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I’d been editing and re-editing, filling up wastebasket after wastebasket trying to write just the right words to describe the Mojave Desert crime scene where Bill Bradford murdered Tracey Campbell and Shari Miller.

Camarillo, California. 1982. Detective St. John and I sat across the kitchen table from each other– a glass of iced tea for him and coffee for me – and the LAPD Homicide Manual off to the side. The plan was, for him to give me a tutorial on crime scene investigation techniques before taking me to the Miranda crime scene in downtown Los Angeles he supervised during the Freeway Killer investigation in 1982.

Today was the day we’d come to Russia for – to visit the Hermitage Museum and the seventy-four paintings (a major trove of French Impressionist paintings from a German collection) stolen from the Red Army and been hidden for fifty years in the Hermitage. This exhibit was opened to the public for the first time on March 30, 1995 and titled “Hidden Treasures Revealed”.

The gloomy, grey sky seemed to follow my laborious trek to the stalled baggage claim carousal. Grandma Kay – always the efficient traveler who once hailed a New York cab driver with the flourish and theatrics of an opera diva – told me to wait by the carousal while she flagged a taxi. I tried not to think about the sunny skies of California, my husband who I was already missing, our three dogs and the cozy office I’d left behind.