A Certain Justice

30

They were in her circular brick driveway in front of the colonnaded white mansion at one of the city's high points in Pacific Heights, overlooking the entire world, less than two blocks from where Kevin Shea had rested at the top of his climb earlier in the day. The landscaping around Loretta's house had been done before either she or Glitsky had been born, and now stately maples folded their branches over them, enclosing the space, insuring its privacy.

The ride had continued quiet, tense, laden with all that was unspoken. Glitsky was angry at himself for what he considered self-indulgence. And, unreasonably, at her for giving him the opening. Then seeing where Loretta lived – the involuntary comparison with his own physical setting, his cramped duplex – seemed to ratchet everything up another notch.

Between the fatigue and the unfamiliar rush of emotion, he knew he was in a dangerous mood – he should just open her door, help her out and say goodnight. But he didn't, he wanted to settle something. He'd waited long enough. 'Well, you married the right man after all, didn't you?'

She shot a look across the seat. 'Do you want to hear about Dana?' Glitsky didn't trust himself to say anything. 'Because I know you didn't understand. I don't know if I did.'

The words spilled out. 'What was to understand? You went with him, it's all right. If you hadn't I wouldn't have met Flo, so it all worked out. It was long ago, it doesn't matter now.'

'It does, Abe, I think it does.'

Suddenly, he slapped the steering wheel. 'Jesus, what was he then, forty-five? What could he have…? That's what I guess I never understood.'

She nodded her head, understanding the question. It was the crux of it. Her voice, like Abe's had earlier, remained flat. 'He had money, Abe. He had prestige and power and he was there. He wasn't working for it like we were. He wasn't hoping. It was all there, already part of the package. And I could be part of it. He wanted me to be part of it.'

'Everybody wanted you back then, Loretta. Probably still do. Why do you think you get elected? People respond to you, close up or far away. As you said, that's just who you are. I just thought, you and me, back then…'

He trailed off and the time lengthened in the car. 'I loved you, Abe, I really did.'

His hands gripped the steering wheel, something to hold onto. 'You left me, Loretta. You couldn't even be bothered to say goodbye.'

She couldn't deny it – it was true. She herself had avoided it for twenty-five years. 'I… I couldn't decide. I asked you, don't you remember?'

'You asked me what?'

'If you were ready, if you could commit…'

'And I said I needed a little time, I didn't say no. Hell, I wasn't yet twenty years old, not even out of school. It wasn't you, it was the idea. Marriage? A few more months, maybe. I would have been-'

'But I didn't have a few months.' She paused, cornered, her eyes flashing. 'Dana was ready right now. Don't you understand that? He was asking and he was going to leave if I didn't decide.'

'You could have decided not to.'

'No, I couldn't. Not without you. Not if you wouldn't be there. I couldn't give up what Dana had, not if I wasn't going to have you either.'

'We might have-'

'Might have wasn't good enough. Dana was my chance and I had to take it. He had what it would have taken me years to get on my own.'

So that was the answer. But there was one more question, maybe the most important one.

'Did you love him?'

'I came to…'

Glitsky slammed the steering wheel again, harder, biting out the words. 'Did you love him then, damn it? Were you stringing us both at the same time…?'

'Stringing you…?'

'You know what I mean, Loretta. Sleeping with us both at the same time.'

The question seemed to rock her. 'No, Abe. I never did that. I left you before… oh, my God, is that what you've thought all this time? I never would have done that.'

'It wouldn't have mattered. Leaving was what mattered.'

'I know,' she said. 'I don't know if I was wrong. I was young. I just didn't feel like I had a choice.'

'You did and you made one. You can't make a choice if you don't have one.'

'I wasn't smart or wise enough to see that then,' she said. 'I thought everything was easy back then, would be easy. That whatever I did would work out and Dana was a way to guarantee it.'

'And it's worked, see?'

She didn't answer, staring at him. So much bitterness there, so much anger. Where had it all come from? Could she have caused all of it? Avoided all of it?

He looked at her and could almost see the question written across her face.

She nodded. 'Yes, it's worked, but at what cost?' She reached for his hand and took it in hers, squeezed it tightly, then moved over and held it in her lap.

They'd gone from Dana to Elaine. Twenty-five minutes, maybe more. There was no time. His hand was in her lap. The cold was creeping into their bones. Now someone had moved to Kevin Shea, Loretta's plan to calm the city.

Glitsky thought he should bring up some of his reservations, not so much about Shea's guilt as the whole issue of due process and how once you started screwing with that you compromised the whole idea of keeping the law, which was his passion and his job.

But he also wasn't a child and wasn't kidding himself – they were both too tired for heavy philosophy. And like it or not, reasonable or not, the air was also thick with import… something was happening with them. She asked if he wanted to come inside, have a nightcap. He didn't drink more than five times a year, but he used the excuse to himself that he'd talk about Kevin Shea, about his work.

They were in a book-lined room. Glitsky sat in a red-leather armchair, his feet planted flat on the Oriental rug. Loretta was pouring amber liquid into snifters on a sideboard next to a fireplace. 'You ask somebody in for a drink, you ought to pour them a drink at least.'

She had taken off the jacket to her suit. Her blouse was purple silk. Glitsky had removed his own leather jacket and hung it on a peg by the hallway near the front door.

Now he sat mesmerized by the angle, the view, as she leaned over, striking a match and laying it against the gas log in the fireplace, the silhouette through the sheer blouse. Some memory stirred in him. He should get out of here.

She turned off the other lights in the room and brought the snifters over, handing him one, then opening his knees and kneeling between them. They touched the snifters – a clear ringing bell from the crystal – and drank. Resting her forearms along his thighs, she whispered to him. 'Hold my glass.'

He took it, chained.

Her fingers moved to his belt. She looked up at him then, confident. Her eyes came up and stayed on his. Slowly, the belt came undone, the zipper pulled, hands still burning where they rubbed him through the fabric.

She leaned forward, over him, and brought herself down, her hands holding him, around him, almost as if she might be praying.

He surrendered to the moment, the touch, the ecstasy.

31

Carrie, Jerohm Reese's live-in girlfriend, did not want him going out, not now, not so soon after he had just been released from jail. But Carrie was young. Unlike Jerohm, she didn't have an intuitive understanding of how things worked. Jerohm knew that you did what you did for one of two reasons – either when you were forced to or when it was easy. And tonight was going to be easy.

The times you were forced were when you were most likely to get caught. If you didn't plan, didn't take a little time, that's what happened. As it had with Mike Mullen.

Jerohm had been a mule for running dope for nearly three years and making a nice clean life of it, with a steady income, the occasional woman. He had learned about the dangers of spontaneous action, and tried to avoid it whenever possible, but with what turned out to be Mike Mullen, suddenly he had had to act and act immediately. He had had no time, no real choice in the matter.

It came down like this-

Jerohm's supplier and partner, Carlos, was expecting his supplier, Richard, to be delivering three kilograms of Chinese white heroin that had, supposedly, recently arrived in the city. Carlos, in turn, had arranged to unload his supply to a local bar owner named Mo-Mo House, who would then step on it and get it moving through its normal channels.

Which was how it always had worked in the past. Except on the day this delivery was due – the day before Mike Mullen died – Richard did not appear. There was no product. This made everyone more nervous than they normally would be – Carlos, Jerohm, Mo -Mo – looking over their shoulders, thinking their mothers might be undercover narcotics officers.

But Mo-Mo had worked a long time with Carlos, so he gave him a chance, with the condition that if the heroin wasn't delivered to Mo's place, the Kit Kat Klub, by sundown the next day, the deal was off. Mo-Mo would take his delivery from somebody else.

Which alone would have been all right, perhaps a hassle to reestablish Mo-Mo's confidence in the Carlos/Jerohm supply line, but nothing too serious. As it turned out, Richard finally did arrive near the end of the next day as the sun was sinking. Carlos had a commitment to buy the drug, but without the sale to Mo-Mo he wouldn't have anything to pay Richard with, and the last man who didn't pay Richard didn't see any more mornings.

Now Jerohm, by the time Richard showed up, had figured he wasn't going to have any work today, no run to the Kit Kat, so he had helped himself to a little PCP, and suddenly he found he had to go steal a car off the street in the time it might take him to blow his nose. And, with angel dust driving his engine, paranoid over Richard and Carlos and most everything else, Jerohm took his.38 Police Special from the place he kept it stashed under the stairs.

There had been no cars on the street. Nobody had parked and left their keys inside, he couldn't get the use of any wheels. And Jerohm was out of time.

Which turned out to be the worst bad karma for Mike Mullen, who was sitting, window down, bouncing along to some tune on the radio. Jerohm couldn't believe he had come all the way to Dolores Street already, which seemed as though it were halfway across town. He had to make his move. The sun was going down and if he didn't get his hands on a car he was dead meat.

So he shot Mike Mullen, pulled him out of the car, and took off. There wasn't any remorse, any particular thought involved at the time or later. Jerohm's feeling was that everybody had their allotted time and this had been Mullen's. It could have been anybody. It was nothing personal. He was merely the agent of blind fate.

Jerohm got the car, got it back to Carlos, took the heroin to Mo-Mo. Everybody was happy.

But though that episode had worked out fine from Jerohm's perspective, generally speaking he had been forced to do what he did, and in that direction lay trouble.

The other way, why he was out tonight, was when it was easy.

Jerohm was wearing black nylon warm-up pants, a black turtle-neck under a black sweater and a pair of Converse black tennis shoes. There had been riots earlier in the day not far from his house on Silver Avenue, and then later tonight up in the Mission District, Dolores Park. Jerohm reasoned they'd pull the National Guard up from Silver, leaving the place deserted, hoping most everybody would stay in because of the curfew.

He smiled to think of it. Citizens were so lame.

He was in good shape. The few days in jail hadn't hurt him any. He could have just run up to Silver but he needed something to carry the stuff away in, and he thought he'd wait a while before trying to score another car off somebody new. Last time hadn't worked out the best.

So leaving his apartment a little after one in the morning, he took his under car – the throwaway he used for business – and rode with the lights out all the way up to Silver, where he slowed down looking out at the playground, although nobody was playing.

He kept driving, running dark, until he came to the row of storefronts, then pulled over in front of the second building – Ace's Electrics – and got out, his sneakers crunching the broken glass under his feet. A few steps over the sidewalk and he was through the broken window, into the shop. He took out his flashlight and checked the shelves. More than he thought there'd be – the guard must have been doing good, keeping out the looters, until they left.

The problem was that the stuff in the shop wasn't high-end – it was the wrong side of town for that. Only radios, clocks, whatever the hell else Mr Ace thought he'd call 'electrics.' But Jerohm didn't waste any time moaning about it. Whatever was here was here for the taking. It would bring him something. Lifting a few of the fancier-looking radios, he came back out through the broken window and put them in his back seat.

Three doors down was Ratafia's Body Shop – a lot better, though he had to break his own window to get himself in. They had a couple of pretty good looking toolboxes jammed to the top with shining gear. They weighed a ton but it would be worth it to carry out – bring some real cash.

Across the street was the liquor store, window broken but bars, and he had to make do reaching through, pulling maybe twenty, thirty bottles out, the ones he could reach by hand or hook with his tire iron.

He kept moving steadily up the street, seeing no one, hearing nothing but his own footfalls over the broken glass. The thrift store was hanging open, but who wanted anything in there? He just lifted a couple of suits that might look good for himself, two or three dresses for Carrie and threw them into the car. Then, thinking about it, he reentered and grabbed a large toy truck for Damien, some scary looking guys with swords, couple of realistic submachine guns. The kid would think it was Christmas.

It wasn't much of a street, but hey, he wasn't complaining. It was all his. Couple more shops – bulk grains and canned goods that he piled in the trunk, a whole passel of what looked like good food stamps in the cash register.

Eighteen minutes. That was enough. He got back into the car, rolling back down Silver, turned onto Palou. Hadn't seen a living soul, which is what he'd told Carrie would happen. Curfew, he told her. People hang inside. Scared of getting shot at, which he wasn't.

But she worried. That was her. Let her. She'd be glad enough to see it when he got it all home.

He knew better, how it worked. You did things when you had to or when it was easy. And tonight was easy.

32

Wes Farrell had vague memories of no sleep.

If he recalled correctly, and he thought he did, Susan – Moses McGuire's wife – wasn't enthralled with the idea of her husband bringing home from his bar a drunk guy she didn't know to spend the night on their couch.

The baby woke up at least three times, although that assumed that she'd been asleep to wake up, and you couldn't have proved it by Wes. He had kept hearing noises all night, one or both of them shuffling around, opening the refrigerator, arguing – 'Would you please bring her in here? I'm not walking around in my nightgown with your friend out there on the couch.' To say nothing of the baby's cries.

As rosy-fingered dawn had lightened the sky, a bleary-eyed Moses McGuire had come into the room and dropped Wes's keys on the floor by the side of the couch. Subtle.

Lydia – Wes's ex-wife – had wanted the dog for companionship because Wes spent so much time away from the house, in the courtroom, and once the kids were gone she did not want to be all alone in the big house. A dog would make her feel safer, too.

But, during the divorce negotiations, Lydia had decided she didn't want the dog anymore. Well, Wes didn't want the boxer either. He'd never wanted it in the first place. It was always Lydia 's dog – Bartholomew D. (for 'Dog') Farrell, Bart for short. Bart, the sixty-five pound dog-doo machine.

And Lydia had said, 'Okay, then he's going to the pound.' It amazed him how Lydia could cut things like that. Had she always been able to? He just didn't know anymore, maybe had never known.

Wes couldn't let that happen. Too many other things had fallen apart in the short years after his youngest – Michelle – had moved out. For some reason he found himself incapable of allowing Bart to go to the pound.

This particular morning he figured that Bart would be pissed off at him. After all, he had been gone close to eighteen hours. He turned the key and there was Bart, whining.

'Hey, guy. Sorry.' He gave him a scratch between the ears. The dog, tail between his legs, leaned into him for a few seconds, then led him to the kitchen. Wes had to be proud of him – Bart had pulled yesterday's Chronicle onto the floor from the table and used it properly. But Wes could tell he was embarrassed.

He really wasn't in the mood to take Bart for his walk in the trolley tracks that ran down 19th Avenue, but he felt it was his duty. His care for Bart was somehow his psychic life raft – his connection to the person he'd been when there had still been a home, kids, wife, a job – responsibilities that had sustained him and given him some day-to-day meaning. Now there was just Bart, and Wes knew he was just a dumb dog, but he wasn't really ready to give up on taking care of him.

Not that he was especially good at it – as the past hours had proved. But he hadn't been particularly successful at the earlier efforts with his family either.

Bart, turned loose, ran ahead, found a likely spot, took care of business. Shivering, still in his shorts and T-shirt, Wes walked on the black asphalt path along the tracks.

There had been feeble sunlight while he was driving back from where he had parked near the Shamrock last night, but as the earth turned the sun had hidden itself behind a lowering cloud cover. Now no one else was out. There were no shadows because there was no sun. No wind. The place, the normally humming thoroughfare – the whole city, come to think of it – seemed unnaturally, eerily silent. Wes stopped, listening. Bart reappeared from somewhere and sat beside him.

Turning, he caught a flutter of white in the corner of his eye and left the path and went over to it. He tore the makeshift wanted poster down from where it had been tacked to a telephone pole.

Maybe Kevin hadn't intentionally blown him off, after all. Maybe he hadn't had a choice. He stared at the poster – that was Kevin, all right. The boy was in some deep shit.

Back in his apartment, Wes took a hot shower, put on a pair of heavy flannel pajamas and – congratulating himself for his self-control – drank down two large glasses of tabasco-spiked Clamato juice without any vodka. Then poured himself a third.

He was in what he referred to as his living salon, waiting for Morpheus to call him, drinking his Clamato juice, absently petting Bart behind the ears, across his neck. He hated to admit it, but the damn dog gave him a great deal of comfort.

Part of him didn't really want to hear from Kevin. Probably the boy had just been out tying one on, got confused, then figured out what he was going to do all by himself. That was probably it.

But, as of late last night, he was still at large. What if he was not only in trouble but really did need him? Wes looked again at the poster he had brought up with him – there wasn't any doubt Kevin was in big trouble. The only question was whether or not he deserved to be. Wes was reserving judgment, but the fact remained that Kevin's call yesterday wasn't just some youthful confusion, some drunken delusion. The poster was real enough, scary enough. And the young man clearly was under the impression that he might need his services, that Wes might be able to help him…

Well, now…

Wes drank some juice and thought that if that were the case it was a whole different can of worms, wasn't it? Because the little whispering voice inside him had been nagging for weeks now – since the semester had ended in June – that he didn't care all that much about getting a doctorate in history. That had mostly been something to fill up the time while he tried to chart a new direction after his wife's, Lydia 's, departure and his best friend's, Mark Dooher's, betrayal.

Wes and Lydia had been sweethearts when they'd been young, then partners-going-on-strangers through the child-rearing years. And then, after Michelle had moved out, the silences in the big house had lengthened and deepened into trenches that neither of them could easily have crossed even if they had wanted to. And it turned out that they hadn't.

He had been a lawyer for so long, going to court, hanging around the Hall of Justice, occasionally chasing the ambulance, while she had been a mom, a PTA person, then a real-estate broker who had started her own company. In the end there wasn't anything much to talk about. He had put on twenty pounds, she had lost almost thirty. She saw her life as beginning a new phase – exciting, challenging, filled with freedom. And Wes…?

While all this was going on with his wife Lydia, Wes had been consumed with something else altogether removed from his domestic life… the trial of his best friend Mark Dooher, who had been charged with murdering his wife. Wes was Dooher's attorney, and it had been the trial of his life.

He leaned back on the couch. Why the hell wasn't sleep coming? He didn't want to think about this now. Not ever, in fact. Maybe he would go and pour in a shot or two of vodka, take the edge off.

But he didn't move.

The truth was, after everything had shaken down, Wes was left with the bereft conviction that he had lived his life and it just hadn't panned out all that well. The child-rearing years were behind him, and he felt he hadn't been much of a dad, hadn't spent enough time on the personal stuff, and now the kids were gone and he didn't know them and they didn't care to know him and he didn't blame them.

And the law – the god he had worshipped and served for all of his adult life – the law had proved to be a sham.

When Lyd had said she wanted to leave him, what had shocked him the most was that after twenty-seven years he had felt only a mild regret that he'd spent so much time in the charade if the only place it had taken them was to here.

But it was the nature of his best friend Mark Dooher's betrayal that had shaken his faith to its foundations. And he had gradually come to realize that he had just stopped caring. The natural skepticism that he had cultivated as a protective device for working with venal and dishonest clients had turned to a profound cynicism about humanity in general.

It was why he had started to drink and why he kept at it so religiously. To keep himself numb. To keep things on the surface. You move fast enough on thin ice and it won't crack. But he also felt himself slipping further and further out, away from everyone else, away from any sense that anything had meaning.

It was why he'd taken and kept and continued to care for Bart. It was also why he was suddenly so ambivalent about what might well be a stark reality – Kevin Shea could be counting on his legal help.

Potentially, another line to the raft. But also another opportunity to hope, and he was not inclined to listen to its knock, especially where the law was involved. The law – the once sacred beautiful law…

No. He couldn't let himself be drawn back to it. He wasn't going to try to help Kevin Shea or anybody else. Maybe he'd refer him – that was as far as he'd go. He wasn't going to open himself up to getting betrayed again. If that happened, he held no illusions – it would destroy his soul, if he had one, and then there would be nothing at all left to save.

He stood up. A little vodka – tasteless, odorless, colorless – would hit the spot after all, thank you. Hold the Clamato.

A telephone seemed to be ringing somewhere. Underwater. Which proved it was a dream. He didn't have to acknowledge it, do anything. Just roll over and it would stop.

He knew he couldn't have been asleep more than an hour, and for a change of pace he'd made it into his actual bed, under the comforter, before he'd crashed. Pulled down the blinds. It was dark as night in his bedroom, warm and secure. He wasn't moving and that was that. He needed at least six more hours before he could face the day.

He turned over, pulling the comforter over his head. Two more rings. Three. Then silence again.

See? A dream.

33

At seven-forty in the morning the mayor of San Francisco, Conrad Aiken, stood looking out over yet another tent city, this one in the Civic Center Park, directly below where he stood partially hidden behind the flags of the United States and of California on the ceremonial balcony area over the magnificently carved double-doorways of City Hall.

As had been the case for the past day and a half, he was having trouble assimilating the information before him. Here he was, the executive in charge of the billion-dollar-plus budget of one of the world's most well-loved and beautiful cities, the destination of thousands of tourists every year, one of the convention capitals of the country, a mecca for gourmets, a center of liberalism and the arts, with the sixth greatest opera house in the world, a haven for the have-nots, homeless and homosexuals of the rest of the country, and he felt as though it had all fallen to pieces around him in a matter of hours.

Through the thin morning fog smoke from cooking fires was rising in wisps over the tents. In his mind's eye it recalled the image he had seen in photographs since his childhood – San Francisco struggling to rise from the ashes of the Great Quake of 1906, until today the city's darkest hour. Before, the image had always struck him as hopeful – the citizens pulling together to rebuild their lives and homes – but today, looking down over the tents, hearing the thrum of boom boxes, the sporadic voices raised in frustration or anger, the reality was anything but hopeful.

Aiken was meeting with the eleven members of the Board of Supervisors in fifteen minutes and he had no idea what he was going to tell them. Worse, in spite of his best efforts with selected staffers whom he had cultivated as moles, he had no real sense of what they might recommend to him. Experience told him that whatever they came up with was unlikely to be productive, although it would vastly increase his workload, undermine his authority and dilute whatever substantive efforts that might be called for and even already in the works.

He'd put the Board off all day yesterday, hoping the situation would somehow blow over quickly, but with the assassination the previous night of the city's district attorney, Chris Locke, which had sparked a new wave of nocturnal riots, there was no longer any pretending that this was going to go away.

Donald, Aiken's administrative assistant – a tall, well-groomed single man of thirty-five – appeared at his elbow. They both stood unmoving for a full minute. 'If you'd like an opinion…' Donald ventured.

Aiken, still lost in his thoughts, nodded. Donald was an asset – ears always to the ground, open lines of communication with everyone at City Hall and blessed with a keen sense of politics, positioning, strategy. 'I'll take anything you can give me.'

Donald was holding a folder that Aiken hadn't noticed. Now he opened it and handed the poster of Kevin Shea to his boss. Aiken had seen it a hundred times. He was sick to death of it, but he'd listen to Donald. He looked over and up at him, thinking not for the first time that Donald would be the perfect assistant if he weren't so damn tall.

'Okay? What about it?'

'I spent all day yesterday walking these hallowed halls, and my sense is that if you don't immediately take charge of the meeting this morning with the simplest possible message you are going to have an unqualified political disaster.'

Aiken had come to this same conclusion on his own. The members of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco were elected in city-wide, non-district elections. No one person represented any geographical area – a Nob Hill or a Hunters Point or Castro Street. In effect each member of the Board represented – embodied – an agenda. Aiken's experience was that this tended to make consensus very difficult on many issues.

Further exacerbating the problem with the Supes – as they were called when not referred to as the Stupes – was their salary structure. The San Francisco charter provided that each supervisor made twenty-four thousand dollars per year. (Which meant that their own clerks and secretaries made twice what they did.) In other words, anyone who needed to work to make a living could not be a supervisor.

So many individuals – including Conrad Aiken – had come to hold the view that the members of the Board were for the most part abysmally ignorant of the rudiments of the workplace. This failing was often combined with a disdain for compromise, an almost sublime disregard for reality, at least as Aiken knew it.

What the Supes did have, in general, was time, personal financial security that insured isolation and sycophancy – and opinions. Positions. Attitudes. Ideas. Yes, these all were present in spades, clubs, diamonds and, mostly, hearts. Ideas abounded on the Board. And, although they had no executive power, they could recommend action to be taken by the mayor. Police action, for example. Or declaring Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to be a Sister City to San Francisco. Or holding off on freeway reconstruction after an earthquake until an environmental impact report could be prepared on the danger such reconstruction would pose to the indigenous frog population of the China Basin.

The mayor didn't have to take any of their recommendations, but if he chose to ignore them he did so at his political peril. Somewhere among these dilettantish positions – white, Hispanic, gay, Oriental, African-American, feminist – there resided an absolute majority, and that is what it took to get elected mayor.

Aiken took the poster from his aide. 'And this is going to help me take charge, Donald?'

'I think Senator Wager was right yesterday about this. When she was here.'

' I remember, Donald. With what exactly?'

'And especially now, with Chris Locke's death. I think what we've got to do is go in there and up the ante. Every one of the Supes is going to be pushing in his or her own direction. There are a thousand cameras in the chamber already – everybody's going to want to make a speech, decry the violence, pass their own resolution… well, you know.'

Aiken knew. 'So what's this about upping the ante?'

'March right in there, take the podium and admit that we – all of us, the whole city – have obviously and for too long been ignoring the racial tension that has been here among us. We've been hiding our heads in the sand. Especially here at City Hall.'

Aiken smiled grimly. 'Well, that's true enough.'

'No, listen. There is a point here. We have been negligent – ignoring the truth that inequality still exists here, that there is justified rage out there in the streets among the regular citizens, especially among the black community. It is obvious that we are – all of us – to blame for the deaths both of Arthur Wade and now of Chris Locke. We have a debt – we have a debt to repay.'

'Donald, this is getting a little thick.'

'True, but when the silver-tongued devil speaks…' A look of conspiracy.

'By that you mean, of course, my own self…'

Donald nodded. 'This is only the general idea, sir. In your words, it will not come out heavyhanded.'

The mayor was accustomed to the flattery, but he thought Donald was probably correct – he knew he did have a gift for oratory. And one thing the Board was usually receptive to was an appeal to their collective liberal guilt. If he started by telling them how they'd all caused this problem themselves, or contributed to it, he just might be able to get something past them. 'All right,' he said, 'what's the rest of the general idea?'

'That before we consider any of the Board's proposals, before we do anything else, we must take immediate measures to integrate the alienated black community back into the mainstream of decision-making and public life. To reach out to them. Something symbolic.'

'Symbolic is always good,' Aiken said.

'So to demonstrate our commitment, to show that our first priority is to bring the city back together…'

'We hand up Kevin Shea.'

Donald nodded: 'He's guilty. Look at the pictures. We offer, say, a half-million dollars, which is cheap indeed if it stops the rampage.'

Aiken ran a hand under his tired eyes, over the port-wine stain. 'I don't want Chief Rigby to think I'm pointing the finger at him, Donald. For not having arrested Shea yet. They're doing all they can.'

'No one's saying they're not, sir. You can even make the point overtly. But we need – you need – the gesture, the assurance to the black community that the city is trying, that we're all in it together. It might even – all by itself – throw some oil on the waters for a while.'

It was all right, Aiken thought, because it could work. And it was justified. A rare combination. 'In other words,' he said, 'the order of business this morning is to rally the Board around this reward, around apprehending Kevin Shea, make a resolution to that effect

'You lead them there, sir.'

'And then walk out?'

Donald gave it a moment, then nodded. 'Essentially. Yes.'

Aiken, too, bobbed his head. 'I like it,' he said. 'Let's go make it fly.'

When the door closed after Aiken had left the room to go to the Supervisors' Chamber, Donald sat at his desk for a very long five minutes, timing it. Often, Aiken would rush out, get halfway to wherever he was going, then turn around and burst back into the office, grabbing whatever it was he'd forgotten, giving a last minute directive that he had overlooked.

But since Aiken was only heading to the opposite side of City Hall – a one-minute walk – Donald thought that if he were going to return it would be almost immediately. Still, Donald was cautious by nature. It was wise to give yourself twice the time you needed. What if the mayor got stopped by the media out in the hallway and then remembered something and ran back in here? One couldn't be too careful.

That thought in mind, Donald got up from his desk, walked the long internal panelled corridor to the reception area, then out through the public door, number 100, that admitted the public into the mayor's outer office.

There was no one in the hallway. Donald walked over to the balcony overlooking the vast rotunda – across the way, in the opposite hallway, he saw the edges of a crowd trying to see inside the Supervisors' Chamber. Something – he imagined Aiken's arrival there – had set off the crowd.

Satisfied, he turned and made his way through the office. At his desk he removed a white piece of paper from his wallet. It was blank except for seven numbers – no name attached.

At the receiving end a pleasant female voice asked him to leave his message.

After identifying himself, Donald told the machine that the mayor was in fact going ahead with the alternative they had discussed, and Donald predicted that the Board would pass the resolution within the next few hours.

When he hung up his hands were unsteady. Well, what did he expect? He had never done anything like that before – naturally it made him nervous. But the funny thing was that it was probably actually helping Conrad Aiken. It was a good idea.

Still, he did feel a small sense of betrayal. It bothered him, as though he had somehow switched loyalties. But after this catastrophe, and it hadn't even played out yet, Aiken was no certainty for reelection in five months and then what was Donald going to do if he didn't watch out for himself?

He had to broaden his base, make himself valuable to other people who might need his help. He had no doubt now – after this call – that Loretta Wager would remember him if he called on her. He wouldn't have to say it – she would know that she owed him. And she would deliver. That was how it worked, and the senator well knew it. He'd heard. Mutual acquaintances.

34

Senator Wager's daughter, Elaine, had finally slept – soundly and long, waking up a little after dawn. Out through her living-room window, under the cloud cover, there was considerably less smoke than there had been the day before. She allowed herself a moment's optimism – things might be getting better, the city's wounds would heal after all.

Then she had opened the newspaper…

In one of the oversized men's T-shirts she used as a nightgown she was sitting on the hardwood floor just inside her door, where she had been when she saw the headline and her legs had gone. She remembered reaching out to the wall for support and then deciding she was just going to have to sit down. She must have lost control of her bladder, the floor under her was wet. She was sucking her index finger. Time must have passed.

Her stomach was growling and she tried her legs again. It was a long way to the bathroom.

She could not believe no one had called her. But then she remembered she had unplugged the phone and turned down the answering machine – there were some times when you had to get some sleep.

Chris Locke's voice was on the answering machine.

'Oh God,' she said, a new wave washing over her.

He'd called before… before…

Her hand clutched at her stomach, kneading the unyielding knot, mesmerized by the words, the voice, the last time she'd hear it.

He loved her, he was saying. He needed her, they had to talk. Was there any chance she could meet him tomorrow – oh Lord, that was this morning – before work? He was going out with Mohandas and her mother for dinner, and that should run late. Maybe he'd drop by her apartment before going home. She could beep him and let him know.

Then here was her mother, with her voice of controlled calm she used in moments of greatest stress, calling from the police station. Someone had almost shot her, had shot Chris… Please, honey, she was saying, don't go out until you get this message, until you've talked to me.

Next on the machine was her officemate, Jerry Ouzounis, but that was information only, the start of office politics, and she fast-forwarded through part of it, then let it play, not listening, her eyes glazed over.

Somehow she had gotten dressed. Was she actually planning on going to work? She didn't know. But here she was, her hair was up, makeup on. Shoes. No hose. She took off her shoes, then forgot what she was doing. She knew she was sitting on the bed and she'd wanted to remember to do something, and here were her pantyhose on the bed next to her. But the connection wouldn't come.

There was the telephone, next to the bed. Was it somebody she wanted to call? She'd tried her mother but there was never any telling where she might be. The phone had rung fifteen times. She punched in that number again. Maybe that was it. Trying again.

There was always a line of black-and-white police cars parked along the curb in front of the Hall of Justice, but this day they clogged four of Bryant Street 's five lanes.

Elaine Wager had to take a cab – her usual bus wasn't in service this morning. She stood at the corner – Seventh and Bryant – again with the overriding sense that reality had shifted in some fundamental way. A parking and traffic enforcement meter minder was casually writing out citations on the police cars as though they were normal vehicles, writing down license numbers and sticking his handiwork under wiper blades as though someone had told him this was a reasonable use of his time amid all this madness. And he had believed it…

The crowd inside the Hall had thinned, no doubt as a result of the curfew – fewer bodies getting hauled in during the night for processing. Elaine spacewalked through the metal detector and came around one of the columns, the cavernous lobby opening out before her.

There were maybe a dozen officers in uniform, standing loose guard over their charges. Why, she thought, were there so many police cars in front of the building? Where were the rest of them? The disconnected observation struck her like a message from a half-remembered world. She had no idea.

The men in the line this morning were the usual unkempt and motley collection, shuffling along, exhausted, black-eyed. As she was waiting for the elevator one of them caught her attention.

She had been planning to take the elevator up, get to her office, close the door. Maybe try calling her mother again, talk to Jerry Ouzounis or to Chief Assistant DA Art Drysdale… somebody upstairs… find out what had happened, what she could do. She had to do something. Do something for Chris.

Walking to the yellow tape that delineated the temporary booking area, she stepped over it and got a better look at the man.

'Excuse me,' she said to an officer talking to another uniform.

'Yes, ma'am.' Then, seeing she was a civilian: 'I've got to ask you to go back over there. You're not supposed to be behind the yellow tape.'

There weren't any cordial smiles left in Elaine. 'I'm with the DA,' she said, flashing her ID. 'Elaine Wager.'

If either of the two cops in earshot put together any relationship between this attractive young woman and the senator from California, they hid it well. But the DA was the DA, and if this woman was part of that office she could talk to them and they would listen.

'Yes, ma'am,' the officer repeated, 'how can I help you?' Elaine gestured with her head. 'Isn't that man Jerohm Reese?'

'Hey, hey, this ain't right. Hey. I'm talking to you. You hearing me. I am talking to you.'

Elaine ignored him. The officer, with J. Dealey on his name tag, was between her and Jerohm, and he told Jerohm to shut up. They were riding up in the visitors' jail elevator, which was faster than the public elevator and stopped at the sixth floor only – the entrance to the jail.

'No, I mean it, 'cause hey, this is no shit. They got no warrant on me. I just got sprung. This is bullshit, man; just a pure hassle. I didn't do nothing

Dealey turned to Elaine, as though they were enjoying a stroll in the park: 'We pulled him over in a curfew zone, in a stolen car loaded with merchandise he'd looted from-'

'Hey, now, hey… that wasn't no stolen car, that-'

'Did I mention shut up, Jerohm?' Dealey gave a jerk on the handcuffs, almost lifting Jerohm off his feet.

'This is brutality! Po-lice brutality. You seein' it, sister. This is it, now. Hey, c'mon, this guy-'

'I'm not your sister,' Elaine told him, meeting his eye and staying with it. 'I am your worst nightmare.'

Art Drysdale, the chief assistant district attorney, was living his worst nightmare. It wasn't yet nine in the morning and he'd been up all night, getting downtown by five-forty. He refused to work even temporarily in Chris Locke's office – he didn't want any misinterpretation, he wasn't angling to become the new DA – and his own space wasn't even marginally close to big enough for the parade of humanity he'd been entertaining this morning, everybody wanting answers or consolation or decisions he wasn't empowered to make.

Normally Drysdale had a carefree style, often juggling baseballs behind his desk – he'd been a major-league player for several weeks in his youth – while he discussed office policy or negotiated plea bargains with defense attorneys. Today he wore a white shirt, his tie loosened, arms resting on his desk and hands folded in front of him, knuckles whitened. 'All right, send her in.'

Elaine came through the door and stood in front of him. 'I hope I didn't hear this right,' he began. 'You've got Jerohm Reese… the same Jerohm Reese we released two days ago without charging him with murder – that Jerohm Reese we've got back upstairs?'

'Yes, sir.'

Drysdale brought a hand to his forehead and rubbed. He squeezed his temples. 'On the same charges as everybody else we're letting go with citations?'

'A few more,' she said.

'A few more. Enough to make an arrest mandatory? From downstairs in the GODDAMN LOBBY! Excuse me, I don't mean to yell, but we can't have this. We don't need Jerohm Reese here right now.'

'I'm sorry-'

'I'm sure you are.' He shook his head. 'Elaine, why did you feel you had to do this?'

'I thought… I thought if word got out that we'd arrested Jerohm Reese again and let him go again-'

'I know, I know. But now we've got him in jail. And we're not keeping anybody else in jail for doing the same things he's done.'

'But we can't let him go now. We can't just give him a ticket and let him walk.'

'No, I don't think we can. Not now.' He sucked in a breath, let it out in a whoosh. 'Goddamn it.'

'I just felt I had to do something. I wasn't thinking clearly. This thing with Chris, Mr Locke…'

Drysdale held up his hand. He was sensitive to the realities of this situation. Elaine was the daughter of Loretta Wager. She was black. In the real world she couldn't be seriously reprimanded, much less suspended, for something like this, possibly not for anything. She was as bulletproof as Kevlar. And he had Jerohm Reese upstairs, which maybe he could somehow keep the media from discovering and exploiting. But meanwhile there was nothing of substance to charge him with, beyond, of course, the usual crimes that Boles was letting everybody else walk on.

'This thing has us all upset, Elaine. I don't know what I'm going to do and I don't know what's going to happen to this office. But our job is putting on trials, not facilitating arrests. We're supposed to think clearly before we take any action like this, you understand that?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I know you do.' Drysdale's hands were back together, the knuckles white again. He'd make some decision on what to do with Jerohm Reese. Legally, the DA had only two days to charge him, but Drysdale was getting an idea that with the Fourth of July weekend coming up he might be able to finagle putting off an arraignment until the following Tuesday, which might be long enough to avoid continuation of this disaster.

He brought himself back to Elaine. 'You're on the Arthur Wade case.' It wasn't a question. 'You're working with homicide on this, right? Closely?'

She wasn't, but she remembered talking with Lieutenant Glitsky at length about it just yesterday, so she wasn't strictly lying when she said, 'Yes, sir.'

'Just see that you do, all right. If you need any help, come to me, ask for it. You don't have to do this alone.'

'Yes, sir. Thank you.'

'Right. Don't mention it. And send in the next victim.'

He didn't smile when he said it.

35

Glitsky was in the police lot behind the Hall of Justice inspecting the last car Chris Locke had ever ridden in.

It was the same year, make and model of the car he had driven back to the Hall this morning, the same one he had taken Loretta home in the previous night, or, for that matter, the same as the one he had driven home earlier last night and sent a patrolman to retrieve and return to the city lot this morning.

The colors were different, that was all. The city had bought a fleet of twenty-seven Plymouths for the convenience of its employees and guests – plainclothes policemen, assistant district attorneys, the occasional visiting dignitary.

Inspector Marcel Lanier, putting in yeoman's hours building up his comp time, was giving Glitsky the grand tour of the crime scene. It was cold and foggy and some wind had come up. The two men wore heavy flight jackets, and Marcel kept his hands in his pockets. Glitsky, into feeling things, had the front-side passenger door open.

Halfway bent over, Glitsky squinted at the passenger's window. It had been rolled up when Locke had been shot and what was left of it was a cobweb of safety glass with a fist-sized hole in the middle of it.

'Forensics got all the glass?'

'All we found.'

'It's a big hole.'

Lanier checked it out. 'Two bullets, Abe. Point blank.'

Glitsky nodded. 'You find the second slug?'

'Other side.'

They walked around the car, Glitsky stopping at the back fender for a moment.

'What? You see something?'

'Nothing. I don't see a damn thing.'

Opening the driver's door, Glitsky went down to one knee, examining the bullet hole in the car's upholstery, then slid in behind the wheel, eyeballed the hole in the window across from him and traced the trajectory of the second bullet with his hand. 'She is one lucky lady,' he said. According to his trajectory the bullet would have scraped the front of his chest; Loretta, of course, wasn't as thick as he was, and so it had missed her, but not by much.

'She must have got lucky with the ride home, too. Last night.' Lanier kept his face straight, but he was jabbing.

Glitsky should have expected it – homicide cops tended to know everything and comment on it with a minimum of respect. Evidently the word was already out that he'd spirited Loretta from the Hall in the middle of the night.

'Give me a break, Marcel. The woman's a senator. It was on my way.'

'Another lucky break for her.'

He could feel the scar in his lips getting tight and fought to control his face. He had to take this without a sign – any response at all would tip a guy like Marcel. 'Where's the rest of the blood?' he asked.

Lanier leaned over him. 'You're looking at it.' There was a small, perhaps three-inch circular stain on the seat next to him. 'We're talking.22, maybe.25 caliber here. They'll have it this morning. Small hole, not much pop. No exit wound even. Lucky for her again. She didn't even get splattered.'

Glitsky itched to give his inspector a few choice words about the amount of luck it took for Loretta to get herself shot at in the first place, but this, again, would be too much reaction – an admission of something out of the ordinary. So he held his tongue, except to say 'okay' as he slid out of the driver's seat, carefully closing the door. They started walking back toward the Hall.

'So what's she like? You talk to her?' Lanier asked.

'Not much,' Glitsky lied. 'She was close enough to shock, pretty exhausted. I think it hit her pretty hard.'

Their footfalls crunched on the gravel.

Nat Glitsky was sitting in one of the plastic yellow chairs in front of his son's desk when the lieutenant reappeared in his office. Seventy-six-years-old and the man was still cooking. As always, a yarmulke covered his wispy white crown. Hiking boots, a multicolored woolen sweater, old-fashioned and paint-stained khakis. He had draped what he called 'the classic men's blue sports coat' – he wore it everywhere – over the back of the chair.

Word had gotten out about Jerohm Reese being back in custody upstairs, and Glitsky, who had heard about it coming down the hallway, was trying to fit that information into his matrix of How Things Worked. It wasn't exactly tongue and groove.

He stopped in the doorway. His father did not show up every day, even most days. Hardly ever, in fact, so something was up. Nat had come downtown a little more often during the months of Flo's illness, taken his son out to lunch once in a while, but since her death Glitsky couldn't remember a single other time.

His dad, never predictable, tossed at him a plastic-wrapped bagel filled with cream cheese. Glitsky spied some lox peeking out, too – the combination being his favorite thing to eat in the known universe. He had not treated himself to one in so long he'd forgotten.

Six inches shorter than Abe, Nat came over and gave him a kiss on the jaw, which was how he had always greeted his son and always would, convention and embarrassment be damned. Glitsky had hated it from kindergarten through the police academy, but now it didn't bother him at all. People didn't like it, that was their problem. He was becoming his dad. There were worse fates he could imagine.

'We've got to talk, Abraham.'

But this wasn't the best time. In the homicide detail behind him, he could see Lanier, Banks, two other inspectors looking in, waiting for him to be free so they could get some direction. He also wanted to see the coroner, John Strout, regarding the autopsies on both Arthur Wade and Chris Locke – something he liked to do with every homicide in the jurisdiction.

On top of the stack of phone messages he was flipping through he noticed one from Greg Wrightson, one of the city's supervisors – a rare pleasure. Chief Rigby wanted to see him again. Unrelated to the riots, there had been a run-of-the-mill domestic-disturbance homicide last night in North Beach.

Not to mention Loretta Wager – what all that meant.

But this was his father, who wouldn't be here if it wasn't important in some way – Nat was no hysteric. 'Should I close the door?'Abe asked. Of course, there was no door.

Nat pointed an index finger. 'Eat your bagel.'

Which Glitsky was doing, enjoying the hell out of it. 'So?' he asked. 'What?'

As always, Nat got right to it. 'You know Jacob Blume? You do. He's my rabbi and would be yours you start going to synagogue again.' He held up a hand. 'This is not what I'm here about – you. I'm here about Blume. A good man.'

'Okay.'

Again, the hand. 'Don't rush. Chew. I'm getting there. So a couple of nights ago – you know this – the riot is not two blocks from the temple

Abe did know it and was surprised that it hadn't occurred to him before. His father's synagogue – Beth Israel – was at Clement and Arguello, around the corner from the site of the lynching. 'I'm sorry, say that again.'

'This is not your old father railing away, Abraham. This is your work here. Put your mind on. Pay attention.' Nat waited, got a nod from his son – Abraham was listening. 'This woman Rachel with some last name you don't believe, she is here maybe three months from Lithuania or the Ukraine or whatever they call it now. She comes to Blume, who comes to me.'

'What about Rachel?'

'She is scared and confused and comes to Blume and he talks to her two hours yesterday – her English, oy - but better than my Ukrainian, I suppose – and it comes out she was on Geary, going home from temple, when the mob starts coming out

'Out of the Cavern? She saw that?' This was what Abe needed, a credible witness who had been there and could say what had happened. It could be a wedge to get some truth out of the barkeep Jamie O'Toole, among others.

Nat nodded. 'But she is scared, Abraham. A Jew, the police. This is not something to comfort her where she comes from. She has seen something. She knows she should tell. But she did nothing to stop it. So is she guilty of a crime? It's a shanda, certainly, taking no stand. What does she need to do? She doesn't know. She wants no trouble here in the U.S. So, finally, a day goes by, she sees what's happening in the city. Maybe she has a duty – she wants to do right… So Blume comes to me, asks me will I talk to you, see if this can be… if you need this. Which I must tell you there's no guarantee Rachel's going to go through with.'

The telephone was ringing. Glitsky stuffed in the last bite of bagel and worked it to the side of his cheek. 'Set it up, Dad, I'll be there.' He picked up. 'Glitsky, homicide.'

It was another one of the assistant district attorneys, Ty Robbins, asking him where the hell he was – he was supposed to be testifying in Judge Oscar Thomasino's courtroom today in People v. Sully, a trial for Murder Two in Department 34. Had he forgotten?

Come on, lieutenant, life was going on. The judge had given a ten-minute recess but he'd better get his ass down there in a New York minute if he didn't want to get slapped with contempt.

Nat Glitsky tapped his son's cheek, said it was nice chatting with him. He'd call.

The ten-minute recess found itself transformed into a day-long continuance – Mr Sully's defense attorney had developed a migraine and pronounced herself unable to continue, and neither Judge Thomasino nor Mr Robbins had had any objection.

This did not sit well with Glitsky, who had thrown on the tie he kept in his desk drawer for just such an occasion and run down to Department 34, wishing he had thought to borrow his father's all-purpose classic men's blue blazer. All he had was his flight jacket – the judge might ream him for a poor sartorial showing just to vent his displeasure at the delay.

Except that now the original delay meant nothing. The entire exercise had been futile and the day was too full for this idiocy. Abe was starting to decide that he was going to mention as much to Ty Robbins when Ridley Banks crabwalked into the pew next to him and sat down, beginning without preamble in a low, insistent voice.

'Couple of things. One, on the Mullen thing, I think we might have a bite. I drove out to McKay's after our little soiree yesterday at the Greek's. Poor guy – McKay – can't seem to find work, just sitting around the house. Wanted to talk to me on the stoop. Actually, didn't want to talk to me at all. I'm a trained investigator, I could tell.'

'It's a useful skill, Ridley.'

'So I mentioned the word warrant…'

'You got a warrant? What for?'

'I didn't. I just mentioned the word and said he didn't have to let me in, but if he didn't I'd probably come back and it wouldn't be so friendly.'

'The broken sliding door,' Glitsky said.

Ridley Banks looked up to Glitsky, the only other dark-skinned inspector in homicide. In some ways he viewed the lieutenant as his mentor. He nodded. 'The broken sliding door or lack thereof.'

If there wasn't a broken window in a sliding door at McKay's house, there went his story that he and his cousin Brandon Mullen had cut their arms when they fell through it during their fight.

'Did you mention this to him?'

'I believe I neglected to.'

'Okay, good,' Glitsky said. 'Let's get both those guys down here today. Start in again.' Then, thinking of his father's information, he added that they might even want to hold Mullen and McKay for a lineup – there was a chance they had a witness who wasn't involved in the mob and who would talk about who she had seen there.

Banks took that in, scanned the courtroom, holding Glitsky in the pew while the assistant district attorney who'd called Abe down, Ty Robbins – the last man beside themselves in the courtroom – closed his briefcase with a snap and started up the center aisle.

Robbins raised a hand feebly. 'Sorry, Abe. Maybe tomorrow, huh?' He kept walking, not waiting for any reply. The huge double doors shushed closed behind him, and Glitsky and Banks were alone.

'Something else?' Glitsky asked.

Banks appeared to be having some trouble making up his mind. He made sure again that the room was empty, then took in a breath and, letting it out, said, 'I want to tell you a story. Maybe a little personal.'

Impatient in any event with today's interruptions, Glitsky almost stopped him – it wasn't a good time, could they get to it later? But something about the young inspector's tone…

'Out on Balboa there's this restaurant called the Pacific Moon – small place, been there twenty-five, thirty years.'

'Sure, I know it. I've eaten there.'

'Everybody has.'

'Food's not very good, if I remember.'

Banks grinned. 'That's the place, which is why, I don't know if you noticed, but you almost never see the place crowded. You go there on a Saturday night, eight o'clock, there's only like twenty tables and you get seated right away.'

Glitsky sat back on the hard bench, not knowing where this was going. 'Okay?' he said.

'So before Homicide I did eight years in White Collar, and when I first got in there there was an on-going investigation about money laundering at the Pacific Moon.'

'Money laundering through a restaurant?'

'Sure. In the old days before electronic transfers, it was pretty common. You have yourself a ton of dirty cash and you deal in a perishable like food, it's custom made. You write up receipts for meals that never got served and presto, there's the cash in your till, clean as a whistle, just like magic.'

'Okay. So the Pacific Moon laundered some money.'

'A lot of money, Lieutenant.'

'Okay, a lot of money. You get any indictments?'

In his own years on the force, Glitsky had heard a lot about 'on-going investigations' – he had conducted a few himself on people he didn't like, didn't believe, wanted to nail. Few of them panned out because evidence got cold faster than scrambled eggs. If you didn't get it the first time you looked it was unlikely to turn up later. If white collar couldn't bring any indictments against the Pacific Moon, the principals either had done nothing wrong or were very good at covering their tracks, most probably the latter. Either way, in the police department, manpower was always at a premium, and if there wasn't some vein in the ore, the on-going investigation would have to stop – most often sooner than later.

'Nope. Place came up clean.'

'Well…?'

'Well, I was young and a red hot. I started eating dinner there every couple of weeks, staying for drinks, hanging out, counting people.'

'Counting people?'

'There wasn't ever more than twenty people in the place. Ever. You know what the Pacific Moon grossed that year, this was eight years ago?'

Glitsky shook his head. 'A million dollars?'

'Two point nine million.'

A minute of pure silence. Glitsky said, 'Twenty tables?'

Bank's voice took on an edge. 'If they filled every table every night five nights a week and turned them over three times each, and if every dinner averaged fifteen dollars, you know how much they would have grossed? I worked it out, Lieutenant, I'll tell you – three hundred thousand tops. Three hundred thousand. And they admit a gross of almost three million.'

"They must have sold a lot of drinks.' Glitsky scratched his cheek. 'You couldn't get an indictment on that?'

'Can you believe…? Nobody wanted to reopen the case. Evidently we'd blown a wad on it, the place had receipts like it was Chez Panisse, the books looked clean, White Collar lost its papers on it and the DA didn't seem to save anything, but I'm telling you, nobody goes there to eat.'

'Not twice anyway.'

'That's what I'm saying.'

Another dead minute. Then, Glitsky: 'Well, it's a good story…' Meaning, but-so-what?

One last look around the courtroom. 'So what is that – this was a few years before I got into it, but still – the word was that Dana Wager was a heavy investor in the place.'

'Dana…?'

'Right, the senator's husband. He filed for bankruptcy in 1977, all his real-estate investments had gone belly-up. He was done. Then he caught the rebound on the economy, reinvested, got lucky. All the sudden he's back on the high seas, and the Pacific Moon is his flagship.'

'People get lucky, Rid.'

'People also get money in ways that aren't legal. And then launder it.'

'You think that happened with Wager?'

Banks wasn't coming right out with anything. He wasn't sure where his lieutenant stood on it, didn't want to dig himself too deep a hole. 'There was some talk.'

'There's always talk.'

Another pause. How far to take it? 'This talk was about his wife, now our senator. How the rumor was that Dana's money came from Loretta, that she'd brought like a million dollars home with her from South America.'

Of course, Glitsky had heard about the incident: he had followed it closely at the time. It had been all over the place, reported in the media. He couldn't very well have missed it, even if he'd been disposed to, which he wasn't.

In 1978 Loretta had been an administrative aide to California congressman Theo Heckstrom, and the two of them, among others, had gone down to Colombia on a fact-finding mission before the 'war on drugs' had been openly declared. On a flight from Bogota to Quito, Ecuador, their small plane had gone down deep in the Colombian jungle. Among the six people in the aircraft, including Heckstrom, Loretta had been the sole survivor.

Badly hurt herself, with a compound-fractured leg, she had remained in the plane's wreckage with the dead for four days, living on candy bars and plantains, before she was finally rescued and airlifted out and back to the United States. Most believed that the publicity associated with the tragedy had made her a household name in San Francisco, and had helped fuel her first successful run for Congress.

After she had won, Glitsky had also begun to hear the rumors about the million dollars – although the amount always varied – about the suitcase full of cash that Loretta had supposedly found on the plane and somehow spirited back into the country.

Now Glitsky was shaking his head. 'The small problem with this phantom money, Rid, is customs.'

Banks was ahead of him on that. 'There weren't any customs. Everybody seems to forget this. They sent a special plane down there to pick her up, get her out in a hurry. Diplomatic airlift direct to Mayo.' He repeated it. 'No customs.'

The room was getting stuffy, the air unmoving. Glitsky pushed his back against the bench, stifled a stretch. 'You think Oswald killed Kennedy by himself, Rid?'

Banks shrugged. 'Conspiracy theories, right?'

'Do you honestly think that if there was anything to all of this – and I'll admit it's a neat story – but do you think there is any way it wouldn't have come out? The woman's run – what? – four campaigns for office, two of them statewide, against people who I'd bet have some knack for finding dirt. Anything was there, it would have come up.' Banks didn't answer.

'You think I'm in denial here, Rid?' But there was a tone in it – half-joking.

'I'm telling you what a lot of guys working the street believe down to their toes, that's all. You know a lot of 'em. They're not generally into conspiracies.' The younger man slapped his hands on his thighs, took a short, sharp breath. 'Anyway, for what it's worth…'

The lieutenant pushed himself up and next to him Banks stood, too. 'It's worth knowing,' Glitsky said. 'Although this particular time, I think the senator might be doing some real good.'

'Okay.' His duty done, Banks nodded. 'I'll go put a call out to McKay, follow up on these guys, get 'em down here. You hear anything about Kevin Shea?'

'Nada. Guy's got any brains, he's in Scandinavia.'

They were at the double doors and Glitsky grabbed one of the handles, then stopped. 'Hey, Rid, I appreciate it, but you don't have to worry.'

'Okay, Lieutenant, I won't.'

Glitsky had wanted to protest to Ridley Banks that all he had done was drive the senator home. Except that wasn't all he'd done and he didn't want to start with small untruths. They tended to grow large and unruly.

As earlier with Lanier, he was hamstrung by the possibility that he would come across as saying too much. Banks was a good cop, and no group hung together like cops. Functioning as early warning, protective of his lieutenant, Banks was putting it out that people might be watching pretty closely. Were already hanging on the nuances. That maybe, on some level he couldn't define, Loretta Wager could be trouble for him.

And this – if he was honest with himself, and he tried to be – constituted a message Glitsky wasn't ready to hear.

He had given her his home telephone number and she had called him before he'd had his morning tea. Isaac had picked up the call and, handing it over, the expression he'd given Abe could have frozen a flame. Some instinct had told Ike that this wasn't a business call – it was a woman and his dad cared about her. And it was too… damn… soon.

When Glitsky heard her voice all that went away. She wanted to see him again, needed to, could they arrange something for today?

Which wasn't reasonable, probably not doable, but they were going to try.

She had gotten a hold inside of him, where he'd told himself he wasn't letting anybody in ever again. He didn't know what worried him more – that it was happening at all or that it might end.

36

'Well, here I am, a grown-up at last, wanted by the police and all, and I guess if I want to call my mom and dad, no one's going to stop me.'

Kevin shrugged at Wes. 'She's just got this way in the last day or two, I can't really figure it out.' But he knew he liked it.

Melanie gave them both a smile. 'Adversity,' she said, moving toward the kitchen's wall-phone.

Wes slumped on the couch in the living salon. His long hair was down and he wore a pair of khaki shorts similar to the ones he had sported the day before, and he had his bare feet up on the footlocker that served as a coffee table. In his right hand was a can of Coors Light, stuck into a styrofoam holder that read: 'Beer – it's not just for breakfast anymore.' Bart had his face resting in Wes's lap.

Kevin was trying to find a way to get comfortable.

Wes's furniture leaned to the austere – there was a large shaggy lime-green bathmat doubling as a throw rug, two canvas-and-wood director's chairs, two straightbacks. The 'couch' was a futon on a plywood frame set a foot off the ground. What with the other amenities in the salon – a television on the floor, a small extra refrigerator for beer, a brick-and-board bookcase, the bean-bag chair Bart slept on, various grocery items whose expiration dates had expired – Wes's apartment might manage to look homey only to someone who had grown up in, say, the Senegalese bush.

'You haven't heard then?'

'Haven't heard what?'

Wes had been living with the television all morning and filled Kevin in on the mayor's initiative this morning, the city stupid-visors' show of solidarity with the rage of the black community. In one of the director's chairs, Kevin shifted. He was afraid he was going to have to see a doctor, but this was more immediate. 'Two hundred thousand dollars?'

The mayor had not been able to get his half-million.

'Round it off to three hundred if you include the original hundred thou – that's a good hunk of change on your poor ass. I'm thinking of turning you in myself, retire to Costa Rica.'

'You're already retired.'

'But I'm not in Costa Rica.' Wes smiled, took a slug of his beer.

In the kitchen Melanie raised her voice. She had been on the phone for fifteen minutes. 'He is not lying. He just did not do it, Daddy.'

Wes made a face. 'Somebody believes you at least.'

Which brought a frown. Any hint of defensive banter was gone. 'You don't?'

Wes tipped up his beer can, found it empty, made a small show of getting himself another from the reefer, offering one to Kevin, who shook his head. And then, his inflection rising with each word, said 'Hey? You hear me? You don't believe I didn't do this?'

Melanie again, from the kitchen. 'NO I AM NOT.' She slammed the receiver against the wall box and it popped out again, smacking on the floor.

Wes settled himself back on the futon, no reaction. The kid had better learn the cold facts of the world.

'Goddamnit, Wes…'

Bart didn't like threatening noises made to his master and, although he knew Kevin, his back hairs went up and a low growl began. Wes patted his rear as Melanie appeared back in the kitchen doorway.

Kevin was laboring out of the chair. 'Let's go, Mel.'

Wes's voice was flat. 'What do you think you're doing? Sit down.'

Melanie, from the doorway: 'What?'

Kevin threw her a look. 'He doesn't believe me, either.'

'Yes, he does. Of course, he does. Wes?'

'It doesn't matter what I believe, that's not the issue-'

'That is the only issue, Wes. That's the reason I'm here.'

Wes didn't reply, sipped at his beer. Which heated Kevin up another notch.

'Well, what do you think? What the hell you think I'm here for?'

'Hey, listen, you want to yell, you'll strain yourself. I got an old bullhorn in the bedroom, maybe we shoot some flares out the window, let everybody know there's a party up here.'

Holding his ribs, Kevin was collapsing back into his chair. Melanie went over to him.

Wes leaned forward, his eyes dark. 'For the record, Kev, the real reason you're here? You got me. You called me, remember? You think I'm somehow putting my foot in this mess. I am done with that. I am not turning you in, and that right there is three hundred thousand dollars worth of good faith. And, though it's none of your goddamn business, I've got absolutely every reason in the world not to get myself involved in this, in you, in any of it.'

Melanie was on her knees by Kevin, glaring at Wes. 'What a great man you are.'

Wes drank some beer. 'I am who I am.'

'Come on, Mel, let's go.' Kevin was trying to get up from the chair again, his breath coming in short gasps.

'Where are you going?'

Melanie turned on him. 'What's it to you? What do you care?'

The tears in her eyes were anger more than anything, and for an instant Wes was reminded of his daughter Michelle. Something twisted in his gut and as a cover he forced another slug of beer, which was suddenly warm, stale. 'You're right,' he said, 'what's it to me?'

'I'm going downtown,' Kevin said. 'End all this.'

'Kevin! You can't do that!'

He shrugged her off. 'That's what I'm doing. Screw this. I'll do it on my own.'

'Kevin, somebody will kill you.'

Wes was standing. 'Why don't you just get out of here, out of the city?'

Melanie clearly didn't want to side with Wes, but she had to say it. 'That's what I've been telling him.'

Wes pointed a finger at her. 'And you've been right.'

Kevin was up now, limping toward the door. His face was drawn. He stopped. 'I'm going down and telling them the truth-'

Wes laughed. 'Oh, that's great. That's really great, Kevin.' His expression withered Melanie. 'Would you two get real? You think anybody really cares about the truth at this stage?'

'I do,' Kevin said.

'Pretty fuckin' stupid, you ask me.'

'Yeah, well thanks. That's really good to know.'

Wes, a couple of shots of vodka and two beers in him, was heating up. He moved closer to them, his own volume rising. 'And what are you getting downtown in? Melanie's car? Which every cop in town is looking for? Or are you going to walk, limp, whatever the hell you're up to?'

Melanie came between them. 'He's got a point, Kevin. The car, I mean. We can't-'

'I'll give you my car,' Wes said, 'but for God's sake, use it to get out of this town.' His tone softened. 'Kevin, they will kill you. Somebody will put a knife in you, believe it. You won't last two days in jail. Sit down, will you?'

'I'll ask for a private cell.'

Rolling his eyes, Wes turned in a full circle. 'You think you know how it works? You don't have any idea how it works.'

Melanie, stepping in. 'And you do, I suppose.'

'Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. And you know how it works? It doesn't. Which we're seeing a good example of now out of the window.' He faced Kevin. 'You want to put yourself in the middle of that?'

Kevin had gotten to the wall by the door and was leaning up against it, obviously weakened by the outbursts. 'That's why I came to you.'

'And what'd you think I was going to do? What miracle was I supposed to perform?'

'Forget it, Kevin… let's get out of here-'

'I thought you were going to help me, Wes. You know the ropes, you're a lawyer, get somebody to listen-'

'People listen all the time, Kevin, they don't hear a damn thing.'

Kevin reached for another breath. 'Well, I want you to hear me, Wes. This is not right. I did not do this. I tried to save him. You hear me? You hear me?'

Wes simply shrugged. 'If you say so-'

'Goddammit…' Kevin lurched forward and swung for Wes's chin, grunting with the pain.

Wes stepped back, Kevin's fist missing him by half a foot, as Kevin's forward motion crumbled him to the ground. Bart jumped forward with a bark.

'Bart!' Wes cuffed at him and the dog slunk to the side.

Kevin was trying to get up. Melanie was down to him, cradling his head in her arms. 'You bastard.'

Wes backed away. 'I didn't…'

Melanie's eyes stuck with him. 'I don't care what happened to you,' she said. 'There's no excuse to explain somebody turning out the way you have.'

An hour later, about noon, Kevin was passed out in Wes's bedroom, the blinds drawn. Wes had a supply of Motrin and Tylenol with codeine and they had pumped Kevin full of the stuff, washed down with a clam-tinged Bloody Mary.

Barefoot, Melanie looked in on him after she came out of the bathroom. She had had a shower and changed into another pair of Wes's khaki shorts, held up with a length of laundry rope, and one of his white shirts, much like the one she had been wearing during the last twenty-four hours.

'He's passed out,' she said.

'He'll be okay as long as he doesn't operate any heavy machinery.' It was an attempt. Feeble, he knew.

But she understood and even appreciated it – the atmosphere had been uncomfortable for the last forty-five minutes. She sat at the opposite end of the futon running a comb through her wet hair.

Wes was watching the news. It was another banner day for the media – we may go down in flames, Wes was thinking, but at least we'll have commentary on it – with the continuing investigation into the death of Christopher Locke, the increase of the reward for Kevin, then the, to Wes, startling news of the re-arrest of Jerohm Reese, which in turn had galvanized Philip Mohandas into previously unsealed heights of rhetoric.

Mohandas was on the screen now, carrying on about racism and calling for the ouster of Acting District Attorney Art Drysdale for approving the arrest of and allowing the charges against poor Jerohm, who had done nothing more than the other four hundred and sixteen citizens who had been cited with various violations over the past few days. No, he was saying, it was because Drysdale was white and Jerohm was black… that was why Jerohm was in jail. The only reason. No charge had ever been brought against him for Mullen's death.

'Hey, Phil!' Wes was yelling to the television. 'Here's a flash for you. Two hundred and eighty-six of the other guys were black, too.' Then, to Melanie, in a different voice. 'I hate that guy. I really do.'

One of the commentators was giving 'deep background,' dignifying Mohandas's charges – a recycling of Drysdale's past that presumably proved him unfit to serve in any capacity in the city and county. Seventeen years before, when asked about his stand on affirmative action in the DA's office, Drysdale had ventured the notion that perhaps there shouldn't be quotas used in hiring experts – for example, trial attorneys – that the people getting hired should be the people who could do the job, be they black, white, chartreuse, polka-dotted. 'Hell,' he'd said at the time, 'if monkeys could do it, I'd say hire monkeys. But they can't, so I wouldn't.'

Naturally, this was interpreted as meaning that Drysdale had called all black people monkeys, and saying he would never hire a black person. The misunderstanding had marked the end of any political aspirations Drysdale might have had (which were few in any event), and over the better part of the next two decades he had gone on to become the rock of the DA's office, a counselor to anyone of any color or creed who needed his help.

And now Mohandas was on him like yellow on a lemon. 'Poor Art,' Wes was saying. 'He's done.'

'You know him?'

'Everybody knows him. He's about the fairest man in the Hall of Justice.'

'But-'

'You watch. He's gone.'

They stared at the picture for another few seconds until one of those 'why-ask-why?' commercials made Wes mute the screen. He liked all kinds of beer, but he'd asked why too many times about too many things to have any idea of what the damn ad was about.

He sat, then, his bare feet flat on the floor, his elbows resting on his knees. 'Want a beer?' Although he didn't move to get one. Finally he sat back, patted the sofa, and Bart jumped into the space between him and Melanie, settling again with his head on Wes's lap. 'What did your parents say?' he asked her.

Hers was an unpractised moue. 'About what you'd expect.' Then: 'What happened to you, Wes?'

The abrupt segue wasn't clear, and he supposed he could have finessed it for a round or two, but of course he knew exactly what she meant. He had talked Kevin – both of them – into staying a while, into thinking through their strategy a little more carefully. At least get some rest.

And why had he done that? Why hadn't he just let them go? Maybe it was time to find out what he was made of, what he was going to do. Maybe open his battered soul's door a crack and take a peek inside, see if there was anybody there he wanted to get to know.

He wasn't very optimistic about it, but Melanie was here, listening – once again she reminded him of his daughter Michelle. All right, he could at least start, see where it went.

'Mark Dooher. I met him in seventh grade. One of those guys the light always shines on, you know? Great-looking kid, he smiled at you and everything was possible. A little like our friend Kevin in fact. In that way.

'And, lucky me, there's a chemistry. I'm not really in his shadow because I'm nothing like him – I've got to work at things, for example, and I swear to God Mark had it all without any show of effort. He once told me, said he didn't understand life – people working so hard to get someplace. To him, it just came. He told me if he had to work he'd probably fail at everything, but it just wasn't that tough for him – you believe that? And there was no arrogance about it, that was just who he was, some guy that everything broke for the right way.

'And I mean everything. Brains, looks, personality, talent, even luck – everything. I should have hated his guts. But a guy like that thinks you're his best friend, thinks you're cool, and that's the way it stays your whole life? Guess what? You figure in this one way maybe you've grabbed a little of his luck – for some reason, the gods like you too. You take it – figure it doesn't have anything really to do with you. Greater forces are at work.

'So we go through life, Mark and Wes. We play ball together – he's shortstop and I'm second base. We go to the Babe Ruth World Series together and damn if he doesn't win the thing with a home run in the bottom of the seventh… and who's on base in front of him? Moi. A sweet moment.'

He paused, scratching Bart absently. One of his feet was curled under him and Melanie thought that, in spite of the gray field of stubble, the long unkempt hair, he suddenly looked younger. He smiled, embarrassed. Perhaps there was something in Kevin choosing him as his friend.

'Anyway,' he went on, 'Mark went to Stanford and I went to Cal, but we stayed close. He met Sheila, and Lydia and I got together – thank God we didn't go for the same type of women, never did – and we both started law school in the same boat down in LA – pregnant wives, living if you can believe it on the same street in Westwood. It was a good life in spite of no money… LA in the seventies.

He did the first few bars of 'I Am, I Said,' got to the laid-back feeling point, and raised his eyebrows.

'Naturally, Mark doesn't crack a book and somehow is law review and clerking with the majors and I'm living at the library pulling Bs. This story too long?'

'No.'

'So after law school he gets on the partner track here in the city starting in the high thirties. This is '75 or so, remember, and that was a ton of money then. I hang up a shingle and start hauling it in in the large hundreds doing low-rung criminal stuff. But that's okay. It's Mark and me, it's who we are. No sweat. We're still best friends. We've got kids the same age – baseball and soccer – we play bridge with our wives and the families do stuff together all the time. It's like we're all one family. My kids call him Uncle Mark and I'm Uncle Wes. It was nice, it was perfect, like everything with Mark. We both eventually wind up back here in the city, and even if he's in St. Francis Wood and we're up the Richmond – so what? We're all happy, what's the problem?'

'So what happened?'

'Well, wait, there's one other thing.' Wes stood, stretched, went to the salon's small refrigerator and took out two bottles. He twisted the top off a Mickey's Big Mouth and gave it to Melanie, who took it without thought. She couldn't remember any time she'd had beer in the afternoon. Well, first time for everything…

Wes was back down, half-turned to her, one bare foot curled under him. 'There was the law. I don't think it's the law as you or Kevin think of it. Or too many other people. Maybe only me.'

'And Mark?'

He chuckled, and it seemed to her both brittle and bitter. 'And Mark, of course. You work in it long enough and I suppose it gets like anything else. You burn out, get cynical. But Mark and I… and this goes back to early high school, maybe before that… I don't know what started it, but we got into this, this attitude. It was like a deal between us.' He sipped his beer, taking a minute, then added, 'No, that's not nearly it. It was more a sacred pact.'

'What was it?'

'It was that we wouldn't lose faith. That sounds stupid-'

'No, it doesn't.'

'Yes, it does, believe me. We saw it happening with everybody around us in the law – how the hours would eat you up, the clients who lied or who were just plain guilty, the crap you had to put up with to survive.

'But Mark and I stuck to our pact. He had this… this vision… don't laugh… that life had to mean something. That that's what made people successful – not what they did but how they did it, how they felt about it, that they didn't stop trying. And we're not just talking monetary success here – no, this was Mark Dooher, this was Life Success, What It Was All About, The Big Picture. So twice, three times a year, I don't know, one of us would get down on the whole thing and we'd take this retreat – go fishing, whatever – reaffirm, get back to What Counted…'

Melanie was sitting forward, entranced. 'Everybody should do that.'

'You're right. It was great. It worked.'

'So?'

Wes let out a long breath. 'So one night three years ago – both of our youngest kids had just moved out – a burglar breaks into Mark's house, rapes his wife and stabs her to death.'

Melanie's beer stopped halfway to her open mouth.

'And after about four months, Mark is charged with the murder.'

The bottle, untouched, was back in her lap. She was tempted to ask if Wes was kidding her. It seemed the only thing possible. But she knew he was not. This had happened, and as the truth and portent of it began to sink in, she muttered, 'Oh my God.'

'No kidding.'

'He didn't do it, did he?'

'Get real. This is Mark Dooher, senior partner in his law firm, major philanthropist, dedicated family man. Give me a break. But he got charged. It was, I thought, an extremely weak case, all circumstantial. His fingerprints were on the knife – but he was the cook in the family, of course his fingerprints are on the knife. Could be his blood type from the sperm samples – right, him and a thousand other guys. But no solid alibi – he'd been out late driving golf balls at Lincoln. Mark and Sheila had just raised their insurance, stuff like that. And he asked me to defend him. And of course I did.'

'And?'

'And I won. Fight of my life, case of my life. And I won it. Got out of the trenches. Mark was mega-high profile, put me on the map. Got two murder referrals in the next year and it looked like I was going to start making some money.'

Melanie nodded. 'But he did it, didn't he?'

He blinked back the dim shine in his eyes. His voice thick, he had to begin twice. 'The… the son of a bitch… the son of a bitch told me, said he didn't want the fact that he had killed his wife to get between us, we were still…' He wiped a hand over one eye, swore.

'So that's why,' she said finally.

He nodded. 'Yeah, that's why.'

37

After the speech and its aftermath – the supervisors unanimously recommended the two-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for Kevin Shea – Mayor Aiken thought his post-lunch meeting with Philip Mohandas would be smooth sailing, a photo op. Black leader, white leader, solidarity, ya, ya, ya.

He was wrong.

Mohandas, accompanied by his bodyguards Allicey Tobain and Jonas N'doum, was lounging in his outer office, having either intimidated or flattered Donald to get in. So at the outset, to Aiken, there was an odd dynamic – his natural turf had been usurped. Wondering where Donald had gone, he stopped in his doorway.

'Mr Mohandas.' Recovering, smiling, striding forward, his hand outstretched. 'Good to meet you in person at last.'

Aiken's eyes took in Mohandas's two aides, but they stayed seated, apparently awaiting instructions. Mohandas was not here to be friends. He got right down to it. 'Mr Mayor, I'm here speaking to you only because our mutual friend, Senator Wager, asked me to be. I'm frankly appalled at this city's official response to the situation we're now all facing.'

Aiken, moving around behind his desk, felt the heat rising in his face. 'Well, sir, we've just gone a long way toward addressing that. The city's official response so far, besides trying to keep itself from burning down, has been to raise the reward on Kevin Shea. No doubt you've heard…'

'No doubt you've heard, Jerohm Reese is back in jail, and Kevin Shea isn't. That's the reality I'm seeing. I'm seeing a white man, a murderer, walking the streets and an innocent black man being held in jail for no reason.'

'Kevin Shea isn't exactly walking the streets-'

'How do you know that?'

Aiken didn't, of course. These were bad cards and he didn't want to play them. 'In any event, Jerohm Reese is not an innocent black man, either. Not as I understand it.'

'He's no more guilty than five hundred people you let go with tickets-'

'Which doesn't mean he isn't guilty, does it?'

'We're all guilty of something, Mr Mayor. What it seems is that Jerohm is not getting the same treatment as white folk. It means you got a bigot acting now as DA and he saw his chance-'

'Art Drysdale's no bigot.'

Mohandas took that for a beat, turned on a heel and spoke to Allicey and Jonas over his shoulder. 'This man don't want to help.' His people rising, Mohandas was halfway to the doorway, and Aiken was half-tempted to let him go.

But if he didn't it would be worse.

'Mr Mohandas. Wait a minute.' He came around the desk. Mohandas stood impatiently by the door. 'What would help? I don't want to argue small points with you, I want to help. I thought I'd done something very helpful this morning with the supervisors. Perhaps it wasn't enough. You tell me.'

There was a quick gleam of triumph in Allicey's eyes, just as quickly quashed. Mohandas saw it, though, and let go of the doorknob. 'Alan Reston,' he said.

'Who?'

'Alan Reston. The deputy state attorney general. San Francisco born and bred. Former prosecutor in Alameda County. I've spoken to him this morning. He is available.'

' Available for what?'

'Appointment to District Attorney.'

The mayor was too stunned to respond. Mohandas breezed right on. 'Alan Reston has the credentials, the expertise, and the political acumen to help pull us through this difficult time. And' – Mohandas shot a finger into the air for effect – 'the fact that he is an African-American will go a long way to balance the lack of minority representation in city government that has been created here with the death of Chris Locke.'

Suddenly Allicey Tobain stepped forward, her imposing presence dwarfing the mayor. 'Sir,' she said mildly, 'appointing Mr Reston at this time would not just be a gesture. It would have real meaning. It would demonstrate that the city is with us in a tangible way. And I'm sure that the community would respond in a similar fashion.'

She didn't have to say 'votes' – Aiken heard her.

But the mayor was not stupid – he understood that if you appeased too much you antagonized everyone else. He didn't know what precise position this woman enjoyed with Mohandas, but she was obviously in his inner circle, and Aiken felt he could talk her language. He looked up at her, smiling, appreciating the view.

'I'm sorry, I don't believe we've met.'

She extended her fine hand. 'Allicey Tobain, sir.' Turning to Mohandas, she said, 'I apologize for speaking up, Philip.' But clearly her role had been discussed, maybe even rehearsed.

Mohandas smiled. 'Allicey and Jonas' – he acknowledged the other man – 'they keep me on the pulse.' N'doum's face was a stone mask, but Allicey was flushed with the compliment.

Aiken spoke to her. 'I know of Reston, of course. But bringing him on for the express purpose of releasing Jerohm Reese is not going to fly.'

Mohandas glanced at Tobain – for approval, direction? She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and he said, 'That would, of course, be the District Attorney's decision.'

But Aiken wasn't giving away the store without a guarantee or two. 'Once he got to be District Attorney, yes. And whomever I chose would need to reconcile himself with Mr Drysdale.'

Mohandas nodded. 'I know Alan Reston and I know he'll do what's best for the city.'

The mayor nodded back. 'I'd be interested to hear what his plans would be,' he said.

Allicey Tobain stepped even closer. 'May I use your phone, sir? I know where he is right now.'

38

Loretta Wager was alone at home.

After the events of the day before it would be unseemly of her to be out on the streets. She also wanted to make herself available to Abe Glitsky, in either his professional role or personally. This was no time to lose track of her priorities.

For all the comments she had heard making light of it the first day she'd been out here, she was in fact glad of her decision not to have brought any of her staff with her. They had important work in Washington, and there was too much she had to do here on her own – this was one of those good times when her actions didn't need any 'spin.'

She was doing what needed to be done.

She was awake early, her mind filled with Abe Glitsky. She had wanted – needed – to call him before he went in to work. Then she was on one of her phones to her Washington office. On the private line the other calls had been steadily coming in: Donald from the mayor's office had called. The wire services. Alan Reston and Philip Mohandas. The whole world wanted her. Well, it would have to wait. She in turn waited until she thought Elaine would be downtown, then called her.

Her poor daughter was suffering badly, but that would pass. Suffering passed – she knew that from her own experience. She wanted to tell her – though of course never could – that she was much better off, that Chris Locke never intended to leave his wife and children, ever – not for Elaine, not for anybody. Loretta made it her business to know things, and this she knew with a certainty.

And then Elaine – the only truly precious thing in Loretta's world – her beautiful and sensitive daughter Elaine would find her spirit broken. She'd become what her mother was.

God knew, Loretta had made enough compromises in her life, but the one constant had always been preserving Elaine's – what was the word? – innocence? Idealism?

Loretta had lost hers long ago, maybe even before her four days in the Colombian jungle, thinking she was going to spend eternity there, clutching a suitcase full of the dollars that the Colombian businessman on the plane had carried aboard as hand baggage, contemplating the money's uselessness to her, living day and night with the lizards and bugs and decomposing bodies of five dead men. Now she was a pragmatist, what counted was what worked. She was a woman of stature and accomplishment, but the idealist she had once been – back, say, when she had been with Abe Glitsky in college – that person was gone forever. And God, how she missed her! How she wished she could return! But, of course, that was life, wasn't it? The taking of one road that foreclosed the possibility of taking any of the others…

Well, now that part of it might not happen to Elaine. At least not because of Christopher Locke. It was a shame that it had to happen, but it wasn't the end of the world – her daughter would get over it.

She wished she felt worse about Locke, a powerful black leader cut down in his prime. But on the other hand, he had lived his allotted time and his death was going to save her daughter from a terrible trauma, whether she realized it now or not.

At first she thought Mohandas was expending useless energy on the Jerohm Reese matter, but on reflection realized that her daughter had unknowingly delivered a trump to their hands, and Mohandas was holding it. The problem was that Loretta wasn't sure Mohandas knew how to play it for the best effect. So she was going to do it for him and then tell him what she had done. And in exchange for…

Well, there was always that – Philip would have to be made to see that he'd have to deliver, too. Nothing was for free.

The passage of the increased reward on Shea was a sign that things were going her way. Once the river of appeasement started flowing, it tended to take on a life of its own. Even better was the fact that the mayor had come to focus on Philip Mohandas as the symbol of the outraged black community. It was a reaction she had helped engineer; she was playing Philip in her own game of chess.

But she had to remind herself not to underestimate the man – he was no mere pawn. In calmer times she knew that Mohandas managed to retain only a small following in the voting community. But when flare-ups occurred, when the general perception got to be that the essence of American black life itself was under threat from the white majority, even moderate blacks – her constituents – flocked to him in large numbers, significant numbers.

The blinds were drawn throughout the house. Dressed in a black woolen outfit suitable for mourning, Loretta sat at a cherry secretary in her small office at the back, looking out and down to the Presidio, the decommissioned army base that had recently been converted to a national park.

The last place of decommissioned and deserted prime real estate in San Francisco was the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation, and, waiting for Abe Glitsky's arrival, Loretta was putting in more phone time to Washington. Her idea had been percolating for months, and she had been patiently waiting for the time to set it in motion. And now that time had come. Whatever the outcome of this crisis, she was confident that her plan would deliver her nearly every African-American vote in the Bay Area.

He arrived in another unmarked Plymouth, parking in the circular driveway by the front door. Nervous, he had called fifteen minutes before from downtown, and she had been waiting for him, watching his car pull up, then the man himself get out, stretch his back, catch her looking in the window and break a small knowing smile.

'The last thing I want to do is argue with you.'

Somehow, an hour had passed.

Glitsky, dressed again, sat with her at her breakfast nook, drinking a mug of Constant Comment tea with extra lemon. There was an island separating the nook from the kitchen, and, her bare feet swinging slightly, Loretta sat up on it, wearing her dark skirt and blouse.

'Disagreeing isn't arguing.'

'Come visit the Senate sometime. The two are kissin' cousins, sometimes twins.'

'Not now.'

'All right, not now.' She slipped off the island, pulled a chair up next to him. 'But right at this minute I don't even want to disagree, okay?'

She was right there, next to him, and he was surprised that she seemed almost timid, afraid to touch him now that the fires had been banked for a while. To some degree, he found himself relieved about it. He couldn't say why, but a casual touch from her – right at this moment – would have struck him as inappropriate, something she might do with almost anyone to drive home a point. He didn't want her to use that trick. Or any other trick.

But, this close, he had to touch her. He reached a hand out and rested it on her forearm. 'My agenda is different than yours, Loretta, that's all I'm saying. Your job is politics. Mine is homicide. I want to find who killed Arthur Wade.'

She spoke quietly. 'We know who did that, Abe. We've got a picture of it.'

'I'm not denying Kevin Shea-'

"Then you've got to get comfortable with us using him…'

'But we know for a fact that there were others, we don't know if Shea was the leader of anything, what he was doing there at all.'

'I think it's clear he was doing enough.'

Glitsky was silent.

'Abe, listen. Doesn't this make sense if you think about it? Forget police procedures. You've said my job is politics, and this is political. It's trying to get to some consensus, get people thinking some solution – it almost doesn't matter which one – is going to work. To stop this thing before it destroys the whole city, maybe the country.'

Glitsky swallowed some tea. 'And you honestly think arresting Kevin Shea…?'

'I think as a symbol, that could end it, yes.'

Glitsky searched her eyes and discovered something he recognized as crucial – at least Loretta believed it.

'So what about Jerohm?'

Loretta sighed. 'That might be a blessing in disguise if we can get the right spin on it.'

Glitsky, a thin humor. 'I don't know from spin.'

'Jerohm appeases the angry whites, Kevin appeases our angry brothers and sisters.'

'Half-brothers and sisters,' Glitsky corrected her, 'if you want to get technical.'

Loretta took that in. 'One drop of blood,' she said.

'What's that?'

'That's the law of our land, Abe. If you've got one drop of black blood, you're black.'

'If you say so…' But he didn't want to fight, he didn't want to have a discussion. He was moving his hand up and down her arm, and she leaned her head down and kissed it. 'You know,' he said, 'it may be different with the people you deal with, but I don't think about my color all the time, about where we're going as a people… it's more everybody, the world…'

'Going down the tubes together?'

'Fast enough. And choosing up sides over who we're gonna hate doesn't seem to be making it any better.'

'Why, Abe Glitsky, you're still an idealist, aren't you, in that heart of yours?' He had to laugh… he considered himself the greatest skeptic he knew. She moved up, closer to him. 'Maybe it'll get better.'

'Does it seem like it's getting better?' he asked.

'On any given day, maybe not. Today, certainly not. But sometimes… sometimes… I mean, somebody like me, twenty years ago a black woman was not a U.S. senator. I've got to think that in the long view things have changed for the better. It must mean something.'

'It might mean that people believe you, Loretta. It might be just you, who you are, what you give people.'

This brought her up short. She bit her lip, straightening, then put her arm around Glitsky and held herself against him. 'How did I ever let you go?' she whispered.

He got beeped and found that his father had succeeded in cajoling Rabbi Blume's reluctant witness to the riot – Rachel from one of the former Soviet republics – into talking to him. He wasn't fifteen blocks away, he could be there in ten minutes.

At the door he told Loretta that he wasn't going to get in her way over Kevin Shea. That was her bailiwick. It wasn't his habit, and it wasn't in his job description, to go public with his investigations. Actually he had few if any substantive doubts about Shea's involvement. But he did want to get the whole picture, a verifiable sequence of events so that when the time came any charges brought against Shea would stick.

'And you know,' he said finally, 'you might want to talk to your daughter.'

'What about Elaine?'

'From her perspective what counts is to prove Shea guilty. If we arrest him and she can't prove he did it, she's going to take the fall for it. If I were you, that would be a concern right now. That she gets it right.'

Glitsky was starting to walk to his car but Loretta held his arm. 'Abe?'

He stopped.

'Would you help her, too? Not let her get hurt?'

He nodded. 'I'll try,'he said. 'It's my job.'

39

What Glitsky 's father Nat had not told him was that he had picked up the boys – all three of them – and was taking them first out to Tommy's Joynt for sandwiches and then down the coast, maybe to Monterey, where there weren't any riots, see the Aquarium, do something constructive with their summer.

It was ridiculous to keep them cooped up the house all day every day. What did Abe think he was doing, being a good father?

'I'm trying to protect them, Dad. I don't want them hurt.'

Father and son were in Rabbi Blume's office, the boys visible outside the window shooting some hoops in the synagogue's playground, which was otherwise deserted. Blume and Rachel were waiting in the attached residence, and Abe was not in any hurry to see them until this got settled with his father, who was not exactly breaking down in the face of his son's wrath – 'What's going to hurt them, tell me that?'

'How can you even ask that? You look around lately? You see what's happening?'

Nat Glitsky shrugged. 'I drove downtown to see you. I drove back to Rachel's. We walk together here, on the street, from her house. Nobody bothers us. Nobody's out.'

'You might want to ask yourself why that is.'

'I know why that is, Abraham. Sit down, would you? You're overreacting.'

'I don't want to sit down. I'm not overreacting! These are my children and my responsibility and I'm not exposing them to… to this. I'm not going to lose any more of my family.'

In spite of saying he didn't want to, Abe sat heavily. Nat hesitated by the rabbi's desk, then walked across the room and pulled up a chair next to his son.

'You can lose them this way, too. Holding on too tight, Abraham.'

'I'm trying to protect them, I'm trying to do what's best.'

Nat nodded. 'Always. I know this. But I called this morning, trying to get you, and Jake answers the phone. I never hear him talk about you like this… "Dad's losing it, Pops. He doesn't have a clue." This kind of talk. And from Jacob, who you know worships the ground under you. It worries me.'

'It worries you…?' Glitsky barked a laugh, cut short.

'I know, I know, it worries you, too. Hey, who doesn't worry a little? And you, since Flo – '

'It's not me.' His voice was sharp. 'It's not my fault this is going on here. And it's not about Flo. It's me and them. Flo's not part of this.'

Nat put a hand on his son's knee. 'Flo is the whole thing, Abraham. Don't be kidding yourself.'

'That's bullshit, Dad.' Then, more strongly. 'That's pure bullshit!' He swatted the hand away, standing, striding across to the window, breathing hard, his face set.

'I think this is the first time you swear at your old man, huh?'

Abe tried to focus on his sons, the game outside. They were doing precision drills, the two older boys taking rebounds and feeding lay-up shots in to Orel. The patter was barely audible, though clearly loose and playful. 'I can't lose any more, Dad. I can't.'

Again, Nat crossed the room to his son. He stood behind Abe, much shorter, seeing the boys outside. 'We cannot hold onto anything, Abraham. It is not in our power and that is God's truth.'

Glitsky turned. 'All right, but what if-?'

Nat cut him off. 'That is what you are thinking and it doesn't mean anything.' Putting a hand on his son's arm, he went on. 'Abraham, think. What if they are locked in at home all day and someone decides to start a fire on your street? This is not in your control, none of this. There is nothing you can do here except second guess yourself to death. Let me take them. We go have some fun, come back when this is over.'

Glitsky's shoulders slumped as he let himself down onto the corner of the desk. 'When's life going to start feeling real again, Dad? I don't know what the hell I'm doing.'

'I know. When Emma… well, you remember.'

'You never changed.'

A short laugh. 'Abraham, I don't think I ever changed back. What I tried not to do was change how I treated you, how I acted. I kept up the motions, the habits, so how I was feeling wouldn't affect you, that's all. You had lost your mother. That was enough for you to deal with.'

Glitsky motioned outside. 'Like them now. That's the message, right?'

His father nodded. 'There are similarities. So now, you do your job, you keep at it, things get to feel normal in a new way maybe. It never does go back to the way it was. That's over.' He paused. 'And that's the hard part to accept. It isn't going back. So what is it going to be now?'

Glitsky brought a hand to his eyes and rubbed them. He stood again, walked a few steps, looked outside. 'If you go to Monterey, stop by the pier and pick me up some saltwater taffy, would you? I love that stuff.'

40

'You guys again?'

Ridley Banks stood grinning on Peter McKay's stoop. 'You know, Peter, you're hurting my feelings, that kind of talk. This is my partner, Marcel Lanier. Say you're glad to meet him, would you? He's sensitive.'

'Yeah, glad to meet you.'

Banks turned half-around. 'What did I tell you? You ask nice, you get a response. This is the kind of witness we should get to interview every day, makes life sweet. What do you say?'

'What do you guys want this time?'

'We want to talk to you a couple of minutes, discuss your statement of the other day.'

'Who's that, Petey?' A young woman with lank blonde hair appeared behind McKay in the doorway. A worn, flesh-colored tank top barely concealed boyish breasts. Skinny white legs under cut-off jeans, white socks and tennis shoes.

'Oh, excuse us,' Banks said. 'I didn't realize you were entertaining.'

McKay backed up a step. This is my wife, Patsy.'

'Your wife? I didn't know… how do you do, ma'am? How's the arm, by the way, Pete?'

McKay twisted his wrist, flexed his fingers. He was wearing a flannel shirt with long sleeves. 'Better every day,' he said.

'Bandage off?'

'Not yet. Couple more days.'

'Is Petey in trouble?' Patsy asked. She had a smoker's voice.

She'd moved forward a step into the light – Banks didn't think she looked fifteen. But, he noticed, there was a gold band on her finger.

'No, ma'am, not now. We're just double-checking a few things he said last time he talked to us.'

'Like what?' She got in front of her husband.

Marcel Lanier spoke from behind Banks, over his shoulder. 'Like how he hurt his arm, for example?'

'He cut it on a door,' she said. 'The glass broke.'

'Well, that's what he told us.' Marcel was jockeying for position on the stoop, stepping up now behind Banks. 'But the thing is, we went back – well, actually, my partner Ridley here did – he is kind of thorough, kind of like Colombo, remember him? Always that "uh, just one more thing." Drives us all crazy sometimes but there you go. Anyway, how the arm got cut… You mind if we come in? It is definitely not warm, and you look a little chilly yourself.'

Accompanied as it was by a glance downward, Lanier was being more antagonistic than he sounded – Patsy McKay's nipples were protruding like gumdrops, poking at the thin fabric of the tank top.

'Why don't you go put on a shirt, hon,' McKay said. 'You guys got a warrant or we can talk right here. What about my arm?'

But Patsy didn't leave, so Banks spoke over her. 'About your arm is that your cousin Brandon Mullen said you both cut yours falling through your sliding back door and when I was by here yesterday I happened to notice that the door isn't broken. You get it fixed right up? Got a receipt for the repair?'

But Patsy was shaking her head. "That was at Brandon 's, not here.'

Banks half-turned, glanced at Lanier. ' Brandon said clear as a bell that you both came back here to have your own private wake for Mike Mullen. To Petey's, is what he said.'

McKay moved forward. 'First-'

'Shh.' Patsy held a hand out, spoke gently but firmly to her husband. 'Hush now.' Back to the inspectors: 'I had a bad headache. They kept waking me up so I asked them to please go over to Brandon 's, which is what they did.'

Banks begged to differ. ' Brandon said they came here.'

'They came here first. Then they went there. Why don't you go ask him again? We'll even go over there with you. Petey didn't do nothing wrong. We got nothing to hide.'

Brandon Mullen was home and acted for all the world as though he had been expecting them. He lived in a lower duplex on 22nd Avenue in the Richmond District, five blocks from the McKays. The sliding glass doors that led to his tiny patio were brand new. And why, yes, inspectors, he did just happen to have a receipt right here for it – two days ago, isn't that right, signed and all? Reardon Glass and Screen.

'I'm going to go bust some chops.'

'Can't do it, Rid.'

They were sitting outside of Brandon Mullen's place, waiting – for nothing. Marcel had the driver's side window down, his elbow on it. 'McKay told Brandon about you coming by his house. Somebody put it together about the window.'

'The wife.'

'Maybe. Anyway, they figured they better break some window.'

'I already figured that out. Thanks.'

'You want to go talk to Reardon of Reardon Glass and whatever the fuck else it is?'

'See if he made the repair yesterday or two days ago, the date on the invoice? No. I don't think he'd be honest with us.'

'I'm shocked. A good Irish Catholic boy?'

'Welcome to police work,' Banks said. 'Shocks abound.'

Working by himself, Carl Griffin took another tack.

He knew he wasn't going to get squatola from any of the other good ol' boys – O'Toole, Mullen, McKay, Shea – the black Irish pulling close round their own men.

His first thought had been to try the emergency rooms at the various local hospitals, but one or two calls had disabused him of that notion – with the city's upheavals, the emergency rooms were, if anything, more swamped than the Hall of Justice, and there weren't many people with the time, inclination or memory to be of much help.

So – methodically, doggedly – he started cross-working a map and a telephone book, phoning every private doctor's office within a two-mile radius of the Cavern Tavern, identifying himself as a homicide inspector and asking if any of the doctors had seen anything remotely resembling a knife wound during the last three days.

Doctors' records were not protected by the evidence code in criminal investigations. In fact, in some cases – such as incidents with gunshot wounds or sexual assaults – doctors were mandated to report to authorities.

It was at the tail end of an eggplant parmesan submarine sandwich. Griffin had parked his beefy frame at his desk in the homicide detail. Leaning back, the heels of his black brogues on the pitted desk, he balefully contemplated the new jail, the slice of clouds and blue above. He was on 'E.' Flipping the pages labelled 'Physicians,' he realized he had another five pages to go.

This was Carl Griffin's brand of police work – you did it by the numbers, you were not inspired, you slogged it out, and eventually, if you covered everything, once in a while you hit it. He considered going to the end of the listings and started backward from 'Z.' But then, he knew, the one he'd left off on at 'E' would turn out to be the jackpot. So he dialed the number for 'Epps.'

Miss Manners would have disapproved of the last bite he took of his sandwich. The telephone was ringing in his ear and when it picked up he had to swallow without chewing and for a fleeting instant thought it wasn't going to go down, that this was his last moment.

'Hello, doctor's office,' the voice repeated.

He swallowed again – saved – and cleared his throat. It turned out that Dr Epps was having her own lunch in the coffee room and she listened without speaking while he gave his spiel. 'Since when was this?' she asked when he had finished.

'Tuesday night.'

'Just a minute.'

Griffin was suddenly elated he hadn't jumped to 'Z.' She was back on the line. 'I had a rather severe Achilles tendon slash that I sewed up on Wednesday morning. The patient was a young man who said he'd gotten tripped up, then fallen over a shovel in his backyard, one of those freak accidents, but I don't think it was a shovel – '

Griffin waited.

'The wound looked like a suture cut – clean and straight.'

'I see. And did you mention this to him?'

'I asked about it, yes. But he said, no, it was a shovel. Brand new, never used, edge like a knife. He didn't blink and I guessed it was possible. I sewed it up.'

'How old was the man?'

'Just a second. Colin Devlin. Twenty-four. Do you want his address?'

41

The waiting area of the bowels of the San Francisco morgue, on the other side of the heavy door that leads to the examination room, was drab and windowless. Plastic yellow chairs, sagging with age and perhaps the accumulation of grief, hugged the shiny light green walls. The two plastic rubber trees no longer looked remotely real, but no one had removed them, no one had noticed. The people in this room were thinking of other matters.

As the assistant district attorney handling the Arthur Wade homicide, Elaine Wager had been called down to the morgue by John Strout, San Francisco's coroner, to go over the forensic report, which, due to the crushing workload over the recent days, had been a little slower coming than usual.

Knees pressed together, hands clasped in her lap, Elaine waited in the anteroom. Strout had told her when he had called upstairs that it would be at least an hour, but she had picked up her folders and gone down immediately, content to be in hiding.

She had spent a good deal of time in the morning fighting herself, keeping busy doing background work on her suspect – his friends, workplace, history. Anything to avoid thinking of Chris, of what had happened… The police had forwarded to her the name of the woman who had provided Kevin Shea's name in the first place – Cynthia Taylor – and, while she had picked up very little in the way of evidence that would be useful in court, the picture of the man had begun to emerge.

According to Ms Taylor, Shea was a half-step up from white trash. He came from a broken family somewhere down south (which fitted perfectly with what he'd done, she thought). He was one of those hangers-on at SESU, drifting from class to class, drunk a lot of the time. Though Ms Taylor believed he worked part-time in some kind of telemarketing ('no way he could hold a real job'), he also bragged about using the GI bill to buy his booze, didn't have any friends to speak of, although he'd had a relationship with one of Ms Taylor's friends for a couple of months, and now appeared to have hoodwinked that hapless victim into becoming his accomplice in escaping. Ms Taylor had ended the interview with the statement that she thought he was 'really dangerous, unstable. You never know what he's going to do.'

And then the coroner had called, and Elaine realized that she had had enough. The walls were closing in. She needed time to let her emotions flow, to be alone. The room outside Strout's lab gave her that opportunity.

Suddenly – any movement in the dead room appeared sudden – the big door swung open and Strout's lanky form was pulling up a chair next to hers. Strout had a strong deep-south accent and no enemies on the police force or in the DA's office. A true professional, he lived for his forensics. He also had a sly humor and a skeptical eye that had many times discovered a homicide in what at first appeared, even to the police, to be an accidental or benign death.

'I'm gettin' real tired of lookin' at dead people,' he drawled. He had his latest ME forms on a clipboard that he held on his lap. 'Couple a day seems to be my limit. Get up to four, five, gives me a sour stomach.'

Elaine didn't react. This was how Strout always was. It wasn't personal. 'Is that Arthur Wade?' she asked, motioning to the clipboard.

He nodded, enough with amenities. 'No surprises, not that I expected any. Cause of death was asphyxiation, which you'd expect gettin' pulled up – must have taken some minutes. Poor man. Long time to hang. Hey, let me get you some water.'

'No, I'm all right.'

But she found herself resting her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. This was too much. She couldn't sit and listen to someone talk about Arthur Wade hanging for a long time like this – at Boalt, Arthur had seemed one of those wonderful people, not that she'd known him all that well. And now, four years later, his future was the past and that was all.

And Chris Locke… no, don't start, she told herself. Don't open that up.

More time had gone by. Strout was back with lukewarm water in a paper cup. 'Y'all want to lay down a minute, there's a couch in my office?'

But she couldn't help herself. 'Chris Locke is in there, isn't he?'

'Yes, ma'am.' Strout sucked some air between his front teeth. 'Sometimes…' His voice, with a sudden guttural quality, trailed off.

She put a hand on his knee, took it away. 'I know.'

Back in her office – ancient desk, stacks of files, smell of paper and dust – she closed the door behind her. Since an hour ago when she 'd left to go to the morgue, someone had come by and dropped a large yellow envelope in the center of the desk. She sat, dropped her Arthur Wade files on the floor by her feet and opened the envelope.

It was another copy of the original Paul Westberg photo that was in the newspapers and everywhere else. But then, about to slip it back into the envelope and throw the whole thing into the file folder, she stopped. Something had caught her eye and she pulled the photo all the way out.

With everything that had happened since then, she had forgotten that she'd asked the photographer – a request, not a demand – to send her the other picture that he had developed. Which he had now done.

It was very close, as Westberg had said, and he had been right, too, that the likeness of Kevin Shea was a little better in the picture everybody had seen. It was obvious why he had gone with the one and not the other.

But there was something strange about the second one. She picked up the file folder, dug for the first picture, and held them side by side. She was struck by one detail – in the second photo Arthur Wade was clearly holding the knife that, in the other picture, was in Kevin Shea's hand.

Well, so what?

Lots of people – professionals even – carried small knives in their pockets. She herself had a penknife in her purse.

She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the moment, the threatening crowd, Shea in the center of it, deciding – now that Arthur was hanging and helpless – that he would take a stab at him as well, put a knife in his ribs, and Arthur had somehow managed to see it, to reach down with one hand, grab for it, a last moment of struggle, captured here in Westberg's photo.

Or another explanation – weaker but, she considered, still possible. Arthur had somehow managed to pull a knife of his own before they had lifted him from the ground, realizing he'd have to try to cut the rope. It would be his last chance to survive. And then Shea, reaching up, had grabbed it from him, wresting it away. It didn't change any of the basic facts of what had happened – fact, it made the picture clearer.

But something else.

And it came on her in a wave of revulsion that nearly doubled her over, then straightened her back up with rage. There was Kevin Shea, grimacing with the efforts to pull down on her old classmate, setting off the chain of events that had killed Chris Locke, her boss, her lover…

It was intolerable that this man – this bigoted southern schoolboy – was still at large. Her mother was right – so were the supervisors, the mayor, even Philip Mohandas. One man was responsible for all this. It may have been a mob, but this one man had led it. This one man had driven the city to its knees – and he had to be taken. He had to be taken now. The madness wouldn't stop until he was. He had to be found.

Elaine pushed out from her desk. She had to make people see this, she had to make them hate Shea for what he'd done the way she hated him.

There were procedures and there were levels of hierarchy, but she also knew who she was. She could go outside channels, direct to the people. Art Drysdale might reprimand her but the reprimand would have no teeth. No one would dare to touch her.

The city provided the media with two rooms – one for print and one for radio and television – on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, both of them just outside the frosted doors that led down the hallway to the District Attorney's office. Both of these were now full to overflowing, with tables set up in the hall – coffee containers, donuts, half-eaten sandwiches.

Over the past days Elaine and most of the other assistant district attorneys had avoided this hallway in an effort to skirt the schools of piranha journalists who had been in a perpetual feeding frenzy over any scraps that fell into their waters. She had ascended and descended by any of the several internal stairways that connected the floors of the Hall.

Now, her anger high and clear and overlaying the exhaustion in her face, she was hip-deep in the main hall, laying a trail of chum.

'I don't believe this.'

'I do,' Wes Farrell replied. He had not moved. He looked typically slob-like in his khaki shorts and his 'On Strike From Major League Bull-' T-shirt, bare feet up on a milk crate, another can of beer in his hand, Bart's head in his lap.

They were all fixed on Elaine Wager's live interview. 'This is how they do it. Get it on the tube, it becomes fact.'

'How do they find out all this stuff?' Kevin whispered. Talking in his normal voice was painful. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was getting weaker rather than improving. His left arm had a constant throb, and at every breath his ribs pinched at him. When he had gotten up, the consensus had been that what he needed was a hot bath. He'd taken one but it had seemed to make everything hurt even worse.

He was drinking coffee. 'What is she talking about, "unstable"? "Despondent over the death of his brother?" "Liable to do anything?" Where does all this come from?'

Melanie was – force of habit – cleaning up in the room behind the men. She had already washed two loads of dishes and now was stacking the piles of newspapers, arranging the paperbacks in the brick-and-board bookcase in alphabetical order by author – she stopped moving for a moment.

'Cindy,' she said. Then, to Wes: 'One of Kevin's earlier conquests that didn't work out so well.' But then she quickly softened it, coming up behind Kevin, planting a kiss on the top of his head. 'A lesson for us all.'

On the tube, Elaine – indignant – was answering another question. 'Well, the fact that he's gone this long without contacting the authorities argues compellingly that he has no reasonable defense. This office is proceeding on the assumption that he is dangerous…'

Slumped, Kevin said, 'Yeah, a major threat.'

'… and I urge any citizen who thinks they have seen Mr Shea to get in touch with the police or the District Attorney's office immediately.'

Farrell was shaking his head. 'Ah, the temperate voice of reason…'

'I've got to go in,' Kevin said.

'You've got to go in to that? Are you listening to this, Kevin? To what's happening out there?' Wes shook his head, finished his beer, number three. 'We need to have ourselves a talk, you and me.'

The image on the screen had changed, and Farrell pointed his remote and turned up the sound. A man with a forbidding countenance was standing on the steps outside the Hall of Justice, collar up against the wind, obviously not enjoying the camera or the microphones in his face.

The male voice-over was explaining that '… Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, the chief of the homicide detail, apparently doesn't share Ms Wager's certitude.'

And then Glitsky, terse: 'We continue to gather evidence. We're trying to get to the truth. That's all the comment I can give you.'

Glitsky was trying to get by but the reporter was in front of him again. 'What about Kevin Shea, Lieutenant? Shouldn't he be your focus? With the mayor's increased reward and the-?'

The camera closed in, and Glitsky said: 'Shea's a suspect. We want to question him, get his story. The end.'

'His story? But Ms Wager says…"

'Ms Wager is doing her job and I'm doing mine – collecting evidence.'

'But don't you have evidence?'

'No comment.'

'What about the picture?'

Glitsky appeared to consider his question. 'Pictures are open to interpretation. Now if you'll let me…' Pushing the microphone away, he brushed by the reporter through the Hall's swinging doors.

At the cut to the commercial Wes Farrell turned off the television. Scratching Bart's ears, he twirled his empty beer can on the arm of the futon and cursed.

'What?'

He turned to Kevin. 'Glitsky.' He gestured toward the TV. 'That guy – '

'What about him? You know him'

'We've done some business.'

Melanie came around in front of him. 'So why does that bother you? He sounded to me like he wasn't sure…'

'You got it. That's what he sounded like.'

Kevin sat up. 'So what's the matter with that?'

'The matter with that,' Wes replied, straightening up, 'is it means we got a chance. We go to him, we might even get a listen.'

'You mean you'll…?' Melanie glanced at Kevin and he raised a hand, slowing her down.

The room went silent. Wes twirled his beer can some more.

'Does that mean you'll help?' Melanie asked.

Wes looked at Kevin. 'Kevin, if it comes out you had any part in this, I'll kill you. I will personally kill you. I will hunt you down and kill you like a rabid animal, except slowly and painfully. Am I making myself clear?'

'I didn't,' Kevin said.

Wes swore yet again, shook his head, tried his empty beer can. 'You better not have.'

42

Glitsky was studying the second photograph, asking some questions on his own. The homicide detail was empty. Blessed peace. There was a note from Carl Griffin that he had gone down to interview a potential knife-wound victim. Good. Glitsky didn't have an alternative explanation yet for the cuts and bandages. But they were there and something had caused them. Perhaps it had been a knife. His father's friend Rachel had mentioned a knife. There was a knife in both pictures. Until he knew what had gone on with the knife he wouldn't have the whole picture, couldn't know for sure what had happened. So knowing would help. Knowledge always helped. No word yet from Banks or Lanier.

The telephone rang. 'Homicide, Glitsky.'

' Ashland, Hardy.'

The lieutenant pushed his chair back, put his feet on the desk. His best friend, Dismas Hardy, was calling him back from Oregon. 'I liked your message,' the voice continued.

Glitsky's entire message had been: 'Hardy, call me.'

'My favorite part was when you did that falsetto part from "Duke of Earl." A lot of old guys like you can't go that high anymore. I thought you were great.'

Glitsky reached for his cup of tea and sipped. 'You picked a good weekend to go away,' he said. 'How are things there?'

'In Ashland? Pretty good. The Tempest was awesome. The pinot noir's good, too. Oregon 's nice. Frannie sends her love.'

'You know that the world as we know it is ending down here?'

'I've heard rumors. It hasn't all gotten here yet.' Then, more seriously, 'How are you doing?'

'I get some time, I'll ask myself. You'll be the first to know. You hear about Locke?'

'I wondered if that was the silver lining we hear so much about.' Hardy and Locke had been professional enemies. Locke had fired him from the District Attorney's office, and then Hardy had gone on to embarrass Locke by presenting successful defenses in a couple of high-profile murder cases that Locke had been prosecuting. So there was no love lost between them. 'I'd be lying if I said the news broke my heart, but I didn't want the man dead, Abe. That's too close to home.'

'I know, Diz. The thought had occurred to me. I sent the kids away with my dad.'

'It's that bad?'

'I guess as long as we don't run out of water we'll survive. It feels like half the city's on fire. I'm trying to put 'em all out.'

'You need some help? I mean personally. You okay?'

'I'm hangin' in. I've had better weeks.'

'You let me know. Leave one of your scintillating messages. We'd come home if we had to.'

'It's not getting to that.'

'All right, but if it does…'

'I hear you. Thanks. Kiss your wife for me.'

'Okay. Where?'

Glitsky found himself chuckling and didn't want to give Hardy the satisfaction, so he hung up.

During the past forty hours Chief Rigby's office had taken on the flavor of a war room. A couple of tables had been moved in and pushed together, and on top of them had been taped a large map of San Francisco. A half dozen staffers were moving around, pushing and pulling pins in various locations, answering the several ringing telephones.

Outside the windows there was a drift of smoke to the south through what Glitsky knew to be a cold-blowing, thin haze of eye-burning smog. The afternoon sun broke through intermittently. Summertime, and the living was easy…

Rigby was standing behind his desk in serious conversation with Alan Reston, a man Glitsky knew slightly as a Sacramento politician with a formidable ambition. The deputy state attorney general had chaperoned Abe the couple of times he had gone up to the state capitol to talk to the legislature on some crime bill or other. Polished and well-spoken, he was about Glitsky's size and five years or more his junior. Now he was here in Rigby's office in a suit and tie. Glitsky had no idea what that meant, but he had been summoned here for a few minutes after he had gotten off the telephone with Dismas Hardy, and when he was summoned by Rigby he came.

Glitsky knocked at the open door, came around the double tables and over to his chief's desk. 'Sir?' he said. Then, to Reston, 'Alan.'

'Abe, good,' Rigby said. Reston barely nodded, which Abe thought was a little strange, but these were tense times. People weren't themselves. 'Let's go on outside a minute where we can talk.'

They paraded out in silence into the hallway, Rigby leading the way, Reston bringing up the rear, past a couple of doors to a deserted interview room. Without preamble Rigby was turned around facing Glitsky: 'This is more in the nature of a friendly discussion than a reprimand, at least at this stage. I want you to understand that, Abe.'

Glitsky swallowed. Friendly discussions that began this way weren't typically his favorite. Reston had moved up, and Rigby included him in his gaze. 'I believe you know Mr Reston, our new District Attorney.'

'Sure, but I didn't know…' He put out his hand. 'Congratulations, Alan.' The handshake was perfunctory. Glitsky turned back to Rigby. 'Is something wrong? What's this all about?'

'This is about the television news,' Rigby replied. 'Specifically, you being on it.'

'But I wasn't-'

The chief stopped him with a hand. 'Listen. I know. We saw it. We heard you. I've ordered a tape if you'd like to see it. You know we've got a community-relations person, Abe. Someone who gets paid to do this.'

'I'm still not sure I know what I did.'

Rigby told him. 'You went public questioning our investigation, which is complete. The man's been indicted.'

He took a moment to digest that. 'With respect, sir, some reporter stuck a microphone in my face and I think I said maybe twenty words.'

'Eighteen too many,' Reston said.

'The District Attorney is correct,' Rigby said, and Glitsky noticed the formal tone. Rigby, too, was being played here. Jobs must be at stake, including his own, the one he had worked his life to get to. Okay, then, if they wanted to do it that way. 'The correct response,' Rigby went on, 'is "no comment." '

'I' believe that was what I said.' But Glitsky knew the truth – if you were accused like this, it was no-win. The more you denied that you'd done something wrong, the more it proved you had.

And Reston picked it up. 'I know this comes across like we're a couple of hardasses, Lieutenant.' In Sacramento, Glitsky had always been Abe, Reston had always been Alan. Now, clearly, things had changed. 'But there has been a great deal of effort expended on a lot of fronts trying to create a… a consistent direction in controlling this situation. We don't want to confuse and stir up things more than they already are.'

'I'm not confused,' Glitsky said. 'I must be ignorant of some basic facts about the evidence we've got – '

'Facts aren't at issue right now,' Rigby said.

'That's what I keep hearing. But I'd be interested to find out the District Attorney's position on that when he takes Kevin Shea to trial.'

'By then we'll have all the facts…'

Glitsky wasn't going to escalate this. He needed his job, and he also felt he was doing it right. 'Let's hope they're the right ones,' he said mildly.

Reston seemed sure enough. Maybe he didn't want to fight either. Not yet. 'They will be,' he said.

His message delivered, Rigby had other business to attend to. 'Just so it's clear, Abe. This whole thing is on a higher level than you or me. The public needs a…'

Glitsky helped him out. 'A spin?'

'Exactly. A spin.'

Reston smiled, and it seemed genuine enough. He put out his hand again, and this time it was firm. 'I knew you'd understand, Abe. We just can't afford to mess with this. Shea is the villain here. We don't want to muddy the waters. Right now he is the best solution to this crisis. He did it. We get him… he is guilty… and the city can move on, start the healing process.'

His face straight Glitsky looked to his chief, then to the new district attorney. 'You got it,' he said to both of them. 'No problem.'

Next to John Strout in the chill air of the forensics lab, Glitsky was shivering. The body of the late Christopher Locke lay, mostly under a blanket, on a gurney in front of them, his head protruding. Strout put a gloved hand under it and raised it a couple of inches. 'Back here,' he said.

Glitsky forced himself to look. It was a small hole, clean and round, behind and a little under Locke's left ear. It might have been invisible had not Strout shaved the surrounding hair. He focused on the spot alone, trying not to see the face, trying not to recognize in it anyone he'd known, talked to, shared jokes with, even if he hadn't been all that fond of the man. He wasn't entirely successful.

'Anything funny?' he asked. 'Anything you didn't expect?'

Strout shrugged. 'Not really. Why?'

'No reason. Force of habit. Maybe I'm just getting in the mood for something funny.'

'Yeah, I know what you mean.' Strout let the head down gently but did not pull the blanket right up. Instead, turning it all the way to one side, so that the hole was up, he leaned over it. 'Powder burns about what you'd expect, maybe a little heavy – '

'Glass?' At Strout's questioning look, Glitsky clarified it. 'From the car window? Shards around the wound?'

The doctor shook his head. 'Shatterproof. It's a city-issue car. I wouldn't expect many, although the microscopic ought to be done any hour now, tell us for sure. You getting at something?'

Glitsky set himself back, flat on his feet. 'You know, John, I'm not getting at a damn thing. I don't know what I'm doing, just pulling at every straw I come across, see if maybe it's attached to something. Tell you the truth, I think I'm overworked lately. And seeing people I know dead doesn't seem to help any.'

Strout straightened up, pulled the sheet up over Locke's face. ' Y'all are sure gettin' that way,' he drawled. 'You think it's a little cold in here?'

He started leading the way out to his office, a large square room lined with bookshelves and well stocked with a variety of ancient and medieval instruments of torture displayed under glass. He stopped on the way to his desk to blow the dust off a spiked mace that graced a pedestal to the right of it. 'One of the DAs was by this morning, handlin' the Arthur Wade thing. Poor girl was a mess.'

'Elaine Wager?'

Strout nodded. 'Started goin' into cause of death – asphyxiation – that whole thing, and she goes 'bout as white as her genes will allow.' He allowed himself a small grin. 'Manner of speakin', of course.'

Glitsky nodded. 'You find any knife wounds on Arthur Wade?'

Strout, by now seated behind his desk, took a moment. 'Knife wounds? No. Rope burns, lacerations, cuts and scrapes, but nothing like a clean cut.' He raised his eyes. 'More straws?'

'Yep.'

'You don't mind a little advice, Abe? Little prescription for some peace of mind?'

'Yep.'

The coroner folded his hands. 'Keep pullin' at 'em,' he said. 'You just never know.'

'Homicide, Glitsky.'

'Lieutenant Glitsky, this is Wes Farrell. I'm an attorney.'

'Sure, Mr Farrell, I know who you are. How can I help you?'

'I'd like to talk to you about Kevin Shea.'

Glitsky was halfway out of his chair, snapping his fingers, trying to get someone's attention outside in the homicide detail so they could pick up a phone, maybe run a tape, at least be a second party. He couldn't see anyone through his open doors at the moment, although he was sure someone had been at one of the desks when he'd gotten back from Strout's.

But no one was appearing. He sat back down.

'Are you representing Shea?'

'I think I know where he is.' A pause. The voice was slurred, as though Farrell had maybe been drinking. Glitsky looked at the clock on the wall. No, that was unlikely – it wasn't yet three o'clock. Still…

The voice continued. '… and I'm in contact with him. He's very much afraid and would like some assurances before he turns himself in. He wants his story heard.'

'All right, then, Mr Farrell. I want to hear it.'

'Where can I meet you?'

'Where are you? You want to come down to the Hall?'

Another long pause. Glitsky heard some discussion over a covered mouthpiece – Shea was right with him. My kingdom for a tapped phone, he was thinking.

'Lieutenant?'

'I'm here.'

'I'd prefer if we could meet personally, alone, you and me.'

'Is Shea going to be with you?'

'No. I'm coming alone. It would just be me.'

If it would put him in touch with Kevin Shea, Glitsky would meet Farrell naked at the top of Coit Tower. 'You know Lou the Greek's, across the street, downstairs place?'

Farrell was definitely slurring. Maybe the guy had a speech defect. 'Lou the Greeksh? Ushed to get my mail there.'

'Say an hour?'

'One hour.'

'Mr Farrell?'

'Yeah?'

'Drive carefully, would you.'

Glitsky moved the police and forensics reports around on his desk. He had been a long time in the business and thought he'd developed a pretty good sense of the moment in a case when the dynamic changed, when you felt you were maybe finally getting to the end of something. He had that feeling now.

He realized that in a certain way Rigby and Reston had done him a favor by reminding him that his role was, after all, specific and limited – he was to bring in a suspect in a murder case. That was all. Find him and bring him in, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. (Glitsky's all-time favorite moment in movie history – Richard Kimble, the fugitive, at the end of the tunnel on the lip of a mile-high waterfall, says to Tommy Lee Jones, 'I'm innocent,' and Jones – beyond cool – goes 'I don't care.')

That would be Glitsky now. Leave the big picture out of it. Collect evidence as it came in and, if things changed, be flexible. But for now the job was to get Kevin Shea into a cell here in the Hall.

He still wasn't completely confident that Loretta's theory would hold, that bringing Shea into custody would throw any oil onto these roiling waters, but on the off-chance it did, wouldn't that be a nice bonus?

Meanwhile, he would go by the book with Wes Farrell. He would play fair, keep it to himself and meet him alone. A deal was a deal, and he was reasonably certain that Farrell, even if he wasn't sober, was not trying to pull anything. It had sounded legitimate. Farrell was a lawyer protecting his client, and that wasn't necessarily at odds with Glitsky's job. At least, not yet.

He didn't blame Shea for getting a lawyer. Three hundred thousand dollars was ample motivation for someone to cause him serious mayhem. And Glitsky wasn't forgetting the not-so-hidden hundred-thousand dollar message that Philip Mohandas had delivered – kill him if you have to. Shea must know, and Glitsky thought he was right, that it would be child's play to concoct some story of attempted escape or self-defense that would work as a justification for taking out Kevin Shea.

So it would work out, maybe by tonight. The boys would be gone out of harm's way in Monterey with his father. The city would creak its way back to business as usual, and Abe Glitsky might look forward to a weekend alone catching up on some much-needed sleep. Maybe other things, too.

He lifted the phone, punched some numbers. She answered on the second ring. From her tone she was relieved to hear from him, as though she expected he wouldn't ever call her again.

She would be going back down to City Hall, to her office. Did he have the number there? She couldn't just stay in her house any longer. She had flown out here to San Francisco to make a difference, and even if she was devastated by what had happened with Chris Locke, she had to get back to work – people needed her. She had to try to use what influence she had, meet with people on every side of it, find some workable solutions, play peacemaker.

Would Abe make a point, please, to look in on Elaine? She hadn't been able to contact her all day and was getting sick with worry.

He let her go on, admiring her strength. A powerful woman with an important agenda. It was heady, but somehow natural, that he would be her connection, she his lifeline.

It would help if she knew how close it was to being over. She would be able to assure people that Shea would soon be in custody. He was meeting Shea's attorney at Lou the Greek's, and they would be arranging the details of his surrender. It ought to be done within a few hours, a day at most.

She told him that that was wonderful news.

If Abe got a chance after that, later, would he be able to stop by her office before he went home? Even a few minutes would be okay. She didn't know what to do with all this, these feelings about the two of them, what was happening. She really needed to talk to him. She needed him.

43

Art Drysdale had been about to make his way over to give Elaine Wager the rest of the week off when he got the news about Alan Reston's promotion to DA. Through connections at one of the television stations he had gotten early wind of Elaine's latest bout of unpredictability and had decided not that she was under too much stress – hell, everybody was under too much stress – but that she wasn 't handling hers properly.

Daughter of a senator or not, she was going to take some time off and think about what she was supposed to be doing here. First she arrests Jerohm Reese. Then she spouts to the media about Kevin Shea, apparently sounding very much the official spokesperson for the DA's office, which she was not. Next, she might… but that, Drysdale thought, was the point – there was no telling what she might do next. He didn't want her around so they could all find out.

But then had come the call from the mayor's office. Not surprising in itself – after all, the DA's job was a political position and Drysdale was primarily an administrator – nevertheless the speed of turnover and person selected for the job were both unsettling.

So Drysdale had sat a few minutes, juggling baseballs, awaiting the arrival of his new superior. Then abruptly he had stood and gone down anyway to his original destination, Elaine Wager's cubicle. The door had been closed and he had knocked, then opened it, finding her sitting on the floor in the corner, hugging her knees to her chest. When she looked up, her face was streaked and ghostly.

Drysdale had gone down to the bathroom and brought back a handful of wet papertowels. By the time he got back Elaine was up off the floor, sitting in the chair behind her desk. He sat in silence at the next desk to her while she wiped her face, blew her nose, got herself together. She said she was sorry. He understood. It was all right. A couple of words. A few more.

A half hour later, when Glitsky knocked at the door, they were still talking quietly, sitting at the two desks as though they shared the cubicle and were working. Drysdale stood and walked the six feet around the desk to the door, opening it a few inches. Seeing who it was, he turned and gestured a question to Elaine, who nodded, let him in. The lieutenant was wearing a jacket, as though he were going out somewhere, and he had some file folders in his hands.

'If I'm interrupting…' His eyes went to Elaine.

'Come on in, Abe. Pull a chair.' Drysdale closed the door behind them.

'They're looking all over for you, Art. I think you've been paged a dozen times in the last half hour.'

'Yes, I imagine they have. I seem to have taken a powder.'

'You heard, then, about Reston?'

Elaine came to life. 'Alan Reston? What about him?'

Drysdale looked over at her. Their discussion had evolved into a personal one and he hadn't gotten around to the new office hierarchy. 'Oh, that's right, I-'

'You know him?' Glitsky interrupted.

She nodded. 'He's a…he's one of Mom's people. His daddy's rich…'

'He's also,' Drysdale said, 'your new boss.'

That stopped her for a beat. 'What do you mean?'

They played a few rounds of 'what do you mean?' until things became clearer, after which Glitsky looked at his watch and said he had an appointment, but Loretta was worried about her, would Elaine give her a call? She was down at City Hall.

Elaine nodded.

Glitsky said, 'I also wanted to apologize to you.'

'What for?'

'Evidently our little news interviews got played back-to-back and it came across that I was saying you were wrong, which isn't what I meant.' He paused. 'I meant what we had talked about earlier this morning – that we just didn't know yet.'

'That's all right,' she said. 'Everything I've done today seems to have been wrong anyway. Isn't that right, Art?'

Shrugging, Drysdale said maybe so, and then added enigmatically, 'Not that you don't have a reason.'

'I don't care about reasons too much anymore. They're all just excuses for doing what you shouldn't have done if you'd thought about it a little longer, which I didn't, or been a little stronger. I'm sorry.'

Glitsky bobbed his head. 'If you say so.'

Drysdale took the ball. 'We were talking about… about extenuating circumstances. About why people do things, have a bad day. Why Kevin Shea did what he did, all the environmental crap in his background

'Everybody's got environmental crap.'

Elaine was almost pleading. 'That's what I'm saying, Abe. I got both of you guys in trouble today and I don't care about any excuses – I just plain screwed up.'

'I thought this was my apology,' Glitsky said, and it loosened things up a bit. 'And I do have to go, but listen…' He handed her the folders he'd been holding, motioning down to them. 'This is exactly the kind of thing I was telling you about earlier, that's going to kill you at trial if you're not ready for it. I don't even know what it means at this point, but Strout's forensic report shows that Wade died of asphyxiation – that's his ruling.'

'Okay. We knew that. That's what happens when you hang, when you get pulled up.' Elaine had the folder open, and Drysdale got up and was looking with some intensity at the second picture.

'Yeah, that's what Strout said.'

Drysdale straightened up. 'So what are you getting at, Abe?'

'I'm getting at the story you guys have developed for Kevin Shea, that these pictures seem to show so clearly. That he repeatedly pulled down on the body'

They both got it at the same time. A moment's silence. '… which would have broken his neck.'

Glitsky nodded. 'Right. Not strangled him, and strangulation is what Strout says he died of. You can bet Shea's attorney is going to mention that when it goes to court and you'd better have an answer for him. That's all I'm saying. As both of you know, niggling facts can, you should pardon the phrase, hang you.'

Drysdale had the second picture out, studying it more closely. 'And what's this?'

Elaine was ready with her answer. She launched into her first explanation, that Shea had pulled out his knife to stab Arthur Wade, who had been trying to grab it from him in self-defense.

Glitsky and Drysdale gave it a courteous listen, which led her to go on to her knife-in-Wade's-own-pocket theory, where Arthur had pulled it out in an effort to try to cut himself down. This time impatience took over. Glitsky didn't want to, but felt he had no choice. He had to speak up.

'You're saying that Arthur Wade is being chased by a crazed mob, they get a rope around his neck, they're pulling him up, and he goes hey, I remember now, I've got a Swiss Army knife in my pocket, I'll just cut myself down. I don't think so. I don't think a jury will think so. Plus I just talked to a witness not an hour ago – a sweet elderly woman from Lithuania with no reason to lie about it – who says it looked to her like Kevin Shea was lifting Wade up, not pulling him down. That he had gotten out his knife and handed it to Wade, trying to get the guy to cut himself down, he just couldn't keep at it long enough.'

'That's not possible,' Elaine said.

'It's inconvenient if it is.' Drysdale was in the business of putting on successful trials, and strategically this was a case-breaker. That the argument could even be made…

'If I were you,' Glitsky said to Elaine, 'I'd get that photographer down here again and find out for sure what order he took those pictures in, if he can remember.'

Drysdale swore quietly.

Glitsky looked at his watch again. 'I've really got to go.'

'There are probably twenty witnesses out there who could testify to Shea pulling down…' Elaine was back in a challenge-mode, her eyes hard on him, not giving up on anything.

'But they haven't come forward and we haven't found them. And if they were in the mob, they're accessories. Which is why we haven't found them.' Glitsky held up his hands, avoiding further confrontation. 'Look, folks, I'm on your side, but you better know your cards, that's all I'm saying.' One last look at his watch. 'Besides good-bye.'

'Alan Reston isn't going to like this.' Drysdale was back at the desk next to Elaine's. 'Maybe I ought to get back and make the man's acquaintance. You say you know him?'

'I met him through Mom. I don't think you can tell him anything about this.'

'It's trial strategy. That's my job. I've got to bring it up.'

'He won't listen to you.'

'So you do know him?'

She shrugged. 'I've seen things like this enough. If he's got this job already, my mom is somewhere in the picture, and Kevin Shea is her program, so it's going to be Alan's.'

'Not if it can't hold up.'

'Who says it can't hold up? Any argument you make to Alan is going to come out like a rationalization, not a trial strategy. I still don't think there's any doubt Shea did it, but Abe's right – it's going to be a little harder to prove at trial.'

'Which is what I should tell Reston, which is what I'm going to-'

'Art, please. Let me. When we know a little more. Maybe my mom…'

She let it hang, and Drysdale subsided back into his chair. 'We present evidence to a court, Elaine, you know that. That's what we do.'

'I know that, Art.'

'Whether or not the shit heads get off…'

'I know.'

'If you don't think that's Reston's primary commitment – and say what you will about Chris Locke, that was his – then somebody ought to know about it real soon. I don't care if he's black or in your mother's hip pocket. Pardon my lack of circumlocution.'

She waved it off. 'I don't know what his agenda is, Art. I don't.'

Drysdale got his long frame up out of his chair. 'You know, about the only thing I'm more tired of than the word "agenda" is the fact that so many people seem to have one. How we gonna all work together, much less live together, with this shit going on?'

'I don't-'

'I don't either, Elaine. I just pray to God you don't look at me and see a white man first, 'cause I'm not any more a white male first than you're a black lady first. What I am first is just a plain old human person.' He stood at the door. 'Now, I hope you're feeling better than you were, and I know you've got some phone calls to make, and I've got to go do what I do.'

'Art…'

'It's all right. I'll let you take it up with Mr Reston. Just remember, this is your case. It's not your mother's. That's all.'

Elaine placed a call to the photographer Paul Westberg and left a message on his machine that she would like to see him again at his earliest convenience.

She sat and stared at the second picture, then suddenly realized what had not registered when she had heard it. And found herself grappling with the question of how Lieutenant Glitsky knew her mother well enough for her to ask him to pass along the message to Elaine that she was worried about her.

'We were together in college.'

'What do you mean, together?'

Loretta Wager let out a sigh over the telephone. Elaine could picture her in the small unmarked office at City Hall, her shoes off, her feet on the ratty old desk. 'I think you can figure that one out, honey. He was… my boyfriend.'

'Abe Glitsky was your boyfriend? Were you serious about each?'

'For that age, I'd say yes.'

'And what now?'

Her mother hesitated. 'Now we are friends.'

Elaine had some trouble with this. 'Mom, I have been around you just a little bit, and I have never heard you mention his name before.'

'We lost track of each other, hon. That happens, you know. He had family. So did I.'

'But he couldn't have lost track of you – '

'Because I have a public life? Maybe not. But there was no reason for him to look me up. Now, since the other day, with this… anyway, he interviewed me about Chris…'

Elaine was silent.

'Are you there, hon? You okay?'

'I don't know what I'm going to do.'

'You haven't told anybody, have you? About you and Chris?'

'No, but I think Art Drysdale kind of has a feeling about it. He was here with me for a long time. We talked.'

The words came out carefully. 'Let him have a feeling, Elaine, but don't ever admit it. Would you promise me that?'

'Mom, I wasn't going to…'

'It will give him too much on you. Anybody, in fact…'

'Not Art. He's not-'

'He's your supervisor. If he needs it he'll use it. That's the way the world works. And you, especially – you're not allowed to have a scandal.'

'Mom, it's you who's not allowed to have a scandal. You're the senator. I'm just-'

'No. This isn't for me. I'm thinking about you.'

'Art Drysdale isn't going to say anything. How did we get on this? I don't even care if he does. What matters is Chris.'

Her mother sighed again. 'Chris is gone, hon. You'll find somebody else.' A pause. 'Somebody better for you.'

'I don't want somebody better for me.' Tears threatened again.

'You will, Elaine, believe me. Someday you will.'

44

It might have been interpreted as a nice domestic scene – the clean-shaven young man with the bandaged leg sitting around the coffee table with his parents and their well-dressed friend, all of them listening politely to the overweight blue-collar guy with the heavy black shoes, perhaps a repairman telling them all about the leaking water heater, the pros and cons of getting a new one.

It was turning into a much more formal police interview than Carl Griffin had ever intended.

Colin Devlin was twenty-four years old and still lived with his parents in a renovated Victorian on Clifford Terrace in the upper Ashbury. Griffin had called from Dr Epps's office and reached the young man, asked a couple of cursory questions and got a minimal response, then wondered if he could call on him, have him make a statement about his injury, keeping it all vague. Colin, sounding nervous on the phone, had said okay. Griffin had reasoned he wouldn't have been able to say anything else without creating suspicion, and he was proved right.

On the way to Devlin's, Griffin ran into an area that had been cordoned off by the National guard and had to detour for half a mile. Then, in spite of the eggplant submarine sandwich he'd wolfed at lunchtime, he also suffered a Mac attack and found he needed a burger. So he set no landspeed marks getting up to Ashbury, and by the time he arrived so had the reinforcements – Colin's parents and their lawyer, a Mr Cohen.

In its own way, this was the most positive thing that had happened to Griffin in three days, since even in today's paranoid world most people did not feel the need to call their attorney to be present at an informal police interview over a self-inflicted shoveling accident.

Given Cohen's presence, Griffin was surprised to be admitted to the house without a warrant. The man was probably the father's business lawyer, not a criminal attorney. If that were the case he wouldn't be up on the rules, which Griffin hoped would prove to be bad luck for Colin.

After a few moments of awkwardness, they got settled in the tastefully appointed front room. A pale mid-afternoon sun came and went through the ancient curved windows that lined the circular room. In spite of a low-burning fire in the grate, the whole place felt cool, and Griffin left his coat on, leading with his best shot. Why, he wondered, had Colin felt the need to invite Mr Cohen to this meeting?

The father, Mr Devlin, was a friendly looking dark-haired man in a Donegal tweed suit and regimental tie. Clearly, he was in control. Though Griffin had not addressed him, he answered. 'Inspector Griffin, let's cut through the malarkey here. As I'm sure you suspect – it's why you're here – my son did not cut his leg the way he told Dr Epps. We don't want to go through the charade of having to produce the shovel and… all that nonsense.' He waved a hand.

'All right,' Griffin said. If they were going to give it to him free, he was going to take it. He shifted his bulk in the creaking bentwood chair and leaned forward. 'What happened exactly?'

The wife, a pretty woman with a lot of jewelry, spoke up. 'Colin didn't mean to-'

'Mary, please.' The husband's imperious look stopped Mary Devlin. He went on. 'We would like assurances that Colin's cooperation with the police…' Unsure of the process he was trying to control, he seemed to run out of steam for a moment, then found his rhythm again.'… that there'll be some quid pro quo.'

Griffin was leaning forward, his hands clasped. 'Cutting deals is up to the DA,' he said. 'Most times, they'll talk about it. How'd you get cut, Colin?'

'I don't even know. Some guy behind me…' The boy's eyes were hollow, his face pale as though he'd worn a beard for a long time and had recently cut it. Maybe in the last half hour.

'Colin, just a minute… I don't think we should talk any more unless you can give us some guarantees,' the father said.

Griffin nodded, stalling. 'If Colin here was at the scene of the lynching, his testimony would be very important. I'm sure the DA would recognize that, put it in the mix.'

Mr Devlin chewed on it a moment. 'We're not trying to duck responsibility here – any that might fall to Colin – but I don't want my boy…' He faltered again. 'Being there at all, being part of it, was unpardonable, I understand that…'

'Dad, I-'

'Colin!'

The boy shut up.

'… and I'm sure that we've been too lax, letting him live at home, giving him an allowance, not insisting he go to work, get some job, but his mother… well, that's going to end. The boy has to grow up, take responsibility for what he does, but he has promised us that he did not touch the man, and I absolutely believe him. He never got close to him.'

At last, the lawyer spoke. 'Bren, I think that's enough. Inspector, what do you think?'

'I'll have to talk to someone downtown, but I think they'll be… receptive.'

'What should be our next step?' Mr Devlin asked.

Griffin stood, pulled down his jacket that had ridden up over his middle. 'I don't want you to take this wrong, sir,' he turned to Cohen, 'or you either, but I think you might want to get yourself an attorney who does this for a living. You might find it makes a difference.'

Jamie O'Toole, jobless due to the loss of his workplace to fire, was bitter and angry. Jamie was a man who had lived in the city his entire life, had gone to Saint Ignatius high school and then done a year at San Francisco State, during which Rhoda (the name alone, he should have known), his girlfriend at the time, had gotten pregnant and he'd married her, which had killed five years dead.

Also, it left him without a college degree, which he would have gotten otherwise, he was smart enough. But the breaks just hadn't worked out for him so he could stay in school. So there he was, needing a job – any job – at the beginning of this recession, and he didn't care what they were saying about it in the newspapers, here in California it wasn't getting any better.

So he'd gotten into bartending – decent tips, most of the money under the table, where he could keep it instead of give it to Uncle Sam or, worse, to Rhoda. Guys had told him, 'Don't get so you're making any money on the books, the ex will just come and get the judgment upped.' And he had listened. Rhoda would do that to him, no question. Same as she wouldn't get married, though she was living with some dweeb in Richmond, because then he'd be allowed to stop his alimony. He supposed the child support would just go on forever, more money out of his pocket, another thing holding him down, keeping him where he was.

They were already giving out some federal emergency money and he had read the guidelines and realized he qualified – government always giving something away to somebody, usually not to him. He'd take it this time.

So he was waiting in a long cold line at the distribution place they had set up on Market Street – place was crawling with low life. Jamie O'Toole hated it, waiting with all those street people, shivering his ass off.

Then some guy, familiar, walks up to one side, and he's got it, he places him – the plainclothes cop, Lanier, that was it.

'How you doing, Jamie?'

'I'm cold, man. Witch's tit out here.'

Lanier was wearing a heavy flight jacket, corduroys, boots. He looked cozy, smiled. 'I was just out at your place. Your old lady said where we might find you.'

'Well, she got something right. Who's we?'

'My partner's parking around the corner. Be here in a minute.'

'I can't wait. Make my day. What do you guys want now?'

Lanier was standing almost on top of O'Toole, backing him away from the line. 'Same as before, just to talk.'

O'Toole went with it, a step at a time. 'What are you doin', man? I been waiting an hour here. This same shit again, Jesus. I'm so tired of this.'

Lanier got him to the corner, a distance off from the rest. O'Toole lowered his voice, punched a finger into Lanier's chest.

'You quit pushing me.'

Lanier smiled. 'You strike a police officer, I'll bust your head open. You think you're tired now…'

There a problem, Marcel?' Ridley Banks had appeared behind O'Toole and thought it seemed like a good moment to make his presence felt. Lanier smiled over O'Toole's shoulder at him. 'No, no problem. We're in the midst of the age of enlightenment here.'

O'Toole whirled around, took a beat noticing that Banks was black, then shrugged. 'Yeah, well, we got nothing to talk about. I told you everything I knew last time.'

Lanier grinned. 'Jamie, a smart guy like you, I figure everything you know ought to take at least an hour. Wouldn't you say, Ridley?'

'At least.'

O'Toole twisted his head back from one of the inspectors to the other. 'Well,' he repeated, 'I've enjoyed it. Now I gotta run.'

Lanier stepped in front of him again. 'There was one little thing, Jamie. The other day you said it was Kevin Shea, by himself, as far as you knew, that had done the thing with Wade.'

'I said I didn't know. I wasn't out there.'

'Oh, that's right,' Banks put in, 'I think he did say that.'

'Did he? Was that exactly it?'

'I think so. You wouldn't change your story, would you, Jamie? Where'd he get the rope?'

'What rope?'

Lanier smiled, humoring him. 'What rope, he asks.'

'If Shea was in your bar and left to go lynch Wade, what happened? Did he stop off at his car and grab a rope from the trunk, or what?'

'I don't know what happened. I didn't leave the bar.'

Now Banks stepped in closer, also smiling. 'He keeps saying that, you notice?'

Lanier nodded. 'Sticking to his story. Didn't see a thing. Good strategy.'

Banks moved in some more and now they had him surrounded. 'We think… actually we're pretty sure, Jamie… that the rope came from the hardware store next to your bar. What do you think about that?'

'I don't think anything about it. I wasn't there.'

'Whew.' Lanier, impressed. "This is some consistent story, Ridley. We'd better just give it up and go on back to the office.'

'The only thing is,' Banks said, 'that we found what looks suspiciously like a beer glass, or big pieces of several beer glasses, in the display window of the hardware store, and I think there's a chance one of those pieces is gonna have your fingerprints on it somewhere. We're checking.'

O'Toole's eyes were darting back and forth. 'I'm the bartender, guys, I would have touched the glasses.'

"That's right, Ridley,' Marcel said, 'he is absolutely correct.'

'Gosh,' Banks said, 'that's right. I must have forgot.' He snapped his fingers, as though suddenly remembering something else. 'I do wonder, though, about the lawnmower. The one in the hardware store's window? Did somebody take that into the Cavern where you might have touched it – mow some Astro-turf or something – and then go put it back in the display next door? What could've happened there, I wonder?'

'Are you saying my prints are on some lawnmower?'

Banks shrugged. 'We're checking, Jamie. We're just checking a whole load of stuff, you wouldn't believe. You think we'll get lucky?'

'I think we will, Rid.'

'I do, too, Marcel.'

The inspectors smiled at Jamie O'Toole. In spite of the cold, he'd broken a sweat. His eyes were moving, the gears in his brain nearly audible as they turned. 'Well, I mean,' he said, 'there had to be other guys. One guy couldn't have done it himself, could he? I mean, there was a bunch of guys. Everybody was drinking, you know?'

Lanier kept up that affable smile. 'We don't know, actually, Jamie, which is why we're being so… I don't know… pushy. We'd really like to find out.'

Banks said: 'You know Brandon Mullen and Peter McKay?'

'Sure, I know those guys. I already told you that.'

'They were there, they admit it. When did they leave?'

'When did they leave?'

'I think that's what I said. When did they leave? After Shea, before Shea, with Shea, when?'

'I think after.'

That's funny. They said before.'

Then it must have been before. Look, guys, it was busy. I can't remember everything.'

'Our lieutenant said you told him it was slow.'

'I thought he meant afterward.'

They kept it up for about five more minutes, then thanked him for his time and sent him back to the line.

Walking back to their car, Banks said, That was kind of fun. I believe the man went outside.'

Lanier nodded. That was a good idea. 'We ought to dust that window. Fire damage or no, we find one of Jamie's prints on anything…'

'I hear you,' Banks said. 'Time comes, it would be a neat surprise.'

45

Lou the Greek's was beginning to fill up.

Glitsky stood blinking in the corridor at the bottom of the stairway that led to the bar, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness. An overriding smell of cabbage made him wonder what culinary delight Lou's wife had prepared for lunch that day. Though he often hung out doing some business or other in one of its tiny booths, Glitsky had stopped eating at Lou's a few years back after an unfortunate reaction he'd had to the place's home-made kim chee, which others of his friends swore by.

The cabbage smell now triggered a sense memory of that, and his stomach rolled over. He took a breath, steeling himself, and walked in.

A hand went up at the bar, and Glitsky, after making allowances for the hair (now in a ponytail) and a few extra pounds, realized that he had known Wes Farrell in another lifetime, had testified in a couple of cases that the man had been defending over the years. As he pulled up a stool, Glitsky was further struck by Farrell's attire – most of the people at Lou's worked at the Hall and wore some variation of the uniform. Farrell looked as though he had just come from the beach – he must be freezing, Glitsky thought, and said as much.

'My veins are ice. I don't feel a thing.'

Farrell was having a coffee drink, maybe just coffee. Glitsky motioned to Lou that he'd like his usual – tea. "That's handy in this town,' Glitsky said, 'not feeling the cold.'

'I don't know what it is, probably age, like everything else. I used to feel it, chatter my teeth, all of that. On the other hand, it could be I'm just anesth… anesth…' He broke a weary smile. 'Fucked up. Never could say that word, even sober.' He sipped his coffee. 'Right at this moment, for the record, I'm halfway back to sober, I think. Haven't had a drink in two three hours.'

Glitsky nodded.

'This is not a problem for me, I hope it's not for you.' Glitsky shrugged as his tea arrived in a cracked brown mug to match Farrell's. 'But enough about me,' the lawyer said, 'I want to tell you a story.'

'That's why I'm here.' Glitsky sipped his tea.

Farrell started to talk, quietly, now with no trace of a slur.

'That's what he says.' Glitsky, to be saying something, did not want to come across as gullible, but even wearing his most cynical hat, he still believed every word he had just heard.

Farrell, holding the high ground, did not need to push. 'You have any evidence that refutes it, any of it?'

"The picture seems to.'

'You got it here?'

Glitsky did not, but there was a newspaper behind the bar and Farrell leaned over and pulled it from the counter. 'Let's glance at this puppy a minute, what do you say?'

For not even close to the first time, Glitsky was face-to-face with the ultimate truism of observation – you saw what you expected to see. Now, looking at the picture that was convicting Kevin Shea all over the country, but with different eyes, Glitsky only saw what Farrell had described – Shea was grimacing with the weight of holding Wade up. He wasn't pulling him down, he was trying to save his life.

There were tiny clues, visible if you knew what to look for, if you were so inclined. The manner in which Wade's shirt was bunched, for example. If Shea had been pulling down, wouldn't one expect the shirt to be pulled taut to the body? And the rope, did Glitsky see the actual rope? Not much of it was visible in the picture – a few inches – but what there was did not seem to be perpendicular to the ground, which it assuredly would have been if it were holding the weight of two men.

And then, and most convincingly, there were the knife wounds. The information hadn't been released to the press. No one had even admitted to having one – Glitsky hadn't yet heard about Colin Devlin and Carl Griffin. They didn't officially exist – the very possibility of someone having a knife wound was part of Abe's mix, not the public's. They were one of his secrets, one of the little tricks that experienced policemen liked to trot out and go 'boo!' with. And now Farrell had preempted him on them, told him all about them, how they fit the picture.

Kevin Shea had had to cut his way through the crowd. He had slashed at the men closest to Arthur Wade. He was sure he had cut some of them. There had been blood.

And Arthur Wade had died of asphyxiation, which Glitsky knew from the coroner. He had not had his neck pulled on.

His tea had long ago gone cold. 'Well, Mr Farrell, I'd say you've got yourself a pretty good story.'

'It's not a story, Lieutenant. It's what happened. Kevin Shea is, if anything, a hero in all of this.'

Glitsky was thinking hard, not committing. If this were a normal case, if every media outlet in the Bay Area, if not the country, hadn't already run stories on the heinous life and career of the arch-bigot Kevin Shea, he would simply bring Farrell across the street and have a talk with the DA or Chief Rigby…

Hell, he was the head of homicide. He'd just be tempted to interview Shea and recommend the DA drop the whole thing right there. If it could be verified, and Farrell's knowledge of the knife wounds came close to meeting his criteria for that.

If this were a normal case…

'What's funny?'

Glitsky glanced sideways. 'Not much.'

'You looked amused.'

'Oh yeah. I'm often amused. Do you have any idea how much energy has been invested in your client being guilty?'

'Some. He's a little more on top of it than I am.'

'Where is he?'

'I don't know.'

Glitsky shot him a look.

'I don't know,' he repeated. 'He calls me. The boy's got a doubting nature, thinks I might turn him in for the rewards and he might not be all wrong on the right day.'

'I'd like to talk to him.'

'I could probably arrange that.'

'He should bring himself in.'

'That might be a little trickier. He's pretty convinced that if he gives himself up before this gets turned around somehow, he's dead.'

'He's being paranoid, you should tell him that. We've got protective custody, solitary-'

'Lieutenant, excuse me. We're doing fine here together, don't start bullshitting me now. You and I know, somebody wants to kill him, and we can assume somebody would for a hundred grand, he's gone. Jail or no jail. And he doesn't want to go to jail period. He didn't do anything wrong. What he wants is to get the word out. He saw you on the tube saying you needed some evidence, he thought you'd be the man.'

Glitsky consciously controlled his face. 'I'd be the man?'

'Get it to the DA, broaden the net, take it off him.'

Thinking of Elaine, Glitsky nodded. 'I can try that, but I'd still like to interview him.'

'He'd still be under arrest, though, wouldn't he?'

'Well, that's the grand jury, the indictment…'

'Can you quash the indictment?'

'Not at this stage. It's not in my province, anyway. The DA's got to withdraw the charges, which, look, you bring him down – backdoor it, I'll get him in to the DA personally. He'll listen, we'll go over the evidence we've got.'

'I don't think so. It's not about evidence. Not any more.'

To which Glitsky had no response. Farrell was right.

Lou came around to see if either wanted a refill and both declined. Behind them, the room was close to its capacity, elbow-to-elbow with the trade.

'And meanwhile,' Glitsky said, 'the city keeps on burning.'

"That's not my client's fault, Lieutenant. If he could stop it, he would. He's a good kid.'

This was an unexpected direction. 'He is? You know him personally?'

'We took some classes together,' Farrell said. 'He's a regular guy, normal as you and me.'

'So what's all this broken family, deep-South bigot, unstable personality?'

'That, sir, is quite possibly a young woman that Mr Shea had the bad fortune to sleep with and then tire of…'

Glitsky raised his eyebrows.

'… either that or the media needing to fill air time or blank paper.'

Glitsky had heard both explanations in different contexts too often before to be surprised, but the way they both fit in here – the hand in glove of it… he shook his head, nearly gagging on the last of his tea. 'How do I reach you?' he asked.

'I don't know when Kevin will get in touch with me, but when he does, I'll call you. Then we'll see where we go from there.'

Glitsky stood up. 'I'll do what I can.'

'You know, Lieutenant, I believe you.'

'Elaine.'

Alan Reston came around the desk – only yesterday it had been Chris Locke's desk – with his arms outstretched to greet her. She rested her leather satchel next to her feet and stood, close to attention, letting him put his arms around her, raising hers to enclose him lightly because it would have been more awkward not to. He did not press her to him, though, merely held her an instant and let go, as an old friend might. Establishing that they were old friends, reminding her. 'This is a terrible business.'

'Yes, it is.'

'And losing Christopher Locke…' He didn't seem to have anywhere to go with that and let it hang in the room between them. Another bond. Chris Locke. His face twitched, out of nerves or fatigue, and he blurted, 'I'm glad you've come down. I was going to try to get by your office earlier, say hello but' – motioning to the papers piled on his desk – 'as you can see…'

'That's all right, Alan. It's okay if I still call you Alan?'

'Elaine…come on. Of course I'm Alan.' His grin came on and he started to reach out to touch her on the arm but stopped midway. 'Can I get you something, anything? You want to sit down?'

During her mother's first senate campaign, when she had still been a teenager, Alan Reston had been a jerk. In his mid-twenties at the time, and engaged (he was now married to the same woman), with a rich father and an ingratiating manner, Alan had an unshakable belief in his attractiveness to the opposite sex.

On the night of her mother's election, and emboldened by cognac, he had wagged his ding-a-ling in front of Elaine Wager in what he had thought was some kind of charming, harmless, celebratory way. He really seemed to think – or so he acted – that this was an acceptable mating ritual. After all, there was this obvious mutual attraction and they had been campaigning together and there was no reason… why, what was the matter? Didn't she know what this was for? What it was?

She had looked down and replied that it looked like a penis, only smaller.

It was the last time they had seen each other, until now.

She went to the couch and placed her satchel full of workpapers next to her. He pulled one of the wingbacks around to face her, but before he sat down she was talking. 'Have you talked to Art Drysdale? I was just by his office, I thought he might have been here. That's why I came by. I didn't want to bother you.'

'And I'm glad you did. It's no bother.'

She waited. Then, prompting: 'Art Drysdale?'

'That's right, Drysdale. He had a meeting, I believe, with the mayor over at City Hall, something about all this… this awkwardness between us. I think your mother was part of it. Smooth the waters.'

'Art doesn't want to be DA, Alan. He really doesn't.'

Reston listed his hands, as though all these things were out of his control, they were just happening. 'I think a couple of his decisions – '

' Jerohm Reese.'

'To name one, yes.'

'What are you going to do about Jerohm?'

'Well, I just hope they don't go too hard on Mr Drysdale. From all I've heard, he's invaluable around here.'

'He is, and I'm the one to blame for Jerohm Reese, not Art. I brought him upstairs on my own authority.'

'And now he's our hot potato.'

'Which is not Art's fault.'

Reston, now taking his seat, spread his palms. The Art Drysdale situation was being resolved at higher levels, it was not his problem. If Drysdale came back he'd work with him. If not, administrators grew on trees. 'Well, Elaine, in any event, you're here now. Maybe I can help you. What were you going to see Art Drysdale about?'

It would have to come to this eventually, she knew, and as she had said to Art, she was the one to bring it up. 'Do you know Abe Glitsky, Lieutenant Glitsky?'

Reston was smiling now, feeling on top of the situation. 'If this is about him stepping on your toes I've already spoken to him.'

'When? About what?'

'An hour ago, maybe a little longer. It's all taken care of, these opinions he's releasing to the media. Chief Rigby and I told him to – what?'

She was shaking her head. 'Not an hour ago. Not that. He was just by my office ten minutes ago.'

'The man gets around.'

'Yes he does, Alan. I think he's trying to get it right.' They sat, staring at one another. The criticism – the challenge was hanging there between them. Reston crossed his legs. 'We all are, Elaine. So what's with the good lieutenant?'

She told him – Glitsky had come straight to her after the meeting with Wes Farrell, supplying her with the gist of it – the details regarding the knife wounds, the revised theory on the second photograph to say nothing of the first, even the explanation that the snitch, Cynthia Taylor, might have been one of Shea's jilted exes.

Reston listened to it all in silence. 'Well,' he said, slapping his hands on his thighs, then standing. 'Well…' Stalling, he walked over to the window, stared at it, shifted from foot to foot.

Elaine spoke to his back. 'Lieutenant Glitsky asked me if we – if the DA's office – might want to review the charges – '

Reston turned quickly around. 'We can't do that.' And then less severe: 'On what grounds?'

'What I've just explained to you.'

'Which is what? An alternative explanation by the suspect's own lawyer? This is supposed to be compelling?'

'Alan, Glitsky isn't-'

'I'm not talking about Glitsky, Elaine. We've got a Grand Jury murder indictment on Kevin Shea, pushed through as I understand it by this office not two days ago, a picture of him in the act of committing the crime…'

'If it's-'

'No ifs, Elaine. The picture is what it is. It's clear to the whole world.'

'The interpretation might be wrong, Alan. That's all Lieutenant Glitsky was trying to say to me. If we take it to trial – '

Now he was pointing a finger, raising his voice. 'But we are the ones who take it to court. Not Lieutenant Glitsky. The DA's office. And I'm hearing nothing that remotely challenges my conviction that Kevin Shea is responsible for this… for all of this.'

'All right, then, how about this?' Standing, Elaine removed the second photograph from her satchel and brought it over to his desk. She moved some of his junk aside as he crossed to her.

'What is…?' he began.

'Taken two or three seconds after the other one. Shea handing the knife to Arthur Wade, giving him a last chance to cut himself down.'

She let him study it for a while, then started to put out, fact by fact, the alternative explanation of what appeared to be there – the way the shirt was pulled, the angle of the rope as Glitsky had shown her.

When she finished, Reston flipped some pages from her file, then walked to the window again. 'It sounds to me like Shea's got himself a good attorney.'

'Or he's innocent, Alan…'

Reston shook his head. 'No, he's not.' He turned again to face her. 'Elaine, let's get this straight. We have a case that convinced the Grand Jury. The Board of Supervisors got together to put a reward on Kevin Shea's head. You particularly – representing this office – have gone public over the airtightness of this indictment. And now you're coming to me, my first day on the job, and you expect me to call off the whole thing – maybe the best opportunity we have to get the city under some control again? That's not going to happen.'

'Even if he didn't do it?'

'You have any proof that he didn't?'

'Traditionally, Alan, we're supposed to have proof that he did. Remember? Lieutenant Glitsky thinks he can get Shea to come in if you'll talk to him.'

'If I'll drop the charges – '

'Only after.'

'No. It's too late for that now. He comes in, he's put under arrest, we go from there. No deals. Not with him.'

'Then he won't come in.'

Reston let out a long breath. 'Then he's taking that risk, and it's substantial.' Trying to close the gap, he stepped closer to her. 'Elaine, maybe you ought to talk to your mother about this. She's got her own investment here, you know.'

'This isn't about my mother, Alan.'

'You may not want to hear this, Elaine, but your mother may be the reason you got the case.' He leaned back against his desk.

Some of his folders slipped off to the floor. They both ignored them.

Her eyes narrowed. 'That's not true. Chris Locke believed in my-'

'No question, but…' This time he did touch her arm. 'Look, Elaine, no one's saying we're not going to give Shea a fair trial, but you don't about-face from rabid abuse of a suspect on television to letting him go because his own defense attorney, for Christ's sake, comes up with some reasons that might, and I repeat might, explain some facts differently. That would make the process and all of us look like fools. It would make your mother look ridiculous.'

'I'm not saying he didn't do it, I'm asking what if…'

His hand, still on her arm, squeezed it firmly. 'And I hear you. I don't want this case going south any more than you do, any more than your mother does. But we can't just do what Chris Locke did with Jerohm Reese – say we're giving up on the charges because the evidence suddenly got shaky. That's what started all this, remember? Even if I thought there was significant merit there, I wouldn't do it. I couldn't. Not now. The city would explode. Nobody's ready to hear it.' He lowered his voice. 'To say nothing of the fact that, personally, I'd be betraying your mother. As you well know.'

'So what are you going to do? What are we going to do?'

'I'm going to wait, Elaine. There's no reason to do anything, to change direction at all. We don't have any new facts. Do we?'

She guessed not, not hard ones… well, maybe the lawyer's assertions about the knife wounds, but they weren't substantiated either. She just didn't know anymore. She was too tired.

'Look, Elaine, it's been a long day. Why don't you go home, get some rest, try not to think about Shea for a while.'

She realized that there was nothing she could do now, and the possibility still existed that an arrest of Kevin Shea would at least bring some calm to the city. She didn't want to muddy those waters, especially not if it would embarrass her mother. There really was nothing to do but wait it out.

She forced a weary smile. 'I'm sorry, it's just been…'

He nodded. 'It's all right, Elaine. It's all right, I understand.' He touched her arm a last time. 'My door is always open.'

No sooner had the door closed, though, than Reston was behind his desk and on the telephone, placing a call to Chief Dan Rigby, who picked up from his War Room on the second ring.

'Chief, I'm sorry to bother you, but I thought we were pretty clear with this Lieutenant Glitsky in homicide, that he ought to keep a lower profile.'

'Yes. Well, I thought so, too.'

'Well, I just had a long conversation with Elaine Wager, and he doesn't appear to have gotten the message.'

46

Melanie had left Kevin alone upstairs and this made her nervous. She didn't like leaving him, felt that he needed her, that without her he wouldn't make it.

So there was a sense of urgency in her work. Her hands were shaking, and not only from the cold. She was half-hidden behind a large car in the darkened shadows of the parking garage under Wes Farrell's building. Whenever the light would change at the corner, there would be a rush of traffic out on the avenue and she'd stop and wait, looking to the garage's gated entrance. Wes had opened it up for them when they had first gotten here – it had gotten her recognizable GEO Metro off the streets.

People were starting to get home from work. She couldn't be too careful. The problem was that she could barely see the grooves in the screws to unfasten the license plate, and then, with the tremor in her hands, the screwdriver kept slipping out. Well, there was only one more screw and it should come loose.

After that, of course, she would have to attach it to her car – take her own plate off and put this one on. She'd do it. She had to do it. They had to get out of here, at least for a while – until they were sure Wes hadn't been followed home.

He had gone downtown to negotiate with the police. And she and Kevin, left alone with their fears, had remembered the unmarked police car parked at the street in front of Melanie's own apartment, their narrow escape less than twenty-four hours ago. It wasn't unreasonable to consider the possibility that someone might follow Wes back home.

They didn't want to risk a cab, even a limo, although Kevin thought that might work – with the tinted windows no one could recognize him. But, she had argued, there would be a pick-up and drop address, a paper trail for the credit card.

So she had come up with the idea of exchanging the plates from one of the cars parked in the garage downstairs with her GEO's. It shouldn't take her more than ten minutes – it already felt like an hour.

They would go to the apartment of another of her friends. Ann was gone for the long weekend and she had a key to her place because she'd agreed – it was the kind of thing she did all the time – to water Ann's plants and feed her precious goldfish. Ann's place hadn't crossed her mind last night as they were running from the police, getting their motel, but now suddenly it had strategic value and her brain had retrieved it.

Finally, finally, the last screw began to turn easily. Another line of traffic passed the garage entrance. No one was coming in. Watching the door, she kept turning the screw – and the license plate came off, falling with a clang onto the concrete. She froze. 'I hate this,' she whispered to herself.

Crossing to where she had parked her GEO, she squatted down again and began loosening the screws that held her own plates on.

She heard the grind of the gate before she had any chance to react. A car had turned out of traffic, waiting as the gate slowly opened. It drove past her down the length of the garage and parked in the last stall on the opposite side.

Holding her breath, she waited, praying he wouldn't look her way.

The man wore a business suit. He got out of his Camry and activated the security system – bu-BEEP. At the internal door, without thinking about it, he kicked away the block of wood Melanie had positioned to keep the door propped open and then, perhaps realizing that this was unusual, he stopped and let his eyes roam around the floor.

Hunched behind her tiny GEO, Melanie was certain the man, even all the way over where he was, could hear the blood pounding in her ears. But his gaze passed over where she hid and evidently saw nothing as he pocketed his keys and went inside. The internal door – the only one she could use to get back inside the apartment building – closed behind him with a sickening click.

The license plates were changed. There was an inside button that would open the garage gate and let her out to the street, but once that closed behind her she would be outside taking her chances, getting around to the front door of the apartment building where she could buzz upstairs.

Of course, being who she was, she had cautioned Kevin not to answer a buzz for any reason. Remember (she had reminded him) Wes had his own key – he'd let himself in when he got back from downtown. There was no reason to open the door for anyone else…

God, sometimes she hated herself. Whenever was she going to learn?

She rang the bell. It was her only chance to get back inside before Wes returned, possibly tailed by policemen. What else was she going to do, hang out in the garage all day? She knew it would probably be futile but she rang anyway. Maybe if she kept it up, kept ringing it constantly for five minutes, maybe tapped out an SOS in Morse code or something, then Kevin might be tempted to…

Obviously, he wasn't.

She buzzed again. No answer. More time passed. The evening wind had come up, cold-and-fog-laden and swirling her hair in front of her face. She hadn't worn a jacket, either. She pushed the buzzer again, held it, yelled into the speaker. 'Goddamn it, Kevin!'

No response. Nothing.

Stomping her foot, she stared at the speaker, her eyes filling with tears.

Then his voice, finally, a whisper from the speaker: 'Melanie?'

'God, Kevin. Yes.'

And the blessed sound of the buzzer.

A black Mercedes-Benz 130D was parked in front of Melanie's GEO, blocking it, and by its open driver-side door stood a tall woman in a business suit, her arms crossed, impatience and anger etched on her face.

Kevin and Melanie came from inside the building through the internal door to the garage and saw her. She wasted no time. 'Is this your car?' The tones were clipped. 'In my space?'

'Yes, it is. I'm sorry,' Melanie began. 'We'll just-'

'You know, I'm so tired of this,' the woman said. 'I get home from work and then I wait around for whoever has decided on that day to take the place that I pay for.'

'Well, we'll just-'

'You don't even live here, do you? Who said you could park here? Who let you in?'

Kevin stepped forward. 'We're really sorry, ma'am. We've got a friend in the apartment and he said-'

'Who?'

The two fugitives looked at each other. 'That doesn't matter. It's-'

The woman pointed a finger. 'You know what? It does matter. I've rung the manager and he's coming down and we're going to talk about this. This is the sixth time this month somebody's been in my spot and I am at my limit. So we'll just wait.'

Melanie: 'Um, we can't. We're expected… we've got a meeting.'

The internal door opened again and a balding man, mid-forties, in a mouse-colored sweater and khakis, no socks and some decade-old topsiders, was moving toward them. 'What's the problem, Maggie?'

'Someone told these people they could park here, Frank, and I want to find out who, and then I want something done about this. It's got to stop.'

Melanie spoke to the manager. 'Listen,' she said. 'Frank. We were told we could park here and now we're leaving. It won't happen again, I promise. But we've got to be somewhere right now.' She turned to the Maggie person. 'We're sorry about the five other times, but that wasn't us.'

Maggie was not listening. Life in the city often hinged on finding a parking place, and a lot of other things that were as seemingly trivial and just as difficult. 'I'm not paying for this place,' she said to Frank. 'Not this month.'

Now Frank seemed to focus on Kevin for the first time. 'Don't I know you?'

'Are you going to do something, Frank, or not?'

Kevin said he might have seen him in the hallway once or twice. He was a friend of Wes Farrell's.

Frank kept staring at Kevin, wondering if that was it.

'Wes Farrell. Okay, then.' Maggie, knowing who she was going to go after.

Frank appealed to her. 'What do you want me to do, Maggie, call the police? Why don't we just let these people go on their way?'

"Yes, that's exactly what I think. I think we should call the police. They're parked illegally. They've stolen my place and they should pay for it.'

'We will pay you,' Kevin said. He was getting out his wallet. 'What do you want?'

Frank spread his hands. "That won't be necessary. Come on, Maggie, please move your car, let 'em pull out.'

Maggie, arms still folded across her chest, stared at the three others, tapping her foot once or twice, sighing. 'Oh, all right.' She slid back behind the wheel of her Mercedes, slammed the door closed, rolled down her window. 'This is not the end of this, Frank.'

Melanie was heading for her car. Frank fell in beside Kevin and the two of them walked to the button by the gate.

'I'll get the gate,' Frank said. 'I want to close it up after you're out.'

The Mercedes started up, pulled forward a couple of feet – enough to let the GEO out of the space – and Melanie hit the ignition. Kevin jogged a few ragged, painful steps in her direction.

When he got to the car he turned around. The gate was open, Frank standing by the button. Suddenly, just as Kevin was getting into the GEO, Frank snapped his fingers and called out. 'Maggie! Back up, quick! Stop 'em.'

At the same time, he turned and pushed the button to close the gate again. 'That's Kevin Shea! That's who it is! Kevin Shea!'

Melanie yelled, 'Get in,' and Kevin half fell into the front seat as the car jerked forward. The Mercedes had not yet had the time to react, but the gate was closing and Frank stood in the center of the drive, blocking them as they turned into it. Melanie leaned on the horn.

'I'm gonna have to… to run him over…'

'He'll jump out of the way! He'll have to.'

She pressed down on the accelerator and the tires squealed on the smooth concrete. The gate was nearly halfway closed. She kept her hand on the horn, heading toward Frank, whose hands were up in front of his face.

'I can't,' Melanie said. She hit the brakes. The gate slammed into Kevin's side of the door. Frank came forward a step and put his hands on the hood.

'Hold on,' Melanie said, and pressed her foot down, the sudden movement lifting Frank onto the hood as it went out over the sidewalk. He fell off into the street as she turned into it.

She ran the stop sign at the corner of Junipero Serra, turned right at the next one, then left, then back up to 19th Avenue, where the traffic was lighter and at least it appeared that no one knew who they were.

Melanie was driving north on 19th Avenue. The sun was setting below the clouds, bright red with smoke in the atmosphere.

Frank's recognizing Kevin built on the closeness of the previous night's escape. Neither said a word for seven blocks, until Kevin pointed. 'What's that?' On either side of them up ahead pillars of smoke were rising – new outbreaks beginning to erupt as the day wore to dusk. Ahead of them, the traffic was slowing.

'I don't know.'

She changed into the right lane. Ahead of them a crowd of people was visible a couple of intersections ahead. Were they throwing things onto passing cars? That was what it looked like. They could make out people running, coming out into the street. 'I'm turning,' she said.

Twenty minutes later they had parked at the end of Page and walked around the corner of Stanyan by the border of Golden Gate Park. Ann's apartment building was a U-shaped four-story brick structure that faced the park, with the entrance in the center, behind a smallish courtyard with a weed-filled garden, a waterless fountain and chipped Spanish tiling. The wind had collected volumes of paper trash and deposited them in the corners by the building.

Melanie let them into the apartment building with her key. When the door closed behind them she made sure it had locked, then something seemed to go out of her. She stopped and turned into Kevin, pressing herself against him, shaking. He enfolded her into him and they stood there a long moment, embracing as the last rays of the sun slanted through the ancient vestibule windows. Finally he lifted her chin and kissed her. 'We'd better get upstairs,' he said.

Ann's apartment was on the fourth floor in the front, overlooking both the scenic courtyard and, across Stanyan, the lawns and evergreens of Golden Gate Park.

As soon as they had let themselves in, Kevin crossed to the windows and pulled the blinds. He turned on a couple of low-watt lights, made a quick tour of the living room. Potted plants squatted on every available surface – a million plants. Also a video camera on a tripod – Ann was a film major – some books and CDs, a television and audio gear and telephone, botanical posters and prints of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Bogart. It was a typical student's apartment, busier and more feminine but not really so different from Kevin's own place. He lowered himself down into the stuffed chair.

'Melanie?'

'What?'

She was standing by the entrance to the kitchen and turned. Their eyes met, and they froze with the realization of what they'd come to, what they were doing…

Minutes passed. The room had darkened, the sun now fully down. Kevin lifted his body from the chair. Melanie was somewhere in the back half of the apartment. 'What are you doing?' he called.

'Might as well feed the fish since I'm here. And water the plants,' she called back.

Kevin looked around again. 'That could take weeks. How many plants does old Ann have?'

'I've never counted. She's only got three fish. Want to meet them?'

'It would give meaning to my life. But first maybe we should call Wes, find out how it all went.'

'Oh, come meet the fish. Wes is either going to be back or not, and either way we left the note saying we'd call. He'll wait.'

That was true enough, but Kevin wasn't disposed to wait. This was his life, and hers too, they were talking about. He made his way through the living room and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

Melanie was feeding the goldfish, her hands passing back and forth over the aquarium. She had taken off Wes's white shirt, which along with her bra was hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

Kevin stood in the doorway, watching the action of the smooth muscles in her back as she moved her arm over the water. She half-turned, her face betraying nothing, then came all the way around, facing him. 'I know we could call Wes right now,' she said, 'but then again I thought – '

He moved toward her.

Farrell was surprised at the note but couldn't blame them for their caution. They'd both had a hairy couple of days and he thought they had earned the right to get cautious. Still, Glitsky had given his word, and even though they were on opposite sides – prosecution and defense – he sensed the man played straight.

'Yo, Bart!'

He had the television set turned back on, had cracked another beer and was opening a can of dog food by the kitchen window that overlooked Junipero Serra when the doorbell rang from down below. At the box by his front door he pushed the intercom button.

'Wesley Farrell?'

Wesley? He thought. Not even his wife had called him Wesley. 'That's me,' he said.

'This is Sergeant Stoner, a special investigator for the district attorney's office. I have a warrant down here to search your apartment on information and belief that you may be harboring a fugitive…'

47

Glitsky sat at his desk, fingers drumming on the blotter. After meeting with Farrell, his chat with Elaine had left him with the impression – incorrect, as it turned out – that the DA would be open to negotiation regarding the Kevin Shea issue. Somehow he would oversee Shea's technical arrest in the next twenty-four hours and this particular segment of the crisis would be over.

He had returned to homicide to find the place still deserted, which didn't bother him… his troops were out there doing their jobs. He decided to catch up on his paperwork on the chance that the call from Wes Farrell would come in soon. Since the riots had begun, the run-of-the-mill homicides in the city had continued at their usual pace. Predictably, a couple of gang lords had decided to use the cover of the disturbances to mask a few raids on rival turf – last night a drive-by into a milling crowd had killed two children, wounded fourteen adults and left no known gang members even scratched. A typical result, but the case had to be assigned and followed up.

Likewise the Korean businessman who had been killed, and Glitsky had to make sure that his inspectors were trying to identify the killers. There were also the Molotov-cocktail fires and their victims, the North Beach domestic, the boys who had been pulled from their cars. The weight of it all eventually slowed him down. Four more folders to go, and he simply stopped.

For over a decade his life had been the study and investigation of a seemingly endless succession of violent deaths. It had bred in him a profound hatred of violence – possibly because of that, but also because it was part of Flo's protective nature – and he and Flo had never hit any of their children, which, he was convinced, was where it all began. A cuff here, a back of the hand there, the other abuses piling up – verbal, sexual, simple neglect. Nobody paid enough attention – it was a rough road and if you wanted it cleared you pushed people out of the way. You didn't say, 'May I be excused' – you kicked some ass.

He shook his head. The folders lay there, Post-its stuck on like Band-Aids. Forcing himself, he grabbed the next one, the file on the late Christopher Locke. He opened it and saw that Lanier's taped interview with Loretta last night was first up, transcribed in record time – probably one of the secretaries interested in what the senator would have had to say – grist for the Hall's thriving gossip mill.

The senator…

And he'd just been thinking about Flo, about the way they'd tried to raise the kids… he still had a picture of her in his desk drawer. Now he opened it, pulled it out. She was blonde, smiling, radiant, impossibly dead at forty.

The room, small enough in any event, closed in, finally wasn't there.

Flo had been so different from Loretta – that, he supposed, had been one of her attractions in the beginning. A white woman, tall, athletic rather than curvy, nurturing instead of combative, as Loretta had been before she'd – apparently – mellowed. Flo did not overvalue what Loretta liked to call the life of the mind. Flo valued life. She also wasn't competitive the way Loretta was. And, having less to prove, she lived on a different plane – more serene, more truly self-confident.

Loretta had always projected herself as supremely competent and sure of herself, but her life-of-the-party, nothing-can-touch-me persona was, Glitsky knew, mostly a front, a reaction to her roots. She had grown up the third of four children in a low-income section of San José. Her parents had been, in Glitsky's view, people of integrity and self-respect who had worked their whole lives, her mother in the same dry-cleaning establishment for over twenty years, her father in a variety of clerical or retail or service jobs – shoe salesman, short-order cook, bus driver, whatever he could get.

By the time Glitsky had met the parents, they had seemed old and used-up, even though they were probably close to his age now. Their first- and second-born sons, both of Loretta's older brothers, had been drafted and killed in Vietnam. Which went a long way to explain Loretta's early radicalization and identification with, especially, the Black Student Union. Her main issue when she had first met him was more that her black brothers were fighting the white man's war than that the objectives of the war might be wrong in themselves. Later, of course, the Sixties being what they were, that evolved, too.

Loretta's younger sister Estelle had already had one illegitimate child when Abe met her, and he had read in an article about the senator a few years back that her little sister was at that time eking out a welfare existence in Los Angeles with three children and a succession of men. The article said that Loretta and Estelle were no longer close (nor, Abe knew, had they ever been).

Flo had had none of that – nothing to scratch and claw her way out of. Resolutely middle-class, she had attended Gunn High School in Los Altos ('Stanford Prep'), then had switched gears and taken a swimming scholarship out to the Central valley – University of the Pacific in Stockton, of all places.

Glitsky had met her in San Francisco at the Jewish Community Center gym, where he went to work out and where she used the pool. Her goggles had been fogged up and he'd been swimming laps, and she executed a perfect swimmer's shallow dive into him, nearly giving them both concussions. (Later she would say she had noticed him at the pool and couldn't think of any better way to introduce herself.) At UOP she had majored in child psychology (now called early childhood learning), after which she had put in two years teaching pre-schoolers at the Community Center. Then, as it turned out, she was ready to have a few children of her own. Glitsky and Flo had fashioned a successful existence together. Many of the 'issues' that had seemed so important to him when he had been with Loretta in college faded from their everyday lives, and he found he didn't much miss them. Yes, he had dark skin and, yes, he had suffered the usual prejudice when he had been younger and even afterward, but, though it continued to enrage him when it occurred (and Flo, too, for that matter), they refused to let it become their focus – that remained the two of them, the kids, the family. He made no apologies for his private life – this was who he had become and it was worthwhile.

It was obvious why the world's injustice cut so much more deeply into Loretta's flesh, her psyche, her life. Given her own younger sister, given the way it so often turned out for black women, it was small wonder the senator was so protective of Elaine, her own daughter. Glitsky understood, for the first time now, that Loretta had pulled some strings with the District Attorney to set up her daughter in her position.

He was even starting to see, perhaps dimly to understand, why she might have felt the attraction of an older, white, rich Dana Wager so compelling, more even than young love had been. She wasn't going to end up powerless and in despair, the way her parents had. Good people, but… good didn't guarantee anything.

Funny, the differences, he thought… Loretta had married white, pretty much against her own politics, to get out of the ghetto, to insure she would never have to go back. And now she was making her amends, identifying with her blackness, rationalizing that Elaine's figurative one drop of black blood made her one hundred percent black. Glitsky, on the other hand, had married white because he had fallen in love with a woman who had happened to be white.

Now whatever was happening between Loretta and him was because of their chemistry, not their color. On her side, did that make it purer? On his, what…?

What if they had stayed together from the beginning?

It was, he figured, better all around that they hadn't. Certainly, Flo had centered his life, took him out of currents that might have washed him away. And Loretta had done very well by herself. To the objective eye, she had reached a pinnacle of the American Dream never before touched by anyone of her background.

But now…

Well, now they were both grown, both free. As Abe's father had told him, the thing to do now was look ahead. Loretta already knew – her life had taught her – that it was pretty much all random. Events, basically, could not be controlled. And Flo's death had reminded him of that, rocked him, knocked him off balance.

Maybe now he and Loretta, by their separate routes, had finally arrived at close to the same place. Maybe his own sense of balance could be restored. He didn't know. That, too, might be random.

But he had to find out, keep trying until it got clear.

The room came back into focus. Where had he been? He looked down at the open file on the desk… oh yes, Loretta's transcript, probably the rest of Strout's forensics, the microscopies. He flipped a page, scanning the lines of type. He didn't need to read it again – he'd gotten the story from her the previous night. He'd talk to Marcel Lanier tomorrow. Now she was at City Hall and had asked him to come by on his way home. Just for a minute even, she said.

Pulling his flight jacket off the chair behind him, he closed the folder and left it in the middle of his desk, hitting the light on his way out.

'Hey!'

He stopped. Ridley Banks was sitting at his own desk in the dusky light.

'Sorry,' Glitsky said, 'I didn't know anybody'd come back.'

'You were in a trance. I didn't want to interrupt.'

Glitsky flipped the switch and the light came back on. 'How'd it go?'

Banks sat back in his chair. 'Jamie O'Toole seems to be getting some recollection that there might have been a mob. He might have even seen someone in it. I think it'll come to him in a dream or something real soon. And speaking of him, you know the last two words a redneck says?'

Glitsky shook his head.

With a down-home accent, Banks said, 'Watch this!' And waited.

Impassive, Glitsky stood by the door. 'That's the joke?'

'I love that joke. "Watch this!" Think about it. It gets funnier.'

'I will.' Mystified. 'Meanwhile, what about Mullen and McKay?'

'These guys!' Banks shook his head. "These guys are just too clever.' He told Glitsky about the 'mistake' as to whose sliding doors had been broken through.

'See if you can find their doctors,' Glitsky said, and went on to explain a little about how the knife fitted into the picture. 'If there are knife wounds, not caused by breaking glass, that means they were close enough to Arthur Wade to get cut. If that's the case, we've got enough to bring them both down, book them with something. I heard a good story today about what started it all off.'

A questioning look. 'So what about Kevin Shea?'

'I expect we'll be seeing Shea before too long. These stories I've been hearing, they come from his lawyer.'

'He's got a lawyer? He's still in town?'

Glitsky nodded. 'Interesting, isn't it? Makes you wonder. And guess what?'

"The lawyer says he didn't do it?'

'Sometimes you do this clairvoyance thing, Ridley – it's spooky. But yes, he does say that. And here's the interesting part – it might even have some truth in it.' He came up to Banks's desk and sat on a corner of it.

Banks sat back. 'You're not telling me Shea had no part of it?'

'Off the record, I think there's even a chance of that. He might be the good guy, might have tried to cut Wade down.'

Banks chewed on that a minute. 'Uh oh.'

'I know. But we're still bringing him in, let it work itself out. You seen the other guys?'

'Marcel went home. He was talking about getting some sleep. Griffin, I don't know, someplace.'

He hesitated, and Glitsky read it. 'What?'

'Nothing.'

But Glitsky knew what remained on his inspector's mind – Banks was tempted to say a few more words about his Pacific Moon theory, that there was something new he had discovered, or remembered, about Loretta Wager and how they said she had laundered money she'd allegedly smuggled out of Colombia in 1978. Banks, eyeing his lieutenant, thought he recognized in Glitsky a warning not to bring it up. Not now. Not, at least, until all this upheaval in the city was in the past.

Neither man said anything else. Glitsky stopped at the door, half-turned. 'Watch this!' he said, deadpan, and hit the light switch again.

48

Loretta Wager was sitting in her small office at City Hall. Her desk was covered by a map of the city. She had been letting her fingers do the walking and now she sat back, folded her arms and allowed herself a moment of congratulation. She was proud of what she had accomplished in so short a time.

All that had to happen now to make it complete was the arrest of Kevin Shea, and Abe Glitsky had told her that that was imminent. Perhaps, even without Abe, it had already occurred.

Her eyes went again to the map and she rubbed a hand over it. What a beautiful city! Even the ugly parts…

The Hunter's Point Naval Reservation covered almost three times the ground area of all of Candlestick Point – it was nearly half the size of the Presidio. Unlike the Presidio, however, the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation was flat, windswept, nearly treeless. The ground under it was poisoned by toxic waste. Its open spaces were dead or gone to seed; its buildings squat, deserted, crumbling. It abutted the most pernicious ghetto in San Francisco, the nadir of the Bay View District, called home by Jerohm Reese. No one was ever going to make a movie entitled Hunter's Point Naval Reservation as they had about the Presidio.

Loretta Wager knew the place well. Its negatives didn't bother her. You took negatives and turned them to your advantage, that was how politics worked. That was how life worked.

Take Alan Reston, for example. Reston was the son of perhaps her largest single contributor, Tyrone 'Duke' Reston, who years ago had begun bottling what, in Loretta's opinion, was the finest rib sauce in the world. Alan Reston, his son, had even campaigned for her directly, proving to her that he could be a player of the first order. Then she had supported him in his bid for deputy state attorney general. And then the Chris Locke vacancy had happened… She needed a conservative African-American in Locke's position and with enough personal authority to continue delivering the white moderate vote in San Francisco. Alan fit the bill perfectly.

The negative was that because he was a crime-busting prosecutor he was not exactly aligned with the African Nation movement. He had no problem with putting people – be they black or otherwise – in jail. Philip Mohandas did not want to go near him, and Loretta had already positioned Mohandas to be the voice of the current outrage, the one Mayor Conrad Aiken would hear.

Loretta had wanted Reston in the DA's office, and she needed to convince Mohandas to sell the idea to Aiken. After all, she had argued to Philip, it wouldn't be all bad. Reston was African-American, as Locke had been. Mohandas, in pushing Reston, would have an opportunity to talk about Drysdale, get his message out there.

But she needed more. Mohandas told her he wasn't going to 'betray my principles,' not for just that. Which had made her think of the old line: 'We've already determined what you are. Now we're just haggling about the price.'

How about if she could somehow deliver to Mohandas control of the huge tract of prime real estate that was the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation? Sitting as it did right on the bay, with some of the best views in the city, in the heart of an African-American cultural enclave, the place was a diamond in the rough, simply waiting for the right vision, the leader who could make its facets shine.

Loretta was in fact a member of the Parks Reclamation Commission and sat on the Committee on Decommissioned Military Installations in the Senate. She knew that the site was a multi-million dollar headache for the federal government. Estimates on the cleanup of the toxics alone – if it could be done at all, and opinions varied widely on that – ran to over $30 million. After that gargantuan task had been accomplished, and it was then designated as a national park (as the Presidio had been), the renovations and improvements necessary before it actually could be opened to the public would cost an additional fifty-five to one hundred fifty million dollars. Finally, add to that the cost of administering the park – twelve thousand dollars a day – and the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation had to be seen, in even the kindest light, as a negative. But Mohandas needed to know none of this.

There were other considerations. First, she was certain she could in fact deliver. She'd been working for months now on some version of what was developing as her final plan. Because it was such a white elephant, Loretta knew that the federal government would like nothing better than to simply give the HPNR away, wash its hands of it, goodbye. Naturally, bureaucracies being what they were, this couldn't just happen in the normal course of events.

But that was the very point of the past few days – the normal flow of events had been radically altered. Symbols were needed, drastic action, red tape cut through to get the message across – we're all in this together, on the state and national level, good faith needed to be demonstrated, not talked about.

And so, early that morning Loretta had pitched the final draft of her proposal to a couple of her senatorial colleagues, as well as to the president's chief of staff, and it had been immediately embraced as brilliant and even visionary by each of them – the idea of an executive order that would release the HPNR to a trustee who would pledge to develop the site as a camp for underprivileged children. It would be a fine opportunity for the president to demonstrate his sensitivity to the plight of inner-city youth – give them a place to go, to play, to learn. (It would also get rid of a massive two-hundred-million-dollar administrative nightmare.) Of course, sources close to the president would leak that Senator Wager had come up with this brilliant idea.

And who better to be the trustee than Philip Mohandas – a man with a vision who had shown even in this crisis a willingness to compromise for consensus? Mohandas had an undoubted commitment to the people he'd be serving, an organization already in place to administer the project. The moderate Senator Wager would vouch for his good intentions.

Finally, she had told Philip, he could expect federal funding (not even including what he could expect in matching or co-payment funds from the state government in Sacramento and the city of San Francisco) in the neighborhood of twelve million per year. A million a month. No taxes. Essentially – cash.

And, like cash, it was nearly impossible to keep perfect tabs on it. No one really even expected it. So Philip Mohandas had gone to Conrad Aiken and sold Alan Reston to the city of San Francisco as its new District Attorney.

Chris Locke's death, Alan Reston, Philip Mohandas, the HPNR – all potential negatives, and wasn't it marvelous to see how they all seemed to be working out?

'Let me drive. You look exhausted.'

Glitsky hesitated briefly, then shrugged and handed his keys over to Loretta. 'I won't argue.'

'And I'm paying for dinner, too.'

'I don't-'

'No discussion. Senators do not brook argument with lesser mortals, which includes everyone except the President, who doesn't brook much argument himself.'

Glitsky enjoyed her, no doubt about it. He was crossing in front of the Plymouth, going to the passenger side, smiling. 'What about the Vice-President?'

She gave him a disdainful look. 'He's just a senator who doesn't get to vote very often. Definitely a lesser mortal.'

'Governor?' he asked.

Opening the driver's door, she shot back, 'What state?' Inside, leaning to the side, she flipped up the lock on Glitsky's door.

He slid in. ' California.'

Loretta thought a minute, reached under the seat and tried to slide it forward. It didn't move. She wasn't big enough. 'Help me here, on three.' She counted, and together they got the seat far enough so she could touch the floor pedals. ' California, I'd say "brook." '

'Brook? What does brook mean?'

'Lieutenant, what are we talking about here? – the brooking of argument, are we not? And I'd say the governor of California would brook no argument from lesser mortals.'

He grinned at her, the scar tight through his lips. 'Okay, then, how about the governor of Delaware?'

'No brook.'

' Louisiana?'

'No brook.'

'Hmm. So police lieutenants – '

Turning the key – the car started right up – she patted his leg, slipping into the familiar patois she used with her daughter and almost no one else. 'Honey, they is only a hundred U.S. senators in the whole world. You got any idea how many police lieutenants they is?'

Glitsky actually laughed out loud, something he did with about the regularity of a lunar eclipse. 'So definitely they are lesser mortals? Police lieutenants?'

That disdainful look again, a Whoopi Goldberg glint in her eyes. 'Now you tell me, sugar. I don't make this stuff up. The numbers don't lie.'

'So I am definitely a no brook.'

'In theory, absolutely right on. But you, personally, Abe Glitsky, there might be a loophole…'

'Which part, the lesser or the mortal…?'

Her hand was on his thigh again. 'Good part of you ain't no lesser than nobody.'

They pulled out into Polk Street, into traffic, heading north – bantering, goofing one another.

Kids.

There were no tents in Washington Square. The riots had not yet infringed on the core of San Francisco, the compact and for the most part elegant wedge of pie bounded on the south and east by Market Street and on the west by Van Ness Avenue – thirty-five blocks north to south, seventeen east to west. The city within.

Glitsky was sitting with Loretta at a back corner table in La Pantera on the corner of Columbus at Washington Square. Up the street was the much more tony Fior d'Italia; across the park was Moose's, hangout, even in these days of crisis, of every bon vivant in the city. But La Pantera was a private place for anonymous citizens and that suited them both. This was a private dinner.

'The rumor that just won't die,' she said. She pushed some tubular pasta around on her plate, drank some of her 7-Up, sighed. Glitsky marveled at the shape and tone of her face – unlined, the skin smooth as fine chocolate. 'The Pacific Moon,' she said. 'Sometimes I wish I'd never heard of the place.'

'I'm just telling you what I heard, Loretta. It's not an issue for me personally. It was just one of my inspectors trying to protect me, that's all.'

But she didn't seem to hear that. 'Now it's three million dollars? Time I'm sixty it ought to have grown to ten.'

"Three million is the profit.'

'I know, I know.' She held up a hand. 'Please. Wait. I want to tell you.'

He nodded, waiting.

'After… after the plane crash… you know about the plane crash, right? Colombia? I thought you did, but… well, Dana and I were having some problems even before then. It was one of the reasons I decided to go to work, get into politics again, have something of my own in case Dana and I split up, which at the time I thought was pretty likely.'

'You mind if I ask why?'

She took a long moment deciding. 'Dana was one of those men who was great to be around when things were going well, when he had money and things seemed to be under his control. He was all tied up in that.'

'Okay.'

'But his investments started to go sour. He took a couple of big hits in the stock market, tried to recoup some of that in real estate here in the city and guessed wrong. Notes were coming due and he couldn't pay them and I guess he started to panic. I mean, he was turning sixty by now. His confidence began to erode. I told him that it didn't matter, that we still had plenty. What was important to me was how he treated Elaine, if he loved me, personal things. But to him, if he wasn't a provider he wasn't anything – it was all tied up in that men's macho thing. And then he got so… well, we gave up on… the physical side, and that of course just continued the cycle.'

She sipped at her drink.

'But after Colombia…?'

'After Colombia, after I got back… I don't know. Maybe it shocked him awake. He wasn't that old. He wasn't going to lose both me and Elaine. He couldn't let that happen. So when I got out of the hospital we came back home and people started talking about me running for Congress, running for Theo Heckstrom's seat, and suddenly we were both looking forward again. His confidence came back, he took a few risks – one of them was the Pacific Moon.'

'And the place made three million dollars?'

She smiled at him. 'Abraham. Please. In the first place, it wasn't three million dollars, not even close. And whatever it was got divided up among the investors. In the second, what it did make was based on another risk Dana took – that's the way he always was. When he had the guts he could do anything. He talked the other investors into rolling the restaurant's profits into the down payment on some throwaway land south of Market here that Dana had heard was going to… well, a good portion of it now is the Moscone Center.'

'My, my, my.' The Moscone Center was San Francisco 's own multi-million-dollar convention showcase.

'Yes. And as it turned out they only had to make three or four payments before the city bought it back from them. It was a nice windfall, one time only, and then Dana got out of the restaurant business, rolled his share of the profit over to continue in development, which was his first love anyway. He just needed the Pacific Moon to use the other investors' money, to get some leverage so he could make a move on the land.'

Glitsky was sitting back, arms folded. He leaned forward. 'This isn't somewhere in the public record? Why would there still be rumors?'

A resigned edge crept into her voice. 'I think, Abe, first, because people don't understand what Dana did. And when people don't understand an answer, they often make one up. Next, I'm a public figure – there would never have been a rumor if I were some housewife, believe me. But now it might be to someone's advantage to find out something bad about me.' She leaned across the table, speaking quietly. 'Abraham, listen to me. Dana went to some pains to keep his books… private. The investors formed a holding company, which bought the property, then turned the profits back to the restaurant, which is why the restaurant showed so much profit that year. No names. But you can find them – people have found them – if they know where to look. Auditors, for instance.'

'But why didn't he use-?'

'Why no names? Why all the hiding?' She sat back. 'Because Dana believed knowledge is power, so don't tell anybody anything they don't need to know. Also, he thought, probably correctly, that there would be resentment by voters if it appeared that I made money off the city on a lucky guess, which was essentially what it was. We didn't do - Dana didn't do – anything wrong, but in this business, my business, politics, appearance is everything.' It clearly troubled her still. She reached a hand across to him. That's the story. Satisfied? Can we still be… whatever we are? You being a policeman and all?'

'I didn't need all that, but it's good to hear.'

Their hands met in the middle of the table. 'I don't need you to be doubting me.'

'I don't. I won't.' He raised her hand to his lips, held it against them.

It was tempting, though Loretta knew she could never do it, to lay it all out for Abe and the world to see. She'd been listening to the moans and accusations of the self-righteous for most of her adult life, and just once she'd like to go on record so the vast unwashed could really understand what you had to do to get somewhere if you'd started where she had.

She had always wanted to do some honest good, to help raise up the people she represented, to make a difference and be an active part of making her country a better place. She wasn't a cynic – she truly wanted these things. And in her career she thought she had gone a long way toward achieving some progress.

It had not been just for ego or self-aggrandizement – at least not for those alone. She never wanted Elaine to suffer the slights she'd had to endure as a child and even more as a young woman. And by God, she hadn't. Power and position did get you protection from the worst of the world. And through Elaine, by extension, her protectiveness embraced others – she'd started out her career by representing the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, back where there was a plurality of votes in that stance.

That had changed now, and she'd had to change along with it if she wanted to stay in power to do any good. She didn't believe she was abandoning her principles, she had just had to adapt to hold onto them. She couldn't help anybody, could she, if she didn't get elected first? Perhaps a politician's age-old rationalization, but it was also true. So maybe the message got watered down some, but it didn't get compromised away, not completely.

What would the righteous have done, she wondered, in her place? It was one thing to take the high moral ground and say, 'Oh I would have turned the found money over to the authorities,' another altogether to sit for four days in the stinking jungle thinking you were going to die and know you had in your possession over half a million dollars in cash that no one could ever trace.

She had never felt any qualms about the fact that she alone survived the crash. No survivor guilt. It was hardly her fault. Yes, the money might originally have come from drugs, who knew? It might have belonged to somebody else, it might have gone untaxed in the United States as income, but certainly the greater good was all it had enabled her to accomplish for her people first as a congresswoman and then a senator. The ends did justify the means – and anybody who didn't think so wasn't living a reality-based existence.

There was another more personal reason why keeping the money had never bothered her. For her it represented random fate evening out the playing field. She had been a victim of poverty – even though her good parents had always proudly if blindly denied it. They had been wrong – where they ended up verified that. She had felt the pain of it every day, in every situation. She deserved some random good luck after the bad that had been the accident of her birth into a powerless family.

Well, finally it had come to her and she had taken it – without apologies, without explanations or guilt. The only ones who wouldn't take it were losers who were afraid to reach beyond where everyone else expected them to stop. That wasn't her. She'd made it and she'd done a hell of a lot of good in the process.

God had sent her that money. All the powers on earth would never persuade her otherwise, or could have forced her to give back even a penny of it.

Not back then, not now, not ever.

49

'I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number.'

'Wes…?'

The phone went dead in Kevin's hand.

'What was that?' Melanie asked. She was combing her hair at Ann's bedroom vanity – eighty-one, eighty-two… She hadn't gotten around to putting her clothes back on.

'That was Wes being cryptic. I'll call him again.' He started to punch the numbers.

'No, wait a minute. What did he say?'

'Melanie, he always does stuff like this. Says I've got the wrong number, then hangs up.' He started pushing buttons again. She was up from her seat, threw herself over him on the bed, grabbing for the telephone. Landing across his ribs.

'Ahh!'

'Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Kevin, I didn't mean…'

He, also naked, was on his side, half-rolled into a fetal position, moaning. She took the phone from him and placed it in its receiver. 'Are you all right?'

He shook his head, trying to catch his breath, struggling with it. 'You want to call him so bad, okay, you call.'

'I don't want to call him. Tell me what he said.'

Rolling over, flat onto his back, Kevin gingerly pushed at his ribs. 'He said, this is a direct quote, get ready. He said, "Sorry, wrong number." '

'Somebody was there. He was followed home. We were right to get out of there. It's true. You know it's true.'

He poked gingerly at his ribs as she sat beside him on the bed. After a minute she lifted the receiver. 'What's his number?'

Closing his eyes, he leaned back again and mumbled it to her. She pushed the buttons. 'This is your mother, Wes. Say, "Oh, hi Mom." Now, if the police are there, say "I don't know. I might be busy that night." '

She nodded. 'We'll call you later. Do you think they'll be gone within an hour?'

A small pause. 'All right, now say "Okay, sorry. 'Bye, Mom." '

She hung up and put a hand on Kevin's belly, shaking her head.

He covered her hand with his. 'Now what?'

Dressed now, hair as neatly combed as Melanie could get it – she thought it might make a difference – Kevin sat rigidly in an easy chair in the living room surrounded by plants, the blinds drawn at the window behind him. They had all the lights turned on, some dragged in from the bedroom, all the lamp shades stripped from them. Ersatz klieg.

Melanie had moved Ann's tripod and video camera around – it was loaded with tape and ready to go – and pointed it at Kevin. She pushed the button, the red light came on, and Kevin tried to smile at the camera, though it came out forced.

'I'm Kevin Shea,' he began, 'and I did not…'

They stood embracing by the inside of the apartment's front door. 'There's no other way to do it. I've got to go. I'll be back in less than an hour, then we'll call Wes again.'

'Maybe you could go by his apartment. He could deliver it.'

She shook her head. 'I'm not going by there. They've probably got the National Guard surrounding the place.' She kissed him. 'Look, Kevin, I'm not the one in danger, I'm the only one who can do this. I changed the plates on the car. We got over here, didn't we?'

'Barely.'

'Barely counts,' she said, kissed him and was out the door.

He thought it odd that he didn't want a beer. Ann had four perfectly good Rolling Rocks in the refrigerator and instead he poured himself a glass of orange juice from the large pitcher. Drank it all down and poured another one.

Back in the living room he tried to estimate the time it would take – Melanie was bringing the tape down to KQED, the public television station, the closest one to the apartment. Assuming she wasn't arrested and didn't get in a wreck, it shouldn't take her an hour. But there was always traffic, and, the last couple of days, the curfew areas she'd have to avoid.

His stomach was cramping. What if something happened to her? Now, when…

When what?

He realized he was more worried about what might happen to her than he was about himself. He should never have let her go alone. He should have gone with her…

Wes Farrell was answering Kevin's question about the police presence. "They're gone. What are you doing?'

'I've been counting seconds for the last seven minutes. There were four hundred and twenty of them I think. It got a little boring so I thought I'd call you. How's Bart?'

'Bart's fine.'

'So your meeting downtown…?'

'I thought it all went along perfectly until the cops showed up here.'

'How did that happen?'

'I should have known. Gets to be a lot at stake, they lie.'

'Who?'

'The cops. In this case, Lieutenant Glitsky. Said he'd keep it to himself but he obviously assigned somebody to follow me home, figuring you were staying at my place, although I said you weren't. He probably figured it was worth a try. If you'd been here he could claim the arrest, maybe even get the reward. Anyway, imagine my surprise and relief when it turned out I was inadvertently telling the truth about you not being here. It also probably kept me out of jail. So what are you counting seconds for?'

'Until Mel comes back.'

'Where is she?'

Kevin explained. 'We figure we get me on the air, the media picks it up, maybe we get a swing in public opinion. Something changes. At least the truth gets out there.'

'I've got one for you, Kev. Why do you persist in thinking that anybody's going to believe anything you have to say?'

Kevin took that in, waited a beat before answering. 'I am telling the truth here, Wes.'

'I'm not arguing with you. We've been through that. But I told Glitsky your truth – at least as I understood it. He even seemed open to it. And yet there's something about this Grand Jury indictment… that's a formal document, Kevin. You are charged with this crime. I don't think a videotape of you saying you didn't do it is going to win many hearts and minds. People are going to be cynical about your motives. Trust me. It's going to take a jury now, unless we can get to the DA, get him to drop it, which even Glitsky thought was unlikely. And, incidentally, so do I.'

'I'm not going to trial for this-'

'I'd take a reality check on that one, Kevin.'

'There's no way, I'm going to-'

'Then why are you staying in the city? I thought you wanted to tell your story, get the truth out.'

'Yeah, but not at a damn trial, Wes. I go to trial I'm a dead man, you know that. Hell, that's what you told me. It can't get to that. That's why I came to you. Get it straightened out behind the scenes.'

Farrell couldn't say anything.

'Wes?'

'Barring an act of God, Kevin, a trial is what's going to happen. We'll have to arrange your arrest, then get you out on bail.'

'I thought there wasn't bail on a murder charge.'

'A capital murder charge – that's something we'd have to negotiate.'

There was a long silence, then Kevin's voice, noticeably weaker. 'Wes, it just can't have come to this.'

'That's what I'm trying to tell you, Kevin. It's already come to this. It's going to have to play itself out at trial… unless they kill you first.'

Another long pause. 'Gosh, you cheer a guy right up.'

'You asked.'

'Do me a favor, would you, next time I ask?'

'What?'

'Lie.'

50

Allicey Tobain was in the storefront's inner office with Philip Mohandas. N'doum was outside standing guard. In spite of the insistent hum of the voices – some of them raised – of the other people in the front, N'doum could clearly hear Allicey through the door…

She was pacing in the small room. 'You are losin' sight of the reality here, Philip. You are being manipulated by that, that politician.' She spat out the word, stopped pacing, faced Mohandas. 'You tell me this – what we got out of all this? We got one of her people in the DA's job. We do that for her, in exchange for something… right? But where's the exchange? Where's the something? We get a promise, that's all, but I'm not seeing any something. And in the meanwhile we're losing sight-'

'You keep saying that, Allicey, but what of? What am I losing sight of? And we will get the something. We get a million dollars a month.' He spoke quietly, gestured to the door. 'That buys a lot of pamphlets, girl, a lot of advertising time, a lot of everything – you hear what I'm saying?'

She wasn't buying. Bringing her face up to his, she said 'I ain't running no day-care center. This isn't about no underprivileged youth. This is about our people, Philip, about how we're really treated. We got a man lynched here three days ago and so far not one person has been arrested. Far as I can tell, nobody's even lookin' anymore. You call that justice? You call that progress? That what you want?'

He was silent.

She crossed back to Philip's sleeping couch, stopped, turned to him again. Her tone softened. 'She's playin' you, Philip. She takin' your teeth out. Don't you see that. It's a game for her. You get caught up in the game, you forget what you're about, who you are, who you can trust.'

'I don't forget that. But she's offering something important we can use, something-'

'Goddamn, man, listen to yourself. You talkin' about her offer, you playin' her game…' Coming back to him, she put her hands on his arms, holding them. 'Let me ask you this – is Jerohm Reese out of jail? Is that man Drysdale still working? If you remember, that's what we wanted this morning – those two things – when Senator Wager gives us the call. You remember that? We got either of them?'

'You were with me, Allicey – '

'I got sucked in a minute, too. I thought we were getting something. But ask yourself, what do we got now? Alan Reston? Who's he? We got the mayor upping the reward on Kevin Shea, but I don't see no Kevin Shea. You see him? You see anything really happening?'

She let go of his arms, smoothed the fabric of his shirt. 'We got brothers and sisters fighting out there, Philip. Losin' the streets. Ain't nothin' make them feeling any better until a little simple justice comes down here. That's what we gotta be calling for – some simple justice. And I think in the heat of all this… this negotiating with the senator… we losin' track of who we are, what we all about. That's all I'm sayin'.'

Philip Mohandas kept his face impassive. He backed up a couple of steps, came up against one of the folding chairs and lowered himself into it, his back straight.

Flanked by Allicey and Jonas, Philip Mohandas was out in the front of the store surrounded by perhaps forty of his followers. Even at this time of night, there were a half-dozen microphones, a representative (with telecam) from one of the cable TV stations, a female reporter from the Bay Guardian who'd been hanging at his headquarters all day. Mohandas, aware that he was being taped, was orating:

'… most emphatically are not satisfied with what you're calling the progress of the city, the situation as it stands today. All that we have seen, and continue to see, is lip service, that is all.'

The Guardian reporter spoke up. Behind Mohandas, Allicey and Jonas frowned. 'But what about Alan Reston? Wasn't he your candidate? He's black, doesn't that show some kind of-'

Mohandas let his voice out a bit. He partially raised his fist. 'Whoever it was, the new DA had to be an African-American. The mayor realized he had no other option. Any other choice would have been… gratuitously inflammatory. Mr Reston himself was acceptable under that minimum criteria, but we remain adamant that Jerohm Reese is an innocent victim as well as a continuing example of white oppression, that Mr Art Drysdale is a racist who must be retired from any public position. So no, to answer your question, we are not satisfied.'

'What about the increased reward? Doesn't that-'

Mohandas pointed at the stringer for the cable network. 'Now I'm glad you raised that question because it's more of the lip service I've been talking about. It's an empty gesture, designed to lull my community – my outraged brothers and sisters – into a belief that the power structure, that people of non-color are concerned. Concerned. But we don't want concern. Concern isn't enough. We want results. What good is a reward – be it fifty dollars or five million dollars – if it does nothing to produce the man?' He pointed to The Picture taped to the wall. 'We got to have the man.'

He turned to the camera, focused and intense. 'Let's not get lost in rhetoric, in so-called good intentions. Let us not forget what has happened here in San Francisco, what continues to happen. Arthur Wade has died and nothing has changed. Jerohm Reese is in jail and Kevin Shea walks the streets, and until that gets corrected, until these facts get turned around, we cannot rest. We will not rest.'

His voice had hoarsened somewhat, and Jonas N'doum handed him a glass of water, from which he drank. 'That is why I am calling for a solidarity march – a peaceful solidarity march – on Saturday morning, presenting these demands to the city once and for all: that there is action on Jerohm Reese, that there is action on Mr Art Drysdale, that the city employ all its resources, all its power to find Kevin Shea and begin the righteous task of bringing him to justice.'

The room exploded in a chorus of 'right ons' and 'amens' and Mohandas half turned, received an approving nod from Allicey Tobain, then faced the camera with an expression of fixed resolve.

51

They were walking on the cold sand of the beach below the Cliff House, Loretta barefoot with her shoes in her hand and wearing Glitsky's flight jacket against the slight chill. There was no wind. He was holding her other hand, pretending to be immune to the weather. They had gotten out here to the ocean, Loretta still driving, along the northern edge of the city, through the Presidio and the Seacliff neighborhood, bypassing anything resembling a curfew area.

'So when are you going back to Washington?'

'I don't know exactly. I'd like to see this… this whole thing resolved, at least stay until that. If it's not too long, which I gather it won't be.'

The night had been all personal – both Abe and Loretta were under the impression that Kevin Shea would be in custody by sometime the next day. The madness would be dissipating. They didn't have to discuss it – it was moving toward its conclusion.

She was continuing. 'I do feel I'm part of that, of all of this. I'm still very worried about Elaine.' Her steps slowed and she stopped walking, turned to look up to Glitsky. 'And then there's you.'

He kept walking, step after step. His factual voice. 'Yes there is.'

'I don't suppose you get to Washington much.'

'That's a good guess.'

She stopped him, studied the sand, drew a few lines in it with her toes. 'I'm here at the recess, couple of times during the year, mostly campaigning.'

Over her head the breaking waves had a phosphorescence. Glitsky thought he saw the lights of a tanker out at the horizon. Behind him rose the faint wail of a siren.

'Okay,' he said.

Her arms were around his waist. 'Would you mind very much hugging me a minute?'

She was holding him tight, her body pressed against him. He felt a shiver pass through her. 'Are you cold?'

Her head shook. 'That's not it.' He kept holding her. 'You tell yourself you don't need this,' she whispered, almost as though it were to herself.

'I know.'

'You get good at it. You have to.'

Glitsky didn't trust himself to say much. 'Yep.'

Gradually, her arms let him go, fell to her sides. He released her and she stepped back. Even in the dim lights from the moon and the street behind him, her eyes were liquid, shining. The hint of a smile fluttered and died. 'Senators aren't allowed to cry. It's in the oath.'

He touched her cheek.

'I want to ask you to stay with me.'

He shook his head no. 'You said it yourself. You've got to give Elaine some time. She needs you. And I've got to check in. If Farrell's called… to say nothing of the fourteen messages which my trained police eye sees blinking on your answering machine. And tomorrow looks to be another long one.'

They were just inside her front door. 'Are you always this responsible?'

'Yes, ma'am. Like yourself, I'm a humble servant of the public.'

'All right,' she said, pulling him down and kissing him. She opened the door, looked out theatrically, back and forth. 'All right, it's all clear. No reporters.' She faced him. 'Come to think of it, maybe I should start getting a little worried about no reporters. Where have they been? They should be here.'

'Staking out your house…?'

She hugged him again. 'I'm teasing you, Lieutenant. Now get out of here. As it is, I'm going to need a cold shower before I'm going to be able to get my head back into my work.'

Glitsky's scar stretched a little. 'Now you didn't say anything about a shower…'

She pushed him outside. 'Git… but tomorrow.'

He pointed a finger at her. 'Tomorrow.'

He walked to the car and stared back at her mansion, which was, he thought, far more intimidating than the woman herself.

It must have been Dana's. It was strange to think of her living here, so close to him, all these years. Of course, for most of them, he'd had Flo, he hadn't been looking, told himself he wouldn't have seen it if it had danced in front of him.

Another siren, this one not far away. He turned and looked at the orange glow of more flames somewhere in the eastern sky. Come on, Mr Farrell, he thought, let's get this over with.

It was still early enough – not yet ten. And he knew no one was home chez Glitsky. It was literally the most free that he'd been in probably fifteen years and he was going to check back in at work. Somebody might need him.

He got in the car. The seat was still jammed up under the steering wheel where Loretta had needed it. He smiled to himself and said 'one two three,' pushing it back to where he could drive. Small packages, he was thinking. What was that expression? What was it that came in them – good things? Or was it dynamite?

This late at night Glitsky's first inclination was to pull directly up to the front of the Hall on Bryant Street and park along the curb. He was aware of heavy traffic even north of Market, and by the time he got where he worked he was barely crawling. Black-and-whites were double- and triple-parked along the entire length of the block. Near the center of the street, by the entrance to the Hall, where he'd been interviewed earlier in the day, the television vans had staked their turf. There was a line of busses for transporting people. He could see the traffic backed up both coming off the Freeway at 7th and down from the lower Mission on Bryant, and he knew at least one of the other side streets was a parking lot. Finally, turning into an alley jammed with what he knew were unmarked police cars parked on the curbs and sidewalks, he crept through the one open lane to the city lot behind the Hall.

A long, partially covered corridor ran between the new jail and the old morgue and led to the back door of the Hall. Although it had grill-covered light bulbs spaced infrequently, at this time of night the walkway had a spacey, almost eerie dimness. Maybe it was in contrast to the startling brightness visible through the tall windows in the Hall's lobby or just the sense that you were entering some kind of cave that happened to abut where they stored dead people, but when it was dark out, this walkway always gave Glitsky the creeps. He half-expected bats to be scared out of their resting places when he passed, exploding by him in a flurry of wings and squeaks.

So he was hurrying and didn't even notice John Strout until the man said hello from the shadowed entrance to the morgue.

After Glitsky landed, the coroner smiled genially. 'I didn't mean to startle y'all.'

'You're working late.' He gestured toward the main building. 'So's everybody else.'

Strout nodded. 'I don't suppose you're down here just to take the waters, either, Lieutenant.'

'I don't suppose so.'

'Anything specific?'

This was an unusual question from Strout. It could be he was making conversation, but Glitsky suddenly didn't think so. 'Not really,' he replied. Then, on reflection: 'Why?'

Mr Noncommittal, Strout shrugged, considered, raised his eyebrows. 'No reason, just-'

'Just what?'

'Just Art Drysdale was by here near closing time, wanted to pay his respects to Mr Locke. Also probably wanted to hide out a while, everybody on his ass for everything he did or didn't do the last five years.' This was a justified beef – Strout and Drysdale had worked together a long time with great mutual respect. 'Mr Locke's death hit him pretty hard.'

Glitsky hadn't been much of a Locke fan, but he understood Drysdale's reaction – the two had been on the same team, fought the same battles for a long time together. It was natural that a bond would develop.

'All the events of the day, I think he was finally gettin' around to the story on what actually happened with Mr Locke. Asked me who was handlin' it and I told him you'd been by.'

For the usually laconic Strout, this much conversation qualified as a philippic. Glitsky thought he was probably going somewhere with it and waited for him to continue.

'Well, he went on up to your place and one of your men told him he didn't think it had been formally assigned, something like that. It was on your desk but-'

Glitsky straightened up. 'John, Marcel Lanier and I both interviewed Loretta Wager, who was our only-'

Strout had his hands up. 'This is not me, Lieutenant. I'm not in the middle of this, this is Art's reaction, that's all.'

'All right.'

'Art seemed to think that some inspector might have gone out and spent the day down by Dolores Park' – the riot location where Locke had been shot – 'and put a little effort into finding this shooter, done some door-to-door in the neighborhood…'

'You know, John, it's not exactly been a slow news week. Maybe Art hasn't noticed.'

'I think he has, Abe. I really do. I think he just knows how fast these trails get cold. Now a day's gone by an' nobody seems inclined to do the routine. Mr Locke bein' the district attorney an' all, he thought it might have gotten itself a little more priority, the investigation, I mean.'

'There were other-' Glitsky didn't mean to snap. He stopped himself. Drysdale, of course, was right as far as he went. Glitsky should have assigned someone to go canvass the area of the shooting, wherever that had been exactly. But that was the point – he should have that knowledge, should know for a certainty that there wasn't any forensic evidence at the site. Maybe there was a strand of fabric, a bloodstain, a shoe print, a bullet casing (although Glitsky knew that the caliber of the bullet that killed Locke didn't come from an automatic so it wouldn't have ejected). Still, something…

Drysdale was right – his boss and buddy Chris Locke had been killed and Glitsky, the head of homicide, was neglecting to investigate the death thoroughly. No wonder Art had come down and mentioned it to Dr Strout.

But damn – Glitsky's blood was rushing – he couldn't do everything. He had every one of his inspectors, including himself, triple-assigned – hell, quintuple-assigned – and he knew that the odds of getting even a long-shot lead to finding the man who had shot Chris Locke – on a dark evening in the midst of a riot – approached absolute zero.

This was the kind of extra helping of the unexpected personal stuff that made his job so frustrating. Not that Drysdale didn't have a point. Not that he wasn't justified that his best friend's death wasn't getting the priority he felt it deserved. But that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how responsible you were – he remembered Loretta's remark – you could never do enough. You were going to piss off someone, hurt someone, let someone down.

And Drysdale, whom Abe worked well with, was having a tough enough time. In fact, he knew, he should have assigned it, long shot or no. Many – most – murder investigations were long shots. The simple, galling truth was that he'd gotten distracted and hadn't entirely been doing his job. And that made him furious at himself, at Drysdale, even at the messenger right here.

But there was no point in losing it with Strout. The person with whom he was really put out lived closer.

'You see Art before I do,' he said evenly to Strout, 'tell him I realized the same thing, thought I'd come down and correct the oversight.'

Just as he entered the building someone started yelling in the cavernous, packed lobby.

The person manning the metal detector at the back door was a former street cop named Jimmy Mercy who had been hit on the head with a tire iron years before and appeared punch drunk ever since. A sweet guy.

'Been like this all night, sergeant.' Mercy would need another year or two, if ever, before he got used to Glitsky being a lieutenant. 'Everybody's in real bad moods lately.'

'Everybody includes me, Jimmy.' He was moving forward, into the noise.

Which was escalating quickly.

A pair of uniforms came out the double-doors of the hallway – the downstairs of the Hall of Justice contained a regular administrative police post, Southern Station, out of which a small contingent of cops worked. Glitsky also knew that the police assembly room on the sixth floor had people on call the last few nights, ready for 'disturbance' assignment. He hoped some of them were still up there now because it looked like the party was coming here tonight.

One of the uniforms turned around and yelled to the area behind him. 'WE GOT SOME SHIT HAPPENING OUT HERE!'

A shrill emergency bell started to ring in the building.

In the lobby Sheriff Boles had continued with his makeshift booking procedures. And in spite of the National Guard presence and Mayor Aiken's orders, looting was continuing throughout the city. From Glitsky's perspective, basically nothing was working.

They had more than a hundred people in the lobby and had just unloaded what looked like another bus from another scene. Thirty-five city policemen were roaming around inside and outside the Hall, herding in the new group; another twenty-five or so sheriff's deputies, all inside, were guarding the lines and doing paperwork at the desks. In the line itself mingled a complete set of San Francisco's ethnicities, some of them bruised, some crying, all pissed off.

And after the procession, Boles was simply letting these people go. And there was nowhere to go. Some people wanted to get away as quickly as they could, but most were turned loose downtown in the middle of the night – no cabs, no friends picking them up, a loose mob of recent rioters and looters milling on the steps and environs of the Hall of Justice.

Another fight seemed to be breaking out in the ranks of the new arrivals. Inside, the line of detainees, unruly at best, swelled toward the entrance, pushing. A couple of men went down. A woman screamed.

The bell kept ringing and more policemen appeared from the hallway, out of the elevators – probably from the sixth floor.

A burly white youth broke from the inside line, ran at the three cops at the front door, took down one of them, punched at another. Glitsky saw him go down in a flurry of nightsticks – echoes of Rodney King – kicking, refusing to be subdued.

More cops, and as they ran to the outbreak, leaving their guard posts, more detainees began rushing for the door, a stampede where the line had been breached. Some of them making it outside. Whistles blowing, that damn bell just going on and on, and over it the sound of explosions outside. Was some idiot firing his gun in all this?

Jesus, all hell breaking…

Forty minutes later Glitsky was behind his desk. They had finally subdued the riot – two hundred and fifteen police, and by the time it was over they had recorralled one hundred and four rioters. The rest of the potential arrestees had either seen or made their chance and taken it. The sheriff's tables that had been in the lobby were tipped over, torn apart. There had been a small paper fire. The earlier records of citations, for the most part, were gone.

Sheriff Boles and his deputies had packed the remaining detainees into the commandeered busses and were taking them to Alameda County, where they would discover what a real jail was like.

It was eleven-fifteen.

Adrenaline was surging through him.

This thing wasn't going away, wasn't even getting any better. For some reason his mind turned to the French Revolution, to a truth he'd only realized for the first time earlier this summer when he'd read about it in one of his continuing self-improvement programs. It was about the storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. (He reflected on the fact that revolutions always seemed to happen in July, which was now only forty-five minutes away.) At the time the Bastille event hadn't seemed to mark the end of the monarchy. For weeks afterward Louis XVI had made his rounds, giving speeches, doing damage repair, the usual. But from Bastille Day onward he was doomed. He just didn't realize it.

Glitsky wondered if they were all in the same boat here in the City by the Bay. Three days in and, if tonight were any indication, on a roll.

The pile of messages on his desk had grown exponentially, Chief Dan Rigby's message labeled 'URGENT' on top, but the first thing Glitsky did was go through the whole pile on the chance that Farrell had called.

Nope.

Why the hell not? What was going on with that guy?

Next he called Rigby's office, only to hear the extension ringing and ringing in the War Room. It wasn't really any surprise – Rigby had probably gone home, along with his staff, for at least a few hours. If he had been in the building during the riot Glitsky would have seen him. He would check back with the chief first thing in the morning, find out what was so urgent.

Supervisor Greg Wrightson had called him again. Although a nominal liberal, like every other supervisor, Wrightson was one of few members of the Board of Supes who at least pretended to care about the mostly so-called right-wing issues that concerned the police department. He also was in the bad habit of believing that he, as a city supervisor, somehow had a mandated authority to order police action whenever it suited him. He had been known to call up Rigby himself and ask him to start enforcing the violations on parking meters around City Hall. Important stuff like that.

Glitsky knew Wrightson wouldn't be in his office in the middle of the night, but he moved the message onto the center of his desk, under Rigby's. If Wrightson had called twice in one day, he had something on his mind.

Glitsky's father Nat's message was that he had also left a message at his home – where was Abraham, anyway? He and the boys were at the White Sands Motel in case he got this message. Monterey was quiet, idyllic. Abraham ought to get away himself on the weekend if he could.

'Sure, Dad,' Glitsky muttered. 'Great idea.'

Then the informal correspondence from his inspectors. Carl Griffin's note about a Colin Devlin who was going to come in tomorrow with a lawyer and make a statement about the Arthur Wade riot. And, by the way, Griffin wrote, Glitsky was right about the knife-wound connection. Devlin had been cut – that's how Griffin had found him. This brought a measure of satisfaction.

But this emotion was short-lived, because looking up brought his stack of folders into his consciousness, among them the reminder of Art Drysdale's complaint to Strout about the Chris Locke investigation, or lack thereof. He reached over and pulled the entire pile over in front of him, digging down through the first four or five until he came to Locke.

All right, this will be on top, too.

And back to his guys – a crisp and cryptic few words from Ridley Banks – 'Re: PM, Mo-Mo House, Watch This!' Glitsky wrestled with it for a minute, squinting into nothing. Mo-Mo House was the proprietor of the Kit Kat Klub, the place where Ridley Banks had arrested Jerohm Reese many days ago. Had Mo-Mo called in the late afternoon, after Glitsky had gone? But why wouldn't he have spoken to Banks? And what was 'Watch This' beyond a reference to Ridley's redneck joke?

He worked it some more – maybe Banks had been on his way out of the detail and in a hurry. Was he saying that Glitsky himself should go by and question Mo-Mo about Jerohm? Some evidence might have turned up? But then Ridley would have pursued it, wouldn't he? It made little or no sense as he'd written it. Glitsky would need to have an administrative chat with the guys about this kind of thing. A message that didn't convey any information wasn't much use to anyone.

The sound of more sirens came up to him as he put down Ridley's note. He got up and crossed the darkened room, looked sideways and down where the jail did not block the view. What he saw was not the aurora borealis flickering orange out there. The city was still burning.

52

Melanie's fantasy had been that she would ride like the wind up to the television station, where a handsome young receptionist who perhaps doubled as a crusading news reporter would grab the tape and hustle into the studio – herself in tow – and interrupt whatever program was in progress for what would be an important flash news bulletin.

The reality was more prosaic.

She skirted riot areas in the Panhandle and lower Twin Peaks before she got lost and wandered in what she supposed must have been Noe Valley until she found herself on Church Street, from which she knew she could get down to Army (two more miles or so out of the way), then over to the freeway and up again into the city.

Figuring that her best exit was Bryant Street, which she could then take back south ten blocks to Mariposa, she got off the freeway at the Hall of Justice. A mistake.

A fugitive driving a vehicle with stolen license plates, she pulled off not only into a substantial traffic problem, but into a convention, a gaggle of – she estimated – roughly seven million police cars. Acutely aware of the lack of the sideview mirror, which had been sheered off the night before during her high-speed chase, she had to get across four lanes of this traffic to make her turn to the south. She was also positive the entire time that some cop would pull her over and issue her a ticket for the missing mirror.

None of her worst scenarios developed. It took her nearly five minutes to go the one block but she made the turn, came around out of the traffic and headed south. At last, having arrived at KQED, she found the station dark, evidently closed for the night. The parking lot was fenced but there was an open entrance which she drove through, stopping six feet from a dimly lighted doorway. A fat, jowly security guard sat inside, feet on a desk, reading a comic book.

She buzzed at the door and the man looked up, sighed, slowly straightened, got out of his chair and walked to the door, gesturing to her to indicate what she wanted. It didn't appear that he intended to open the door.

Tentatively, she held the tape up. 'Tape?' she yelled through the glass.

He nodded.

'I've got a tape I'd like to leave for the newsroom. It's very important.'

Another nod.

'Please.'

The guard only pointed to a box by the side of the door, yelling something through the glass that sounded like 'Stickney's got the pox,' but it was probably more like 'stick it in the box.'

'It's really important, somebody's got to see it right away.'

He continued to nod. She had a vision that maybe he had springs implanted in his neck. Maybe it was a physical impairment. Maybe he belonged to the Constant Nodders of America Club. He was also pointing at the box, yelling, 'box, box!'

She couldn't just leave it like this. After all the hassle getting here, Kevin finally getting to tell his story, and now she had to entrust it to this Neanderthal with neck palsy.

But what else could she do? She'd already been driving over an hour and a half. Kevin would be worried sick. She didn't remember the addresses – or even the approximate locations – of any of the other stations. She couldn't just drive around all night and she couldn't go home with the tape, not after all this.

All right. She placed it against the wide slot and pushed. It was inside. Winkin' and Blinkin's buddy leaned over, picked it up, shook it, listened to it.

'It's not a bomb,' Melanie whispered. Then, more loudly: 'It's a tape. It's a VCR tape.'

Bobbing his head randomly, the tape now in his hand, he seemed to be waiting for something else. But she had nothing else. Pointing at the tape one last time, Melanie yelled at the glass, 'It's really important. Okay? Really.'

The guard nodded.

Kevin was up out of his chair as soon as he heard her key in the door, opening it before she could, pulling her to him, gathering her into his arms. 'What happened? Are you all right?' Kissing her, his hands over her back, through her hair, pulling away enough to see her face.

She just held him. Held onto him. Both.

The two of them embracing there in the open doorway, the hall yawning behind them. Finally Melanie remembered where they were and got them both over the threshold, closed the door behind them. 'You know, I think I could use a drink.'

'You? Melanie Sinclair? That's my girl.'

'I could use a big drink. What's a big drink?'

He thought a minute. ' Mai Tais. '

'Okay.'

Holding hands, they went to the kitchen. She was telling him her adventures while he rummaged in the closets, through the refrigerator.

'So, after all that, we're not sure it's even going to get seen?'

'I know. I mean I don't know. I feel like such a failure-'

'Don't,' Kevin said. 'Wes says nobody would believe it anyway. He says I shouldn't have run in the first place. I should have-'

'But you couldn't…'

'I could, I guess, but I didn't. But now that we've gotten to here, he says it's going to come down to a trial.' He tried to drop it casually, even following it with a little riff on drinkmaking. 'Apparently Ann doesn't have any orgeat syrup. You can't make a Mai Tais without orgeat syrup.' But it didn't get by Melanie.

'Exactly what would they try you for?'

'What? Oh, murder, something like that. Wes thinks they might even prove it with the picture, public opinion, me being white and Arthur Wade black, all that. I told him I don't think…' He looked up, noticed she had started to cry, crossed to her. 'Hey, hey.' Gathered her to him. 'It's not that big a deal, she doesn't have 151 rum either, so we couldn't have Mai Tais anyway. You really need a float of Myers's 151 if it's going to be any good. Actually, she doesn't have any rum, so the whole Mai Tai idea turns out to be kind of lame.'

She didn't laugh, didn't even smile. Her body continued to tremble against his. He didn't know what to say.

Melanie was in one of the overstuffed chairs, hands folded stiffly on her lap, staring straight ahead. She had continued to cry for a while – she still held a handkerchief tightly.

Kevin came into the living room carrying two glasses in one hand and in the other a large pitcher of liquid with a head on it.

'This,' he said, 'is going to elevate the good time quotient on what I must admit has been a somewhat disheartening evening.'

'What is this?'

' "What is it?" she asks. But, I notice, without a really convincing show of interest. When at her very elbow is the very first rendition of a drink that may be to the nineties what the Margarita was to the eighties.'

'I'm tired, Kevin. I'm scared. This isn't going to work.'

He pointed to the pitcher. 'Whatever else may transpire on the roads of our lives,' he told her, 'this will work.' He poured into one of the glasses and handed it to Melanie.

She took a sip. 'I don't really need a drink anymore. I want to know what we're going to do.'

'When?'

She slapped the arm of the chair, the new drink overflowing. 'Damn it, Kevin! Now! What are we going to do now?'

Back on his heels, Kevin pondered. 'You're right,' he said seriously. 'We're going to have to think about this for a while. I propose we don't say a word for fifteen minutes.'

He drank from his glass, refilled the top inch of hers. She wasn't really thinking about it at all – she was too scared, angry, upset. She took a drink.

'This isn't bad, what is it?'

The pitcher was half-gone, three glasses each.

Pouring again for himself, Kevin was on the floor, legs crossed. 'You've put your finger on the one problem we face – a name. Every great drink needs a name.'

She took another sip. 'Fred,' she said.

'Fred, the drink?'

'Yep. Fred.' She took a bigger sip. 'It's pretty good,' she said, 'what's in a Fred?'

'Fred, hmm. It can't be a guy's name.'

'Why not?'

'I don't know. You just don't name drinks after guys. I mean, look at all the drinks with girls' names – Margarita, Tia Maria, Bloody Mary…'

Melanie was holding her glass out. 'Kahlua, Manhattan, Rusty Nail… in fact, Rusty Nail…'

Kevin pointed a finger. 'Watch it…'

'Besides, it's a guy's kind of drink, it ought to have a guy's name. A Fred. What's in it?'

'Well, aside from the obvious beer, orange juice, vodka, cranberry juice, Coke – '

'Coke?'

'Diet Coke, actually.'

'Okay.'

'And port. And some brandy.'

She took another sip. 'Fred. It could be colder.'

'See,' he said. 'Now we're into the marketing campaign. No, listen, this could be really big. Fred, it could be colder. Fred, it could be sweeter. Fred, it couldn't be bolder. I like it. I love it.'

'Kevin,' she said, 'he couldn't be a bigger horse's ass.'

'Where was this Melanie Sinclair when we were dating?'

'You weren't smart enough to handle the real me back then.'

It set him back a beat. 'You know, I think you're absolutely right – '

She softened it, coming forward, kissing him.

They were both on the floor, blankets under and over them, pillows piled about, Melanie's head on his chest. The pitcher was empty. The television on low.

The news had aired. Again and again, every channel until they got too sick to watch anymore. The increased reward on Kevin, the appointment of Alan Reston, the night's new fires and disturbances, the continuing problems in Detroit, DC, Los Angeles, the Mohandas call for the solidarity march on Saturday, and now, just an hour before, the riot at the Hall of Justice. All of it, and no hint of Kevin Shea's videotape.

Nothing but what he had started and now he would have to pay.

He stared blankly at the screen. Melanie breathed evenly on his chest, her arms thrown over him. Pulling the blankets up around her – the room had become cold – he had come around to believing his best chance, finally, was to run. He could never take the chance of a trial in which even Wes thought that the best result might be some degree of murder.

He would have to run.

But to where? And how? And could he take Melanie with him?