The ashen-faced cook was close to hyperventilating. He was sitting at the first table inside the mess hall, hands clamped down on spread knees, eyes bulging wide open, staring straight ahead, as if not wanting to see the red stains all over his whites.

"Hey, man, it's okay," Jim Hall said. "Just take it slow. Breathe. No, slower. Deep breaths. Slower. Yeah. That's it. Take a minute. It's gonna be okay."

The cook, a pudgy white guy in his forties, didn't respond, but he began to get his breathing under control. Jim looked at his shoes. He, too, did not want to dwell on the cook's gore-spattered uniform. He imagined he could smell it, and felt his stomach do a small flop. Finally, the cook looked up at him.

" 'Okay'? Okay? Hell it will," he croaked. "It was like... like he was trying to fly."

"Say what?"

"The guy? It looked like he was trying to fly. I saw him. One split second. Arms wide, like one of those high divers, you know? His eyes were closed, though. Like he knew."

Well, no shit, Jim thought. Of course he knew. Doing a swan dive from six stories onto flagstone? Yeah, the dude probably knew.

"Young guy?" Jim asked. He'd seen the body. It was actually a reasonable question.

"Yeah, probably a plebe. I mean, like, a really young face."

Jim nodded. He tried again to shut out the image of the wreckage out there in the plaza between the mess hall and the eighth wing. Wait till the breakfast formation gets a load of that. He felt his stomach twitch. People had no idea.

He made a couple of notes, waiting to see if the cook had anything more to add. Then he heard one of the EMTs outside call in the DOA code. Got that right, he thought. The semirigid cook now had beads of sweat all along his forehead, and his lips were turning a little blue. Jim stepped over to the double doors and called the EMTs to come over. One pushed through the doors of what was formally called King Hall, the Naval Academy's hangar-like mess hall. The cook looked like he was about to flop and twitch on them.

Jim motioned with his chin. The medic took one look and went right to work. Then a short, scowling Navy captain came through the doors and signaled that he wanted to talk to Jim. And here we go, Jim thought, closing his notebook. Here we go.

As he headed back through the doors, he wished the NCIS agents would hurry the hell up. He definitely did not want to deal with Capt. D. Telfer Robbins, the commandant of midshipmen, all by himself, no way in hell. And he really didn't want to see any more of that mess out there in the plaza.

He scanned the small crowd outside. As the Naval Academy's civilian security officer, he was nominally in charge of the scene until the Naval Criminal Investigative Service people showed up. There were the Academy's own police, a couple of Annapolis cops, and some shocked-looking naval officers. The impatient captain was waiting for him next to his official sedan, rising up and down on the balls of his feet, a cell phone in his hand and anger bright in his eyes. Jim resisted the urge to page the NCIS office again, just as the 6:30 reveille bells began to ring throughout the eight wings of Bancroft Hall. He was pretty sure he knew exactly what the commandant was going to say to him.