The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King

maybe she shouldn’t use the word civilization —“the Bay Area, you don’t have problems with vandals?”
    “Oh, some, sure. But we do have night patrols, and if anyone hears something they call us. That’s the advantage of live-ins. I admit, we have had a few problems with full-moon skateboarders, down the cliff road.”
    Kate felt herself go pale. “Kids ride skateboards down that road? At night ?”
    “Sometimes they use bicycle headlights strapped to their helmet. They’ll have a buddy drop them at the top and drive around to pick them up at the bottom. Or sometimes they’ll break the lock, that doesn’t happen often, it’s too much work. They only get one or two runs in before someone calls us.”
    She suppressed a shudder, and pulled her mind back from the sensation of flying out over a cliff in the moonlight.
    “Tell me about Battery DuMaurier.”
    “Actually, DuMaurier was the only single gun to be established in Fort Barry, a part of the expansion in—”
    Kate interrupted. “What I’m wondering is, why was the body left in that particular spot? I’d have said it’s hardly the first place that springs to mind.”
    “That’s for sure. If you want to leave a body here, Wallace is closer to the road, Alexander is more private, Mendell doesn’t even have padlocks to break. Maybe it was just the challenge?”
    Great, thought Kate. A killer with a quirk. “As far as you know, there haven’t been other bodies found there?”
    “We’ve had deaths in the park, sure. Heart attacks mostly. But specifically DuMaurier? Not that I know of.”
    Still, Kate told herself, you never know: They might do a five-minute search through the records and find that the tall, skinny man in the pajamas had been chief suspect in an assault at Battery DuMaurier two years before or something, and this would turn out to be the assault victim’s revenge and statement. Stranger things had happened.
    Kate thanked her informant and wandered off to look over the remains of Fort Barry. Forty minutes later the faint echo of a car horn reached her where she stood on the windy bluff overlooking the ocean. She looked back at the parking area, saw the figure standing beside the blue Jeep, and waved a wide response before starting back along the crumbling concrete of Mendell.
    When she reached the car, she found Lo-Tec Freeman and his new partner packing up their kits and Williams leaning against the Jeep, talking to Dan. As she came up, the Park CIB detective stood away from the car and shook hands with the ranger, saying, “I’ll be back Monday to look over the records. Thanks a lot.”
    “Happy to help. Have a good weekend, you two.”
    “Ready?” Chris asked Kate.
    “Sure. You got everything?”
    “Such as it was. We put another padlock on and sealed the door, but I don’t think there’s much there. However, I had a call from Hawkin to say that he had someone dig into the records, and it looks like maybe Gilbert lived alone.”
    “You want to go anyway?”
    “Oh yeah, just wanted you to know that we might not have to break the news to anyone. Al also asked me to tell you that he’d talked to your lieutenant, but you’re to phone him, too, when you’re finished at the house.”
    It did cheer the drive back across the bridge, thinking that they might not have to face the whole shock-and-grief process, and that it would only be a matter of finding what the house could tell them.
    And when they had eventually followed the young woman from the security company through the front door, what the house had to tell them was that, from gas lamps to icebox, its master had been a bizarrely committed devotee of a character of detective fiction.

 
    TWO
    L ee, you know anything about Sherlock Holmes?”
    Kate was sitting in the room with the flocked wallpaper, talking on her cell phone, a scrap of technology that felt like some intrusion from another universe. Still, Gilbert’s wicker chair was surprisingly comfortable, and the