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was dumped.”
    “Couldn’t that be reverse psychology?” said Reed. “Or just plain arrogance — thinking he’s smarter than us? Like those idiots who mail messages? Or return to the scene to gloat.”
    “It’s possible.”
    Milo’s fingers were already dancing along the keyboard. “Well, look at this. Mr. Duboff has a record.”
     
     
    Silford Duboff had been arrested seven times in ten years, every instance a confrontation at a protest march.
    Anti-globalization ruckus at the Century Plaza, pay raises for hotel housekeepers in San Francisco, sit-in opposing the expansion of the nuclear power plant at San Onofre, resisting coastal development in Oxnard and Ventura. The seventh bust was fighting the billionaires’ grab for the Bird Marsh.
    Six of the arrests were for resisting, but at the anti-globalization fracas he’d been charged with assaulting a police officer, pled to misdemeanor battery, paid a fine. Conviction reversed two years later when an appeals judge hearing a class-action suit ruled LAPD at fault for the near-riot.
    “I remember that one,” said Milo. “Big mess. So the guy likes to sit in the middle of the street and chant. But there’s no serious violence on his sheet. Doesn’t even merit being called a sheet. More like a pillowcase.”
    Reed said, “Anti-globalization attracts anarchists and those types, right? Which brings me back to Huck’s cap. Those guys wear stuff like that. What if Huck and Duboff were protest buds and found out they had a common interest in nastier stuff?”
    “They attend the same marches, Duboff gets busted, but Huck doesn’t?”
    “Duboff’s an in-your-face guy, no subtlety. Huck’s more the sneaky type. Maybe that’s what I was smelling about him.”
    “An unholy duo,” said Milo. “By day, they agitate for liberation, when the sun goes down they kill women and chop off the hands and toss the bodies in the muck.”
    Reed drove faster. “I guess it is far-fetched.”
    “Kiddo, at this point far-fetched is better than nothing. Sure, look into both of them. You find Señor Huck’s name on the membership rolls of any group Señor Duboff marched with — any link between the two of them, whatsoever — and we’ll go the kill-team route.”
    I said, “A pair of killers would make the dump easier. One guy parks, the other hauls the body. Or they both haul, are able to do it quickly and get out of there.”
    Moe Reed said, “Think I should also talk to Vander’s accountant, find out about the other teachers making house calls?”
    “Someone Selena met on the job did her in?” said Milo.
    “More like someone on the job could tell us more than Huck did. Maybe we didn’t find any evidence of an outside social life in her apartment because being on call for Kelvin Vander stopped her developing outside interests.” Shaking his head. “Fifty grand to teach one kid… what if Selena’s involvement with this family is what got her dead?”
    “Selena and three other women with no right hands?”
    Reed didn’t answer. Moments later: “No outside social life but there was that bustier et cetera. Like you said, Loo, maybe she partied somewhere else. And so far, the only place we know she spent time was the Vander house.”
    “Drilling the kid on Bartók,” said Milo, “then sneaking off to the pool house for a quickie with the karate coach.”
    “Or Huck. Or Mr. Vander himself, for that matter.”
    Milo said, “The plumber, the pool boy, the florist, the gardener.”
    Reed kept silent.
    “Sure, call the accountants and get anything you can about the staff. Until we get I.D.’s on the other victims, we’re freeze-dried, anyway.”
    “Fifty grand,” said Reed, “could’ve led to expectations by the boss. Huck says Vander’s out of the country, but the rich don’t do their own dirty work, they hire out.”
    Milo said, “Rich, ergo evil.”
    “I just think those people can get entitled.”
    “To you and me, Moe, fifty K is serious money. Guy