Nothing seemed unusual and nothing caught McMichael's eye. He talked briefly to the girlfriend and the professor, and they seemed concerned, willing to talk, and straight up. The other brother was still in prison. The sisters were out of state. She hadn't called a soul in Florida.

Where was her accomplice? And how was she talking to him or her or them? Pay phones, he thought. Or maybe he was calling her. Or maybe there wasn't one.

The desk officer called him at two-thirty to say that McMichael had a visitor in the lobby. "Lance Wood," said the desk cop. "He says he wants to talk to you about Pete Braga."

"Can we go outside?" asked Lance Wood. He looked at McMichael with steady blue eyes, then turned to look behind him. He looked early twenties, tall and tanned, with a thatch of straw-blond hair. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, shorts and thongs despite the cool January afternoon. McMichael noted the edge of a plastic shopping bag visible in the sweatshirt pocket.

"How come?" asked McMichael.

"Because this is a police station."

"Let's go outside."

They sat on a planter wall, well away from the headquarters entrance. McMichael looked out at the old gray buildings, humbled against the intense blue sky.

"I got your name from the paper," said Wood.

"Okay."

"I scavenge the harbor a couple times a week in my kayak, hit the good spots for finds. After a storm I go out for sure, because the high tides wash up all sorts of good stuff. I was down off of Point Loma a couple of days after that Braga guy got killed, but I didn't know it."

"Didn't know about Pete?"

"Yeah, I don't read the news or watch TV, so I just heard about it two days ago from one of the guys out surfing at Ralph's. He said the old man got beat to death with a fish club right in his own house. The wood and glass one down at Poinsettia Street."

"That's what happened."

Lance Wood reached into the front pocket of his sweatshirt and pulled out a plastic bag with something in it. "I found this down the beach from that house. Friday, after he got killed."

Wood slid a fish bat from the bag. It looked identical to the one lying in Pete's blood in the trophy room.

"Set it on the wall here," said McMichael.

"I've touched it a bunch."

"That's okay."

"When I heard about the old guy, I looked hard at this thing. Thought maybe it was important."

McMichael looked down at the bat. Exactly like the one they'd gotten at Braga's, so far as he could see. "I'm going to have to take this," said McMichael.

"That's why I brought it."

McMichael wrote down his address and phone, talked a little about kayaking and scavenging the bay, found out that Lance had gone to the same high school he did, knew a few of the same families.

"Sorry it took so long," Wood said. "I keep stuff. I hung it on a nail in the garage, figured I might find a use for it someday."

"Don't be. Will you show me where you found it?"

"About a hundred yards south of the house."

"I mean exactly," said McMichael.

"I can do that."

"I'll drive."

"You'll have to. I walked here."

McMichael carried the bat back into the building, took it upstairs, asked Hector to book it into evidence ASAP, get it to Arthur Flagler in the lab and run an NCIC check on Lance Wood. He wrote down Wood's phone and address and hustled back downstairs.

When he came back down Wood was still sitting on the wall. McMichael led the way to his car. "How come you don't like the cop house?" he asked.

"I got busted for pot when I was nineteen. One joint. Cop shoved me and my girlfriend around more than he had to. A lot more. So I shoved back, and got the living shit beat out of me, right in front of her."

"That's rough."

"You're telling me."

Lance Wood had found the club on the beach, one hundred and eight McMichael steps from the south corner of the wall in front of Pete Braga's house.

"It was here," said Wood. "About fifty feet above the waterline, but the tide was low by then. It could have washed up, or it could have been dropped. Buried, maybe."

They stood on a pretty little beach, a spit of sand that swept gracefully into the bay. The remnant of an old seawall angled from the sand down into the water. A bright white gull stood on the wall and eyed them antisocially. To the south McMichael saw the boatyard cranes rising into the pale blue sky, a Coast Guard cutter on patrol, the barren tip of Coronado Island. A silver passenger jet lowered over the hills toward Lindbergh Field.

"Think it's the murder weapon?" asked Lance.

"We'll have to look at it," said McMichael.

He drove Wood to his Pacific Beach apartment, getting a message from Hector on the way: Wood had come up as a convicted drug offender on NCIC- possession of marijuana, nineteen ninety-eight, clean since.

McMichael asked him about it.

"I was just young and got caught," said Wood. "Everybody smoked grass. I guess you guys can find out anything about anybody."

"Just the bad stuff," said McMichael. "The computer won't tell anybody that you helped a cop. So, thank you."

Wood nodded, frowning. "No problem."

McMichael stepped into Pete Braga's trophy room. Again he pictured the silver-haired old man there, oblivious to the intruder as the wind kicked at the window glass. He pictured the man in the dark jogging suit, creeping straight toward the fireplace with the club he'd use on Pete. He pictured the club coming up in the gloved hand, and he heard the first shattering, pressurized concussion of aluminum on bone. He saw Pete's body vibrating as it slumped, the blood flying off the club every time it was raised, the roostertail of liquid splattering against the lights. Again and again. Sixteen times, at least.

You're tired and you're breathing hard, but you think you're smart, don't you? You see the tear in your glove, but you've planned for this- you know the wall club is clean and will stay clean, if you're just careful. And you are. You set down your weapon near Pete, go to the trophy wall and lift the Fish Whack'r off the nail between the dorado and the barracuda, gently, by the leather strap, and you rest it in the bloody pool next to Pete, then let it drop. This way, the cops will have the wrong one to work with from the start. This way, the murder weapon can go into the storm that will wipe it clean.

Yes, McMichael thought: you knew about the club on the wall and you got one just like it. To cover and confuse. To make things harder on us. You gave us the wrong murder weapon.

And you knew exactly when the nurse was gone. Because you watched her from your car, parked in the darkness on the street, figuring she'd have to leave him alone one of these nights? Because you'd seen her do it before? Or because she told you?

And you knew Zeke wouldn't be a problem because you took care of the little terrier once and for all on New Year's Eve. Eat, eat. Dance, dance. Pant, pant.

Maybe you fed him the poison from outside that night. Maybe you snuck up to the wall and tossed him a treat. Maybe.

Or maybe you were invited to the party. Because you are friend, or family, or an acquaintance valuable in business.

You thought you were smart and careful and clever, but you weren't smart enough to know your fingerprints would be inside the gloves. Or that your club would wash up on shore.

McMichael walked to the sliding glass door and unlocked all three locks. He pulled it open to a fresh blast of air, trotted across the sand, hopped the wall and headed south toward Aster Street. For a moment he stood there and looked back to where the street hit the beach- concrete steps with a rust-pitted handrail, steel warning stanchions with reflectors, a large Norfolk Island pine casting the end of the cul-de-sac into shade. Entirely possible, he thought, that the neighbors just didn't see the car.