The city cops were a salt-and-pepper team: a wide black man and a taller, skinnier white woman. The black man seemed to be the senior officer. He got a sealed package of latex gloves out of his glove compartment and snapped them onto his beefy hands, then moved in to examine the body. He checked the body’s wrist for a pulse, then shifted its head and tried again at the base of the neck. “Christ,” he said. “Karen?”

His partner came closer and played a flashlight beam onto the face. “He got a good punch in, that’s for sure,” the woman said, indicating the wound Pierre’s keys had made. Then she blinked. “Say, didn’t we bust him a few weeks ago?”

The black man nodded. “Chuck Hanratty. Scum.” He shook his head, but it seemed more in wonder than out of sadness. He rose to his feet, snapped off his gloves, and looked briefly at the campus cop, a chubby white-haired Caucasian who was averting his eyes from the body. He then turned to Pierre and Molly. “Either of you hurt?”

“No,” said Molly, her voice quavering slightly. “Just shaken up.”

The female cop was scanning the area with her flashlight. “That the knife?” she said, looking at Pierre and pointing at the bowie, which had landed at the base of another redwood.

Pierre looked up, but didn’t seem to hear.

“The knife,” she said again. “The knife that killed him.”

Pierre nodded.

“He was trying to kill us,” said Molly.

The black man looked at her. “Are you a student here?”

“No, I’m faculty,” she said. “Psychology department.”

“Name?”

“Molly Bond.”

He jerked his head at Pierre, who was still staring into space. “And him?”

“He’s Pierre Tardivel. He’s with the Human Genome Center, up at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.”

The officer turned to the campus cop. “You know these two?”

The old guy was slowly recovering his composure; this sort of thing was a far cry from getting cars towed from handicapped parking spots. He shook his head.