by Susan Dunlap
“What about your parking tickets? Deckhands didn’t do that.”
Kiernan laughed. “Marc Rosten? I was right about him, that he’d get me for invading his office. I’m only thankful I got off as cheaply as that. In medical school, practical jokes had been a whole lot more pointed.” Rather than feeling annoyed at the ticket episode, she found it comforting to discover that traces of the young, passionate Marc Rosten had survived despite a job he regretted. Neither he nor she had the job they’d dreamed of. The evolution had been good for her; maybe it was more suitable for him than he was willing to admit.
“Where is this Platform Nina?”
“Up in Alaska. But that doesn’t matter. Policy is policy. And once the California voters see this memo, they won’t allow these guys to get anywhere near our state.”
Kiernan leaned back against the car door. “Can you imagine what the oil companies would pay for this? No wonder Robin Matucci was so hot for it.”
Tchernak laughed. “God, I can hardly wait to see Jessica’s face. Piles of paper will go flying around her office. She’ll be talking ten miles a minute, racing out to Baker Beach and having the biggest press conference of her life.” Tchernak’s mouth was actually quivering. He dove across the seat and hugged Kiernan. “She’ll stand there on the beach and sift the sand through her fingers and know that that sand will never be covered with oil.”
Kiernan tugged on Tchernak’s beard to pull him closer, gave him a blowsy kiss, and said, “I just hope this memo won’t make you such big stuff in the environmental world that you’ll never make me another mahimahi-and-arugula salad.”
Ezra shoved his way into the front seat and pointedly nudged the car door. Kiernan opened it and followed the big dog onto the grass. The early morning sun was streaking through the redwoods. Tchernak walked up the bluff and stood, his arms braced against a redwood bole, stretching his thigh muscles. Then he sprawled under a tree and tossed a stick for Ezra who, for once, disdained it. The wolfhound circled behind Kiernan, pushed between her and Tchernak, and flopped down, flinging one enormous paw across her knee.
The red front door of the house opened, and the sheriff’s deputies escorted Maureen and Garrett outside. In the clear light, Maureen looked exhausted. Garrett, however, appeared rested, neat in a fresh plaid shirt and chinos. His stride was long and steady, that of a man on a normal, everyday errand. The deputies merely looked tired.
Garrett veered toward the pool. He walked to the edge and looked down at the broken pieces of cement. Was he seeing the pool as it had been when he was a child, or was he looking at the empty, useless space that would grow more dangerous, more irretrievable with each new season?
Maureen followed and paused beside him on the edge, then stiffened and moved a few feet away.
One of the deputies called Garrett. Garrett started toward him. Kiernan was still looking at the abandoned pool, but she could hear Garrett’s voice.
“Now where is it we know each other from?”
A Biography of Susan Dunlap
Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.
Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.
One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.
After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.
Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.
In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.
Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”
Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.
In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”
Dunlap’s dog Seumas at eight weeks old. “We’d had him two weeks and he was already in charge, happily biting my hand (see my grimace),” she says. “He lived for sixteen good, well-tended years.”
Dunlap started practicing yoga in 1969 and received her instructor certification in 1981, after a three-week intensive course in India with B. K. S. Iyengar. Here she demonstrates the uttanasa pose (the basic standing forward bend) for her students.
Seumas and Dunlap in 1988: “He was an old guy by this time, who had better things to do than be a photo prop. I think his expression says it all.”
Dunlap relished West Coast life. “This is what someone who grew up in the snow of the East Coast dreams of . . . the California life!”
For her fiftieth birthday, Dunlap and a group of close writer friends went to Santa Cruz for the weekend. Seated above from left to right: Marilyn Wallace, Marcia Muller, Dunlap, and Shelley Singer. Seated on the floor: Judith Gruber (pen name Gillian Roberts), Linda Grant, and Lia Matera.
The Sisters-in-Crime presidents and former presidents—known as the Goddesses—always gather for a picture at conventions. One year, Dunlap had to miss the gathering. Her friends, knowing how much she wanted to be there, photoshopped her into the image.
Dunlap’s last typewriter, before she happily switched to writing on a computer. “Plotting is one of the aspects of writing I really like—everything’s new, all gates open, all roads wide,” she says. “But it involves a great deal of data with connections that are not always linear. On paper or white board or with notes taped on corkboard—I tried them all—it was cumbersome. Using the computer was magic.”
Acknowledgements
A BOOK LIKE THIS requires a lot of research and the help of busy, generous people. I would like to thank N. Tom Siebe, Chief Deputy Coroner of Sonoma County, for his expertise and patience, and San Francisco Coroner Dr. Boyd Stephens for his superb suggestions. (All my characters at the morgue herein are totally fictional.)
Thanks to Dr. Charles Yingling, professor of psychology and neuropsychological surgery, for his insights and graciousness.
To Ronald Lynn, oceanographer at Scripps Institute, for his technical help.
And to Captain Bob Gallia of El Dorado I in Berkeley, Linda Harrington, “Admiral” of bird rescue in Seward, Alaska, gymnast Natasha Hall, and Mike Lynch at Golden Gate Gymnastics.
And to Jennie Arndt for her unusual perception.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text o
f this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1991 by Susan Dunlap
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-5056-3
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY SUSAN DUNLAP
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
follow us: @openroadmedia and Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
SIGN UP NOW at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters