like being inside a hollow sky-scraper. It also made you see how high it was off the water.

Jimmy walked along the shore on the paved path toward the angular brick fort. It had been built at the beginning of the Civil War, to guard the mouth of the Bay, set there long before the bridge. It was a Monday and still early, and tourist traffic was light. As vacationers’ destinations go, Fort Point seemed not to mean much to non-Americans. The crowd, what there was of it, seemed like Kansas people, men in short cargo pants with skinny white legs who looked like they’d been up since four thirty, their portly wives, and kids in Disneyland tees and knit Target shorts the colors of the houses back in the Marina District.

Jimmy knew Fort Point was a gathering place for Sailors. By night anyway. They weren’t out now, or at least they wouldn’t be expected to be, only the ones looking for trouble.

But George Leonidas was there.

“Hello, sir,” Jimmy said, surprising himself with the deference, the formality.

The grieving father, if that’s what he was here for, grieving, was sitting on a bench next to the freshly painted guest services restroom. He was wearing the same clothes, but a fresh version of the brown cuffed trousers and the white short-sleeved shirt. And the brown wing tips. He sat with his legs open, his forearms on his knees, one hand wrapped around the fist of the other, as if holding it back from doing what it wanted to do. His eyes were on the water but unfocused. He hadn’t seen Jimmy until he spoke. But he didn’t seemed surprised to come upon him here. Maybe nothing surprised him anymore. He nodded a greeting, tipped his head up.

When Jimmy got a good look at his eyes, it was hard to think of what to say to him.

“How’s your wife doing?”

Leonidas nodded.

“Better than you, I bet,” Jimmy said. He didn’t mean it harshly, but Leonidas bowed up a little, seemed about ready to come at him, to say something, but didn’t. He knew it was true.

Jimmy looked down at him. I shouldn’t have told you, he thought. He almost said it out loud. This is what you get, when you tell them. It doesn’t make it easier; it makes it harder. The truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it wraps you in a whole new set of chains.

“Why’d you come down here?” Jimmy asked him.

“A kid on the waterfront told me to. Works at one of the crab joints.”

“Told you what?”

“That he thought he saw my Selene here.”

“Selene.”

“Christina,” George Leonidas said. “I called her Selene.”

He suddenly looked at Jimmy, very directly. “I never saw Melina,” he said. “My other girl. Is she the same as . . . as what you said? Like Christina?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. Stop thinking about what I told you. Forget me.”

Jimmy watched as the Greek’s eyes left him, went to the underside of the bridge, out across the bowed line of it toward the center.

“There were three more. Went off the Gate,” he said.

“I know,” Jimmy said.

“It’s not anything I ever thought of. Before,” Leonidas said, still looking where he was looking. “I was in the army. In Vietnam. You see people die, and it changes the way you think. You think different. You just want to come home, work hard, have your house.”

Jimmy thought of the pink rooms Duncan Groner had described, the girls’ rooms.

“One of them was an old lady,” Leonidas said. “Ninety.”

“Go home,” Jimmy said. “Go back over to El Cerrito. Stay away from the City, from places like this.”

Leonidas nodded. He got up, still nodding. Jimmy got the sense that something had scared him, something he’d felt in himself, an idea, an impulse. He was grateful to be yanked back to himself. He offered his hand, and Jimmy shook it.

Jimmy watched him walk away, watched him until the Greek was behind the wheel of the Cadillac, in the first slot in the lot. He’d been up all night, the first one there. Jimmy watched until he saw the Caddy’s wide hood dip at one corner, when the engine started.

He stayed on the bench for a minute, then made a pass through the fort, walked across the open courtyard, but it was all just sea breezes and sunbeams.

He didn’t know what he was looking for anyway.

Coroners’ offices have less security than you’d think. Jimmy walked in a back door, off the loading dock. He came