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butterflies.
    “Come on, John. It’s not that big a deal. With a buck this big you want to make a mistake? The press will pick this thing apart like my brothers on a Thanksgiving turkey. And don’t get me started on the feds. You break procedure, they’re going to want to know why. They’ll load you up with about two dozen questions and a stack of paperwork that’ll keep you buried from here to Tuesday.”
    Thorpe’s mouth pinched as if swallowing a hundred different things he wanted to say, none of which was “you’re wrong.” Without uttering a word, he turned abruptly and started up the bluff. Molia followed. He might go back to the station and find Bert Cooperman in the locker room lifting weights, which Coop liked to do after his shift. The rookie officer might even tell him he spooked when he realized he was out of his jurisdiction—a rookie mistake. Sure, those were possible explanations. And the autopsy might also reveal that Joe Branick, special assistant and personal friend of the president of the United States, decided to put a gun to his head and blow away half his skull. At the moment, however, Molia’s gut was telling him that the likelihood of either scenario was less than that of his mother admitting that the Pope was fallible.
    At the top of the bluff, out of breath, he looked up at the sky to curse the sun and noticed the trace outline still visible in the pale morning sky.
    A full moon.

5
    Pacifica,
California
    A MOIST FOG had rolled off the Pacific Ocean in thorough disregard for summer and hung over the coastal town like a wet wool blanket, shading the streetlamps to a dull orange glow, the only color in an otherwise gunmetal-gray world that spread to the horizon—a monochrome that revealed no hint of the time of day. If the coldest winter Mark Twain ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, it was only because Twain had not had the courage to venture thirty miles south along the coast to the town of Pacifica. The fog in summer could chill so deep it made your bones hurt.
    The windshield wipers hummed a steady beat across the glass. Wisps of the fog blew thick and thin, shrouding the two-story apartment building like something in a horror film. Like most things in Sloane’s life, the building had been neglected and was in need of repair. The relentless moisture and salt air stained the cedar shingles with a white residue. Rust pitted the aluminum windows, which needed to be replaced. The exterior deck coatings were peeling, and there was evidence of dry rot in the carport overhang. Eight years earlier, Sloane had taken a real estate agent’s advice and used his growing wealth to purchase the eight-unit apartment building and the adjacent vacant lot. Developers were paying handsome prices to turn the apartments along the coast into condominiums, but then the economy crashed with the precipitous drop in interest rates, leaving Sloane holding a white elephant. When an apartment became vacant he moved in to save money, not expecting to be happy about it. But in the intervening years he had grown fond of the building, like a mangy old dog that he couldn’t consider getting rid of. He slept with the sliding glass door to his bedroom open, drifting off to the sound of waves crashing on the shore, finding comfort in the rhythmic roll and thumping beat of nature’s eternal clock, a reminder of time passing.
    Sloane turned off the ignition and sat back, numb.
    “That is some gift you have . . . what you did to those jurors.”
    Patricia Hansen’s words in the courtroom continued to haunt him. With practice, he had developed the fine art of stalling following a jury verdict, methodically packing his notebooks and exhibits, determined to be the last person out of the courtroom. He refrained from any backslapping and handshakes. For the family of the deceased, a defense verdict was like reliving their loved one’s death, and right or wrong, that made Sloane the Grim Reaper. He preferred to leave