"Might have been two weeksa"might of been two daysa"I was in the car with all of them. David and Linda and Patti and Cinnamon. Linda got out of the car and Patti started shootin' off her mouth like she always does."

"Where were you going in the car?"

"Looking for some place to have a picnic."

Manuela had stayed behind with Krystal. Grandpa Brown had sat in the back of the van, but he had heard a lot. "She's a foulmouthed b.i.t.c.h," he said, spitting on the ground to emphasize his disgust with Patti. "She was discussing it when Linda got out of the van to peea"Linda had kidney trouble. Patti's got a very vile, big mouth. Just to talk to her normally, you'd think, 'd.a.m.na"she's a doll,' but she's a b.i.t.c.ha"pardon."

Patti had, Arthur Brown claimed, said she would get rid of Linda to save David.

"You feel," Newell asked, "that maybe that's what happened?"

"It took me five or six months to remember all this. I couldn't remember hardly my own G.o.dd.a.m.ned name for a while. I haven't liked Patti sincea"and I never will. I have to live here with David and Patti because ... it feels like he owes her his life."

And yet, Arthur Brown could not remember that he mentioned any of this to Cinnamon. Pressed, he admitted he might have told her. But what was the use? He didn't believe any of it would hold up in court.

"Even if someone can't be prosecuted," Newell offered, "we want all the details. It may or may not help Cinnamon. If Cinnamon isn't fully responsible for this, why shoulda""

"I'd bet my life on that," her grandfather cut in.

"You wouldn't make up a story just to get Patti in trouble because you don't like her, would you?" Newell asked.

"No way. No, sir. If it wasn't true, I wouldn't of said it. .. it's bad enough that it happeneda"no use of me adding any stories to it. I was in hopes it might help Cinny because as far as I'm concerned, she's a doll."

The case had just taken a complete spin. If Arthur Brown was believablea"which was the salient questiona"Patti Bailey, not Cinnamon, was a killer.

Newell heard a car engine lugging up the hill behind him and turned to see David Brown himself driving up. Arthur looked panicked.

Sotto voce, Newell said to the old man, "I'm a real estate man. If you want to maintain that, fine."

"Okay. If I stick my neck out too far, I'll lose my son, my granddaughter, plus another granddaughter."

"We don't want that to happena"but we are concerned with the truth," Newell stressed. "Here comes David. We can talk about it later," and then, in a louder voice, "Yeah, I've sold a couple of houses on this block."

Newell grinned, held out his hand, and introduced himself to David Brown as "Jerry Walker, Realtor."

"How ya doin'?" David Brown answered.

For a beat, Newell's breath caught, and then he knew that Brown had not recognized him. His eyes were drawn to a solid-gold pendant of some creature that David wore on a chain around his neck. It glittered in the sunlighta"gold, and beneath that, orange and yellow stones. He knew what it was; he'd talked to the jeweler who had made it, but he wanted to hear David's explanation. "That's unusual," he said, "what is thata"a dragon?"

"A phoenix." David offered nothing more.

Newell launched into a discussion of what a shame it was that a neighboring house, needing paint, was such an eyesore in such an expensive neighborhood. "I feel guilty showing houses up here because of that."

Newell slid his eyes toward the old man and saw that Arthur Brown's mouth was shut tight. He wasn't going to give him away.

It was odd. Finally talking to the man he had stalked for almost two years. David Brown was animated in the way of weak men who strive to appear influential and macho. He was most interested in making more money in real estate, he said, although he explained he'd already done very well indeed. He did not seem ill, although he was certainly out of shape, and he smoked like a chimney.

"This stuff is goin' up though," Newell continued, as smooth as if he had been selling real estate all his life. "Anything over three hundred thousand dollars is selling."

David brightened. He had been thinking about making a change.

"This new tax thing is forcing people to get something more expensive, and the write-offs are gone, and old Uncle Sam gets it," Newell said easily. "I have four condos myself, and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to keep them. But these bigger housesa"they're selling. I've got friends interested in moving up here."

Newell tossed off some impossibly high figure he could get for David's house, and he could see David salivate.

Grandpa Brown, standing behind David, was getting nervous, sweat beading on his forehead. He would never make a poker player.

Newell slapped his breast pocket, murmured that he had run out of cards, but he would be back. He turned and strolled easily down the street to his car.

He had plenty of cards, but they all read "Jay Newell, Orange County District Attorney's Office, Senior Attorney's Investigator." At the moment, they didn't seem appropriate.

"Well, have a good day, you guys," he shouted.

Newell had been in any number of dicey spots, pretending to be someone he was not. Drug buys. Gang infiltration. But there was something about David Arnold Brown that chilled his blood. A certain flatness in his eyes, even when he was grinning. From a distance, he looked like a tubby cartoon figure. Up close, he looked like .. . what? Evil. Newell surprised himself with that one. Evil wasn't a concept he usually thought about.

He wondered if the old man could hold firm. He had gone on and on about his illnesses and ailments. Between Arthur and David, the Brown men seemed to suffer from every ailment mankind is p.r.o.ne to. Newell believed that Arthur Brown wanted to save Cinnamon, but he also knew the old guy was weak. He had been strong enough to finger Patti Bailey, to suggest that she was the shootera"not Cinnamon a"but would he ever be strong enough to get up and say it in court, or even say it in front of his son? Grandpa Brown seemed to shrivel up when he was around David.

Newell had good reason to doubt Arthur Brown's fort.i.tude. Even before that evening was over, he had confessed to his son that the man he had been talking to was not "Jerry Walker," but rather, Jay Newell of the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

David was both furious and alarmed. He called his father a fool, told him that he had endangered the whole family by even considering talking to the police. It was not Arthur's place to protect Cinnamon; that was David's job, and there were a lot of things that Arthur did not understand, could never understand.

Chastened and fearful, Arthur went to his room and stayed there.

David, enraged, confronted Patti. She didn't know what had happened, but she obeyed him as he told her to find their wedding certificate and the prenuptial agreement she had signed. Weeping, she did so. He tore them into small pieces, and then he marched her out to the backyard and pointed toward the brick barbecue.

"Burn them."

"Why?"

"Never mind why. Burn them and stay here until you're sure every single piece of them is ashes."

As she always had, Patti did as her husband said. But watching the flames, it seemed as if her marriage were going up in smoke too. She didn't know, and apparently David didn't think about it, but the original of the marriage certificate was on file and could be replaced. David's lawyer had a copy of the prenuptial agreement. That doc.u.ment, giving her only the old MG, had been to protect Davida"not Patti. But it could come back to haunt him.

Patti knew only that something had gone terribly wrong. It would be days before David stopped scowling. And Grandpa Brown tiptoed around the house as if he were going to jump right out of his skin.

Even though they were legally married, Patti and David had to sneak to be together. If they waited until the old couple were asleep, they could share physical intimacy. Even better, they had time alone when Arthur and Manuela went home on weekends to take care of their house in Carson, mow the gra.s.s, and trim the hedges.

David was jumpy. He no longer wanted Patti talking to her own familya"about anything. "He was afraid my family would connect us to the crime 'cause we were still living together," Patti said, "and I hadn't gone back to live with them." But then David had never wanted the Bailey family to know about his business. That distrust was simply magnified.

It seemed to Patti that David was getting more paranoid all the time, that he didn't trust anyonea"not even her. Ever since the night he made her burn her marriage papers, it had been getting worse. David became obsessed with knowing where she was all the time. He fitted her with a beeper so that he could always find her and check on what she was doing. She was never allowed to leave home without David, and when he left, he called her often on the beeper to be sure she was still at the house.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1987, David, Patti, Krystal, Manuela, and Arthur lived their uneasy existence in the palatial home in the Anaheim Hills. Arthur's fervent wish to have Patti out of the house went unheeded. If anything, she seemed more entrenched.

Arthur longed to live back in Carson, no matter how fancy David's new house was, but Manuela didn't trust Patti with the baby, and David wouldn't let the older couple take Krystal home to Carson with them.

"Patti's so G.o.dd.a.m.ned, stinking jealous that she keeps Krystal away from Grandma," Arthur complained to anyone who would listen. Still, they didn't leave. With David being so sick, his parents hated to leave him alone. You could never tell when he might have an attack of some kind.

Things got a lot dicier for David in February 1987 when Patti told him she thought she was pregnant. Whatever his many physical ailments, they had apparently not compromised David Brown's s.e.x life. He remained both potent and virile. But he was outraged at what he considered Patti's stupidity. A pregnancy for Patti could bring disaster. David insisted that she have an abortion. For once, Patti refused to obey him. No matter how vehemently he argued, she would not kill this baby.

She had played what she considered a loving trick on David. She had told him that her doctor said she would never be able to conceive a child. And he had believed hera"and never concerned himself with birth control. Now, Patti allowed David to believe that her pregnancy was a strange aberration of fatea"that she was as surprised as he was when she proved fertile after all. David was mad enough at her without her telling him the whole truth.

David insisted that, if their marriage had to be kept secret, her pregnancy would be doubly dangerous for them. The cops kept sniffing around, looking for some d.a.m.n motive to show they had been involved in killing Linda. It didn't matter if they had or hadn'ta"the cops enjoyed trapping innocent people, just to make themselves look good. A baby was superfluous, anyway. They had Krystal to take care of. Wasn't that enough for Patti?

Patti balked at David's insistence that she get an abortion.

She wanted her own baby. She had never had one thing in her life that was just hers to love. True, she had supplanted Linda in David's life and given him everything Linda hada"except a baby. She was sure he would change his mind when it was born. He was so crazy about Krystal. He would love this baby just as much.

Time pa.s.sed and Patti's swelling abdomen could not be ignored. Manuela looked at her sharply and whispered to Arthur. They had always considered themselves several rungs above the Bailey clana"although they had grudgingly come to accept Linda. Patti's obvious condition only verified what Manuela believed. The Baileys were trashy, and Patti was one of them. What could you expect?

When the pregnancy was no longer a secret, David denied that he was the father. He told his parents and anyone who expressed interest that Patti had "gotten herself pregnant" by some guy named Doug who lived near Betsy Stubbs and drove either a Camaro or a Trans-Am. "He's a Greek."

"Doug" was blatantly a mythic character, a man no one who knew either Patti or David had ever seen. Since Patti was always with David, and only a beeper away when she wasn't, it would have been all but impossible for her to sneak away for an intimate liaison with the swarthy "Doug." But relatives knew better than to question David. If he said Doug was the father, then Doug was the father. To beef up the Doug story, David ordered a large bouquet, enclosed a card signed "Doug," and had it delivered to Patti at the house.

Jay Newell noted Patti's condition as he continued to watch David and Patti together whenever he had the opportunity. Patti followed David obediently, as always. She didn't look happy, and David looked annoyed. Newell figured he knew who the father was.

On September 29, 1987, Patti Bailey gave birth to a baby girl, whom she would name Heather Nicole. David insisted that she pay her own hospital billa"out of her share of the 1985 accident settlement. In truth, David now had three daughters: Cinnamon, seventeen, Krystal, three, and Heather. While he embraced Krystal as the perfect baby and showered her with gifts and attention, it was not so with Heather. Heather was only a dangerous embarra.s.sment to her father.

He would never claim Heather as his.

It hurt Patti that David did not acknowledge Heather. She was far too unsophisticated to realize her main attraction for him had been her youth, and the fact that her body was unmarred by stretch marks. In her efforts to hold on to David, Patti had unwittingly done exactly the wrong thing.

David liked p.u.b.escent teenagers. Young mothers didn't turn him on. Patti had been his ideal when he married hera"as had most of his wives. But the inexorable pa.s.sage of time, maturity, and/or motherhood had diluted his pa.s.sion for each of them.

Now, Patti was almost twentya"not old in most men's books, but old to Davida"and she was always fussing over Heather. She looked so much like Linda that, in a certain light, it was spooky. Her mouth was a trifle fuller, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s larger, but her features were almost identical. If his marriage to Linda had been as idyllic as David claimed, then having her image returned to him might have ensured that Patti's devotion would be rewarded.

But according to innumerable observers, the marriage to Linda had not been all that happy. And now, David had the matured Lindaa"or the closest thing to hera"back again. And Patti fought with his mother a h.e.l.l of a lot more than Linda ever had.

Patti Bailey Brown had become the very ant.i.thesis of what he wanted.

She must have known that. Periodically, she tried to destroy herself. Pathetic, ineffective suicide attempts that left thin white scars trailing along her arms. She had become David's childhood nightmare.

Despite David's disinterest in his new daughter, Heather, he did persuade Patti that it was foolhardy not to have insurance on the baby. He applied with a number of agents for several hundred thousand dollars' coverage on Heather. He was turned down everywhere he tried; not one of them could justify that much insurance on a newborn infant.

In November 1987, Cinnamon was given another interview in an attempt to isolate her emotional problema"and find a way to treat it. It was the first of two evaluations ordered by the parole board.

In December 1987, Cinnamon had another psychiatric examination. She arrived late for her appointment and apologized for oversleeping. She pointed out that she had already had an evaluation only a month before. Told that two evaluations had been requested, she seemed puzzled and a bit annoyed that so many doctors were trying to unlock her subconscious. Almost a year ago, she had had hopea"her grandfather had made her think that he might be able to help her.

But nothing had come of it. She was still locked up, and her father's visits were less frequent than ever. If he had an investigator working on her case, she sure didn't know anything about it, or a new lawyer either. She wasn't bitter; she had just had to grow more philosophical about everything.

As always, Cinnamon's response to the psychiatrist's questions was very general, veering off from areas that got too close to the night of the murder. She was not impolite; she was merely evasive. She said she was busy with college courses, and the Christmas holidays. She admitted there were "a lot of things that get me really upset," but she did not want to explore them. She had "tons of homework" and that came first.

Pressed, Cinnamon insisted she had not committed the crime for which she was locked up, and that she still had no memory of Linda's murder.

"How do you feel about the fact that your stepmother's killer might presumably still be at large?"

She pondered the question for a moment, then answered inscrutably, "I have anger in me, but I'm not angry at that persona"I don't have the right. It was not her fault. She was not in control of the situation."

Her fault. ... It was not clear whom Cinnamon was talking about.

Cinnamon admitted freely that, yes, she was angry that she was still in prison. But she was used to dealing with that. She was also angry about the crime, but "did not hate the person who did it for who they were."

Cinnamon's examiner looked at her perplexed, and she said she could not explain fully, and she did not expect anyone else to understand what she meant. "No one else has been through this."

This seventeen-year-old girl accepted what wasa"what had to bea"in a sad, world-weary way. She said she suspected that the parole board also knew she was innocent, but that, without new information its members could do nothing to help her. "And I don't expect new information to show up," she said quietly. "This doesn't bother me."

"What if you should be confined beyond your parole date?"

"That's great," she said flatly. "I have nothing to do outside that I'm not doing here. I might like to take more college courses, but as for being outsidea"all I see on television is hate."

Beneath Cinnamon's brittle, listless veneer, there was fear. It showed only sporadically, but it was there. She made veiled references to the possibility that someone on the outside might harm her; inside, she was safe.

She had partic.i.p.ated fully in every program, in every educational opportunity offered at the Ventura Schoola" everything but group therapy. "It would be ridiculous for me to go," Cinnamon said softly. "With everyone talking about their offenses and dealing with thema"and me saying I was innocent. There's no point. I'd be uncomfortable."

Cinnamon Brown missed her little sistersa"Krystal and Brenda's younger daughter, Penelope. (She did not know that she had another little sister, Heather, two months old.) She wondered aloud about why she had been locked up for so long. Going on three years now from the time of her arrest. And yet she seemed resigned to staying incarcerated; her biggest concern was finding enough college courses to keep her busy.

Looking at the girl, it was difficult for even a trained psychiatrist to view her as a cold-blooded killer. Still, reading the details of Linda Brown's murder, there was no other way to describe the crime and the shooter.

But something was off-center. Something didn't mesh. Cinnamon's test results had always showed very low readings in the hostility index, and her other scores indicated she was a well-functioning, untroubled personality. Her reasoning and vocabulary were in the normal range.

Cinnamon had blossomed from the chubby fourteen-year-old Fred McLean had found vomiting in the doghouse. She had slimmed down, and she worked out with weights. She was a pretty girl, with long-lashed olive-brown eyes. She had started a part-time job as a reservations clerk with a major airline (albeit working at her computer well inside the reformatory's walls). She did cross-st.i.tching and fancy needlework, and she went to school. Her days were full. She did whatever was asked of her; she was a credit to Ventura School.

But she was blocking her psychiatrist. Asked why she was incarcerated, she answered swiftly, "Why, to be rehabilitated."

"Rehabilitated for what?"

"Why, to have a better life."

Pinned down, she admitted the judge who convicted her had felt she was guilty of first-degree murder. She was sorry she had not had a jury trial, although that had never been an option in Juvenile Court. She denied committing the murder, and indeed, all wrongdoing . . . ever.

It was impossible to dislike Cinnamon Brown, and almost as hard to believe she was guilty of murder. Was she a multiple personality perhaps, a girl who truly did not know what her other self was doing? Was she a sociopath who could lie glibly? Was she hiding the truth because she was still terrified of somethinga"or someonea"outside the wails of her prison?

She was evasive, that was certain. She stalled, repeating nearly every question, rolling it around on her tongue while she formed an answer. When a question was too probing, she giggled to buy time. The giggle was a practiced device, a happy, light laugh, but one designed to ignore questions.

Cinnamon's psychological test scores warred with a diagnosis of multiple personality, sociopathy, or some other dark personality disorder. There was no convenient niche in which to fit her. The worst infraction she had committed at Ventura School was forgetting to tuck in her blankets when she made her bed.

Hardly the sign of a cold-blooded killer.

But her evasiveness troubled the interviewer. Confronted with the fact that she skirted around questions, delaying, Cinnamon answered that she wanted to be sure she got things righta"so she had to take her time to answer.