G us stared down at the body and tried to put together the steps that had led them here. Ellen Svaco had come to them looking for a necklace she’d lost in the park. After that, nothing made sense. There was an armed mime, a walk of shame in tissue paper diapers, and now a dead client. Not to mention a near case of heatstroke and wilderness-induced panic attack and hallucination.

For one happy moment Gus let himself speculate that he was still hallucinating. He wasn’t in Isla Vista at all, but still back in La Canada, wandering on that sun-blasted nature trail; he had dreamed everything that happened afterwards. It made a kind of sense, as most of his non-wilderness-related night-mares involved a spell of public nudity, and the toilet-cover diapers Shawn had made for them were humiliating enough to show up in one of his worst dreams.

But no one else in the house was acting like it was a dream. Shawn was carefully studying the room, while Lassiter, kneeling by the body, was barking orders into his cell phone. When he was sure no one was looking at him, Gus glanced down casually and made sure that his clothes were firmly in place. They were. This was reality.

Lassiter snapped his cell phone shut and stood up, seeming to notice for the first time that Shawn and Gus were still in the room.

“You two, out,” he snapped.

“Make that three.”

Gus, Shawn, and Lassiter all wheeled around to the front door. The man standing there was over six feet tall with the bleached blond hair and ropy muscles that come from a lifetime of playing beach volleyball. His uniform seemed to have been designed to show off his physique-short khaki pants that exposed most of his thighs and a baby blue polo shirt that was tight across the pecs and featured the stencil of a badge and official logo Gus couldn’t make out from across the room. A holstered gun hung off his thigh.