But now it was time to turn the next card over. Time for a new table and another game. Time to fight the urge to cash out.

She pushed aside the newspaper, opened the slider, and stepped onto the porch. The winds had picked up, drying out the city after ten straight days of heavy rain. In spite of the sun raking the basin from downtown to the ocean, the temperature probably wouldn’t climb out of the forties. Still, the view from the top of the hill this afternoon was stunning. The entire city appeared clean and polished, glistening in a wet light. Although she didn’t heat the pool, vapor was rising out of the water and drifting toward the sun in a flush of color. She couldn’t keep her eyes off it. The peace. The illusion of peace in the city so many people wanted to call their home.

She wondered how long the illusion would last. There had already been 478 homicides in Los Angeles this year. With only eighteen days left on the calendar, she wondered if they’d beat five hundred and expected that they probably would. Over the past eleven months, the prison population had reached 173,000 and become the twenty-fourth largest city in the state. Bigger than Pasadena, even though it was a city without a name, a football game, or even its own parade.

She wondered if the illusion of peace had the power to last.

The heat clicked on, the newspaper sailing off the table from the outdoor breeze. Lena stepped inside and shut the slider. As she picked up the paper, she noticed a photograph she’d missed on page three of the California section. A mansion in Beverly Hills was under a foot of snow. After thinking about what happened in Malibu last week, she started reading the article and realized that the photograph wasn’t a result of the storm and hadn’t been doctored by a special-effects house in Burbank. The snow was part of the city’s grand illusion, manufactured and blown over the house and yard because the owner was rich and he wanted to give his kids a white Christmas. Instead of spending the holiday in the mountains, the house and yard would be sprayed with new snow every day at a cost of ten thousand dollars a pop. Lena did the math. The price tag for a white Christmas in Beverly Hills topped out at a cool $120,000. By all appearances, the illusion everyone knew as L.A., and the insanity that went with it, remained intact.

Her cell phone began ringing from its charger on the counter. Turning over the newspaper, she got up and checked the display before picking up. It was her supervisor, Lt. Frank Barrera from the Robbery-Homicide Division, calling on her day off.

“Good news, bad news,” he said. “You cool, Lena?”

“I’m good. What’s up? I can barely hear you.”

“Hold it a second. Let me close the door.”

Barrera was whispering.