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pointing to it. So they brought in a lot of dirt to cover them with—which, as you can tell, various tree seeds were happy to find—and those emplacements built afterwards were harder to spot from the air.”
    Kate tried to think if the West Coast had ever been directly attacked, other than the rumors of Japanese submarines. In the end, she asked.
    “There was one gun fired at a British ship,” Dan told her, “back at the end of the nineteenth century. Missed, of course, since the guns weren’t moveable, so the crews had to more or less hope a ship would drift in front of the flight path. But the ship moved on, so they claimed success.”
    With that note of martial absurdity, the ranger seemed to think he had delivered enough of a lecture for this point on the tour, and turned to resume the trek uphill.
    “Oh,” Al said in the direction of the ranger’s broad back, “I nearly forgot. Your woman back there along the road? She said she needed a coffee break and a toilet. Looked pretty cold.”
    “Damn, I forgot all about her—normal routine is shot pretty much to hell today. Thanks for telling me, I’d better go spell her. Here, you see where everyone’s been walking?” He pointed at the continuation of their route, well to the side of the worn soil of the official path. The damp grasses lay thoroughly beaten down by the passage of many feet. “Just follow that path, okay?”
    “Sure, we’ll be fine,” Al told him. The ranger trotted easily down the hill, quick and surefooted despite the slick grass. The two detectives watched him go, then turned their backs on the view and continued up the hill toward the stand of misshapen trees growing in the disturbed soil around a gun.
    Yet another ranger waited at the top of the hill, making Kate wonder if there was anyone left to lead a tour. She stood near a solitary wooden picnic table, on which sat two men with Marin County logos on their jackets. The two Coroner’s men were trying hard not to shiver in front of the pretty young ranger, who was wearing a jacket adequate for Arctic service.
    “You the San Francisco detectives?” she greeted them cheerfully as they signed the logbook.
    “That’s right,” Al told her.
    “Inspector Williams is waiting for you, just in there.”
    She gestured toward an opening in the hillside, a dark concrete maw whose square opening was set with the foot-high words BATTERY DUMAURIER. The gray concrete echoed with the roar of a generator, set at the far end of the tunnel into the hillside. Halfway down, the generator’s cord led through a door that was standing open a crack, bright light spilling from around its edges. Al shone his flashlight along the doorframe, where a mighty padlock dangled uselessly, connecting a hasp to one end but not the other. The frame had been dusted, but from the evenness of the powder, it did not look as if Crime Scene had lifted any prints. Al pushed gently at the door, and they stepped into the gathering of death professionals.
    At the increase in sound from the door, the four people inside looked around. The nearest, the only one in uniform, moved briskly to intercept them, slowing when Al flipped open his badge. The two kneeling on the floor turned back to their tasks, but the fourth, a man in jeans and a nice warm-looking fur-lined bomber jacket, rose from his squat against the wall and came to the door.
    “Hey, Al,” he said, shaking Al’s hand, “I was glad it was you on call. Chris Williams,” he said to Kate.
    Kate shook the man’s hand and offered her name in exchange.
    “Come on in and let’s shut this door so we can hear ourselves think. We won’t be long, Crime Scene’s just finishing, but I wanted to keep the body here so you could see it.”
    “Was that the Marin Coroner’s van outside?” Al asked, although the question was more Why is Marin here? than it was Was that Marin? Williams had no problem picking up the real question.
    “They’d already answered the call when my