WE SAT IN A CIRCLE around the fire pit behind our rental cottage near the spectacular Point Reyes National Seashore, an hour north of San Francisco.

“Lindsay, hold out your glass,” Cindy said.

I tasted the margarita – it was good. Yuki stirred the oysters on the grill. My border collie, Sweet Martha, sighed and crossed her paws in front of her, and firelight made flickering patterns on our faces as the sun set over the Pacific.

“It was one of my first cases in the ME’s office,” Claire was saying. “And so I was ‘it.’ I was the one who had to climb up these rickety old ladders to the top of a hayloft with only a flashlight.”

Yuki coughed as the tequila went down her windpipe, gasping for breath as Cindy and I yelled at her in unison, “Sip it!”

Claire thumped Yuki’s back and continued.

“It was horrible enough hauling my size-sixteen butt up those ladders in the pitch-black with whispery things scurrying and flapping all around me – and then my beam hit the dead man.

“His feet were hovering above the hay, and when I lit him up, I swear to God he looked like he was levitating. Eyes and tongue bugged out, like a freakin’ ghoul.”

“No way.” Yuki laughed. She was wearing pajama bottoms and a Boalt Law sweatshirt, her hair in a ponytail, already drunk on her one margarita, looking more like a college kid than a woman nearing thirty.

“I yelled down into the dark well of that barn,” Claire said, “got two big old boys to come up and cut the body down from the rafters and put Mr. Levitation into a body bag.”

Claire paused for dramatic effect – and right then my cell phone rang.

“Lind-say, no,” Cindy begged me. “Don’t take that call.”

I glanced at the caller ID, expecting it to be my boyfriend, Joe, thinking he’d just gotten home and was checking in, but it was Lieutenant Warren Jacobi. My former partner and current boss.

“Jacobi?”

Yuki shouted, “Don’t stop, Claire. She could be on the phone all night!”

“Lindsay? Okay, fine,” Claire said, and then she went on. “I unzipped the body bag… and a bat flew out of the dead man’s clothes. I peed my pants,” Claire squealed behind me. “I really did!”

“Boxer? You there?” said Jacobi, gruff in my ear.

“I’m on my own time,” I growled into my cell phone. “It’s Saturday, don’t you know that?”

“You’re going to want this. If not, tell me and I’ll give it to Cappy and Chi.”

“What is it?”

“The biggest deal in the world, Boxer. It’s about the Campion kid. Michael.”

MY PULSE SHOT UP at the mention of Michael Campion’s name.

Michael Campion wasn’t just a kid. He was to Californians what JFK Jr. had been to the nation. The only child of our former governor Connor Hume Campion and his wife, Valentina, Michael Campion had been born into incredible wealth. He’d also been born with an inoperable heart defect and had been living on borrowed time for the whole of his life.

Through photos and newscasts, Michael’s life had been part of ours. He’d been a darling baby, a precocious and gifted child, and a handsome teenager, both funny and smart. His father had become a spokesman for the American Heart Association, and Michael was their adored poster boy. And while the public rarely saw Michael, they cared, always hoping that one day there would be a medical breakthrough and that California ’s “Boy with a Broken Heart” would be given what most people took for granted – a full and vigorous life.

Then, back in January of this year, Michael had said good night to his parents, and in the morning his bedroom was empty. There was no ransom note. No sign of foul play. But a back door was unlocked and Michael was gone.

His disappearance was treated as a kidnapping, and the FBI launched a nationwide search. The SFPD did its own investigation, interviewing family members and retainers, Michael’s teachers and school friends, and his virtual online friends as well.

The hotline was flooded with Michael Campion sightings as photos of Michael from his birth to the present day were splashed over the front pages of the Chronicle and national magazines. TV networks and cable news ran documentary specials on Michael Campion’s doom-shadowed life.

The tips had led nowhere, and months later, when there’d been no calls from a kidnapper, and no trace of Michael had surfaced, terror attacks, wildfires, politics, and new violent crimes pushed the Michael Campion story off the front page.

The case was still open, but everyone assumed the worst. That a kidnapping had gone terribly wrong. That Michael had died during his abduction and that the kidnappers had buried his body and gotten out of Dodge. The citizens of San Francisco mourned along with Michael’s famous and beloved family, and while the public would never forget him, they put the book of his life aside.

Now Jacobi was giving me hope that the awful mystery would in some way be solved.

“Michael’s body has been found?” I asked him.

“Naw, but we’ve got a credible lead. Finally.”

I pressed the phone hard against my ear, ghost stories and the first annual getaway of the Women’s Murder Club forgotten.

Jacobi was saying, “If you want in on this, Boxer, meet me at the Hall -”

“I can be there in an hour.”

I MADE THE ONE-HOUR DRIVE back to the Hall of Justice in forty-five minutes, took the stairs from the lobby to the third floor, and strode into the squad room looking for Jacobi.

The forty-by-forty-foot open space was lit with flickering overhead fluorescent tubing, making the night crew hunched over their desks look like they’d just crawled out of their graves. A few old guys lifted their eyes, said, “Howsit goin’, Sarge?” as I made my way to Jacobi’s glassed-in corner office, with its view of the on-ramp to the 280 freeway.

My partner, Richard Conklin, was already there; thirty years old, six feet two inches of all-American hunk, one of his long legs resting on the edge of Jacobi’s junkyard of a desk.

I pulled out the other chair, bashed my knee, swore loudly and emphatically as Jacobi sniggered, “Nice talk, Boxer.” I sat down, thinking how this had been a functional workspace when Jacobi’s office had been mine. I took off my baseball cap and shook out my hair, hoping to hell that the guys wouldn’t smell tequila on my breath.

“What kind of lead?” I asked without preamble.

“It’s a tip kind of lead,” Jacobi said. “Anonymous caller using a prepaid cell phone – untraceable, naturally. Caller said he’d seen the Campion kid entering a house on Russian Hill the night he disappeared. The house is home to a prostitute.”

As Jacobi made room on his desk for the prostitute’s rap sheet, I thought about Michael Campion’s life at the time he’d disappeared.

There’d been no dates for Michael, no parties, no sports. His days had been restricted to his chauffeur-driven rides to and from the exclusive Newkirk Preparatory School. So it didn’t sound exactly crazy that he’d visited a prostitute. He’d probably paid off his driver and escaped the plush-lined prison of his parents’ love for an hour or two.

But what had happened to him afterward?

What had happened to Michael?

“Why is this tip credible?” I asked Jacobi.

“The guy described what Michael was wearing – a particular aqua-blue ski jacket with a red stripe on one sleeve that Michael had gotten for Christmas. That jacket was never mentioned in the press.”

“So why did this tipster wait three months before calling it in?” I asked Jacobi.

“I can only tell you what he said. He said he was leaving the prostitute’s house as Michael Campion was coming in. That he didn’t drop the dime until now because he has a wife and kids. Didn’t want to get caught up in the hullabaloo, but that his conscience had been needling him. Finally got to him, I guess.”