groundballers. There's nothing on the PI, Katanga. Just vanished."
"The girl?"
"Ran the usual suspects on Leah Henning -- phone, gas, power, water, and broadband. All last-knowns trace to an apartment in Van Nuys. Here's the address. I spoke to the manager -- cranky old broad. Leah skipped her lease March fifteenth, left the security deposit behind."
Two days after her visit home.
"No forwarding info, no new bills in her name. She just blinked off the radar." Bear coughed into a fist. "What do you have?"
"Not a damn thing."
"Well, that's why you're here. To make magic outta moleshit." Bear wiped his hand on his pant leg. "The P.O. box checked out to the San Fernando office, just north of Van Nuys, where the girl lived. I guess if we get desperate, we can sit someone on it, but I'm not sure Tannino'll give up the manpower for a low-odds angle this early in the game."
"The PI already gave it a go with no luck. Let's save that for a last-ditch."
Bear flattened the chips bag with his hand and seemed disappointed to find it empty. "These cults pull some intense shit. Didn't you do some mind-control mumbo jumbo in Ranger training?"
"Biofeedback stuff mostly, to teach us to control our thoughts, balance our emotional responses, mediate our pain reactions."
Bear wore the dubious expression he generally reserved for discussing political correctness and tax hikes. "How'd they do that?"
"They stuck us with needles and put probes up our asses. We'd joke that we got lost at the Blue Oyster Bar from Police Academy."
The white coats had taught him to focus on his breathing, his heart rate, even his body temperature. Eventually he could lower them at will, even when the techs were giving him mild shocks or pricking his fingertips with needles. They'd kept cardiac leads all over him, hooked into a computer; his task was to lower his blood pressure and make pink dots disappear from the screen. The aim, one walleyed tech bragged, was to regulate his adrenaline response, to disconnect the wiring of his fight-or-flight instinct. Four twenty-minute sessions a day, seven days a week.
When Tim finished, his core body temperature stayed at ninety-seven degrees.
"There is a shadow government." With effort, Bear pulled himself up off the chair. "Page me if you need me. I gotta chase down some jack-ass who walked out of an Inglewood halfway house after banging a cohabitant. Remember, it ain't all glamour."
He thundered off, hefting his pants by his belt.
Tim sat for a moment, elbows on his knees, head lowered. It took a while for the juices to get flowing, but the instinct returned like a remembered melody. He plucked the phone from the base, called the L.A. Times: Valley Edition and then the Weekly, asking for Classifieds. Newspapers were notoriously fastidious when it came to confidentiality, so he introduced himself both times as Lee Henning and complained that he'd been overcharged for a moving-sale ad he'd placed in the papers a few weeks ago. He was additionally pissed off because they'd misspelled his name. Neither paper could locate an ad. He came up blank at Pennysaver and Recycler but got a hit at the New Times, a lower-circulation rag that catered to students and the younger set.
"Yeah, right here," the clerk said. "Le ah Henning." A hiccup of a giggle. "Bet that confused the buyers, huh? It just ran once. You should've been charged thirty-five bucks."
"If memory serves, I was charged fifty."
"Nope." The sounds of fastidious keyboard clicking. "Got the bill right here."
"Can you fax me a copy of it? And the ad, too, while you're at it?"
He waited, fingers drumming on the desktop, until he heard the fax machine whirring across the room. Reluctant to ask his way around the new office, he followed the noise through the maze of desks. The papers awaited him in the tray.
A notation on the bill showed that Leah had paid the bill with cash, which struck Tim as odd and inconvenient. Tim had run through some specifics with Will