“ Louise Lake was a beautiful woman. Where did that fit in?” With the question, I noted that the cleft had reappeared between Reynoso’s eyebrows. She wanted to know about Sterling and Louise, the couple. The thought apparently caused her to frown.

Gibbs didn’t suspect that anything was going on between Sterling and Louise until a Halloween costume party that Gibbs had long planned to celebrate the completion of the renovation of the Corona Del Mar cottage. Louise wasn’t even planning to attend the party; she had sent her regrets weeks before because she was scheduled to work the overnight from LAX to Heathrow on the thirty-first. Some combination of factors-Gibbs thought it was a mechanical problem and a crew overtime issue, but who ever knew with the airlines?-conspired to keep Louise in L.A. for another night.

She arrived at the Storeys’ party in Corona after midnight, still dressed in her BA uniform. The party was already in its death throes, and the few guests still remaining on the patio were so inebriated that a couple of them even complimented Louise on the originality of her costume.

Gibbs was decked out as Grace Kelly. By self-report, she’d looked the part. Sterling came as Joe DiMaggio, and Gibbs remained troubled about his late change of heart about costumes. She had been counting on Prince Rainier or James Bond, her early suggestions. If she’d known he was going to be wearing pinstripe flannels as Joltin’ Joe, she would have tried to talk him out of it.

Failing that dissuasion, she could have done Marilyn just as easily as Grace.

All he’d had to do was tell her. Was that too much to ask?

Louise was one of the last to leave the party, shutting down the new great room bar around three. Gibbs volunteered Sterling, who never drank when he was hosting a party, to drive Louise down the coast to her home in Laguna. After a tepid protest Louise agreed to give up her car keys and accept the ride.

Sterling pulled his car out of the garage in Corona at three-fifteen.

He didn’t return home until the sun was beginning to crest the string of coastal hills in the South Bay the next morning.

“That was October. What about November? Can we get there soon?” Carmen Reynoso asked. I suspected that she lacked a therapist’s natural respect for backstory, but didn’t say so. It was something we could discuss at another time. Or not.

Sterling had blown off Gibbs’s concerns about the lost hours before dawn on Crescent Bay on All Saints’ Day morning. He told his wife that he and Louise had talked for a while. That was it.

Gibbs didn’t trust Sterling much, from a fidelity point of view. And she didn’t believe him often, at least where other women were concerned. But she’d let the issue go. She’d watch for signs. With Sterling and other women she did that a lot.

Louise didn’t spend much time in Laguna during the first three weeks of November, and although she spoke with Gibbs a couple of times on the phone, they didn’t see each other during that period. Louise had bid for, and received, a month flying routes into De Gaulle and JFK because she adored being in both New York and Paris over Christmas. She didn’t want to be in either city for Thanksgiving, though. She had four days off, Tuesday through Friday of the holiday week, and she was planning to spend them alone in Laguna. Helena was working, and Paulie and his latest partner were doing Ibiza.

Louise called Gibbs from her rental car on Tuesday afternoon to bitch about the traffic on the 405 and to gossip about an Australian tennis player she’d met while her actual date, an American lawyer, was in the WC at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank in Paris. She reiterated her promise to come for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.

Gibbs reminded her that dinner would be early; the turkey would be carved at five.

And Louise reminded Gibbs that she didn’t eat turkey and that she’d recently realized that she was only two minor obstacles away from being a true vegan.

Gibbs had asked what the obstacles were.

Louise had replied, “Paris, and meat.”

“That was Tuesday?” Carmen Reynoso clarified. “Two days before Thanksgiving?”

“Yes,” I said, recognizing that the calendar pages had flipped forward to almost the exact same spot in the current year. I went on. “Gibbs said Louise was killed that night, not the next day like the newspapers reported.”

“Please go on with your story.”

“Please remember, it’s not my story. It’s Gibbs’s story. I’m just repeating what I was told. You can tell me one thing, though-is Gibbs correct about the time of death? Please tell me that.”

“We’ll get there, we’ll get there,” Reynoso said. When the issue was my ignorance and not her own, she was suddenly a very patient woman.

For some reason I thought of Sam.

The tape recorder snapped off. Carmen Reynoso fumbled in her bag for a spare tape. After she exchanged the tapes, she said, “Go on.”

Sterling wasn’t due home from New Orleans until Wednesday, late. Gibbs had completed the holiday shopping, supervised the house-cleaning, and done all the prep work she was planning to do in the kitchen before Thursday’s meal. She had a Mexican woman whose name she didn’t remember coming in to do most of the cooking on Thanksgiving morning.

By Tuesday afternoon Gibbs was bored. She decided to surprise Louise. She’d pick her up and welcome her home by taking her out to dinner somewhere in Laguna.

About a block from Crescent Bay, Gibbs spotted Sterling’s car parked on the street.

She almost missed it. What caught her eye was the bright red hat with the network logo that he kept on the shelf behind the backseat.

“A block away?”

“About a block away.”

“She didn’t tell you exactly where?”

“I don’t know Laguna Beach, Detective. I wouldn’t recognize any landmarks. I’m sure Gibbs will tell you.”

“Did she say what kind of car?”

“I don’t think so. She may have. If she did, I’ve forgotten.”

“You forgot? Anything else you forgot, Doctor?”

Gibbs drove a few blocks away from Louise’s home and phoned Sterling’s office from her car. His secretary reminded her that he was still in New Orleans and suggested Gibbs try him on his cell phone.

To get to Louise’s apartment, a visitor could use the public access path partway to the beach, then cut across an aging flagstone trail to the deck. Gibbs returned to Crescent Bay, parked near the top of the public path, descended a few yards, stopped, and listened.

She heard Sterling and Louise arguing. She couldn’t tell about what. But she heard her name.

Gibbs.

Sterling had yelled, “I don’t fucking care about Gibbs.”

Gibbs headed back up the path in tears. Up near her car she heard a scream. She wasn’t sure if it was Louise or not. At the time she thought it couldn’t be. Why would it be? When she heard the news later, on Thanksgiving afternoon, she wasn’t so sure.

Back at her car, she grabbed her phone and punched in the number of Sterling’s cell. The distinctive sound of her husband’s ringing phone traveled up the slope to where she was standing.

She killed the call.

“I think you know the rest,” I said.

“I’d like to hear about his reaction when the body was discovered. Can you talk about that?”

“Yes. Yes, I can.”

Sterling was home, as scheduled, late in the evening on Wednesday. Gibbs never said anything to him about what she had witnessed the previous afternoon.

On Thanksgiving Day, as was his practice, Sterling had all the TVs in the house tuned to football games. But he wasn’t watching football; he was watching coverage, production. The competition. At three-thirty a local news update reported that a partially clothed female body had been discovered facedown in a tide pool at Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. Stay tuned, more after the game.