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haven’t paid their tickets because they didn’t know they got them.”
    “And if this hits the newspapers, no one in town is going to pay a ticket. They’re all going to say theirs got lost,” Murakawa predicted.
    “And the people who have paid are really going to be pissed,” I said. It would be the big brouhaha of the year, the kind of fuss that Berkeley was famous for. “It’ll make a great companion piece to the main story for all those reporters who’ve wasted their Sunday night here: Hostage Negotiation Team outwitted by dummy.”
    “You think this is the work of our meter maid vandal?” Samson asked hesitantly.
    No one answered, but I would have put money on the same thought filling thirty heads: a news photo of the deflated dummy with a caption TICKETED TO DEATH. I’d have upped the ante to cover thirty minds sure that the Berkeley Hostage Negotiation Team was going to be the laughingstock of the Bay Area, and the press was going to make the whole department a circus until we found the perp who’d collected this load of parking tickets and the perp (maybe one and the same) who’d been staging pranks on parking enforcement carts all over the city.
    Bugging meter maids was one thing, but this prank was something else. I couldn’t have said if it seemed that way because this time it was I who’d been had, or if, in fact, it signalled a turn from the playful to the malicious. And indicated a mind that couldn’t see the difference.

CHAPTER 3
    I F THERE HAD BEEN any way to avoid it, we certainly would have. But the field operations center was at the Arlington. We had to come back there. And thus, there was no way to avoid having the entire Negotiation and Tac teams emerge from the canyon debacle up the chute, person by hostage-less person, with the regularity of baseballs from an automatic batting machine. After the dark of the canyon, as each one of us hit the blinding lights of four TV crews, we stopped, blinked, and looked like rabbits stunned by headlights.
    The adrenaline rush was gone. Now I felt drained and had one of those dull caffeine-hangover headaches that only throb sporadically—as if to remind me that I’d let myself get too caught up in this operation. Every guy on the team looked worn-out and surly; I was willing to bet that at some point in the last hour every one of them had thought that the “victim” was a woman like his aunt or mother or grandmother. But I was the only one on the team who’d thought the “victim” was someone like me.
    “What’s the story down there?” Alison Saunders, one of the reporters, shouted leaning far across the second line of tape—the outer perimeter. Behind her cars were still gunning motors for the sharp uphill spurt to the upper lanes of the Arlington. Brakes squealed in the distance as gawkers, drawn by news bulletins, filled the curbs on the far side of the Arlington and doubtless all the streets that fed into it. The crowd had quadrupled in the hour I’d been in the canyon. Earlier it had been mostly neighbors who’d wandered out with glasses of wine. By now some of them had gone home and retrieved the bottles. And there were the crisis junkies who’d grabbed windbreakers and helmets and hopped on bikes, plus the normal array of Berkeleyans: bejeaned ponytailed guys in old flannel shirts and down vests, college girls with used rabbit coats and bare feet in Birkenstocks, shoppers from the stores a block up the Arlington still clutching grocery bags. Clearly our operation was the social occasion of the day.
    “Hey, Smith, what went on down there?” Saunders insisted.
    Ignoring her, I huddled with Inspector Doyle and McKinley, the field press officer liaison. They’d be the up-front officers with the press. Grayson moved in next to McKinley.
    “So you lost him, Grayson,” Doyle muttered.
    “Not us, sir. He was probably gone long before we got the go-ahead. The only flashlight signal Smith thinks she saw was over an hour ago. And