looks like you’ve got a job ahead of you, boy.”

      Rick nodded. “Graham’s squeezing me for answers. So’s my boss.”

      “The buck stops at you. It’s what you get for being the best.” But there was understanding in Billy’s tone. “A lot of serial killings go on for years. They shouldn’t expect a solution overnight.”

      “It’s been three months.” Three long, stress-filled months of increasingly impatient phone calls, e-mails and ass-kicking lectures from his superiors. Senator Graham had clout, and he was using all of it in the case of his niece’s highly publicized death.

      The irony was, Graham hadn’t liked her. Deirdre Morton had had a penchant for the outrageous and a rather pathetic need to grab headlines. Why Vanessa had hung out with her in college was almost as big a mystery to Rick as the identity of her killer.

      “You’ll nail him.” Billy gave a decisive nod. “And I’ll say that to Senator Graham myself if he keeps pestering you.”

      “It doesn’t fit.” In as much as the space allowed, Rick pushed off to pace. “The guy tried to kill her in a crowd of people in Chinatown.”

      “One shot?”

      “Yeah.”

      “What kind of gun?”

      “A .32. I know—same caliber as the second victim. I’m betting on a different weapon, though.”

      “Second victim was murdered in Arizona, late last month, right? It’s August now. Time frame and all, chances are good your guy flew to Houston after that. Metal detectors, physical searches—you can’t smuggle weapons onto planes these days. Guy burgles the third victim, stabs her with a knife, also not easily transportable, then hightails it on up to San Francisco. He does his burglary thing there and buys another gun. Reasons it worked once, it’ll work again.”

      “He’s never gone with a crowd scene before. It’s been one-on-one in the three previous cases. The MO works. Why change it up now?”

      “Why hit the first victim over the head in a sleazy alley stairwell? Why leave the second floating in a hotel bathtub, fully clothed? Why slash the third victim’s throat and let her drain out facedown on her office desk?”

      That last scenario had been hard even for Rick to stomach. “The victims were alone in every case. Vanessa wasn’t.”

      “But she’d have been dead just the same if the shooter’d hit his mark. Maybe results matter more to your murderer than MO.”

      “That’s what Palmer thinks.”

      “What does Detective Connor think?”

      Rick picked up the coffeepot at Billy’s elbow, swirled the murky contents. “We didn’t get into it.”

      “Too busy kissing her, huh?”

      Although he didn’t answer, Billy’s remark cemented the point that what had happened between them tonight couldn’t be repeated. “I checked

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