The Suspect

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On a clear, still and silent Sunday at the end of the second week in September, a fifty-year-old outdoor writer named Stuart Gorman sat on a flat-topped rock at the edge of a crystalline lake set in a bowl of granite near the California Desolation Wilderness Area a few miles southwest of Lake Tahoe. The lake's mirrored surface, unsullied by even the trace of a breeze, perfectly reflected the opposite shoreline-more granite, studded with pine and a purple sky above.

Stuart could barely be seen to breathe. In the warm afternoon, he'd removed his T-shirt and placed it beside him. Now he wore only his hiking boots and a pair of brown shorts. Though he had a good head of medium-length dark brown hair, the gray in his two-day stubble and on his chest betrayed the bare fact of his age. Without the gray, the developed torso, perhaps dangerously tan, could have been that of a man half Stuart's years. His solid barrel chest spoke of hours spent outdoors in vigorous exercise; there was a hollow of tight skin under his rib cage where most men his chronological age carried their fat.

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