“Yes, it has.” Leaving him there, Hook followed Miss Madera around the house to the garage.

Hook had never ridden in a Jaguar XK-E before, and he found the experience something like sealing oneself up in a bomb, albeit a bomb that held rigidly to the twisting coast road despite the fact that Miss Madera drove as if sixty miles an hour were the legal minimum. In the cramped quarters, however, it was not the car he was aware of but its driver. She had changed into a blue miniskirted dress with shiny knee-high black boots and a matching short raincoat that left her thighs exposed inches from his own hand tightly gripping his knee. And there was also the smell of her, something subtler than perfume, more natural, more animal, perhaps sea air melded with the salts of her own sweat, or simply some strangely clean and cutting body musk—Hook did not know. But he knew its effect. There had been times in the years since Kate’s death when he had thought the sex urge in him was almost dead, often three and four weeks at a time when he would not even have to give the matter thought, and then suddenly it would be upon him again, like a malarial fever, and he would have to invent some excuse to go to St. Louis, where he would find release with a whore or pickup. Now he felt that same fever—on the day of his son’s death, and toward this woman who probably had caused that death—and it filled him with self-contempt. He looked over at her in anger, trying to concentrate only on the matter at hand, which was to get some sort of reading on her motive for driving him back to town, but all he could see in the stark white glow of the dashboard was the woman, the dark eyes and sensuous mouth, and they told him nothing. So he decided to ask.

“Why did you want to drive me?”

She kept her eyes on the road. “I don’t know.”

“Wasn’t it to talk, Miss Madera? Don’t we have a lot to talk about?”

She shook her head, not in denial so much as puzzlement, doubt. “I couldn’t just leave it the way it was, that’s all. I mean Dorothy and Richard letting you come in, showing you where it happened, and saying so long, that’s it, tough luck.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I am so sorry, Mr. Hook. I am so sorry.”

Hook looked away from her tears. “I still want you to tell me about it.”

But she preferred to change the subject, remarking that he did not have a bag. He told her that he had left it in Sergeant Rider’s car.

“Can you get along?” she asked.

“No problem.”

She had turned onto the oceanfront drive by now and they were growling past the city marina, with its hundreds of yachts rocking expensively in the light swells of the harbor. Ahead, on the city side of the drive, were the tourist motels, each with its own discreet sign of identification, no flashing neon stars or arrows to dragoon one in off the street, for of course this was Santa Barbara, Hook remembered, and not apple-pie America. Across from the motels and restaurants was the long scimitar of sand he had seen from the air, and in between, lining both sides of the road, twin rows of date palms with their shabby skirts of dead fronds, which he had found ugly even as a youngster in the Navy. “Like French ticklers on a hairy cock,” a fellow Midwestern swabbie had described the trees then, and as far as Hook could see the simile was still every bit as accurate as it was gross.