Lake County Ca

Convicted rapist Michael A. Dodele had been free just 35 days when sheriff's deputies found him dead last month in his aging, tan mobile home, his chest and left side punctured with stab wounds. Officers quickly arrested Dodele's neighbor, 29-year-old construction worker Ivan Garcia Oliver, who made "incriminating comments, essentially admitting to his attacking Dodele," the Lake County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

THE luxury speedboat pulled up to the dock of a sun-dappled hacienda, and a bikini-clad blond dug around the bow searching for something. When she found it, she slipped the slinky, black cocktail dress over her swimsuit and sashayed down a footpath -- through a field of lavender and around the occasional fig tree -- to a swank wine-tasting room. You'd expect that at the waterfront playground of Nice. Just not this Nice.

If there were a single spot in all of Lake County where the past and the future come rushing together, it would probably be one short stretch of twisty Highway 29. Calistoga is in the rearview mirror, so close that it is almost possible to hear corks pop and crystal clink. Up ahead, the oaks part to reveal a small jewel of a hillside vineyard. A few more curves and the Lazy S Mobile Ranch looms.

I was 3,000 feet above the khaki-colored foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains. To the west, I could see the bright line of the Pacific Ocean; to the east, the edge of the Central Valley. And straight overhead, an eagle carved the sky, a small shape swooping around the sun. "What's he doing up this high?" I asked Chris O'Neil, the pilot of my two-person glider. "Having fun," O'Neil said, "just like us." The glider ride was the high point of a recent trip to Lake County.