"You up for it?" He repeated the question a third time.

She swallowed some cold tea from the bottom of her cup, testing her throat. Then she wrote on the pad in front of her what she had written before. / didn't see his face. Then, Tea? Stalling.

Mike got up and disappeared out the door to ask someone to get it.

The features Greg used-noses, mouths, eye and eyebrow shapes, foreheads, jawlines, head and hand and limbs and body shapes-could be manipulated in a computer program, but he also could do it manually, creating faces and forms from laminated flip cards that he sketched into his own more lifelike portrait. Naturally, he ignored her denial. "We'll start on the shape of his head and his body type then, okay?"

April closed her eyes, trying to conjure an impression of size from a blocked memory. Why were they bothering with this? They knew she'd gotten hit on the head in her fall. For how many seconds she'd lost consciousness she didn't know. What she did know was that lost consciousness also often meant a loss of memory of precipitating events as well. Sometimes it was a merciful thing that those minutes of actual violence disappeared forever, but it was not good for law enforcement.

What April remembered was her annoyance at Bernardino for leaving without saying good-bye, the wet blanket of fog on the street when she left the restaurant to follow him. She remembered hearing the sound of the metal leash. A man had been walking his dog, some kind of big dog. She didn't remember now what kind. The two had passed her. Now that she thought about it, it seemed odd. How could they have missed Bernardino when she had almost tripped over his body?