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once, hard, in the stomach. The air exploded from her lungs in one whoosh and she sagged like a pile of rags. Beringer caught her easily, levered the door of the Taurus open behind him and swung her onto the passenger seat. He folded the long, lovely legs into the car, dropped her plastic bag of groceries at her feet and closed the door with the door lock already set. Edie’s face was pale behind the window, her mouth open and struggling to suck air like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
    Walking quickly around the front of the Taurus, Beringer scanned the parking lot. The woman in the station wagon was driving away. No one was looking his way, only a few stragglers in sight intent on their own small errands. Into the Ford, all doors locked, the wide package tape ready in its holder, slap it around her wrists, taping them together in her lap. Tape around her ankles too; good, no trouble now. Tape her mouth as well? She was coming out of it a little, panic leaping into her eyes when she realized her hands and feet were tied. He didn’t really want to tape that pretty mouth, he had better plans for it, so he hit her on the side of the face, holding the roll of steel balls, and saw her lights go out.
    Driving slowly, the excitement singing in his blood, Beringer left the shopping center and drove south, following the coastal route on the ocean side of the burning hills.

Four
     
    B IKE TRAILS HAD been laid out just off the coastal highway south of San Carlos, where the road traversed some protected wetlands, a sanctuary for migrating birds. The trails were popular with weekend bicyclists. There was the ocean off to the west, beyond the highway, and a quarter mile of sand dunes, and inland there were some twenty thousand acres of relatively untouched nature teeming with ducks and cranes, occasional Canadian geese and a variety of smaller birds.
    Harry Malkowski, a reed-thin chemistry student in his third year at San Carlos College, tried to get in a full fifty-mile bicycle run every weekend, following the trails south from San Carlos along the coastline. He liked to get out early, before the trails were packed with other cyclists or the joggers who never seemed to get the idea that the bike trails were for people on bikes, not on foot.
    This Saturday he was out early as usual, a thermos of coffee strapped to the carrier behind the seat of his Yamaha ten-speed, the sun not yet up when he hit the trail shortly after five o’clock. The hoped-for onshore flow of air had moved in late Friday night, bringing early morning coastal clouds and the cooler temperatures that meant relief for the firefighters in the hills. Unlike many beachgoers who loved the dry, warm Santa Ana winds and hated the usual coastal clouds and damp fog, Harry enjoyed these misty mornings. They muffled the beat of city noise behind him, leaving him alone with the distant crashing of the surf, invisible beyond the dunes, and the tranquil beauty of the wetlands as far as he could see. This morning veils of mist curled over the marshes like the fire smoke that blanketed the San Carlos hills. Through the mist Harry glimpsed a family of ducks swimming along one of the estuaries, a white crane standing one-legged in shallow water as still as a post, a colony of mudhens, and there, by God, yes, two honkers drifting on the water, must have flown in during the night.
    Where the highway spanned one of the many creeks that threaded through the wetlands and the bike trail ran parallel to the road over its own wooden bridge, Harry saw the body. Shock pelted through him. He veered to the right, nearly colliding with the railing of the overpass. He stared down at the foot of the highway bridge, his heart pounding. A young woman, naked, lay facedown in the mud on the bank of the creek. For Harry, whose nights were often filled with fantasy images of naked women, there was nothing titillating about the sight of this one at all. She looked pathetic rather than sexy lying there.