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look at Hawkin’s badge, then pointed them to a spot at the end of an untidy line of cars, some official, some civilian. He had been standing and talking with a dozen or so men, women, and children, all of them dressed for the weather, but he left the residents behind and walked after the car, and was waiting when their doors opened.
    “Morning,” he said with the same chronic cheerfulness the woman ranger had shown. “You’re here to look at our body?”
    He might have been offering sightseers a glimpse of a rare visiting bird or excavated whale skeleton. Kate half expected to be handed an explanatory flyer.
    “Inspectors Hawkin and Martinelli, SFPD,” Hawkin supplied, retrieving his heavy coat from the car’s backseat and fighting the wind for possession of its flying sleeves. Kate, in the lee of the car, had an easier time of it, but once hers was buttoned, she immediately wished she’d brought a second to go over it. And maybe worn ski pants instead of khaki trousers—the sun was out for the moment in this slice of the headlands, but the fog was a stone’s throw out to sea and the clammy air sliced right through garment and flesh, going for the bone. She pulled her knit hat down over her ears and raised her voice to Hawkin.
    “That looks like Lo-Tec’s car.” The incongruous cheery green classic Porsche parked between a Marin County coroner’s van and the SFPD crime lab van could only belong to the SFPD’s crime-scene inspector, Lawrence Freeman, known with affectionate irony as Lo-Tec, for his addiction to cutting-edge technology. Lo-Tec was small, neat, gay, hyperefficient, and prone to singing softly as he worked, usually Fifties tunes to which he invented his own words. “Traces of Love, On the Sheets,” was a classic, published on his website.
    “The Park crime lab consists mostly of a drying room,” Al commented. “They’d have called either us or Marin in for this.”
    “And speaking of which, are you taking your binder?”
    The leather binder, containing notepad and various forms, was a statement of authority at a crime scene. Taking it would be tantamount to saying they were going to need it.
    “Maybe we should leave them here for the time being, until we’re sure.” Kate nodded, and slammed the door: It didn’t do to appear grabby.
    It felt odd to be approaching a murder scene with nothing in her hand, but Kate buried her gloved hands in her pockets, feeling the small spiral notebook she’d stuck there, and trudged after Hawkin.
    The path wound up the grass toward the top of the hill; halfway up they were intercepted by yet another ranger, older than the others they’d seen. He strode along the hillside from an angle, putting out his hand as he came up to them.
    “Dan Culpepper,” he said, pumping Al’s hand with vigor. “Park Police Patrol—I was the responding officer this morning, though the investigator’s here now. He asked me to bring you up.”
    “Al Hawkin, Kate Martinelli,” Al supplied. “SFPD.” Dan transferred his powerful grip to Kate’s hand.
    “Crime Scene’s here?” Kate asked when she had retrieved her squashed fingers.
    “They’ve been here for hours. In fact, I think they’re nearly finished.”
    “When was the body found?”
    “First thing this morning, a little after eight. Two guys here for the Bunkers tour at ten were poking around the emplacement and noticed that the padlock was broken. They opened the door, saw the body, one of them stayed here to make sure nobody disturbed it while the other came down to the visitor’s center to phone it in. I got the call, checked it out, and kept control of the scene until the supervisor got here—that’s Diana Sandstrom. Inspector Williams arrived about twenty minutes later, and your Crime Scene people just after that. The Marin coroner came, and half the people with scanners in the county—everyone from the sheriff to the local dog-walker—wanted a look. Your photographer’s been and gone, and the