Finally Hook got out his pocket knife and cut off branches of chaparral and set them afire one at a time, holding them up in the air like torches as long as he could and then dropping them onto the roadway. As he lit a third branch, he saw far in the distance the flashing emergency light of a police car or ambulance speeding through the foothills. And then he heard the vehicle’s siren.

In a short time, it drew in behind the first car. Then, after a few moments, the first car started moving again, accelerating rapidly as it moved up the mountainside. When it came out of the last turn Hook stepped into the center of the roadway and went through the unnecessary motions of flagging it down—unnecessary because it turned out to be Rider’s car, Rider who stopped and got out, followed by Liz Madera.

“Where is he?” the sergeant asked.

Hook led him to the side of the road, the rocky shoulder where Parnelli lay. Grunting, the burly Rider got down and felt for a pulse in front of Parnelli’s ear. Liz came around on the other side of the victim, apparently not wanting to stand near Hook. Nor would she look at him.

“Is he alive?” she asked Rider.

Getting up, the sergeant shrugged helplessly. “I can’t find a pulse,” he said.

Liz turned and headed back for the car.

“An ambulance will be here any minute,” Rider said to Hook. “You okay? You look a little beat up.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, you know that?”

Hook did not answer.

At nine o’clock that night, almost two hours after Bo Parnelli had been pronounced dead on arrival at St. Francis Hospital, Hook stood at a second-floor window in the courthouse looking down on the floodlit formal garden below. And he told himself that for the time being he would try to become like the palms standing there, a living thing and nothing more. He would ignore his feelings; he would have no fears or worries or regrets. He would go through the motions, do what had to be done, say what had to be said, and time would pass. And he would be home again, on his own land, with his own family, his own silence.

He had wanted none of this. He had caused none of it. Bo Parnelli was dead simply because he had been Bo Parnelli, because he had been vicious and stupid and finally unlucky. All Hook had done was seek the truth about his son’s death, and for no more complex reason than that he could not have gone on living the rest of his life without that truth. And there was no crime in that, no guilt. Yet as he turned away from the window now his limbs felt leaden, his throat was dry, his heart sprinted in his chest.

He came to the end of the corridor, to a doorway that opened into a large bullpen area containing a half-dozen officers’ desks, all but one abandoned at this late hour. Near the deputy working at the one desk, Liz Madera sat alone, in one of eight old wood chairs lined up against the wall. Across the bullpen from her was a row of three small conference rooms with glass walls facing in, so that their occupants were visible to anyone in the bullpen. In the middle room, Jack Douglas was leaning back against a table and gazing down at the floor as he listened intently to the earnest counsel of his lawyer, a very expensive-looking man who earlier had spirited his client like a rock star through the small band of reporters and photographers assembled outside, the same group that had accosted Rider and Liz and Hook at the hospital. Next door to Douglas, Richard Ferguson paced nervously while Dorothy Rubin sat glaring at Liz, though Hook could not see why she would resent the girl any more than herself, for it was she who had first heard about Parnelli’s planned ambush, and later, half drunk, half hysterical, had told Liz about it.