It probably wasn’t an accident that his new lady friend was a geologist. Bryce wondered what he’d seen in Louise, back in the day. She was nice enough-she worked at being nice, in fact, worked hard at it-but she wasn’t what you’d call long on brains.
“So what?” Bryce wondered, again out loud. Chances were Colin had been so happy he was getting laid regularly that he hadn’t cared about anything else.
Kai su, teknon? Bryce wondered. That was Greek, and it was what Julius Caesar had really said when he saw that Brutus was one of the guys shoving knives into him on the Ides of March. It meant You, too, kid?
Bryce was aiming it at himself. Now that Vanessa was gone, he wondered what he’d seen in her past a pretty face, nice tits, and long legs that opened for him like the door into heaven. What more did you need? When you were first starting out, you thought everything was just like the movies and you were guaranteed to live happily ever after.
He knew what she’d seen in him. She’d been fighting with her then-boyfriend, and Bryce looked like an escape hatch. That she’d been fighting with the other guy should have been a red flag. But when you had a boner that wouldn’t quit, it was easy enough to figure the fights were all the fault of the SOB she was ditching.
Did Hagop What’s-his-name figure Vanessa’s fights with Bryce were all his fault? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Hagop had a good many miles on the odometer. Chances were he’d seen that things were rarely as one-sided as the person talking about them made them out to be.
Of course, why would he care? When you landed a girl young enough to be your daughter, why would you care about anything? It might not last long, but wouldn’t you have fun while it did?
When I’m in my fifties, will I troll for girls in their twenties? Bryce was sure he’d still look at girls in their twenties; that was one of the things they were for. But to touch instead of just look? He hoped to n agaappily settled with someone by then. He’d hoped to be happily settled with Vanessa. Whatever else might happen, that wouldn’t, not now.
His phone rang. He picked it up, and smiled when he recognized the number. “Hey, Susan,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.” In a manner of speaking, it was true.
“Well, good. I was thinking about you, too,” Susan Ruppelt said. German or maybe Dutch, Bryce guessed. One of these days, he’d get around to asking her. It wasn’t urgent, not the way it might have been a lifetime earlier. In L.A. these days, any white whose first language was English counted as an Anglo. That cracked up Bryce and some of his Jewish friends, which didn’t mean they didn’t take advantage of it. Susan went on, “How crazy should you get before your orals?”
“There’s an interesting question. You’re going to, you know, whether you want to or not,” he answered. She was scheduled to take them fall quarter. It seemed a long way off to Bryce, but it wouldn’t to Susan.
“Tell me about it!” she yipped.
“I know. I know.” He tried to sound soothing. He’d survived his exams almost three years ago now, and got blasted afterwards. “Listen, if your chairperson’s worth the paper she’s printed on-”
“She is,” Susan broke in. “Claudia can drive me nuts sometimes, but she’s one of the best in the country. That’s why I came here.”
“Cool.” Bryce stayed in soothing mode. He still didn’t call Professor Towers by his first name, and wondered if he ever would. But then again, Professor Towers’ first name was Elmer, so chances were nobody called him by it. That was neither here nor there, though. “Like I was saying, if she’s worth anything, she won’t let you go up for exams unless she’s sure you’ll do fine.”
“She told me the same thing. I don’t know whether to believe it, though,” Susan said.
“Believe it,” Bryce said firmly. “When you look back on them, doctoral exams are more a rite of passage, like, than anything else.”
“They don’t feel that way when you’re looking forward to them.” Susan sounded fretful-and who could blame her? Disasters did happen. The year after Bryce passed his orals, a woman doing ancient Rome gruesomely flunked hers. No one but the profs who examined her was supposed to know what happened, but word got out all the same. The guy under whom she’d studied had retired a few months after the fiasco. UCLA was still searching for a full-time Romanist. With upcoming budgets looking as starvation-lean as the current one, the university might keep searching for a long time.
But Susan wasn’t like poor underprepared Joanna. Bryce didn’t know much about Western medieval history. He knew a solid scholar when he saw one. And he’d done a Roman minor field himself, as Susan was going to with whatever temporary lecturer held the slot come fall. He’d tutored her after they started dating, but not for long-she had a better grasp of the Romans than he did.
“Hey, you know your stuff,” he said. “The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. You don’t come down with stage fright, do you?”
“Not usually. But I’m not used to going up on this big a stage, either.”
“They’ll cut you slack for that. They’ve seen panicked grad students before. If I got through, you can do it. You’re way more outgoing than I’ll ever be.”
“I’m just afraid I’ll forget everything the second they start asking me questions.”
“Won’t happen. Honest to God, babe, it won’t. They started me out with softballs so I could loosen up a little before they started hitting me with the tougher ones. From everything I’ve heard from other people, that’s how they usually do it.”
“They know so much, though.” Come hell or high water, Susan was going to worry. “If they want to flunk me, they can.”
“Sure they can. They can flunk anybody if they want to. They sure could’ve nailed me to the cross. But that’s the whole point. They won’t want to.”
“Really?” Susan said in a small voice.
“Really. You’ll do great,” Bryce answered. They’d been through this before. If she needed a shoulder to cry on-or to fret on-he was glad to lend his. He’d got through what she was approaching; he knew the bumps in the road. He sometimes thought grad students were the only people fit to associate with other grad students. No one else understood the peculiar pile of shit they had to shovel.
He also sometimes thought people who’d gone through messy breakups were the only ones fit to associate with others of their kind, for similar reasons.
“Thank you, Bryce,” Susan breathed. No messy breakups in her past, so Bryce hoped like hell he was full of it.
VI
A secretary dumped the latest pile of printouts on Colin Ferguson’s desk. “Here you are, Lieutenant,” she said.
“Thanks, Josie.” Colin spoke Spanish after a fashion: small vocabulary, bad grammar, heavy accent. It often came in handy on the street, but he knew better than to trot it out with Josefina Linares. It would only piss her off. She went out of her way to show how American she was. Chances were he knew more es-panol than she did. He also knew she’d had family in the States longer than he had.
He went through the printouts one by one. They were DNA records from convicted felons. Plainly, the South Bay Strangler had never been nabbed for anything that required him to give a DNA sample. But if someone who was closely related to him had, the near miss might point the cops toward the real perp.
It could work. It had worked. The LAPD had busted the bastard they called the Grim Sleeper after his son’s DNA made them look in his direction. He’d got away with murder-and with a whole swarm of other crimes-for more than twenty-five years. But he sat in San Quentin now, going through the endless appeals that came with capital-murder cases.