If You Really Loved Me by Ann Rule

would scatter the other's ashes off of Diamond Head in Hawaii—because we were so happy there. But that was before Linda was a mother. I couldn't do that to our child. I couldn't deny Krystal a place to go where she could be close to her mother. I instructed the cemetery in Newport Beach to allow Krystal to take Linda's ashes to Diamond Head if that's what Krystal chose to do when she was old enough to decide.
    "Linda's in a fountain, right in the base of the fountain, where she can hear the water cascading down twenty-four hours a day. She's way up where she can see the ocean—if it isn't a smoggy day. I loved her enough that I wanted her to have everything the way we discussed it."
    Employees at the memorial park recalled David Brown. He bought two niches, and two dark verdigris antique-bronze plaques. He was not satisfied with the first chiseling of an inscription and ordered the job redone. His manner was so unyielding and arrogant that he was not remembered fondly.
    For his own reasons, he had that first plaque removed and destroyed.

7

    T he Garden Grove investigators spread out in a half dozen directions, racing their own arbitrary twenty-four-hour deadline, aware that the most vital and pertinent information and evidence can only be retrieved during the first day and night following any murder. Just as physical trauma victims must be treated within that first "golden hour" to forestall deadly shock, homicide detectives have a "golden twenty-four hours." After that, people and things evaporate. Witnesses can rethink their stories, alter their perceptions, all unaware. Witnesses can be deliberately contaminated. Inexorable, invisible mutations of fact occur. The chances of an arrest's being made lessen.
    A homicide investigation is, always, a race against time and change.
    Fred McLean would begin with interviews of those who knew and/or were related to the David Brown family. He had heard only from David Brown and Patricia Bailey at this point, and they were in complete agreement about the dangerousness of Cinnamon Brown. With the confession from Cinnamon herself, the follow-up investigation did not seem to be a matter of finding a suspect.
    Cinnamon Darlene Brown, fourteen, was the suspect.
    Steve Sanders headed to the Manchester Building, the Juvenile Court building on The City Drive in Orange, part of an aging complex that housed the district attorney's juvenile offices in 1985—along with the Juvenile Court, Public Defender's Office, and the Department of Probation. The DA's Juvenile Division occupied offices on the third floor of the Manchester Building. Within a few hundred yards on either side of the building are the University of California (Irvine) Medical Center and the Sitton-Orangewood Children's Home.
    Juvenile Hall loomed behind the Juvenile Court building, outdated as were all the juvenile facilities in the mid-eighties. There was then, and is today, an irony in the cluster of buildings. Abused children shout and laugh in the play yard of the Sitton-Orangewood Children's Home, so close to the Juvenile Hall where teenagers peer through bars. Too late, perhaps, to save the older kids—possibly too late for some of the babies.
    Sanders knew it was time to confer with Deputy DA Dick Fredrickson, give him a synopsis of the case so far and see if charges could be filed against Cinnamon Brown for the murder of her stepmother.
    From all the investigators could discern, Cinnamon's crime was murder without extenuating circumstances. The code in California was PC-187. The admitted shooter was only fourteen, but she had confessed to pulling the trigger three times. She was a juvenile, but her crime was adult.
    Dick Fredrickson was no neophyte when it came to juvenile homicide suspects. Without intending to, Fredrickson had become the resident expert on teenage killers—a phenomenon that was becoming disturbingly commonplace in Orange County. Although Fredrickson usually served as an administrator, he had