Runyon wanted to know if he’d killed me. Really? You sent a nonexplosive paper bomb, buddy.

So Runyon got it all wrong.

Colleen, on the other hand, had gotten it all right. She was the best assistant I ever had. And more. I’d cared about her deeply.

I stopped reminiscing about Colleen and brought my attention back to the present. I said to my investigators, “Colleen worked here at Private for over a year. We started going out. It wasn’t a secret.”

“She was a great girl,” Del Rio said.

“Yes, she was. She was visiting friends here in LA and somehow she was captured or tricked, then murdered in my house.”

I talked about the terrible scene I had found in my bedroom, then turned the floor over to Sci, who looked fifteen years old in his pineapple-print aloha shirt, painter’s pants, and tennis sneakers.

He read from a report citing the cause and manner of Colleen’s death, homicide by gunshot to the heart. And he said that there was evidence that she’d had sex sometime before her death.

“We’ll have the DNA profile later today,” Sci said.

I said, “No matter what we find, the LAPD isn’t going to buy it because we can’t tell anyone that we processed the crime scene. So we’ll have to use what we’ve found to trap the doer and then lead the cops to him.”

There were questions about the time of Colleen’s death, where I was when it happened, whether the murder weapon had been found, and if the killer had written, called, or left a message for me to find.

“The killer was a pro. This was a well-planned murder, and it can only have been a setup to frame me. We’re working overtime until we nail the shit who killed Colleen.”

At that, the door to the conference room opened and Justine came in, tall, slim, elegant in navy-blue suit and cream-colored silk blouse.

“Sorry,” she said, taking the seat next to mine.

“We’re just wrapping up,” I said. “You want to report on Danny Whitman?”

“Possible new case,” she said to the group. “Young movie star with a criminal zipper problem. I’m meeting him today.”

“Thanks, Justine. Anyone else?”

“I need a few minutes with you, Jack,” Justine said. “If you can spare the time.”

I adjourned the meeting. And after the room emptied, I closed the door and sat down next to Justine.

CHAPTER 38

SEVEN YEARS AGO, after I returned from the war, I went into therapy, saw an excellent guy, Josh Moskowitz, who specialized in vets like me. That is, ex-military who’d gone through bloody hell and weren’t adjusting too well back home.

Like many of us, I had night terrors.

I kept hearing those boys in the bombed-out rear section of the CH-46, screaming as the helicopter went up in flames.

Dr. Moskowitz had an office in Santa Monica, a little office in a tall building on Fifteenth Street. I didn’t know it then, but Dr. Justine Smith worked in the same building.

I ran into her in the elevator one night, was thunderstruck in a way that you can’t explain by describing hair and eyes and curves. I rode up ten floors just staring at her before I realized that the elevator wasn’t going down.

She’d laughed at me, or maybe she just enjoyed seeing me go from zero to smitten in sixty seconds. Next time I saw her, I held the elevator door open, told her my name, and asked her to have dinner with me.

She said okay.

It was as if she’d cupped her hands around my heart.

Justine was a couple years younger than I was and maybe a decade wiser. Beautiful. Smart. Worked in a mental hospital most of the week, had a private practice and saw a handful of patients on Mondays and Wednesdays.

We had dinner together at a little Italian place out at Hermosa Beach, and I talked through it all. I told her more about myself over that one dinner than I’d told her since. I sensed she was a safe person, trustworthy, accepting, and she must have thought I was the kind of person who could open up.

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