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Delphine thought about this as the young doctor continued reading her chart, as she considered the neighborhood around the hospital where she was living. The little hilltop community reminded her of a tide pool: dynamic and blossoming with the energy of feeders and prey. Wafting through it all were the doctors in their tunicate white coats carrying tall coffee cups, oblivious or at least hardened to the sickness around them, patients clutching on to paperwork, and now, more and more homeless people drifting like large ungulates across the grasslands of the human-built plains. She had come to know several homeless people during the last five months. She had tried to buy them food rather than giving them cash. There was the man who ate her leftover pizza nearly every night. He was shockingly thin. There was the young couple who argued on street corners and outside of bodegas along Madison. The woman always seemed to be holding a different pink- or blue- clad baby.

The young doctor left the room without explanation. Delphine remained on the examining table with her shoulders slumped. Her mind again wandered to the northern basin of the Pacific Ocean. She imagined sounds of whales, the hissing of deep ocean background noise.

John, her husband of some forty years, was dead now. They had both started out in criminal investigations; he had been a criminal defense investigator for more than three decades until he started writing books. John had no real expertise in any one thing, but he had known a little bit about a million different subjects. If you needed to know the basics of the Reid technique police used to interrogate suspects, or the effects of flame on teeth in an arson fatality, he was your man. His one great talent was in talking to almost anyone. He loved conversation, particularly conversation with dangerous people. John knew how to find things, and she missed him now like a person buried underground misses oxygen.

They had lived most of their lives together in small houses, some not much larger than the examination room she was currently in. After spending the winter of 1984 in a twelve-by-sixteen cabin where they had set out to study radio-collared Canada geese, Delphine ended up devoting her life to the study of big animals instead. When Delphine and John had arrived at the cabin on Thanksgiving, there were more than one hundred whales in the surrounding inlet. At that time, the thinking in the scientific community was that humpbacks were gone from Alaskan waters by late November. But everywhere they looked in the cove, whales blew their spouts. It was like a sprinkler system had been left on after a harvest. What were these animals doing here? When Delphine's reports began making the rounds, requests for information flooded her radio set. She began photographing the whales and identifying the patterns on the underside of their flukes. She and John never found any of the radio-collared geese, which turned out to be overwintering far up the estuary of the large creeks, so far from salt water that the radio receiver Delphine carried in their little tin skiff never detected a single signal from their tags.

During the spring and summer of the whale years in Seymour Canal, Delphine and John worked on criminal defense cases together: rape, murder. They were hired by lawyers who were assigned cases conflicted out by the Public Defender Agency. At that time, there weren't many experienced investigators available in Alaska. All it took was two not guilty verdicts to give them all the experience they needed. One lawyer was quoted as saying, "I don't want ex-cops. I want smart and curious thinkers who can help me tell the true story of my client's innocence. The evidence of innocence is usually the first casualty of police investigations. Once guilt is assumed, there is little else the cops need to investigate." John and Delphine kept looking for the evidence of innocence or considerable doubt right up to the end of trial.

The next winter, one year after their hunt for radio-collared geese, Delphine and John went to the Marine Mammal Conference in San Francisco and found that the leaders in the field were mostly old men. Apparently young women had nothing to say about large charismatic megafauna. The old boys acted as though the animals they studied were in fact men themselves. Hunting strategy, social hierarchy—male behavior was the order of the day. One paper presented by the most influential professor posited that toothed whales generated a powerful enough sound from their bulbous melons to injure other males or even kill them. Apparently, this possibility was discovered in meetings that started when a bottle of whiskey was broken open after a day out on the research vessel. This hypothesis was quickly named the "Saturday Night Special Effect."

"Jesus," Delphine had said at the time, "there are a whole lot of male hormones in here."

The worst part was that when they talked to the new Alaskan researchers, the old boys most often ended up talking with John.

"You know I love you," she told him back in the hotel room, "but sometimes I think you have a big floppy mouth and you talk about stuff you are completely ignorant about." John agreed, but they both realized that it wasn't really John's fault because it was his one great talent, talking with men who often weren't aware of their mistakes. But it left Delphine feeling excluded. That night, in the cheap Tenderloin hotel, they split D and J Investigations in half. Just like that, Delphine gave up her life of crime, and John doubled down on proving up innocence.

Alaska in the seventies was a good place to forge your own odd and specific career. John worked on big murder cases all over the state. He had a reputation for knowing the docks and the fishing business, the boats and the people who worked on them. When an Exxon skipper was charged with the felony of being under the influence of alcohol after his ship grounded in Prince William Sound, the captain's legal team hired John for their defense case. He was found not guilty, and John was offered a staff investigator job with the Public Defender Agency.