“You do get around, Mr. Hook.”

Hook held the letter out to him. “My son mailed this from Santa Barbara two days before he died. I think you ought to read it.”

Rider took the letter. “Anything else?”

“Yes. But I’d need a few minutes to tell you.”

“You free now?”

“I’m free.”

Rider reached back over the seat and unlocked the rear door. “Get in, then.”

Hook climbed in and was still closing the door when the driver tromped on the accelerator and turned into the street. They sped through a yellow light and then a red one, with the siren growling softly.

“We got an O.D.,” Rider told Hook. “Drug overdose up in the foothills. This is Sergeant Anderson. Consider yourself honored. He’ll be running the FBI in a few years, won’t you, kid? Say hello to Mr. Hook.”

“Morning,” Anderson said. He was a tall neat young man with a crewcut and a gray flannel suit and dark check tie any corporation executive would have felt comfortable in. And he had the manner to go with it, a manner Rider obviously did not appreciate.

“Mr. Hook’s come here to California to help us,” Rider said.

“We need all the help we can get.”

“Speak for yourself.” Rider took the letter out of the envelope.

“Notice the postmark,” Hook said. “And the date of the letter.”

Rider nodded.

“Another thing—I believe I can get testimony from a couple of girls back home. Girls my son had sexual relations with.”

“They’ll sign a statement?”

“Possibly. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“That’s right. I didn’t ask.”

Rider’s expression, a weary cynicism, told Hook what he thought of this bit of information. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got here first.”

As the sergeant began to read the four pages of the letter Hook settled into the back seat and waited. Anderson had turned off the siren but they continued to move rapidly uphill past the Old Mission and into the wooded, countrylike area beyond it, their tires squealing around the curves of the narrow blacktop as it snaked in between the close-growing live oak and eucalyptus and the stone walls and log fences beyond which ranch houses sat back in the leafy shadows, hugging hillsides and lying in arroyos. It was beautiful country, a beautiful day.

And they were on their way to a death scene.

They went down into Mission Canyon and then started up again, for a mile or perhaps two before the sergeant finally finished the letter. He folded it and put it back into the envelope.

“You make a copy of it?” he asked Hook.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll keep this.” He slipped it into his suitcoat pocket.

“Well, what about it?” Hook asked. “What do you think?”

“Later,” Rider said.

They were plunging down a steep curve through the woods now, toward a small stone bridge that crossed a creek at the bottom of a canyon. On this side of the bridge, off the road, a battered old Volkswagen minibus decorated with yellow dayglo peace symbols was parked. Across the road from it were two sheriff’s patrol cars, one with its dome light flashing ineffectually in the bright morning sunshine. Beyond the bridge two other cars had pulled off the road. Their occupants, a young couple and a businessman, had gotten out to look but remained on their side of the bridge, as if they feared contamination from the minibus. One deputy was standing at the rear of it, looking away from whatever lay inside its opened doors. The other deputy was across the road, leaning on the open door of his patrol car, talking to a young woman slouched in the back seat.