Betrayal

30

Dismas Hardy's windshield wipers couldn't keep up with the downpour. They thwacked as fast as they could go, but this latest in a series of March squalls reduced his visibility to near zero. He could barely make out the first gate until he was at it. He loved his little two-seater Honda convertible with the top down in the summer and fall, but it wasn't made for this kind of weather. The plastic back window had long since gone opaque and even with the defrost fan blasting, the inside surfaces of the door windows were fogged over too. He pushed the button to lower his driver's window so he could present his identification to the guard and the rain misted in over his face.

Behind him, someone honked, then honked again. His rearview mirror was useless; he couldn't see his side mirrors, either, through the condensation on the windows. The rain pounded down on the cloth roof. He was inside a drum. Blinded, cocooned, he had to lower his window another few inches so he and the guard could see each other. Opening the window allowed more water in, enough to soak through the fabric of his suit in seconds.

Another blast from the impatient prick behind him. Hell, Hardy was already wet; he had half a mind to jump out and confront the guy, pull him out of his ride, deck him, dump him into the churning brown stream that ran over the road's gutters.

Instead, he squinted out to see the guard, flashed his driver's license, and spoke so he could be heard over the rain. "Dismas Hardy, to visit one of your inmates, Evan Scholler."

The guard, all but invisible through the downpour, spoke loudly, too, from his semienclosed space, "I'll have to see your ID better than that, please, sir. Sorry."

Seething, Hardy handed it out. Waited. He had time to decide that if the car behind him honked once more, he would go take the driver out, but then his wallet was back at the window and he heard a crisp "Thank you, sir. Ahead to your right after the next gate."

And he rolled up his window and let the clutch out simultaneously.

When he'd left the city a couple of hours ago, the sky had been light gray, but it hadn't even been drizzling. So he didn't have an umbrella or a raincoat with him.

After he found his spot in the parking lot, he turned off the motor and parked to wait out the worst of the squall. Regain some of his composure. Whoever had been behind him-some delivery guy maybe-didn't follow him to this lot. He thought it was probably just as well.

Composure was an issue. Even before the rain, Hardy's physical reaction to the scheduled visit to the prison had caught him off-guard. It had been a while since he'd had a client in prison, and he was out of practice. He kept having to reach for a breath, his palms were sweaty, an unaccustomed emptiness had hollowed out his lower rib cage. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head back and drew in a long breath through his mouth, which he then exhaled with a certain deliberation. He did it again. And again.

When at last the drumming of the rain stopped, he opened his eyes. Now, suddenly, it was just a light drizzle. Seizing the moment, he opened the car door and stepped out onto the asphalt.

HARDY HAD SEEN pictures of Evan Scholler in the newspapers, caught some glimpses of him on the TV news as the trial had gone on, so he thought he'd recognize him on sight. But when the guard first opened the door to the very small room to bring the inmate in, Hardy took a quick glance and decided that this couldn't be his man; the guard must have gotten it wrong and this shackled guy must be going to see another attorney in a different room.

For one thing, Evan was younger, just thirty-one now; this inmate looked at least forty. Further, in photos and on television, Evan was far better-looking, with a stronger chin, lighter hair, a better complexion, smaller in the gut and bigger across the shoulders. This guy here was big, casually buffed, physically intimidating, especially wearing a flat-affect expression that made his thin mouth look mean, even cruel. At first glance, this guy looked like a stone killer.

But the guard, checking the slip of paper in his hand, said, "Dismas Hardy?" A nod. "Here's your mope."

Evan took the slur without reaction. He stood at attention, but relaxed in the pose, seemingly uninterested in what, if anything, happened next. He looked Hardy up and down as he might a side of beef hanging in a cooler.

"You can take the shackles off," Hardy said.

For the obvious reason, guards in prison did not carry guns on their persons, so in any one-on-one encounter such as this delivery, shackles on prisoners tended to be the norm. Hardy knew several attorneys who visited their clients here and most of them were happy to let the shackles stay put. A shackled convict was a controllable convict, and with many of these inmates, you couldn't be too careful.

The guard hestitated for an instant, then shrugged. "Your call." With practiced precision, he unlocked the handcuffs from the chain that was threaded through the Levi's belt loops encircling Evan's waist. The cuffs still dangled from the waist chain at his sides.

Now, though, his hands free, Evan rubbed at his wrists.

The room was four feet wide by about seven feet long. A heavy, solid, industrial gray metal desk squatted against Hardy's right wall and stuck out two-thirds of the way across the space; in a pinch it could serve as a first-line barrier in the event of a surprise attack. Folding chairs sat on either side of it. Hardy had a door with a wire-glass window in it behind him and another door just like that facing him. The guard who'd let him in had cautioned him to stay on his side of the desk, "just to be safe." He'd also pointed out the small button low in the wall in Hardy's side that could be pressed in the event of any trouble.

Evan's guard said, "I'm right outside the whole time," and then that's where he was, closing the door behind him.

Hardy said, "You want to sit down?"

Evan thanked him and sat. He put his free hands on the table, still looking through Hardy, until suddenly he focused. "You got a cigarette?"

"Sorry, I don't smoke."

"I didn't either," Evan said. "What a joke."

"What is?"

"Not smoking. Watching what you eat. Staying in shape. All that stuff outside. Then you wind up in here." Maybe he felt as though he'd given too much of himself away. As a cop or a soldier or at the prison or somewhere else, Evan had gotten good at the thousand-yard stare, and he reverted into it. After a minute inside himself, he came back to Hardy. "So who are you?" he asked.

"Dismas Hardy, your new attorney."

"Don't take this wrong," Evan said, "but it took you long enough."

"Yeah, well, it was a little complicated."

A beat. "What's that first name again?"

"Dismas. The good thief. On Calvary? Next to Jesus?"

Evan shook his head. "Don't know him. Dismas, I mean. I've heard of Jesus."

Hardy looked him in the face. If this was humor, it was damn subtle and wouldn't be a bad thing. But he couldn't tell. He could see, however, that his initial impression of the man's age was off-close up he came as advertised, thirty-one. Hard years.

"What happened to Charlie Bowen?" Evan asked.

"He went missing last summer. He's the equivalent of dead as far as the Court's concerned. My firm inherited his files, including yours. I got them about four months ago."

"You a slow reader?"

Hardy's glance came up at his new client again. The guy wielded words efficiently, short punches inside. First a wave at humor, then a cutting jab. A lot going on behind unyielding eyes. Hardy figured he deserved the rebuke-four months while he decided whether or not to take on the appeal himself must have felt a lot different to him than those same four months inside the prison had to Evan.

But Hardy was here now, and that's what mattered. Evan's trial had ended nearly two years before. Charlie Bowen obviously hadn't gotten too far with the appeal in the fourteen or so months that he'd worked on it. Nobody else had done anything on it for six months after Bowen disappeared. The four more months that Hardy had taken while he made up his mind after he got the files were the least of Evan's real problems.

So Hardy ignored the question. It was irrelevant now. He pushed his chair back from the desk, crossed his legs, started in a conversational tone. "I used to be a cop," he said. "Before that I was a Marine and did a tour in Vietnam. Sound familiar?"

"You enlist?"

"Marines," Hardy repeated. "They don't draft Marines."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty."

"Yeah, I was twenty when I joined the Guard, still in college."

"That was pre-nine-eleven?"

"Pre-everything," Evan said. "Different world. The Guard looked like easy money at the time. A good way to keep in shape. Who knew?"

"Did you go right into the Police Academy after school?"

"Pretty much. Couple of months off, maybe. You can only drink so much beer and do nothing else before it gets old."

"I don't know. I spent ten years doing that. I had a kid who died."

Hardy wasn't fishing for sympathy. He wanted Evan to know a little bit about who he was, why he might be taking on this case personally. The young man's history struck a chord in him. With his life apparently over, Evan was still seven years younger than Hardy had been when he'd awakened from his own long alcohol-powered slumber after the death of his first son, Michael. Starting over from scratch at thirty-eight, Hardy had resurrected himself and his life in a way he would have been unable to predict-success, wife, kids, even happiness. So he knew it could be done. You didn't want to bet on it, but the slim possibility was there. Maybe this kid-like Hardy an ex-cop, ex-soldier-could get another chance. "So how long," he asked, "did you walk a beat before they recalled you?"

"Three years, give or take. This isn't in my file?"

"How's it relate to your case?"

Perhaps unconsciously, Evan scratched with his right index finger at the surface of the desk. "I don't see how it would."

"That's why it's not in your file," Hardy said. "Not in Bowen's, anyway."

"What about Everett Washburn's?"

"It might be there, I don't know. I haven't talked to him yet. I wanted to meet you first. See what you had to say."

"Like what?"

"Like your own testimony at your trial. Was that Washburn's decision, or yours?"

"I don't remember, exactly. I think we agreed on it together."

"I don't understand why, when you were on the stand, you didn't take the chance to tell the jury yourself that you didn't kill Nolan. If you didn't."

The scratching stopped. Evan stared across at Hardy. "Maybe I did do it."

"Okay. That'd be a good reason. Did you?"

"You really want to know?"

"It's why I'm here."

"Washburn never cared one way or the other. If I actually did it, I mean. Said it didn't matter."

"That's what makes the world go 'round. I do care if you killed him. Did you?"

"I don't know," he said.

THE SECOND OFFICE out of which Everett Washburn practiced law was the lower flat of a Victorian building on Union Street in San Francisco. It was really more of a personal refuge than a business office. Everybody in Redwood City knew Washburn; aside from his managing-partner role in his own firm, he was a fixture at the Broadway Tobacconists down there, and sometimes the constant familiarity, having to be "on" all the time, got to be a little much for the old man. In San Francisco, he kept a secretary who came in for about ten hours every week. Her main job was to keep the plants watered. There were a lot of plants.

The place he favored most in the flat was all the way in the back. Twelve feet in diameter, octagonal in shape, with windows on four of the walls and bookcases stuffed with leisure reading-no law books-on the other four, the room was intimate and comfortable. It held his rolltop desk and slat-back chair, two small upholstered couches, a love seat, a large, square coffee table of distressed wood, and a couple of wing chairs. All of the furniture sat on a cream-colored Persian rug that had set him back twelve grand five years before.

"This is a great room," Dismas Hardy told him as he followed him in and stopped to admire it. "I could live in this room."

"It has a certain feng shui, I must admit. I do love the place. Have a seat, anywhere you'd like." Washburn plumped himself down in the middle of one of the couches, fixing Hardy with an appraising stare. "I've heard your name come up several times over the past few years, Mr. Hardy, but seeing you, I think we've met before, haven't we?"

Hardy took one of the wing chairs. "Yes, sir. And it's Diz, please. About five years ago in Redwood City. You put me in touch with an ex-client of yours and she wound up saving one of my associates' lives."

"Literally?"

"Well, the information she gave me. It solved a murder case about ten minutes before the guy could do it again."

Washburn pulled a look of pleased surprise. "I must say I don't hear that kind of story too often. An actual solved murder? My side of things, that never happens."

"Well, it did once. I probably should have gotten back to you, told you about it."

"You're telling me now. It's good to hear when a case turns out well. Did I charge you for the referral to my ex-client?"

"No."

Washburn clapped his hands together. "So much the better. Although as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished."

"I know," Hardy said. "I avoid them at every opportunity."

"And yet you've done me the courtesy to come down here to see me."

"That's not a good deed. I needed to talk to you and it was either my office or here. It gave me the chance to get out into the air in the middle of the day."

"Well, regardless, I appreciate your flexibility." And then, suddenly, as though he'd flicked a switch, Washburn shifted into business mode. He came forward to the very edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely. "You said it was about Evan Scholler."

"It is. I'm doing the appeal."

"Ahh. So you're the guy who comes in after the battle to shoot the wounded."

"I hope not. I've reviewed the transcripts. So far, from what I see, I'm not inclined to go with incompetence of counsel."

"That's magnanimous of you. Though in all honesty that trial wasn't one of my finer moments, I'm afraid. But what are you going to do when your client won't plead? I know I could have gotten him a manslaughter, and he could be out by the time he's forty. Now…" He shook his head. "Anyway, when I heard it was about Scholler, I thought you were coming here as a courtesy to tell me in person that I'd fucked it up and that was the basis of your appeal."

"Nope."

"So what are you thinking? The PTSD?"

Hardy nodded. "The judge shouldn't have kept it out. My call is that Ninth Circuit judges are going to fall all over themselves spinning this thing when it gets in front of them. Scholler had a legitimate disability of some kind that the jury couldn't hear about? And he did, right?"

"Oh, yeah. We had the experts. The diagnosis was cold."

"Are you kidding me? And the judge didn't let it in? How could it not be relevant and admissible?"

"How indeed?"

They both, of course, were familiar with the notorious liberal slant of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had made countless rulings on the admissibility of extenuating circumstances in murder cases, such as childhood abuse, dysfunctional parenting, or exposure to violence on television. If PTSD being ruled inadmissible didn't get their attention, Hardy would eat his bar card.

"Well." Hardy held out his hands, palms up. "Need I go on?"

"Not to me," Washburn said. "I do think that PTSD's the best play, though that just might be my own self-interest talking. I've kicked myself a hundred times over some decisions I made in that case. If I were doing the appeal, I might go for incompetent counsel."

"What would you have done differently?"

"Well, fought harder with Evan to take a plea, is the main thing." Washburn focused on an empty space in the air between them. "Done more with the Khalil murders, maybe, although God knows what that would have been-I spent fifty grand on my private eye and he got nothing remotely usable. Then-this was my favorite-I got halfway through my own chief medical witness when I realized that his testimony, if anything, helped the prosecution. But the main thing, as I say, would have been a plea."

"But he wouldn't take one."

"Adamant. He didn't remember doing it and wasn't going to say he did. Period."

Hardy shook his head. "Dumb."

Washburn shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe he thinks he probably didn't do it."

"What do you think?"

The old man waved that off. "I never go there."

Going for levity, Hardy put on half a grin. "Even for fun?"

"Never, nohow, no way, ever."

"I can't stand a man who won't express his opinions."

"No. Me neither." Washburn sat all the way back on the couch. "But the poor fucking guy. You met him yet?"

Hardy nodded. "I went down there last week." A beat. "I bet he'd take that plea now."

"Yeah, I bet he would." Washburn had already given Hardy about twenty minutes of his time, call it two hundred dollars' worth, although he wasn't charging him for this visit. Still, time was money and if there was no business to be done between these two men, Washburn would not make any until Hardy left. "So. How else can I help you?"

"I was hoping to pick your brain a little."

"How little?"

"Six to eight hours over the next month or so."

Washburn came forward again. "My professional courtesy rate is two hundred."

"Sounds reasonable," Hardy said. "I don't know how much time you have right now, and I don't want to impose…"

Washburn held up a hand and looked over at the grandfather clock that stood sentinel where the windows met the bookshelves. It was quarter to four. "I'm comfortable going till five," he said. "Feel free. Pick away."

A month into his new old job, his second hitch as head of San Francisco's homicide detail, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky walked alone down the fifth-floor hallway and turned into the small room-itself bisected by a counter-that served as the unit's reception area. It was five-twenty, and both of the clerks stationed here had left, probably gone home for the day. Glitsky, after his initial disapproval, was getting used to the idea of hourly employees putting in their time and going home. While he'd been deputy chief of inspectors over these past few years, he'd always felt it odd that even the clerical jobs were so personal-you got in early and you stayed until your boss went home because if you didn't, someone else might get close to him and then you might not rise in the bureaucracy when he did. Or she, of course.

In another few steps, he was in his office-a small room stuffed with file cabinets, crammed with a large flat working desk, windows high enough in the wall along the right to allow in a bit of natural light but that afforded no view of Bryant Street down below. Coming around the desk, Glitsky glanced up at his bulletin board of active homicides-nine of them today, about average, crimes committed in the past month or so on which his inspectors were still working. Settling into his chair, he sat back and wondered anew if his request for what amounted to a voluntary demotion had been a mistake.

He'd been on the job for more than a month now, and besides some of the personnel issues that had been and continued to be a bit troubling, he found that, much to his surprise, he somewhat missed his large official office with its bookshelves and plaques and wall decorations, its brace of leather chairs for important visitors, its reception area that discouraged passersby from stopping in to say hello. The deputy chief's office was that of an Important Man, and while he had occupied it, Glitsky often had not felt, at base, like he belonged there. Now, as head of homicide, he still had what he believed to be an important job, but it was mostly an invisible one. Could it be, he'd been wondering, that he'd grown accustomed to being in the public eye, to having his opinion matter to others, to being consulted by the chief and even the mayor about important civic issues?

He kept telling himself that he was in a period of adjustment to the new surroundings, that was all. Change itself was never easy. But two or three times already, he'd entertained the thought that maybe he'd made yet another mistake in a recent history of poor career choices.

And there was no getting around it. These new digs were different and they made the whole job, once so familiar, feel different. First, this office was physically separated from the inspectors' room. When the detail had been on the fourth floor, the internal windows in the lieutenant's office looked out over the crowded room that held the desks of the troops. Here, even if his new office had internal windows, which it didn't, he wouldn't have been able to see the inspectors, since the computer room was in the way. Inspectors could and did come and go, they never had to pass his door, and Glitsky might never know they'd been around.

The good news was that, barring emergencies, Glitsky's own hours had stabilized. As deputy chief, he'd considered it his duty to set an example of rigor, discipline, and enthusiasm, and he'd made it a point to be at work at seven-thirty. At the other end of the day, department meetings, press conferences, and public appearances often kept him out until nine, sometimes later. His weekends rarely were his own either. Deputy chief wasn't a job; it was a life.

And Glitsky was at a juncture-the crux of it, really-his desire in life was to be with his wife, Treya, and their two young children, Rachel and Zachary. The last couple of years, since Zack had been born, had been something of a strain. Treya worked as the secretary for San Francisco's district attorney, Clarence Jackman. She was at her desk at nine and left at five. There had been weeks while Glitsky had been deputy chief that they'd basically only gotten to speak to each other in this building, the Hall of Justice.

Now, having made sure that his desk was cleared, Glitsky was getting ready to check out for the day. He went out his door, closing it behind him. Passing through the empty computer room, he entered the inspectors' area and saw that fully eight of the fourteen homicide inspectors were in the room. This was unusual, since most of the time, these people were out interviewing witnesses, assessing crime scenes, building cases, and working out rebooking details and/or charges with assistant DAs.

Darrel Bracco looked over and raised a hand in greeting-at least one person in the unit apparently okay with the new status quo. As the vibe of Glitsky's presence passed through the room, other inspectors looked up. Glitsky caught a few nods from veterans who went back to their conversations and coffee, was ignored by a couple of others.

This was the way it had been since he'd come down here, his people misunderstanding his reappointment to homicide, wondering if in reality he was some kind of spy sent down by the brass to shake up the detail, screw up their jobs.

Glitsky hoped that this was simply the effect of change on his people, and that it, too, would shortly pass. But until it did, he wasn't having a good time. Getting up to Bracco's desk, he summoned a neutral tone. "I'm out the door, Darrel. Anything happening I might want to know about before I go?"

Bracco thought a minute, then shook his head. "Nothing new, Lieutenant," he said. "Slow day on the prairie, I guess."

"I guess so." Glitsky did a quick scan of the room. He didn't want to seem to be checking on anyone. In fact, he wasn't, but that didn't mean people might not think he was. "See you tomorrow, Darrel."

"Yes, sir," Bracco said. "Have a good one." Glitsky had turned and gone two steps when Bracco spoke again. "Wait a sec, Abe. I just remembered. There was something you might want to put back on your board." This was the active homicide board in Glitsky's office. Usually, once a name left that board, it stayed off forever, either because a suspect in the case had gotten arrested, or because the trail had gone too cold to waste the inspectors' time anymore, or if the only eyewitness fell terminally ill with lead poisoning, or if, for any of a zillion reasons, the case wasn't being actively worked anymore.

"Back on the board?"

"Yeah. One of my old ones. Bowen. But it's been closed since before your time. We can get to it in the morning. Here, I'm writing myself a note so I won't forget."

"How 'bout if I just walk back in there and write it back up?"

Sheepish, Bracco nodded, getting to his feet. "That would probably work too. I didn't want to keep you if you were leaving."

"How long can it take?" Glitsky asked. "B-O-W-E-N, is that right? Five letters. Shouldn't take me more than a few minutes." He was already back at his door, turning the key in it. "So what's the case?"

"Hanna Bowen. Finally ruled a suicide by hanging."

Glitsky turned and faced his inspector. "What? She unhang herself?"

"It's more like I promised the daughter that I'd take another look at it. She can't seem to get her arms around it. That her mom killed herself, I mean."

"Okay. But the coroner ruled suicide? And you're going to help this daughter how?"

"I know it's a long shot, Abe, but the girl's still torn up. You know all the classes we take that tell us to be sensitive to the victim's pain, and all that. I figure what can it hurt, and it might help her."

"What, though, exactly?"

"Well, evidently the mother kept a diary. Or the daughter-her name is Jenna-Jenna thinks her mom might have kept a diary and she asked me if I could try to find it."

"And do what with it?"

"See if it gave us any reason to think her mom's death might have been a homicide."

Glitsky boosted himself back onto his desk. "This was your case originally?"

"Yeah."

"Anything point to homicide back then? When was this?"

"Maybe early February, and not really, no. Except that Jenna had such a hard time with accepting that her mother would do that."

"Well, God knows we've seen that before, Darrel. Not that I blame her. Your mother goes that way, you don't want to believe it. Maybe you honestly can't believe it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen."

"I know. I told her I'd look, that's all. No promises."

"For this diary?"

"I don't know, Abe. That might not be all. I worked the case pretty hard when it was live. There were other elements at the time. Well, to be honest, mostly one other element, but it seemed worth checking out, although at the time I couldn't get anything on it."

"What was that?"

"The dad, Charlie. He disappeared last summer. That's supposedly why the wife killed herself."

"What do you mean, disappeared?"

"I mean poof, gone, vanished. No trace. Jenna thinks he wouldn't have just disappeared either. She thought he might have been killed."

"By who? Why?"

"No idea."

"Very strong, Darrel. So she thinks her father was killed, too, and that it's somehow connected to her mother's suicide?"

"Not suicide. She doesn't buy suicide. She thinks her mother was another homicide."

"Two homicides." Glitsky sat with it for another few seconds.

Bracco made a face. "The daughter lost both parents in the same year. If the diary turns up…" He shrugged. "Who knows. We might get something."

"So where are you gonna start?"

"I suppose I'll meet her and go through all the evidence again. Then maybe get to the father's files, which I never really looked into last time."

"What files?"

"His work files. He was a lawyer. Maybe it was something he was working on."

"What was?"

"The reason he was killed."

Glitsky scratched for a second at the corner of his mouth. Bracco had always been an enthusiastic cop, but he'd gotten promoted up to homicide originally because his father had been a driver to a former mayor, and sometimes his lack of experience showed. "You realize, I know, Darrel," Glitsky said, "that most middle-aged guys who disappear…I'm assuming this Charlie Bowen was middle-aged?"

"Fifty."

"There you go. Sometimes guys like him just walk away from it all on their own. They're not murdered."

"Right. I know that, Abe. Of course."

"And the wives of those men, who have been deserted by their husbands of, say, thirty years, might they find themselves depressed in the months following the desertion, even to the point of wanting to kill themselves?"

"Sure."

"Did we investigate Bowen as a homicide when he went missing?"

"No."

"And that was because…?"

"He was considered a missing person."

"Not a homicide?"

"Not a homicide. No, sir."

"Okay, then. Just to make the point."

"I hear you." Bracco shrugged away his misgivings. "Anyway, I'll be logging some time to the case and I thought you'd want to know."

"Okay." Glitsky pushed himself off his desk and wrote the word BOWEN onto the board, with the name BRACCO in the investigating inspector's column. "But, Darrel?"

"Yes, sir."

"Maybe not too much time, huh?"

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, Glitsky's grown boys-Isaac, Jacob, and Orel-and Treya's grown girl, Raney, had created a diaspora of their own to places as far-flung as Seattle, Milan, Washington, D.C., and-not so far-flung-Orel was living in San Jose. Now the new family unit with two toddlers ranged in the same old upper duplex on a cul-de-sac above Lake Street.

When Glitsky got home from work-driving his own car instead of being chauffeured by his driver in his city-issued vehicle-he and Treya and five-year-old Rachel had pushed Zack's baby carriage for a mile or so on the foot-and-bike path that ran behind their home at the edge of the Presidio's forest. In their backyard, in the still-warm evening, both kids swung on the new swingset Glitsky and Dismas Hardy and Hardy's son Vincent had built about three years before. Dinner was a store-bought roast chicken, the skin peeled off, with fresh steamed spinach and a side dish of noodles for the kids-since Glitsky's heart attack six years ago, Treya wouldn't let him eat anything with cholesterol in it.

By eight o'clock, both kids were asleep in their separate rooms down the hallway off the kitchen. Abe and Treya sipped tea sitting together in dim light on the leather love seat in the small living room. They had redecorated the room for the birth of Rachel, and now what had been a worn and dark interior sported blond hardwood floors accented with colorful throw rugs, yellow Tuscan walls, Mission-style furniture, plantation shutters.

Taciturn nearly to the point of muteness, Glitsky was happy to let Treya carry the conversational ball as she told him about her day, the machinations of the DA's office, Clarence Jackman's dealings with the board of supervisors, the mayor, the chief of police. It was endlessly entertaining because they both knew all the players and because the city was in many ways such a truly loony and fascinating place to live.

Today's drama featured Treya's boss on a tightrope walk between Mayor Kathy West's edict that declared San Francisco a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, and the U.S. attorney's response that he was going to cut off every federal law enforcement grant to the city if she did anything to hamper the Justice Department's crackdown on arresting and deporting these people.

"That I'd like to see," Glitsky said. "What's he going to do, arrest Kathy?"

"If she actually does anything other than talk the talk."

"You think she will?"

"I don't know. She's talking about it." Treya's laugh was a low contralto. "Talking about not just talking about it."

"Very bold."

"Très. But you never know. She might really do something."

"So what's Clarence going to do?"

Treya laughed again. Sometimes Glitsky thought that her talent for laughter was what had attracted him the most about her. After his first wife, Flo, had died, he had thought for a long while that he would never laugh again. "Clarence," Treya said, "has got eight lawyer positions funded by federal money, but the rest of his budget comes from the city. He is going to wait."

"He's a good waiter," Glitsky said.

"One of the best." She put a hand on his leg. "But here I've been, me, me, me. You seem-I don't mean to spook you-but slightly more upbeat than you've been."

Glitsky shrugged. "Just getting used to the new world order. I actually had a possibly productive talk with Darrel Bracco today."

"I like Darrel. And possibly productive? Wow. The man gushes."

Sipping his tea, Glitsky gave her a sideways look. "Maybe saved him some hours of slog, that's all."

"Okay, retract the gush." She squeezed his leg. "And next you were probably going to tell me what Darrel talked to you about. If you were going to keep on talking, I mean. Not that you have to. No pressure."

This time his smile broke clear. "He was going to be spending half of forever looking into the case files of this lawyer who disappeared last summer because some poor heartbroken girl thinks maybe he didn't run away and desert her and her mother after all. Maybe he was killed instead."

"Is there any reason she thinks that?"

"Not that Darrel knows. But the thing that makes it so sad is that her mother killed herself over it a couple of months ago, and the girl just can't accept it."

Treya took a beat and sipped her tea. "And people say you're not really all that fun. How can that be?" She turned to him. "That heartening, upbeat story was what's made you feel better about the job?"

"Talking to Darrel," Glitsky said.

"Ah. The silver lining."

"I mean, first, you've got to believe Charlie Bowen was a homicide, which there's no sign of, so why are you even looking?"

"Charlie Bowen," Treya said. "Where do I know that name?"

"He's the father. The missing person."

"The lawyer? I knew him, Abe. He's the guy, Diz got all his files."

"Our own Diz?"

"Our own Diz." Treya gave his leg another squeeze. "Maybe Darrel ought to talk to him."

31

The next morning, Friday, May 4, Glitsky and Treya drove in to work together. Through the largesse of Clarence Jackman, Treya had a dedicated parking spot behind the jail that she considered perhaps the job's single greatest perk.

Yesterday's high pressure front had scoured the sky clean and banished the marine layer halfway out to the Farallones, so the sun packed an unseasonable warmth. Though there was no breeze at all, some fluke of nature had delivered a fragrant and powerful olfactory blast from the city's main flower market around the corner. Treya, getting out on the passenger side, looked over the car's hood at her husband and said, "This day is too beautiful. Do you smell that? If we were truly evolved spirits, no way would we go in to work today."

"No? What would we do instead?"

"Whatever we wanted. Dance, sing, take the ferry to Sausalito."

Glitsky met her in front of the car and took her hand as they started toward the Hall of Justice. "If we were truly evolved," he said, "we'd probably get fired. So, luckily, we're not."

"Well, maybe you're not." She ceased walking, effectively stopping them both, and sniffed the air aggressively. "But I'm at least taking one extra minute here to enjoy this."

"Smelling the roses, as it were."

"You should try it. Close your eyes a second, breathe it in."

Glitsky did as instructed, then opened his eyes. "Yep, roses," he said, "and then all that other stuff."

When Glitsky opened the door to homicide's reception area, he was looking at Dismas Hardy, who was dressed for work in his suit and tie and looking at his watch. "Two minutes late," Hardy said. "What kind of example is that to set for your team?"

"Treya held me up," he said. "We stopped in the parking lot to smell the flowers."

"How were they?"

"Really great. Flowerlike." Glitsky greeted the two clerks that sat at their desks and then swung open the door to the counter that divided the room, indicating that Hardy follow him in. Opening the door to his office, Glitsky asked, "Did we have an appointment?"

"No."

"I didn't think so."

"But you called me last night, if you remember, which I bet you do. I didn't get in till too late to call you back. Something about Charlie Bowen?" Hardy took one of the chairs from against the back wall and pulled it up to sit on it.

Glitsky got himself seated behind his desk. "His name got you down here first thing in the morning?"

"Not really. I've got a hearing downstairs at ten anyway." Hardy crossed a leg. "So you're going to tell me they found his body?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Let's see. You're homicide. You call me about a guy who went missing ten months ago. Call me crazy, but I figure maybe he's suddenly become a homicide."

"Nope. That's not it. Good guess, though."

"Thank you. You want me to make another one?"

"You could, or I could just tell you."

"Okay. Let's go with that."

Glitsky gave it to him in about ten sentences, at the end of which Hardy was frowning. "So your guy Bracco," he said, "wants to do what exactly?"

"Find this diary."

"Which may or may not exist?"

"Right."

"And then which may or may not have anything to do with Charlie's wife's death?"

Glitsky shrugged his shoulders. "This isn't my idea, Diz. Treya just thought you might save Bracco some running around."

"If I could, I'd be happy to. But we're talking like sixty large boxes of files, about a third of which we've already farmed out or returned to clients."

"Right. I know."

"Besides which," Hardy said, "the timing's wrong. If the wife died in February, I had the files in my office by mid-December. She couldn't have dropped the diary into any of them even if she wanted to. You want, though, I'll get one of my people to go through the boxes on everything we've got left, but I wouldn't get my hopes up."

"That's what I told Darrel."

"There you go," Hardy said, standing up. "Great minds. Oh, no, wait, that couldn't be it."

Glitsky was picking up his telephone. "Get the door on your way out, would you?"

Hardy had taken up the habit of his now-deceased mentor David Freeman and, whenever the opportunity presented itself, walked the fourteen blocks between his office on Sutter Street and the Hall of Justice. Today, his morning hearing having ended sooner than expected, he was making pretty good time-not that it was a race or an opportunity for exercise or anything like that-when he got to Mission Street. There, a well-dressed, elderly woman caught his eye and moved just a bit over to get in his path. She looked into his face, beamed at him, and said, "Pardon me."

"Yes?"

"Are you all right?"

"I think so." She didn't look like it, but Hardy suddenly had no doubt that she was yet another in a city full of crazies.

"Then you ought to smile."

"Excuse me?"

"A day like this, a handsome man like you ought to be smiling."

"I wasn't?"

"Not really, no. More like frowning. More like the whole world's on your shoulders."

"Sorry," he stammered, trying to rearrange his expression. "Better?"

"Much," the woman said. "You watch. It'll help. Have a nice day."

After she disappeared into the crowd, Hardy stood for a long moment, unable to move. Catching his reflection in the store window next to him, he saw that the smile he'd dredged up had already faded completely away. Stepping all the way out of the foot traffic into the archway entrance to an ancient storefront, on an impulse he pulled his cell phone off his belt and punched in a number. "Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself. This is a surprise. Is everything all right?"

"Fine. Everything's fine. I just wondered what you were doing?"

"When?"

"Like, now."

His wife's laugh tinkled through the phone. "Like now I'm about to get in my car and go eat a salad someplace. Why?"

"Because I thought for a change of pace maybe you'd like to have some lunch with your husband."

Hardy waited out the short pause.

Then, "I would love to have some lunch with my husband. I think that's a great idea."

"You're not too busy?"

"I've got two hours and change. Where were you thinking?"

They decided on Tommy's Joynt, Hardy by cab and Frannie by car, since it was about midway between Frannie's office on Arguello and Hardy's downtown. Fifteen minutes after the phone call, they sat down in one of the booths, Hardy with a bowl of buffalo stew and a beer and Frannie with a French dip and Diet Coke.

"You don't come to Tommy's Joynt and eat a salad," she said, biting into one of the place's homemade pickles. "I mean, it's legal and all, but it would be wrong."

"It's not that I don't agree with you," Hardy said. "But if you really wanted a salad, we could have-"

"Hey!" She put a hand over his. "We're here," she said. "This is the perfect spot right now. There couldn't be a better one."

Hardy looked around and nodded. "No." He sighed. "You said it. It's perfect."

Frannie cocked her head. "Dismas, are you all right?"

"You're the second person who's asked me that in the last half hour, so apparently not."

"The second one. Who else?"

He told her about the lady at the corner of Mission.

"You mean out of everybody walking down the street, she just stopped you and told you to smile?"

"Right. But first she asked me if I was okay. That I looked like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Then after she left, I realized that that was pretty much the way I felt. I don't know why. I wasn't consciously down or anything. It's an absolutely glorious day…" He put down his fork, looked across at her. "Anyway, it hit me pretty good upside the head, almost like a message from on high."

"Saying what?"

"One thing, saying I ought to call you."

"I'm glad you did."

"Me too." He picked up his fork again, put it in the stew, stirred a minute. "I never thought I'd say this, but I think I'm having some trouble with this empty nest thing."

She put her sandwich down and again covered his hand with hers. "Yeah."

"And then I've been pretty pissed off at you for not being home when I get there, so I arrange not to be home when you are. Maybe I don't even consciously know I'm doing that, but I think that's what's been going on. It's wearing me down."

"I know. It's wearing me down too." She brought a napkin up to her eye and dabbed at it. "I don't really miss them so much, you know. I mean, I don't want them living with us anymore, God knows. We did enough of that. I just don't seem to know what to do with myself, so I fill up all my time with work, and then when I come home and you're not there either…"

Hardy finally got some of the great stew into his mouth, followed it with some Anchor Steam. "I'm thinking maybe we ought to reinstigate Date Night. Make it sacred again."

"I think that's a great idea. Maybe even go wild and have two a week."

"I would if you would."

"Deal."

She put her hand out over the table and Hardy shook it.

An hour later, Hardy ascended the steps into the wide, marbled, circular foyer that marked the reception area of the law firm of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, of which he was the managing partner. He marched up to the waist-high mahogany bullpen that demarked the territory of Phyllis, the firm's receptionist, and, obeying the finger she held up, waited while she placed a call to one of the other offices.

When she finished her business, she turned to him with her usual expectant petulance. "I told an Inspector Bracco that you would be here at one o'clock," she said. "Which is when you told me that you would be here."

"I know, Phyllis. I'm sorry. Something came up."

"And your cell phone broke?"

"You know, now that you mention it"-Hardy held his jacket down over the holster for his phone-"I've been looking all over for the damn thing. Have you seen it? Maybe I left it in my office somewhere. Or the car. I bet I left it charging in the car."

She shook her head with an icy disdain. "He waited forty minutes."

"I'm sure he did. Did he leave a number? We can get back to him."

"Of course, but I wanted to be sure you were here."

"As well you should, Phyllis. As well you should."

"Would you like me to call him now? He may not be far away. It's only been twenty minutes, after all, since he left."

Hardy considered that for a second. He had thought about driving down the Peninsula and getting some unscheduled time to ambush Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille on his Scholler appeal, but if Bracco was still close to the office, he was all but certain that it would be a short meeting. "Sure," he said, "call him back if he can make it."

Phyllis started punching buttons. Hardy made it to the door of his office when his cell phone rang on his belt, stopping him in his tracks as he lifted the phone and looked at the display screen. The call was from his office's main number. His shoulders fell and he turned around to face her.

Phyllis, her mouth set in disapproval, shook her head at him. "Maybe you left it charging in your car. Or maybe not."

Busted.

"I'll try to reach Inspector Bracco now," she said.

Bracco could have been the poster child for the good homicide cop. He went about five foot ten, a hundred and seventy pounds of muscle. He wore a tailored camel-hair sport coat over a pair of brown slacks, a light tan dress shirt with a plain brown tie. Under a close-cropped head of straw-colored hair, gray eyes animated his square, ruddy, clean-shaven face.

Now Bracco sipped a cup of freshly brewed coffee and sat comfortably in a leather chair by one of the windows that looked down on Sutter Street. This was in the more casual of the two seating areas that distinguished Hardy's office-the other, formal, more intimidating space with the Persian carpet, the Queen Anne chairs and lion's claw coffee table, complete with doily, claimed the area more or less in front of his large cherry desk.

Hardy went to the twin of Bracco's chair and sat down. He began on a conciliatory note. "I'm sorry you had to wait last time you were here. There was some confusion about my schedule."

Bracco turned up a palm, dismissing the apology. "You're doing me the favor, seeing me at all. I appreciate it."

"Sure. But I told Abe it'd probably be pretty slim pickins."

"That's what he said. He also said you offered to have one of your people go through Bowen's files, but that you didn't expect to find Mrs. Bowen's diary in them."

"Only because she would have still been writing in it, I presume, when the files had already been removed here to our storage. Glitsky said you weren't even sure there actually was a diary."

"No. Well, Jenna-Bowen's daughter-she's pretty sure there was a diary. Although I went through the house again this morning with a comb and nothing turned up."

"Well." Hardy wasn't sure where he fit in this picture, but he didn't want to give Bracco the bum's rush after his wait earlier. Let the man at least finish his coffee. "I can't speak for the files we've already finished with, but if you want me to light a fire under this, we can probably get through the rest of them in a couple of days. I've just gotten back to the office, otherwise I would have had somebody on it already. Is there some kind of hurry I don't know about?"

Bracco shook his head. "Just Jenna, to be honest with you. For the first few weeks after her mom's death, she was pretty much out of commission with grief. Now she's trying to process it, close the book one way or the other. If there's a diary and some clue…" He shrugged. "Anyway, so no, there's no real hurry, but I feel like a owe her another look if it's that important to her. And it is."

Hardy sat back and crossed his legs. "So I take it you had the mom's case?"

"Right."

"And you were okay with the coroner's call?"

"Pretty much."

"Did you see anything or talk to anybody that made you think it wasn't a suicide?"

"Generally, no. I mean, her husband had vanished a few months before. She'd made plans to go to Italy this summer, but the general feeling was that that was to try to put the desertion behind her, not to party. Most of her friends, and I talked to a lot of them, described her as devastated and depressed."

"So what's her daughter's take?"

"I think pretty much the usual. Her mother just wouldn't have done that. That's not who she was. Then she points to the Europe trip. Hanna-the mom-was evidently pretty frugal. Tight as a drum, Jenna says. She would never have bought tickets to Italy and not used them. She would have killed herself afterward."

Hardy allowed a small grin. "I know some people like that. Although putting off your own suicide until after you get your money's worth might be stretching it. And that's it? That's the daughter's reason she thinks it wasn't suicide?"

"Originally, basically, yes." Bracco drank some coffee, stared out the window for a moment.

Hardy had the impression he was trying to decide if he should say any more and thought he could help him along. "That's a lot of disclaimer you're throwing around. Originally. Basically. Do you have some doubts yourself? Is that why you're digging here?"

Bracco's mouth pursed as he continued to wrestle with whatever it was. "It was their rope, she slung it over a beam in the garage, got up on a little step-up ladder, and dropped off."

"But…?"

Noticing that his coffee was finished, Bracco came forward in his chair and put the cup and saucer on the low table in front of him. Now he looked straight across at Hardy. "None of this worried me too much at the time, you understand. I had three other actives. This one went to the coroner and went away in a couple of days. It wasn't until Jenna called me back a few days ago that I looked at it again."

"And?"

"And her neck was broken." He paused, then made his point more clearly. "Regular slipknot, no hangman's noose, fifteen-inch fall."

"You're thinking she should have strangled."

"Most people, those same conditions, that's what happens."

"But not always? Did you ask Strout?" This was the city's medical examiner, who'd ruled the death a suicide.

"He says he's seen a few where the fall and the weight breaks the neck."

"Well, there you go."

"Nobody who weighed as little as she did, though. A hundred and five pounds." Hardy made no response; by itself this was interesting, certainly, but not conclusive. "And then," Bracco went on, "there was the other thing Jenna didn't think about originally, but remembers now."

"What was that?"

"That her mother had decided that Charlie didn't just disappear. That he'd been killed."

"Someone in her position," Hardy said, "that could easily be wishful thinking. That he didn't leave her, he was taken from her instead. Big psychological difference."

"Yeah," Bracco said, "but the main thing is that Jenna says her mom was on a mission to find out who killed her dad and wouldn't have killed herself in the middle of it."

"Maybe she got to the end and found he'd really run out on her."

"I said the same thing to Jenna. She totally disagreed. If her mom would have found that out, even then if she decided to kill herself, she would have left a note for Jenna so at least her daughter would know the truth."

A short silence settled between the two men. "You're saying you think it's not impossible somebody killed Mrs. Bowen."

"It's not the kind of thing I'd try to sell to Glitsky. Not on what I've got now."

"You got a motive?"

"You probably won't love it."

"Try me."

"Somebody-the same person-killed the husband, too, and Hanna got too close to finding out."

Hardy shook his head, suppressed the start of a smile. "A bona fide conspiracy theory. You're right, that would be a tough sell to Glitsky."

"That's why I'd like to find that diary. It would be something real."

Hardy thought that even if it existed, it still would be considerably less than a smoking gun. Stealing a quick glance at his watch, he decided he'd given Bracco enough time and a good listen. Bracco didn't wear a wedding ring, and Hardy wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the daughter, Jenna Bowen, was a pretty young thing. As for him, it was time to get back to work. He started to get up.

But Bracco suddenly came forward. "Anyway, the reason I wanted to see you in person. I'm just saying there might be something else in those files."

"Some reason Bowen might have been killed, you mean?"

"Right."

This time, Hardy let his grin blossom. "You know how many big moving boxes we're talking about here, Inspector? Something like forty-five or fifty to go. Last time I checked, when he disappeared Charlie Bowen was covering two hundred and thirty-two active files, of which we've offloaded about eighty so far." He softened his tone. "Which is not to say we won't come upon something that looks fishy somewhere down the line, and if we do, I promise you'll hear from us. From me. But I think you're talking the original needle in a haystack."

Chagrined, Bracco sat back and nodded. "Yeah, I can see that. Well…" He pushed himself up to his feet.

Hardy, rising himself, said, "If you get anything specific attached to some probable cause, you could always subpoena the files and have a special master go through them."

"I could do that, but I don't have any idea what I'm looking for."

"Well, there's that." Hardy brightened. "Except the diary."

"Right. Except the diary."

"I'll get somebody working on that before you hit the street."

"I appreciate that," Bracco said, extending his hand. "Thanks again for your time."

Hardy nodded. "And we find anything on the other matter, you'll be the first to know. But as I told Glitsky, I wouldn't hold my breath on any of this."

Bracco broke a small smile. "I never do."

32

Hardy had a spy in Redwood City.

His old law school buddy Sean Kelleher worked as an assistant district attorney in the same building as Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille and told Hardy that she wasn't calendared for any trials and should be in or about her office for the whole day. As soon as Bracco had walked out of his office, Hardy had made the day of Michael Cho, one of his paralegals, by assigning him to start looking through the boxes of Charlie Bowen's files for a woman's diary. Then he'd picked up the phone and called to make double sure about Mary Patricia, told Kelleher he owed him one, and hightailed it down to his garage.

Ten minutes later, top down on his S2000, Hootie blaring from his car's speakers, Hardy cleared Candlestick Point and twenty minutes after that was parking in the courthouse lot twenty-five miles south. If San Francisco had been warm and pleasant all day, Redwood City, in the mid-eighties, was positively balmy. As he brought the roof back up over the convertible, he found himself humming out loud. He felt like a different person from the stoop-shouldered slug who'd attracted the attention of the possibly-not-crazy elderly woman at the corner of Seventh and Mission that morning. The lunch with Frannie, her receptiveness, maybe the start of the next phase of their lives together after the unexpected hollow emptiness of the recent one.

The little dance he was doing around Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille was not frivolous. He thought it so likely as to be certain that she would not consent to a regular scheduled appointment with him. After all, he was the man who was trying to undo all of the hard work she'd put in on what was to date still one of the most successful moments of her career. In fact, he considered it not impossible that even his planned ambush of her would be rebuffed. Certainly, there was no reason, other than professional courtesy, that she need feel compelled to see him. He wasn't kidding himself. He knew who he was. He was the enemy.

When he arrived in Redwood City, he called Kelleher, who came out and walked him past the receptionist into the offices in the back. He had a cup of coffee and shot the breeze a little and then asked Kelleher to point him toward the lair of Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille.

Her door was open and Hardy stood for a second in the hallway, trying to take her measure. Younger-looking than he'd expected, with a very appealing profile, she was sitting forward in her chair, her elbows on her desk, one hand playing with a loose tendril of blondish hair, apparently reading. Her feet, shoeless, were tucked back under her chair. It was a Friday-afternoon scene similar to one he'd seen a thousand times in the legal world-the alone, as opposed to lonely, time every good lawyer needed to keep up on facts, to study cases, to stay current on changes in the law, to recharge.

Part of him hated to bother her.

The rest of him stepped forward and knocked softly on her door. "Excuse me."

She turned to face him, her expression just short of querulous. Yes, it said, he was interrupting her. But she could be serene about it. The petulance gave way to a mild curiosity. "Can I help you?"

"I think so." He pointed to the name on her door. "If you're Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille."

"That's me."

"That's some name."

"Tell me about it. Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking. Mississippi and all of New York."

"Pardon?"

She straightened up in her chair, put her hands behind her lower back, and arched herself briefly. Getting out the kinks or showing off the merchandise. "Nine syllables," she said. "Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille. Mississippi and all of New York. Imagine having to ask people to say 'Mississippi and all of New York' every time they wanted to address you by name. You'd never talk to anybody." She broke a nice smile. "People call me Mills. Who are you?"

Hardy came forward and introduced himself.

"Dismas?" she asked.

"Dismas."

"I don't think I've ever met a Dismas."

"You're not alone. He was the good thief on Calvary, next to Jesus. Also, he's the patron saint of thieves and murderers."

"Good for him. I'm proud of him. I've always wanted to be patron saint of something, except I understand first you've got to be dead, and that's got limited appeal." Mills swung in around to face him. "So, Dismas, how can I help you?"

"Well, speaking of appeal, I wanted to ask you for a few minutes of your time to talk about the Scholler case. I'm doing the appeal."

The mildly flirtatious personality dropped off her like the calving of a glacier, leaving only the cold, flat ice behind. "I have nothing to say about that. I won the case. I don't think there are any legitimate appealable issues."

"You don't think PTSD should have been let in?"

"If you've read the transcripts, you know I argued against just that and prevailed. That was the right call. And now, I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of-"

"You spoke to Charlie Bowen. I'm only asking for the same courtesy."

"Charlie Bowen made an appointment with me and we set ground rules."

"I'll go with ground rules," Hardy said. "Same as Charlie's."

"Do you even know what they were?"

"It doesn't matter. I'll agree unseen."

"There's a desperate offer." She folded her arms over her chest. "Look, Mr. Hardy…"

"Dismas."

"Mr. Hardy, please. I don't want to be a hardass, but I'm not going to talk to you about Evan Scholler. He was guilty and I got him convicted and I hope he rots away in prison. That's all I've got to say, all right? Please."

Hardy counted five of his heartbeats. Of course, there always had been the make-an-appointment-and-set-ground-rules option, but he'd never before had a conference like that produce anything of real substance. If you wanted your soda to fizz and bubble, you had to shake it up.

But now he was looking at turning around and driving back home, facing a weekend with absolutely nothing to chew on and work with. The words and the idea came out of his mouth before he was aware that he'd thought of them. Anything to keep her talking with him. "How about if I don't talk about that case at all?"

She cocked her head, still wary. "Then what exactly would we be talking about?"

"Charlie Bowen."

"What about him?"

"Anything he might have said to you before he disappeared."

That stopped her. She combed her hand through her hair, made a face at him that could have meant anything, looked down at her desk, back at Hardy. "Why do you want to do that?"

"He disappeared while he was working on this appeal. Before I get too far with it, I don't want to have the same thing happen to me."

She shook her head, chortling. "Don't be ridiculous. He'd barely started even the preliminary work. I don't think he'd even finished the transcripts when I talked to him."

"So what did you talk about?"

"He wanted to review the evidence that hadn't been used at the trial. To see if I had any working papers not included in the defense discovery. Stuff like that. Just to make sure the record was complete while he was going ahead. Housecleaning."

"He didn't mention any personal conflicts?"

"No. If I recall, the meeting lasted under the hour. We didn't get too close."

"But he was going ahead with the appeal?"

"Of course. That's why we were talking at all."

"He didn't seem nervous or overly concerned with his safety?"

"Why would he be? The bad guy was already in jail." Shaking her head as if to clear away that thought, she went on. "I hate the appeals process, you know that. They ought to give our side an appeals process if we lose a case-try the scumbags again until we get 'em and put 'em away."

"Yeah, that's Mills," Washburn said. "She's a bit of a zealot, but she's also only the second person in thirty years to whip me in court, so she's got my respect." Hardy had thought it was late enough in the day that there would be a good chance he'd find Washburn at the Broadway Tobacconists, and he was right.

Now they sat in a cloud of cigar smoke in the back of the unpretentious little store. Except for Greta, the female proprietor, they had the place to themselves, a situation-Washburn assured him-that would change in the next hour, when his acolytes and his girlfriend would appear from their various offices to drink "from the vast fount of my knowledge."

Not entirely sure Washburn was poking fun at himself, Hardy said, "Well, whatever time you and I get together here, it's on the clock."

"Goes without saying." Washburn savored his smoke, drawing on it, exhaling another plume. He twirled the cigar around between his lips, then dipped the unlit end into a small glass of amber liquid which, from the bottle next to it, was Armagnac. "Sure you won't join me?"

"Thanks, but then I'd just want a little nip of your nectar, and I'm going to be driving."

"Probably wise. So how can I help you today?"

"Well, this is odd, but it came to me when I was trying to get to Mills. I didn't even see a draft of Charlie Bowen's appeal brief in the file, so I'm assuming he hadn't gotten to it. I'd also been assuming that he was going to go with the PTSD. But now I'm wondering if he'd mentioned anything about that to you."

"What?"

"What he was basing his appeal on. Especially if it wasn't PTSD."

Washburn sat back, drew on his cigar, held the smoke. "Actually," he said, "you raise a good point." Another pause while he dipped the cigar again in the Armagnac. "You know, he seemed to think that it might be more fruitful to attack the competency of the local constabulary as well as the FBI."

"How's that?"

"Well, the Khalil murders." Turning the cigar between his lips, Washburn sat back, pensive. "I mean, here you had two murders intimately connected with the Scholler case-there was no question of that-and a blatant assumption that Evan had committed them with the frag grenades and so on. But the DA never charged him with those murders. You see the issue?"

Hardy saw it plainly, and it struck him as unusually powerful. "So the police and the FBI never questioned anyone else?"

"And, on one hand," Washburn added, "why would they? They had a suspect they could convict, and may as well send him down for one murder as for three, without the risk of losing on the other two."

"You mean they never questioned anyone else about the Khalil murders?"

"I assume they must have, a few people anyway. But certainly not everyone they could have." He took in a huge lungful of the pungent air. "You're forgetting, though, and I wonder if Mr. Bowen did as well, that you can't base your appeal on evidence that isn't discussed in the record. The Court doesn't know anything that the court reporter hasn't taken down."

"I'm not forgetting that," Hardy said, "but then who killed the Khalils?"

"Well, if you believe Evan, Ron Nolan did."

"Did you believe Evan?"

Washburn seemed to be considering it for the first time in a long while. "You know, now that you mention it, yes, I think I do. Evan just didn't smuggle small arms and grenades out of Iraq as souvenirs. He was only over there a matter of weeks. In the brief time he had there, he couldn't have both found a source for these things and arranged to find a way to send them home. Especially when you consider he was airlifted out of there unconscious and with no warning. I'd be surprised if he got out with his own socks, much less all this hardware." He studied his cigar's lengthy ash. "No," he repeated, "it beggars belief. That just didn't happen."

"So where did that stuff in Nolan's closet come from?"

"It must have been from Nolan himself, wouldn't you think? He could move about a lot more freely, and he had both more time and a lot more contacts than Evan ever did."

Hardy sat back in his chair, his elbow on the armrest, his hand resting over his mouth, in deep thought. "Okay," he said in a faraway voice, "let's go with Nolan killing the Khalils for a minute. I don't want to jump too far ahead of ourselves here. Can we take that as fact?"

After a small hesitation, Washburn nodded. "I do."

"All right, then, here's the million-dollar question. Why did he do it?"

"I don't know."

"Was there any speculation you heard?"

Washburn shook his head, now troubled by this as well. "Somehow that just never became part of the discussion, did it?" Asking himself. He turned to face Hardy. "Even when everyone was taking it for granted that Evan had killed them, I don't remember anyone stopping to examine the why of it too closely." He drew on his smoke. "I think there was more or less an assumption that it was something that had happened in Iraq that we would never find out about. Maybe it was something personal or maybe he just hated Iraqis in general for what they had done to him. And at the same time he could frame Nolan for the murders and eliminate his rival for Tara. It was a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone if you happened to be a psychopath, which some people thought Evan was."

"But nobody asked the hard questions?"

"Apparently not."

"Even though the FBI was all over this thing?" It wasn't really a question. "Does that strike you as the FBI we all know and love?"

Clearly, Washburn, too, had caught the bug. His eyes were alight with possibility. "If Nolan did in fact kill the Khalils," he said contemplatively, "then certainly anyone in the Khalil family-Iraq being the tribal culture that it is-would have had not just a motive but an obligation to kill him."

Hardy, low-watt electricity running through him, leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What do you think are the odds that the FBI never talked to any of the Khalils?"

"Zero. And yet now that you mention it, all the interviews we got were from the Redwood City police. And it was a pretty perfunctory job."

"So you're telling me the FBI would have relied on the locals to talk to witnesses in a potential terrorism case? I don't think so."

Washburn nodded and nodded. "Son of a bitch," he said, unmistakable glee in his voice. "You're talking Brady."

Hardy, his mouth set, tried to keep his elation low-key. "You're damn right I am."

The reference was to what was commonly called a Brady violation. In Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that a defendant had a right to any evidence that was in the possession of the prosecution that might cast doubt on his guilt, whether or not it was eventually to be used at trial. The prosecution was absolutely required to turn over any background, testimony, evidence, interviews-anything-that could exculpate a defendant. If the prosecution withheld any of this discovery, and the withheld material was reasonably likely to undermine confidence in a guilty verdict, then these were grounds to reverse a conviction. Of course, evidence of such a violation was never found in the court's records. The whole point was that the prosecution had withheld the evidence and the defense didn't find out about it until sometime after the trial.

This opened up an entirely new strategic element.

Hardy and Washburn both keenly understood the situation. If in fact the FBI had interviewed witnesses in the Khalil killings and did not supply either the witnesses or the testimony, or both, to the prosecution, which the prosecution was then mandated to turn over to Evan's defense, it was highly possible that they were looking at a Brady violation. The added beauty of the situation was that Mills didn't even have to know about the withheld evidence. The FBI was legally construed to be part of the prosecutor's team and Mills was responsible for turning over that evidence whether or not the FBI told her about it.

Of course, proving not only that the FBI had held back evidence but also that the withheld evidence was likely to undermine confidence in the guilty verdict against Evan Scholler was another problem.

But Hardy would face that when he came to it.

For the moment, the Brady possibility, if he could get it off the ground by finding an FBI witness or two that hadn't made it into the Scholler record, meant that he could file a writ of habeas corpus with declarations and get it in front of the court of appeals in relatively short order. The court of appeals could then remand it back down to Redwood City, probably back to Tollson's courtroom, where-if they were hearing new evidence-anything might happen.

Washburn tapped Hardy's knee, snapping him from his reverie. "It's still going to be a long shot proving the evidence is exculpatory," he said. "Essentially you'll have to prove somebody else other than Evan might well have killed Nolan. Which, I must tell you from bitter experience, is a tough nut." He lowered his voice. "It might even be contrary to fact."

"Maybe not," Hardy said. "It might be enough for the court if I prove that somebody else had a reason to."

The old lawyer shook his head. "That, I'm afraid, is wishful thinking."

"Not at all. If there was another plausible suspect the jury didn't get to hear about…"

Washburn frowned. "And the FBI, which withheld it last time, and which is immune to state process, is going to hand it over now? How are you going to make them do that?"

"I don't know," Hardy said. "It's a work in progress."

33

Hardy drove back up to the city on the 280 Freeway, got off on the ocean side of town at Nineteenth Avenue, and, at a couple of minutes after the official beginning of the cocktail hour, walked into the front door of the bar he partly owned, the Little Shamrock. Moses McGuire, his brother-in-law, out of rehab now this past year or more, was behind the bar at the far end by the beer taps. To Hardy, he looked impossibly fit, although maybe it was simply the fact that he'd lost thirty pounds and cleaned up his appearance along with his bloodstream.

Perennially shaggy and long-haired, often bearded, McGuire had cultivated more or less the look of a biker or a mountain man since his twenties-which is to say for nearly forty years. Faded, often tattered blue jeans and some crummy T-shirt seemed as much a part of his personality as his justly fabled temper, his casual disdain for convention, his fondness for altered states of consciousness.

Down at the end of the bar today, passing the time with a pretty young woman, he might have been a mid-forties banker on his day off. The still-full head of salt-and-pepper hair was short and neatly parted, the mustache trimmed in an otherwise closely shaved face. He'd tucked the tails of his blue dress shirt into a pair of khakis. He'd had his nose broken often enough in bar fights that Hardy thought he'd always look a bit battered, but today his eyes were clear, his skin nearly devoid of the capillary etching that had been a regular feature of his face in the heavy drinking days that had comprised the majority of his adult life.

As a sometime bartender and part-owner, Hardy could have gone around the bar and helped himself to whatever he wanted, but occasionally you got back there and found you couldn't easily get yourself out, and tonight was supposed to be the first of his new Date Nights with Frannie, and he didn't want to start it off on the wrong foot. So he pulled up a stool and gave McGuire a casual nod, which brought him right on down.

"What's the word, Counselor?"

"Hendrick's, over. One onion."

"That's four words, and I've got cucumber."

Hardy nodded. "Even better. And while you're pouring, I've got a question for you."

"Hazel." McGuire didn't miss a beat. "Although some people think they're more green. But I'd call them hazel. Kind of a bedroom hazel." McGuire grabbed a glass, threw in some ice, reached up behind him to the premium gin row, and brought down the round dark bottle of Hendrick's gin. After a quick free pour to an eighth of an inch below the rim, he cut a fresh slice of cucumber and dropped it on top. "Santé," he said, placing it on the cocktail napkin he'd laid down on the bar. "Okay, what's your real question?"

"It's a long one."

McGuire scanned the length of the bar and around the corners of the room, none of which were very far away. The Shamrock was a small, neighborhood place that had been in its same location at Lincoln and Ninth Avenue since 1893. The grandfather clock against the wall behind Hardy had stopped during the Great Earthquake of 1906 and nobody'd set it running again since. The pretty girl had gone back to her friends by the dartboards, and all of the other twenty patrons seemed comfortably settled at the bar or on the couches in back. "That's all right," McGuire said. "The crowd's pretty much under control."

On the drive up from Redwood City, after he'd wrestled with some of the problems raised by the Brady violation issues, Hardy had returned to the question that he still hadn't answered, and that, in his and Washburn's enthusiasm for Brady, they'd inadvertently let drop. So, after filling in his brother-in-law on some of the background-with a doctorate in philosophy from UC Berkeley, McGuire's ability to grasp facts and concepts had always been impressive even when he was in the bag; now that he was sober, it was formidable-Hardy came out with it again. "So, the question is, why did Nolan kill the Khalils?"

"Piece of cake," McGuire said. "It was his job."

Hardy drank off some of the rose-scented gin-he'd come to love this stuff. "Just like that, his job?"

"Sure. He's a SEAL, right? He's a trained assassin. You remember the SEALs in 'Nam. Shit. Killers. And now he's working for this security company in Iraq?"

"Allstrong."

"Right, Allstrong."

"But he was a recruiter over here, Mose, hiring people. No way was he doing wet work."

"Right. I'm sure. With his background? No way he wasn't, if it was needed."

"And why would it have been needed with the Khalils?"

"I don't know. Not enough information. But they were Iraqi, n'est-ce pas?"

"Yep."

"Well, then, you check it out, I bet you find they have family or something over there and they were somehow getting in the way of Allstrong's business."

"So they kill the father over here?"

McGuire nodded. "Sending a message."

"Pretty long distance, wouldn't you say?"

"The father was probably running the business from over here. Cut off the head, the body dies. This isn't brain surgery, Diz. All this didn't come out at the trial?"

"None of it did."

"Why not?"

"Well, the easy answer is that everybody on the prosecution team thought my guy had been the killer, and the motive was mostly personal, about him and Nolan."

"But you think it was Nolan?"

"I'm beginning to."

"And you're thinking, then, that this stuff about him ought to have been in the trial?"

"Precisely."

"Hmm. Let me think about it." He walked down the bar and saw to a couple of drink orders. Shooting himself a club soda from the gun, he came back down to Hardy. "Okay," he said, "I've got it all figured out."

"Hit me."

"Nolan killed these Khalil people, and then their family killed him in retaliation."

"How'd they know he did it?"

"They put it together that it was Allstrong because of what was going on in Iraq, whatever that was. Once they knew that, they found out Nolan was Allstrong's man over here. Even if he wasn't the actual killer, they were striking back and getting revenge."

"How'd they know where he lived?"

"Diz, please. It's cake to find people nowadays. You got a computer? They probably knew where he'd be living before he moved in. Come on, this doesn't sing for you?"

"No, it does, that's the problem."

"Why's it a problem?"

"Because if it happened the way you say, my client's innocent."

"And this is bad news because…"

"Because he's about three years into life in prison right now."

Moses tipped up his club soda. "Could be worse."

"True," Hardy said, "but it also could damn sure be better."

"But why didn't the prosecution look into that?" Frannie asked between bites of her calamari. "I mean, I can see them finally deciding it was probably your guy Evan, but you'd think they'd at least question some of the victims' family, too, wouldn't they? If only to find out some background on them."

"More than background, Frannie. These were two murders. Just thinking it was Evan shouldn't have been nearly enough. They would have wanted to prove it and maybe send him to death row."

They were at Pane E Vino, back on Union Street not far from Washburn's office, and here it had finally chilled down enough to make them decide to eat inside. They were up right in the window. Dusk hadn't yet progressed into dark. Frannie's shoulder-length red hair brought out the contrasting green in her eyes, which were the same color as the silken blouse she wore-a visual that, even after all of their time together, still captivated Hardy.

Dipping some of the fresh warm bread into the restaurant's little dish of olive oil, Hardy pinched some salt from the open bowl and sprinkled it over his upcoming bite. "But just because we have no record that anybody from the FBI talked to them doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Washburn and I have developed a theory about that."

"Which is?"

"That the FBI interviewed these people and didn't pass their information on to the police or the DA."

"Why wouldn't they do that?"

"Well, the simple answer is because they didn't have to. But another answer is maybe they just didn't want to. And finally, Washburn's personal favorite and maybe my own, is perhaps they were ordered not to."

"Why would that be?"

"Evidently, that is not a question for us mere mortals."

Frannie chewed thoughtfully, sipped at her Chardonnay. "So what are you going to do?"

"Well, first thing, I've already done it. Driving up, I called Wyatt"-this was Wyatt Hunt, Hardy's private investigator-"and asked him to try to find anybody in the extended Khalil family that the FBI actually talked to. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't even really matter too much what they said. If the FBI talked to them at all about the Khalil murders and didn't see fit to tell the DA, then we've got a real discovery issue." Hardy put his wine down. "Moses, you know, thinks Evan might even be innocent."

"And why does my brilliant brother think that?"

"Well, the great thing about Mose, as you know, is that he can build these complex theories without any reference to the facts. Or maybe with just one teensy little fact."

"And which one was that?"

"In this case, that Nolan killed the Khalils."

"You think that's a fact?"

Hardy considered, nodded. "Close enough. I don't think Evan did, that's for sure. So based on that, according to Mose, Evan didn't kill Nolan. The Khalils did."

Frannie's face grew dark. She placed her hands carefully apart on either side of her plate. "And these are the people you're hoping to go talk to? These same people who killed Nolan?"

"We don't know they killed Nolan. That's just Mose's theory." But even as he said it, Hardy knew where his wife was coming from, and why she suddenly was so concerned. He couldn't deny the sharp tickle of apprehension that washed over him as well.

And, he realized, it was not altogether ungrounded.

Frannie was already concerned, and she wasn't even aware yet that there was any question about what had happened to Charlie Bowen, whether he'd in fact actually disappeared or whether he'd been the victim of foul play.

Perhaps following the same path upon which Hardy was thinking to embark.

He sucked in a quick breath-he didn't want Frannie to worry about that-then picked up his wineglass and took a sip. "I know what you're saying," he told her, "but if these guys were a real problem on that level, I've got to believe the FBI, with all of its resources, would have gotten some inkling of it. Wouldn't you think?"

"I would think that, yes. But then what?"

"Then I'd think they would have arrested somebody. That's what they do, Frannie. They find bad guys and put them away."

"Except if this one time they, in fact, didn't."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"For the same reasons you just gave me why they didn't tell the DA about these interviews you're pretty sure they had." She ticked them off on her fingers. "They didn't have to, they didn't want to, or they were ordered not to."

Hardy acknowledged the point with a small nod. "Well," he said, "I've got to believe there's a quantum difference between not turning over interview notes and not arresting someone they knew was a killer."

"Dismas." She put her fork down and met his eyes. "I never actually thought I'd say this, but you don't watch enough television. On The Sopranos, the FBI turn mobsters all the time and leave them in place for years, hoping to scoop up the big fish. Meanwhile, all these other people are getting beat up and killed. This happens in real life too. Everybody knows this."

He nodded again. "True. It just seems a ways off on this case. At least at this point when everything's speculation."

"Do me a favor, would you?"

"Anything, my love."

"If it moves beyond speculation, take a little extra care. If these people killed Nolan, they could kill you."

Hardy knew that she might be right, but so was he-this was a long way from being established. "I'm not a threat to the Khalils," he said. "I don't want to prove anything about what they did or didn't do. I just want to know if the FBI talked to them and didn't tell the Redwood City cops about it. So I don't think we have to worry too much about anything happening to me."

"Oh, okay," she said with an edge, "then I'll be sure not to."

Another of the changes in Frannie's life after her own children had moved out was that she had turned into a baby junkie, so after dinner, since they would be driving right by the Glitskys' flat on their way home anyway, she suggested that they should call their friends and see if they wanted company. Back a few years ago when Date Night had been truly sacred, especially during Rachel's first year, this postprandial visit had become a weekly ritual.

Now, while Frannie and Treya and even Rachel passed the infant Zachary back and forth with suitable enthusiasm in the living room, the two men sat on the steps overlooking their swingset project in Glitsky's small backyard and talked quietly, very quietly, about Charlie Bowen.

"You really think he's a homicide?" Glitsky was nowhere near as defensive as he might have been if either Bowen or his wife had disappeared on his watch, rather than on Marcel Lanier's. So Hardy's theories were interesting and maybe even fun to talk about, but they weren't-yet-Glitsky's problems.

"Not exactly," Hardy said. "It's just suddenly I'm finding myself a little more curious about what happened to the guy."

"You're building the whole thing on a bunch of ifs. You see that, don't you?"

"Well, not all of them are ifs. Scholler didn't kill the Khalils, for example. That just didn't happen."

"That doesn't mean Nolan did."

"No. That's true." Hardy rubbed his palms together. "But let's say that a homicide professional such as yourself had a hunch somebody had been killed, even if there was no body and no evidence. How would you go about finding out if you were right?"

Glitsky didn't hesitate. "I'd trace his last days, his last hours if I could."

"So do you know anything about Bowen's? Last days? Last hours?"

In the light from the bulb over the back door, Glitsky turned to his friend. His face, partly in shadow, with its hatchet nose and the whitish scar coursing through both of his lips, might have been some kind of terrible tribal mask, fearsome and powerful. "I don't know anything about Bowen, period, Diz. As far as I'm concerned, he's a missing person."

Hardy sat, musing. He wasn't here to argue.

An animal scurried through the brush on the Presidio's grounds.

"Your man Bracco came by my office today too," Hardy said. "On this Bowen thing."

"Charlie?"

"No, the wife."

"Right," Glitsky said. "He wanted this alleged diary."

"He did. But he also had a few other concerns that had just come up." Hardy went into it in some detail, Bracco's discoveries that the very light Hanna Bowen had broken her neck in a relatively short fall without a hangman's noose, that she'd come to believe her husband had been murdered. Bracco also apparently did not think it inconceivable that Charlie Bowen had been murdered, and that it might have had something to do with one of the cases he'd been working on.

"I told him," Hardy concluded, "that Charlie had a couple of hundred cases and identifying any one of them as connected with murder was going to take a bit of doing."

"But now," Glitsky said, "you're starting to think it might be Scholler."

"I don't know if I'd go that far yet. I wouldn't try to take it to the bank, but there's starting to be a hell of a lot of questions, don't you think?"

After a minute, Glitsky nodded. "It's interesting," he said. "I'll go that far." Then, "You want me to do anything?"

Hardy shook his head. "I don't know what it would be, Abe. Bracco's already on it, even without the diary. Since you trained him, he's probably doing that last-hours-and-last-days thing with Mrs. Bowen. Maybe he'll come up with something."

"If Darrel finds something that leads back to Charlie, Diz, and he starts to look like a homicide, I'll jump all over it."

"That'd be good. I'd appreciate it." Hardy fell into a silence again.

"What are you thinking?" Glitsky asked after a minute.

"Nothing."

"Yeah, but it's a loud nothing."

Hardy took a breath. "I was just wondering if it was possible that the FBI knew who killed the Khalils and didn't say anything about it because it was part of a bigger case."

Glitsky looked over at him. "I missed a segue here. I thought we were talking about the Bowens."

"Now we're talking about the FBI. But it's still Scholler."

"Guy gets around."

Hardy shrugged. "It's a complicated case. But part of it is how much the FBI didn't tell the DA. Or even if they had another suspect they forgot to mention."

"Whatever it is," Glitsky said, "you'll never know."

"But you think it's possible they'd deliberately withhold that kind of evidence?"

"As my father would say, 'Anything's possible.' If it's the FBI, I'd go a little further. Nothing is impossible."

"They'd screw up a murder case on purpose?"

"Not every day, certainly. Not usually. But for the right reason…"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Say maybe the guy's a valuable snitch. Or he's a mole in a terrorist group." Glitsky snapped his fingers. "There you go. He's giving the Feebs good information on a terrorist cell, I bet they wouldn't blink if he killed his girlfriend on the side. Say 'national security' to these guys and anything goes."

"You think?"

Glitsky chewed his cheek. "Would I bet on it in this case? Maybe not. Do I think it's ever happened? Definitely, and more than once."

And if it happened here with the Khalils, Hardy thought, perhaps Charlie Bowen hadn't figured it out in time as he was preparing his appeal. Maybe the Khalils had seen him-justifiably-as a threat, a loose cannon who wouldn't hesitate to accuse them of murder if it would help get his client off. And if they had, or if one of them had, in fact, murdered Ron Nolan…

"Okay, then here's another angle you might want to put in your pipe and smoke," Hardy said. "Moses is of the opinion-again, based on nothing, but still, he's not dumb-he thinks that Nolan killed the Khalils because it was his job. They were Iraqi, and he worked for this company that does a lot of business in Iraq. Allstrong Security, which is evidently-"

But Glitsky put a hand on his arm, stopping him. "Allstrong Security?"

"Yeah, headquartered here and in-"

"I know where they are, Diz. I know who they are." Unconsciously, he tightened his grip on Hardy's arm. "Nolan worked for Allstrong? How could I not have heard about that?"

"Maybe because it's a small detail about a trial in another county three years ago. Could that be it? And why would it have mattered, anyway?"

But Glitsky, a muscle working in his jaw, was inside himself, putting something together. He let go of Hardy's arm, staring ahead of himself into the darkness.

"Abe? Talk to me."

Slowly, he began to spin it out, as though to himself. "I'd bet my life it's close to the same time frame, something like three years ago, right? But I'll check that."

"What?"

Still, Glitsky hesitated. "We had a homicide here in the city of a guy who'd been over in Iraq working for Allstrong. His name, if memory serves, was Arnold Zwick. Somebody snapped his neck in an alley down in the Mish. Left his wallet on him."

"All right. And this means…"

"No, wait. The same weekend, a day or two later I think, three more guys, all together, all muggers with sheets, turn up dead on the street in the Tenderloin. Two of 'em with their necks broken."

"Three broken necks?"

"That's what we said. Batiste thought it might be a serial killer starting out, but nothing else happened. No clues, no suspects. Eventually it all just went away."

"So what was the deal with Allstrong?"

"Nothing, really." Glitsky still trying to process his memory. "We never found anything, anyway. The investigation never went anywhere."

"But?"

"But witnesses told us Zwick seemed to be rolling in cash before he got killed. But we never found any of it, except a couple of hundred in his wallet. Debra Schiff thought he'd embezzled it from Allstrong in Iraq, then split. They were getting paid mostly in cash back then. Her theory was that Allstrong sent somebody back over here to find Zwick, make an example of him, get the money back. But as I say, we never got a lick of proof."

"And now you're thinking…"

"I'm not thinking anything yet. Except maybe Moses might not be all wrong about Nolan."

Hardy sat, elbows on his knees, mulling over this new information. "Let me ask you this, Abe. You've got friends in the FBI, right?"

Glitsky hit a one-note chuckle. "Local cops like myself don't have what you call bosom buddies in the FBI, Diz. But I know a few guys, yeah."

"Maybe you could ask them a couple of discreet questions?"

"About this Khalil case?"

Hardy shrugged.

"And what," Glitsky asked, "makes you think they'd tell me anything at all about that? Especially if they've kept something about it hidden all this time?"

"Well," Hardy said, "I know the two agents who were involved in my case. Maybe you could just put in a good word and see if they'd talk to me."

"I could do that, sure. Which doesn't guarantee they will."

"No, I know that. But it might help."

Glitsky shrugged. "Couldn't hurt, unless it does. And we'll never know either way, anyway. But I'll put in the word."

At that moment, the back door opened behind them. Frannie was standing there holding Zachary, with Treya in the hallway behind her.

"What are you guys plotting out here?" Frannie asked.

"Violent overthrow of the government," Hardy replied. "It's time we took control and fixed everything."

"Good idea," Treya said. "Maybe Abe could start the revolution with that squeak in our refrigerator door. It's been driving me crazy for weeks."

When they got home, while Frannie was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, Hardy moseyed on downstairs and picked up the telephone in the kitchen. After three rings, he got the answering machine for the Hunt Club, Wyatt's private investigation agency.

"Wyatt." His voice a whisper. "I just wanted to give you a heads-up about the Khalils. You might want to keep a low profile. And if you find out if and when somebody talked to the FBI, go easy from there. Get as much detail as you can, but if you meet any resistance at all, don't make anybody mad at you. Just report back to me. We don't want to raise any flags with them. If you're getting the impression that the risk factor's gone up around this thing, that would be accurate. So be careful. Just treat that as the word of the day-careful."

When he got back upstairs to the bedroom, Frannie was in her pajamas in the bed. She put her book down. "Where'd you go off to?"

"Just downstairs, locking up, that's all."

She gave him a quizzical look. "Is everything okay?"

"Fine," Hardy said. "Everything's fine."

34

The questions ate away at Hardy for the rest of the weekend, and at seven-thirty Monday morning he called Darrel Bracco on his cell phone from home. The inspector seemed glad to hear from him at such an early hour, and told Hardy that they still hadn't located Hanna Bowen's diary but that yesterday he'd talked to one of Hanna's best friends, a woman named Nora Bonner, and gotten what he called pretty strong corroboration for Jenna's opinion that her mother had not been suicidal. Bonner and Hanna had gone out to dinner two days before she died, and all she'd been able to talk about was what she kept calling her husband's murder.

"Hanna didn't by any chance mention who she thought had killed him?"

"She thought it was something he was working on, but didn't know what. Evidently, he didn't talk about his cases at home."

"So why did she think it was that?"

"The last couple of days, he told her he thought he was onto something big, that he might actually be doing some real good."

"But he didn't say what it was?"

"He didn't want to jinx it before he had some answers."

"So why didn't she, Hanna, tell that to the police earlier? If Charlie was looking into something big-"

"Because nobody was looking at Charlie's case, that's why. It wasn't a homicide, remember?"

"All right," Hardy said, "let me ask you this. If Hanna was trying to find what Charlie was doing, how was she investigating it?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out. If it were me, I'd probably have gone to Bowen's secretary. Or maybe he was using a private eye. But the problem is this is all ancient history now. Bowen's gone most of a year. Who's gonna know, or remember?"

"The secretary might."

"Right. And she was?"

"It'll be in his admin records. While we're looking in the files anyway. Then you just track her, or him, down. Hopefully still in town, probably with another firm. Or-here's a possible shortcut-maybe the daughter knew."

"That's worth checking. I'll ask her." Bracco paused. "Can I ask you one?"

"Sure."

"Last time we talked at your office, you didn't seem too enthusiastic about the odds of getting anything out of all this. Now you're calling me before I'm in at work. Did something happen I might want to know about?"

Hardy took a beat. "That's a fair question. The answer is yeah, although it's all still pretty nebulous. I'm working on the appeal for one of Bowen's cases that was hanging fire when he disappeared. Evan Scholler. Some of the witnesses I'm hoping to talk to might have developed a motive to kill Bowen."

"You're shitting me."

"It's a long way from established, but it's something I'm looking at. I talked to Glitsky about it over the weekend."

"What does he say?"

"What does Abe usually say?"

"Not much."

"That's what he said this time too. But I'm thinking if you can find some independent confirmation looking into Hanna's last days, maybe that she had tried to contact these same people-"

"What are their names?"

"It's a family. The Khalils." Hardy spelled it for him. "The father and mother were killed about four years ago in Redwood City, and everybody thought my guy Scholler had done it. Now, maybe not."

"So these Khalils killed their own parents?"

"No, but they might have killed the guy Scholler got sent up for. If you're keeping score, his name was Ron Nolan. Anyway, I've got my investigator looking into this too. So, yeah, I'd say it's heating up, but it might all fizzle and go away."

"I should talk to these people too. The Khalils."

"Well." Hardy temporized. "First we've got to find out exactly who we're talking about, and at this point, we don't have any idea. It's a big family. And you're already well along on Hanna's last hours. If you get something solid there, you're ahead of me and then you've really got something to talk to these people about. Meanwhile, I keep scratching. And call you if I get anything real."

"With respect, sir. If Charlie Bowen's a murder, it's police work."

"I couldn't agree more, Inspector. I'm just trying to find grounds that'll fly for my appeal. But Hanna Bowen's murder, if it was that, is police work too. And it's way fresher."

Bracco paused a little longer this time. "We ought to stay in touch."

"That's my plan. If you notice, I made this phone call, for example. I've got no desire to work your case, Inspector. Really. I just want to get my client out of jail."

Bracco let out a little laugh. "God, that just sounds so wrong. My clients, all I want to do is put 'em in jail."

At lunchtime, Hardy was down the Peninsula again. Though he might have been able to get the information from his client, Everett Washburn also knew Tara Wheatley's address and phone number and even where she worked. He'd left a message, identifying himself as Evan's attorney, and she'd called right back on her break and agreed to meet him in front of her school at a quarter to noon.

As soon as he saw her, as she walked out of the building and got close to where he'd parked, Hardy understood a lot better what all the fuss had been about. He'd just read a book called Silent Joe by one of his favorite authors, T. Jefferson Parker, where one of the underlying concepts was the idea of the woman who possessed what one of the characters called "the Unknown Thing"-an attractive force so powerful that it altered the orbit of every man it encountered. It wasn't mere physical beauty or sexuality, though they both were part of it. It was something bigger, more inclusive, subtler, and far more dangerous.

Whatever the Unknown Thing was, Tara Wheatley had it in spades.

When she got to the passenger door, she stopped and beamed a smile down at Hardy that, at another time in his life, would have melted him. She wore sunglasses against the bright day. Her hair was down. The plain pale-orange cotton dress she wore revealed nothing-it came to below her knees-and yet stirred something that, to his old bones, felt primal.

"What is it about guys and convertibles?" she asked. "I'm assuming you're Mr. Hardy."

"That's me."

Hardy started to reach over the seat, but she opened the door on her own-bare tanned legs and sandals-and plopped herself in. Hardy had the rogue thought that it was lucky she was teaching fifth-graders-any further into adolescence and her boy students would probably riot.

"Where to?" Hardy put the car in gear, got moving. "Can I buy you lunch someplace?"

She shook her head. "I've only got one period off for lunch-forty-five minutes. Just away from here, anywhere. Wherever you find shade."

Out of the parking lot, he turned right and crested a hill, following the main road until it dipped into an area where the homes were surrounded with old oaks.

"You can turn anywhere in here," she said.

Hardy did as he was told, and parked at the curb on a shady street in an established neighborhood of large attractive homes set on small lots. As soon as he'd set the brake and turned the motor off, she turned toward him in her seat, her near leg tucked up under her. "Sorry to hustle you out of the lot back there," she said, "but people don't need to see me talking to another man outside the school. I'm already pretty much the fallen woman. I almost lost the job over it back during the trial."

"Over what? Having a boyfriend?"

"Having two boyfriends, Mr. Hardy. Not exactly at the same time, but close enough for some people."

"Who?"

"Suburban moms, Mr. Hardy. Never underestimate the power. Some of them really never liked me. I think I must have threatened them somehow, though I don't know how or why that would be." Hardy had a pretty good idea, but he said nothing. "Anyway, thank God the nuns supported me. I love the work. I love my kids. But you didn't drive down here to talk about me. What can I do for you? Is everything all right with Evan?"

This had been her first question to him on the phone this morning, too, as soon as she'd heard who he was. But this time the question prompted an unexpected one from him. "Have you not seen him recently?"

Clearly, the answer made her uncomfortable. "Two weeks."

"That's not so bad."

She shrugged. "It's not good. Not if he's the man you love, and he is. But he's already been in prison for two years, and in jail another year before the trial." She lowered her head, shook it slowly back and forth, let out a deep sigh. "It's a hard one, the whole thing."

"I can imagine."

"I mean," she went on, "if he stays in prison. I don't know what we're supposed to do. He won't marry me. I've offered that a hundred times. I think he's starting to lose hope. I don't know what he wants out of me anymore. Sometimes I'm not even sure what I want. I know I wanted him-I do want him-but I wanted a life with him. You know? Not this." Suddenly her eyes flashed. "But I'm not giving up on us. I'm not. Don't think that. It's just…it's so hard. It's so endless."

"I believe you," Hardy said.

She raised her eyes and looked over at Hardy. "Do you think you're going to have any luck? Do you think he's ever going to get out?"

"To be completely honest with you, I don't know. I don't want to give you any false hopes, but I'm starting to think we might have a prayer."

"Is that what was so urgent?"

Hardy nodded. Maybe he'd exaggerated about needing to see her right away, but here they were now, and he couldn't feel bad about it. He felt that things had begun to move quickly, and he didn't want to lose his momentum. "There's a good chance that the FBI talked to the Khalils and didn't let the prosecution know. If that's true, we've got an appealable issue."

"Well, I'm glad. But I don't know anything about that."

"No. I didn't think you did." Hardy hesitated for a moment. "I wanted to ask you a few questions about Ron Nolan."

She rubbed her hand across her forehead, brushed a hair away. "I knew it was going to have to come to that again someday."

"Why did you know that?"

"I don't know. He was such a mistake. I still don't know why…" Letting the thought hang until there was no other way to complete it. "I feel like the whole thing is my fault."

"How is that?"

"If I hadn't gone and told Evan about Ron tipping off the FBI. Ron knew I'd do that once he told me. He just played me. And then Evan went up to his place…"

"So you think Evan did kill him?"

"Well, I mean…I don't think he was himself at the time. But I guess…"

"You guess so?"

She shrugged again, then nodded. "I don't know what else could have happened."

"A lot else could have happened, Tara. Nobody seems to know what happened. So unless Evan told you something that didn't make the trial-"

"No! He didn't do that. He didn't remember."

"I believe him. You might be happier if you believed that too. But what I'm wondering is if Ron ever talked to you about his work with Allstrong? You went together for how long?"

"September to May. How long is that? Eight months? What do you want to know about his work?"

"Whatever you can tell me."

"Well, he liked it, it paid very well, he was gone a lot."

"Back and forth to Iraq?"

"Sometimes."

"Even though he was under suspicion for causing the blow-up at Masbah?"

"I never knew about that until Evan told me just before Ron and I broke up. But that really didn't worry Ron. Nothing worried Ron. I'm pretty sure he went over to Iraq at least three, maybe four times. To get paid in cash if nothing else."

"In cash?"

"Yes." She adjusted herself in the seat. "He showed me a wrapped-up brick of something like fifty thousand dollars in cash after one of his trips."

"What did he get that for?"

"I think it was just how he got his regular pay sometimes. That's what he told me."

"How did he get that back into the country?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, you can't enter the country with that kind of money in cash. You've got to claim it at customs."

She shook her head. "No. Ron didn't have any problem with that. He always flew by military transport out of Travis. He knew all the pilots and the commanders and everything. It was just part of how Allstrong did business."

"Tara," Hardy asked, "didn't it ever occur to you that Ron brought those frag grenades over from Iraq the same way, and that he'd killed the Khalils with them?"

"Of course. I knew Evan hadn't done that anyway. But there wasn't really any proof that Ron had either. But then, he was such a liar. He lied about everything to me. And to Evan."

"Did you ever hear him mention anything about the Khalils?"

"No. Not really. Not until they were dead, anyway." She looked at Hardy in a pout of frustration. "I wish I knew what you were trying to get me to say. If it would help Evan, I'd say it. But I didn't know much about Ron's work at all."

"I'm not trying to get you to say anything, Tara. I'm trying to get a handle on Ron Nolan, on what was going on around him. See if that leads me anywhere on this appeal."

"Well, for a handle, I can help you there. He said he was a warrior."

"A warrior. What did he mean by that?"

"Oh, we talked about that a lot. I really didn't like it, or agree with him, but when he talked he could make it sound like it made perfect sense."

"What did, exactly?"

"That the world needed warriors, and the job of the warrior was to kill. And that's who he was, how he defined himself."

"As a killer?"

"A killer." She nodded. "And I'm sure he was. One time…well, no, never mind."

"What?"

She paused, then shrugged. "Well, it was one of our first dates…"

35

Glitsky was on the phone at his desk, talking to his closest connection in the FBI, Bureau Chief Bill Schuyler, with whom he'd had many previous, nearly amicable dealings. Now the tone didn't ring with cooperation and friendship.

"Bill," Glitsky said, "you're telling me both agents quit?"

"Yes, sir."

"At the same time?"

"I'm not at liberty to disclose that, Abe. They're no longer with the Bureau. That's all I know."

"Could I talk to their superior?"

"I am their superior, Abe. What else do you want to know?"

"I want to know where they are."

"I just told you. They quit."

"You just also told me that you were their superior. And two hours ago when we last talked, you didn't know they'd left the Bureau."

"I hadn't worked with them personally in a while, Abe. I guess they got away from me."

After a small pause, Glitsky tried again. "This is a murder case, Bill. Freed and Riggio testified a couple of years ago down in Redwood City and it would be helpful to know who they talked to."

"Wouldn't that all be in the record?"

"We were wondering if any of their reports dealing with that case happened not to get turned over to the DA."

"I'm sure they turned over everything they were supposed to. And you're investigating a homicide in Redwood City? Isn't that outside of your jurisdiction? And who is we?"

"The Redwood City case might be connected to a couple of San Francisco homicides, Bill. And we is me and the lawyer I've been working with on this stuff."

"Well, whoever it is, Freed and Riggio aren't going to be available."

"Because they've left the Bureau?"

"That's correct, Abe. Anything else?"

"When you say they left the Bureau, Bill, do you mean they joined another federal agency? Or are you telling me a couple of thirty-something FBI agents opened a Dairy Queen in Texas and didn't tell you where?"

"Always a pleasure to talk to you, Abe. Have a nice day."

In spite of Schuyler's best wishes, Glitsky wasn't, in fact, having a nice day. He sat at his desk in the early afternoon. He had gotten up five minutes earlier and turned off his overhead lights, closing and locking the door behind him. Both of his hands were cupped on the blotter in front of him and from time to time, irregularly, he would drum the fingers of those hands. His mouth was tight and a muscle in his jaw worked at the side of his cheek.

He hadn't been kidding when he'd told Hardy that one didn't really have bosom buddies among the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But Hardy's request, to put the word out to Agents Jacob Freed and Marcia Riggio to talk to him if he called, had been so benign that Glitsky never expected any sort of bureaucratic runaround. He and Schuyler had worked portions of several cases together and, jurisdictional squabbles apart, had always before gotten along reasonably well as human beings.

When Hardy had told him on Friday night that the number of questions surrounding the Bowens, which might or might not be connected with the Scholler case, was sufficient to get his attention, Glitsky still had had no problem reserving his judgment. Questions came with the territory. They were what investigations were all about. Few people had the good taste to disappear or die in such a way as to leave all questionable issues in their lives resolved.

But now this unexplained and almost certainly spurious disappearance of the two FBI agents who'd been instrumental in the Scholler case forced Glitsky up against one of the other cardinal rules of investigation: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

It wasn't a coincidence that Ron Nolan worked for Allstrong, and so had Arnold Zwick.

Three broken necks in one weekend wasn't a coincidence.

Beyond those new and disturbing items, it was one thing to have Charlie Bowen, who was working on the appeal in the Scholler case, vanish without a trace. There was a reasonable and plausible explanation for the suicide of his wife six months later.

And certainly FBI agents had been known to leave their jobs.

But for all of these things to come together in an apparently random set of coincidences stretched Glitsky's credulity far beyond its normal capacity for elasticity.

A relationship existed here among these parts. He just didn't know what it was. But he was starting to get a good idea that it probably involved at least one homicide in his jurisdiction, possibly two. And maybe more. This made it his business.

But more than that, the FBI and Allstrong connections significantly enlarged the playing field. Whatever had originally happened in the Scholler case, and Glitsky was woefully ignorant of all but the most general of those details, it had appeared more or less parochial-essentially two guys duking it out over a woman. Now, suddenly, Hardy's theories involving the Khalils, and whatever business they were doing in Iraq, and perhaps even some kind of U.S. government involvement, did not seem so incredibly far-fetched. And though Abe's opinion of the FBI's methods included his belief that it would ignore the taking of a life by a snitch or a prospective witness if it suited its agenda, it it did not extend to the possibility that its agents would actually sanction or commit murder.

So-the only conclusion he could draw-the FBI knew more about this case than they were willing to divulge. They possibly knew who had killed the Khalils. And who had killed Ron Nolan. And if it wasn't Evan Scholler, this meant that the FBI had let the wrong man be sent to prison for life.

If one of the Khalils instead had killed Nolan in retaliation, and then either or both of the Bowens because they'd picked up that trail, and the FBI knew about it…

He pulled over the phone on this desk, lifted the receiver, and punched in a number he knew by heart. "Hello, Phyllis," he said, "it's Abe Glitsky. I need to talk to Diz, please."

Hardy's private investigator, Wyatt Hunt, did his research primarily on his computer in the large converted warehouse by the Hall of Justice that he called home. He had no trouble finding the details of the Khalil murders on the net. Over the weekend, he also spoke to Hardy to clarify exactly what his assignment was. It had evolved somewhat from Friday's first phone call, when Hardy merely wanted to know who, if anyone, among the Khalil family had had an interview with FBI special agents in regard to the Scholler case. Now, Hunt's personal priority had shifted to finding out, without putting himself in danger, what those interviews had been about.

By now, on Monday afternoon, he knew that the extended Khalil clan consisted of twenty-three separate families strung out between South San Francisco and San Jose, and then across the Bay over to Hayward and Fremont. The typical arrangement was that each family owned its own franchise of the 7-Eleven chain, although four of them owned more than one store. The family had been in the country since Ibrahim and Shatha had emigrated with their four children in 1989, before the first Gulf War.

The eldest surviving brother, Abdel Khalil, had been the spokesman for the family in the aftermath of the murders of his parents and seemed the likeliest source of information. Abdel owned three stores along the El Camino Real between the two northern Peninsula towns of Millbrae and San Bruno, but conducted his corporate business out of a low-slung stucco-and-glass building set down in a former landfill by San Francisco Airport.

Hunt got out of his Mini Cooper and walked in the flat glaring sunshine across a treeless parking lot and into the nondescript reception area of AMK, Inc. A swarthy, somewhat disheveled young man in shirtsleeves sat at the only substantial piece of furniture, a cluttered desk in the middle of the room. He was sorting some kind of paperwork. A cup of tea steamed at the side of his desk. The screen saver on his computer showed an artist's rendering of a 7-Eleven store in a typical urban strip mall. A radio, turned low, played what Hunt would have called Middle Eastern, perhaps Iraqi, music.

Hunt had made the appointment this morning, probably with this same young man, under slightly bogus conditions, saying that he was a writer who was doing an article on successful immigration stories. Now, after he introduced himself, the boy gave him a nervous smile and disappeared through a door behind him, leaving Hunt standing alone in front of the desk.

A minute later, Hunt was shaking hands with a good-looking man in his mid-thirties. With his mustache he bore a slight resemblance to Saddam Hussein, although he was dressed in American clothes-black slacks that looked to be the bottom portion of a man's suit and a light blue dress shirt with an open neck. "Mr. Hunt, I'm Abdel Khalil. Would you like something to drink? A cup of tea, perhaps, coffee, Coke."

"Coffee would be nice. Black, please."

"Fine. We can take it in my office." Khalil snapped his fingers twice quickly and the boy jumped, bowed, and disappeared.

Hunt followed Khalil to a more spacious room in the back corner of the building. From the chair he was directed to in front of the standard wooden desk, he had an unimpeded view of the Bay and of planes landing at the airport.

The room itself, like its counterpart outside, was functional in the extreme. An oversized map of the Bay Area was pinned to one of the walls above a low credenza. A computer had its own small table at a right angle to the desk, which Khalil went around and sat behind. He'd barely gotten settled when the receptionist knocked and entered with a cup of coffee and handed it to Hunt, then closed the door behind him on the way out.

"Now." Khalil clasped his hands on the desk. He spoke educated and uninflected English. "Mr. Hunt. How's the coffee? Good. Now, how can I help you? I understand you're writing an article of some kind?"

This was always the tough part. Hunt placed his saucer on the tiny table next to him. "Actually, sir, that's not the case, and I apologize. I'm a private investigator working with a lawyer who's doing the appeal on the Evan Scholler case and if you'd like to kick me out of here, I'd understand."

Surprised, but not completely unamused, Khalil waved that off. "You've barely gotten settled. Why would you think I wouldn't talk to you about Evan Scholler?"

"It could be a touchy subject."

"And why would that be?"

"I think the assumption was that he killed your parents."

"Yes." Khalil's face darkened. "That was a difficult time. But I hope we've put that behind us. Did you say Scholler was appealing his conviction?"

Hunt nodded.

"Well, I wish him luck."

"You do? That's a bit of a surprise."

"Why is that?"

"If he killed your parents."

"But he was never charged with killing my parents. And frankly, it didn't seem to make much sense at the time, unless you bought the idea that after what happened to him over there, he hated all Iraqis and just picked them as a random couple to sacrifice." Khalil shook his head. "I never really saw that."

"So who do you think killed them?"

"I think it must have been Ron Nolan."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, the fragmentation grenades, for example. His work, I understand, brought him to and from Iraq frequently, where he would have access to that stuff and would have been able to bring it back here by military transport without having to bother with customs."

"But why?"

"Why what?"

"Why your parents? What was Nolan's motive?"

Khalil grimaced, the memory of it all beginning to play back. "I believe he picked up a contract to assassinate them in Iraq. Our family has business interests over there and I think-well, I had heard this, and when I told the FBI-"

"Wait a minute, please! Excuse me. You're saying you talked to the FBI, then?"

"Of course."

"And you told them that you believed Ron Nolan had killed your parents because of information that you got from Iraq?"

"Well, yes."

"And what did the FBI say?"

"They seemed to already know, and didn't disagree that that was probably what happened. They assured us they would look into it. But then, of course, after what happened to Mr. Nolan…"

"So they talked to you about the Scholler trial?"

This seemed to stump him for a minute. He half turned and looked out his window, his brow furrowed, then came back to Hunt. "I don't really recall that."

"So what did they talk to you about?" Hunt sat back, lost for a beat in his own perplexity. "But I'm sorry, I interrupted you. So you're saying the FBI didn't think Scholler killed your parents?"

"Right. That's probably a large part of the reason he never got charged with that. Everyone I've talked to in the FBI agreed that it was Nolan."

"But Nolan was never-"

"Nolan was dead, Mr. Hunt. What was anybody going to do about that? It was over, a done deal. Even if some of my brothers and cousins wanted to kill him, he was already dead."

"So you're saying Scholler did kill Nolan?"

Now Khalil showed genuine surprise. "Well, yes, of course. I don't believe anyone has any doubts about that. Do they?"

Well, as a matter of fact, yes, Hunt was going to say, my boss does. Which would have led to Khalil's next question, Then who did kill Nolan? And Hunt's answer-Hardy's answer-would have been: Uh, you guys. The Khalils. But suddenly, that was not how this was going.

Instead, Hunt scrambled. "Okay. Nobody doubts Scholler killed Nolan. And the FBI told you that Nolan probably killed your parents. Did they know why? Or who put this contract out?"

"The short answer is not at first, they couldn't find anything, although I heard from relatives that they interrogated a lot of people over there."

It was all Hunt could do to keep his mouth from dropping open in amazement. "In Iraq? The FBI interrogated people about your parents' death all the way over in Iraq?"

"Of course. That's where the trail led."

"But they didn't find out who did it?"

"Eventually, they believed they did, yes." Now Khalil allowed a small smile. "And we-my family-verified that they were right. Your FBI, they know what they are doing, you know. They're extremely competent and efficient."

Hunt sat back. "What did they find out?"

"Well, as I say, eventually it became more or less obvious. But first you have to know that my father, Ibrahim, was a brilliant businessman. He directed his youngest brother, Mahmoud, in some of his widespread business dealings in Iraq. Mahmoud was trying to supply contract workers on a reconstruction job over there, a very lucrative one, but the main supplier-Mahmoud's chief competitor, in fact-was a Kurd named Kuvan Krekar. The FBI became satisfied that Mr. Krekar took out the contract on my mother and father to disrupt our business over there, and to a large extent he was successful. In the short term." When Khalil's small smile returned, it had a chilling aspect. "I received word about two years ago that Mr. Krekar had died from an improvised explosive device. My country, as you know, is going through some very violent times. But the good news is that Mahmoud and his business have been thriving lately, and we believe we have turned the corner over there."

36

At five-thirty, Hardy and Hunt were sharing one of the window booths at Lou the Greek's, a bar and, in some people's opinion, restaurant located just across the street from the Hall of Justice. The squabble over whether it was in fact a true restaurant worthy of the name derived from the uneven quality of the food they served at the place. Many of the regular patrons came in only to drink at the tiny bar in the front, and didn't ever try to eat the constantly changing Special that Lou's wife, Chui, created every single day.

The Special was the only food item on the menu, and in deference to Chui's Chinese and Lou's Greek ethnicities, she most frequently tried to make different combinations of ingredients that included both of these two cultures' rather violently disparate culinary traditions. Thus, on any given day, the Lou's Special might be taramasalata (fish roe) wontons in an avgolemono broth, moussaka potstickers, or the oft-requested Yeanling Clay Bowl, the ingredients of which had once stumped a panel of six of the city's all-star chefs after DA Clarence Jackman had publicly referred to it as his "favorite lunch in the city."

Because Lou's was semi-subterranean-the entrance off Bryant descended eight steps from the street level-the booth where Hardy and Hunt sat had windows high in the wall above them, which at the same time were at the ground level of the alley that ran alongside the building on the outside. The view out the windows, which few took advantage of, was of passing feet, garbage cans, the occasional horizontal homeless person.

Today, neither Hardy nor Hunt was paying attention to the ambience. Hardy, who had spent most of the afternoon working on the first draft of his argument on the PTSD issue for Evan's appeal, sat with his shoulders hunched over slightly as though he were brooding, his hands cupped around a mug of coffee. Hunt sat sideways in the booth, slowly revolving a pint glass of beer on the table. Hunt had already made his report to Hardy at his office, and this had prompted Hardy's call back to Glitsky, and ultimately the decision that they should all meet down here and see what they had.

"You don't think the fact that the Khalils talked to the FBI is going to be enough for you?" Hunt asked. "Friday that was all you wanted."

"I remember it well," Hardy said, "those halcyon bygone days. And absolutely I'm going to make the argument. The Khalils had a strong motive to kill Nolan. The jury should have known about that and decided for themselves whether that caused them to have a reasonable doubt about Evan's guilt. It's up to the jury, not the FBI, to decide what's important and what's not. But for Brady to work, the withheld discovery has to be reasonably likely to cast doubt on the verdict. And the idea that some unknown third parties had a motive to kill Nolan probably isn't going to convince the court to give Evan a new trial. We're just going to need something stronger if we want to argue that the Khalils killed Nolan-"

"Which I just don't see, Diz. Really. Still possible, I know, but you had to have heard this guy. If he didn't absolutely believe Scholler killed Nolan, he's gotta get himself an agent."

"Well, if the alternative option was either himself or one of his relatives, it might sharpen his thespian skills a little bit, don't you think?"

Hunt shrugged. "Possibly. But still, it's against my gut."

"All right, then, let's go with that for a minute. Say whoever killed Nolan, it wasn't the Khalils and it wasn't Scholler. Who does that leave?"

"How 'bout the FBI? Maybe there was way more money involved and these two agents who have disappeared found it and left the country."

"Maybe," Hardy said without enthusiasm. "And a good story. But I kind of doubt it."

"Me too," Hunt said, pointing at the entrance. "And I hate that. But here comes Glitsky. Maybe he'll know something."

It wasn't only Glitsky. Bracco came in with him. Hardy introduced Hunt around-he hadn't met either of the cops before. Lou came from behind the bar and took their orders, Glitsky's green tea and Bracco's Diet Coke. In the next few minutes of show and tell, everybody got reasonably caught up. The story Hardy had heard from Tara about the mugging incident in San Francisco's Tenderloin, implicating Nolan in those three deaths, significantly upped the buzz quotient around the table.

Bracco went last, revealing to the civilians what he'd already told Glitsky-that he'd located Bowen's secretary, Deni Pichaud, and talked to her for an hour or more about what her boss had been working on during the last few days before he disappeared. Ms. Pichaud didn't have much to offer. Bowen, as everyone already knew, had a varied and substantial practice, and according to Pichaud he tended to flit from one case to another as clients called and demanded his attention. She had no special memory of anything about Evan Scholler or his appeal.

When Bracco finished, the four men sat looking at one another for a long moment. Hardy finally broke into the silence. "So where does that leave us?"

"Is shit creek already taken?" Hunt asked.

Glitsky, who eschewed profanity, gave the detective a quick bad eye but then blew on his tea, sipped, and said, "It's the FBI and Iraq. That's all that's left."

Hardy shook his head. "The FBI didn't kill Nolan, Abe."

"Maybe Scholler did." Bracco held up a hand. "I know he's your client and all, but-"

"Yeah, but that almost doesn't matter at this point," Glitsky said.

"I'm afraid it still does to me, guys," Hardy put in. "That's why me and Wyatt are here. So if everybody's good with it, maybe we can just leave the whole question of who killed Nolan open and see where that leads us."

"Good by me," Glitsky said. "I want who did the Bowens, and we know that wasn't Scholler."

"So you're going with the Bowens being murders?" Hunt asked.

Glitsky nodded. "Until I get proven otherwise." He pointed a finger across the table at his inspector. "Which means, while I'm thinking of it, Darrel, feel free to put in more time on both these investigations. Treat 'em both like they're righteous one eighty-sevens. Witnesses if you can find 'em, evidence ditto, phone and financial records, the whole ball of wax."

Bracco, determination all over his face, nodded. "Got it."

"Meanwhile," Glitsky continued, "how are the FBI and Iraq connected to the Bowens?" In a rare display of humor, he channeled the line from Ferris Bueller. "Anyone? Anyone?"

"I've got a thought," Hardy said. "Let's go back to Nolan. The FBI talked to him in person and his employer works in Iraq, which puts FBI and Iraq in the same sentence anyway."

Hunt picked it up. "All right. And Abdel Khalil says Nolan picked up the contract on his parents in Iraq from a guy named Kumar or something."

Hardy, who rarely forgot anything, chimed in. "Kuvan."

"Okay, Kuvan. Kuvan paid Nolan forty or fifty grand to take out the Khalils. Then the Khalil family over in Iraq took out Kuvan."

The four men sat with their thoughts and drinks. Finally, Hardy cleared his throat. "My, what a tidy little package," he said.

Glitsky turned to him. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that this is all a nice cleanly closed circle, except for two little things-Charlie and Hanna Bowen. And I think we're all in agreement that, no matter what, the FBI didn't kill them. Right?"

Nods all around.

"Well, check me if I'm wrong on anything here, but how about if the trail leads to Iraq, all right, but instead of Kuvan paying for the hit, the order came from Allstrong?"

"The way it did with Zwick," Glitsky added.

"Do we know that for sure?" Bracco asked. "And even if we do, what does it get us?"

"Nothing with Zwick, as you say. The FBI never got involved in that investigation," Hardy answered. "But with the Khalils, it gets us the FBI covering for an American company with contracts over there, deflecting the blame-and the retaliation-on this Kuvan guy. Just another Iraqi businessman who got squeezed in the war. This totally satisfies the Khalils-they get their tribal revenge and they're happy. And over here, now nobody's looking at Nolan anymore, or at Allstrong. The story's completely over."

"And the FBI did this, again, why?" Glitsky asked.

"Because Allstrong is connected high up in the government, both over there and back here. High enough that they could call off the FBI."

"Uh-oh." Glitsky was shaking his head.

"I know, I know," Hardy said. "You hate this conspiracy stuff. Which doesn't mean, Abe, that it doesn't happen."

"I don't hate it," Bracco said.

Hunt chimed in. "Me neither. In fact, I kind of like it."

"Maybe I'm missing something," Glitsky said, coming back at Hardy. "So, Diz, you're saying that the FBI went over to investigate what? Nolan's murder?"

"No. The Khalil murders."

"I thought they'd concluded that was your client?"

"No," Hunt corrected Glitsky. "Redwood City, not the feds, concluded that that was Evan. According to Abdel, the FBI thought it was Nolan pretty early on."

"So they went over to Iraq? Why?"

"To find the source of the frag grenades," Hardy said, "if nothing else. Interview Nolan's associates, maybe his boss, who has, it turns out, in fact actually ordered the hit."

"But again, Diz, why?"

"Well, and here I'm extrapolating a little bit, but see if it doesn't sing for you, because Allstrong had a profitable relationship with this guy Kuvan. And the Khalils were getting in Kuvan's way. This is all stuff, by the way, that Wyatt more or less verified this afternoon with Abdel. So Allstrong orders its guy, Nolan, to do the hit. Which is, P.S., what he basically did for a living anyway."

"So." Glitsky, trying to make the tumblers fall into place, slowly swirled his teacup in front of him. "How does this get us to Bowen?"

"Bowen gets Evan's appeal," Hardy said, "just like I did. He starts asking the same types of questions I've been asking, except instead of sending Wyatt here down to talk to Abdel Khalil, he starts with the assumption we're working with right now-that Nolan and not Evan killed the Khalils. So that changes his equation about who would need to cover that up if it comes out, and what's the answer?"

"Allstrong," Hunt said.

Hardy nodded. "Ten points."

"Who needs to cover what up?" Glitsky asked.

"Allstrong. They can play fast and loose all they want in Iraq and nobody asks too many questions as long as they're fulfilling their contracts. But if it comes out-and it would be a huge story over here-that they're killing naturalized American citizens on American soil to promote their business interests in Iraq, I've got to believe that screwed up as things are over there, Allstrong would at least stop getting new contracts. They might even lose the ones they've already got, and that's if they don't get charged for murder first."

Bracco slurped at the end of his Diet Coke. "How much money are we talking about? For Allstrong, I mean, their contracts over there."

Hunt spoke up. "I got curious checking out some stuff on Nolan and Googled them over the weekend. Their first year in Iraq, when Nolan was on the payroll, they got about three hundred and fifty million dollars in government contracts."

"You've got to be kidding me," Bracco said. "Allstrong Security? I mean, who are they? Nobody's ever heard of them. They're not exactly Halliburton."

"No, but they're trying harder," said Hunt, "that's for sure."

"Maybe they'd actually kill to get work," Hardy deadpanned.

Glitsky sat back, his body language saying that he was still reserving judgment. "Okay, okay. So you're saying Bowen went to Allstrong first, not the Khalils, with these questions?"

"That's my guess," Hardy said.

"And Allstrong killed him?"

A nod. "Or had him killed, yes."

"That's pretty drastic, don't you think?"

"Maybe from our perspective, granted. But these guys are a bunch of mercenaries. They're hired guns. That's how they solve problems." Hardy came forward in his enthusiasm. "Look, Abe, Allstrong had already dealt with the whole Nolan thing and put it behind them. The world believed it was Evan Scholler who'd killed the Khalils for his own twisted reasons. Someone with the government who had major juice-a general, a congressman, I don't know, somebody who was in Allstrong's pocket and helping it get its contracts-had either ordered or convinced the FBI to offer up Kuvan privately to the remaining Khalils."

Glitsky was still shaking his head. "I know we're not all big FBI fans here, but I've got to say that I don't see them doing this. Ever. Sometimes they might get a little overzealous, but they're not going to frame an innocent Iraqi and stand back while someone else kills him."

Hardy nodded, conceding the point. "How about if they didn't know, Abe? How about if someone way up, like the general or senator or whoever I was talking about earlier, got to the director of the Bureau, say, and vouched for Allstrong, meanwhile selling him a bill of goods about Kuvan? So your agents solve the case and then they're ordered off it."

"And when somebody else wants to talk about it," Bracco said, "like you, this morning, sir, the agents don't work there anymore."

"And Allstrong stays off the hook," Hardy said.

"Until Bowen showed up," Hunt added.

"That's it," Hardy said. "And then here it was again, the threat to Allstrong, to its very existence, and a lot closer this time. So they had to make Bowen disappear before he could make any kind of public stink. Or even ask any more questions. He just had to go away." Hardy looked around the table. "Anybody see an egregious flaw here?"

Glitsky looked across at Bracco. "Don't worry about it, Darrel, he always uses words like that." Then, back to Hardy. "Do you know that Bowen ever actually got in touch with Allstrong? I mean, any actual proof?"

"No, but we can find that out. Those phone records you were talking about." Hardy turned to Bracco. "And you might want to check Hanna's too."

Glitsky snapped out a curt defense of his inspector. "I'm sure Darrel's got some sense of the drill, Diz."

"Sorry," Hardy said to Bracco. "I tend to get excited. This may really be something."

"Let's get some evidence first," Glitsky said. He sipped at the last of his tea, put his cup down gently. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with discontent. "I really don't want to believe there's a conspiracy here. And a cover-up. From somebody high enough up to have influence with the FBI. I keep believing our guys don't do that kind of stuff."

"With all respect, are you kidding, sir?" Hunt said. "These are the same swell folks who brought us Abu Ghraib and all the other disasters over there. Giving up Kuvan for the greater good, and that means pumping more money into a hardworking, God-fearing company like Allstrong-that's a no-brainer. We're the good guys, remember, so whatever we do is right."

"Yeah," Glitsky said, "so let's hope we're wrong on this one."

Hardy, thinking about Evan Scholler doing life without parole in prison, didn't hope they were wrong. He didn't see another plausible alternative, and he'd long since lost faith in the essential goodness of man. Some were good, true, maybe most. But others, particularly those drawn to war zones and to chaos, would sometimes do anything-lie, cheat, and kill-for more money and more power, either or both. The basic rules of civilization did not apply.

That, Hardy was now all but convinced, was what had happened here. The moral rot that festered in Iraq and in the halls of power both here and abroad had poisoned the communal well over there. What distinguished Allstrong was that it had had the arrogance and irresponsibility to bring the rot and the chaos home.

And that, Hardy felt, could not be allowed to stand.

37

Hardy sat in his reading chair, his feet up on the ottoman, in the dark living room in the front of his house. He wore the same black gym shorts that he'd put on before he'd gotten into bed six hours before. When he had started awake about an hour ago-he'd dreamt that he'd been pushed from an airplane out over the Pacific Ocean-tossing off the covers, he had lain still in the night until his heart slowed down, listening to his wife's breathing beside him, taking what comfort he could from the peaceful regularity of it.

Finally giving up on the idea of sleeping, he eased himself out of bed. Downstairs, he looked into the refrigerator out of habit, then closed it and went into the adjoining family room and watched his tropical fish swimming in their dim, gurgling home.

He'd spent most of the evening after dinner back next to his fish at his computer, finding out everything he could about Allstrong Security. Hunt's analysis of their financial success early in the war was accurate as far as it went, but he'd failed to mention that to date, the company's government contracts in Iraq totaled eight hundred and forty million dollars.

Allstrong was in charge of security at sixteen of the country's airports, as well as guarding electrical grids in twenty-two administrative areas. They had been in charge of the currency changeover for the entire country as well as the rebuilding of the power lines in the extremely violent Anbar Province. The company's Web site boasted of 8,800 employees in Iraq, 465 of whom were former American military men, most of them officers.

The company had also become active in several other countries, with more than 500 ex-commando operatives in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Nigeria, and El Salvador, where it specialized in corporate as well as government logistics and security. Over 200 more employees worked at a sprawling new headquarters complex near Candlestick Point in San Francisco, where the concentration was mostly on programs to guarantee the integrity of municipal water supplies and, incongruously, on raising catfish as a sustainable and inexpensive food source for developing countries.

Jack Allstrong, the founder, president, and CEO, had evidently relocated back to the home office in March of 2005. He lived alone in a mansion in Hillsborough and presided over the business out of San Francisco, although the home page stressed that Allstrong was ready and able to embark to trouble spots anywhere in the world at a moment's notice in one of the corporation's fleet of private aircraft, which included two Gulf-stream V jets.

When he went to bed, Hardy's brain had been spinning with the possibilities that Allstrong presented for his Scholler appeal. As soon as Bracco could forge the link tying Allstrong to Nolan's involvement in the assassination of the Khalils and to the deaths of the Bowens, Hardy would have an unassailable argument that the jury in the original trial never saw crucial evidence that reasonably could have affected the verdict. He'd get his appeal granted on the Brady violation, and then probably a new trial. And further, he doubted that a new jury, given the reversals in the case, would convict Evan again.

Now Hardy's subconscious had rejected all of these optimistic conclusions. As he sat slumped down in his living room chair he found himself scavenging for any kind of salvageable something that could tie Allstrong-either the person or the company-to any crime at all.

If Jack Allstrong had personally ordered Nolan to eliminate the Khalils, and paid him in cash, which is exactly what Hardy conjectured had happened, he could count on there being no record of it whatsoever. Especially after all these years.

Or-Hardy corrected himself-Charlie Bowen had come up with the only evidence there might have been, and perhaps had inadvertently passed it on to his wife. But by now, whatever that had been must be gone. And similarly, the murders of Charlie and Hanna had been carried out with professional efficiency.

Even if Bracco discovered that Charlie and/or Hanna Bowen had called or gone down to visit Allstrong on the last day of their lives, what would that prove? Would it lead to a discovery of Charlie's body, which had probably long since become fish food? Or would it place an Allstrong mercenary in Hanna's garage pulling her body down to make sure to break her neck as she dropped from her stepladder?

Hardy knew it wouldn't.

And so long as Allstrong didn't confess to anything-and if there was no proof he'd ever done anything wrong, why would he?-then in the face of all the accusations in the world, he'd remain untouchable. In fact, Hardy realized, with the size of the operation Allstrong was running, by now he'd undoubtedly have surrounded himself with protection-administrative assistants, senior staff, his own lawyers-to keep him insulated from riffraff such as Hardy himself or even Sergeant Bracco who might come calling on him with impertinent questions. Hardy might never even get to talk to him.

At the sound of the newspaper hitting the porch, he opened his eyes again. The darkness outside had lessened by a degree.

It was going to be a long day.

Three and a half hours into the work portion of that day, Hardy glared malevolently at the phone as it buzzed at his elbow. He was eight pages into his brief about the Brady violation. He made a good case that the FBI's information should have been disclosed to Washburn. This would have allowed him to cross-examine the now-disappeared, allegedly ex-FBI agents on the entire question of Nolan's involvement with the frag grenades. He'd turned off his cell phone and left strict instructions with Phyllis to hold all of his calls. He needed to concentrate.

But here was the phone, buzzing at him. Hence the glare.

He put his pen down and reached for the receiver. "This must be an emergency," he said in a mild tone. "Is the building on fire?"

"No, sir. But Lieutenant Glitsky said I should disturb you. Apparently somebody tried to kill Evan Scholler at the prison this morning. Lieutenant Glitsky is holding now. Shall I put him through?"

"That would be a good thing, Phyllis. Please." He heard the click of connection. "Is Evan all right?"

"He's alive, though he's cut pretty bad. He was lucky. The shiv hit a rib or he'd be room temperature by now."

"So he's going to live?"

"No promises, but good chance, evidently."

"So what happened, Abe? He get in a fight?"

"Well, finding out what really happened is always a little iffy there, but by first reports, it's starting to look like he was a target of some kind. The guy who went for him was a Salvadoran gangbanger out of L.A. named Rafael Calderon. Nobody had ever seen these two guys together before this morning."

"So you're saying somebody ordered this?"

"I'm not saying anything. I'm telling you what I've heard so far. And I've heard that your man Evan had been an ideal inmate. No word about any enemies, or what he might have done to make them."

"So the order came from outside?"

"Don't know. It could have been something personal we don't know about. I'd hesitate to conjecture. But maybe you've got something you want to tell me?"

Hardy, recalling his research the previous night, couldn't keep the thought from jumping to the front of his mind-Allstrong Security was developing a presence in El Salvador. Beyond his net surfing last night, he'd read several lengthy magazine articles and even pieces of a couple of books delineating the relationships between U.S. mercenaries and the Salvadoran gang networks in that country, and took it as gospel that the connections between them ran deep. He took a minute to get Glitsky up to speed, then asked, "Did they question Calderon?"

"Calderon wasn't as lucky as Scholler."

"Are you telling me he's dead?"

"That's right."

"Did Scholler kill him?"

"No. Scholler was on the ground, bleeding. When the guards heard the screaming and yelling from the assault and got there, they got Calderon surrounded and he went more or less insane. He still had his shiv on him and he charged them. They reacted with what, after the hearing, I'm sure will be called appropriate force in self-defense."

Hardy realized that he was gripping the phone so tightly that his knuckles were white. He knew that if Calderon had taken the job of assassinating Scholler in prison and either botched it or got caught afterward, both of which had happened in this case, he could expect to be killed by his handler or by another gang-connected inmate before he could be questioned and give anything away. And he knew that whoever had put out the contract would just as easily put out another one.

After the phone call, Hardy couldn't get his mind back on the draft of his brief. He decided to walk down to the Hall of Justice to clear his mind. The fine weather continued, and if Glitsky had already gone to lunch, Hardy could walk down a couple of blocks and catch a meal at any one of a number of the good new joints in SoMa, South of Market. But Abe was in, at his desk drinking a bottled water and eating a rice cake. Glitsky opened his desk drawer, pulled out a handful of peanuts in the shell, and slid them across his desk.

Hardy cracked a shell. "This is Allstrong again, Abe."

"Calderon? It might be at that."

"It is, absolutely."

Glitsky shook his head. "Don't get me wrong. I want it to be with all my heart, but I don't have enough, Diz. If makes you feel any better, I think it's possible, and I didn't think that a few days ago. I'm waiting for Darrel before I jump to any conclusions."

"I made that jump when I heard about the stabbing. There is no other conclusion."

"Not to be disagreeable, but don't kid yourself. You were all over this at least yesterday, maybe before."

Hardy chewed reflectively. "You want to hear how it works? Why it's Allstrong?"

"Sure, but the short version, please."

"Okay, six weeks ago Hanna gets killed. Allstrong's now had to kill two people involved in the Scholler appeal. He thinks it's probably all done as far as getting rid of evidence is concerned, but he knows that as long as Evan Scholler's in prison, there's going to be this appeal coming up again and its attendant risks, meaning people like Bowen or me coming around asking him provocative questions. Maybe there's even more evidence someplace that he was actively involved in a domestic homicide."

"Let's hope," Glitsky said.

Hardy nodded. "So Allstrong gets another idea."

"Kill Scholler."

"You're reading my mind." Another peanut. "Scholler dies, the appeal is over. Cuts it off at the source. But of course, the problem is that Scholler's in prison. Not untouchable, but more complicated, through El Salvador and backup through one of the L.A. gangs." Hardy held up his hands in a voilà gesture. "There's your six weeks between Hanna and now."

"Brilliant." Glitsky ate another peanut. "You've got it all figured out."

"I've got Bowen figured out too. They dumped him out in the ocean."

This brought Glitsky forward in his chair. "How do you know that?"

"I dreamed it," Hardy said, grinning. "But it's what happened, Abe. You're going to find his DNA in one of their airplanes, I promise."

"Just as soon as I get to look in one of them." Sitting back, Glitsky folded his hands on his lap. "I want to believe you, Diz, I really do. I'll jump on all of this with both feet as soon as I can go to a judge to give me a warrant. Or I get any other reason to send Bracco to talk to the guy. But until I do…" He shrugged. "I'm waiting on Bracco. He finds something or he doesn't. Usually, if something's there, he does."

"Yeah, but meanwhile, my client's still a target."

Glitsky glanced at the wall clock. "Diz. I think that's a reach. I really do. Or, at worst, by your own math, the next attack is six weeks away."

Glitsky was half joking, but the next attack felt far closer than six weeks away to Hardy.

Back in his office, galvanized, he told Phyllis to hold his calls again and spent the next two hours working on his brief. One thing he could do, as a lawyer, was actually file his appeal and get things shaking. He, too, had been waiting for Bracco to come up with actual evidence that either of the Bowens had called Allstrong, but there was another, and much more direct, way to go about getting this information. He could pick up the phone and ask.

It wasn't Glitsky's way, and Hardy, in his enthusiasm to simply figure out what had happened, had gotten hung up with that process. But Glitsky was trying to solve two homicides in his jurisdiction and bring a killer to justice. Hardy, on the other hand, had only one job. He was working to free his client.

It was a crucial difference, and it now had gained added urgency with the prison assault on Evan this morning. Hardy had been hoping that once the police could somehow prove an Allstrong/Bowen connection, it would strengthen the argument in his appeal. But he really didn't need that to file-the FBI and the Khalils might eventually lead to Allstrong and Nolan, but the issue was whether or not those initial interrogations should have been part of the prosecution's discovery, and on this point there was little doubt.

Easy though it might be to make an actual phone call to Allstrong, there was another component to the equation that Hardy could ignore only at his peril. These guys had proven themselves seriously proactive about people who threatened their business interests. If Hardy's theories were correct, and he was by now all but certain that they were, they had killed both the Bowens and made an attempt on the life of Evan. And all of this without leaving behind a shred of evidence that would tie them to these crimes.

Hardy realized that as soon as he made that one simple phone call, the threat level in his own life was going to go up in a hurry. He would be putting himself exactly where Charlie Bowen had gone before he disappeared forever.

But he needed the information. He had to know for sure; he couldn't file his appeal until he knew.

Reward; risk.

Hardy had written the Allstrong office number down in his notes as a matter of course while he was doing his research last night. Returning from word processing where he'd dropped his draft marked URGENT, he closed his office door, went behind his desk, sat down, took out his notes, and pulled the phone over in front of him, punching the numbers with a steeled deliberation.

38

"Jack Allstrong, please."

"I'll see if he's in. Can I tell him who's calling?"

"I don't know. How can you tell him who's calling if he's not in?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said you'd see if Mr. Allstrong was in. But if you were going to tell him who was calling, then you must know he is in. Isn't that right?"

Hardy hated to launch this logic assault on the poor receptionist, but with the attack on Evan, he believed he was running out of time. "Please tell Mr. Allstrong that my name is Dismas Hardy and that it's extremely important that I speak with him as soon as possible." He spelled his name out for her. "I'm an attorney working on the appeal in the Evan Scholler matter, with which I'm sure he's familiar. Please also tell him that I'm continuing the work begun last summer by a lawyer named Charlie Bowen. If he's busy, tell him I'll be happy to wait here on the line for as long as it takes."

As it turned out, it took less than a minute. A voice with an undefinably Southern accent and devoid of nervousness, anger, or fear came through the wire. "This is Jack Allstrong."

"Mr. Allstrong, my name is Dismas Hardy and-"

A big, booming laugh. "Yeah, I already know that. You made quite a first impression on our Marilou, I must say. And normally she is some kind of a tough nut to crack. She says you're working with Lieutenant Scholler?"

"Evan. Yes, sir."

"Evan, right. I always think of him as Lieutenant. That's what he was when he worked with us." He paused. "God, that whole quagmire with him and Ron Nolan just turned into a hell of a thing, didn't it? The messes people get themselves into. And two better young men you couldn't have imagined. But I don't suppose you ever had a chance to meet Ron?"

"No, I didn't."

"That's a shame. He was a fine man, a fine soldier, a loyal employee. What happened to him was just nothin' less than a goddamned tragedy, Mr. Hardy, I'll be honest with you. And I know it was because of the lieutenant's head wound to some extent, so I don't blame him the way I might otherwise. War, and this one's no exception, it can do horrible things to people. Anybody's been in one knows that for a fact. You a veteran, Mr. Hardy?"

"Yes, sir. Vietnam."

"Well, then, you know what I'm talking about. But at least this war, the soldiers themselves, the men on the ground, they're getting some respect. And about goddamn time, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, I would," Hardy said. "But I'm calling because I'm about to file an appeal to see if I can get Mr. Scholler out of prison and-"

"Wait!" Allstrong's voice hardened up. "Now, wait just a second here. You say you're trying to get the lieutenant out of prison? I thought nobody doubted that he had killed Ron."

"Well, the jury thought it was beyond reasonable doubt, which is not-"

"Now, hold on. We don't need to be splitting hairs here, Mr. Hardy. I think I've made it clear that until he was injured and even after that, Lieutenant Scholler had my complete respect. He was a good soldier, a natural leader, good to his men. But I don't think I'm comfortable with the idea that the man who killed one of my first employees, and a damn good friend, is going to be out walking the streets again, a free man. And I certainly don't think I'm inclined to help with this appeal of yours."

"Sir, I don't believe Evan Scholler did kill Ron Nolan."

"Well, that's a good one. You might be in the minority with that opinion. I haven't talked to anybody else who thinks that."

"Not even Charlie Bowen?"

Allstrong didn't hesitate for an instant. "Not him either."

"So you talked to him?"

"Couple of times, at least. Last summer sometime, was it? I don't know. Whatever happened to him anyway? One day he's here asking me all kinds of questions, I'm thinking he's moving forward on this appeal like you are, and next thing you know he's gone."

"That's what happened," Hardy said. "He disappeared."

"Just like that?"

"Apparently." Hardy found his temper starting to flare, and decided it was time to push on Allstrong, see if he could get a bit of a rise. "Did you know Charlie Bowen's wife?"

"I don't believe so."

"She never called you there?"

"She might have called here, although I don't know why she would have. But if she did, she never talked to me. Why do you think I would know anything about her?"

Hardy laid out his conjecture as factual truth. "She was working on some of the files Charlie was working on when he disappeared. Then, I don't know if you've heard, but six weeks ago, she committed suicide."

For the first time, Allstrong hesitated, then made a little kissing noise. "Well, I'm sorry to hear that, of course. Over Charlie walking out on her?"

"That's the general assumption, I presume. Although there are other theories."

"About why she killed herself?"

"Not just why, but whether. There's some evidence that she might have been killed by someone who wanted to make it look like a suicide."

"Why would anyone do that? Want to kill her, I mean?"

"Maybe because she'd found out something to do with her husband's death. And in that case, maybe Charlie Bowen wasn't a simple disappearance either. Maybe he was murdered too."

"That's a lot of maybes."

"Yes, it is. And here's another one. Maybe Charlie's work on this appeal is what convinced somebody they needed to kill him."

"Who would that be?"

"Whoever actually did kill Ron Nolan."

"Ahh." Allstrong mustered up a kind of chortle. "And this is what brings us around to where you don't think it was Scholler who killed him."

"That's right. These are my theories about the Bowens, both of them. I think they were both murdered, and I think the person behind those murders also tried to have Evan Scholler killed this morning at Corcoran Prison. But that one didn't work." Hardy didn't know if Allstrong had already received this news from his sources within the prison, and he thought it wouldn't hurt to hear it now from him.

And while there was no sign that this information registered as anything but another unimportant detail about Hardy's case, by degrees the superficial warmth was leeching out of both men's tones. When Allstrong spoke next, his easy Southern geniality was entirely missing. "Well, all of this is interesting, I'm sure, but it really doesn't have shit-all to do with me. And I'm afraid, as I told you, I'm not going to be too disposed to help you get Ron Nolan's killer out of prison. So if there's anything else specific I can help you with, let's hear it. Otherwise, I got a business I'm trying to run here."

"I appreciate that," Hardy said. "I thought you'd be interested in finding Ron Nolan's killer in any event, though. Whether or not it was Evan Scholler, you'd want to know who really did it, I presume. And whatever you can tell me now might help me get to the truth. I'm basing my appeal on stuff I think the FBI discovered that they didn't reveal to Evan's prosecutors at the time of the trial. I assume you're familiar with fragmentation grenades?"

"Sure."

"Well, then you may know that Nolan, who was in your employ at the time, had several of these in his home."

"I understood that Scholler put them there to frame Ron."

"No, sir." Hardy easily came out with the next untruth. "Since the trial, that's been pretty much discredited. The FBI concluded there was no way Evan could have gotten these things back home, whereas Nolan could have just packed them in his duffel."

"And why would he do that?"

"Because he liked them to cover his tracks after he assassinated people."

Allstrong laughed out loud, although through the phone Hardy picked up as much nerves as humor in it this time. When he got his breath, he said, "That accusation is really beneath contempt, Mr. Hardy. Ron was my recruiter out here. He didn't assassinate people."

"Yes, he did. The FBI has made that clear enough to the Khalil family, who were among his victims. That's the evidence I'm trying to get in front of the court this time around. If Nolan was killing people on contract, then revenge becomes a motive for his own death, and that might give Evan an out."

Allstrong came out with the question Hardy had been leading him toward. "You say Nolan was killing people on contract? That's absurd."

"The FBI doesn't think so."

"So who was paying him?"

"Well, the FBI makes the case to the Khalils that it was one of your former clients in Iraq, a man named Kuvan Krekar."

"Kuvan is dead. He's been dead now a couple of years."

"I know that. He was killed by the Khalils over in Iraq, but I don't think Kuvan was paying Nolan anyway. For what it's worth, a couple of inspectors with San Francisco's homicide department think the same thing I do, and they won't be giving up on their investigation anytime soon. They think that whoever paid Nolan to kill the Khalils also had a hand in the deaths of Charlie and Hanna Bowen. You got any idea who that might be?"

"None at all."

"That's funny, because all of us have the idea that it's someone in your company, Jack. Allstrong Security."

After a long pause, Allstrong said, "If that ridiculous accusation ever sees the light of day, Mr. Hardy, I hope you're prepared to spend the rest of your life defending the lawsuit I'll bring against you."

"I'm glad I did it," Hardy said. "I had to shake something up. It was kind of fun."

Frannie sat next to him at the bar of the Little Shamrock. Her brother, Moses McGuire, was standing across from them both behind the bar. "It was kind of fun," Frannie said to Moses, mimicking Hardy's voice with heavy irony. "I think it's kind of fun to threaten a man who's already killed at least two people and tried for three trying to keep this information from getting out. I think it's kind of fun that he can put me on his kill list next so me and my family can live in fear of being murdered every day from now on. I really think that's kind of fun." Frannie's color was high, her eyes shining with anger.

Hardy put a hand over his wife's. "That's not going to happen, Frannie. And you know why? Moses knows why, don't you, Mose?"

McGuire sipped his soda and lime. "Because you told Allstrong the cops were on it too. Killing you the way he'd done the Bowens wouldn't get him anything. But"-he held up a finger-"here's the tiny flaw my smart little sister has picked up on in your strategy, Diz. If this guy is juiced enough that he can pull strings inside the FBI, and apparently he is, what on God's good earth makes you think that he can't get around Abe Glitsky and Darrel Bracco?" He turned to Frannie. "Did I express that succinctly enough, you think?"

She bobbed her head once, still furious. "Perfectly," she said.

"Guys, come on," Hardy said. "He's not going to kill two cops, for Christ's sake. And who knows who else is in on the investigation. That's just not going to happen."

"He doesn't have to kill them," Frannie replied. "But what about if he has them ordered off from on high? Where does that leave you then?"

"Me, me, Monty, call on me." Moses wasn't smiling, either, though. He leaned over into his brother-in-law's face. "That leaves you hanging out there alone in the breeze, Diz."

"Okay, but if that unlikely event happens, which I doubt-"

"Then you'll have an accident, like Charlie Bowen did," Frannie said.

"No, Abe would never rest if-"

Frannie slammed her palm down on the bar. "You'd already be dead, you idiot!"

In the silence that descended, Hardy put his hand gently over Frannie's again. "Well," he said, "then I'd better get this whole thing done fast, shouldn't I?"

Hardy could be glib all he wanted, but in fact Frannie and Moses weren't all wrong, or even mostly wrong. He knew that he'd possibly put himself in an elevated state of jeopardy and could live with that-he also thought he'd mitigated the problem dramatically by telling Allstrong that the police were already involved in this same investigation.

But the more he lived with it, the more he found himself worrying. He hadn't adequately considered that his phone call to Allstrong might also have put Frannie in danger. That had not been his intention, though it might very well be the result.

So Date Night, even at their old favorite restaurant Yet Wah, ended early. Frannie, still very upset over Hardy's call to Allstrong, went straight up to bed. Hardy went to his chair in the living room and punched up Darrel Bracco's number on his cell phone. The inspector picked up and Hardy told him his story-putting a press on Jack Allstrong in person-to a considerably more enthusiastic response than Frannie had given him. When he finished, Bracco said, "So we know both the Bowens were talking to Allstrong. I got that from the phone records too. But so what?"

"So what is what else this tells us."

"What's that?"

"This is close to him, personally. It's not just some corporate thing."

"How do you know that?"

"Mostly," Hardy said, "because he came to the phone to talk to me when there was no reason he needed to. He's got two hundred people under him down there. I guarantee he's got several levels of bureaucracy between him and the front desk. But I call him up out of thin air and mention Evan Scholler and the Bowens and he came right away. He wanted to know what I knew, to see how exposed he was. And I'm confident that I made it pretty clear."

"Why did you want to do that?" Bracco asked. "Warn him we're coming."

"My wife had the same question," Hardy said. "But maybe rattling his cage gets him to do something stupid."

"Something stupid to do with you, maybe."

"Maybe, but unlikely. I made it clear to Allstrong that now it's not just one lone attorney, and then several months later, his wife, also acting alone. The police are part of it now. If any of us disappears or has an accident, the heat only goes up on him. So he's got to figure another way out, make this investigation go away, and I'm trying to make it easy for him."

"He's not going to confess to ordering a domestic murder. Or anything to do with the Bowens."

"True. But I don't need that. I just need to get my client off. As far as he's concerned, that's going to be all I want."

"I want these murders," Bracco said.

"Of course you do," Hardy replied. "And you should. But you'll admit that building any kind of winnable case on the evidence we see so far after all this time is pretty long odds. Meanwhile, Allstrong knows this whole thing is driven by Evan Scholler. That's what was behind the attack this morning in prison. He already believes that if Scholler goes away, all his problems go away."

"I'm not going to go away," Bracco said.

"You won't have any choice if he's left you no evidence to work with. I got the feeling this guy's built his business by getting around local authorities everywhere he sets up shop. Now he's got political clout and the veneer of respectability. We're not going to take him head-on."

"So you've got a better idea?" Bracco asked.

"As a matter of fact," Hardy said, "I think I do."

As he tiptoed into his bedroom at a little after eleven o'clock, Frannie switched on the light next to the bed.

"Hey," Hardy said.

"Hey." She patted the bed next to her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was worried. I'm still worried, but I don't want to fight about it."

He crossed over to her and sat down, put a hand on her shoulder. "I don't either."

After a minute, she let out a long breath. "So how'd it go?"

"I think I've got Darrel talked into it. He really wants this guy. As do I."

"What about Abe?"

"I didn't get around to talking to Abe. He might have reservations I'd rather not entertain at this point in time."

Frannie closed her eyes and sighed again. "It's really that important?"

"Charlie Bowen told his wife it was the most important thing he'd ever worked on. It was his biggest chance to do some real good in the world."

"In the world, huh?"

"The big old world, yeah." He kept rubbing her back. "I didn't pick this fight, Frannie. It just came and fell in my lap. And now it turns out that this guy's just the smiling face of evil in this world, and what makes it worse is he cloaks it all in patriotism and loyalty while he deals away lives so he can make another buck. It makes me puke."

"And it's all up to you? It's got to be you, Dismas Hardy?"

"I think I've got the cards," Hardy said. "I can beat him and take him down."

"And what about the people protecting him politically?"

"Well, with any luck, them too. But Allstrong's enough for my purposes. I'm just trying to do the right thing here, Frannie, mostly for my client."

"I'm not sure I believe you, babe. I think you want to save the world."

"But if I did that," Hardy said, "I'd need personal theme music."

39

Hardy didn't sleep as well as he would have liked. He woke up for the first time at two-sixteen to the sound of squealing tires out on the street below his bedroom. Wide awake, he went downstairs to check that the house was locked up front and back, which it was.

Behind the kitchen, he turned on the light and went to his safe under his workbench, opened it, and brought out his own weapon, a Smith & Wesson M &P.40. He hesitated for a moment, then picked it up and slammed a full magazine into the grip, racked a round into the chamber, and took off the safety. Then, quietly and methodically, he went through the downstairs, checking the kids' rooms, the family room, back up through the dining and living rooms. Nobody there.

Back upstairs in his bedroom, the gun's safety on, he put it in the drawer next to his bed and lay down again.

The sound of a Dumpster slamming shut, or a garbage can being dropped-something loud and clanging-woke him up at four thirty-eight. He grabbed the gun again and made another tour of the house, with the same result.

Up for the day, he realized, he put on a pot of coffee and went out to get the newspaper, but stopped at the front door first and looked down the street in both directions. Only after satisfying himself that it was clear did he go outside and grab the paper.

This was not turning out to be the way he had planned it.

About five minutes before Frannie's alarm was going to go off, he went upstairs again and laid a hand on her shoulder, gently waking her up.

"Is everything all right?" she asked him.

"So far everything's fine. But sometime in the middle of last night, my subconscious must have decided that you were right. I've been awake half the night worrying. I shouldn't have put us in this situation. I'm sorry."

She reached out and took his hand. "Apology accepted. So what do you want to do?"

"I don't think it would be the worst idea in the world to check into a hotel for a couple of days. Treat it like a vacation."

She sat up, letting go of his hand. "Did something else happen last night that I didn't hear about?"

"No. I've just had time to think about these guys some more. Until it's clear to Allstrong that Glitsky and Bracco are really in on this investigation with me, which I hope ought to be by today or tomorrow, it's like Moses said-we're hanging out there all alone in the breeze."

Frannie shuddered. "I think I liked it better when you were pretending there was nothing to worry about."

"Me too. But I don't think that's the smart move right now. I think we'd be wise to lie a little low."

Sitting with the idea for another moment, Frannie finally sighed. "A couple of days?"

"Probably no more than that."

"Probably." She shook her head. "Do you have any idea how much I wish you hadn't called him?"

"Pretty much, yeah. If it's any consolation, I didn't feel like I had much of a choice."

"Right," she said. "That makes me feel much better."

Allstrong would also know that Hardy went into his office every day, but Hardy had convinced himself that he could minimize his risk on that score by pulling directly into his parking place in the gated and locked parking garage underneath the building and taking the inside elevator up to his office. Once he was inside, he had a reasonable faith in his firm's security system.

As he pulled in about to park, though, he noticed a brown paper lunch bag lying against the wall just in front of his space. For a minute, the sight of the thing froze him. It was just the kind of harmless-looking item, he imagined, that might in actuality be an improvised explosive device. Turning on his lights, he illuminated the bag, which looked to be nothing more than what it was.

Setting the brake, Hardy opened his door and walked over to the bag, touching it gingerly with his foot, then leaning over to pick it up. It weighed almost nothing, and contained only a few napkins, an apple core, and a couple of Baggies.

Forcing a small nonlaugh at his paranoia, Hardy got back in to his car and parked, then crossed to the elevator and pushed the button to call it down.

In his office, Hardy went over the final draft of his appeal, which explicitly laid out his argument on the Brady violation in such a way as to maximize Allstrong's connection to Nolan and to the Khalils. He attached a declaration from Wyatt Hunt detailing the conversation Hunt had had with Abdel Khalil. Included in the narrative was Tara Wheatley's information about the cash Nolan had brought back from Iraq, buttressing the idea that perhaps he'd been paid to carry out a contract on the Khalils. Of course, the FBI's interrogation of Abdel Khalil, which the agency had not seen fit to share with the prosecution team, was at the crux of his discussion.

In toto, Hardy believed that the appeal raised enough questions about important evidence that had not been admitted in the trial that he thought he'd at least get a hearing out of it. And possibly, if things worked out with Allstrong between now and then, a new trial for Evan.

Satisfied with his work, he sent one of his paralegals down to the court of appeals to file the brief, and then sent registered copies of it, as required, to Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille down in Redwood City, and also-although there was no mandate he do so-overnight to Allstrong Security marked "personal and confidential" for Jack Allstrong. He wanted Allstrong to know what he was doing, when he was doing it, and how it was likely to affect him if he didn't step in and do something to stop it.

Next, calling the prison, Hardy learned that Evan was still in the infirmary and that his condition had stabilized. There was some chance that he would be able to have visitors, perhaps as soon as the next day.

Hardy's cell phone went off-Bracco calling him. "It worked," he said. "I used the old 'Surely you'd want to cooperate in a murder investigation' and he opened up some time for me and I'm on the way down there right now."

"Have fun," Hardy said, "but be careful."

"Right." Bracco barked out a short, nervous laugh. "I'm all over it."

ALLSTRONG AND HIS ATTORNEY, who introduced himself as Ryan Loy, led Bracco back through a maze of hallways into a beautifully designed medium-sized oval conference room containing an apparently custom-made table with twelve matching chairs around it. An enormous spray of fresh flowers claimed the center of the table; at the counter under the tinted windows, someone had set up a full coffee service with pastries and fruit. When Bracco sat down at last with his coffee and Danish, he had a view of the entire South Bay as it shimmered in the sunshine.

Jack Allstrong had played the gracious host in his garrulous style as they moved back through the building, pointing with pride to the headquarters of the other divisions that now made up much of the company's work-computer security, water safety, privatization, logistics consulting, aquaculture. Loy, bookish and reserved in his suit and bow tie, nevertheless came across as another truly nice guy. Everyone they passed in the hallways was well-scrubbed, nicely dressed, young.

Loy closed the door to the conference room behind them and went around the table to Bracco's left while Allstrong sat two chairs over from him on the right. Bracco took out his pocket tape recorder and without comment placed it prominently on the table out in front of everyone.

"Excuse me, Inspector"-Loy had stopped in the middle of raising his cup-"but I understood this was to be an informal discussion and not a formal interrogation."

"Either way," Bracco said with a matter-of-fact tone, "I'm going to need a record of it. I understood that you wanted to cooperate. Mr. Allstrong doesn't have to answer any question he doesn't want to. You both understand that, right?"

Loy looked at Allstrong, who nodded.

Bracco picked up the tape recorder and spoke into it. "This is homicide Inspector Sergeant Darrel Bracco, Badge Number 3117, conjoined case numbers 06-335411 and 07-121598, talking with Jack Allstrong, forty-one, and his attorney, Ryan Loy, thirty-six. It's eleven forty-five on Wednesday morning, May ninth, and we are at the offices of Allstrong Security in San Francisco. Mr. Allstrong, did you know an attorney named Charles Bowen?"

"Yes."

"How well did you know him?"

"Not well at all. I met him two or three times here in these offices to talk about an appeal he was working on."

"Evan Scholler."

"Yes."

"How did you figure in that case, that Mr. Bowen wanted to talk to you?"

"One of my past employees, Ron Nolan, was the victim. Scholler was eventually convicted of killing him."

"Do you know the grounds that Mr. Bowen planned to base his appeal on?"

"No idea."

"But he talked to you two or three times?"

"Yes. Is that a problem?"

Bracco shrugged. "Was he talking to you about the same things each time you talked to him?"

"Yes."

"And what specifically was the subject of those conversations?"

"I think he may have been trying to connect Nolan in some way to another couple who had been murdered a few days before Nolan himself was killed. I have the memory that he was trying to implicate Nolan in those murders somehow, which was ridiculous, and I told him so."

"Do you remember specifically any questions that he asked?"

"No. I couldn't really give him answers to the questions. This was a long time ago, and it didn't seem very important."

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"I don't know. Sometime last summer."

"And when was the last time you spoke to him on the phone?"

"I don't remember."

"Do you know that Mr. Bowen disappeared last summer?"

"Yes, I believe I did hear something about that just recently. Certainly I stopped hearing from him."

"Were you aware that his records indicate that he called you on the morning that he disappeared?"

Loy decided he had heard enough. Holding up a palm, he said, "Just a minute, Jack. What's your point here, Inspector?"

"Mr. Allstrong was apparently contacted by Mr. Bowen on the day he disappeared. I was wondering if he remembers any of the substance of that last phone call."

Allstrong reached out his own hand. "That's all right, Ryan." Then, to Bracco, "I don't remember any last phone call at all. I didn't know until just now that this last phone call was on the day he was supposed to have disappeared. As far as I know, Mr. Bowen might have just called the office on a routine housekeeping matter. I wouldn't know that. In any event, I don't remember talking to him. And while we're on this, Inspector, why didn't anybody ask these questions last summer when they might have been a little fresher in my mind?"

"The Bowen case has been reopened as a possible homicide, and we're going into more detail than when it was a missing person."

Loy sat up straighter, as if prodded. "If Mr. Allstrong is a suspect in a homicide, Inspector, I'm going to advise him to stop talking to you right now."

"Mr. Allstrong can stop speaking to me anytime he wants. And I never said he was a suspect. But he does appear to be someone who might have had contact with Mr. Bowen on the day he disappeared." Bracco talked straight at Allstrong. "But this leads to my next question, about Mr. Bowen's wife. Did you ever meet her or speak to her on the phone?"

"No."

"Are you quite certain?"

"Yes."

"Well, it appears she made a number of phone calls to your number. Do you have any explanation for that?"

"Again," Loy said, "he already told you he doesn't remember speaking to her. Mr. Allstrong gets a hundred calls a day, Inspector. He doesn't have time to speak to most of those people."

"Mr. Loy. Your client indicated he wanted to cooperate in this investigation. I have a number of questions I want to ask him." Bracco nodded. "He doesn't have to answer any questions, but what I need are his answers and not your suggestions as to what might or might not have happened. So again, Mr. Allstrong, do you have any explanation for phone calls that Mrs. Bowen made to your phone?"

"Well, of course, Mr. Loy is right. I get lots of phone calls."

"I can appreciate that. But the last call Hanna Bowen made in her life was to here. And it was the day before her death. I think you can understand why we are curious about two people who call Allstrong Security, one of whom disappears and the other dies immediately after the contact. It does appear an unlikely coincidence." It also wasn't true, but Loy and Allstrong didn't have to know that. Hardy's plan was simply to have Bracco show up and make it clear that the cops, too, were now part of the picture.

"Well, okay," Loy said. "You've asked your questions. Mr. Allstrong has told you what he knows. If you don't have anything further, I think it's time to end the interview."

But Bracco ignored Loy again. "Mr. Allstrong," he said, "if you didn't receive these calls, to whom in your company might Mrs. Bowen have spoken?"

Allstrong shrugged. "I could ask Marilou, our receptionist. She's the first line of defense. If Mrs. Bowen was hysterical or nonspecific about what she wanted or who she wanted to talk to, her calls would have stopped at the front desk. But as Ryan here says, we can always ask and make sure."

Bracco finally reached for his coffee and took a sip. It had gone tepid and he made a face.

"Is something wrong, Inspector?" Allstrong asked.

Bracco reached over and turned off his tape recorder. He decided he'd give the shit one last stir. "This doesn't seem to be going anywhere, gentlemen. I came here under the impression that you'd like to cooperate in these homicide investigations, but I'm not picking up much of a spirit of cooperation. In fact, frankly, you both seem pretty darn defensive for people who've got nothing to hide."

"That's ridiculous," Loy said. "We've answered every question you've asked. The plain fact is that Mr. Allstrong doesn't know anything about the Bowens other than what he's told you. He runs a huge corporation with branches all over the world. He doesn't have time to get involved in these small parochial matters. Look, Inspector, we're sorry Mr. Bowen disappeared, and about whatever happened to his wife. But to imply that there's any real connection between Allstrong Security and these events is just an absurd flight of fancy."

"Amen to that," Allstrong intoned.

"Well, then"-Bracco pushed his chair back-"thank you for your time."

AT THREE-FIFTEEN, Glitsky was standing in front of a video monitor in the tiny electronics room between the two similarly minuscule interrogation rooms that fed off a narrow hallway that, in turn, was separated from the homicide detail by a glass wall. "I give up," he said to Debra Schiff, "what is it?"

"That, sir, is the top of your head."

Glitsky looked again. He wore his graying hair short and close to his skull. Leaning over, he squinted into the seven-inch monitor. "Could be," he said. "I couldn't prove it isn't."

"You see any identifiable part of your face?"

"No." He turned to her. "This is all the camera got in there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Lord." Glitsky walked out of the electronics room, took one step to his left, and reentered the interrogation room he'd left a minute before.

The room was four feet by five feet, so it was really more like a closet. It had no windows. Suspects in homicide investigations were often brought in for questioning and placed in these rooms, where they could be left alone and theoretically observed as they fidgeted or talked to themselves or otherwise did things that might be both incriminating and admissible in court. The problem was that the camera that was supposed to record all of this activity was cleverly hidden within the ceiling and the room was so small that the only image captured on tape, ever, was the top of the head of the suspect. As Schiff had just demonstrated to Glitsky.

"It's hopeless," Schiff told him. "We can't do business like this. We need a new room."

"I thought this was the new room." Glitsky was right. The entire homicide department had transferred to the fifth floor from the fourth only a little over a year before. Newly designed and supposedly state of the art. "But you're right, it's a little small too. Who approved the plans for this thing?"

"Well, nobody, which is kind of the problem. There's a couple of guys in robbery who moonlight doing construction here in the building."

"We didn't bid this out?"

Schiff laughed. "Are you kidding me? We have employees that do the maintenance in the building. We try to bid this out, the union's going to have a fit. We'd be taking their jobs."

"Well, then, why didn't we have the people in maintenance do it?"

"Because they said there's a three-year backlog on maintenance, and they'd need to charge us seventy-five thousand dollars from our budget. So we got the two guys from robbery to do it."

"Perfect," Glitsky said. "So where do you propose we put it, this new room?"

"I don't know, Abe. Anyplace else. Maybe out where the lockers are. Or take part of the computer room, which is way too big anyway. But this thing is just crazy."

"I agree with you." He tried a small joke. "I'll try to bring it up to somebody in facilities."

Schiff didn't laugh. "Sooner would be better, Abe."

"I hear you, Debra, I'll see what I can do. Really." But even as he was finishing up with this unwelcome bit of housekeeping, Glitsky saw that one of the clerks from reception was hustling his way. "Yo, Jerry," he said. "What up?"

"I've got Bureau Chief Bill Schuyler with the FBI holding for you, sir. He says it's important."

The doorbell rang in Hardy's hotel room. They'd gotten a small suite at the Rex, not far from Hardy's office, and Hardy had checked in at a little before five o'clock.

He crossed to the door and, taking no chances, looked through the peephole. Glitsky frowned at nothing in the dusky light. When Hardy opened the door, the lieutenant focused the dark look on him. "When Phyllis told me you were here, I thought maybe she was kidding me."

"Yeah, she's a great kidder, that Phyllis."

Glitsky threw a quick look around. "Obviously, you think this is necessary."

"Precautionary, that's all."

Glitsky nodded, his expression set and hard. "In any event, we've got to talk."

"And, lo, as if by magic, here we are talking right now."

Abe tightened his lips enough that his scar stood out in relief. "Would you like to know the result of your ill-advised encouragement to Darrel Bracco that he go down and have a chat with the Allstrong people?"

Hardy's face grew sober. "Is he all right?"

"Physically, he's fine." Glitsky pushed on the door and Hardy stepped back to let him in, then followed him into the sitting room. Grabbing the chair behind the desk, Glitsky spun it around and straddled it. "But he's slightly ticked off at you. As am I, I might add."

"And why is that?" Hardy sat down on the love seat.

"Because he was starting to get a feeling about this Bowen case, or cases. That he could crack them if he just had some time. And now that's not going to happen, ever."

"Why not?"

"Because I got a call this afternoon from Bill Schuyler. You remember Bill Schuyler? He's the FBI bureau chief who couldn't find the agents who'd testified in the Scholler trial."

Hardy's eyes lit up, although he tried to keep any sign of enthusiasm out of his face. "Tell me the FBI's taken over the cases."

"Lock, stock, and barrel."

"Citing national security issues?"

"Citing they're gonna do it and we can't stop them. I think the actual line was 'I don't got to show you no stinkin' badges.' But even Schuyler went so far as to say that he didn't really like it, but the order came from high up and there was nothing he could do about it. You know what a huge concession that was from him?"

"I can imagine."

"I bet you can. So you know how me and Darrel have spent the last three hours? Packing up all our files on either of the Bowens and delivering them over to the Federal Building. These are two now very probable homicides in my jurisdiction, Diz, and now I'm off them for no reason that I can understand."

"Which accounts for your less-than-stellar mood, not that you normally need anything specific. But that was faster than I would have thought." He held out a hand. "I'm not talking about the three hours. I'm talking about Allstrong getting someone to pull the FBI's strings. He's got to be seriously highly connected, which is what we figured, anyway."

"So you knew this was coming?"

Hardy nodded. "I hoped something like this would happen. This soon is a surprise, but that's not a bad thing either."

Glitsky's face remained hard. "Well, I'm glad you're so happy about it. Darrel and I are feeling just a little bit used and abused."

But Hardy shook his head. "I told Bracco last night, and I'll tell you now, you weren't going to get Allstrong on either of the Bowens. Never. Those cases are old, Abe, what evidence there might have once been is gone. And since these guys are stone pros, I'm guessing there wasn't much in the line of evidence anyway to begin with. So this FBI takeover, it's actually very good news."

"Yeah, I'm trying to keep my celebration pretty low-key. But just for the record, what's good about it?"

Hardy sat up straight. "All of a sudden the whole situation, which from Allstrong's perspective was under control and stagnant, is fluid again. It's a live issue. He's going to have to react and keep reacting if he wants to keep it where he can control it, which means he's going to have to deal with me."

"Like he dealt with Bowen?"

Hardy shook his head. "Not if I can help it, Abe, not this time. He's tried that approach and now it's come back to bite him. He's going to see that."

"I hope you're right, but even so, if the FBI is protecting him from prosecution, what difference can anything you do matter to him? Best case, you're a nuisance. He's never going down for murder if the Feebs won't let anybody build a case."

"Ah, but that's just it, you see? I don't want him for murder. I want his help to try to get my client out of prison. Then I'll just go away."

Glitsky's brow came down and hooded his eyes. "I hope I'm not hearing that all this has been about all this time is getting your damn client off."

Hardy's head snapped at Glitsky's rare use of a swear word. If he'd come to that, he was far angrier than Hardy had perceived. "Abe," he said quietly, "listen to me. Like it or not, my client's the only leverage we've all got. The Bowen murders pose no threat, they're ancient history. The attempt on Evan at San Quentin, same thing. That assailant's dead and it's never going to be anything more than a prison beef anyway. So what's the only other crime we know about that he's done here on U.S. soil? Putting out the hit on the Khalils, right? Which means Ron Nolan. And who's the only guy interested in connecting him to Nolan? Me. He's going to have to come to me."

"And then what?"

Hardy leaned forward in his chair. "Then I play him."

40

Evan came to the visiting room in a wheelchair. He was going to recover completely, he told Hardy, although he joked that he never wanted to hear those particular words again. Still, it was a good sign that he could make a joke about anything. The attack, he told Hardy, had been completely unexpected and, except for his rib, professionally executed as he walked into what he thought was the empty bathroom. As far as he remembered, there were no witnesses.

Hardy brought him a copy of the brief to look over, and they discussed some of the finer legal points that he didn't understand at first, but in the end he seemed satisfied that this was an approach that possibly had legs. Hardy also brought him up to date on the developments in the Bowen cases, the FBI takeover, and they talked about who the mysterious higher-up might be.

"We may never know," Hardy said. "Somebody who believes that it's more important for guys like Allstrong to build companies that grow and prosper than worry about if they exactly adhere to the letter of the law. So they need to kill a few people? Look at all the jobs they're providing, the infrastructure. Totally worth the price, right? Damn straight."

"I love the national security angle. Like if Allstrong goes under, what happens exactly?"

"At the very least, it hurts the war effort, all the good work Allstrong's doing over there. That's always a good one they pull out." Hardy had his grin on. "But I'm also guessing that the big guy, whoever he is, loses a decent portion of his discretionary cash income."

Evan drew a pained breath. "I don't like to think that's really happening." He looked around at the prison walls. "But then again, I don't like to think that any of this is really happening either."

The call came in at a little after one o'clock, just after Hardy arrived back at his office.

"Mr. Hardy. Jack Allstrong." He had his hearty good-guy voice back on. "This morning I received a copy of the appeal that you're filing in this Evan Scholler case. Mr. Loy says we can probably expect an application for a writ of habeas corpus to follow. He admires your work, Mr. Hardy, and advises me that there is a fair chance the court will at least order a hearing into your issue. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot in our last conversation, and I wondered if you might be free to come down to my headquarters office this afternoon."

Hardy didn't think it would hurt to play a little hard to get. "If you don't know anything about Mr. Nolan's connection to the Khalils, and last time you made it pretty clear that you didn't, I'm not sure we have much to talk about."

"Well, you seem fairly certain that Scholler didn't kill Ron Nolan, and if that's the case, there might be something we can do to help. I think it might be worthwhile to discuss it."

Hardy let him hang for a few more seconds. "I could give you a couple of hours this afternoon, but I really think this meeting should take place in my office."

Hardy sat at his desk with his legal pad in front him. He'd already written a few notes to remind him of things he needed to cover in his upcoming conversation. Feeling mostly embarrassed at himself for believing that he might actually have the need for it, he'd placed his gun in the top desk drawer on his left, in easy reach if in fact it came to that.

As Phyllis let Allstrong into the room, he pretended to be writing. Looking up-"Excuse me, a few more seconds"-he motioned to the straight-backed Queen Anne chair that he'd placed in front of his desk, indicating that Allstrong take it. While he did, placing his briefcase down next to the chair, Phyllis closed the door on her way out. Scrawling some more lines, Hardy finally put down his pen and pushed the pad to one side.

"It appears," Hardy said, "you've got a guardian angel someplace in Washington who's taken care of making the police investigation into the Bowens go away. But as long as Evan Scholler is alive and in prison, either me or someone like me is going to be digging into the connection between Allstrong, Ron Nolan, and the Khalils. Whoever tried to have Evan killed has missed his chance and, with him held in protective custody from now on, isn't likely to get another one. And as you've recently found out, appellate lawyers are interchangeable. And, trust me, Mr. Allstrong, anyone who reads my file and my notes, of which there are several copies, will start this inquiry right where I left off. Does that about sum up the situation?"

Allstrong, wearing alligator cowboy boots with his light green gabardine suit, sat back and crossed a leg, his facial features relaxed, nearly friendly. "It adequately elucidates your understanding, certainly," he said. "Although, as I said in our conversation the other day, any assumption you're making that I've committed any kind of crime at all is false. I'm sure that federal investigators will find no evidence implicating me or Allstrong Security in what's happened to either of the Bowens."

"I'm sure they won't," Hardy said.

"And likewise they'll find no evidence that I ordered Ron Nolan to kill anybody. That's not the way I do business." His pro forma pitch completed, he flashed a quick salesman's smile.

"Since you've arranged to have Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles assigned to the investigation," Hardy said, "I'd be surprised if they could find Allstrong in the phone book. But that's not the point. What I'm going to uncover is the evidence the FBI already gathered that connects Nolan and your company to whatever it was that happened in Iraq that got the Khalils murdered. And if, in getting to Nolan, your company gets mixed up in a very public scandal, that's just an added bonus."

Allstrong sat impassively. "What makes you think the FBI has evidence tying Allstrong to these killings?"

"The agents told the Khalil family. What the agents found, I can find."

"I understood that the agents further told them that the contract had come from Kuvan Krekar. Isn't that so?" Allstrong asked.

Hardy nodded. "That's my understanding too."

"Well, then?"

"Well then what?"

"Well, then, it's obvious where the contract originated, isn't it? With Kuvan, not with me, and not with Allstrong."

"That would be obvious except for one thing. Or rather, except for two people. The Bowens. The whole thing with Nolan and Kuvan and the Khalils was a closed circle until Charlie Bowen pried it open again. If the Bowens were still alive, I might have believed that killing the Khalils was Kuvan's idea and Kuvan's contract. But Kuvan was already dead when Charlie Bowen started sniffing around, and that kind of neatly eliminated the possibility that Kuvan was Bowen's killer. But somebody still needed Charlie dead because he was going to find out and expose who'd really put out the contract on the Khalils. And you know who that was, Jack. You know because that was you."

Allstrong let his shoulders sag for a moment. "Back to that," he said.

"I'm afraid so." Hardy met his adversary's eyes, unyielding.

Allstrong shrugged, nodded, leaned down, picked up his briefcase, brought it up to his lap, and snapped it open. "Regrettably," he said, "this has become a very inconvenient situation."

And for an irrational moment, Hardy thought he'd miscalculated and in another half second he would be dead. Before he could even react to reach for his own gun, which he'd so stupidly, stupidly placed in the closed top drawer, Allstrong's silenced bullet would explode with no warning at all through the expensive briefcase and blow Hardy into oblivion. That would put an end to Hardy's threat right here, right now.

Hardy's left hand went to his drawer, started to pull it out.

He wasn't going to have enough time.

It was over. His life was over.

But in the moment Allstrong would have taken his shot if he could, instead of firing a weapon he'd perhaps concealed in his briefcase, he simply continued talking. "I have to admire your tenacity and industry. In fact, I'd like to offer you a retainer to take on some of my legal work. Mr. Loy is a fine corporate attorney but lacks the killer instinct sometimes required in my business. Like all our senior employees, you will be paid in cash."

Allstrong turned the briefcase around, showing Hardy the neatly stacked packages of one-hundred-dollar bills. And no sign of a gun.

Hardy quietly exhaled and brought his shaking hands together, clasped now white-knuckled on his desktop.

And Allstrong continued. "This is two hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Hardy. I'd like to offer it to you against billings for the first year. If you prefer, I could arrange to have this deposited in an offshore account, a Swiss bank account, or any other place that you choose. You would in fact be retained by one of our Iraqi subsidiaries, who do not file tax returns in the United States. So whether you choose to report this to the IRS as income is completely up to you."

"I wonder how many of those are my tax dollars," Hardy said.

"Don't be naïve," Allstrong countered. "And don't trifle with me." The bribe offer having already, albeit tacitly, admitted his complicity in everything that Hardy had accused him of, he went on. "I'd strongly advise you to consider what I'm offering. As you yourself have noticed, other alternatives, though perhaps risky and more costly, are still available to me."

Hardy clucked and cracked a grin. "I really thought we'd moved beyond that, Jack."

Allstrong slowly and carefully closed up the briefcase, setting it down again beside him. Sitting back, he eyed Hardy for a long moment. "So, Mr. Hardy, do we have an understanding?"

"Oh, we understand each other, Jack. But, no, we don't have a deal. I thought I'd made it clear. I want Evan Scholler out of prison. I don't care how it happens, but that's my price."

"What if the FBI suddenly found evidence that did implicate Nolan in the Khalils' deaths? What if there were surveillance reports linking some members of the Khalil family to terrorist organizations? And wiretaps where they discussed killing Ron Nolan? Do you think that would do the job, Mr. Hardy?"

"I think it might. So what you have to do, Jack, is get me that evidence."

"And then what?"

"And then I lose interest in you."

But Allstrong still wasn't quite ready to give it up. "And what if the evidence just doesn't exist?"

Hardy inclined his head. "Ah, but we know it does. Remember? The FBI found it before they talked to the Khalil children. You saw it when you decided to sell out Kuvan."

A lengthy silence settled.

At last, Allstrong nodded once. "He should have never used the grenades," he said quietly, as though explaining a complicated process to a child. "That was his own decision and just tactically stupid. But he didn't care. He'd become a liability. He loved to blow things up. He thought it was fun. The fool thought he was invincible."

"You want my opinion," Hardy said, popping a peanut into his mouth in Glitsky's office, "he did Nolan too. Not personally. Allstrong himself was still over in Iraq back then. But one of his guys took out Nolan. Just another job."

"Why?" Glitsky asked.

"Allstrong said it himself. Nolan had become a liability. He used the frag grenades that could be traced back to Allstrong."

Bracco, sulking, stood against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. "You're not telling me he's giving you something that can be traced back to him? I'm talking about the frags."

"No. He won't do that. They might get back to the company, but old Jack will be able to say that Nolan stole them or something, that he was acting on his own when he killed the Khalils. It was a freelance gig."

"It doesn't matter anyway." Glitsky sat all the way back, exuding frustration. "He's got protection, remember? He might as well have immunity. I'm still having a hard time getting my arms around the fact that the Feebs are part of this. Schuyler wouldn't go along with any of this on his own."

"I wouldn't take it personally, Abe," Hardy said. "And it's not on his own. He's being told it's national security, too, and he believes his bosses. There's a greater good involved. So everybody winds up being good guys."

"Peachy," Glitsky replied.

"So what about the Bowens?" Bracco asked. "What about those murders? Collateral damage and we leave it at that? Does that seem right to either of you guys?"

Hardy turned to him. "You were never going to make the case anyway, Darrel. Never, ever, in a million years. Ask Abe if he agrees."

For an answer, Glitsky shrugged.

Hardy held up a hand. "I'm not saying I'm happy with that, but it's reality."

"It sucks," Bracco said. "What am I supposed to tell Jenna the next time she calls? That fat cats like Allstrong walk? Sorry, but that's reality. Your parents don't count." He slammed his hand hard against a metal locker. "This just pisses me off." And he walked out the door.

"It's not over yet," Hardy called after him.

In the ensuing silence, Glitsky growled. "It's not over. What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean I'm going to be getting this evidence in the next few weeks. And the great thing about evidence is that it speaks for itself."

Glitsky glared at him. "Oh, yeah, your client. Good for him. Good for you too."

"Not just us," Hardy said.

"No?" Glitsky asked again. "Then who else?" Sitting up, he shook his head in disgust. "Get the door on your way out, would you? I've got real work I got to do."

41

Hardy was in his office opening his mail, having just finished reviewing the documents that he had received over the past three weeks via registered mail from the local FBI office in San Francisco. The FBI had done its usual efficient and thorough job and, from fragments found at the Khalil home, had matched the grenades used in that attack to a cache of them at the Allstrong warehouse at BIAP. Beyond that, they had recovered a bullet from the Khalil scene and matched it to the gun that had been in Nolan's duffel bag with the grenades. Downloads from Nolan's hard drive revealed not just the photos of the Khalil house from various angles, but also photos of the eventual victims that looked as though they'd been scanned in. Nolan's bank records memorialized regular biweekly automatic deposits of ten thousand dollars and another deposit, four days before the Khalils were killed, of twenty-five thousand. There was a handwritten quarter page in Nolan's handwriting, noting the victims' names and address, some indecipherable scribbling and doodling, and the notation "$50,000" circled several times.

The evidence tying the Khalils to a plot to kill Nolan was equally impressive. The wiretaps arrived, accompanied by neat binders of translations from the Arabic. There were informant reports, with names blacked out due to national security, but which clearly identified some of the Khalils as involved in a plot to murder Nolan in retaliation for the Menlo Park killings.

Hardy had to admire Jack Allstrong's own thoroughness, as well as his caution. All of this evidence would be valuable to Hardy when the hearing came up for Scholler's appeal. And none of it directly implicated either Allstrong himself or his company.

Of course, during the same time period, Hardy had been reading in the local press about the agents involved in the FBI's handling of the Scholler case. The debate raged in the media about whether the agents had been merely grotesquely incompetent or criminally derelict in suppressing such critical evidence in the trial of a bona fide war hero. Agents were being transferred, suspended, and demoted.

Glitsky, following it daily with Hardy, could barely suppress his own glee. Hardy had tried to point out that it was unlikely that anyone truly culpable in the affair was ever really going to be punished, but Glitsky exulted in the random carnage the agency was inflicting on itself.

Now Hardy reached for an 8¹/2 11 envelope. It had arrived addressed to him, personal and confidential, by regular mail with no return address, but postmarked in San Francisco. Reaching in, he pulled out two sheets of faxed copies of e-mail correspondence between Rnolan@sbcglobal.net and JAA@Allstrong.com. Dated the day after the Khalil murders, it acknowledged that Nolan had accomplished his most recent assignment and requested payment of the remainder of his fee into a certain bank account. Allstrong should advise Mr. Krekar that "the situation has been resolved, as promised; Krekar should expect to move on the Anbar contracts without competition."

Although there was nothing remotely humorous about any of this, a ghost of a smile tickled the side of Hardy's mouth. Maybe he ought to tell Glitsky that Bill Schuyler wasn't the gullible, gutless G-man he needed to pretend to be if he wanted to keep his job. On the other hand, Hardy had no proof that Schuyler had had anything to do with this latest evidence. Any mention of his name would probably just get the man in more trouble. And in fact, the evidence could have come from any other FBI agent between San Francisco and Baghdad who had a sense of what was happening and a disgust at the role that the Bureau had been forced to play in it.

Hardy realized that without a witness or some other way to authenticate the documents, what he had in his hand were just two pieces of paper, worthless in a court of law. He sat at his desk pulling the tight skin at his jawline as for the hundredth, the thousandth, time he considered the ramifications of his intentions.

He had made no promises to Allstrong. To the contrary, he'd made it abundantly clear that whatever information he received would be his to do with as he pleased. Additionally, this wasn't information he'd gotten from Allstrong anyway. He owed Allstrong nothing. As Allstrong himself had said, it was an inconvenient situation.

He got up and, without a word to anyone, walked across his office and out to the copy room, where he copied the two pages. Coming back to his desk, he put the copy in his file and began searching through his notes for the address of Abdel Khalil.

Hardy and Frannie were trimming the roses that bounded the fence in their backyard on a cool Sunday afternoon in the second week of June, talking about the arrival of their children, who'd both be returning home from their respective schools in the next couple of days. "I think they should both work," Hardy said. "I worked every summer of my life."

"Of course you did," Frannie said. "I can see you now, four-year-old Dismas out plowing the fields. To say nothing of walking ten miles to school every day, in deep snow."

"Leave out the snow part," he said. "This was San Francisco, remember."

"Yeah, but back when you were a baby, wasn't the climate different here?" Frannie enjoying the little joke at the expense of the eleven-year difference in their ages.

"You're a very funny person." He reached over and clipped a newly budded rose just at its base.

"Hey!" She turned on him.

"It's my old eyes," he said, backing away. "I was aiming for lower down on the stem."

"Yeah, well, keep it up and I'll aim for lower down too." She took a quick and playful swipe at him with her cutting tool.

Hardy backed up another step, then cocked his head, looking over her shoulder. "Well, look what the cat dragged in."

Glitsky was just emerging into the yard from the narrow walkway between their house and the neighbor's. He was in civilian clothes, hands in the pockets of his battered leather jacket. Getting up to them, he gave Frannie half a hug and accepted her kiss on the cheek, then turned to her husband. "You should leave your phone on."

"I know. It's bad of me," Hardy said. "But it's Sunday, I figured whatever it is can wait. But maybe not."

"Maybe not, after all. You know anything about this?"

"About what?"

"Jack Allstrong."

Hardy felt his stomach go hollow. He caught his breath, cleared his throat, tried to swallow. "No. What about him?"

"He got in his car this morning down in Hillsborough and turned it on and it blew up him and half his house. It's all over the news."

"I don't watch TV on Sunday either."

Glitsky just stood there.

Frannie touched Glitsky's arm. "Abe? What's wrong?"

"I don't know, Fran. I don't know if anything's wrong. I was thinking Diz might be able to tell me." He kept his eyes on Hardy.

Who drew another breath, then another, then blew out heavily and went down to one knee.