She moved forward a little, adjusting her position. The D.A. moaned with pleasure. His black, broad-featured face broke into a grin. ‘My, don’t we look smug,’ Pullios said. She tightened herself a little around him and he closed his eyes with the feel of it.

‘I feel smug,’ Locke said. ‘Come down here.’

She leaned down over him. He took one breast in each hand and pulled her face up to his. She took his tongue into her mouth and bit down on it gently, then pulled away.

‘You are such a bitch,’ he said. Still smiling. She moved her hips again. He tried to come up to meet her face, but her hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down, grinning at him.

‘I know, and you love it.’ She came down and licked the bottom of his ear, staying there, beginning to rock rhythmically.

‘God, Pullios…’

She pulled away, halfway up. Her face now was set. She had found her angle, concentrating. Her hands cupped his head, tighter. He rose to meet her, feeling it build.

‘Not yet, not yet…’ She was breathing hard, her teeth clenched. ‘Okay, okay.’ She pounded down against him, now straightening up, arching, her head thrown back. ‘Now. Now. Now.’ Grinding down into him as he let himself go, collapsing against his big chest, a low chuckle escaping from deep in her throat.

Turning south on Highway 1, Hardy was thinking that fate could be a beautiful thing.

The dunes with their sedge grasses obscured the view of the ocean, but with the top down on the Suzuki, Hardy could hear and smell it. The afternoon, now well along, was still warm. Dwarf cypresses on the east side of the road attested to the near-constant wind off the ocean, the evergreen branches flattened where they faced the beach, as though giants walked the land, stomping them to one side.

Where the highway turned inland at Fort Funston near the Olympic Club golf course, hang-gliders filled the sky. Even on a windless, cloudless day, thermals up the cliffs at the shoreline provided decent lift. Hardy thought he might like to get into hang-gliding sometime. Take the wife and kids. Soar.

The fate that had saved him from his files had come in the guise of a call from Abe Glitsky, who’d been called down to Pacifica to view a body that had washed ashore. Calls from the SFPD to other local jurisdictions over the past few days had gotten the word out, and when the call came in, Abe had been in the office and volunteered to go down and have a look. He’d called Hardy from his squawk box, patched in.

The turnoff was just north of Devil’s Slide, a two-mile stretch of Highway 1 where the curving roadway’s shoulder disappeared at the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff. Most of the time, the area was shrouded in fog, and it was the rare year that didn’t see another verification of the fact that automobiles could not fly.

Hardy wound back on a rutted and unpaved roadway toward the city. Glitsky’s car was parked in the dirt area at the bottom, along with a couple of Pacifica police cars. As Hardy was getting out of his car, an ambulance appeared on the road he’d just used.

The tide was out. Getting on four o’clock, there was still no wind at all, no fog. Maybe, Hardy thought, we’re going to have our three days of summer.

He nodded to the ambulance guys, but was too anxious to wait for them. Crossing the soft sand, he got to harder ground and broke into a trot. The officials were knotted around a still green form about twenty yards from the line of surf.

Hardy nodded to Glitsky, who introduced him around. ‘Here’s your victim,’ he said.

The body lay covered with a tarp, on its back. Hardy asked permission to look, and one of the Pacifica cops said go ahead. He pulled the tarp away and involuntarily stepped back.

Sand flies buzzed around the half-open mouth, the nose, the empty eye sockets, the thinning head of gray hair. Hardy was momentarily startled by the fact that the body wore jogging sweats identical to the pair he owned -except that the body’s green sweatsuit had a large crescent-shaped tear in the right torso. There was also a ragged break in the lower left leg, with flesh showing beneath it. Two small clean holes – one in the chest and one just over the crotch – spoke for themselves. Forcing himself to take it all in, Hardy noticed the wedding band on the left hand. But, by far, the most arresting detail was the end of the right arm, a jagged and torn mess of tendon, bone and sickly greenish white flesh. Hardy knew what had happened to the hand.

The ambulance men had made their way across the beach with a stretcher. Hardy stepped away and let them move in.

‘You get an ID?’ he asked Glitsky. Glitsky had a scar that ran through his lips, top to bottom; when he got thoughtful or tense, it seemed sometimes to almost glow white in his dark face. It was glowing now. He wasn’t saying anything.

‘Looks about the right age for Owen Nash,’ Hardy said.

Glitsky nodded, still thinking, looking off into the horizon. ‘That’s why you’re here,’ he said.

‘Shot twice?’ Hardy asked.

Glitsky nodded again. ‘Before the sharks got him. Small caliber, one exit wound out of two.’ Like a dog shaking off water, he came back to where they were. ‘Once in the heart, and whoever it was tried to shoot his dick off.’ He thought another moment. ‘Probably not in that order.’

Hardy felt his balls tighten. Suddenly Glitsky spoke to the ambulance attendants who had opened the stretcher and were preparing to lift the body. ‘Excuse me a minute.’ He went over to the body, got down on one knee and picked up the left hand. ‘I’m going to take off this ring,’ he told the Pacifica cops.

He looked at it briefly, showed it to them, then brought it over to Hardy. ‘You see anything?’ he asked.

It was a plain gold band. On the flat inside surface, there was a tiny stamp in the gold that said IOK. Nothing else at first glance. Hardy faced away from the sun and held the ring up to catch the light, turning it slowly. ‘Here you go,’ he said. He brought it closer to his face. Worn down flush to the gold, invisible except at one angle, Hardy could make out some initials. ‘E.N. and some numbers – something looks like fifty-one.’

‘What was Nash’s wife’s name?’

Hardy remembered mostly because of the boat. ‘Eloise. And fifty-one – sounds like a wedding date, doesn’t it?’

Glitsky uttered an insincere ‘Absolutely brilliant’ and held out his hand. Hardy dropped the ring in it. He put the ring in a zip-loc evidence bag and stuck it in his pocket. ‘So I can either check the prints, have Strout do some DNA testing this month at a cost of ten grand or call his attorney again. How do you vote?’

The body was on the stretcher, and the ambulance attendants began carrying it over the beach. Hardy, Glitsky and the other men fell into a rough line behind them, and the caravan trudged over the sand. Nobody said a word.

‘The Eloise was out all day Saturday!’ Jeff Elliot was excited.

‘I knew that,’ Hardy said. He was at home, talking on the kitchen extension. He lived fifteen blocks from the beach, just north of Geary, and he’d seen no point in going downtown for ten minutes so that he could turn around and drive back home.

Twenty minutes after leaving Devil’s Slide, he was cutting up some onions in his kitchen. When the spaghetti sauce was made, bubbling on the stove, he opened himself a beer and called Jeff Elliot.

‘I thought you were keeping me up on the breaks in the case,’ Elliot said. ‘If you knew the boat had gone out -’

‘We didn’t even know it was Owen Nash, so what difference could his boat make? In fact, I would tend to agree with our good Dr Strout,’ Hardy drawled, ‘that yo’ conclusions were de-sahded-ly prematuah. All we knew was that a man was missing and the hand might show that it was used in karate. That’s a long stretch for hard news.‘