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exactly had Pereira found it? I opened my mouth to ask her just as a great roar came from the apartment above.

Chapter 5
    “W HAT WAS THAT?” P EREIRA demanded.
    “Sounded like an avalanche,” I said.
    The initial roar had abated and a second began. With Pereira, I headed for the stoop and banged on the door to the upstairs flat.
    There was no response, just a swelling of noise. I pounded again and got no reply, then tried the door. It had been left unlocked—a practice too common in Berkeley.
    As I pushed it open, an explosion of sound forced me back. It smothered all other noises and there was no way to tell whether the room upstairs held one deaf old lady or a score of armed revolutionaries. I motioned Pereira to follow me up a staircase that rose steeply between fuchsia walls. Automatically, my hand poised over my holster.
    At the landing, vapors of incense thickened to a gray haze that curtained off the room. Squinting, I made out gaudy posters of Oriental deities along the walls of a room furnished only with floor pillows, a tape recorder, and four speakers. Facing a statue, a lone man sat cross-legged, unmoving.
    With Pereira waiting at the landing, I moved up beside the man, stood, and when there was no response, put a hand on his shoulder.
    His eyes opened slowly and seemed to glisten against the pale angularity of his face. Even his light brown curly hair seemed to soften. The hair started far back on his forehead, so that his features appeared to have been set low down on his head, rather like a short letter typed on an eleven-inch sheet. But unlike many such faces where eyes, nose, and mouth are tiny and seem to huddle together against the vastness of the skin around them, this man’s features were full—his eyes were blue, a royal blue that appeared just freshly painted on; his nose was fleshy with soft bumps below the bridge and at the bottom; and his lips were full. Indeed, his features would have been jammed on a smaller face.
    He wore a loose white outfit that appeared overlarge on his slight frame.
    “I’m Officer Smith,” I yelled, extending my shield through the smoky air.
    He glanced at it, and back to me, his face set in an expectant smile.
    From either side of the room, the noise crashed over my head, beginning a new triad. “The tape,” I shouted. “Could you turn it off?”
    It was a moment before he said, “Yes, of course,” in an uninfected voice that mimicked the three-part beat of the tape. Dipping his head to the poster before him, he rose and pushed in a button on the tape recorder.
    The sudden silence was startling. Traffic noises from College Avenue were inordinately clear. The bright colors of the posters seemed more intense, and even the pungent scent of the incense seemed sharper.
    “I’ll need your name,” I said in a voice that was much too loud.
    “Harvey Fallon.”
    I stared at his guru suit and I could feel a smile creeping onto my face.
    He smiled, too. “My students call me Sri Fallon. I try to keep things simple, but it’s a bit much to expect a novice to call his spiritual mentor Harvey.”
    I laughed cautiously, afraid my relief would bubble up in gales of unprofessional hilarity. Turning, I motioned to Pereira, and she headed back downstairs.
    Harvey Fallon’s face dropped into what appeared to be an unnaturally serious expression. “Have you brought a complaint?”
    “No. Were you expecting one?”
    “There have been some, other places I’ve lived. A chanting ashram is not always accepted as a neighbor.”
    “I can imagine,” I said. “But I’m here about Anne Spaulding.”
    “Who?”
    “Your downstairs neighbor.”
    “Is something the matter?”
    “She may be missing. This is just a preliminary investigation.” She could be dead, but Harvey Fallon didn’t need to know that. Taking out my pad, I asked, “Do you live alone?”
    “No one into expanding his consciousness lives alone. But you mean on the material plane, don’t you?” Without