“I can do that. A lot of what happened was my own fault. I was so taken with you, and so needy.” I brushed some of her wild mane away from her eyes. “Whatever happens from here on will be a lot better than whatever was going to happen in there.” I nodded at the truck, which was now engulfed in dense black smoke. “And if you want, I’ll stand by you as long as you need me to.”

Culpepper came back with a small tank of oxygen and clamped its small mask over Gail’s mouth. She coughed violently as the pure air hit her lungs.

Nancy returned with our clothes and helped Gail into hers.

“How did you know we were here?” I asked Culpepper.

“I didn’t know anything,” he said, and indicated Nancy, who was slipping a dress onto Gail as if readying her for her first day of school. She said, “I’d had dinner with Bob in the Chinese Village by the Gayway, then came back to Sally’s on my own and found that little drawing of Linney’s you’d left with me for safekeeping. Despite your casual note, I knew you’d never part with that unless you thought something might happen to you. I was so alarmed, I went to the Claremont, and when you weren’t there by eleven-thirty, I asked the front desk if you’d had any messages in the last twenty-four hours. They said you had, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. I told them I’d been your wife, and that made them clam up even more. So I called Bob and, thank God, he came over, flashed his badge, and we learned you were meeting someone near a marina.”

Culpepper said, “That could have been anywhere. But everything you’ve been doing these last two weeks has seemed to center on Treasure Island. Trouble is, by the time we got here, there was nobody left to question. So we just poked all over the place, wondering where Gail might have burned her music, like she said in the note.”

“The note wasn’t from Gail,” I said. At least I could exonerate her on that count.

Nancy wrapped her own cloth coat around Gail and then wrapped her in the blanket again. “We’d given up and then we heard the truck explode.”

Culpepper took the oxygen tank from Gail and, over my protests, made me breathe from it for a minute. As I wheezed louder than a concertina, he said, “Listen, I wish I didn’t have to bother you with this now, but we can’t let whoever did this to you get out of the area. I’ll take the full story from you a little later. Right now what I need is a description and the name of who we’re looking for.”