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Beautiful! Carver thought. He was sitting by his office window, watching two women walk past on the other side of Magellan. They were young and elegantly built, and the warm breeze off the Atlantic molded their lightweight dresses to them as they leaned forward gracefully and tried in vain to hold their hairdos in place. If I were a painter, he thought, I’d do a “Women in the Wind” series of canvases. But he wasn’t a painter. A couple of rooms long ago, and a house once. That was it.

As the women passed from view beyond the cream-colored stucco Del Moray courthouse and jail, Carver wondered if really he appreciated them because of his bad leg, because they moved so beautifully and with an ease he now felt only in the water when he took his therapeutic morning swims in the sea.

“I knocked,” a voice said, “but nobody answered.”

Carver turned away from the window and the outside glare, swiveling slightly in his desk chair. The man who’d entered his office was tall, lanky, gray-haired, with pale blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. He had broad shoulders without much meat on them, and thick wrists with veins like fire hoses. He had to be pushing seventy, an aged Viking.

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