“You have pictures?” Dar asked Lawrence.

Lawrence nodded and patted his Nikon. “This is going to be the interesting part,” he said very softly.

“What is going to be…” Syd began, and then said. “Oh, my God.”

Beneath the wreckage of the pickup truck was the body of a second man. His head and right arm and right shoulder had been smashed almost flat. His left arm was broken in a compound fracture that looked as if it had happened before the flattening. He was wearing a T-shirt but was naked from the waist down—or rather, his pants were bunched around his ankles at the top of his work boots. A dozen searchlights and flashlights were trained on the corpse and Sydney Olson said, “Oh, my God” again.

The man’s legs and exposed torso were scratched in a hundred places. There was a folding knife open and protruding from his thigh. The wound had bled heavily. The man had the end of a length of clothesline tied clumsily around his waist and there must have been a hundred more feet of the clothesline lying on and around the body. Worst of all, three feet of a thick branch—a holly branch—protruded from the corpse’s rectum.

“Yes,” said Dar. “Interesting.”

Photographs and measurements were taken. The police officers and rescue workers milled and discussed, discussed and milled. The medical examiner and a county coroner both pronounced the man dead. This was a relief to some of the onlookers. Debates raged as to how exactly this accident had played itself out.

“No one has a fucking clue,” whispered Sergeant Cameron.

“This is crazy,” said Syd. “Like some satanic cult thing.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Dar. He went over to talk to the fire fighters. Five minutes later they had moved the long fire-truck ladder and extended it to the top of the cliff, invisible through the branches to the onlookers below. Darwin, Lawrence, and two of the CHP officers clambered up the ladder with powerful flashlights. Five minutes after that, they scrambled down the ladder—all except for Dar, who stayed twenty-five feet up and waved at the fireman at the controls. The ladder swiveled into the thick tree branches, taking Dar with it, and he ducked the heavier boughs and shined his flashlight back and forth.

“Here,” he called at last.

Syd squinted up, but could not make out what Dar was touching and then photographing. Lawrence was looking through small binoculars he had pulled from a flap pocket of his safari shirt.

“What is it?” asked Syd.

“It’s the guy’s underpants caught on a branch,” said Lawrence. “Sorry,” he added, offering her the binoculars. “Want to look?”

“No, thanks.”

Fifteen minutes later, the discussions were over, the bodies were being put in body bags and carried by stretcher to separate ambulances, and everyone seemed satisfied. Lawrence walked back to the Land Cruiser with Dar and Syd. His Isuzu Trooper was parked just beyond Dar’s truck.

“All right,” said Sydney Olson, sounding slightly irritated. “I don’t get it. I couldn’t hear you talking to the officers. What the hell happened here?”

Both men stopped walking and started talking at the same time. “Go ahead,” said Dar. “You tell the first part.”

Lawrence nodded. His large hands opened and gestured as he started the explanation. “Okay, basically, these two guys drank their eighteen or twenty cans of beer and tried to crash the concert. No tickets, but they knew about an old fire road and decided they could come in the back way after dark. But the back way is fenced by our client. A ten-foot-high wooden fence up there.”

Syd stared back toward the cliff and the darkness. They were lifting the smashed pickup onto a flatbed truck now.

“They accidentally drove through the fence?” she said, her voice thin.

“Uh-uh,” said Lawrence, shaking his head. “They backed the pickup right against the fence and the driver—a skinnier guy—boosted his pal over. But it was real dark up there, and when the bigger guy went over, he found that it was a thirty-foot fall. So he came crashing down through those tree branches…”

“And that killed him?” said Syd.

Lawrence shook his head again. “Naw, he hit a big branch about forty feet up. That was probably when he broke his arm. The branch had snagged him by his undershorts and part of his belt.”

“He still didn’t realize how high he was,” added Dar. “Looking down in the dark, he could see the tops of the shorter trees and probably thought they were bushes that would break his fall.”

“So he cut himself out of his shorts,” said Lawrence.

“And fell another twenty feet,” said Syd.

“Yeah,” said Lawrence.

“But that didn’t kill him,” said Sydney, speaking in a tone that suggested she now knew that she was the straight man.

“Nope,” said Lawrence. “That just scratched him up something terrible as he fell through the branches. Plus that was also when his own knife was jammed three inches into his thigh and that holly branch got rammed up his ass. Pardon my French.”

“And then what?” said Syd.

“Dar, you figured it out first,” said Lawrence. “Why don’t you tell the finale.”

Dar shrugged. “There’s not much more. The driver could hear his friend crying in agony down there. He realized what a drop it must have been. The big guy’s screams of pain must have been drowned out somewhat by the Metallica concert, but the driver knew he had to do something.”

“So he…” prompted Syd.

“So he took the length of old clothesline that was lying in the back of the pickup, threw it down to his friend, and told him to tie it securely around his waist,” said Dar. “That’s my guess. Actually, it wouldn’t have been that easy or succinct. There would have been a lot of drunken shouting and cursing and crying going on, but the bigger guy wrapped the line around his middle twice and tied it off with a granny knot, while the skinny guy tied the other end of the rope securely to the rear bumper of the F250.”

“And then…” said Syd.

Dar tilted his head as if the rest was obvious. It was. “Well, our skinny driver was very drunk and very rattled. He accidentally put the truck in reverse, gunned it, drove backwards ten feet through our client’s high fence—the tire tracks up there speak for themselves—and dropped backwards forty-some feet onto his buddy, catapulting himself eighty-five feet out through the windshield in the process.”

“E-mail me your report in the morning and I’ll write the official version and send it to our client,” said Lawrence.

“I’ll have my analysis to you by ten A.M.,” said Dar.

Sydney shook her head. “You do this for a living?”

The first phone call came in a little after 5:00 A.M.

“Damn,” said Dar. He didn’t really consider it morning until sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 A.M., sitting over coffee and a second bagel, behind the morning paper.

The phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Minor, this is Steve Capelli with Newsweek magazine. We’d like to talk to you about—”

Dar slammed the phone down and rolled over to catch a little more sleep.

The second call came in two minutes later.

“Dr. Minor, my name is Evelyn Summers…perhaps you’ve seen me on Channel Seven…and I was hoping that you would—”

Dar would never know what Evelyn was hoping because he hung up, turned the ringer off on the phone, and walked over to the window. Along with the San Diego Police patrol car that had been parked inconspicuously across the street all night, there were now three very conspicuous TV trucks. A fourth truck with a satellite antenna on its roof pulled up as Dar watched.

He walked back to his phone, and recorded a new message on the answering machine: “Yo, dis is Vito. Dere’s nobody home but me an’ the Dobermans. You got sometin’ to say to me…say it! Otherwise, hang the fug up.”