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the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Mile long, broken up into two sections, the smaller one to the north allowing nudity because it was on federal land. Unsafe for swimming: large waves, riptides, and undertow. Original site of the Burning Man festival before it moved out into the Nevada desert in 1990. More data than he needed, but he’d filed it away just the same; you never knew when bits and pieces of background information might be useful.
    He’d looked at a dozen or so posted photographs, too, to get a visual sense of the place, among them several of the HAZARDOUS SURF sign and the little rocky peninsula that separated the two parts of the beach. So he knew what to expect when he swung off Lincoln Drive a few minutes before ten on Thursday morning, turned onto the road that led to the north parking lot.
    Last night’s wind had died down to a mild breeze and the day was already starting to warm. The good weather had brought people out early; the parking lot was already a third full and some of the picnic tables scattered through the cypress grove flanking the road on the inland side had been claimed. Runyon wore casual clothes—Levi’s, loose-fitting shirt, the only pair of shoes he owned that were appropriate for the beach. And he had the right props: a towel, a bottle of mineral water, and his Nikon camera strap-hung around his neck. His cell phone was in his shirt pocket.
    What he wouldn’t take with him was the .357 Magnum he kept locked in the glove compartment. For one thing, his carry permit didn’t extend to federal land. But even if it had, he wouldn’t have done it. You’d have to be an idiot to bring a loaded handgun onto a crowded public beach. Even a direct confrontation with the perp, if it was the perp who showed, would be foolish in a place like this. There were only two ways off the beach, this parking lot and the other one farther south; easy enough to follow his man when he left, no matter who he was, and brace him elsewhere.
    Runyon parked near the entrance to Battery Chamberlin, the remains of a WWII gun emplacement. The path down to the beach ran alongside the battery fence; he made his way past another warning sign, this one telling you straight out that people had died swimming and wading here. The beach was fairly narrow, extending south in a gentle curve to where the backsides of expensive Sea Cliff homes stretched along the seaward bluffs. The Google sites had touted panoramic views—the looming towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, the long sweep of the Marin Headlands across the Gate—but they might as well have been props, too, for all the attention he paid to them. He wandered down toward the surf ’s edge, then angled over toward the HAZARDOUS SURF sign to familiarize himself with the area first-hand.
    Some place for a blackmail exchange, out in the open and with no easy exit. Maybe the perp had picked it for that reason, but still it seemed a curious choice. There were plenty of secluded or semi-secluded places in this general area that offered more privacy.
    Runyon pretended to take photographs of the headlands, the bridge, the low sloping area of dunes and sea scrub that stretched from the beach back up to high cliffs and thick cypress forest. Then he backtracked past scattered groups of people to a spot next to a post-and-wire fence at the dunes’ edge—closer to the exit into the parking lot than to the warning sign. He spread his towel there, sat down in the sun. His wait would be almost an hour, but that was all right. Waiting didn’t bother him, and it was always better in a case like this to put yourself in position as early as possible. He sat with his thoughts cranked down but his senses alert, watching people come and go and stroll along the waterline, dogs playing in the surf and kids tossing Frisbees and footballs back and forth.
    The beach began to fill up as noon approached. Runyon’s scanning eye picked out