Back at his motel room, Hook could not relax. Somehow he felt both tense and logy at the same time. He was used to long days of physical labor and he could feel its lack now more in his mind than in his body, a ragged nervous edge he normally did not have. So he decided to go out and walk, to do his thinking on his feet, and there was much to think about this night, much to try to sort out in his mind.

He put on a sweater and his raincoat and left the motel, crossing Cabrillo Boulevard to the beach and moving laboriously through the soft sand toward the shoreline, where the sand would be hard enough for easier walking. The beach was deep at this point, a good hundred yards from the street to the water. When he reached the shore he turned east, heading under the wharf on which were a restaurant and fish markets and facilities for the boats that serviced the oil rigs and the islands. Beyond the wharf it was open beach for miles, like a road at midnight, a long gray strip of pavement curving away from him into darkness. The night, like the last two days, had the fierce clarity of mountain air, with stars almost as brilliant as the distant row of streetlights diminishing down the palm-lined drive, and Hook found it all difficult to accept as December, as Christmas, yet the holiday was only a week away now. Even if he was not finished here by then he would have to fly home, he knew, be there for the holidays, for Bobby and Jennifer would need him then, just as he would need them, on this their first Christmas without Chris.

So he felt the pressure of time, that it was slipping away from him, yet he did not feel totally frustrated. It had been a long day and he had learned a great deal. The only problem was he did not know what value to put upon the things he had learned. He had started the day fairly well convinced that he would have to begin concentrating on Mrs. Rubin, that the combination of Jack Douglas’s straightforward manner and his alibi supported not only by his employees but by a responsible third party just did not add up to his being involved. But that had been before the third party, the eminent dentist, had panicked. And Hook still could not figure out why he had. What Parnelli and Ferguson had done after the dentist’s call, that Hook could understand. It made sense that they would be disturbed by Hook’s crusade even if their employer and candidate had had nothing to do with Chris’s death, for a politician was vulnerable to rumor. On the other hand, if Douglas was involved, they probably had even more reason to rise to his defense, for in all likelihood then they too might have been involved in the crime or accident, whichever it was, as accessories if nothing else. And in fact, of all the things Hook had learned today the one that stood out most vividly in his mind was Parnelli’s low threshold of violence, both as Oliver had reported it to Hook and as the onetime football hero himself had almost demonstrated it on Ferguson in the bar. No great leap of the imagination was required to relate that defect to Chris’s death—Chris’s violent death.