Guilt

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sergeant Paul Thieu, an investigator in Missing Persons who doubled from time to time as a translator, rode in the passenger seat of Glitsky's unmarked green Plymouth, chattering away as though he was on his way to a wedding or a party, instead of a murder scene. Next to him, Glitsky kept his eyes on the road – it was dusk and the fog clung around the car like wool.

Actually, Glitsky was thinking that it wasn't so bad hearing a voice with some animation in it. There wasn't much cheeriness in the rest of his life, especially around his house, where now they had a nurse coming in every day.

Flo wasn't going to spend her last days in any hospital – they'd discussed it and the family was going to be around her. Not that she was there yet, to her last days, but they were coming. Also, Nat – Glitsky's father – was spending a lot of nights on the couch in the front room, taking up the slack with the boys, trying to keep things in some perspective, as if there could be any.

But Glitsky had hjs job. Going to it was a kind of a relief. And Thieu, chatter or not, represented the beginning of what might turn out to be a more than normally interesting case.

By far the majority of homicides in the city were what law-enforcement personnel referred to as NHI – 'no humans involved' – cases. One person from the lowest stratum of intelligent life would kill another, or several others, for no apparent reason, or one so lame that it beggared belief.

Last week, Glitsky had arrested a twenty-three year-old woman whose IQ soared into the double digits and who'd killed her boyfriend in a dispute over what television show they were going to watch. After she'd shot him, she sat herself down and watched all of Roseanne before thinking, 'Well, hey, maybe I'd better see if I can wake old Billy up now.' Which, with a bullet in his heart, proved an elusive undertaking.

But occasionally someone with a more or less normal life got killed for a real reason; the deadly sins did continue to reap their grim rewards. These were the cases Homicide cops lived for. Glitsky and Thieu were driving to what looked like one of them now – an attorney named Victor Trang, who'd been stabbed in the chest.

'So the way I figure it, there's no way I'm going to get to Homicide by moving up the list.' Thieu was referring to the seniority list by which promotions in the SFPD were controlled. 'The other guys up there – isn't that true? – they put in their fifteen-twenty and by the time they get assigned to Homicide, they are completely burned out. Then they discover they actually have to work weekends and nights if they want results. But they don't want to put in that kind of time. Hell, Homicide's a reward, isn't it? But they can't be touched because of their seniority. And they still want the prestige of the Homicide detail, so they take the job and then don't do it.'

Glitsky shot him a glance. 'I do my job, Paul. Other guys do their jobs.'

Thieu didn't seem affected by Glitsky's lack of agreement. Certainly it didn't shut him up. 'I'm not saying that, Abe. I'm not talking about you. You know who I mean.'

A non-committal nod. Glitsky did know who he meant, and Paul had perfectly analyzed the deadwood problem within the unit. It was not Glitsky's inclination, however, to bad-mouth anyone else in his detail. These things had a way of getting around.

'But the point is, I'm being the squeaky wheel. I want to do this. This is the action and I crave it.'

Something in Thieu's enthusiasm for the work forced Glitsky to consider smiling. The idea of the thrill of the chase had slid away from his vision of his job over the years.

'And imagine this!' The gush went on. 'I get this call in Missing Persons and we wait our three days and I just know. I know this is a homicide.'

'It's a rare gift, Paul.'

Thieu caught the intonation and realized he was pushing too hard. But who could blame him for being excited? When he got the call from the Vietnamese-speaking mother about her missing son, he'd had a hunch. In San Francisco, a missing person had to be gone for at least three days before it became an official police matter. And Thieu had gone by the book, waiting the full three days, but sticking with the story as it developed.

'So how many calls did you get in total?'

Thieu didn't have to consult his notes. A graduate of UCLA in police science, crew-cut and clean-shaven, he represented the increasingly new brand of San Francisco cop. He wore a light green business suit and a flamboyant red and green silk tie that somehow worked. 'His mother, his girlfriend, one of his clients.'

'And how long was he missing?'

'This was in the first day, before it even got to us.'

'Three people in the first day? This was a popular guy.'

'Well, evidently that's a question.'

Glitsky, driving slowly, flicked him a glance.

'I looked into it a little, did some background before he got filed officially as an MP.' A missing person. 'Something the mother said about a lawsuit this guy was working on.'

'Which was?'

'Well, evidently he was well known, but not particularly liked – except by his mom and girlfriend.'

'Why not?'

'Why not what?'

'Why wasn't he liked?'

'Oh. Well, appears the guy was a politician in the Vietnamese community here. Glad hand, big smile, full of shit.' Thieu looked over at Glitsky, checking for his reaction, which was not forthcoming. He was watching the road. 'That's not me speaking ill of the dead. It's what I've heard.'

Glitsky was paying attention to Mission Street. They were now at the light on Geneva, which wasn't working. Traffic was a mess. The fog made it worse. Darkness was closing in fast.

So Thieu kept chattering. 'Anyway, seems this guy Trang was always showing up at parties, gatherings, weddings, funerals, giving his card to everybody… a real nuisance.'

'I think I met him,' Glitsky said, straight-faced.

'Really? You met Trang?'

Another sideways glance. 'Joke, Paul. Not really.'

Momentarily taken aback, Thieu slumped a little in his seat. Glitsky, perhaps oblivious to his passenger's distress, said, 'The heck with this,' and pulled his flasher out, putting it on the roof, turning on the siren. In five seconds, they were through the intersection, rolling. 'So what did his mother say?'

Glitsky's rhythms put Thieu off his own – he'd lost the thread of what he'd been saying. 'About what?'

'About some case he was working on that made you think there might be trouble, which as it turns out there is, if you define trouble as getting yourself killed, which I do.'

'Well, apparently Trang was suing the Archdiocese of San Francisco for a couple of million dollars or something…'

'What for?'

'I don't know. Not yet. The mom said he was over his head, and knew it, but it was a big case. He was scared, she said.'

'Of what?'

'I don't know. Just playing at that level, I think. The mom seemed confused about the Church and the Mafia and thought getting mixed up with one was like the other.'

Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard worse theories. So he was scared. Did he get any threats anybody knew of, the mother knew of? Anything like that?'

'No.'

'Well, there's a help.'

As was often the case, Glitsky was the first of the Homicide team to arrive. The body had evidently been discovered at around 4:15 p.m. by someone from Trang's weekly cleaning service, who, undoubtedly not wanting to call attention to his immigration status, had gone back to the main office and reported it to management. After suitable discussion, the company had called the police. Squad cars from Ingleside Station had confirmed the stiff.

Since they had a tentative identity for the victim, Glitsky had made a courtesy call to Missing Persons and asked if they had an outstanding MP named Victor Trang. Which had alerted Paul Thieu, who'd asked if he could tag along.

A couple of squad cars were parked in front of a squat, faceless, depressing building on a side street off Geneva. Two uniformed officers stood shivering four steps up in a little semi-enclosed portico, smelling of urine and littered with newspaper and broken glass. Identifying himself and Thieu, Glitsky asked them to wait until the coroner and the Crime Scene Investigators arrived.

Then he and Thieu opened the door and entered the building.

Inside, two bare bulbs illuminated a long hallway, in which three doors were staggered on opposite sides. At the far end, the other two officers and either another plainclothes cop or a civilian stood in a tight knot, whispering. Glitsky was aware of his and Thieu's echoing, hollow footfalls on the wooden floors.

Though the other doors in the hallway were wood-faced, pitted and stained, with the lacquer peeling off, this one's top half was of frosted glass, upon which had been etched the name Victor Trang and under it, in script, Attorney At Law.

'He had that door made special,' the civilian said. His name was Harry something and he lived upstairs and said he managed the place.

Poorly, Glitsky thought.

Harry did have master keys for the building – the uniforms had located him as soon as they'd set up. It was a minor miracle, and Glitsky was grateful for it. 'Must of cost him a thousand bucks, the door.' Harry was trying to be helpful, talking to be saying something.

Glitsky ignored him and turned to Thieu, to whom the likely presence of a dead person was having the opposite effect than it was having on Harry. Thieu had stopped chattering. 'You ever do this before?'

'No.'

'You might want to wait then.'

Steeling himself- it was never routine – Glitsky opened the door, flicked on the light. Fortunately, he thought, it had been cold in the office. Even now the room was chilly, but he could detect, before he saw anything, the distinctive smell. Something was rotting in here.

In Glitsky's experience, real-life crime scenes tended to be prosaically ordinary, rarely capturing the vividness, the sense of evil and foreboding so favored by cop shows and B movies. This one, though, Victor Trang's office, came close.

Trang had evidently blown all of his appearances money on his door. Once inside, the office reverted to the form of the rest of the building and neighborhood. The long desk was an eight-foot slab of white-washed plywood – in fact, Glitsky realized, it was another door, perhaps the original. At an L to the desk, a table held a computer and printer, the phone and answering machine.

The walls were a fly-specked shiny beige which might once have been white, and they were absolutely bare – not a calendar, not a picture, not even a post-it. Behind the desk, a dark window, without blinds or curtains, was a black hole. There was an off-green couch along the side wall, a wooden library chair with a pillow seat, a folding chair set up facing the desk.

Slowly taking it in as he moved, Glitsky walked around the folding chair. Had it been set up for an appointment? Was it always where it was now?

He stopped. The chair behind the desk had been knocked over – he could see it now up against the back wall.

The body rested along the length of the desk in an attitude of repose, almost as though – no, Glitsky realized, exactly as though – it had been placed there. Carefully laid down.

Trang had been wearing an off-white linen suit, and now it was striped with red, in neat rows. There was a large bloodstain in the center of the chest, but it was roughly circular – it hadn't run down the front of his shirt. Therefore – strangely – it hadn't bled much until Trang was already on the floor.

Glitsky stood looking for a moment, letting it all sink in. He would wait until the coroner arrived, until he'd read the forensic reports, but his impressions were coalescing into a certainty. He knew what the red stripes were. It chilled him.

The killer had used a knife, then had held Trang up in some death embrace, holding him up, maybe for as long as a minute, leaving the knife in, perhaps twisting it toward the heart. Then, with his victim good and completely dead, he'd laid him down carefully on the floor, finally pulled out the knife, then calmly wiped the blade off on Trang's suit – two or three swipes at first glance.

Glitsky had been a cop for twenty-two years, in Homicide for the last seven of them. From the evidence of what he was seeing here, he thought he might be looking at the most cold-blooded, up-close and personal murder of his career.

CHAPTER TWELVE

'Mark, are you all right?'

Christina stood in the doorway, one arm propped against the frame. Her hair was down. She wore a navy blazer over a white silk blouse, two buttons open, just this side of demure. She wouldn't start her summer job until late June, but she'd been coming in regularly for the past couple of weeks – ever since Dooher had counselled her to be supportive yet independent – to help Joe get his workload organized for the move south.

She'd also gotten into the habit of stopping by Dooher's office after business hours, just before she went home. Daylight Savings Time had begun two weeks ago, and the office was above the fog layer, bathed in an amber light from the sunset. 'Is something wrong?'

'No. Nothing's wrong.'

'Something, I think.' Moving into the room, she stopped behind the brocaded easy chair, hands resting on it.

He took in a deep breath, held it a moment, exhaled heavily. 'The Trang thing, I guess. Can't get it out of my mind.'

He raised a hand to his eye and rubbed. Weary and distressed. An apologetic half-smile at Christina, a shake of his head. 'What's the sense in it, huh? Here's a guy who's just getting started, prime of his life, perfect health… I don't know. You wonder. It rocks you.'

'The big plan?'

'Yeah, I guess. The big plan.'

'Maybe there isn't one.'

'It's all random, you mean?'

'If it isn't, what's free will?'

He paused a minute, nodding as though in agreement. 'That's a good lawyer question. I'll have to get back to you on it.'

Her lips curved up slightly and she came around the chair, sat on the edge of it, pulling at her skirt, meeting his eyes, then looking down. 'You do hide behind that, you know? That lawyer pose. The glib answer.'

'I am a lawyer, Christina. If I'm glib, it's a line of defense. First we argue, then we deflect the direction words might be going, and on those rare occasions when it doesn't look like we're going to win, we… obfuscate. But I'm not hiding from you. I hope you believe that.'

'I do. I know that.'

He shook his head again. 'I feel bad about Trang, but what's the point of belaboring it? Nothing's going to bring him back. It's the simple fact of it… of life being so fragile. I don't feel so glib about that. Not at my age.'

'Your age again. How old are you, anyway? Sixty? Sixty-five? You couldn't be seventy.' She was teasing him, trying to cheer him up.

'Eighty-three next month,' he said. 'But I work out.' He pushed around some items on his desk. 'Actually, since you're as young as you feel, I couldn't be a day over eighty-one.' He shook his head. 'Sometimes the world gets to me, Christina. I shouldn't burden you with it.' Shifting around behind the desk, he flashed his self-deprecating grin. 'You're just lucky, I suppose, getting to listen to my moaning.'

'I do feel lucky.'

'Well, I'm glad. I do, too.'

'You do?'

He nodded. 'Why do you think the managing partner takes fifteen minutes at the end of the day just to visit, risking not only the office gossip but the wrath of people who think they need my time?'

'I don't know. Part of me thought you were just watching out for me, after talking me into coming here, that I wasn't screwing up.'

'I don't believe that.'

'Well, a small part, but some…'

'None. Not the smallest bit. I don't take care of people professionally – you either do it here or you're out.'

'No. You wouldn't…'

'I don't recommend you try me. But I have no worries about you. Not one.'

She sat back in the chair. 'Then I don't know why…?'

'Yes, you do, Christina.' He leveled his eyes at her across his desk. The moment called for a matter-of-fact, intimate tone, and he got it. 'You know, life goes along, and people get so they don't talk to people – I mean you talk, but it's mostly surface, but with you and me, maybe we got lucky that first morning, Ash Wednesday, you remember?'

'Of course.'

'What I mean to say is this, it's not common – in fact, it's rare. And valuable. I value it immensely. You ought to know that. I'd hate to die suddenly like Trang did, and you not know. This isn't business. You and me isn't business, okay?'

'Okay.'

'And another thing, while we're on it – I'm happily married. My wife is a great partner and a wonderful person and not a half-bad cook. I'm not going to accept any gossip about you and me that this office is likely to put out, and I hope you don't either.'

She was smiling now, with him. 'I won't. I don't.'

'Good. Now, how are things with your boyfriend?'

Abe Glitsky, in a pair of khaki slacks and a flight jacket, was walking down one of the muted hallways toward Dooher's office, accompanied by the night receptionist, an exceptionally attractive black woman of about twenty-five. She was explaining that Dooher's secretary had gone home – was Glitsky sure he had an appointment for this time, 6:30? Normally, the receptionist was explaining, if she'd known that, she would have stayed.

'I made it with Mr Dooher personally,' he said, non-committal. 'Maybe he didn't mention it to her.'

Glitsky was struck by the color of the light. The doors to several west-facing offices were open and the sun was going down over the cloud banks, spraying the hallway with crimson.

In almost every office he saw a young person hunched over a desk, oblivious to the sunset, to everything but what they were reading or writing. Fun job.

Dooher was standing in his doorway, talking to yet another beautiful woman. Glitsky figured they grew on trees at this altitude. 'Sergeant Glitsky?'

She was smiling at him, holding out her hand, and he realized he knew her – from the rape clinic, and then that visit to his office. What was she doing here?

'Christina Carrera.' Helping him out.

'Right. Levon Copes,' he said. 'And I'm still looking.'

This seemed to register positively. 'I'm glad.'

The man with her – Glitsky presumed it was Dooher – stepped forward. Protectively? 'You two know each other?'

Christina quickly explained while Glitsky checked out the man in his thousand-dollar pale gray Italian suit. The only wrong note was the hair – no gray, which meant the guy was vain and had a bottle of Grecian Formula hidden in the back of his sock drawer. Glitsky figured if he looked like Mr Dooher, he'd be vain, too. But he'd have to go some before he decided to dye his hair.

The receptionist had disappeared. Christina was asking if Glitsky was the only Homicide Sergeant in town. 'Sometimes it feels like it.'

'I don't know how you do it,' Christina said. 'Up until a couple of months ago, I never knew anybody who'd been murdered, and now I've met two -Tania Willows and Victor Trang. It's unsettling.'

'You knew Trang?'

'I met him here in Mr Dooher's office once. Still…'

'It is easier if you don't know them first.' Glitsky tried to mitigate the cop humor of what he'd just said by smiling, but his scar got in the way. 'I know what you mean, though.'

'It's terrible,' Dooher said. 'Christina here and I were just talking about Victor Trang, the waste of it.'

'You were in Vietnam?'

Christina had gone away – Glitsky had no questions for her. He and Dooher went into the big corner office and they had more or less finished with the routine questions. Glitsky was still seated on the sofa, his tape recorder spinning silently on the coffee table. The receptionist had brought him a cup of tea, and it was excellent. With a slice of lemon yet. He would take the moment of peace until the cup was drained. They were hard enough to come by.

Dooher was volunteering information. It probably had no connection with Victor Trang, but Glitsky's experience was that a murder investigation led where it took you, and the most innocuous comment or detail could be the hinge upon which it all eventually turned. He sipped his tea and leaned back in the soft leather, waiting for whatever was coming next.

The strange red sky had gone mother-of-pearl and Dooher had loosened his tie. He was drinking something amber without ice, pacing around, leaning on the edge of his desk, crossing to the easy chair, to the floating windows. Nervous, Glitsky thought. Which wasn't unusual. He knew that people -even attorneys – got jittery when they talked to Homicide cops. It would be more suspicious if he wasn't.

'That's why I was surprised I found myself liking him. Trang, I mean.' Dooher sighed. 'I don't like to admit it, but it's one of the prejudices I've carried around all these years. Maybe it's genetic. My dad had the same thing with the Japs – the Japanese. He always called them Japs. Me, now, some of my best friends…'

Glitsky kept him on it. 'So how'd you like it, Nam?'

'You go?'

He shook his head. 'Bad knees. Football.'

'Yeah, well, maybe you've heard – it sucked.'

Glitsky had come upon that rumor. 'You see action?'

'Oh yeah. We got ambushed and most of my squad got killed.' He swigged his drink. 'I still don't know why I survived and the other guys… and then the warm welcome at home, that was special.' He looked over at Glitsky. 'I was bitter for a while. Blamed it on the Vietnamese. Ruined my life – all that.'

'Did they?'

Dooher took in his plush surroundings. 'No, that was all youth, I suppose. Excuses. Look around, my life isn't ruined. I've been lucky.'

Suddenly he snapped his fingers, went around his desk and opened a drawer; he pulled something out and handed it to Glitsky. 'These were the guys.'

It was a framed color photograph of a bunch of soldiers, armed and dangerous, goofing and scowling. Dooher was in the front row, on the far right, with his captain's bars, his weapon propped next to him. 'I had this up in that space in the bookshelves here till just before Trang came up here the first time. Then I realized it would be offensive to him. I guess I can put it back up now.'

Glitsky handed it back. 'They're all dead?'

'I don't know all. Three of us came home, I know that. But I haven't seen either of the other two in maybe fifteen years.'

The tea had cooled. Dooher went back around the desk and placed the frame in its former space, in full view now. 'Anyway, they trained me pretty well,' he was saying, 'to hate 'em. Charlie, I mean.'

'So what happened with Trang?'

'Like anything else. You finally meet one personally, get to know 'em a little, and you realize they're people first. I just put off meeting any of them for a long time. I wanted to keep hating them, you see? So the war would make some kind of sense. Dumb. It's so long ago now.'

'So who still hated him?'

'Trang? I don't know.'

'I understand he was suing you.'

Dooher had settled in the easy chair. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. 'Well, that's technically accurate. He'd filed a lawsuit where some priest took money from a woman. He was amending the suit, that was all. Trying to get more. Hey, it's his job. Anyway, I represent the Archdiocese. The whole thing hadn't gone very far. That's just our business. Litigation. Personally, we were on good terms.'

Glitsky didn't have any reason to doubt Dooher. He did believe that the killer was probably a tall, strong male, and though that described Dooher, he didn't have a patent on the build. 'I'm wondering if he mentioned anything to you about anybody else – clients, colleagues…'

The attorney gave it a long moment. 'Honestly, I can't think of anybody. I'll put my mind to it if you'd like.'

'I'd appreciate that.' Standing, Glitsky turned off his recorder and slipped it into his pocket. He handed Dooher his card. 'If something comes to mind, that's me, day or night.'

Dooher accompanied him to the door, opened it for him. The cotton clouds out the window had begun to glow with the lights coming on in the streets below. 'Do you have any leads at all, Sergeant, on who might have done this?'

'No, not yet. It's still early, though. Something may come up.'

'Well, good luck.' They shook hands, and Glitsky turned to leave as the door closed quietly behind him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Wes Farrell and Sam had been going out for a couple of weeks now and hadn't yet moved into the 'serious' phase, as they called it, of what they were also calling their quote relationship unquote. There was no plan as yet to escalate. Things were nicely physical. They were getting along, moving back and forth between their places, taking care of their respective dogs, although Quayle and Bart had yet to meet.

Wes was flirting with what felt like his first happy and carefree moment in about half a decade. It was the Saturday evening after a noon wake-up, followed by love-making and the Planetarium in Golden Gate Park. They'd sat in the plush reclining seats holding hands as the night sky came up indoors – Farrell learned more than he ever thought he'd need to know about the planet Neptune. Although you never knew – facts had a way of coming in handy.

They ended up sharing a short drink at the Little Shamrock, the bar where they had met.

It didn't hurt that the winter cold had lifted. Not that it was balmy, but anything above forty-five degrees seemed a gentle gift. The wind and fog were both gone, and here at dusk Wes was comfortable half reclining in the chaise outside, wearing blue jeans and a sweater on Sam's tiny fenced-in deck, surrounded by potted greenery, in the cupola created by three large redwood trees. She'd handed him a perfect martini – gin had always been, to Wes, the harbinger of summer – and told him she'd be out in a minute to join him, as soon as she'd put the game hens on to roast.

Sam was making him dinner, a first step into the heretofore dreaded return of the domesticity that had failed him so miserably the first time around.

They had talked about the implications of the dinner and decided they could risk it. Besides, Sam had pointed out, it wasn't going to be just the two of them and Quayle. Nothing that intimate. Other guests would be there to buffer the raging magnetic attraction that was nearly ripping the skin off their bodies. There was going to be some lawyer woman from her office, Christina, and her fiance, another lawyer, Joe. And Sam's brother- remember Larry and Sally? – would serve to balance out the lawyer ratio.

Wes sipped his drink. Sam thought he might be nervous meeting all these people in her circle at the same time. He supposed one day long ago this kind of situation might have had that effect, but today there was nothing but a sense of the exhilaration of new beginnings. Hope. It was great.

The door creaked. A hand on his shoulder. The scent of her as she leaned over from behind the chaise, laid a soft hand against the side of his face.

'You know what I can't believe?' she said. She came around the lounge chair, holding her own martini. Farrell loved a woman who drank like he did. He also loved the look of Sam – the way she had filled her glass right to the rim, slurping at it delicately to get that first taste, puckering her lips around it. 'Um-um.' She was wearing jeans, too. And a white sweater. And hiking boots. She looked seventeen.

He smiled up at her. 'What can't you believe?'

'I can' t believe that Pluto' s going to be inside the orbit of Neptune for the next eleven years. So it's not Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto anymore; it's Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune.'

'That wacky old solar system,' Wes said. 'Just when you think you got it all figured out.' He moved his legs off the recliner, patted it with his palm, and Sam sat, the haunch of her leg tight up against him. He grinned at her. 'The good news is that this is the kind of fact on which I believe we can make some money.'

Larry and Sally arrived first. The sun was down and Wes was back inside with Sam – another round of gin poured and good smells emanating from the kitchen – everybody already getting along, laughing about St Patrick's Day.

'Hey, the parts I remember were great.' Larry, defending himself from his sister's mock attack.

'And how many parts do you remember?'

Larry paused, considering. 'At least two.'

'Including meeting Wes?'

He gave Farrell an appraising glance, shook his head. 'I'm afraid that particular moment didn't make the cut. Where were we exactly? No offense, Wes.'

'You had the T-shirt,' Sally said to Wes. She was as tall as her husband, with long dark hair that had gone about a third gray. Her friendly, attractive face showed more age than Sam's. She also wore nicer clothes, some makeup, dangling earrings.

'That's what did it,' Sam said.'The shirt. I saw that shirt and read the message and said, "Here's a guy I've got to meet.'"

'I thought it was how it fit me.'

That, too,' she said. That's what I meant.'

'You guys.' Sally was smiling. 'No foreplay until after dinner. It's one of the rules.'

'What shirt?' Larry asked.

Farrell recognized them both immediately. Shaking Joe's hand, taking in the woman – Christina Carrera. Yep, it was her, no doubt about it. Not looking any uglier either, he noticed. And it looked as though she'd found the right guy. Joe Avery was tall and thin, with an angular, clean-shaven face, shoulders a yard wide and no gut at all. It wasn't fair.

'You're at McCabe and Roth, aren't you?'

Joe included Christina. 'We both are.'

'Not quite yet.'

'Close enough.' Then, placing Wes. 'You've been to the office…'

'No more than two, three hundred times. Mark Dooher's my best friend.'

Christina snapped her fingers. 'That's it.' Explaining: 'I knew I knew the name Wes Farrell. When Sam told me… it's been driving me crazy. You go on camping trips or something with Mark, right?'

'Occasionally. Retreats, we call them.'

Joe Avery was looking a question at Christina, but Sam was coming up, kissing her on both cheeks, getting introduced to Joe. 'Okay, you lawyers, break it up. No professional talk until we've all said hello. At least.'

The moment passed.

Sam and Sally were in getting dessert and Larry had gone to the bathroom.

Joe turned to Christina. 'So how do you know about these retreats?'

'Mark told me about them, one of the first times we talked. I don't remember exactly. It just came up.' She turned to Wes, hoping to deflect the line of questioning from Joe. 'He said you guys go out and get re-charged on life.'

Farrell shrugged. 'Mostly we drink,' he said. Then, continuing to make light of it, 'Get away from the day-to-day. Talk about what we believe in, in theory. Try to beat the burn-out which you know, Joe, is a constant.' Wes drank some more wine and smiled at Christina. 'You'll find out after you've been at this business a year or so.'

Joe shook his head. 'I can't see it with Mr Dooher… Mark. He doesn't seem like he's on the burn-out track. He's always geared up.'

'Joe, he's got to act that way,' Christina, rushing to Dooher's defense, nearly blurted it out. 'You don't want your managing partner moping around, making you feel like it's all so hard.'

'Well, he doesn't do that, that's for sure.'

'Yeah, but I think Christina's right. He acts tough, but if you know him…'

Christina laughed. 'Don't tell me he's a pussycat. A gentle heart, maybe, but…'

'No way,' Joe couldn't envision it. 'Maybe with you guys, but I've worked for him a lot of years, and Mark Dooher does not invite closeness.' Joe looked around the table, perhaps realizing he was being too negative. He caught himself, nearly knocking himself over backtracking. 'Although, lately, I must admit -I don't know exactly what happened – he's been fantastic.'

'You got over the hump, that's all,' Farrell said. 'You proved yourself.'

'Is that it?'

Farrell nodded. 'That's Mark. He used to be too soft – one of the guys, you know. Didn't want to give orders, set himself above anybody.'

Avery laughed. 'Well, he sure got over that one.'

'Joe!'

'That's a fact, Christina. Say what you want about Mark, being afraid to give orders isn't what he's about anymore.'

Farrell stopped them. 'You're responsible for ten people dying, Joe, it hardens you right up.'

In the silence, Christina finally spoke up. 'What do you mean, dying?'

Farrell made a face. He hadn't intended to bring this up. It was too personal. One of Dooher's true ghosts. But to drop it now would only arouse more curiosity. Better to downplay it – God knew it did relate to their discussion.

'Mark was in Vietnam,' he said. 'Platoon captain, about a dozen guys under his command. This being Vietnam, as you may have heard, the guys smoked some dope.'

'Did they inhale?' Joe asked. 'Mr Dooher smoked dope?'

Farrell shook his head. 'No, I don't think so. But his men did.'

'So what happened?' Christina asked.

'So Mark knew how bad things were over there, and he knew the dope made it bearable for his troops – regular guys pretty much his age – so he made an unspoken policy that they had to be straight when they were going out on maneuvers, but otherwise he wasn't busting anybody for a little dope. He thought it was a reasonable rule and so everybody would follow it.'

'What was a reasonable rule?' Larry, returning from the bathroom, didn't want to be left out.

Wes shortened it up. 'My best friend happens to be the managing partner of Joe's law firm,' he said. 'We were talking about how he got to be such a hardass to work for. And the answer is Vietnam. He didn't exert his authority, didn't take charge. So when his troops went out on patrol, it turned out they were stoned to the eyeballs and got themselves ambushed and most of ' em died. I don't think he's ever forgiven himself for that.'

'Jesus.' Joe clearly wasn't used to stories like this one. 'You get used to thinking in business terms, how maybe somebody beat him in a deal or something, but this…'

'No, this wasn't like that. This was real. So now he's more careful. He's got to be. Problem is – and I've known him my whole life – underneath he really does want to give people a break, but people, you cut 'em some slack once and next time they expect it again, so they don't perform as well as they might and that doesn't help anybody. So he's a bastard at the firm.'

'He is not.' Christina didn't like the language at all. 'He is nothing like a bastard.'

Wes held up his hands. 'He's my best friend, Christina. We're a little free with what we call each other. He's been known to be less than flattering to me.'

'Who has?'

Sam was coming back in with a large plate of cut fruit and cheeses. Wes rolled his eyes. They weren't going over this whole thing again. Enough Mark Dooher, already. 'Nothing,' Wes said. Then: 'I've got five dollars that says Neptune is the last planet in our solar system.' He winked at Sam.

'No, it's Pluto,' Joe said.

'It is Pluto.' Christina was sure, too. Larry and Sally were nodding in agreement.

Wes extended his hand out over the table. 'Five bucks,' he said. 'Just slap my palm.'

'That was cruel,' Sam said.

The guests had all gone home. She and Wes were having some Port, sitting on the loveseat they'd pulled in front of the wood-burning stove. Quayle was curled over her feet.

'Cruel but cool,' Wes said, 'and we did make fifteen dollars; it could have been twenty if Sally had ponied up her own five.'

'They're married,' Sam said. 'Married people never do that.'

'I remember.'

A piece of wood popped in the grate. Wes raised his glass to his mouth and realized he'd had enough tonight – gin, wine, Port. Maybe for tomorrow, too. The silence lengthened.

'You all right, Wes?'

He brought her in closer against him. 'I'm fine.'

'"Fine" isn't the strongest word in the dictionary.'

'Okay, I'm ecstatic.'

'This wasn't too much tonight – the family stuff, dinner at home?'

He had to chuckle. 'I assure you, this wasn't anything like any dinner I've ever had with Lydia, at home or anywhere else. In the first place, you can cook.'

'I'm not pushing anything,' she said.

'I know, not that I couldn't handle a little of that, even. But it was fun. I had a great time. I enjoyed your brother and sister and thought your friend Christina was charming and lovely and I think you are fantastic, although I'm not absolutely sure I'm going to respect you in the morning.'

She put her own glass down, took his hand from where it rested on her shoulder and placed it on her breast. 'I hope not,' she said.

'Let's go find out.'

At about the same moment that Wes Farrell was enjoying his first martini that evening, Mark and Sheila entered St Emydius church to attend Saturday-night Mass.

They walked together down the center aisle and chose a pew about ten rows from the front. There were more than fifty people in the church, a good showing. The congregation had come early to take part in the Reconciliation Service, which had for most Catholics replaced the old, often-humiliating sacrament of Confession. Now, sinners were offered an opportunity to reflect on their weakness, privately resolve to do good, and then be communally absolved of any guilt without having to confront another human being or suffer the minor indignity of a formal penance.

Today, though, before the priest had come on to the altar to begin the Reconciliation Service, Mark leaned over and whispered to Sheila that he was going to use the real confessional, which was still an option. 'I'm old fashioned,' he said. 'It does me more good.'

He didn't know what priest would be sitting in the confessional, but there was a good chance he'd know Dooher, and vice versa. All the priests at St Emydius knew him. Maybe not, though. Often a visiting priest would get the chore of Saturday Confession.

Dooher would let fate dictate it.

He nodded his head, made the sign of the cross, stood up and opened the confessional door. The familiar smell of it – dust and beeswax – filled his soul, as did the comforting darkness. Then the window that separated him and the priest was sliding open. The man recognized him immediately.

'Hello, Mark, how are you doing today?'

It was Gene Gorman, the pastor, who'd been to the house fifty times for poker, for dinner, for fundraisers, who got a bottle of Canadian Club every Christmas, who'd baptized Jason, their youngest.

Dooher paused. 'Not so good, I'm afraid,' he whispered. He let the silence gather. Then: 'I don't want to burden you, Gene.'

'That's what the sacrament's for, Mark.'

Dooher hesitated another moment. Hesitation heightened the gravity of things. 'Would you mind not using my name? Is there someone in the other stall?'

The confessionals at St Emydius, as in most Catholic churches, had three compartments – one in the middle for the priest, and one on either side of him for the repentants. This time the hesitation came from Father Gorman. Dooher heard him slide open the window on the other side, then close it. 'No, we're alone. You can begin.'

The old words, the ritual he so loved. Again he made the sign of the cross. 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.'

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

John Strout, San Francisco's coroner, was a gangly Southern gentleman of the old school. He had a prominent Adam's apple, a perennially bad case of dandruff in his wispy gray hair, poor taste in clothes, and a pronounced Dixie accent. He was also, rube or not, one the country's most respected forensics experts, and now he was taking a morning walk with Glitsky through the debris and detritus of south-of-Market San Francisco.

It was Monday morning – sunny, breezy, and cold. Strout was, of course, a medical doctor, and – after a lifetime of bad morning coffee and stale donuts – had recently been a convert to the theory that a healthy breakfast was the key to a long life and perhaps even more luxuriant hair growth. Like all good converts, he had found the truth and was going to spread the word around, goddamn it. Like it or not.

So, whenever feasible, he'd taken to briefing cops and DAs about his forensics reports over breakfast in one of the city's eateries. It never occurred to him that discussing the finer points of often-gory violent death, complete with color photographs, might not be particularly conducive to stimulating the early-morning appetite.

It did occur to Glitsky.

Strout had finished the PM on Victor Trang on the previous Friday afternoon, and Glitsky had – atypically, in Strout's experience, probably because of his troubles at home – said he'd be free to discuss the results first thing Monday morning. Let the weekend intervene. Why not?

'I'll just look at the pictures while we're walking here, if you don't mind, John.' With a show of reluctance, Strout handed over the folder, and put his now-empty hands into the pockets of his greatcoat against the chill. 'What do we have?' Abe went on. 'Any surprises?'

'Well, as a matter of fact…'

Glitsky closed the newly opened folder. 'What? I'll listen first.'

'Surprises may be too strong a word, but the deceased here got himself gutted by a pig sticker of the first order.'

'Pig sticker?'

'Knife.'

'A pig sticker is a certain kind of knife?'

Strout's expression betrayed a certain intolerance. 'Damn, you Yankees… pig sticker means knife. Genetically. Victor Trang got stabbed by a big knife, is that clearer? And not just any big knife, something like a Bowie or my own favorite guess, a bayonet. Y'all familiar with the term "bayonet"?'

Glitsky played along. 'I've heard of it. Made by the Swiss Army people, right? Whittling tool.'

'Yeah, that's it, 'cept the large version.' Strout put a hand on Glitsky's arm and stopped him as they walked. 'Open the file,' he said. The breeze gusted and they moved into the entrance of an office building, out of it. 'The photos.'

Glitsky followed instructions, flipping over glossies of the murder scene, the body as he'd found it, then as it looked from various angles stripped on the morgue table. Finally Strout put his finger on one. 'There you go. That one.'

It was a color close-up that Glitsky recognized all too soon: the wound itself, after the area had been washed – long and wider than most knife-wounds he'd been witness to.

'You see there?' Strout was saying. 'Right at the top?'

Glitsky squinted, not clear what he was supposed to be seeing. Strout moved in closer, put his finger on the area over the top of the gash. 'Right here. You see that half-moon? The little circle under it? Know what that is?'

Glitsky took a second, then guessed. 'It's an imprint from the haft of the knife.'

The coroner was pleased. 'I must say, it is a pure pleasure to work with a professional. That's exactly what it is. The perp stabbed him so hard and so far up, the haft left this little fingerprint, which is pretty damn distinctive, you ask me. Actually cut into the skin above the blade area. I wouldn't put my name on it as a definite,' – this was because he could never prove it for certain and some attorney might discredit his entire testimony if he wasn't one hundred percent positive and correct on every detail – 'but between us, this could be nothing but a bayonet.'

Strout reached inside his greatcoat and extracted a folded brown paper shopping bag. 'As a matter of fact…'

'You just happen to have one handy.'

This wasn't as unusual as it might have appeared. Strout's office contained an impressive collection of murder weapons from throughout the ages – maces, crossbows, garrotting scarves, sabers, handguns and Uzis. And, apparently, bayonets.

He withdrew it from the bag, hefted it affectionately, and handed it to Glitsky. 'I thought I'd cut my steak with this at breakfast. Make an impression on our waiter. But look.'

Abe was already looking. It was, as Strout had noted, a pig sticker of the first order. Where the blade met the handle of the knife was an oversized steel haft with a half-inch circular hole through the metal.

Strout was pointing again. 'That's where it connects to the mount of the rifle.' Then back to the picture. 'It's also why there's that kind of double circle – the top of the haft, then the punch-out area… couldn't really be any thing else.'

'How common are these things, you think?'

Strout shrugged. 'Well, they ain't exactly Carter's Pills, but anybody wants could get ahold of one. Army/Navy stores, gun clubs, mail order, good old paramilitary-type boys saving our country from the government… your guess is as good as mine. Round here they probably wouldn't be as common as, say, in Idaho or Oregon, but you'd find 'em.'

'Also, ex-Army,' Glitsky said. Suddenly, he experienced a small jolt of connection. Mark Dooher. Vietnam and his dead troops. He closed his eyes, trying to re-visualize the photograph he'd seen in the attorney's office, whether there might have been a bayonet mounted on any of the many weapons displayed. He couldn't see it, couldn't bring it back.

But Strout was going on. 'Actually, Abe, that might be a tougher nut. If memory serves, they take your weapons away when they muster you out. 'Course, you could smuggle 'em… people probably been known to.'

Rubbing his thumb over the bayonet's blade, Glitsky nodded. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'That would be illegal.'

After his Monday-morning breakfast meeting with John Strout, Glitsky had planned to get right on the Trang investigation – murders that didn't get solved in the first couple of days very often never did. But when he'd come back to the office, there had been another homicide. He had been on call last week, so normally this would have been someone else's problem, but this week's Inspector had called in sick and gone salmon fishing, and Glitsky appeared just as his Lieutenant, Frank Batiste, had despaired of finding an Inspector to assign.

Apparently, a fry cooker who'd been fired from a Tastee Burger in the lower Mission had returned to the scene of his humiliation and gone Postal – a new expression Glitsky loved. The ex-employee naturally killed none of the people with whom he had a gripe. He did, though, by mistake before he killed himself, end the life of a seventeen-year-old high-school student who'd stopped in for a hot chocolate. This new homicide brought Glitsky's workload to seven active cases, and put him inside and around the Tastee Burger for the rest of the day.

Now it was just before noon on Tuesday and finally he was at Mrs Trang's clean but cluttered apartment with Paul Thieu, his enthusiastic interpreter.

Victor's mother had been Glitsky's first choice of where to begin asking questions, but like so many other of his plans lately, this one hadn't panned out. He had respected the fact that she had been too distraught to talk in the immediate aftermath of her son's death. Then there had been the wake and funeral. This morning was the earliest they could get together.

The apartment was a study in lace. Every smooth surface was covered with some type of crocheted thing – a doily or hankie or tablecloth. There was lace over the back of the overstuffed couch that Glitsky and Thieu were directed to, lace over the coffee table, on the end tables under the lamps and photographs, on the television set, under the phone on the little hall table. A feeble sunlight struggled to pierce a veil of web-like lace drapery covering the front windows.

Trang's mother was petite and weathered, with flat gray hair and a shapeless tiny body, made more so by its enclosure in an oversized man's black business suit, over the shoulders of which she had thrown a crocheted white shawl. She offered them small flavorless cookies of some kind and coffee – near boiling, chicory-laced and appalling to Glitsky's taste, but Thieu sucked the first cup right up, black, and accepted a second. She sat still as a rock at the coffee table, responding to his opening expressions of regret in a patient and compliant way, without any interest. Her life, along with her son's, was apparently over.

But now, finally, he was getting to it. 'And the last time you saw your son was?'

He waited for Thieu to interpret, listened to the woman's inflection as she answered, trying to piece something in advance from sounds alone, but the tonality was too flat. Thieu nodded to Mrs Trang, then turned to him: 'She saw him the day before he was killed, but talked to him that night, that evening, after dinner sometime. She's not sure exactly what time.'

Glitsky pretended to scribble on his pad and kept his face impassive, his voice low and conversational. 'Paul, would you please just say the words she says, exactly? Don't tell me what she says. Say what she says.'

The younger man nodded, then swallowed, suitably chided. 'Sorry.'

'It's okay.' He sat forward on the couch, spoke directly to the mother. 'Mrs Trang, how did Victor seem to you the last time you saw him?'

Thieu translated. The wait. 'He was hopeful. We had a nice dinner. He tries to come over at least once a week, on Sunday, sometimes more. He…' She paused and Thieu waited. 'It saves him money to come here and eat, I think. He has taken a little while to start making money as a lawyer, and he felt that he was about to make a lot.'

'And how was he going to do that?'

'He had a client who was suing the Archdiocese, and he said they – the Archdiocese – had offered to…' Thieu listened, turned to Glitsky. 'She's apologizing to me,' he said. 'She doesn't know the jargon.'

Glitsky pointedly ignored Thieu. 'That's all right, Mrs Trang, just do your best.'

She came back to him, began talking again. Thieu picked it up: '… to settle it… before going to court. They were not going to go to court and he thought he would make a lot of money.'

'He was pretty certain of that?'

'Yes. He seemed very sure, very hopeful. But also worried.'

'What about?'

'That it wouldn't happen. That something would go wrong.' A pause. 'As it has.'

'Did he say what might go wrong? What he was worried about?'

'That this was a lot of money, and the Church might use… connections… in the court, perhaps, so that even though Victor was right, even if the law was on his side, they could stop him.'

'Did you think he meant violently?'

'No. Now, I don't know. Maybe so.'

'How much money was he talking about?'

'He didn't say exactly. Enough to pay off his loans. He thought he would move his office, get a secretary. He wanted to get me a new place.' She motioned around their cramped quarters. 'Buy me some new clothes.'

'Okay, then, how about the next night, when he called? Did he call or did you call him?'

'He called me. The attorney for the Archdiocese…'

'MarkDooher?'

'Yes, I think that was his name. He had called Victor and asked him to stay in the office to wait for a phone call, and they were going to offer more money that night.'

'Did he say when he'd gotten that first call, from Dooher?'

'I thought it was just then, just before he called me.'

Glitsky made a note on his yellow pad. There would be a phone record of the precise time.

Mrs Trang said a few more words, which Thieu related. 'It's why he stayed late.'

'Would he have called anyone else about this, to tell them, perhaps, about the possible settlement?'

'No. I wanted to call my sister and tell her and he told me to wait, that he was going to wait, too. Not to talk to anyone until it was done. He didn't want to…' Thieu frowned, trying to find the right word '… to bring it bad luck, to jinx it. He told me this.'

'But that doesn't mean the girlfriend or somebody else didn't just happen to drop by.' Thieu wanted to talk about it. Still and always.

Glitsky was driving the unmarked Plymouth back to Trang's office, trying to keep from jumping to conclusions, glad he didn't usually work with a partner. He was coming to believe that entirely too much credence was given to the round-table discussion. Sometimes – a radical idea in this bumptious age, he knew – but sometimes solitary contemplation did produce results.

'It had to be somebody he knew, right?' Thieu persisted. 'It wasn't a robbery – nothing was missing.'

'We don't know that. We don't know what was there to be missing.'

'I mean his wallet, personal effects…'

'It might have just been botched.' If Thieu wanted to play these games, Glitsky could at least make them instructive. 'Guy's in there and Trang comes back from dinner…'

'He didn't leave for dinner.' Paul had done his homework. 'The autopsy didn't find anything in his stomach.'

'So he came back for his keys or something. Or went to mail a letter. If he left, though, and came back, discovered the perp burglarizing the place, who killed him, then decided he'd better split…'

'That didn't happen,' Thieu said.

'No, I don't think so either. But it could have, which is my point. What I think is what you think – a strong male who knew him killed him.'

'Dooher?'

'Maybe, or maybe one of his clients. Maybe one of the people he was hassling for business.' Abe gave the other man a sidelong glance. 'That's what they pay us for, to find out.'

Trang's office didn't look much better in the daytime, and to Thieu it felt worse. The crime-scene tape was still across the door. Inside, the way it had been left by the Forensics and Homicide teams on Friday night created a sense of abandonment that, to Thieu, was overwhelming.

He noticed that none of whatever weak sunlight there had been outside made it into this cavern. Ever.

Glitsky had zipped up his flight jacket. His breath showed in the chill. He crossed to the one window – the black hole of the other night – and opened it into the brick of the building next door, about four inches away. He stuck his head out and looked up, down, sideways. 'If the perp came through here,' he said, 'he is one skinny dude.'

It was the first even remote touch of levity Thieu had heard from the Sergeant. Emboldened by it, he dared ask another question. 'What are we looking for?'

Glitsky had moved back to the desk, was sitting in the library chair. He motioned to four cardboard boxes lurking in the corner with manila file folders visible in them. 'Anything. Why don't you start by looking through those boxes?' Thieu shrugged – the well of Glitsky's humor was proving to be relatively shallow – and went to work.

The files weren't alphabetically arranged, and he'd gone through the first three of them – notes from law school! – when he heard a click and a hum behind him, and turned to see Glitsky at the computer, legs stretched out, arms crossed, scowling at the monitor. After a minute, the Sergeant sat forward and began clicking the mouse.

Thieu left his boxes, straightened up and came around behind him, resolving to ask no questions, though it wasn't his style not to ask. He liked people and believed that the truth emerged from a full and free discussion of ideas and theories. Also, it had been his experience at UCLA that asking professors what they wanted was how you found out what to give them. It wasn't any mystery, just simple communication. And then at the Academy it got drilled into them that you should just ask questions and senior officers would always be happy to help you.

He didn't think anybody had briefed the Inspector here on that part.

The monitor was scrolling the pages of a document that was evidently some kind of an organizer. Glitsky got to the day of Trang's death, a week ago yesterday now, and leaned forward. 'Look at this,' he said.

Thieu already was. There were four entries:

10:22 – called MD, told him need answer by COB today or filing tomorrow. $3.00 million.

1:40 – MD message. I called back. He was at lunch. WCB.

4:50 – MD callback. F. out till 6. Extension till midnight tonight okay.

7:25 – MD from F's. Settlement possible. Offer $$ still unresolved. Midnight firm.

Thieu couldn't stop himself. That last one, that's when he called his mother. Who's "F"?'

Glitsky was scrolling backward now, eyes on the screen. 'The Archbishop,' he said. 'Flaherty.'

As expected, it didn't appear that Victor Trang had had a lot of business. The screens reflected few clients, appointments or telephone numbers. At the screen for a couple of weeks earlier, Glitsky stopped on another screen: MD, $600KH! Declined.

'That's something,' Thieu said.

Glitsky nodded. 'Youbetcha.'

'He turned it down?'

'Looks like. I guess he thought he could get more.'

There was an answering machine with calls from Trang's girlfriend, Lily Martin, and Mrs Trang and Mark Dooher and Felicia Diep, all wondering if Victor were there, why he'd not called back, would he please call when he got the message.

They also found the folder on the lawsuit, including the amended complaint, pre-dated for Tuesday, the day after Trang's murder. There was a yellow legal pad with pages of notes that were mostly unintelligible to Glitsky, but on the first page Thieu had been able to read enough to learn that Trang had felt 'threatened' in his first visit to McCabe & Roth.

'Dooher?' Thieu asked. They were heading back downtown where Glitsky was to talk to Lily Martin, who'd volunteered to come to the Hall of Justice for an interview. 'I'd just bring him in and grill him.'

'About what?'

'About what? About all this is what!'

'This isn't anything, Paul. This is squat. We are nowhere yet on this.' He didn't really want to bite off Thieu's head. After all, what the man was saying could be correct. But there was, as yet, no evidence that it had been Dooher, not even enough to insult him by asking him pointed questions. And Glitsky was still smarting from his fiasco with the undoubtedly guilty Levon Copes, where he had just known what had happened. He wasn't going to make the same mistake here. But he was really being an unnecessary hardass. He didn't want to burn the kid out before he even got lit.

Although he knew he wouldn't require any translator with Lily Martin, Glitsky decided on the spur of the moment to invite Thieu to remain for the interview with her. Besides, Glitsky knew there was a chance he might need him again. 'Let's talk to the girlfriend first, Paul. See what she's got to say.'

'One million six hundred thousand dollars was the settlement figure. Which was… would have been… five hundred and thirty-three thousand for Victor.'

Lily Martin was absolutely certain.

She was conservatively and, Glitsky thought, inexpensively well dressed, and she spoke English perfectly, having been in this country since she was four. Her father, Ed Martin, had fought in Vietnam, married her mother over there and brought them all back here. Now she was twenty-five. Working, as she did, as a junior accountant doing her internship with a Big 8 firm, the money angle was no mystery to her.

'Victor's mother said he told her he wasn't going to call anybody to tell them,' Abe said gently. 'He didn't want to jinx the deal.'

'He didn't call me -I called him. Like a minute after he got the call.' She broke a brittle smile, which cracked almost immediately. 'This was going to be the start of our life, of everything. Of course I called him.'

'That night? Last Monday?'

'Yes.'

'And what did he say?'

'He said that Mr Dooher had just called from the Archbishop's office, and he wanted… before he presented a final number to the Archbishop… he wanted to run it by Victor to see if they were going to be in the ballpark.'

'And that number was…?'

'What I just told you, Sergeant, a million six.'

'I just want to get this straight, ma'am. Dooher told him they were going to be talking in that range?'

That's right.'

'And if they – Dooher and Flaherty – if they didn't come through?'

'Then Victor was going to file, but he didn't think… no.' She folded her arms, too quickly, over her chest. Glitsky recognized the classic body language – she'd decided to clam up about something.

'No, what?'

'Nothing. I'm sorry. Go ahead.'

The interrogation room was small and windowless. There was no art on the walls. The furnishings consisted of three folding chairs around a pitted wooden table. This setting could play on the nerves of even the most cooperative witness. The air got stale. People froze, imagined things, got weirded out in any number of ways.

Suddenly Glitsky leaned back, straightened, shook his shoulders, getting loose. He lifted the corners of his mouth, scratched his face. Finally, there was the trick he did with the eyes, letting them go out of focus. He fancied this made people think there was something soft in there. He turned his head to include Paul Thieu. 'How about if we all take a break, get a cup of tea or something?'

'So then, after you talked this night…?'

'He was going to come to my place. He asked me not to call again – Dooher might be there. He'd call when he knew, or when it was over.'

'And when he didn't?'

'I just thought it must have gone real late. He just went home. I waited all the next day at work, but no call. I tried his office, his home… even Mr Dooher's office.'

'And what did he say?'

'He didn't talk to me.' Glitsky and Thieu exchanged glances. Lou the Greek's seemed unusually cavernous, nearly empty here in the mid-afternoon. It provided a better environment for talking than the tiny interrogation room at the Hall. 'So eventually I went by the office and knocked, but there wasn't any answer. Of course.' By now she was sniffling occasionally into a napkin. 'And then I called the police.'

Glitsky kept it casual. 'Why wouldn't Dooher talk to you?'

She shook her head. 'I don't think it's so much he wouldn 't, he just didn't. His secretary took my message, which was that I was a friend of Victor Trang's and did he have any idea where Victor was? Had he seen him? Then she called back and said he was concerned, too. Maybe we should both call the police. So that's where I left it.'

Glitsky was tearing his own napkin into tiny bits and piling them neatly on the table. 'Ms Martin. Upstairs a while ago there was something you didn't want to talk about, about the settlement with Dooher…'

She cast her eyes to the ceiling and sighed deeply. 'Okay,' she said.

That night, at the Glitsky home, it was almost the way it used to be. His sons were watching television, perhaps even doing some homework to the mindless background, in the bedroom shared by the two younger boys.

Flo was feeling better today. It went up and down. But tonight it was way up. She was dressed in tight bluejeans, gold sandals and no socks, a maroon blouse. Diamond stud earrings and a brush of makeup, a light touch of lipstick. A maroon scarf artfully curled around her head to hide the hair loss.

The nurse was off at night. And Flo had sent Glitsky's dad back to his home. She told him he needed some time for himself. He should take in a movie, go solve one of the mysteries of the Talmud.

Nat must be sick of taking care of things here and Flo was able to cope today. Who knew how long it was going to last, but for now – maybe a couple of days, maybe more – she craved some semblance of normalcy for them all.

And somehow – she was a genius – she'd done it. Created that feel. Made dinner of stuffed flank steak (everybody's favorite), home fries with onions and peppers, broccoli and cheese sauce, vanilla ice cream over cherry pie. 'You know, I just never seem to worry about cholesterol anymore.'

Jokes yet.

Now she was rinsing dishes – about a freightcar full – piling them carefully in the dishwasher. Glitsky sat on the counter next to her, telling her about his day, just like old times, about what Lily Martin had suddenly gone quiet about, which was that her boyfriend never really thought he would win the lawsuit if he filed it.

'You mean he was basically trying to extort money from the Church?'

'Lily didn't want to put it so bluntly, but essentially, yeah.'

'That is scuzzy.'

Glitsky shrugged. 'He's a lawyer. Was a lawyer.'

'You think that's why he got killed?'

'Just because he was a lawyer? I don't know, Flo, that's a tough theory. There's lot of lawyers out there and many of them are alive.'

She gave him the eye. 'Because of the deal, Abraham.'

He temporized. 'I don't know yet. I think it might be possible.'

Another look. 'Sergeant goes out on limb. Film at eleven.'

He smiled at her, his real smile. My problem is this: so what? This guy Dooher may have had all this against Victor Trang, but you don't go out and kill somebody who's suing your client. And this killing was personal.'

'How about if you thought you might lose your client if you lost?'

'But they weren't even playing yet. Nobody was going to lose that big. They were settling.'

'Maybe the client wasn't happy about the settlement terms. They'd go with this one because they had to, it had gone too far, whatever – but afterwards they fire the lawyer. Or he thinks they might.'

'So he kills the guy?' Abe shook his head. 'I just don't see it. It doesn't make any sense. Besides, this lawyer we're talking about, Dooher, he's managing partner of a big firm downtown. He's been at this all of his life. He's not going to kill a professional adversary over a case. Besides, they lose a case, they lose a client, it's not the end of the world. His firm's probably got a hundred clients.'

'Only probably? You didn't check?'

Glitsky had to smile. 'Yeah, Flo, in my free time I ran a D &B on them. Firms don't usually run on one client.'

Flo shrugged. 'Okay, so who then, if it's not money?'

'I know. I just hate to see a money motive go nowhere.'

She put the last dish into the dishwasher, closed it up, and came to stand in front of her husband, between his legs. She put her arms around him. They kissed.

'I remember that,' Glitsky said.

Flo nodded toward their bedroom. 'Race you.'

For a half-hour, he'd forgotten all about real life.

Then she was breathing regularly and he was back in it. The clock said 9:45. It was a school night – he had to get the boys down to bed. He had to move, but if he didn't, maybe it would all just stop right here, where he was, where they all were.

She shifted slightly. 'Abe?' Not sleeping after all. 'Find somebody else. Promise me that.'

There was a tremor, a tic, above his eye. The muscle of his jaw tightened. The scar through his lips went white with a surge of anger so sharp it grabbed his next breath.

'I don't want to talk about it.' He stood. 'It's time I got those kids to bed.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Christina knew it had happened at the dinner on Saturday at Sam's… its aftermath.

On the drive back to her apartment, Joe going on and on. How could Christina think she knew Mark Dooher so well? What was with the two of them? Where did she get off, saying he was nothing like a bastard? And while they were at it, what was the real story behind her knowing about these retreats with Dooher and Farrell?

And she'd closed her eyes, too tired to fight him anymore, to explain, to care. The certainty had come in a flash – that Joe wasn't right for her, and all the rationalizing and wishing in the world wasn't going to change that.

He would never be right. She didn't love him.

There had been early admiration, then a desire born of curiosity, followed by a leap of faith. But the fact was that she didn't feel much about him one way or the other. Except when he started talking about /acts. And even then she didn't hate him – she just found him irritating and boring.

Pleading a headache, she'd gone into her apartment alone, said she'd call him when she felt better.

Which wasn't Sunday. Then on Monday he'd flown to LA and stayed overnight. She'd been out both nights, studying. She'd come home and listened to his petulant messages and it all got clearer.

Now, Wednesday morning, she stood at his office door. He was, as always, hip-deep in work. Ear stuck to his telephone, he was signing something and reading something else, passing paper to his secretary, who hovered beside him with a notepad and an expression of exasperated fear.

Yep, Christina thought, Joe is going to make it.

Fate sealed the decision. At that moment Joe reasonably spoke into the telephone: 'I don't think you've got all your ducks lined up, Bill, and that's the plain fact of it.'

She came forward into the room. Seeing her, Joe held up one finger, pointed at the phone and smiled as though she were a client he'd been expecting. He mouthed, 'Be right there.'

She sadly shook her head and put the envelope containing the ring and her letter on his desk. Patting it once, she turned and walked out.

'I feel like a coward, just running out like that. I should have faced him.'

'And said what?'

'I don't know. Told him.'

'Would he have listened?'

'Maybe to the fact that I was leaving him. Maybe that.' She looked out at the whitecaps pocking the blue bay, sailboats half-keeled in the breeze, San Francisco in the distance, the Golden Gate beyond the Sausalito curve to her right. At Sam's expression, she laughed. 'No, you're right. Not even to that. And that look isn't fair.'

'What look? And I didn't say anything.'

'You know what look. And you didn't have to.'

They were at Scoma's, having taken the ferry to Sausalito. Sam had two experienced volunteers working at the Center and decided she could afford a few hours off. For her part, Christina, after leaving her envelope, had been tempted to go to Dooher's office and tell him about it, but thought it would smack of leading him on, which she flatly wasn't going to do.

To what end? He'd made it clear he was married, not interested in her in that way. And what a relief, really, though she did think he was terrific.

She sometimes thought every other man on the planet was incapable of seeing who she was inside. But not Mark. He simply liked her, who she was. It was a joy.

She was aware, however, that her decision to break off with Joe had come about because she'd been unable to avoid contrasting the younger man to Dooher, with his heady mix of physical good looks, substance, experience, power, and humor. She decided that her growing friendship with him would be the litmus test for the kind of relationship she would eventually… not settle for, as she had with Joe. But settle on. Someone of Dooher's quality, if he could be found at all. It might take a while.

But that was the other thing, the other wonderful result of this friendship with Mark Dooher – if some other man didn't come along to validate who she was, it didn't have to be the end of the world.

She was trying to explain this to Sam. 'I don't know why it took me so long to realize. Sometimes I think about the only man who's ever liked me for me, besides my dad, is Mark.'

Sam, mopping up the perfect Dore sauce with the perfect piece of fresh sourdough bread, was matter-of-fact. 'It's the curse of fabulous beauty.' She raised her eyes. 'I'm serious.'

Christina knew better than to flutter her lids with false modesty. 'Well. But now at least I'm getting a glimpse that maybe I'm worth something by myself.'

'As opposed to?'

'I don't know. The lesser half of some guy I happen to be with?'

'The trophy?'

Christina nodded. 'On some level it's flattering. Or something. So I let it happen -I become the person they want me to be.'

'It's tempting, that's why. It is flattering. It's also what everybody's always taught you. You want to please. You're hard-wired for it. So it gets internalized.' Sam mopped more sauce. 'I cannot make a sauce this good at home. How do they do this?' She took the bite, chewed a moment, sighed. 'It's one of the hard truths.'

'The sauce?'

Sam laughed, shook her head. 'What sauce?' Another laugh. 'I'm all over the place, aren't I? No, the hard truth about who we are. I went through the same thing about ten years ago.'

'I think you've lost me. What same thing?'

'This decision that I wasn't what some man thought I was.'

'And you did it, just like that?'

'No.' Smiling again, she held up a finger. 'But I tried. I acted that way for all the world to see. Got my heart broke four or five times. Got bitter and cynical about men. But I did get better about me. I think. Eventually.'

Christina nodded. 'Well, I'm not going back. Not the same way. Not to another Joe.'

'Good. Hold on to that feeling. You're going to need it when it's been six months. You get a little lonesome. Trust me on this.'

'I think I can handle lonesome. I've done lonesome before. The difference was that lonely was always clearly the time between one guy and the next guy. Now, I think I'll cultivate some friendships.'

'Friendships are good,' Sam said. 'As long as you don't get confused.'

'You mean Mark Dooher?' Christina shook her head. 'No. He's not like that.'

Sam raised an eyebrow. 'He's not a sexual creature?'

'No.' She laughed. 'He exudes… confidence that way, I suppose. But he's married. He's happy. He's got it in balance. He's never come on to me in any way. In fact, more the opposite. Hands off. Be a person first. It's great, actually.'

'I've got to meet this guy. Wes thinks he's God, too.'

'Speaking of…'

'God – or Wes?'

Christina nodded. 'MrFarrell.'

'I'm afraid I let lonesome get the better of me and pursued him a little more, uh, recklessly than I would have liked. Now I like to think we're moving cautiously toward friendship, but we've got a ways to go before we get beyond superficial.'

'Which isn't so bad, is it?'

Sam shrugged. 'I don't really know. That's the funny thing. It makes me a little nervous – what we've been talking about all day here. There's no way I'm investing any of this,' she tapped her heart, 'until I know him better.'

'Until you know it's real.'

Sam's face was a kaleidoscope of emotions. She nodded sheepishly. 'That's always the question, isn't it?'

Glitsky really hated it when he talked himself out of a plausible murder suspect, and that's exactly what his two talks – the one with his wife and the other with Paul Thieu – had accomplished.

Not only did he lack any physical evidence pointing to Mark Dooher as Victor Trang's killer, but – as he had told Flo – there was no reasonable way that a successful corporate lawyer was going to stab another lawyer to death over the terms of a possible settlement. That solution, much as he would love it if it did, just didn't scan.

So he was going to have to get another approach, and to that end he had dropped in on Paul Thieu in Missing Persons and asked him to call Felicia Diep and set up an appointment for some time, if possible, before afternoon tea.

In the meanwhile, Glitsky went upstairs to Homicide.

The room looked as it always did – a large open area with twelve desks, no more than three of them occupied at any one time; the doorless corner cubicle 'office' of the Chief of Homicide, Lieutenant Frank Batiste; two massive dry wall columns papered, stuck and tagged with every poster, fax, ammo sale notice, car repo slip, random prostitute's phone number – and so on – that had crossed some Inspector's desk in the past four years or so and which, at the time, had seemed too important, funny, or unusual to simply discard in a waste basket.

Glitsky's desk was next to one of these columns. He pulled his chair in, crossed his arms behind his head, and put his feet up. His eyes came to rest on the Xeroxed note at his eye level: Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash.

He let his chair back down, trying to will away the nagging sense that he shouldn't stop concentrating on Mark Dooher who was, in some ways, the least likely probable candidate for the murder. But for just that reason…

Instinct counted. That was the problem. Glitsky's instincts were screaming something that he couldn't prove – Trang's murder had to have been personal. Someone had hated him passionately.

And that element just didn't seem to be there with his business adversary, Mark Dooher. So Glitsky should stop wasting energy on him. Except if Trang represented something Dooher hated passionately. Like Vietnamese people.

No. Forget that. He had a lot of other work, six other pressing homicides.

It might, after all, be the girlfriend, Lily. Girlfriends always had a motive or two. And Lily stood to benefit if Trang accepted Dooher's settlement. Maybe she'd gotten mad at him when he hadn't? Yesterday he'd told himself that no, she was too small; she could never have held Trang up. But – sudden thought – what if she had another boyfriend? She'd known Victor was alone in the office. He'd overlooked that. If she sent boyfriend number two over…

'Abe – got a minute?'

Frank Batiste stood in the doorway to his cubicle. The Lieutenant and Glitsky had come up together through the ranks. Both were nominal minorities – Glitsky half-black, Batiste a 'Spanish surname' – and both had elected to disregard any advantages, and they were legion, accruing to that status in San Francisco. It had created a bond of sorts. And although Batiste currently outranked Glitsky, they'd been in the department the same number of years and felt like equals.

So Glitsky got up and by the time he reached the doorway, the Lieutenant was sitting behind his desk.

'What's up, Frank?'

'Come on in. Sit down. Get the door.'

A joke, since there was no door. Glitsky took the folding chair across from the desk. Batiste pulled a pencil from his drawer and began tapping the table. 'So you know how to tell the prostitute in the Miss America contest?'

'I'm afraid I don't, Frank.'

'She's the one with the banner reading I-da-ho?

The one saving constant in the office, Glitsky thought. Somebody's always got a dumb joke. And Batiste was on a roll. 'Okay, another chance for you: you know the difference between Mick Jagger and a Scotsman?'

Glitsky broke a small smile. 'I give up.'

'Mick Jagger says "Hey, you, get offa my cloud," and the Scotsman says "Hey, McCloud, get off my ewe.'"

'You gotta get an agent, Frank. The right agent could make you a star.'

'That's true, the downside being that it would leave a vacancy here,' Batiste said. He pulled himself up straighter, getting to business. 'Which is what this is about. I notice you aren't taking this year's Lieutenant's exam. You don't want to make more money?'

'More money would be good.'

'Then what?'

'Maybe I don't want to be a Lieutenant. Maybe I don't want to leave Homicide.' Typically, a promotion to Lieutenant meant a transfer out of the detail to which an officer had been assigned. There were exceptions to this rule. Batiste himself had been a Homicide Inspector before his promotion. That wasn't something to count on, but Batiste was hinting that it could happen again with Abe. But, of course, first he had to take the exam.

Batiste opened the side drawer of his desk and took out a giant handful of peanuts in the shell. He dumped them on the desk between them, then grabbed one and cracked it. The peanuts were a constant in the Homicide detail. No one remembered when or how they'd first arrived, but they were always there. 'That's fine if that's what you want. I just didn't want it to be an oversight. I know you've had a lot on your mind lately.'

Batiste chewed and cracked another peanut, busy with it. This was awkward ground. 'You want my opinion, you want to take the test, keep your options open.'

Glitsky gave it a minute, then nodded. 'Okay, I'll do that. Thanks for mentioning it.'

'Good.'

The sound of peanuts being cracked. Neither of the men moved. 'Hey, Frank.'

'Yeah?'

Another long moment. Batiste took another handful of nuts out of his drawer and Glitsky got up, dropped his shells into the waste basket, looked out through the open entrance of Batiste's office, then sat back down. 'Are you sure there isn't anything else? I could handle it, there was.'

'Like what?'

'Like I've got so much on my mind that I'm not doing my job?' Glitsky's voice remained matter-of-fact, but his eyes became distant. 'That I'd be better off pushing paper as a Lieutenant in the traffic division than as a lowly Inspector with a real job in Homicide.' The eyes rested on his Lieutenant. 'I'd like to know, Frank, I really would. If I'm an embarrassment…'

'Who's saying that?'

His shoulders sagged. 'I am, I guess. I'm asking. I couldn't close on Levon Copes. Then I get assigned this clown who shoots up the Tastee Burger when there is no investigation to conduct but it keeps me off the streets? This kind of stuff, it makes me wonder.'

Batiste had stopped with the peanuts. He shook his head. 'Nobody's saying anything like that, Abe. I don't even think it.'

Glitsky took a breath. A beat. Another one. Three.

Batiste. 'You all right?'

'I'm reading everything wrong, Frank. Sorry. I didn't mean to lay it on you. I'm just getting everything wrong.'

Batiste told Abe he didn't have to worry so much about what he might be doing wrong. So what if he wasted a few minutes? They worked in the city's last bastion where results – not hours – were what counted. If Glitsky felt he wasn't on all cylinders, enough were still firing to get the job done. So he should put aside the doubts about why he thought it was Dooher.

Sometimes professionals had hunches. You asked yourself every question you could think of, even if you didn't exactly know why you needed to ask it. Answering them all probably wouldn't take fifteen minutes.

Then he could go talk to Lily Martin again, or Felicia Diep. Or the Pope.

Which gave Glitsky an idea.

'By the way, I met your girlfriend again the other night. I think she likes you.'

Wes Farrell, leaning against the padded back wall, was sitting on the hardwood floor on the squash court, breathing hard. Dooher wasn't even winded. He was absently whacking the ball into the wall, hitting it back on the short hop. A machine.

'I've got so many, Wes, which one are we talking about?'

'The pretty one.'

Dooher inclined his racket slightly, the ball bounced, shot straight up off his racket, and arced into his waiting palm. 'They're all pretty,' he said, smiling.

They're not all as pretty as she is. The girl from Fior d'ltalia? Christina. Your summer clerk. Ring a bell?'

Dooher corrected him. 'One of my summer clerks, Wes. I think we're bringing on about ten. And I hate to ruin your fantasies, but we've remained platonic.'

'I thought I was talking about your fantasies.'

'I have no fantasies. I live an ordered and disciplined life, which is why I will beat you in this next game. Besides, Sheila and I are enjoying a little renaissance right at the moment.' Dooher gave his practiced shrug, minimizing personal complicity in all the good things, such as his wife's sexual favors, that constantly came his way, and bounced the ball off the floor. 'Double or nothing? I'm ready. Where'd you see her?'

Farrell slowly pulled himself to his feet. 'Actually, I'm having a little renaissance myself.'

'With Lydia?'

'Lydia who? Her name's Sam.' He was all the way on his feet now, half limping, holding his back. 'How did I get so decrepit, anyway? I eat right, I drink right. Am I not at this very moment exercising?'

Dooher was tossing the ball up and down, catching it without looking. 'Whose name is Sam?'

'My girlfriend, you fool. And Christina Carrera is a friend of hers. We were at a dinner party.'

'And my name came up?'

Wes shrugged. 'When we realized half the people there knew you. I said you weren't as bad as you appeared. I'm afraid I told them your Vietnam story.'

Dooher's face clouded for a moment. 'That story. I don't think it's come up once in the past ten years, and just the other day…' Dooher explained about Glitsky. 'So I showed him the picture. What was Christina's reaction to all this talk of me?'

'She didn't need your tragic background to think you were a hero. She's one of your fans. Obviously, someone has deluded her into thinking you are a sweet and gentle soul under that craggy exterior.'

'She's got a keen insight into human nature,' Dooher said. 'Maybe I'll give her a raise.'

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It wasn't exactly the Pope, but Glitsky's Polish was pretty ragged anyway. He figured the Archbishop was close enough.

Flaherty's Appointments Secretary was initially inclined to be coldly officious, but after Glitsky had explained that he needed a personal appointment with His Excellency to talk about the murder of one of his flock, the man had first gotten interested, then had thawed. He checked. Flaherty had a two o'clock, but his lunch had broken up early – he was in the office right now. Would Glitsky wait a moment?

Okay, the secretary had told him, if he could get down to the Chancery Office, the Archbishop would give him between when he arrived and his appointment, say twenty minutes if he flew.

He flew.

The windows were open and the sound of children playing down below drifted up to them.

They sat kitty-corner in wingchairs. The spartan office was chilly. Glitsky kept his jacket zipped. The rest of the room reinforced the theme of minimal creature comfort – Berber rug, flat-top desk, computer, the chairs, some photos of Flaherty with unknowns and kids and sports figures, a crucifix, a wall of books. With no pretension or sign of earthly power, it was nothing that Glitsky had expected.

Neither was the man himself. In his black pants, scuffed loafers, white socks, green and white striped dress shirt, the Archbishop might have been a high-school teacher. The gray eyes, though, were singular. Intelligence there, Glitsky thought, lots of it. The ability to calculate. To see through things.

But in spite of that, he didn't seem to be following Glitsky's line of questioning. 'Are you saying that Mark Dooher told you we had a meeting here on Monday a week ago?'

'He didn't say that, no.'

'Good. Because that didn't happen.'

'There was no meeting to talk about an increase in the settlement you were willing to give Mr Trang?'

'Yes, we had that meeting. But it was, it must have been three weeks ago. Maybe more. And we decided no. We were sticking with the six hundred thousand.'

Clearly, the settlement issue still rankled. But Flaherty wanted to go back.

'I'm curious. You said you talked to Mark, Mr Dooher, is that right? So if he didn't mention this meeting, who did?'

'Victor Trang's girlfriend. And his mother. Independently.' Glitsky felt he ought to explain a little further. 'I've been talking to people as they've been available, sir. Dooher was first.'

'Where did you even get that connection? Dooher to Trang?'

Flaherty might try to present a low profile, but he was used to command. Glitsky sat back, kept his voice low. 'Dooher called Missing Persons. Him, the girlfriend, the mother. That's where I started. And Dooher didn't volunteer anything about the meeting, but since that time I've heard about it from two sources. I'm trying to find out if it happened.'

'Why didn't you go back to Dooher?'

Now Glitsky leaned forward, made some eye contact. 'Excuse me, sir, but do you mind if I ask a couple of the questions? That's how we usually do this.'

The Archbishop let go with a deep-throated laugh, recovered, told Glitsky he was sorry, to go ahead. He'd shut up.

'So there was no meeting?'

'No. Not that Monday night. Not any night. As I said, we discussed the settlement terms at one of our regular daytime business meetings.'

Glitsky consulted the notes he'd taken with Lily Martin. 'You never discussed the figure of a million six hundred thousand.'

'No chance. Mark wouldn't even have brought me a figure like that. He knows that would have been insane. Hell, what we did offer – the six hundred - that was insane.'

'But Trang turned it down?'

The Archbishop shrugged. 'People are greedy, Sergeant. It's one of the cardinal sins and I bet you wouldn't be surprised how often it comes up.'

'So where was it going from there? The lawsuit?'

'I'd guess Mr Trang was going to amend the complaint and then file it. And lose.'

'That's what everybody seems to think. Which makes me wonder why he was going to do it.'

Another shrug. 'It was a power play, Sergeant, pure and simple. That's all it was. Mr Trang evidently thinks – thought – that we have infinitely deep pockets. He was, I gather, inexperienced in these matters, and evidently thought he could get more simply by holding out, putting the squeeze on a little tighter. But the suit itself had little merit.'

'And yet you were going to settle for six hundred thousand dollars?'

Flaherty broke a cold smile. He hesitated, uncrossed his legs, and leaned in toward Glitsky. 'In real life, Sergeant, an untrue accusation can be as damning as a conviction. We were willing to pay something to keep a lid on the accusation.'

'But not a million six?'

'No. Not even half that, as I've told you.'

'Did Dooher ever mention to you how he felt about Trang personally?'

'No.'

'Didn't like him or dislike him?'

'He was an adversary. I don't think they saw each other socially, if that's what you mean.' Flaherty sat back. 'You can't honestly think Mark Dooher could have had a hand in any of this, do you?'

Glitsky pointed a finger, toy-gun style, risking a faint smile. 'You're asking questions again, but the answer is I don't have a clue. Trang's death seems to have been good for the Archdiocese…'

Finally, a degree of frustration peeked through. 'Sergeant, we're in constant litigation about one thing or the other. One lawsuit, one scandal, more or less, just isn't going to make too much difference. And that's God's truth.'

Not that Glitsky necessarily bought it, but that direction wasn't taking him anywhere. 'All right, one last question. Do you have an appointments calendar I might glance at? See what you were doing that Monday night?'

This marked the obvious crossing of the Archbishop's threshold into active annoyance. Flaherty nodded curtly, stood up, and went to the door and out. In a moment he returned with a large black book. He carefully placed it open onto Glitsky's lap. 'That the day?'

'Yes, sir.' He looked down. 'Catholic Youth Organization convention. Do you remember that? Did it go on late?'

Flaherty was no longer Glitsky's friend, that was certain. But he answered civilly. 'It was at Asilomar, Sergeant, down in Pacific Grove. You know it? It's a hundred miles south of here.' He picked the book up and closed it firmly. 'And see the line here, to noon the next day. That means I spent the night.'

In one of those amazing coincidences, Glitsky thought, just then there was a knock on the door and the Appointments Secretary opened it, stuck his head in, and told Flaherty that his two o'clock had arrived.

Glitsky looked at his watch, closed his notebook, and stood up. The interview was over. He put out his hand and the Archbishop took it. 'Thank you, sir. You've been a big help.'

Flaherty's grip was a vice and his eyes had gone the color of cold steel. 'You know, Sergeant, I try not to stand upon it, but most people address me, at least, as "Father". Some even say "Your Excellency".'

Glitsky squeezed back. 'Thank you. I'll remember next time.'

But what did it mean?

He'd better begin to consider the possibility that there had been no meeting on Monday night. At least not with Flaherty and Dooher. So why did the two women – Lily Martin and Mrs Trang both – think there had been?

But wait – who said the meeting had been in person in Flaherty's office? Maybe Flaherty hadn't been able to talk to Dooher until later because… but no, that meant Flaherty was at the least just plain lying, and at most implicated in the actual murder. And though Glitsky ran into liars every day – murderers too – he did not really believe the Archbishop was involved here. He'd just not been able to resist the urge to jack him up a little. He'd always had a problem with people who thought they spoke directly to God.

He'd picked up a piroshki and a celery soda and sat having a late lunch in his car just off Market Street, his windows down. It was warmer outside than it had been in Flaherty's office and the air smelled sharply of coffee. One of the nearby restaurants must be roasting its own.

He kept coming back to the meeting, or non-meeting. For now, he was going to believe that the meeting never took place. Further, he didn 't believe Flaherty had even talked to Dooher on that Monday night.

Which did not mean that Dooher hadn't talked to Trang.

Did it?

Glitsky was wrestling with it, trying to piece together some rationale for Trang to have written up messages on his personal computer, purporting to have come from Dooher, if there had been none. It could have been that he was going to extraordinarily great lengths to run a false story past his mother and girlfriend – 'See, I'm just on the cusp of greatness, just about to be rich and successful. It's going to happen any day now. The other side is about to cave in. Look, here are the messages from their attorney to prove it. I'm not a nothing, as you've all believed. I'm going to make it big.'

Was that too much of a stretch? Glitsky wasn't sure. He'd known a lot of people – perennial losers – who'd tried to fool themselves and others in similar ways. Maybe that had been Trang, trying to convince himself as well as the women in his life. And then when the settlement didn't come through after all, he'd fall back into victim mode. It hadn't been his fault. The breaks were against him, the power of the Church, the bigger players had ganged up.

But – Glitsky brought himself up short – the truth was that there had been a substantial offer. Six hundred thousand dollars had been on the table, and Trang had turned it down. Would he have done that if he wasn't fairly sure he was going to get more?

No. He would have taken it.

Which meant – what?

That the penny-ante psychological profile Glitsky had been drawing of Trang-as-loser was not valid. And if that were true, then at the very least, Trang believed something was happening with Dooher and the settlement. He hadn't made it all up. Or possibly any of it.

So Dooher had called him. Twice on that Monday. Maybe three times.

He wondered if he'd admit it. It didn't exactly reek of probable cause, but Glitsky knew he could find a judge to give him a warrant for Dooher's phone records based on the inconsistencies. But if Dooher hadn't called Trang from his home or office, any other call would be nearly impossible to verify – the phone company kept track of the calls you made, but didn't keep records of non-toll calls received.

He chewed the last of his piroshki, tipped back the soda. Well, at least now he had a plausible excuse to go back and talk to Dooher, take another look at the Vietnam photograph while he was at it. Maybe casually bring up some other topics. 'Say, I was doing the crossword this morning and came across a seven-letter word, starts with "b", means infantry knife. What do you think that could be?' Subtlety was the key.

Dooher was going to be in meetings out of the office for most of the rest of the afternoon, but if he checked in for messages, his secretary would tell him the Sergeant had called.

So the rest of Glitsky's Wednesday afternoon was lost in paperwork. He labored over his initial report on the Tastee Burger killing. He checked the transcription of his interviews with three of the witnesses there.

Moving along, he filled out the warrant for Dooher's business and personal phone records. Then there was the application for the Lieutenant's exam.

A final Homicide issue involved re-booking a burglar who'd killed a seventy-year-old man last week. The elderly resident had had the bad luck to wake up and grab his.38 in the middle of the night when he'd heard the noise.

At 5:10, completely fried with the paperwork, as he was putting on his jacket to go home, his telephone rang. 'This is Mark Dooher,' he said to himself. And it was.

Dooher was free now, but maybe if the Sergeant just had a quick question or two, he could answer it on the phone, save him a trip. Glitsky wondered if he really needed to actually see the Vietnam photograph again. It was quitting time. He wanted to go home and be with his family. He'd worked a long day as it was. He wasn't the same cop he had been. He said some questions should do it.

'Sure, I talked to him that day.'

'More than once?'

'I may have. I believe so. Why?'

'When you and I talked last time, you didn't mention it.'

'Did you ask about it? I'm sorry. I don't-'

'I thought it might have occurred to you as relevant, talking to a murdered man just before he was killed.'

No answer.

'Do you recall what you talked about?'

'Sure. He was asking for my strategic advice on another case he was handling. As I told you, we kind of hit it off. I think he was hoping I'd offer him a job at the firm here.'

'You didn't discuss the settlement of your suit?'

Another pause. 'No, not that I recall.'

'Although he was threatening to file it the next day, ratcheting up the figures?'

'And then we'd duke it out in court. That's how we do it, Sergeant. 'Those lines had been drawn. There wasn't anything to talk about.'

'And he didn't seem concerned, worried, anxious?'

'Not to me. He seemed normal.'

'Do you remember what the other case was about, the one he wanted your advice on?'

'Sure, it was another settlement on a personal injury. Sergeant, am I under some kind of suspicion here?'

'The case is still open,' Glitsky said ambiguously. 'I've been trying to get a sense of what Mr Trang did in those last hours.' But may as well just come out with it. 'Did you have a bayonet as part of your gear in Vietnam?'

So much for the subtle approach.

'It sounds like I should contact my lawyer.'

'Or just answer the question.'

'Yes, I did. Did a bayonet kill Victor?'

'We believe so. Do you still have yours?'

'No. The Army takes it from you when they send you home.'

'Do you mind telling me where you were last Monday night?'

A sigh, perhaps an angry one. 'I believe I went to the driving range, then came back to the office here and worked late. Sergeant Glitsky, why on earth do you think I'd consider killing a man, any man, much less Victor, whom I've told you I liked?'

'I didn't say I did. I'm collecting all the information I can, hoping some of it leads somewhere.'

'The implications are pretty damn infuriating.'

'I'm sorry about that. Archbishop Flaherty thought so, too.'

'You talked to the Archbishop? About this?'

'He's your biggest client, isn't he?'

'By far. So?'

'And Trang's death means the suit gets dropped…'

'Trang's death means Mrs Diep gets another lawyer, Sergeant. And that's all it means.'

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The earthquake that rocked the city at 5:22 the next morning wasn't as destructive as the World Series Quake of '89 – it didn't collapse any part of the Bay Bridge, for example, or any freeways. However, with a magnitude of 5.8 and an epicenter just a mile into the ocean northwest of the Cliff House, it was by no means a minor temblor. The eventual damage total exceeded $50 million. Seventy-seven people were injured seriously enough to seek medical help, and four people died.

Bart was going insane. He jumped up on Farrell's bed, howling like a coyote rather than the intelligent and sensitive Boxer that Farrell knew him to be, so something must be wrong, but Wes had no idea what it could be. He cast a quick glance at the clock next to his bed. 5:19. What the hell! 'Bart, Bart! Come on, boy. It's all right. It's all right.'

But apparently Bart knew more than his owner on this score. Wes was grabbing for the dog's collar to pull him nearer. It sounded like he was dying. Wes was thinking, I knew I shouldn't have given him that lamb bone. That's what it is – it's cut his stomach to shreds.

He flicked on the light, holding the dog close now, murmuring to him, petting to try and calm him down. 'Please don't die. Come on, hang in there, I'll call-'

Wham!

It was a sharp up-and-down, similar to the Northridge quake that had done so much damage to Southern California. The experts later estimated that the shock was equal to a vertical drop of five and half feet. It was probably fortunate that Farrell had no art on his walls and very little furniture, so there wasn't much to fall or fly around.

After one terrified bark coupled with a desperate escape maneuver involving claws and fangs that scratched Farrell's face badly, Bart got himself to a corner of the room and set up another howl.

The lights went out. There was a second, smaller jolt, and Farrell rolled from his bed and started crawling, eventually arriving at the bedroom doorway, his hands gripping both sides of it for support should the foundations shake again.

His hands were sticky and wet.

Glitsky hadn't been able to sleep and didn't want to keep Flo up, so at around midnight he'd gone out to read on the couch in the living room. Taking a cue from his father Nat, a Talmud scholar, he had been immersed for weeks in Wilton Earnhardt's epic tome Gospel, a story about the missing New Testament book of Matthias. This was about as far from San Francisco crime and politics and his home life as he could get. Which was the point.

Eventually, he'd nodded off.

What got him up wasn't the shock but Flo screaming his name. The lamp next to him crashed to the floor. Sparks and broken pottery. One of the kids – he thought it was Jake, his middle one – was also calling him. God! Why were the other ones quiet?

'Abe!'

'Yo! Coming.'

Another shake, knocking him sideways. Bare feet on broken shards. In the short hallway, he turned on the light. Another step, the bedroom, the light. Flo looked at him, eyes wide and tearful, as though he were a ghost.

As well he might have been.

The six or seven-hundred pound oak armoire in which they kept their hanging clothes had jumped four feet across the room and fallen, landing on Glitsky's side of the bed, where he normally would have been lying.

Flo was up and in his arms, and Jake cried out again.

Sheila Dooher nudged her husband. 'Earthquake,' she said, swinging her feet around, finding the floor. Louder, another push. 'Mark! Now!'

People said you never got used to earthquakes, but Sheila had lived in the Bay Area most of her life and had experienced over twenty of them. The great majority of the time, they shook the ground or the building you were in and then stopped. And the other quakes… well, by the time you worked yourself up to really scared, they were over, and then you dealt with what they'd done.

Mark opened his eyes, immediately awake in the darkness. He knew that Sheila had moved to her pre-arranged location in the doorway to the stairs – it was a drill. And he did the same to his, four steps over to the bathroom door.

'You all right?' he heard her say.

There was another, smaller shake. They rode it out – three seconds max -

'Fine.'

For Sam Duncan, living in a seventy-year-old underground apartment with brick walls, there was no time for any thought. Either Quayle was a sounder sleeper than Bart was, or he wasn't as finely attuned to the tiny movements of the earth by which animals can supposedly predict earthquakes. In any case, Quayle didn't whine, or bark, or howl preceding the event. Sam was sleeping one moment, and the next – feeling something moving, falling around her in the split second she had to react – covering her head as the wall behind her bed gave, collapsing over her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Before Christina was awake, her father Bill had gone downtown to the bakery and come back with hot ham-and-Swiss-filled croissants, her favorite. Irene, her mother, left the steaming cup of French roast on the nightstand in her room and brushed a strand of hair back over her daughter's ear.

She stirred.

'Your coffee's here,' her mother said.

Having driven down to Ojai in six hours, she'd arrived unannounced at ten-thirty last night and they'd kept the visiting short; she was tired and planning to stay through the weekend, get rested before finals next week – they'd get time to catch up in person. They'd all turned in early, around midnight.

Late April, before noon, and she was sitting out by the pool in her bathing suit, in perfect comfort. She wondered again why she was living in San Francisco, in the wind and fog and bustle. Here it was already warm as midsummer, the pace was slow, life itself seemed to have an element of fluid grace.

Her parents' house was on the side of one of the encircling hills at an elevation of about 400 feet, and the pool hung out, cantilevered over a deck that seemed to drop off into space.

Far below, the town sparkled in the pristine air, a little terra-cotta jewel nestled in its verdant setting. In the distance, the Topa Topa Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest lent some drama to the view. Closer in were the avocado and orange orchards, the golf course, the orange-roofed landmarks of her own childhood; over to the right she could just spy the edge of her high school, Villanova, for good Catholic girls as she had been.

There was the Tower at the Post Office, and in the peace of the morning she could hear Some Enchanted Evening coming up on the thermals – the Tower played show tunes on the hour.

Her eyes continued to roam. There were the trees over Libbey Park, downtown, where she'd gone to dozens of incredible concerts – blues, classical, jazz, rock 'n' roll – all the great LA players loved coming up here. This is where Hollywood came to drop out.

Ojai was the Chumash Indian word for Nest, and she thought it captured the place perfectly. It was her nest, her home. She wondered, again, if she'd ever really have another one.

Her mother was walking down from the house with some iced tea. She normally worked in her husband's brokerage house as his assistant, but decided she'd take the day off to catch up with her daughter.

Irene Carrera had a buffed leather complexion from too much sun, and her body, toned with regular exercise, was still twenty pounds overweight. Nevertheless, in a casual way she believed herself a beautiful woman, and so nearly everyone else thought she was, too. She frosted her hair and wore gold slippers padding about out by the pool and she appeared to be as shallow as a petri dish. But she'd never fooled Christina.

Now she sat in the wicker chair next to her daughter's chaise longue, put down the tray that held the pitcher and glasses, and placed coasters on either side of the table. 'You picked the right day to come down. San Francisco's had another earthquake.'

Christina sat up straight. 'A bad one?'

Her mother handed her a glass. 'They're saying moderately serious. Although if you ask me, they're all bad.'

'You can ask me, too.'

'Do you want to call anybody?'

'No, no. They don't want you to use the phones after emergencies anyway, Mom. Besides,' she took a sip, 'there's nobody to call.'

Her mother sat back, gestured to her daughter's left hand. 'Your father and I noticed there's no ring. We didn't want to press last night. I guess we're not going to be meeting Joe.'

'I guess not.' A sigh. 'It was my decision. It wasn't going to work out.' Irene took a minute stalling with her iced tea – lemon, sugar, mint.

'You gave it enough of a chance? You're sure?'

Christina shrugged. 'Come on, Mom, you know. Over a year. It just wasn't…' She trailed off. 'I'm not sad about it, so I don't think you should be.'

'I'm not sad about you and Joe, hon. I worry about you, that's all. These relationships that get to…' She took a deep breath and plunged ahead to intimacy,' that go on a year or more, then end. They must be taking their toll.'

'I know.' Christina was nodding. 'They are.'

'I just look at you now – and I know this is foolish, don't laugh at me – and I don't see my happy little girl. It just breaks my poor silly heart.' Christina started to stop her, but her mother touched her shoulder and continued. 'No, I know what you've been through. I do, or a little. With Brian, and the pregnancy, and now this. I do know, hon, how it must hurt, how you're trying. But it just seems to me that every time you give up, when you let it end, then part of you dies. The part that hopes, and you don't want to lose that.'

A tear coursed down Christina's cheek. She wiped it with a finger. 'The good news is I didn't put much hope in Joe.'

'Then why did you say you'd marry him?'

'I don't know. I was stupid. I wanted to convince myself that I could do just what you said – commit to somebody and make it stick. To get there, Mom. You know what I mean? You get so tired of waiting, of things being empty.'

Her mother sat back in her chair and looked for a moment out to the horizon. 'It has to be right, that's all. The right person to begin with.'

'Yeah, well where is he? That's what I want to know, Mom. Where the hell is he?'

'Christina? It's Mark Dooher.'

'Mark. Are you all right?'

A refined chuckle. 'I'm fine. I was worried about you. We've had a pretty good earthquake up here, you might have heard. Several people didn't make work and you were one of them. So we tried to reach you at home and you never called back'

'Was I scheduled to come in? I've got finals next week. I wasn't starting until after that. I thought I told Joe…'

'No, no, it's all right. I was concerned, that's all. I remember you'd told me about Ojai, so I thought I'd see if your parents had heard from you, if you were okay.'

'I am. In fact, I thought of you five minutes ago. We're drinking champagne. Remember? The lost art of pouring?'

'I do. How is it down there, by the way?'

She looked out through the French doors. A balmy evening was settling. 'It's the pink moment,' she said. 'The classic pink moment.'

She could almost see his grin. 'I'm on my car phone, just at the Army Street curve on my way home and it's the classic gray moment here.' A moment went by. 'I heard about you and Joe. I'm sorry.'

'Yes, well…'

The pause seemed a little awkward to Christina. She was thinking that Mark didn't want to push. But then he spoke up. 'Well… good luck on your finals, then. And we'll see you in a couple of weeks?'

'I'll be there.'

'I know you will. If it's any help to you, Joe should be down in LA by then. There shouldn't be any awkwardness.'

'I know. I guess.'

'No guesses. This is a promise. If you have any problems, I want you to come see me, hear?'

'I hear. I will.'

'Okay, then.' There was a crackle on the line. 'Sorry, the call's breaking up. You hang in there, Christina. Things'll turn around, you watch. I'm glad you're okay.'

'I am. And Mark?'

'Yes.'

'Thanks for checking. It matters.'

It might be the pink moment, but it was also the yellow jacket moment. At dusk, the vicious bees seemed to come up like locusts, scouring the foothills for food, and making outdoor hors d'oeuvres a challenge at best.

But it was one to which Bill and Irene rose whenever they could. Christina remembered sitting inside a hundred times as a child, afraid to go out. Until one day her father had sat her down: 'Look, we can either go outside where the weather's great and we've got the view and the air and things taste better, except we' ve got the chance of being molested by yellow j ackets, or we can sit cooped inside wishing there weren't such a thing as yellow jackets, but definitely inside, and definitely not having half the fun. I'll take the risk every time.'

So tonight they had broken out some paté, three kinds of cheeses, cornichons, French bread, the works. After she'd hung up with Dooher, she stood a moment at the French doors, looking out at her parents who were sitting in their matching wicker chairs, holding hands, laughing at something.

Okay, she thought. There was her father and there was Mark Dooher. Two good ones. It wasn't impossible. She would simply have to bide her time, do her work, live her life.

The pink shifted, almost imperceptibly, to mother-of-pearl, and she stood in the door, struck by her third revelation this week. The first had been that she didn't love Joe. Then recognizing something deeper – something fundamentally different and better – in the way she and Mark Dooher related, something that would be part of her from now on, of any future she had.

Then, watching her parents, the last illumination – that she was still afraid of the yellow jackets, so wary of being bitten that she was afraid to go outside. That was why she had always settled for her lesser men.

It was so clear now, suddenly, and so wrong-headed: there had always been yellow jackets on otherwise perfect evenings, and she'd never gotten stung. And taking that risk of getting stung put you out where you really wanted to be.

It was the only way, with luck, to get you to where her parents had gotten.

To where she wanted to be.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

'Of course nothing happened to you,' Wes said. 'Why did I even feel like I had to ask? In fact, now that I think about it, I'm surprised some fissure didn't open in your backyard revealing a vein of gold.'

'I didn't tell you about that?' Dooher put a hand on his friend's shoulder. 'Just kidding,' he said. 'How's the face?'

Farrell had needed seven stitches and a tetanus shot. He had one bandage under his blackened left eye, another on the side of his mouth. 'Let's go with unpleasant.'

'No, how's it feel?

Farrell gave him a look. 'Funny.'

It was Friday morning a little before noon, the day after the quake, and they were in Wes's office. Dooher took a seat in the ragged armchair. His friend was putting books back on the shelves. Bart, giving no sign that he'd ever been jumpy in his life, slept under the table.

'So how'd your office make out?' Wes asked. 'Don't tell me, it wasn't touched.'

'A little. It's a relatively new building with all the codes up to date. They don't shake much.'

Farrell turned around. 'You mean nothing, don't you?'

'Nothing structural. Couple of bookshelves fell over, like here.'

'Not like here, Mark! Not like here. Here we got cracks in all the walls, maybe you didn't notice, the place has got to get completely repainted, we got plaster in the ducts, the water's out in the bathroom, every single one of my books hit the floor running,' he whirled further around, pointing, picking up some steam, 'that window, check it out, is now plywood…' He blew out a long breath. 'No! No, decidedly not just like here.'

Bart came awake, barked once, went back to sleep.

Dooher, sympathetic as a hangman, held up a hand. 'Du calme, Wesley, du calme.'

'Du calme, my ass. Easy for you to say.' His body sagging, Farrell crossed to his desk and edged himself onto the corner of it. 'I know there's no justice in the world, and nothing happens for any reason, it's all random -I know all of that – but what I don't understand is why all this perverse, random shit happens to me!'

'It's like Grace,' Dooher said.

'And don't give me any of that Catholic stuff, either.'

'Not that Grace.' Dooher crossed a leg, enjoying himself. This lady, Grace, she's born ugly as sin, half-blind, one leg missing, her hair never grows, she gets cancer at thirteen, a mess. Dies horribly and goes up to the Pearly Gates. God looks at her, says, "Grace, you're going to hell."

'"But why?" she asks. "Why, God? I've tried to be a good person, tried to please You, suffered my whole life…"

'"I don't know, Grace," God says. "There's just something about you that pisses me off.'"

Farrell was shaking his head. 'I can understand why that joke would appeal to you. You are lucky. I, on the other hand, am cursed.'

'Oh bullshit, Wes. People-'

'Stop! Stop! I know what you're going to say. That people make their own luck. That is what every lucky person in the world says, and that is bullshit!' He pushed himself off the desk, stepping on Bart's tail. 'Ruff!'

'You, dog, shut up! I don't want to hear anymore out of you.' Back to Dooher. 'Look at me here, Mark. Look at me. My apartment is trashed, my office is ruined, my fucking dog – man's best mauling machine – nearly tears my head off…' he sank back to his corner of the desk, staring at his shoes.

'Wes…'

Tm sorry. I'm just a whining sack, aren't I? But I have to tell you, sometimes the weight of what appears to be random bad luck just gets a little hard to take. It's not like I want something terrible to happen to you, but don't you sometimes wonder when it never does? Does this mean something about me? Jesus!'

'Hey, come on.' Dooher got out of his chair, walked over to his bud, put his arms around him. 'Come on. I love you, Wes, you know that. You need help here, I'll send over some of my associates. You need it at home, some money, whatever, you got it. You want, I'll put a couple of gashes into my own face, bleed a little.'

Farrell looked up, shook his head in disgust. 'I'm a waste, aren't I?' Dooher pinched his good cheek. 'But cute. Come on, let me buy you some lunch.'

It wasn't fancy, but the Chinese food was spicy hot and excellent. There were only six tables in the place, and Farrell took the opportunity to point out that he came here twice a week and never got an empty table.

But Mark Dooher walked in the door, and there was one with his name on it, and no, they didn't mind if the dog came in, too. The owner had a dog looked just like Bart. This led Farrell to wonder aloud if there was any part of Dooher's experience untouched by good fortune.

'For the record, I've got some pretty estranged, screwed-up kids, and you don't.'

'I never see my kids,' Farrell said.

'But when you do, they don't hate you, do they?'

'No. At least I don't think so.'

'Mine hate me. My failed artist namesake son hates me. My lesbian daughter hates me. My skiboard bum son hates me.'

'They don't…'

'Trust me, they do. You know it, too. Now I don't know whether that's luck or not, but it's not good. I must have had something to do with it.'

'Okay, that's serious. Your life isn't perfect. I apologize.'

A macho shrug, Dooher's mini-lesson in handling the pain the way a man should. 'It's life,' he said. 'It hits us all. Which is actually, since we're on the subject, why I wanted to see you this morning. More bad luck for me. But this is business.'

'What business?'

'I want to put you on retainer for a while as my personal attorney.'

Farrell stopped with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth. 'I'm listening.'

'Victor Trang.'

'Okay, what about him?'

'I think the police think I might have killed him.'

'Get out…! You! Are you kidding me?'

'I don't think so.'

'Why do they think that?'

'I don't know. I'm not even a hundred percent sure they do, but this cop Glitsky called me the other-'

'Glitsky?'

'Yeah, that's his name. You know him?'

'He was the cop handling my last case, Levon Copes. Screwed it up completely.'

'Well, that's a relief. He might be screwing up this one, too.'

'He thinks you killed Victor Trang? Why?'

'Take it easy, Wes. I'm not sure. But he's called me back a couple of times, zeroing in, asking questions – where was I, did I talk to Trang, that kind of thing.'

'And you answered him?'

Dooher shrugged. 'Sure. I've got nothing to hide. Why wouldn't I talk to him?'

'That doesn't matter. The first rule is never talk to a cop about a crime in your time-zone without your lawyer sitting there.'

'But I didn't-'

'Doesn't matter. What did he ask? What did you tell him?'

'Does this mean you're on retainer?'

Farrell nodded. 'Yeah. Of course. What do you think?'

It was quarter past noon on Friday afternoon. Glitsky was walking the hallway on the 4th floor, heading back to Homicide. He'd spent the morning interviewing witnesses who lived in apartments on either side of his seventy-year-old victim, who'd owned a handgun for protection – the man whose last thought had been that his gun was going to help him if a burglar ever broke in.

Nope.

The last couple of days had been well over the line into surreal. At home, the earthquake damage had been serious but, miraculously, all cosmetic. They'd straightened up the armoire and rehung the clothes. In the boys' room, Jake had been crying out because it was dark and he'd been tipped out of his bed. Isaac and O.J. had remained so quiet because they'd slept through it all. (As he had, he reminded himself. If Flo hadn't yelled out for him…)

Then, all day yesterday, his wife wouldn't stay still. She had been up and around, throwing away the broken dishes, shards of pottery and glass, straightening, vacuuming, rearranging, even washing the windows. Nesting, nesting.

The day of the quake he'd stayed home. (A good day for it, as it turned out. There was not one homicide reported in San Francisco.) Today, day two, he couldn't stand seeing Flo working so hard, singing to herself, reborn. So much energy and sense of purpose – it was going to come crashing down. He couldn't let himself get his hopes up.

This was pure adrenaline – hers.

He wanted no part of it, and she didn't want him moping around, bring her down. They'd almost had a fight about it – would have, if he hadn't left.

So he'd gone to his morning interviews. Now, back at the Hall, his plan was to call around, line up some more witnesses on his other cases, call the phone company and check on the progress of Mark Dooher's records.

There was a package on his desk and he ripped it open. The phone records on Dooher weren't supposed to be delivered for at least another day, maybe two or three, but now here he was holding them in his hands.

Wonders did never cease.

Dooher's home was easy. He'd made no phone calls at all on the Monday that Trang had been killed. His office was a little more interesting. He'd called Trang twice – 1:40 and 4:50 – precisely the times noted in the dead man's computer.

Which meant that if Trang had been making up a story to impress his mother and girlfriend, major elements of it were close to the truth. His pulse quickening – the thrill of the chase indeed – Glitsky turned to the last little packet of sheets. There, as promised by Trang, was the third call, from Dooher's cellphone, at 7:25.

And even though Glitsky thought the official policy on miscreants in San Francisco was, 'Three strikes and you're misunderstood,' this time he was getting willing to call Dooher out. He sat back in his chair, feet up on his desk, wondering what, if anything, it meant.

Trang's computer notes might have been cryptic, but they also told a consistent story – Mark Dooher was working on the settlement, not acting as an adviser on a personal injury case as he'd claimed. Glitsky could imagine no reason why Trang would lie to himself in his electronic notebook.

And here was another tantalizing entry -MD from F. 's. The 7:25 call that Glitsky had interpreted to mean that Dooher had called from Flaherty's office. But, in fact, he'd made it from his car. What did that mean? Was it possible that F wasn't Flaherty?

Another thought – did Trang even have any personal injury cases in his files? This, Glitsky thought, was a job for the ever-eager Paul Thieu. And the note? MD message. There might be something the lab could salvage from the tape that had been in Trang's answering machine, even if it had been recorded over. He leaned forward, pulled his yellow pad toward him, and started writing.

He longed to catch Dooher in his lie. In any lie. There had to be one. In a kind of trance, he was lost in his notes. Then staring into the space in front of him, he picked up the telephone and punched some numbers.

'Law Offices.'

'Hello. This is Sergeant Glitsky, San Francisco Homicide. I'd like to talk to Mr Dooher's secretary, please. And I'm sorry, I don't remember her name.'

'Janey.'

'That's it. Thanks.'

'Mr Dooher's office.'

'Janey?'

'Yes.'

Another introduction, a little riff of bureaucratese, then he was saying: 'Janey, I need to confirm a couple of things your boss told me. This is just routine.'

It turned out Janey did remember the call from Trang on the day he had died. He'd called while Dooher was at lunch, left an urgent message that Dooher get back to him.

'This was about the settlement deadline, isn't that right?'

Janey paused, perhaps wondering if she was saying too much. Glitsky didn't want to lose her. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'that was the impression I had.' Let her think he'd gotten it from Dooher.

It worked. Janey continued: 'Mr Trang reminded me to tell Mr Dooher that he needed to hear from him before five, no later, or that he'd have to go ahead and file the amended complaint the next day.'

So Trang's call to Dooher had been about the settlement. Janey had said as much. And that made Dooher a liar.

And if that were true, it dramatically increased the odds that, at the very least, Dooher knew more than he was letting on, and at the most, that he was a killer.

Glitsky was bouncing it off Frank Batiste. The Lieutenant was sitting forward in his chair in his office, arms on his desk, pencil in hand, shaking his head. 'I believe you, although I'd be a little happier if you had any idea why.'

'Wasn't it you who's told us a zillion times that we're not in the motive business, we're in the evidence business?'

'Yep, that was me, and I was right.'

'So?'

'So what? Where's your evidence then?' Batiste continued drumming his pencil. 'Because we agree you don't have a motive.'

But Glitsky didn't want to let the motive go. In his experience, people didn't often get killed – not by someone they knew – for no reason whatever. 'Look, the Archdiocese is Dooher's biggest client. If the case gets filed, he gets fired.'

'Why would that happen?'

'Because he hasn't done his job, which is keep the lawsuit hush hush.'

'And why would that be?'

Glitsky rolled his eyes. 'Because, Frank, it's politically embarrassing to the Archbishop.'

'So to keep it from getting filed, Dooher kills Trang? That's a reach, Abe.'

'I know. But it's all I can think of.'

Batiste straightened up, bopped his pencil a couple more times, stretched out the crick in his neck. 'Are you sure you're not just on Dooher because you haven't got any other suspects?'

'Maybe there aren't any other suspects because he did it, Frank.'

'Maybe that's it.' Batiste didn't want to fight about it. He took a beat. 'Well, that was instructive and a hell of a lot of fun. We should do it again sometime. This was where we started, isn't it? No motive? So let's leave motive. You came in here wanting to talk evidence. Evidence is good. What do you got?'

But there wasn't much. Glitsky had gotten his search warrant for Dooher's phone records by trotting out the old probable cause argument to Judge Arenson, who knew him fairly well and was aware that he didn't abuse the privilege.

Now the question was whether the information in the phone records – the three calls that coincided with Trang's notes – moved things along the probable-cause trail. Glitsky knew that the Judge wasn't about to give him carte blanche on the more invasive search warrants he was going to want to request – Dooher's house, office, car, and so on – unless there was something real, whether or not it was physical evidence, to back up Glitsky's suspicions.

He was hoping the phone calls would be enough, but Batiste wasn't buying that either, and didn't think Arenson would. 'So is this just your day to be difficult, Frank, or what?'

The pencil was tap-tapping again. 'What do they prove, Abe, the calls?'

'Dooher said they were talking about a personal injury case. Trang's notes say it was the settlement.' Even as he said it, Glitsky knew the objection, and it was valid.

'So it's "he said this, but he said that.'"

'But Dooher's secretary, Janey, agrees with Trang.'

'She didn't overhear the last two calls.'

'Why would Trang have written fictitious notes to himself on the calls? That just doesn't make any sense.'

Batiste held up the pencil. 'Abe, even if they talked about the settlement, even if Dooher is lying about it, we got nothing. Maybe Dooher was sleeping with Trang's girlfriend.'

'Or his mother,' Glitsky said. 'Maybe his girlfriend and his mother.'

Batiste liked it. 'Now we're on to something.'

Glitsky's lips were pressed tightly together in frustration, and the scar stood out in relief. 'I need a warrant. I've got to look through the guy's laundry.'

Batiste didn't think so. 'Arenson won't do it, not with what you've got so far. You're going to need more. What about the bayonet?'

'He never brought it home from Viet-' Stopping short.

Batiste broke a smile. 'Says he.'

'Lord, I'm stupid! The wife!'

If she invited him in, he would not need a warrant.

He kept a white shirt and regimental tie in the drawer of his desk for the occasional forgotten court date. He changed in the men's room and traded his flight jacket until tomorrow for Frank Batiste's gray sports coat – a little short in the sleeves, but the chest fit. It would do.

He was on the semi-enclosed front porch, his badge out, introducing himself to Sheila Dooher. There had been sun and a cool breeze at the Hall, but out here, a mile from the ocean, the fog clung and a savage wind dug itself into his bones. He didn't mind, though. At this moment, it was to his advantage.

'… the Victor Trang case. You're familiar with that?'

'Yes. It was really such a tragedy. Mark was very upset about it.'

'Yes, he was. I'd been planning on coming by a little later, when your husband was home, but I was in the neighborhood, and thought I could save some time. I wanted to ask you a few questions, too.'

'Me?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'What about? I didn't even know Victor Trang.'

Glitsky shrugged. 'But you know where your husband was on the night of the murder.'

'Yes. Well, I don't know. You don't think…?'

'I don't think anything at the moment, Mrs Dooher. But the fact is that your husband was one of the last people we know who talked to Victor Trang. So, far-fetched as it might seem to you, he's a suspect. And you could eliminate that possibility right now. Was he here that night, Monday a week ago?'

He noticed that she was gripping the door handle, her face set, eyes shifting. 'I think I should call Mark,' she said.

'You could do that, but you understand that anything you say to me now, before talking with him, will have a lot more weight. You could verify his alibi right now and that would be the end of any suspicion.' He added conspiratorially, 'Really, ma'am. It would be a good thing.'

She wrestled with it a moment, then dredged it up. 'Monday night he went to the driving range, I think. I could check.'

'That's what your husband said.' Glitsky broke his smile. 'See, that wasn't so bad.'

Behind him, the wind gusted, and Sheila Dooher seemed to notice it for the first time. 'I'm sorry, Sergeant. Would you like to come in out of this weather?'

'I wouldn't mind, now that you mention it.'

She fixed him a cup of tea. They were sitting on either side of a marble bar in a sky-lit kitchen that was about the size of Glitsky's duplex. Through the French doors, he had a partial view of an expanse of manicured lawn, a patch of early daffodils, stubbly bare roots and trunks marking an ancient rose garden.

He took a slow sip of the tea, swallowed, then plunged in. 'Mrs Dooher, your husband was very upset by Victor Trang's death. He asked me if there was anything he could do to help with our investigation.'

Her expression, pleasant concern, teased at the edges of his conscience. But, more importantly, it meant that Dooher hadn't told her that he was under suspicion.

'That's Mark,' she said, waiting for Glitsky to continue.

'I really didn't think much about it until we discovered that Trang had been stabbed with a bayonet.'

'Oh God, how horrible!'

He nodded. 'Yes, ma'am, it was bad. But the point is, we weren't able to go much farther than that. The weapon hasn't been found – undoubtedly the murderer's thrown it away. Anyway, I mentioned all this to your husband – he wanted to be kept in the loop – telling me that if we could just identify exactly what kind of bayonet it was, from the size of the blade and so on…' he assayed a smile, speaking more quickly now, hoping to keep her riding on the flow of verbiage '… the forensics guys can tell these things, that we might be able to determine where it had been bought, or what war it might have been used in, that kind of thing. And from there maybe get a lead as to where the murderer might have got it.'

He hoped.

She was paying attention, still with him.

'I was hoping to compare it with the one your husband brought back from Vietnam. Trang being Vietnamese, it might narrow it down to someone in that community. It's a long shot, but might be worth checking.'

She was nodding. 'I'm not sure I completely understand, but it sounds like it might be a good idea.' She stood up. 'I think it's out in the garage, up pretty high. You might have to help me get it. Do you mind?'

CHAPTER TWENTY

By dusk, Farrell still hadn't reached Sam.

It worried him enough that he decided to drive by her house, find out what was going on.

Yesterday, the day of the quake, okay, lots of lives had been disrupted, his own more than many others. While he was trying to get his own mess cleaned up, he'd tried to call Sam a few times, but had no luck.

He'd been sure he'd get her today.

But he'd started calling as soon as he woke up, had placed maybe two dozen calls, and nothing. Her machine hadn't even picked up, neither had the phone at the clinic, no one had heard from her. Her brother Larry had an unlisted number.

Farrell eventually even thought to call Dooher back after their surprising lunch, to see if by any chance he had Christina Carrera's number, if she might have heard from Sam. But no, Dooher said Christina was in Ojai, visiting her parents.

Why and how did Mark know that?

The first indication that something might really be wrong was the construction equipment all the way up Ashbury Street, stopping traffic trying to get up over Twin Peaks. Farrell was in his 1978 Datsun, painted by his son six years previously in what Lydia called a 'fetching puke yellow'. (Lydia was driving the metallic green 1992 BMW – he really hated her.) Bart wasn't enjoying the wait in the fog and fumes anymore than he was.

Finally, when divine intervention produced a parking space, he pulled in and decided he and Bart would hoof it. It was time Bart met Quayle anyway, he thought. He attached the dog's leash and they got out.

But drawing up close, getting to Sam's block, he was struck by the air of disaster, and hurried his steps. There were more than a few police cars, plus other emergency vehicles. A revolving knot of gawkers milled around in the street, quietly taking in the destruction.

Four brick structures in a row on the west side of the street, with Sam's third on the way uphill, had taken the big hit. All of them had lost their chimneys, a majority of their street-facing windows. Though crews were still there and had obviously been at the cleaning a while, piles of brick rubble and roof slate still littered the area.

Supporting scaffolding had already been erected around the two downhill buildings, but Sam's, from the look of it, might be beyond salvage. The front corner appeared to have caved in completely, and the entire house listed forward as though waiting for one more tiny aftershock to send it toppling.

My God! he thought. That was Sam's room. She was in there!

Farrell walked up to one of the blue-uniformed policemen who were keeping the crowd from getting too close to the unstable structure. 'Excuse me. I know somebody who lives in that building. Do you have any news about the tenants?'

The cop turned around, his eyes sympathetic. 'Have you tried the hospitals? Maybe I'd start there.'

Wes nodded mutely, then stood another minute, struck again by the power of moving earth. 'Excuse me,' he repeated. 'Do you know if anybody died in these buildings?'

The cop shook his head, commiserating, conveying the worst. 'I'd check the hospitals,' he said again.

Once Sheila Dooher admitted that her husband had owned a bayonet – although it was no longer in the garage – Glitsky thought that getting his search warrant would be easy.

He filled out his new one and brought it down to this week's duty Judge, Martin Arenson. But Arenson, like everyone else, was cleaning up from the earthquake. He'd handed off his magistrate assignments to another Municipal Court Judge, Ann Connor, and she hadn't been particularly receptive to Abe's version of probable cause. She'd refused to sign the warrant, which put him in a bind, since once one Judge in the Muni Court declined to sign a warrant, no one else there would touch it.

Glitsky did have another option – one he'd used in emergencies in the past. He could go to Superior Court and get a sealed warrant from one of the Judges on the Senior Bench. He was fairly well known in Superior Court since most trials he attended were for homicides. And he was anxious to move quickly, before Dooher had a chance to hide or ditch anything else.

'But the wife can't testify against him.' Judge Oscar Thomasino had the search warrant in front of him on his clean desk, awaiting his signature. He'd listened to Glitsky's tale and wasn't close to sold on more probable cause. 'And am I wrong? I don't see anything pointing to this man, except your questionably legal search.'

'She let me in, Judge.'

Thomasino waved a hand. Sixty-ish, he wore his gray hair brush cut. He had thick slab of a face, a swarthy, liver-spotted complexion, and a reputation as a judicial hardass.

It was Friday night and he had been going home after a grueling week of earthquake-related delays, but Glitsky had caught him at the back door and tried to guilt him back inside. He'd come, but out of duty, not guilt, and now he wasn't disposed to be cooperative, and he treated Glitsky to his bushy eyebrow trick – up and down over the glare. No words.

'I don't need her testimony, your honor,' Glitsky repeated. 'I just need what might be in the house.'

The Judge smoothed his hands over the grain of his desk. 'Abe, this is a prominent man, not some lowlife from the projects, not that as a matter of law that makes any difference, of course. And you're telling me you didn't find out anything incriminating from the phone records?'

Glitsky more or less agreed, but tried to sweeten it by riffing around it for a couple of bars. Thomasino stopped him. 'I don't see this one, Abe.' The Judge straightened up in his chair, considering something, then decided to come out with it. 'You know, Abe, this business of coming to Superior Court when Muni turns you down is tricky. I know you've got good instincts; you might even be right. But what I see here, I don't have enough. Connor didn't either.'

'Judge…'

Thomasino held up his hand again. 'I understand you can't go back to Muni, not now. But you've got to get me a little more. If you find it, come by the house, I'm around all weekend. I'll sign off. But I need something I can point to. Do you even know where he was on the night in question?'

'He was killing Victor Trang.'

A face, the eyebrows. 'Okay. But what does he say?'

'He says he went to the driving range, then came back to his office and worked late.'

'Well, if he did that, maybe somebody saw him. Or didn't.'

'That may be.'

'Well, good luck,' the Judge said. 'Have a nice weekend.'

Glitsky was damned if he was going to find himself a picture of Mark Dooher and go trotting with it out to the city's driving ranges, showing it to employees and asking if they specifically remembered seeing him a week and a half before. If he thought that course of events would produce any results, he might have considered it, but he believed what he'd told Thomasino. Dooher had been killing Trang that night, not hitting golf balls.

But the bottom line was that he didn't have the signed warrant and couldn't go looking where he stood a chance of finding, so what the hell else was he going to do?

Pondering, he was standing in the downstairs lobby of the Hall, by the elevators, hands in his pockets, oblivious to the passing throngs checking out for the weekend.

'Too much lemon in your tea, Abe?' Amanda Jenkins, the Assistant DA who'd shared Levon Copes with him, had moved out of the flow of humanity and, amused, was looking up at him. 'That expression – I just sucked on a lemon – it's so you.'

'It so happens I did just suck on a lemon.' He held up the unsigned warrant. 'But what's really made my day is Thomasino's call on this.'

Jenkins snatched it away and scanned it quickly. 'This looks good to me. House, car, office, personal effects. What's the problem?'

'You'll notice the good Judge didn't sign it. My first choice for perp appears to be a pillar of the community, so he's got a higher probable cause threshold than lesser mortals.'

'Ah, democracy.'

'Ain't it grand? I don't have any evidence, so I can't get permission to look for evidence.'

'It's a beautiful system,' Jenkins agreed. 'So what do you have? You got anything? You must have something.'

Glitsky started to tell Amanda what he did have – his hunches, the settlement background, the discrepancy between Trang's women's story and Mark Dooher's, the hazy alibi, the bayonet that had mysteriously – and apparently recently – disappeared, and finally the one search warrant Thomasino had signed off on, for Dooher's phone records.

'They don't by any chance include a earphone, do they?'

'Yeah. But so what?'

Jenkins's normally stern visage cracked. Her eyes lit up with excitement, with the thrill of the chase. 'You got time to take five, get some coffee? All may not be lost.'

The downstairs cafeteria was nearly deserted, cavernous and echoing with the cleanup workers' efforts. Glitsky and Jenkins brought their paper cups over from the long stainless steel counter and were sitting down across from one another at one of the fold-up tables. Amanda was already rolling with it, explaining the new technological investigating-tool breakthrough that had been discovered as a by-product of the cellular phone network. 'You never heard of it,' she enthused, 'because I don't think anybody's ever used it to find out where someone was. Normally, they use it to track where somebody is, right now.'

She could see Glitsky still wasn't clear on the concept. 'Abe, you remember that big kidnap/ransom thing in Oakland last year? Okay, the kidnapper, he's calling the victim's family every five minutes, making ransom demands, changing the drop point, making sure there's no trail, the usual. So guess what? He's using his earphone, and one of our guys remembers an article in one of those magazines we all throw away. He gets a brainstorm. He calls the phone company, asks if there's any way they can tell, even roughly, where a cell call originates. You know how it works?'

'I'm listening.'

'Big metropolitan area like Oakland, there's maybe ten towers around the city – cells, hence the name. Clever, huh? And they work like a combination amplifier/receiver. If you're in your car, you move from one cell to the next and there's a record of it.'

'Okay.'

'But, and this is the cool part, within each cell there are also pie-shaped cones that pick up the signals. So this guy, the kidnapper, he's talking on the phone, calling again, yack, yack, yack. They figure out exactly which block he's driving around, and they nail him.'

Glitsky was nodding. Amanda was right. This, if true, was cool. 'But I don't see how it helps me here,' he said.

'I don't either, Abe. But Thomasino said he only needed a little more to get to probable cause, right? So maybe your perp was ten miles away when he said he was at the driving range, that kind of thing. Prove he lied. Hell, you've got the warrant for the phone records already. Might as well use it all up.'

Sheila told him what she'd done.

'Are you kidding me?! That son of a bitch! He came in here, lied to you, invaded our privacy? I'm calling Farrell, calling somebody. This is pure harassment. I'll have the bastard's badge!'

He threw his leaded crystal bourbon glass with all his might and it smashed into the bottom pane of one of the French doors, shattering glass all over the kitchen. 'That son of a bitch!'

Sheila was in a deep couch in her living room, crying. She was of a class and station that had grown up believing in authority. Sergeant Glitsky had represented that to her. And he had betrayed her, tricked her and used her to insult her husband. She had put her husband in jeopardy. She couldn't stop sobbing.

Mark came over and handed her a large glass of white wine and she held it with both hands. He sat down next to her. 'It's all right, Sheila. How could you know?'

She shook her head, mumbling through her tears, over and over: 'I should have known. I should have just called you.'

He put the palm of his hand under her glass and helped her raise it to her lips. She had to admit that it helped. She took another mouthful, the good cool wine.

She'd been getting back to a glass or two regularly lately and it hadn't caused her any ill-effects. The doctors nowadays were always so paranoid about alcohol. She should have started out taking their dire warnings with a grain of salt. This wasn't hurting her at all. In fact, it was helping.

She got her breathing back under control. 'The whole story didn't make much sense to me, Mark, but I just thought-'

'It's all right,' he repeated. 'There's no harm done. I didn't even have any damn bayonet.'

'I know. But I didn't remember.'

'I lost the damn thing on a camping trip five ten years ago, maybe longer. You don't remember?'

'But why would he think, the Sergeant…?'

Her husband shook his head. 'I have no idea. I knew Trang. Maybe I'm the most convenient warm body. I think that's how these guys work.' He reached out, laid a hand on her shoulder.

'So what happens now?' she asked timidly.

Mark sat back into the couch. 'Now I think he'll probably come back with a warrant and tear the house apart, and maybe my car, and the office. I've got the M-16, after all, and he's seen it, and some Judge will probably believe that means something and give him the search warrant. After all, I did steal it from the Army, demonstrating my long-standing history of criminal moral character.'

'You were twenty-three years old!' she cried. 'You haven't broken a law in almost twenty-five years.'

'Well, I did cut the tag off a mattress once.'

'Don't be funny. Please, not now.' She was shaking her head. 'God, this is unbelievable. This can't be happening to us.'

Farrell kicked himself for being so stupid, but at the moment he hadn't seen any alternative. He had to drive all the way home in the lower Sunset District to leave Bart anyway, and he decided to make his calls to hospitals from there. Ten minutes later, he found himself in his car again, driving the three miles back, nearly an hour at this time on a Friday night, to within 500 yards of where he's started – St Mary's Hospital.

Wes hated almost everything about hospitals – the smells, the light, the sound which somehow always seemed to be simultaneously muted and amplified. As the elevator opened on the fourth floor, he let out a sigh of relief. This wasn't the Intensive Care Unit. He realized he'd been afraid to ask.

He stopped at the door to the room. The bed wasn't visible – the room separators had been pulled halfway around it – but Larry and Sally, Sam's brother and his wife, were sitting next to one another, talking quietly.

'Hey, comrades,' he said. 'She never calls, she never writes. Is this the party?' Then, seeing Sam, her head wrapped in gauze, one arm above the blanket and one strapped to her body, he came forward, up beside her bed. 'Hi.'

He found his hand clutched by her free one. There were sickly black and yellow wells under both of her eyes, a bandage over the bridge of her nose. He saw her make the effort, to try to smile to greet him, but it cost her. Her eyes moistened, and he leaned over to her, gently brought his cheek next to hers, left it there. 'God,' he said. 'Thank God.'

'She's going to be okay.' He heard Larry behind him. 'Couple more days and she's out of here.'

He straightened up, still holding her hand, looking at her. 'I'll ask these guys,' he said.

Larry and Sally told him. Sam had, actually, been very lucky, suffering only a concussion, a broken nose, a broken collarbone, multiple bruises and abrasions. She'd been buried by brick and mortar, but the beams in the ceiling had prevented the house from collapsing on her. They'd pulled her out within three hours.

'And how's Quayle? Is he okay?'

Her grip tightened. She shook her head and a tear broke and rolled across her cheek.

Glitsky thought the day might never end, but the trail was getting hot, and this was where you didn't quit.

After he left Amanda, he ran up the outside stairs to Homicide, where he called the cellphone company. Because of the earthquake, a supervisor, Hal Frisque, was actually on duty, working late, pulling a ton of overtime. He would love to help.

So five minutes after faxing a copy of his warrant to Frisque, Glitsky was again on the phone at his desk, a map of San Francisco open in front of him.

'We're talking the seven-forty call, is that right?' Frisque asked.

That's what I've got here,' Glitsky said.

'Okay.' A pause. 'That's zone SF-43. You got a map there? Looks like he was on the 280 Freeway. Had to be, because a minute later, he got picked up in SF-42, so he was going west.'

Glitsky was lost in possibilities, but none of them helped him very much. True, Trang had been killed near the 280 Freeway, south of it, on Geneva Avenue, but to get to the San Francisco Golf Club and Driving Range, or to Dooher's home for that matter, his car could have taken the same route.

But Frisque was continuing. 'Okay, now he moves to DC-3.'

'Further west?'

A short moment, then: 'No, mostly south. DC, Daly City picked him up. Check your map. I'd say it looks like he left the freeway at Geneva and went south. No way to tell how far, because the call ends. Sergeant Glitsky?'

'I'm here.'

Dooher left the freeway and turned south on Geneva at 7:41, knowing at that time that Trang was sitting in his office alone.

Got him!

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Archbishop Flaherty had canceled his other appointments for this Monday morning. This was more important. The entire situation was getting out of hand, as a matter of fact. Over the weekend, the police had torn apart Mark Dooher 's world, finding nothing that tied him to Victor Trang in the process. It was unconscionable, irresponsible and appalling.

So his spartan office was crowded with a gaggle of lawyers. His full-time staff corporate counsel, Gabe Stockman, was punching something into his laptop. Dooher and he had been in touch over much of the weekend, and now he and his attorney, a man unknown to Flaherty named Wes Farrell, had arrived. They were pouring themselves some coffee from the small table near the window that overlooked the schoolyard.

'What I'd like to know,' Flaherty said, 'is why they seem to have settled on you, Mark.'

Wes Farrell, the new guy, stopped stirring his coffee. 'Mark owned a bayonet once. He talked to Trang. They don't have anybody else. That's what they have. Beyond that, I've got a theory if you'd like to hear it.'

'At this point, I'd like to hear anything that makes sense.'

'Glitsky. Sergeant Glitsky. I understand you've met him, too. That he attacked you, as well.'

'That might be a little strong,' Flaherty said. 'He wasn't very sociable, let's just say that.'

'Well, regardless, Your Excellency, I did a little checking, a couple of people I know at the Hall of Justice. He is having some serious personal problems. His wife is dying. He screwed up his last major investigation – which happened to be another one of my clients. At the same time, he's bucking for promotion and he needs a high-profile success in a bad way. And guess who oversees police promotions? The Chief, Dan Rigby, who's a pawn of the Mayor, who is, in turn, just a little bit left-wing.'

Flaherty interrupted. 'You're telling me this is political.'

Now Stockman looked up, putting in his own two cents. 'Everything's political.'

Emboldened by the support, Farrell was warming up. 'So here's how it breaks. The Mayor's support is ninety percent blacks, women's groups and gays, am I right? Hell, he's got two gay supervisors in his pocket. The Catholic Church, represented by my client here, Mark Dooher, is anti-abortion, anti-women priests, anti-gay.'

'That's not entirely accurate,' Flaherty said. He really didn't like the anti-this and anti-that rhetoric. If Farrell was going to be representing Dooher, he'd have to try to get him to re-tool his vocabulary. The Church was pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage. It was not a negative institution.

But Farrell waved off his objection and kept rolling. 'So Glitsky is willing to go the extra mile to bring Mark to grief. Even if the evidence is lame, and it's less than that, he puts himself on the side of the people who can promote him, who can watch out for his ass. Pardon the language.'

The room went silent.

'Could that really be it?' Flaherty asked. 'That's very hard to believe. I mean, this is the police department of a major city.'

Farrell sipped his coffee. 'It's one man.'

Dooher held up a hand. His voice was cool water. 'Glitsky's not the issue here, Wes. There is absolutely no evidence tying me to Victor. I was out driving golf balls. I forgot to tell Glitsky that I had stopped on Geneva to get gas on the way out to the range. I foolishly paid with cash. The attendant who took my money had his nose buried in some Asian newspaper and consequently didn't remember me or my car. Or anyone else, I'd wager. So Glitsky thinks I lied, covered up. That's not it. Even if Glitsky's out to get me, somebody out there has got to believe I'm innocent. Maybe the DA himself, Chris Locke.'

This, Flaherty realized, was why he valued Dooher so highly. He saw things clearly. Even here at the center of this maelstrom, he was formulating a firm, effective strategy. It was ridiculous to think that Mark Dooher would ever have to resort to violence of any kind. He was too smart. He could destroy without a touch. 'Let me try that,' Flaherty said. 'I'll call Locke, explain the situation. See if he can help clear things up.'

Chris Locke was the city's first black District Attorney and a consummate political animal, and he was sitting alone in his office thinking about Archbishop James Flaherty, with whom he had just spoken.

Locke knew that Flaherty influenced a lot of votes in San Francisco through parish homilies, position papers, public appearances, pastoral letters. He also knew that conservatives, comprising perhaps thirty percent of the city's voters, played at best only a peripheral role in any election, but that it would be foolish to ignore them completely. Locke, though a prosecutor, was on the Mayor's liberal team (as any elected official in San Francisco had to be), but his private support of the Archbishop might in some future election tip the scales in his favor. Locke thought that cooperating with a powerful conservative like Flaherty, behind the scenes, was worth the risk.

But something in Locke knew it wasn't just the votes. It was more visceral, more immediate, and he was addicted to it – having something on people who held authority and power. And Flaherty had taken the unusual step of asking Locke for a favor. That was worth looking into.

Though he directed all prosecutions in the city, Locke was rarely current on the progress of investigations being conducted at any given time – they were police business. The DA came later.

But, of course, he had his sources. He could find out.

Art Drysdale sat behind his desk juggling baseballs. Now in his late fifties, he'd played about two weeks of major league ball for the Giants before he'd gone to law school, and the wall behind him still sported some framed and yellowing highlights from college ball and the minors.

For the past dozen years, Drysdale had run the day-to-day work of the DA's office, and Locke depended on him for nearly all administrative decisions. The DA had come down to Drysdale's smaller office, knocked on the door, and let himself in, closing the door behind him.

Drysdale never stopped juggling.

'How do you do that?'

'What? Oh, juggling?'

'No, I wasn't talking about juggling. What makes you think I was talking about juggling?'

The balls came down – plop, plop, plop – in one of Drysdale's hands, and he placed them on his desk blotter. 'It's a gift,' he said. 'What's up?'

'What do you know about Mark Dooher?'

The Chief Assistant DA knew just about everything there was to date about Mark Dooher. Drysdale believed in a smooth pipeline from the police department, through the DA's office, and on to the courts. He stayed in touch with Chief Rigby, with the Calendar Judge, with his Assistant DAs, such as Amanda Jenkins. He generally knew about things before they officially happened, if not sooner. If asked, he would undoubtedly say that his prescience, too, was a gift.

So he ran the Dooher story down for his boss. It was a tasty mixture: Flaherty's fears, Dooher's mysterious turnoff onto Geneva near the time of the murder, the bayonet question, the interviews with Trang's women, Glitsky's recent over-aggressive stand on Levon Copes, the stress he was under because of his wife's illness.

'But not much evidence yet?'

Drysdale shook his head. 'Not that I've heard. They searched all weekend.'

'Flaherty says this Dooher is a pillar of the community.'

'Community pillars have been known to kill people.'

'We know this, Art. But His Excellency thinks that maybe Glitsky's harassing Dooher for some reason.'

'The famous "some reason"

'The point is, Flaherty is really unhappy. Really unhappy. He's also worried that Glitsky will arrest Dooher for murdering Trang anyway, even if he's light on evidence.'

Drysdale was shaking his head no. 'Glitsky's a stone pro, Chris. He's not going to arrest him without a warrant. If there's no evidence, there's no evidence.'

'And there is none?'

'Nowhere near enough. So far.'

'So I can tell the Archbishop he needn't worry?'

'If things don't change. But,' Drysdale held up a warning finger, 'they often do.'

'I'll keep that in mind, Art. But in the meanwhile,' he stood up, 'if we're hassling this guy, whatever reason, I want the word out it's to stop. We get righteous evidence or we let it go. We in accord here?'

'That's the way we always do it, Chris.'

Locke was at the door. 'I know that. I don't want to criticize a good cop who's having problems, Art, but Flaherty seems to know that we've got no matching hairs or fibers or fingerprints, no blood, no bayonet. And no motive. Am I right?'

'Yep.'

'All right.'

Drysdale stared at the door for a moment after it closed behind the DA. Then he picked up his baseballs again. Locke, he thought, had his own gift: the man knew how to deliver a message.

Glitsky's fears about his wife were well founded. After three days of whirlwind house-cleaning following the earthquake, she had faked feeling better on Sunday morning. When Glitsky had left to continue serving his search warrant, she had gone back to bed.

She sent all three boys out to the movies, with instructions not to return until dinnertime. Flo knew that her nurse, and Abe's father Nat, would be back on Monday. She thought she'd be fine until then. She didn't want to burden anybody, which is all she did anymore.

But this morning she hadn't been able to get out of bed. The nurse was in with her. Abe had put off going to work and now he and Nat sat in the living-room armchairs in the same attitude – hunched over, elbows on their knees.

'She's got to do what she's got to do, Abraham. Maybe all the cleaning, it did her some good. For her soul.'

Glitsky didn't have it in him to argue anymore. It had been a thoroughly dispiriting weekend. Hours of work and nothing to show for it. There had been no sign of Mark Dooher's bayonet. The lab would be coming in with microscopic results over the next few days, but Glitsky held out little hope of finding anything. Dooher had lots of suits in his closet at home, ten pairs of shoes, and all of them were pristine. It had been basically the same story at his office – fewer clothes, but everything spotless. His files gave no indication of any meeting with Trang. He kept his golf clubs in the trunk.

And in pursuit of those meager pickings, Abe hadn't been there for Flo, and now his father was talking about her soul. Well, he no longer cared about her soul. He cared about her body – that it wasn't causing her pain, if it could somehow stop betraying her. Even, God forgive him, that it let her rest for good. 'Maybe you're right, Dad. Maybe it helped her soul.'

'But you don't think so?'

He shrugged. 'It doesn't matter. She did it. It wore her out. Now she's worse.'

'But for those couple of days, she was better.'

There was nothing Glitsky wanted to say. He might feel like howling at the moon, but he didn't want to yell at his dad, who was cursed with the need to find meaning in life, an explanation for the randomness of experience.

The telephone rang and he made some hopeless gesture to Nat, got up, and went to the kitchen to answer it.

It was Frank Batiste. Locke's message had made its way through the system, and he heard it, said, 'Thanks,' and hung up.

'Who was that?' His father was standing in the hallway between the kitchen and his bedroom.

Glitsky stared ahead. 'Work.'

'If it's important, you can go in. I'll be here. Flo-'

'No,' Glitsky said. 'Just a case closing, that's all.'