The Art of Detection Read Online Free PDF

supervisor.”
    “How much has the site been disturbed?” asked Al apprehensively.
    “Very little—I put up tape first thing, called in backup, didn’t let anyone in at all, and none of my people did, either, so it was clean when Diana got here. Ranger Sandstrom, I mean. She sure didn’t let anyone through except for Williams and the coroner. And I don’t think the guys who found it did anything other than look in and see the body. They said they could tell from the smell that the guy was beyond help. They just went in far enough to make sure it was a human being and not a sea lion or something, then left.”
    “A surprisingly sensible reaction,” Hawkin commented.
    “I know. Second World War vets, you know—we get a lot of them, particularly for the Nike missile site tours. I guess once you smell a dead body, there isn’t much doubt about it the next time it happens.”
    That was very true. Still, both cops made silent mental notes to look at the vets, since people who “discovered” bodies in odd places were often the people who had put them there in the first place.
    “If they could smell the body in this weather, it’s been here a while,” Kate noted. “Any idea why he wasn’t found earlier?”
    “It’s been miserable and cold since Sunday, and this time of year we don’t get a lot of traffic through here anyway, except if there’s a nice weekend. The people at the conference tend to stick close to the buildings when it’s wet. Even the people with dogs keep closer to the parking lot when it’s stormy. Off the cuff, I’d say that if the body was here last Saturday, someone would have noticed it. For sure they’d have seen if the door was standing open. People just can’t resist a half-open door.”
    They had been climbing steadily for a quarter mile or so, and were now not only out of breath (two of them, at least) but also high enough to see past the nearby hills. The obliging ranger, aware of their breathing but too polite to mention it even obliquely, paused as if doing so was a regular part of the tour. It might even have been, considering what met their eyes when they obediently turned around to look: magnificent orange bridge, its cables rising and swooping to meet the incongruously forested landscape of the Presidio on the south side of the Golden Gate. Behind the dark vegetation rose the bright white sprawl of the city—low residences along the many hills of the city, high-rises jostling for air in the downtown area to the left. A cloud of sailboats dotted the water inside the bridge, while a ship piled with shipping containers pushed its way out to sea. A multicolored parade of minuscule cars scurried across the bridge; the hillside where they stood felt very far from the world.
    A person tended to forget, Kate reflected, living among San Francisco’s high-rise valleys and natural hills, that the city was a major port on the edge of a vast continent. Most commercial shipping had shifted across the Bay to the container-cargo derricks of Oakland and Alameda, but the port, along with the Sacramento River that led up toward the gold fields, was the reason the city existed. Standing here, with the panorama of Bay and city spread out at their feet, the reminder was powerful.
    “You have got one gorgeous place to work,” Kate told Dan.
    “Yeah, this is a real hardship post,” the ranger agreed with a grin.
    “A miracle the developers didn’t grab it when the Army stepped out,” Al said. “Can’t you imagine what a view like that would bring?”
    “It was a very close thing, like with the Presidio,” Dan told them. “Although that’s going to have to pay for itself. With any luck, this’ll be kept natural.”
    “It’s almost enough to restore your faith in the world,” Al said, not even sounding very sarcastic.
    “You might say that the view is what attracted the Army in the first place—a strategic attraction, of course, not an aesthetic one: Between these guns and the