Lynn Peterson

Lynn Peterson, Nico Peterson’s sister, is both a witness to the supposed death that conceals his disappearance and a victim of the search for him. Her identification of a body and help arranging its cremation give Nico’s staged death a public appearance of fact; her later abduction and murder expose the human cost of the scheme and its pursuit. The investigation also reveals that Wilberforce Canning considered her his daughter.

Identity and Introduction

Lynn first comes into view at the Cahuilla Club, where Philip Marlowe sees her emerge from the pool in a white robe, beach shoes, and a towel wrapped around her head. Floyd Hanson hesitates when she appears, then hurries Marlowe along. At the time, Marlowe does not know who she is. The moment gains significance later: Hanson’s reaction makes sense once Marlowe realizes that Lynn is Nico’s sister and Hanson had not wanted them to meet.

Marlowe encounters her again in Nico’s house, where she finds him investigating. He recognizes her broad face and green eyes from the club and guesses her identity from Hanson’s earlier account that Nico’s sister identified his body at the morgue. Lynn confirms her name but does not accept Marlowe’s explanation at face value. She challenges him to identify himself, wary of a stranger in her brother’s home. Marlowe tells her he is a private investigator; she remains suspicious. Her caution is grounded in the circumstances: she has found an intruder who could be dangerous, while he has entered her brother’s house without her permission.

The Body and Nico’s Disappearance

Lynn’s importance to the case lies partly in an act that initially appears to settle Nico’s fate. After a body is found on Latimer Road, Nico is officially treated as the victim of a hit-and-run. Joe Green tells Marlowe that the death occurred on April 19, and the medical and police record describes a fatal collision. But the body’s identity depends on recognition, not just the circumstances of its discovery. Hanson says Nico’s sister identified it at the morgue the next day, and Lynn confirms to Marlowe that she did so. She says Hanson had not allowed her to see the body at the scene; the identification took place afterward. She calls the experience difficult, but offers little further explanation during their conversation.

The apparent certainty of that identification becomes part of the mystery. Clare Cavendish has reported seeing Nico alive in San Francisco, prompting Marlowe to question whether the dead man was really Nico. At Nico’s house, Marlowe is about to tell Lynn about Clare’s sighting when two Mexican enforcers arrive. In the later account of Nico’s escape, the body proves to have been an unknown dead man dressed in Nico’s suit. Nico says that he and Floyd Hanson put the body near the clubhouse and moved it to the road; he had been behaving as if drunk so that people, including Clare, would see him. Lynn had agreed to identify the body and arrange for cremation. With a car waiting and a suitcase in the trunk, Nico then fled north. Her participation helped make a planned disappearance resemble a documented death, though the evidence does not establish exactly what she knew about the body’s identity at the time.

Abduction and Death

The interruption at the Peterson house turns Lynn from a source of information into a target. When Gómez and López enter, Marlowe is still considering whether to tell her about Clare’s sighting. Their arrival prevents that conversation. After they search the house, Lynn is gone. Marlowe understands that the men recognized her and took her with them; he has no immediate way to learn where they have gone. He finds the house ransacked and realizes that the search has not produced whatever the men wanted. His concern for Lynn remains distinct from the question of Nico’s whereabouts, but the two are now bound together by the enforcers’ pursuit.

Lynn is later found dead. Marlowe recognizes her, and the identification is confirmed through her driver’s license, although her condition makes recognition difficult. The account does not present her death as an accidental consequence of the false identification: she has been taken by the men searching for Nico and killed. At the time, the searchers’ exact instructions and the full chain of responsibility are not yet clear to Marlowe. The later explanation connects the killing to Mendy Menendez’s decision to send the two men after Nico. Terry Lennox calls Lynn’s murder undeserved and says he had not known Mendy would dispatch them before Marlowe had time to find Nico. His regret does not undo the consequence of that decision.

Family Ties and Narrative Significance

Lynn’s relationship with Nico is practical as well as familial. Her identification of the body and arrangement of the cremation are essential to his plan, and her association with that plan places her in danger when others begin looking for him. Terry confirms that she had been involved with Nico’s arrangement, while Nico himself recounts having made the plan with her. The novel thus complicates the official story of Nico’s death through evidence that is personal and procedural at once: a sister’s identification becomes part of a deliberate deception.

A separate family connection emerges when Wilberforce Canning questions Marlowe about Lynn. Canning says that Marlowe was the last person to see her alive apart from the men at the door, then reveals that Lynn was his daughter. The disclosure comes during Canning’s captivity of Marlowe, amid Canning’s talk of killing and the supposed necessity of removing people he considers undeserving. For a moment, the revelation exposes grief beneath his controlling language; it does not change what happened to Lynn or establish that he protected her. It does, however, place her within the fractured family history surrounding Nico and Canning.

Lynn has little space to explain herself before the violence around Nico’s disappearance cuts her life short. Her guarded exchange with Marlowe shows a person assessing a stranger on her own ground; the later revelations show that she was also helping maintain a carefully arranged false death. Those strands resist a simple division between the innocent relative and the criminal scheme. The evidence makes her part in the plan clear, but leaves the limits of her knowledge uncertain. Her death, meanwhile, marks the point at which the search for Nico ceases to be merely an investigation into identity and becomes an account of the people harmed by his disappearance and the forces trying to uncover it.