It was nearly 6:30 when Brody turned onto Old Mill Road. The sun was well up. It had lost its daybreak red and was turning from orange to bright yellow. The sky was cloudless.

Theoretically, there was a statutory right-of-way between each house, to permit public access to the beach, which could be privately owned only to the mean-high-water mark. But the rights-of-way between most houses were filled with garages or privet hedges. From the road there was no view of the beach. All Brody could see was the tops of the dunes. So every hundred yards or so he had to stop the squad car and walk up a driveway to reach a point from which he could survey the beach.

There was no sign of a body. All he saw on the broad, white expanse was a few pieces of driftwood, a can or two, and a yard-wide belt of seaweed and kelp pushed ashore by the southerly breeze. There was practically no surf, so if a body was floating on the surface it would have been visible. If there is a floater out there, Brody thought, it’s floating beneath the surface and I’ll never see it till it washes up.

By seven o’clock Brody had covered the whole beach along Old Mill and Scotch roads. The only thing he had seen that struck him as even remotely odd was a paper plate on which sat three scalloped orange rinds—a sign that the summer’s beach picnics were going to be more elegant than ever.

He drove back along Scotch Road, turned north toward town on Bayberry Lane, and arrived at the station house at 7:10.

Hendricks was finishing up his paperwork when Brody walked in, and he looked disappointed that Brody wasn’t dragging a corpse behind him. “No luck, Chief?” he said.

“That depends on what you mean by luck, Leonard. If you mean did I find a body and if I didn’t isn’t it too bad, the answer to both questions is no. Is Kimble in yet?”

“No.”

“Well, I hope he isn’t asleep. That’d look just dandy, having him snoring away in a cop car when people start to do their shopping.”

“He’ll be here by eight,” said Hendricks. “He always is.”

Brody poured himself a cup of coffee, walked into his office, and began to flip through the morning papers—the early edition of the New York Daily News and the local paper, the Amity Leader, which came out weekly in the winter and daily in the summer.

Kimble arrived a little before eight, looking, aptly enough, as if he had been sleeping in his uniform, and he had a cup of coffee with Hendricks while they waited for the day shift to appear. Hendricks’ replacement came in at eight sharp, and Hendricks was putting on his leather flight jacket and getting ready to leave when Brody came out of his office.

“I’m going out to see Foote, Leonard,” Brody said. “You want to come along? You don’t have to, but I thought you might want to follow up on your … floater.” Brody smiled.