Horvath ran away in Olympian fashion. Culpepper muttered to me, “I’d lock down the island but I have no idea what I’m looking for. If anything.”

I nodded soberly. Apparently I was now his Watson.

Culpepper addressed the crowd in a voice that would have made a megaphone redundant. “Attention, folks! I am Lieutenant Robert Culpepper of the Oakland Police Department.” He flourished a bright silver badge in a cheap black wallet and got it to reflect the sunlight nicely. “Everyone in this area is to move in an orderly fashion toward the Enchanted Garden, which is that way.” He pointed with arrow-fingered fists toward a formal garden about a hundred yards away. “No one is allowed to leave the island until I say so.”

I spotted Gail now leaning against an electric light stanchion. I said to Culpepper, “I’m going to see how my friend is doing, is that okay?”

Calling Gail my friend was an overstatement, but I detected a wish in me that it might not always be. The wish was a young man’s feeling, a feeling I’d not felt in a long time.

As I moved toward Gail, Culpepper tugged me back by the crook of my right arm as if he were the straight man in a burlesque routine. “What kind of weapon,” he said to me, apparently just because I was next to him, “could do that much damage to one person and absolutely nothing to anybody else?” His eyes swept the area in all directions. “It’s like she was hit by a bazooka, but there’s no scorch marks and no shrapnel, except for bits of her scattered in every direction. I didn’t hear any kind of explosive . . .”

“Well, what I heard,” I offered, thinking a musician’s observation about sound might be of use, “was the kind of noise I heard when I was a kid, when we used to drop water balloons from the top of an apartment building.”

He stared at me for a moment, then cursed and looked disgusted. “Oh, and I call myself a cop? Looking for a weapon and I’m standing on it?”

I glanced down at his feet, but there was nothing beneath his Florsheim brogues except concrete.

Culpepper pointed at the cement. “There’s your blunt instrument. That’s what hit her. At about sixty miles an hour.” Seeing my puzzled expression, he pointed at the soaring obelisk. “She fell from the top of the Tower of the Sun. Or jumped.” He bent his head back to view the tower’s peak and muttered, “I’d have noticed if she’d screamed. Most of them scream. They change their mind and there’s nothing they can do about it and then they have the wait, of course. Must be the longest three, four seconds anyone ever lived.”

“Try three minutes,” I heard myself snap. I instantly realized it was an odd response.