Was there a connection between the stabbing death of Walker’s daughter, Ruth, and the stabbing nearly a decade later of her former Best Friend Forever-turned-romantic rival, Janet Bollinger? I didn’t know enough to proffer a reasoned opinion one way or the other. But if I knew anything, it’s that most people go their entire lives without being violently knifed, or knowing anyone who has. The coincidence seemed more than coincidental.

People lie. Faces never do. The manner in which Walker responded to the news of the assault on Bollinger, as if he already knew, left me uneasy. Not that his response was a slam-dunk psychological assessment. Human behavior is always subject to interpretation. Failing to make eye contact, for example, does not automatically convey deceit. Nor does someone looking you in the eye confirm complete honesty. Those of us assigned to Alpha learned that we had to closely observe our enemies, taking note of their baseline behaviors — how they reacted when you knew they were lying or telling the truth — to accurately assess their nonverbal clues. Still, I couldn’t shed the disquieting notion that Hub Walker, Medal of Honor recipient and living aviation legend, knew something about the attack that afternoon on his daughter’s former friend that he wasn’t telling.

It’s just a job, Logan. You’re only in it for the money.

I forced myself to think other thoughts. The sea air was cool and damp on my face, carrying with it a sweet fragrance I couldn’t place at first. Pittosporum, maybe. Possibly jasmine.

Or pee.

A homeless teenager was using a bush not ten feet behind me as a toilet.

“Hey.”

He glanced over at me, fear in his hollow eyes. He was about sixteen, garbed in a gray hoodie and jeans turned black with filth.

I started to read him the riot act, only I really don’t know what the riot act is. The sugary odor of the kid’s urine told me he was likely diabetic and dehydrated. He also looked hungry and scared.

“Step over here into my office, my man.”

I reached into my pocket to hand him a couple of bucks, but he must’ve thought I was going for a gun, because he ran like a hunted deer.

I’m not my brother’s keeper. I’m not convinced that we are the world. I believe that the world is filled with evil, two-legged monsters who would take from you what is yours in a heartbeat, including your life, if they thought they could get away with it; and that one’s only assurance of safety is hypervigilance — that and a fully loaded weapon. Chasing bad people to the dark corners of the globe in the name of national security had only reinforced those convictions. But in civilian life, I’d come to realize, clichés aside, that there is something to be said for random acts of kindness. Not that such gestures necessarily make the world a better place. They make us feel better and, in the end, maybe that’s what matters most.

I stuffed the cash back in my wallet.

From the north came a shrill whistle and the alarm bells of crossing gates lowering, followed moments later by a single blinding headlight that pierced the night a half-mile up the tracks. Savannah’s train was in. For once, Amtrak was on time.

The locomotive slowed as it passed me and hissed to a stop. Savannah descended from the third passenger coach toting a cocoa-brown overnight valise while wrestling with a matching, oversized suitcase big enough that Houdini could’ve hidden in it. I grabbed it from her and maneuvered it down the steps, onto the train platform. The suitcase weighed eighty pounds if it weighed an ounce.

“Eisenhower packed lighter than this when he invaded Normandy.”

“Eisenhower knew the itinerary,” Savannah said. “I don’t.”

She was wearing calfskin, high-heeled boots that came up just below her knees, form-fitting skinny jeans, and a short-waisted, black leather jacket over a periwinkle camisole. On a scale of one-to-ten, she was close to infinity.

“How was your trip?”

“Long,” Savannah said.

“You get something to eat?”

“A hot dog from the café car. They had an egg salad sandwich, but it looked more like a science experiment.”

I had to smile.

We walked to my rented Escalade, Savannah shouldering her tote, me wrangling her rolling armoire, which kept pulling to the right. The SUV was in a pay-in-advance self-parking lot directly across from the tracks. I hadn’t paid. Given the hour, I figured the meter maid would be off-duty. I was right. No ticket on the windshield. Good karma.

I pressed a button on the key chain remote control, unlocking everything, and opened the passenger side door for Savannah, before hefting her suitcase into the back.

“My, what a big car you have,” she said. “Now the Saudis can afford to build another palace.”

“Just be glad I didn’t rent a Prius. We would’ve had to leave Houdini at the station.”

We climbed in and pulled out of the lot, heading north on Pacific Highway. Almost immediately, I noticed headlights trailing behind us. A left onto West Ash Street, a right onto North Harbor Drive, along the all-but-deserted waterfront, then west on Laurel confirmed my suspicions: somebody was tailing us.

“Where are we going?” Savannah asked.

“The Walkers. They live up in La Jolla. Nice little guesthouse out by the pool.”

“How many beds in that nice little guesthouse?”

I glanced over at her.

“I’d just like to know what the sleeping arrangements are, Logan, that’s all.”

“We’ll figure it out when we get there, OK?”

“No, Logan, definitely not OK. The unknown equals tension, and tension in any relationship creates conflict. Or are you forgetting what our marriage was like most of the time?”

“Some of the time,” I said, correcting her.

“It’s one bed, isn’t it?”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

I blew through a yellow light and hooked a left, back onto northbound Pacific Highway. A US Airways Boeing 757 thundered in less than 200 feet overhead on short final to runway 27 at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field. The other car was still behind us, its headlights in my rearview.

“Why are we going so fast?”

“No traffic, open road. This is Southern California. Do you know how rare that is? I’m just enjoying the moment.”

Savannah bought none of it. She leaned forward and checked the side-view mirror. “We’re being followed.”

“Really? News to me.”

“C’mon, Logan. I can see the guy. He’s right there.”

Our pursuer was now all but hugging my bumper. I floored it. He floored it, drafting my rear like Dale Earnhardt at Daytona. Then blue and red lights swirled on his windshield. There came the whoop-whop of a siren.

Our pursuer was an unmarked police cruiser.

I pulled over to the shoulder of the road. The officer got out and advanced on my side of the SUV, silhouetted by the spotlight he’d purposely aimed at my mirrors to blind me to his approach.

His right hand rested cautiously on the butt of his holster pistol as he slowly scanned the SUV’s interior with his Maglite. He looked young enough to have graduated that morning from high school.

“Any idea how fast you were going tonight, sir?”

“Obviously not fast enough to outrun you.”

“You were trying to outrun me?”

“I was concerned you might be somebody who intended to do us harm.”

“Why would somebody intend to do you harm?”

“My question exactly,” Savannah said, eyeing me hard.

We would’ve been there all night, me attempting to justify to both of them my paranoia and flagrant disregard of California motor vehicle code.

“Just give me the ticket.”

And he did.

Savannah remained largely silent on the drive to La Jolla, steamed by my unwillingness to explain what had prompted my latest run-in with local law enforcement. About the only thing she said was that the collapse of our marriage could be pinned to a large degree on my lack of “emotional honesty,” as evidenced by what she condemned as my “chronic secretiveness.” It started, she said, when I was unwilling to reveal anything to her about how I really earned a living when I worked for the government. And now I was doing it all over again, clamming up, refusing to tell her why I thought we’d been followed.