Gibbs hadn’t paid much attention. Sterling didn’t stray more than a few feet from the television.

A few minutes later Sterling asked Gibbs what time Louise was due for dinner. Gibbs said any time.

He said he hoped Louise was okay.

“ ‘Okay’? That’s the word he used?” Reynoso asked, frowning.

“That’s the word Gibbs said he used.”

The news report from Laguna Beach was repeated about a half hour later. This time there was a news crew live at the scene, and they were showing videotape of a wide shot of a body sprawled on the rocks on the north end of the horseshoe that was Crescent Bay. The tide was coming back in, and waves were lifting plumes of spray into the air as they crashed onto the rocks. The earlier report about Emerald Bay had been in error.

The body by the tide pool was draped with a sheet striped in pastels.

“I’m going down there,” Sterling said to his wife.

“Why?”

“I have a bad feeling about Louise.”

“ ‘A bad feeling’?”

“Yes, a bad feeling.”

“Huh.”

When Sterling got home, dinner was cold. As he ate a turkey and stuffing sandwich with cranberry sauce and lots of black pepper, he told Gibbs that he thought Louise had been strangled.

“ ‘Strangled’?”

“Yes.”

“He said that?”

“According to Gibbs.”

“That would have been when-six o’clock, seven?”

“You’ll have to ask Gibbs.”

“Anything else?”

“Sterling told her that he thought that somebody must have broken into Louise’s apartment. He bet that the killer had broken a window and just gone in that rickety back door.”

Carmen Reynoso sat back and crossed her arms.

“Why did you make the call? Why didn’t Gibbs call us herself?”

“I’m not quite sure about the answer to that one, Detective. It has something to do with the nature of the betrayal she feels she’s engaged in. Turning her husband in is one thing. Making the actual call is something else.”

“You think it’s psychology, then?”

“Isn’t everything?”

“No. Some things are just criminal.”

The distinction was obviously clearer to her than it was to me.

“Are we done?” I asked. I was tired, and the clock told me my girls were due home any minute. I really didn’t want Detective Reynoso here when they walked in the door.

She stood. “Except for your earlier question. Time of death? Remember? You still interested?”

“I didn’t think you were actually going to answer me.”

The snow was coming down in waves. A curtain of white, thick enough to obscure the entire valley, would blow by over the course of a few minutes, and then suddenly a sparser fall would reveal the dark geometry of the fence posts and dirt tracks in the greenbelt below our house. After a brief interlude of visibility the curtain would shut, the angularity would disappear, and the world would again become white.

A couple inches of snow were already piled on the grasses and in places on the ground that spent the late autumn in shadows.

Carmen Reynoso stared at the winter spectacle, her lips parted. “I’ve only seen snow a few times in my life. I’m an Oakland girl. Didn’t ever get to Lake Tahoe much. It’s mesmerizing.”

The sardonic quality of her Lake Tahoe comment was oddly alluring. I said, “There’s a moment during every storm when I’m overcome by the beauty of it all. And a moment, usually a little later on, when I’m almost-almost-overcome by the aggravation of it all.”

She turned back toward me, puzzlement in her eyes.

I explained. “Driving in it. Shoveling it. Walking through the slush of it. It gets old.”

Her next words surprised me.

She said, “You’re not a romantic, are you? I took you for a romantic. A knight-in-shining-armor-type guy.”

“Wrong conclusion, I think. I am a romantic. I’ll be romantic about this storm all day today and all night. Then tomorrow morning, sometime around fiveA.M.,my neighbor will fire up her little green John Deere and start plowing our lane. That’s when the romance will begin to disintegrate, with the sound of my neighbor singing Christmas carols on her John Deere at five o’clock in the morning.”

“And that’s so bad because…”

“You’d have to know Adrienne. She makes up her own words to the carols, and she can’t sing to save her life.”

Reynoso stepped away from the windows. “At least you get your driveway plowed.”

“You have a little Pollyanna in you, don’t you, Detective?”

“Very little, Doctor. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Maybe your neighbor will take the Lord’s day off.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “That would be nice.” I didn’t bother to clarify that if Adrienne was anything religiously, she was Jewish, and that affiliation would make her Sabbath Saturday, not Sunday.

“The time of Louise Lake’s death has never been made public.” Reynoso’s change of direction was abrupt. Sam did the same thing to me sometimes. I was beginning to suspect that cops in general have an underappreciation of the value of segue in conversation. “The press has always reported it was Wednesday, and we’ve never contradicted them in any of our public statements. Gibbs’s contention that it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, is what hooked us-hooked me, anyway-that her story might be… real. Because the coroner says it was indeed late afternoon, early evening on Tuesday, and not late Wednesday, that Louise Lake was murdered.”

I tried to keep my face impassive.

“But what really hooked me was something Gibbs didn’t say, that she only implied. We’ve left the public with the impression that Louise was murdered on the beach and her body was pulled out into the water. Numerous reports from neighbors indicated that she walked the cove and the tide pools at least twice a day when she was staying in town, often at dawn or dusk. The public version of the crime is that someone followed her to the beach, or waited and accosted her there, and killed her. Maybe a crime of opportunity, maybe not.”

“But she didn’t die on the beach?”

“No. She died on the rocks. Her body had premorbid wounds from the rocks. And the broken window in her back door? It’s not public information, either. Therefore Sterling knew something he shouldn’t know.”

“Why was the window broken? Is there is evidence of a struggle in the house?”

“No comment.”

“You haven’t talked with Sterling yet?”

“No. He’s in Florida. Something tells me he’s going to lawyer up anyway. I’m proceeding as though we’re not going to have an opportunity to interview him.”

“Do you have enough to arrest him?”

“If we did, he’d be in custody.”

I tried a segue-free transition of my own. “Why a tide pool? The killer must have known the body would be discovered soon enough.”

“Louise Lake’s body was not placed in the tide pool. It was dumped into the Pacific, we think it got caught on something, and was in the water for almost thirty-six hours before it floated free and back into the tide pool during high tide.”

We walked to the entryway, and I helped her with her coat.

“You can’t repeat any of this,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. I was already wondering why she had told me what she’d told me. I wasn’t considering the possibility that her volubility on the subject of Louise’s murder was evidence of indiscretion. Rather, I assumed that Reynoso had another motive for talking with me. What? I wasn’t smart enough to know.

She went on. “I heard from a couple of local cops that over the years you’ve demonstrated some wisdom about forensic things-you know, from a psychological perspective-so let me ask you something. From what you know about him-I’m talking Sterling Storey, obviously-could he have done it? Could he have killed Louise Lake?”