"If we forget them, then something is wrong with us," I said.

Roche emerged from the locker room looking like a disposable astronaut in his face shield and paper suit. He kept his distance from the gurney but got as close as he could to me.

I said to him, "I've looked inside the boat. What items have you removed?"

"His gun and wallet. I got both of them here with me," he replied. "Over there in the bag. How many pairs of gloves you got on?"

"What about a camera, film, anything like that?"

"What's in the boat is all there is. Looks like you got on more than one pair of gloves." He leaned close, his shoulder pressing against mine.

"I've double-gloved." I moved away from him.

"I guess I need another pair."

I unzipped Eddings' soggy dive boots and said, "They're in the cabinet over there."

With a scalpel I opened the wet suit and dive skin at the seams because they would be too difficult to pull off a fully rigorous body. As I freed him from neoprene, I could see that he was uniformly pink due to the cold. I removed his blue bikini bathing suit, and Danny and I lifted him onto the autopsy table, where we broke the rigidity of the arms and began taking more photographs.

Eddings had no injuries except several old scars, mostly on his knees. But biology had dealt him an earlier blow called hypospadias, which meant his urethra opened onto the underside of his penis instead of in the center. This moderate defect would have caused him a great deal of anxiety, especially as a boy. As a man he may have suffered sufficient shame that he was reluctant to have sex.

Certainly, he had never been shy or passive during professional encounters. In fact, I had always found him quite confident and charming, when someone like me was rarely charmed by anyone, least of all a journalist. But I also knew appearances meant nothing in terms of how people behaved when two of them were alone, and then I tried to stop right there.