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a half-dozen other seniors. Police are investigating the possibility of a drug involvement.’’
    As she spoke, the tape ran again, in slow motion, then again, freezing on the boy’s face—not a man, Anna thought, just a child. He hung there in midair, screaming forever on Jason’s tape. The Madsons, from Tilly, Oklahoma, were also shown, but their faces at the window were cut into the jump, so it appeared that the Madsons were watching—as they had been, though not when the tape was shot.
    At the end of the report, the tape was run again, and Anna recognized the symptoms: They had a hit on their hands.
    Too bad about the kid, but . . . she’d learned to separate herself from the things she covered. If she didn’t, she’d go crazy. And she hadn’t seen the jump, only the aftermath, the heap of crumpled clothing near the pool. Less than she would have seen sitting at her TV, eating her breakfast, like a few million Angelenos were about to do. Anna drifted away from the television, sat at the piano and started running scales. Scales were a form of meditation, demanding, but also a way to free herself from the tension of the night.
    And she could keep an eye on the television while she worked through them. Five minutes after the report on the jump, the blonde anchor, now idiotically cheerful, said something about animal commmandos, and a version of the animal rights tape came up.
    The tape had been cut up and given a jittery, silent-movie jerkiness, a Laurel-and-Hardy quality, as the masked animal rights raiders apparently danced with the squealing pig, and dumped the garbage can full of mice. Then the Rat was bowled over by the pig—they ran him falling, crawling, knocked down again; and falling, crawling and knocked down again: they had him going up and down like a yo-yo.
    The guards, who’d come and gone so quickly, had been caught briefly by both Creek and Jason. Now they were repeatedly shown across the concrete ramp and up the loading dock; and then the tape was run backward, so they seemed to run backward . . . Keystone Kops.
    The tape was funny, and Anna grinned as she watched. No sign of the bloodied kid, though. No matter: he’d get his fifteen seconds on another channel.
    ‘‘Good night,’’ Anna said, pointed the remote at the television and killed it.
    She worked on scales for another ten minutes, then closed the lid of the piano, quickly checked on the back to see that the yellow dehumidifier light wasn’t blinking and headed up to the bedroom.
    In the world of the night crew, roaming Los Angeles from ten o’clock until dawn, Anna was tough.
    In more subtle relationships, in friendly talk from men she didn’t know, at parties, she felt awkward, uneasy, and walked away alone. This shyness had come late: she hadn’t always been like that.
    The one big affair of her life—almost four years long, now seven years past—had taken her heart, and she hadn’t yet gotten it back.
    She was asleep within minutes of her head touching her pillow. She didn’t dream of anyone: no old lovers, no old times.
    But she did feel the space around herself, in her dreams. Full of friends, and still, somehow . . . empty.

three

    The two-faced man hurried down the darkened pier, saw the light in the side window, in the back. He carried an eighteeninch Craftsman box-end wrench, the kind used in changing trailer-hitch balls. The heft was right: just the thing. No noise.
    He stopped briefly at the store window, looked in past the Closed sign. All dark in the sales area—but he could see light coming from under a closed door that led to the back.
    He beat on the door, a rough, frantic bam-bam-bambambam.
    ‘‘Hey, take an aspirin.’’ The two-faced man nearly jumped out of his shoes. A black man was walking by, carrying a bait bucket, a tackle box and a long spinning rod.
    ‘‘What?’’ Was this trouble? But the fisherman was walking on, out toward the end of the pier, shaking his head. ‘‘Oh, okay.’’
    He