"She was absolutely lucid," Mickey was saying. "No question about what she saw and what it meant. And I must say, I don't think any of us would have even thought of it."

"So what was it?" Hunt asked.

Mickey sipped at his beer. "You really ought to guess. If only to get a feeling for how far off we all were."

"She saw the limo out there," Hunt said, "after it was supposedly back at Sunset."

"Not close. Tam?"

"She heard something."

"Nope. Way more obvious."

"She saw something," Tamara said.

"Good."

"From her boat?"

"Getting warm," Mickey said.

"Wait a minute," Hunt put in. "So it happened out by the boats?"

Mickey was enjoying the moment, leading them on. "I told you, think outside the box. We would never, ever, have thought of this. We're not even in the right area code. And we know it happened because she saw it with her own eyes."

For a long moment, all was silence. "Okay," Hunt said, "he actually met somebody on one of the boats. They had a fight out there . . . but, no, that's too far from the lagoon. n.o.body's carrying a dead guy three blocks. Or even from the boats out to the parking lot."

"No. No carrying involved. No boats involved either." Mickey tipped up his beer again, put it down, gave a last-chance look to his colleagues. Theatrically, he sighed. "We can call Devin Juhle and close the case as soon as I tell you guys," he said, "but I thought, obvious as it is, we might want to talk about it a little first, before we bring in the cops." One last triumphant glance around the table. "Okay, you know the blimp, the tourist blimp?"

Hunt, very slowly, nodded. "Airship Ventures," he said with caution. "The Eureka."

"Right. That's the one. Well, Virginia was out on her deck Tuesday night, late dusk, just enjoying the peace and serenity out there, and she notices the Eureka coming back from out over the Golden Gate. Beautiful, if you like blimps, and who doesn't, just floating around up there. But whatever, it was a warm night and she just watched it sail pretty much straight overhead, a couple of blocks south, but really, darn close. And then, suddenly, she's looking up at it and she sees something-I'm not making this up-she sees something fall out of the thing. At first, she can't believe what she's seeing, but then she realizes it looks like a body, and it just falls and falls until it goes out of sight just over the trees, about where the lagoon would be."

"Lucky they drained it," Tamara said. "He might have killed a duck."

"But he hit the lagoon before it was drained," Mickey said, "and he didn't hit a duck anyway."

Tamara smiled brightly. "Well, that was lucky too."

"You're right," Hunt said drily, "we never would have thought of that."

"He fell into the lagoon?" Tamara asked.

"Absolutely."

"How'd he wind up at the one end, tied up in all the roots and stuff?"

"Must have been the tide," Mickey said.

"There's no tide in the lagoon."

"Hmm," Mickey said. "There's a slight snag in the story."

"Here's another one," Hunt said. "She saw this and didn't call the police?"

"Ah." Mickey held up a finger. "That one's covered. She thought the police might think she had something to do with it if she reported it. She was going to wait until it was in the paper or on the radio and learned more about it, but then they were obviously covering it up somehow. At least until she heard about the reward, and realized what it must have been. Which was Como."

Tamara put down her Cosmopolitan. "Wow."

"I know," Mickey said. "I was impressed. So now I'm wondering how many calls like this we're going to get. Wyatt, maybe we could figure out a better weeding-out process."

"Not if they won't talk on the phone," Tamara said. "They're all tapped, you know, and I don't think Virginia's the only one that knows it."

"Heck," Mickey said, "even I know that. But really. Wyatt?"

Hunt finished his Scotch. "Well, let's see how many of 'em we get. We told Devin half our work would be weeding out the wackos, maybe more. And if we don't get some live ones, I'll be interviewing them too."

"Not that it wasn't a good time," Mickey said.

Hunt made a face. "No. I hear you. Sounds like it."

12.

At ten after six, Hunt walked into the homicide detail and over to Juhle's desk. The inspector looked up and Hunt opened a leather folder and extracted several sheets of paper.

Juhle didn't exude joy at the interruption. "What's this?" he asked.

"Eleven reports. One guy didn't give his name or address, but we included a summary of his statement. Nine people gave statements, eight to Tamara over the phone. They're in order from least obviously crazy to most crazy. One lady wouldn't talk on the phone, so I sent Mickey out to talk to her. She saw Como fall out of a blimp. And I had a chat with Mrs. Como, who mentioned a couple of things she forgot to tell you when you interviewed her. Don't look at me like that-I'm just the messenger. That's ten in two hours, Dev, plus Mrs. Como." Hunt paused. "It's something," he said.

Juhle raised his eyes. "Tell me about the blimp lady."

At a quarter to seven, Hunt and Juhle had baseball gloves on (Hunt owned several) and were playing hardball catch, soft-tossing, alongside the basketball court in Hunt's warehouse, both of them dressed in street clothes.

"What p.i.s.ses me off," Juhle was saying, "is people telling you stuff that they didn't tell me and Russo when we talked to them. What'd they think we were doing, just d.i.c.king around?"

Hunt caught Juhle's toss and threw it back. "People don't trust cops. Either that or they're scared of 'em."

"Me and Russo? She looks about fifteen and scares no one, trust me. And I can't even scare my own kids."

"It's what you represent. You're involved with the cops, everybody knows that basically you're in some kind of trouble. You talk to me or Mickey, or even Tam, it's just a conversation. Besides, you didn't want to talk to the blimp lady. We saved you from that."

"I'm grateful. You guys are my heroes."

Juhle threw. Hunt caught.

Hunt threw. Juhle caught.

Juhle said, "Ellen Como. We talked to Ellen Como for like an hour, maybe more. She told us basically nothing helpful, and she gives you the store."

"She got the feeling you thought she was a suspect."

"Well, she wasn't all wrong there. She is a suspect. Note the clever use of the present tense. What'd she think? She doesn't call to report her missing husband for a whole day? She lives two blocks from where they find his body? He got left off outside their house? No, no, it can't be her. What can we be thinking?" He unleashed a fastball.

"Hey! You're gonna throw the arm out again. Easy." Hunt demonstrated, a nice soft sixty- foot toss. "So anyway," he concluded, "Ellen's pretty sure it's her. Alicia."

"She said he fired her on that day?"

"The very one."

"Well, the girl said there wasn't anything physical between them."

Hunt caught the next throw and shrugged. "Maybe there wasn't."

"I've seen her, if you remember. I'd bet there was. But even if there was, so what? That doesn't mean she killed him. And you realize that Ellen could have just been trying to deflect the investigation away from herself?"

"You're kidding," Hunt said. "I never would have thought of that."

"Yeah, well. The thing is, they both had a reason, and she's the spouse, so she gets top billing until we find some evidence leading someplace else."

"And on that front . . . ?"

Juhle shook his head no. "Somebody must have dragged him to the lake, or even went in with him and got him tucked under the trees, but there's no sign of struggle on any of the banks. We've just got the body with the b.u.mp on the head."

Hunt threw. "What caused the b.u.mp? Any idea?"

"ME says no pattern injury. No definite shape or weight to the weapon. Other than that, something hard. A rock, a piece of lumber. h.e.l.l, a baseball bat, an anchor, a sap, a gun? Who knows? Maybe somebody will call you and give you a hint, and then you can tell us. Did I mention that this p.i.s.ses me off?"

"I think so."

"You dangle three hundred grand out there-and by the way, that's obscene in its own right-and suddenly you've got witnesses, you got people just dying to be good citizens. You think any one of 'em might just think to pick up the phone and tell what they think they know to the police? You think that maybe could happen just once?"

"You want the truth?"

"Always."

Hunt caught Juhle's toss and kept the ball in his mitt, signifying the end of the catch. "I wouldn't hold my breath."

Hunt met his girlfriend, Gina Roake, for a late dinner at Sam's Grill. Sam's was a hopping power room during the lunch hour, but settled into a more intimate groove as the evening wore on. Now, closing in on nine o'clock, Roake and Hunt sat in one of the booths back by the kitchen. Their waiter had pulled the curtain on them after he'd left their dinners, and there might as well have been no one else in the restaurant.

Roake was older than Hunt, closing in on fifty, but as an inveterate exerciser and outdoors person, she was in excellent shape. After twenty-five years in the practice of law, she'd just recently had her first legal thriller, Brief Deception, accepted for publication, and she was thinking about her next one.

Most of the dinner, they'd talked about what that one might be about, and of course the marketing for the first one. Would they want her to go on tour? What about her law practice when she was out of town? Should she spend her own money on advertising? Did she want to use the same character in the second book, or break in an entirely new one? Maybe she should go to nonfiction, write up one of the real cases she'd seen or worked on? G.o.d knows, there had been some good ones. Did she have a big enough theme? Did it have to be a murder case?

Hunt nodded. "Got to be murder."

"They're always murders, though. All these books."

"Right. You know why? Any violent crime that's not a murder has a living victim. And the victim can tell you what happened. You could write a book, but it would probably be pretty short, and it wouldn't be much of a mystery."

She smiled.

"Besides, people don't care so much about bicycle theft, or other lesser crimes. Except maybe rape, now that I think of it. You could probably do a rape case, but you'd have to kill people in it eventually anyway. And if you're going to be knocking people off, might as well make it a murder case to begin with."

"Maybe you're right." She put her fork down, reached across the small table, and took his hand. "Have I been monopolizing the conversation?"

"Very charmingly."

"But that means yes. I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about. It's all been interesting."

"And yet, in spite of that"-she broke a smile-"you seem slightly distracted."

"Maybe a little," he said.

"Maybe a little," she repeated. Then, "What?"

"Actually, it's been a h.e.l.l of a day."

"Good? Bad? I was thinking bad, and didn't want to ask. You'd get to it."

"Well, in fact, in a remarkable and unexpected change of pace, it's been nothing but good. Pretty amazingly good, in fact." He ran down the events for her, from Tamara's appearance in the office this morning, to Mickey's idea and the miraculously ever-growing reward, the reprieve on his business, short-term at least. Ending it with Ellen Como and the tragicomic relief of Virginia, now and forever to be known as the Blimp Lady. The victim's fall from the sky into the lagoon, "which," he concluded, "we've pretty much discounted as improbable."

"Good decision." Gina shook her head in gentle amus.e.m.e.nt. "This town." But after another minute, her expression grew serious. "So in effect you're investigating this murder?"

"Not exactly. Pa.s.sing what we find, if anything, along to Juhle, is all."

"He's talking to you again? I'm glad to hear that."

"Me too."

"I felt a little guilty, I still feel a little guilty, about driving you guys apart. Does he know you're still seeing me?"

"I a.s.sume so. He's a cop. He knows everything. But that doesn't matter. It wasn't you and him. It was me and him. Although he's not too thrilled that people seem to be coming to me now and not him."

"Is he offering them money too?"

"That's what I told him. It wasn't much consolation."

Gina sipped wine, put her gla.s.s down, something obviously still on her mind.