“He purposely pawed Gail to get her to leave and be out of our way. We drove back to Oakland and picked up Marie at my apartment. Once we were up on Grizzly Peak, Russ pretended there was a problem with the car, then he knocked Marie out, put her in the passenger seat, and poured gasoline over her body. He thought the story was going to be that while he was changing a tire, the emergency brake had slipped and I’d gone over the cliff. I was supposedly going to move to another town and he was to join me a few months later, after I’d established a new identity. But while he was pouring the gasoline on Marie, I hit him over the head with the same lead pipe he’d used on her.” Her eyes narrowed. “He didn’t quite pass out, and that was a little frightening. Luckily, he was stunned enough that I could hit him several more times until his skull caved in. I pushed him into the driver’s seat and let the car go over the edge. After it started burning, I tossed my silver mesh bag down into the ravine where it would be found by the police, then walked about a quarter mile to a van that Russ had parked up a dirt road earlier that day, and drove back to my flat in Lake Merritt. End of me, end of Russ.”

She was almost too forthcoming. Was it simply because she believed I’d never blow the whistle on anything that might hurt Gail, or was there something she knew that I didn’t? “Who do you work for, Martha?”

She brushed the skirt on her lap. “It will be announced very shortly that Japan has formed an alliance with the Third Reich. Any conflict with either Axis country will cause the United States to face us on both your European and Asian flanks. So you can understand why a new naval base vital to the defense of your West Coast is of great interest to Germany as well as to Japan. But officials of the German government can’t enter or leave the United States at will; we had to act quickly while our Japanese counterparts still have that right.” She laughed. “You let Japan, who as everyone knows you plan to go to war with, have a pavilion on the very island you’d use for your destroyers and aircraft carriers.” Her giggle was an unimaginable sound. “I love the way America prepares for battle.”

I moved over to Gail, who’d sat frozen since Martha’s account of Hewett’s murder. “Honey, what I don’t get about your involvement in all this is . . . why?”

She replied numbly, “People will do things for a parent they wouldn’t do for anyone else.”

How I could possibly get her out of this? “You knew nothing about Russ Hewett’s death?”