“How does it sound, Adam? Or do you just make things up as you go along?”

“Look, we were just getting to know each other, I thought—”

“First you don’t tell me one true thing about your family, your music, nothing. Then you tell me half a story about this—” She hung finger quotes. “—work you’re doing. It’s like you’re desperate to obscure who you are—you don’t even know who you are.”

She made for the door but I blocked her.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know who I am. I just…maybe I’m like you, I feel like an impostor. And I didn’t want to scare you off.”

She turned to me now and gave me the full force of her big blue eyes, but their light was strained with pity.

“Dude,” she said, “You’re nothing like me. I am working overtime right now to keep it real. And I can’t afford to roll with anybody who needs to put up a front. And forget about me! Think about that old lady in there—the one who can’t walk, you remember her? The one who’s practically in love with you? How fucking disappointed do you think she is?”

I froze up.

She spoke softer now, but with conviction. “I don’t think it even occurred to you that you could be compromising Ziva. Who, by the way, happens to be my charge.”

“Your charge?”

“Yes—that means it’s my job to take care of her.”

“I know, I know, that was so reckless, dammit.”

She started for the door again but this time I got out of her way.

“Endi—please let me talk to her. I’ve got to know what this guy looked like. Before he goes attacking somebody else.”

Exasperated, she said, “Fine,” and swayed her arm toward the little living room with sardonic drama. “Be my guest.”

Sheepishly, I passed through the house, the pied-à-terre kitchen, out the back door and knocked on the guesthouse door. Endi watched, arms folded.

Ziva said, “Come in.”

“Ziva, I am so sorry, I heard what happened, I—”

I reached for her hand but she pulled it toward her chest.

She was trembling slightly, elsewhere. “A man came tonight.”

“I…I heard.”

“He wanted your record album.”

“I know. Who was he?” I asked somberly.

“A man.”

“Like, my age?”

She shook her head a little. “Older.”

“With tattoos?” I was thinking of Sandoz.

“I saw no tattoos.”

“Did he have, like, curly hair? Half-Black maybe?”

She shook her head. “A man. An angry man.”

“Was he short, tall—”

“He was the gestapo,” she blurted, furious. “In cheap sunglasses.” Then she recoiled and said, “Please let me rest.”

“Ziva, I am so sorry.”

But she looked away and I backed off, as in a nightmare, from the half-painted canvases, the brushes hanging on wire, her aged face, hard with disgust. I turned to Endi—she wouldn’t look me in the eye either, and then I was out the door and driving off in a broken daze, almost crying, pulling into the parking lot at Vons. I moved through there feverish and scored an eleven-dollar Tracfone. Then I got back in the car and pulled around to the alley behind the supermarket. I dialed Fry.

“It’s me, I’m on a burner—I got a problem.”

“Talk to me.”

“I’m being followed or…something.” I looked over my shoulder—dark alley. “Someone broke into one of my rider’s houses—”

“One of your riders?”

“Endi’s client—they must’ve got the impression the LP was there, and they tore the place up looking for it.”

“Jesus,” Fry said deadpan. “Someone either really wants that record, or else they really want to scare you off.”

“Yeah, well, they’re doing a bang-up job of it.” I tried to complete a deep breath—a fat rat scurried from under a garbage bin out into the slash of lamplight.

Fry said, “Who are you getting close to? Who are you making nervous?”

“I…have a lead. A big one, but I can’t tell you where it’s from. There’s this doctor, a wannabe producer named Bahari.”

The alley was dark, dead still.

“Fry—everything bad that happened to that band went down after this doctor got involved. And supposedly he kicked Rey out of the group, like, a few weeks before he was killed. And…and Fountain Grove—they’re together.”

“Bahari’s with the DJs?”

“They gotta be—it’s a program.”

“You really think so?”

“A hundred percent. Dr. Bahari runs a bogus vitamin lab—health solutions for seniors, right? First they hook elderly people, people on their last legs, to invest in this crap, they lock ’em into some kind of culty residency at the estates—drain them of their resources, who knows what else. The guy down there, my lovely tour guide, even insinuated they had some kind of…euthanasia program.”

Fry said, “Wow.”