Nina returned to her work. She was writing down points to cover during her cross-examination of the medical examiner when Bob knocked on the door.

“Mom? I’m going for a hike.”

“A hike? Where?”

“In the hills out back.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. There are tarantulas and snakes and poison oak and-”

“I’ll watch out. Hitchcock hasn’t been for a good walk since he got hurt.”

Yes, but there’s a fugitive hiding somewhere out there who wants to take some children, Nina thought. “I’ll go out with you about four.”

“But I want to go now.”

“Go swimming at the condo pool. Okay?”

Bob’s eyes had fallen on a book that lay open in front of her. “What the heck is that?”

“Don’t look at those, honey.” Nina hastily closed the book.

“What happened to those people?”

“It’s a book by two medical examiners, both named Di Maio, called Forensic Pathology. It’s about trying to figure out how people have died.”

“You have to read stuff like that? Look at those cracked-up skulls? That one guy looked like a mummy. His skin was hanging in flaps!”

“I’m sorry you saw the pictures, honey. This book is a reference book for doctors and lawyers. Not for you to look at.”

“Remind me not to be a doctor or lawyer!”

“I’ve got to get back to work now, Bobby.”

“So when are we gonna have our big talk?”

“In the next couple of days.”

“Is Paul mad that I’m here? He’s staying away a lot, isn’t he?”

“Paul likes you just fine,” Nina said. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

“You always say that.”

“Bob, I-” I don’t have time to talk right now, I have a prelim tomorrow and I have to get to work, kiddo, she wanted to say. And managed not to say it. “So go have a swim and get some sunshine.”

He also hesitated. He was growing up and she couldn’t always read his mind anymore. “Okay. See you later.”

“I’ll be knocking off around four. We’ll take a hike and later we can eat at Robata and we’ll stop at the Thunderbird Bookstore.” And then she would work some more.

He closed the door and Nina opened her text again. The caption under the photo said, “Scalp burned away, exposing cranial vault.” Outside the window, it was summer.

At Ben Lomond, Ted and Megan stopped for more water and granola bars, twenty hard miles from where they had started cycling. Ted’s hair, when he removed his helmet, curled in tendrils above his brow and made him look like a Roman emperor. They sat on a bench in front of the general store, drinking water and sweating it out almost as fast as they took it in. The tourists drove along Highway 9, gawking like they were exotic or something.

“I never liked these mountains around Santa Cruz,” Megan said. “They’re too dark. Too thick. Too many murders too. I think the hippies who never grew up came here and some of them stagnated for a long time and then they got rotten.”

“They’re dying off now,” Ted said. “The music was pretty good, though.”

“Sex and drugs and rock. Do you think they had more sex than the current generation?”

“Oh, crap. Are you on the sex thing again?”

Megan looked at him, tall, hard, sucking down his water, wet hair, black spandex cycle shorts, hairy legs. “I’ve got a theory,” she said. “About the sex thing, as you call it.”

Ted groaned.

“I think it’s your bicycle seat. And all the time you spend on it. It injures your testes.”

Ted ate some of his granola bar. He said, “I thought that just made you infertile.”

“If it can do that, it must be cutting back on your testosterone production.”

“Stop it, Megan. You’re starting to really bug me.”

“It’s that, or have an open relationship,” Megan said. Ted groaned again.

“You never quit.”

“Because you won’t be straight with me. Yes, I am straightforward. I don’t make three hundred thousand dollars a year pussyfooting around. But remember, Ted, I am also nonjudgmental. I want to solve this problem of us not making love.”

“Maybe it is you,” Ted said. “Maybe you’re cutting my balls off talking about all the money you make.”

“You’re stronger than that.”

“Maybe I need a seventeen-year-old honey who blindly adores me.”

“I adore you. In my way. But I won’t let you keep secrets from me.”

“Megan, I-”

Megan waited.

Ted’s face contorted. “All right!” he said in a low, intense voice. “You asked for it! I don’t like to have to be the one who does it! I want you to do it to me!”

“Do what?”

“You know! I need you to-I’ve been feeling so guilty about some things I need to be-I don’t want you to go easy on me-”

Megan finally understood. She had been obtuse, very obtuse. “You mean, you want to be the passive one in-”

“Don’t say it! Don’t say it out loud!” Ted looked embarrassed now.

“Thank you,” Megan said. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?”

“Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. I need to ride.”

Megan put her lips close to his ear. She said, “After our hot tub tonight, I’m going to-are you listening?-tie you-to the bed-and-punish you severely.” His ears flamed. He filled out his shorts in a whole new way.

31

W ISH HAD THE FLU. HE SNUFFLED into a handkerchief beside her at the defendant’s table. He had a generic prisoner’s look about him with the shorn hair and the orange jumpsuit.

Behind him, in the audience section of the court that Nina thought of as the pews, Sandy sat in her purple coat, her purse in her lap. They had whispered a few things to each other. Then Wish had folded his hands in front of him on the table and gone mute.

Paul sat next to Nina at the defense table, reading the Monday morning paper. He had arrived home late the night before and had been sleeping when she headed for his office at 7:00 A.M.

In the second row she recognized two newspaper reporters, farther back Elizabeth Gold and Debbie Puglia, and, sitting together, two drifters who enjoyed going to court proceedings. She also saw David Cowan in the back row. Cowan looked anguished. His wife had had some sort of setback over the weekend and had barely pulled through.

The witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense came in one by one. For the prosecution, they were Davy Crockett and Gertrude Rittenhauer, the chief medical examiner for the county of Monterey, and also the county deputy sheriff who had located Wish at the condo, Deputy Grace. Crockett sat down at the prosecutor’s table on the right, looking spiffy in a blue suit.

For the defense, Nina had subpoenaed Dustin Quinn, dressed up in a sport coat and giving Wish the thumbs-up. Wish would testify too. The hell with received wisdom, this defendant would take the stand.

Jaime came in from the side door, arms full of books and papers. He said “Hi, Nina” in that low-key way he had, and started getting organized. At the same time, Judge Salas’s clerk, a blond woman of about fifty, had taken her chair and was writing on a form. To the side of the room, by the empty jury box, the bailiff leaned back in his chair in his tan uniform.

Wish was extremely nervous, and she thought again about this decision to have him testify. Yet how else could they explain what he was doing on the mountain? The burden of proof in a preliminary hearing was so minimal that if they left it with Jaime, Wish would certainly be bound over for some distant trial date.

But Wish had to be credible. He had to stop looking so guilty. “Sit up straight,” she whispered to him as Judge Salas appeared at the judge’s dais.

“The Superior Court of the County of Monterey, State of California, is in session, the Honorable José Salas presiding as magistrate.”

Judge Salas had shed his role of Superior Court judge for this proceeding and become a mere magistrate, for arcane legal reasons that Nina, in a discussion in bed on Friday night, had been unable to make Paul understand.