Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag. “Don’t do that to me,” he said.

They ate in silence for a few moments. Brody finished his sandwich and milk, wadded the sandwich wrapper and stuffed it into the plastic cup. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. Meadows was still eating, but Brody knew his appetite wouldn’t be diminished by any discussion. He recalled a time when Meadows had visited the scene of a bloody automobile accident and proceeded to interview police and survivors while sucking on a coconut Popsicle.

“About the Watkins thing,” Brody said. “I have a couple of thoughts, if you want to hear them.” Meadows nodded. “First, it seems to me that the cause of death is cut-and-dried. I’ve already talked to Santos, and—”

“I did, too.”

“So you know what he thinks. It was a shark attack, clear and simple. And if you’d seen the body, you’d agree. There’s just no—”

“I did see it.”

Brody was astonished, mostly because he couldn’t imagine how anyone who had seen that mess could be sitting there now, licking lemon-pie filling off his fingers. “So you agree?”

“Yes. I agree that’s what killed her. But there are a few things I’m not so sure of.”

“Like what?”

“Like why she was swimming at that time of night. Do you know what the temperature was at around midnight? Sixty. Do you know what the water temperature was? About fifty. You’d have to be out of your mind to go swimming under those conditions.”

“Or drunk,” said Brody, “which she probably was.”

“Maybe. No, you’re right—probably. I’ve checked around a little, and the Footes don’t mess with grass or mescaline or any of that stuff. There’s one other thing that bothers me, though.”

Brody was annoyed. “For Christ’s sake, Harry, stop chasing shadows. Once in a while, people do die by accident.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that it’s damn funny that we’ve got a shark around here when the water’s still this cold.”

“Is it? Maybe there are sharks who like cold water. Who knows about sharks?”

“There are some. There’s the Greenland shark, but they never come down this far, and even if they did, they don’t usually bother people. Who knows about sharks? I’ll tell you this: At the moment I know a hell of a lot more about them than I did this morning. After I saw what was left of Miss Watkins, I called a young guy I know up at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I described the body to him, and he said it’s likely that only one kind of shark would do a job like that.”

“What kind?”

“A great white. There are others that attack people, like tigers and hammerheads and maybe even makos and blues, but this fellow Hooper—Matt Hooper—told me that to cut a woman in half like that you’d have to have a fish with a mouth like this”—he spread his hands about three feet apart—“and the only shark that grows that big and attacks people is the great white. There’s another name for them.”