Murder in Marina Del Rey

"The hour of the wolf is the hour between night and day when death stalks the Earth and the wolf lurks outside the door." From Swedish folklore From the opening of the novel: It's a sunny day over Marina del Rey. Sailboats are in their slips and on the ocean. People are sunning themselves on the beach. Linda Collins is sunning herself on the beach. She is long, lean and tan and is wearing a white bikini swimsuit. Her blonde hair is long over her shoulders. Her eyes are blue, and they are set into a softly beautiful face. "That's me. I'm Linda Collins." She gets up from the sand. "I recently had the experience of cracking up, meaning I had a nervous breakdown." She puts on her beach cover-up. "I'm doing better now." She folds her towel. "I do have, however, PTSD." She rolls up her mat. "I got it from a violent, deadly incident that happened around me a few months ago. That caused my nervous breakdown." She puts her beach bag on her shoulder. "I work for James Bridges, on his sailboat, which is his office." Linda walks off along the sand. "He's in Military Intelligence, though he pretends he's retired, and he masks what he really does in Military Intelligence now by working behind the false front of being a private detective." She makes a gesture with her hand like, He's not fooling me. "He connected me up with a military psychiatrist, who was an old friend of his, and the military psychiatrist is now treating me for my PTSD." She walks over to a trash can. "I have a shrink." She tosses an empty water bottle into the trash can. "How strange." She again walks along the sand. "My psychiatrists tells me, among other things, to sit in the sun, so I do, sometimes on the sand and sometimes on the deck of James' sailboat." She heads towards the walkway running along the far edge of the beach. "I was making progress dealing with the deadly trauma I went through, and then I had a set back." Linda reaches the walkway. "It was another incident of violent death I got caught up in." She heads down the walkway. "It'll make more sense to you if I tell you the whole story." She makes a gesture with her hand. "I call this story Eddie Bacon." She continues down the walkway. "It goes like this." Linda looks out at the sky above the water, remembering back.