Nothing But The Truth

14

Saturday morning in an empty house. Gradually over the past several years, but chronically it seemed in the last few months, Hardy wasn’t happy at home. Kids constantly underfoot, Frannie with her women friends, talking about kids mostly. Kids fighting, discipline. Kids’ sports, games, school, homework, lessons, meals they didn’t eat, pets they didn’t care for. Kids kids kids.

Whenever anyone asked him directly, he always said he loved his own kids, and he thought he did. But if he had it to do over, being honest with himself, he had doubts.

When they’d started out, Frannie and he had read all the books about marriages coping with the changes of a growing family. Hardy had often wondered since why somebody hadn’t written the real book, called ‘Children? Don’t!’ Because he’d come to believe that having a family didn’t simply change things – it ended that earlier existence. You might go into it thinking you were retaining the essentials of the old life, merely adding to its richness and variety. But in a few years you had a whole new life, and it felt as if none of it was really yours.

He’d come around to accepting as absolute fact that paradise would be sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to an empty, quiet house. Maybe one that would stay that way.

Now, doing it, suddenly he wasn’t so sure.

The sun was in his eyes. He threw a forearm over them, then squinted out his bedroom window over the city. Where was he, anyway? It came back to him – he’d slept in his clothes, crashing on the bed. The gun was on his reading table, where the clock read eight thirty. He must have been a zombie on wheels. He didn’t remember anything about driving home, where he’d parked, letting himself in.

God, it was quiet.

Bones creaking, he forced himself to sit up, saw the gun and reached for it.

He got up and went into the bathroom, throwing cold water on his face, trying to wake all the way up. Through the rooms, then to the front door, which he’d locked, then back down the long hallway to the kitchen. The house felt hollow, as though the soul of it had been sucked out. The kids, he realized. Frannie.

It struck him forcibly – a revelation. Standing by his sturdy, rough-hewn table in a well-equipped and beautiful kitchen on a fantastic Indian summer morning, he felt nothing but an underlying sense of terror, a vast pervasive unease.

This was the alternative.

But he had work to do, and yesterday had been a reminder that the engine wouldn’t work without fuel. His black and ancient cast-iron pan was in its place on the back burner. No matter what he cooked in it, nothing ever stuck. He cleaned it only with salt and a wipe with a rag. Since Hardy had first cured it, the pan had never known detergent or water, and now its surface was a flat black pearl.

Turning the gas on under it, he threw down a thin layer of salt from the shaker, then crossed to the refrigerator. He grabbed a couple of eggs. Evidently Frannie had been marinating filet mignons for Thursday night when the grand jury session had intervened. Hardy picked one of the steaks from its ceramic bowl and dropped it into the pan, then broke an egg on either side of it.

There was a loaf of sourdough in its bag by the bread drawer and he sliced off about a third of it, cut it down the middle, poured some olive oil on to one of the cut sides, and placed it next to the sizzling steak.

While everything cooked on one side, he put on a pot of coffee, then turned the bread and the meat, laid the eggs on the toasted side, broke the yolks, turned off the pan, and went in to shower.

The day, when he hit the street outside, was impossibly bright, warm, and fragrant. He felt hopeful and motivated, a far cry from how he’d woken up, when he couldn’t figure out a move and then – unable to focus – hadn’t been able to locate his car for ten minutes.

But running on automatic, he knew that whatever else he did he had to go to Erin’s first, to check in and see Vincent and Rebecca, make sure they were getting along all right at their grandmother’s. And that visit had provided him with a bonus as well as the usual territorial disputes.

Last night Ed and Erin had taken them to the Planetarium and they were telling him about all they had learned, and the cool way the night sky came up. Vincent didn’t believe it was an optical illusion. He was sure it was the real night sky. ‘It was. It was exactly the sky, Dad. They just opened the roof and there was the moon and the stars and everything.’ Shooting a glare at Rebecca the literalist, daring her to contradict him.

But Hardy cut them off. ‘I’ve seen it, too, Vin. It is the exact sky. I love that, too.’ A warning eye at his girl – don’t say anything. Let him have this one.

Finally he got to her. ‘So, Beck, what’d you see?’

His daughter, always ready to show off a fact, no longer cared about the truth of the night sky. Her father had finessed Vincent and given her the floor and that was all that mattered. ‘Well, the main thing was about, what’s that moon, Vin?’

‘I don’t know, but around Jup-’

‘Yeah, that’s it. Around Jupiter, one of the moons has an atmosphere and water and everything you need for life.’

‘What about heat?’

‘Inside, Dad. Molten core and volcanoes. Just like a mile under the ocean here on earth. Where’s the heat there? Inside. See?’

‘Great. I bet it could happen.’

‘Definitely. They even showed what could grow as if we were there. Some of them-’

‘You know what I thought was the best thing?’ Vincent had to get a word in.

‘The Beck’s not done, Vin. One more-’

‘She’ll never get done. She’ll keep going till you have to go.’

Hardy thought of a new name for his ‘don’t have that child’ book – The Endless Referee. But he sighed. ‘Beck? Are you almost done?’

But she must have been truly happy to have her dad there, or else wanted nothing more than to please him, which did happen. She hesitated only a second before smiling. ‘He can go.’

‘OK, Vin, what did you think was the best thing?’

The boy was so thrilled with his good fortune – interrupting his sister and it worked! – that for a moment Hardy thought he’d forgotten what he was going to say. This happened all the time, and invariably made Vincent cry. But it was, suddenly, a morning for miracles. The fact had come back to him. ‘How you can see a star when you can’t see it?’

It must have been obvious that Hardy didn’t understand.

Vincent tried it another way. ‘When it’s too dim, when you can’t see it otherwise.’

‘What is?’

‘A star, or a planet, or anything in the sky. If it’s really dim, the way you see it is you don’t look right at it. You look to the side. We did it. It really works.’

So when Hardy left, his next stop wasn’t Frannie or Abe or his reporter friend Jeff Elliot to catch up on the Beaumont case.

At his son’s suggestion, he wasn’t going to look directly at it for a while. He still had clients and phone messages and paperwork so he went to his office to attend to those.

And sure enough, somewhere in the middle of that, he remembered that Phil Canetta had stood behind him with his spiral pocket filing system, and he’d written down all the names on Ron’s answering machine.

He had told Hardy he worked out of Central Station, so he looked up the number and made the call.

The Central Station, close to the border of Chinatown and North Beach, was where Hardy wanted to open his restaurant when he retired. Not that there weren’t dozens of other fantastic dining establishments within a couple of blocks – Firenze by Night, Amelio’s, Rose Pistola, the North Beach Restaurant, Caffe Sport, the Gold Spike – but the smells of coffee, breads, licorice, sesame, roasted duck, cheeses, fish, and sausages kept tourists in a near constant feeding frenzy.

Even the locals, such as Hardy, weren’t immune. After his breakfast, he wasn’t at all hungry, but as soon as he stepped out of his car and caught a whiff of it all, danged if he didn’t think he could go for a little smackerel of something. It was a wonder, he thought, that the cops out of Central weren’t the most overweight in the city.

Plus parking. The five-story public parking structure was directly across the street and would never under any conditions be approved by today’s city planners because, after all, what kind of political statement could a parking structure make? Its only purpose would be functional, and the shakers in the city hadn’t cared about that issue in years and years.

Hardy was walking out of its utilitarian perfection now, trying to figure whom he could bribe to condemn the station building so he and maybe David Freeman could open some hip new spot there. Somebody had done it recently with Mel Belli’s old building and you couldn’t get inside the place now. Freeman, another old lawyer, might react to the precedent, and certainly he’d know whom to bribe.

Canetta cut a completely different figure in his uniform. With the three stripes on his arm, his handcuffs, bullet belt, gun, and nightstick, he was definitely a cop through and through. He appeared more substantial than he’d been the other night – heavier, older, thicker in the chest.

Hardy had arrived at what might be considered early lunchtime, and Canetta obviously wanted to get away from the station if he was going to talk about any of this.

They stopped at Molinari’s Deli so Canetta could get a sandwich – mortadella and Swiss with the waxy sharp pepperoncini Hardy loved and usually couldn’t resist, although today he did. He bought a large Pellegrino water instead.

They walked up Columbus to Washington Square. A few minutes of small talk – an update on Frannie – brought them to an unoccupied bench directly across from the twin spires of Sts Peter and Paul. Coit Tower presided over the row of buildings to their right. In front of them, a bare-chested man with gray hair in a long pony tail was trying to train an Irish setter to fetch a frisbee.

Canetta unwrapped his sandwich and Hardy started talking. Somebody had been in the penthouse and at least erased the tape. Perhaps they’d taken something as well.

Canetta let a few seconds pass, looked sideways at Hardy, fiddled with his sandwich wrapper. ‘That was me.’

Hardy tried not to show his surprise. ‘You went back? After we left last night?’

A bite of sandwich. A long time chewing. Then a nod. ‘I already had who’d called, right? Wrote ’em all down.‘ He patted his back pocket, where he kept his notebook. Then he went on, explaining, ’My answering machine at home, it only takes nine messages. I figured his might be the same. And if somebody else called him, I didn’t want the machine full up.‘

‘Makes sense,’ Hardy said, although that wasn’t what he thought. But it was a done deed. And in any event, Canetta was going on. ‘You know, they always say it’s the husband.’

Hardy nodded. ‘I used to hear that a lot when I was a cop. Now I’m not so sure it’s true.’

‘You were a cop?’ Canetta looked him over with new eyes.

‘It’s been a few years, but just after ’Nam, before I went to law school, I walked a beat. Glitsky was my partner, matter of fact.‘

A moment’s reflection while this settled. Then a question. ‘So the head of homicide’s your old buddy, and you’re coming to me?’

‘I’m the one whose wife’s in jail. Glitsky’s got two guys on the investigation, but it’s three weeks old now and they’re don’t have a thing.’

‘And you think you can help them?’

‘No. I think I can help me.’

Canetta liked that and smiled. ‘Little slow for you are they, huh? The suits?’

And there it was again, the animosity between the street police and the inspectors. Hardy had picked up a trace of it the first night and, not looking directly at it, it had seemed he might be able to get something out of it.

But he had to play the hand close. ‘The way I see it is this. They’re holding my wife because of something she knows about Ron, right?’

‘OK.’

‘Because Ron’s their suspect?’ Another nod.

‘So if I can give them somebody else, anybody but Ron, the heat’s off Frannie. They’ll let her go, since what she knows isn’t part of a murder.’

He could see that the idea appealed to Canetta. The strategic considerations were provocative enough, but suddenly there was something more – the chance to show up the inspectors downtown. If Canetta was any part of the solution to a homicide, he’d get a hell of a lot of print and even more prestige. ‘I told you the other night and I’ll say it again, I think it’s Bree’s work. And you’re saying you’d start with the phone messages?’

Hardy nodded. ‘Ron had calls from both of Bree’s camps. So I’m asking myself why they’d call Ron. What was in those files one of them talked about?’

‘You’re saying that was why she was killed.’ His sandwich now forgotten, Canetta was already digging for his notebook.

‘Not exactly. I’m saying if it wasn’t Ron – and for my own reasons I’d prefer it wasn’t – then this is the next rock to look under.’

‘Valens and Jim Pierce?’

‘Yeah. What?’

Canetta’s eyes had narrowed. He was staring out across the park. ‘Nothing really, except I know Pierce a little – that freelance security work I told you about.’

‘And?’

A shrug. ‘I don’t think I should talk to him about any of this. He knows I’m not in homicide and he’d bust my sorry ass.’

This made sense, and Hardy agreed easily enough. ‘But how about some of these others? You still in? This Marie, for example. Who’s she?’

Canetta answered with a guarded enthusiasm. Clearly, he still wanted to be part of this, but he wasn’t going to show how much. ‘The insurance guy would probably be the easiest one to get a hold of,’ he said. ‘Bill Tilton. If he’s local, he’s probably listed.’

Hardy had his own notebook out now, and was copying the names. He planned to see Ron later today and get many of these answers, but Canetta could be useful – a badge in his service. ‘OK, we’ve got one other person with a last name, this woman Sasaka, with the mystery appointment.’

A thought struck Canetta. ‘Ron knew a lot of women, didn’t he?’

Hardy didn’t want to pursue that. Ron wasn’t going to be his focus. Tapping his fingers on his pad, making a show of thinking, he finally looked up. ‘What was the security work where you met Bree?’

‘Hotel stuff. Bunch of suits down from Sacramento, lobbyists, politicians, one time the Vice President, secret service yada yada.’

‘So what was your assignment? Did you guard individual people?’

‘No, nothing like that.’ Canetta obviously didn’t like the work. ‘Stand at the doors, take your hardware, be a presence. You know, these guys, they like to make a show. How important they all are.’

‘But even at these meetings, Bree was somebody?’

He nodded somberly. ‘Oh yeah. She stood out. I mean, first was the looks thing, especially in this bunch of geeks and wonks. But then she’d always give some talk and bring down the house. She had this… sincere quality, a lot of… passion, I guess.’ Canetta was stumbling over himself, trying to make Hardy see. ‘Like she really believed in things. I mean, she got to people – you know what I’m saying.’

At least, Hardy was thinking, she got to Canetta. But now the cop, his eyes far away again, seemed to be considering something. He was half-swallowing, and his next words nearly decked Hardy. ‘Couple of other times, you know, I talked to her.’

He kept his voice neutral, but it was an effort. ‘You mean personally?’

Canetta still wasn’t completely committed to revealing this, but after a beat he nodded. ‘Coincidences, really, the way it started. I was doing traffic duty a day or two after one of these shows.’ A pause, deciding to keep talking. ‘I don’t know, three, four months ago. It’s early evening, I pull her over for speeding about a block from her place. It’s obvious she’s had a couple.’

‘She was drunk?’

‘Maybe.’ A quick exhale, letting some of the tension go. Hardy suddenly understanding a little about why Canetta didn’t want to talk to him at the station house. He was already involved here. ‘I’m alone in the cruiser. I recognize her of course. I don’t cite her. She’s not like out of her mind, blowing maybe a one is my guess. Long story short, she gets in and I drive her home.’

She got in his cruiser? Hardy wanted to ask if anything else had gone on. In his line of work, it wasn’t uncommon to hear about some cop pulling over a pretty woman because the tread on her back tires was worn down, so he could meet her, be charming and find out if she was available.

Much more seriously, if less common, was that it wasn’t unknown for a cop to get a woman’s address off her driver’s license and start stalking. Hardy was sure it was because he’d established his credentials as an ex-cop, a member of the club, that Canerta was telling him that he’d broken every rule in the book with Bree.

Still, it was unsettling.

And it wasn’t over. ‘So anyway, little while later, I’m passing the building and she’s standing out on the sidewalk. I stop and ask her does she need a lift someplace, but no, she’s waiting for somebody to come pick her up. We talk a minute.’

‘What about?’

A shrug. ‘She just thanked me for not writing her up. Said she didn’t usually drink too much. She’d just been under a lot of pressure recently. Job stuff. I tell her I heard her talk a couple of times. It seems to me she’s doing some real good with her work, making a real difference. But she shakes her head. ’It’s all a mess,‘ she says, then like stops, not wanting to say anything else. Says she’s sorry. I ask her for what, and she says like everything.’

A silence.

‘Did you tell any of this to Griffin?’

‘Who?’

‘Carl Griffin, the inspector who got the case.’

A sideways glance. ‘He didn’t ask me. I’m just a station cop – what could I know?’ The sergeant had gotten himself hunched over, elbows on knees, during the telling. Now, suddenly, he sat back up as though surprised at where they were. He remembered his sandwich and took a bite, his jaw working furiously.

Hardy killed a minute with his water. ‘You married, Phil?’

‘Eleven years,’ he said evenly. ‘We got a son just turned twelve. Sometimes you think if things were different, if you could have a choice…’

Hardy clearly heard what he didn’t say – you meet someone like Bree and you wish you wish you wish, but the option isn’t there anymore.

‘But you’d meet with her, with Bree?’

‘Nothing that arranged. I’d pass by the same time of day and she got so she’d be there sometimes. We’d say hi, how’s it goin’, like that. Tell the truth, the feeling I got was she wanted to be reassured that I was there, like her protector.‘ He took in a ton of air and let it out slowly. ’And then she gets killed on my watch.‘

15

Jim Pierce lived in a three-story Italianate structure set behind a wraparound high, white stucco wall. The property was in what realtors would call a serious neighborhood, on North Point, a block from the Palace of Fine Arts. On this lovely Saturday in the early afternoon, the tourists and even what appeared to be some locals were out in droves, enjoying the Marina district, escorting hordes of children through the Exploratorium, eating gourmet picnic items and feeding the ducks in the lake with the leftovers.

All of which Hardy got to see in his seven-block walk back to North Point from the parking space he finally located after circling the lake four times. As he went, Hardy found himself considering the possibility that the ducks were inadvertently being fed bits of duck from Chinatown – the odd smear of duck paté, maybe some seared duck cracklings, or breast slices from someone’s salad – and that this cannibalistic feeding would someday give rise to the dreaded Mad Duck Disease, which wouldn’t be discovered yet for another twenty years, by which time it would be too late. Today’s trendy duck eaters would be dropping like flies.

He’d let his mind wander as a defense to the sense of intimidation he’d felt when he’d first identified the house from the address Canetta had provided. But now he was here, before the imposing, black, solid metal gate, and there was nothing to do but push the burton. A pleasant, contralto, cultured female voice answered. ‘Yes. Who is it?’

Hardy told her. Said he was afraid it was about Bree Beaumont again. He was sorry. Keeping his role vague, since he really didn’t have one.

She hesitated, then asked him to please wait. For a moment, he thought he might have gotten lucky, and he put his hand on the knob, waiting for the click as it unlocked. Instead, an impatient male voice rasped through the speaker. ‘Who the hell is this? I’ve already talked to you people half-a-dozen times. I’ve talked to the grand jury. When are you going to let me have a little peace? I swear to God, I’m trying to cooperate, but I’m tempted to ask for a warrant this time. This is getting a little ridiculous.’

But the gate clicked, and Hardy pushed it open.

For all the imposing nature of his house, and even with the impatient tone in his voice, Jim Pierce came across as a nice guy. He opened the front door before Hardy was halfway up the walk. ‘Do they change investigators downtown every five minutes nowadays? No wonder you people aren’t getting anywhere.’ Hardy squinted in the bright sunlight. Pierce wore a white polo shirt with a colorful logo over the left breast, a pair of well-worn but pressed khakis, tassled loafers with no socks. ‘I’m just watching the game. Notre Dame, USC? The Irish are eating them for lunch. You like football?’

‘I used to like Notre Dame back when Parsegian coached,’ Hardy said. He was on the porch stairs and Pierce was already a step into the dark interior of the house. ‘You ought to know I’m not with the police.’

Pierce stopped and turned back. ‘I thought Carrie said it was about Bree… oh, never mind.’ It was his turn to squint. Hardy stayed outside, framed in the doorway. ‘So what can I do for you? What’s this about?’

Hardy introduced himself as a lawyer doing some work for Bree’s husband, Ron. ‘You called him last week.’

A flash of surprise. ‘I did?’

‘Yes, sir, I believe so.’

The expression held as – apparently – he tried to remember. ‘All right, then, I must have. Did I say what it was about?’

‘You asked him to call you back. Something about Bree’s effects. Did you ever hear back from him?’

Pierce didn’t have to think about it. ‘No.’

‘Can I ask you what you wanted?’

The nice-guy image was fading slightly. Pierce was getting tired of fielding questions about Bree. ‘One of my duties involves community relations,’ he said. ‘I think she took a lot of boilerplate with her when she left – form letters, standard language PR materials, disks. It would be helpful to have it back.’

‘So why didn’t you ask her for it when she was alive?’

‘I did. She wasn’t very well disposed toward the company after she left. I thought Ron might be a little more… malleable.’ By degrees, Pierce had moved back to the doorway, and now stood perhaps two feet from Hardy, his hand back on the door, by all signs ready to say goodbye.

But something stopped him. ‘Now how about if I ask you one?’

‘Sure.’

‘As a lawyer, what are you doing for Ron? The police don’t have suspicions of him, do they?’

‘They’re eliminating suspects right now and he’s one of them. Maybe I can find something to get them off him.’

‘So you don’t think he killed Bree?’

Something in his tone set off bells. Hardy cocked his head. ‘You do?’

‘No. I didn’t say that.’

‘That’s funny. That’s what it sounded like.’

‘No.’ He sighed again, this time the weariness unmistakable. ‘Lord, where will this end? I don’t know who killed Bree. I’m still having a hard time believing anyone could kill her, that someone purposely ended her life.’

Hardy suddenly noticed the pallor under Pierce’s ruddy cheeks – lack of sleep, time spent indoors. The darkened house. He put it together that, like Canetta, Pierce was in a kind of mourning. Another guy laid out by Bree’s death.

The woman certainly had cut a swath.

‘If you had to guess, Mr Pierce, why was she killed?’

A blank look, his mind no longer on Hardy. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I realize that you can’t talk about what you told the grand jury…’

Suddenly Pierce seemed to realize they were still in the doorway. ‘I’m sorry. Where are my manners, keeping you standing out here? Come on in.’

Hardy stood a minute inside, his eyes adjusting. Now that he’d asked him in, Pierce seemed uncertain what to do next. He motioned to a large bowl on a table next to the door. ‘Help yourself to some candy, if you’d like. Almond Roca. The best.’

Hardy thanked him and took a couple, unpeeling the gold wrapper on one of them as Pierce led him back through the foyer. It wasn’t just the Almond Roca – ‘the best’ seemed to be the underlying theme of the place. Formal living areas, one-of-a-kind furniture, ten-foot ceilings. They bypassed the winding staircase. The television droned in a small room and Pierce poked his head in. ‘Halftime,’ he said, and kept walking.

The last door on the right opened into a modern kitchen, where a woman sat at the island counter. Facing away from them, reading a magazine, she half turned as they entered.

‘Excuse us, Carrie. Mr Hardy, my wife.’ Then, explaining. ‘He’s not with the police after all. Mr Beaumont’s attorney.’

She got off her stool and stood, extending a cool, firm hand. A nod of the regal head, holding on to Hardy’s hand an instant longer than was customary. Mrs Pierce was no child, no recent trophy wife – she appeared to be just to either side of forty – but Hardy decided immediately that she was not just very attractive, but almost disturbingly beautiful. Widely set, startling blue eyes dominated the face of a northern Italian goddess. He estimated she was wearing two thousand dollars’ worth of tailored casual wear that emphasized the slim waist. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe style that highlighted the sculpted bones of her face. Simple designer gold earrings dangled from what seemed to be designer earlobes and a wide gold necklace graced a flawless expanse of finely pored, honey-toned skin over the rise of a deep and dangerous cleavage. ‘Have they charged Mr Beaumont?’ she asked in her cultured voice, a pretty frown clouding her perfect brow.

‘Not yet.’ Hardy hoped he wasn’t stammering. ‘I’m trying to keep that from happening. I was just asking your husband why he thought Bree Beaumont was killed.’

‘Or why he’s a suspect?’ Carrie Pierce said it matter-of-factly. ‘He was Bree’s mentor from the beginning, that’s why. They worked closely together and of course people talked. People tend to be jealous, not to believe that men and women who work together can be friends without…’ A brief look of distaste. ‘I mean, the world doesn’t really turn around sex, after all.’

Hardy thought it was good coloration for Carrie Pierce to believe that. He doubted that any man had ever looked at her and not thought about sex. But if she wanted to retain a sense of her value as a person outside of that context, she’d better believe that there was more.

‘The point is,’ Pierce said, ‘that evidently someone – one of my colleagues perhaps – had told the police that I’d been furious at Bree for leaving Caloco, especially so abruptly.’

‘And were you?’

Pierce looked at his wife, then nodded. ‘Pretty mad, yes. Betrayed, hurt, all of it. But that was personal.’

‘But her leaving? Changing sides in these gas additive wars I keep hearing about. That was business.’

Pierce wore a look of amused toleration. ‘And you think that the big bad oil companies got together and, because she’d had a philosophical change of heart, we decided to kill her?’

Hardy had to smile himself. ‘Actually, hearing it out loud it doesn’t sound too plausible.’

‘It’s completely absurd,’ Carrie said. ‘Regardless of what you may hear on the radio, murder isn’t really one of Caloco’s business tools. Or any of the seven sisters.’

‘Seven sisters?’

Pierce explained. ‘That’s what they call us, the spin-offs of Standard Oil after antitrust broke up the mother company. But none of the sisters would have any reason to kill Bree or anybody else. Frankly we don’t need to.’

Hardy said it mildly. ‘Even for three billion dollars?’

Pierce had on his tolerant face, the one Hardy supposed he used for the public. ‘And what is that figure, three billion dollars? Where does that come from?’

‘That’s the number I’ve been hearing. Isn’t that the yearly income from this gas additive everyone’s fighting about?’

‘MTBE?’

‘That’s the one.’

Pierce nodded. ‘That sounds about right. Three billion.’ He pulled out a stool, sat on it and indicated Hardy take one, too. Which he did. Carrie excused herself and moved over to the main counter to pour more coffee.

Hardy tried not to follow her movements, but it was not easy. He tore his eyes away, back to Pierce. ‘So my point is that that’s a lot of money. And if Bree led the charge against this stuff…’

But Pierce was shaking his head. ‘No.’ He lifted his hand, ticking off the points on his fingers. ‘First, Bree didn’t have anything like that kind of power. She wrote our drafts, she was a great and persuasive spokesperson, but Jesus Christ himself could come down and say MTBE was the devil and it wouldn’t just go away. The stuff has cleaned up the air unbelievably. It works, Mr Hardy. The EPA loves it. Hell, it mandates it – that’s a long way from being outlawed. It’s not going away because one woman says it might have side effects, which, PS, is nowhere near proved. Second, and this is always a tough one to sell, but three billion really isn’t all that much money.’

Hardy had to reply. ‘Three billion! We’re talking three billion dollars.’

Pierce nodded. ‘It’s all relative. It’s mixed into gas at eleven per cent. And basically the stuff’s only used in California, and only for half the year at that. So you do the math. Three billion represents about ten per cent of half of California’s gasoline bill. It’s a drop in the bucket.’

‘You’re telling me you wouldn’t miss three billion dollars?’

‘Somebody in some department might notice, but long-term? That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s nothing.’

Carrie came back over with an urn of coffee, china cups and saucers, sugar, and cream on a silver platter. ‘It’s the hardest part of Jim’s job, Mr Hardy. Making people see that this isn’t all about money. They think because we make a profit that we must be evil. But Jim hired Bree to do good, to find out how to make a better product, better for the world. No one seems to understand that. And that cost billions, too, to re-tool the refineries-’

Pierce reached over and patted her hand. ‘What Carrie’s saying is that it’s a complicated issue. It’s true that we’ve spent billions developing MTBE and for a while everyone was thrilled with it. It seemed to be doing the job. Now some questions have come up and we’re looking into them. But the point is that we’re committed to clean fuels and if it turns out that we have to develop some new refining tool, we’ll do that, even if it costs billions, which it will because everything costs billions. That’s the price of admission in this league.’

He took a sip of his coffee. ‘But the other point, Mr Hardy, is that Bree getting a case of the doubts is no reason on God’s earth for any oil company to do anything, much less have her killed. And that’s essentially what I told the police.’

Hardy picked up his own cup and took a drink. Most of what Pierce said made logical sense if he accepted the premise that three billion dollars wasn’t a lot of money, but that remained a bit of a leap. ‘I once figured out how long it would take to count to a billion,’ he said. ‘If you did nothing else. One number every half second, twelve hours a day. You want to guess?’

Pierce shrugged. ‘I don’t have any idea. A week?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Thirty-two years, give or take a few months.’

Pierce chuckled. ‘Get out of here.’

‘It’s a really big number, a billion,’ Hardy said.

‘Can that be right?’ Carrie asked.

Hardy nodded. ‘It’s right. But my point is, it might be why people seem to have a hard time thinking three billion isn’t a lot of money. Why Bree might have been killed for it.’

‘She was one person, Mr Hardy,’ Pierce said.

‘So was Hitler. If he’d been killed, it might have avoided World War Two.’ He shrugged. ‘Look, I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m trying to get a handle on what I keep hearing on the radio, that the oil companies had a motive to kill her.’

Pierce remained unruffled, as though he’d heard it all before, which he probably had. ‘You’re welcome to look, Mr Hardy, but it will waste a lot of your time.’ He sipped coffee. Hardy had the impression he was stalling for a moment. Then he seemed to reach some decision, and sighed. ‘You know the source of all this radio nonsense, don’t you?’

‘No. I thought it was kind of a groundswell…’

Pierce was shaking his head. ‘Not at all. It’s a well-funded group of eco-terrorists. Don’t laugh, that’s what they call themselves. Eco-terrorists.’

‘And?’

‘And they all seem to be working to get Damon Kerry elected since he’s the standard bearer against MTBE.’

‘All right.’ Hardy didn’t see where this was going.

‘Well, at the time she left us, Bree was very much under the spell of Damon Kerry, too. Perhaps more, although I shouldn’t say that after all I’ve had to endure on that score.’ He glanced at his wife, whose lovely face again betrayed her distaste at this subject.

Pierce turned back to Hardy. ‘What I’m saying is that at least these are the kind of people who admit to resorting to violence, or the need for it. Maybe somehow Bree crossed them, joined the camp and was going to renege, something like that.’

‘You’re not saying Kerry-’

‘No no no, not personally. But somebody behind him. Possibly. Really I don’t know. I don’t like to point a finger at anybody, but…’ He trailed off.

Hardy remembered Canetta’s comments about Al Valens, who had also left a message for Ron Beaumont. A question presented itself. ‘You said this group – these terrorists – are well-funded. Where do they get their money?’

Carrie nearly blurted it out. ‘That’s easy. SKO.’

Pierce snapped at her. ‘We don’t know that, not for sure.’

‘Of course we do.’

Husband and wife glared at each other.

‘Who?’ Hardy asked.

Making a show of reluctance, Pierce let out a long breath. ‘Spader Krutch Ohio.’

‘The farming conglomerate?’ Hardy asked.

Pierce nodded. ‘Corn. Ethanol, the other additive. It’s a huge company, as you say, heavily subsidized by the government. They’ve got a stake in seeing MTBE outlawed.’

‘So they could make the three billion dollars?’ Hardy asked.

Carrie’s color was up. ‘They would kill for it.’

Pierce shook his head from side to side. ‘I doubt that. But there is, I believe, very little doubt that they are the source of these funds.’

Hardy digested this information for a moment. ‘Have you told the police about this?’

‘What exactly is there to tell?’ Pierce stood up. He’d given Hardy several minutes – nearly a halftime’s worth – and now the interview was over. ‘They asked me about my suspicions. I told them I’d heard about these economic motives and frankly, gave them short shrift. Poor Bree wasn’t assassinated, she was murdered.’

Hardy realized that this, from an oil company’s senior vice president, was self-serving. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Still, he thought, three billion dollars.

They had all begun moving back toward the front door. Carrie laid a hand on his arm, guiding him through the dimness. ‘If there is anything more you need,’ she said. ‘Jim and I want to help, but we don’t really know anything more than we’ve told you.’

They’d arrived in the foyer and Pierce went for the door. ‘Now that we’ve opened this can of worms, Mr Hardy, if you’re convinced it isn’t Beaumont, you might look into Kerry’s campaign after all. The funding, maybe the eco-terrorist thing. There could be something there.’ He sounded skeptical, though.

Hardy stopped, blinking in the sudden sunlight let in by the open door. It was the second time that Pierce had inadvertently alluded to Ron’s involvement in the murder. ‘But personally, you still think it’s Beaumont, don’t you?’

A temporizing smile. ‘I believe these things tend to be personal, let’s say that. If Bree had just started an affair with one of Kerry’s people and Ron found out…’ He trailed off. ‘Well, that’s motive, anyway.’

Hardy wanted to say, ‘So’s three billion dollars,’ but instead he merely thanked the couple for their time, handed them his card, and turned back for the long walk to his parking space.

16

Sergeant Canetta’s sandwich from Molinari’s had given Hardy the idea. For all his peregrinations of the morning, there hadn’t been a minute when Frannie wasn’t somewhere in his consciousness. Now, heading downtown for another visit to the jail, it occurred to him that perhaps every instant she spent locked up didn’t have to be hell.

Since it often worked for him, he reasoned that some good food might improve things temporarily for Frannie to the point where it was only as bad as purgatory – same conditions as hell, but you really knew it would end someday.

So he stopped and bought a spread of delectables from David’s Delicatessen – lox, bagels, cream cheese, chopped chicken liver, pastrami, onion rolls, pickles, even three bottles of creme soda, which was her favorite drink in the world that wasn’t made from grapes.

Only to be harshly rebuffed when he arrived at the jail. Was he crazy? The desk sergeant wanted to know. Didn’t Hardy know better by now? Visitors weren’t allowed to bring anything for the inmates into the jail – any piece of cake might have a razor blade or weapon in it, any drink some dissolved drugs.

So reluctantly, Hardy left the bag at the desk. The best of intentions…

One step into the room, Frannie turned from the guard and saw him sitting at the table, smiling at her. He spread out his arms. ‘Sorry it’s just me,’ he said. ‘I bought all your favorite food in the whole world, I really did, but they wouldn’t let me bring any of it inside.’ With a helpless expression he repeated that he was sorry.

She dissolved into tears. Just standing there in her orange jumpsuit, hands at her sides, looking at him and crying.

Nat Glitsky didn’t like being interrupted when he was at temple.

Lots of times when he’d been younger, he’d been less than diligent at keeping the Sabbath, but now in his eighth decade he’d come to believe that the Ten Commandments had gotten everything exactly right if you wanted to have a world full of healthy and productive people. People should pay attention to the wisdom in all ten of them, he believed. They really should. Keeping the Sabbath, taking a day off, kept you sane.

But nowadays even religious people mostly only acknowledged nine. Keeping holy the Lord’s day was not only forgotten, it had been completely subverted, even reversed. Woe betide the lazy bum who took a whole day off every single week to reflect and try to gain some perspective on his life and work and the world around him. There wasn’t time for that. There was only work. It was wrong.

Nat’s working days were over, and all he wished now was that he’d kept the Sabbath sacred more often back when he’d get overwhelmed with childraising or working or the pressures of his marriage. It might not have changed his life much, but at least it would have planted the seed in his son Abraham, who was always crushed under his workload, and who now was sitting – fidgeting really – next to him.

And that was what adhering to the commandments was all about, too. It was generational. It fostered the long view that human nature never changed. Only individual humans did. But not so often as you’d think.

Nat finished his prayer and hit his son on the thigh. OK, they could get up and go outside now.

On the steps of the synagogue, they both stopped, squinting into the bright sunlight. ‘I love the boy, Abraham, you know that. It’s nothing to do with that. It’s you.’

Abe drew in a deep breath. ‘What’s me? I didn’t plan this, you know, having to go downtown on Rita’s day off. They need me down there.’

Nat rolled his eyes, dismissing that excuse. ‘They always need you down there. Your son needs you out here. Suppose I just say no, I’ve got to go back to temple – then what?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I go get Orel and bring him down with me.’

‘Among the criminals? There’s a fine solution. Better I should take him back here.’

‘Except he’s got his soccer practice.’

‘Oh yes, right. Much more important than temple on the Sabbath.’

‘Well, he’s there, Dad, and I told him you’d be picking him up. If you’re not, fine, but I’ve got to know right now – all right?’

Suddenly, the serenity of the temple vanished, and a rare flash of anger took its place. Nat’s voice took on a hard edge. ‘Everything’s now with you, Abraham. You want to ask yourself why that is, maybe?’

Abe raised his own voice. ‘No. I don’t need to ask myself that, Dad. You want to know why? It’s because everything is a crisis. Everything has to be done five minutes ago, and so Saturday rolls around and all the stuff that needed to be done on Friday…’ Abe reined in his own escalating temper. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t mean to yell at you.’

Nat reached up and put a hand on his son’s shoulder. Abe had his mother Emma’s height and, of course, her color. He towered over his Jewish old man, who now shrugged. ‘I been yelled at before, Abraham. It’s not the yelling I’m worried about. It’s your boy. It’s time passing and then it’s gone and you never saw it.’

Glitsky had told his father he’d be getting home in time for dinner with him and Orel.

Nevertheless, the discussion nagged at him as he drove down to the Hall of Justice. It was still on his mind when he walked through the doorway into the long hall that led to the DA’s office, airport for Flying Assholes Airways.

What did they really need him for now anyway? On Saturday afternoon?

The politicos thought they could just snap a finger and he’d have to come a-runnin‘. And he was proving that they were right, because here he was. He should have just said no, he had other plans, he couldn’t come down and discuss Ron Beaumont. But it was too late now.

Scott Randall was in Sharron Pratt’s office with her lordship, the DA’s investigator Peter Struler, Chief of Police Dan Rigby and Abe’s predecessor as head of homicide, Captain Frank Batiste, who was now an assistant chief. And my, weren’t things heating up? Four of the five of them – everyone but Batiste – were already in a friendly discussion about something that abruptly halted as Glitsky’s shadow crossed the room’s lintel.

‘Ah, Lieutenant Glitsky.’ Pratt was sitting on her desk and actually clapped her hands as though in delighted surprise that Abe had dropped in.

Batiste, Glitsky noticed, had found a convenient neutral corner and was memorizing the stains on the ceiling tiles. He was a good guy and his body language was telling Abe a lot. This wasn’t his party, which meant that he’d been called down by the chief to neutralize Abe and make sure that homicide accepted the message, whatever it was.

Rigby and Randall sat on either end of the low couch looking at some papers spread on the table in front of them.

‘Ah, Ms Pratt.’ Unable to stop himself, Glitsky silently brought his own hands together. Sometimes imitation wasn’t the sincerest form of flattery. Sometimes it meant that you saw through pretense and were telling the pretender that she was full of shit.

He stopped in the doorway and went into his best at ease. He nodded at the men, but no smile. ‘Hey, guys.’

There was an awkward moment during which some glances were exchanged, Rigby evidently waiting for a signal that it was time to begin. He cleared his throat. ‘About this Beaumont thing, Abe. And now the newspaper stories about this woman in jail.’

Glitsky nodded. ‘Frannie. Her name’s Frannie Hardy.’

‘Yes, of course it is. Frannie.’ The chief looked over at Pratt, got some secret message, cleared his throat, and spoke again. ‘We’ve just about decided to put out an all points on Ron, the husband, and we wanted to run it by you first, to get your input.’

‘We wanted to be sure we kept you in the loop, Abe,’ Pratt added.

Glitsky did a quick take at Batiste and the two conducted a millisecond’s worth of non-verbal communication of their own. Then the lieutenant folded his arms and leaned his bulk against the door jamb. ‘I really appreciate your concern, Sharron, thank you. And this all points bulletin? It would be in light of new evidence that Investigator Struler’s come up with – would that be it?’

Scott Randall spoke up. ‘We want him for questioning, that’s all. We want to talk to him.’

‘You don’t need me to talk to him.’ Glitsky couldn’t have been more laid back. ‘You don’t need me for an APB. But I’m curious about what you plan to do if you find him after this all points manhunt.’ He looked at Struler, then Randall. Across the room, Batiste brought a hand up to his mouth and pulled on it to keep the corners down.

‘What do you mean?’ Struler asked. ‘We bring him in and-’

‘You arrest him, you mean?’

Cornered, Struler looked to Randall, then Pratt. He nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘With no evidence? No chance to even get past a prelim and go to trial, much less win? You want a lawsuit for false arrest, or what?’

Chief Rigby cleared his throat again, getting into the middle of it. ‘Come on, Abe, it’s not like there’s no evidence.’

Glitsky turned to him. ‘It isn’t? I haven’t seen any if there is.’

‘The man’s disappeared,’ Randall said.

Glitsky shrugged. ‘So? What’s new?’

‘The murder was at his house,’ Pratt added. ‘There’s no sign of anyone else. She may have been having an affair and told him she was leaving. Process of elimination leaves Ron.’

Glitsky withered her with a look of disbelief and wondered, not for the first time, if the City and County’s top attorney had passed the bar or ever won a case in court. It didn’t seem possible. ‘You want to take that to a jury and get beyond reasonable doubt, Sharron, you’ve got my sympathy.’

Rigby, a political animal himself, tried to smooth the waters. ‘The point is, Abe, that in the real world we’ve got to move along on this.’

But Pratt couldn’t keep herself out of it. ‘I’ve had calls from a lot of citizens plus we’re getting some very bad response to this woman being in jail.’ Pratt had made something of a career out of ignoring the rules of law. Now she seemed to be having a hard time reconciling herself to the fact that her political problems weren’t going to go away even if she broke more of them. ‘I got a call from the mayor this morning, do you realize that?’

Again, Glitsky shrugged. ‘Talk to Judge Braun about that.’

‘The mayor has talked to her.’

‘And?’ Although they wouldn’t be here if Glitsky didn’t know the answer. Braun wasn’t budging.

Randall butted in with the crux of his theory. ‘If we get Beaumont in custody, Abe,’ he said, ‘we can shift public opinion away from Frannie and on to Ron. He’ll be the bad guy for putting her in this position.’

Now Glitsky had it all on the table. These people were really from Mars. ‘If memory serves,’ he said, ‘it was you who put her in this position, wasn’t it, Scott?’

But the young attorney waved that off. ‘I was perfectly justified and Judge Braun was also well within her rights. It’s just that we’re starting to get a lot of political flack-’

‘And want to sacrifice Ron Beaumont. Same as yesterday.’ Glitsky’s eyes raked the room. ‘This is not how it works, guys.’ A shake of his head. He turned to Rigby and asked the direct question. ‘Chief, what do you want me to do?’

Rigby was by now sitting on the front two inches of the couch. He looked up balefully. ‘What have you got, Abe?’

‘We’ve got Griffin’s notes – basically nothing. I’ve got a better one for you.’ He turned back to Pratt. ‘Sharron, who, specifically, has been pressuring you to go get Beaumont?’

Again, some unspoken message seemed to pass among the airport staff – Struler, Pratt, Randall. Glitsky was getting a little tired of the secret handshake stupidity, but experience had told him that if he let it run its course, it might lead him somewhere.

Pratt slid off the desk and went around it, where she opened a drawer, then closed it. ‘Well, naturally, Caloco would like to see the case closed. They’re taking a lot of flack in the media, as you may know.’

‘And are they one of your contributors?’ From Pratt’s reaction, Glitsky could tell that the question had hit a mark. He hadn’t done twenty-five years of interrogations for nothing after all.

But Pratt didn’t blow. Her eyes narrowed slightly. Her game face appeared. ‘They contributed to my opponent as well, sergeant.’

‘And as long as whoever gets elected does them a favor whenever they ask, they keep the money coming, is that it? So what’s the favor here? Find a likely scapegoat and hang him out to dry?’

‘Sergeant, you’re out of line,’ Rigby barked.

But finally, Batiste took a few steps toward the group. He’d spent many years in homicide and suddenly had picked up a bad smell. ‘With all respect, sir, Abe’s asked a good question. If Caloco’s trying to influence the investigation, it increases the odds that they might somehow be involved.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Pratt exploded.

Randall was up now, supporting his boss. ‘Completely ridiculous. You can’t make that kind of baseless charge, captain. Caloco’s been the soul of cooperation…’

‘I haven’t made any kind of charge,’ Batiste retorted. ‘I’m saying the lieutenant, here, has the right to ask the question. Do you have anything on Caloco?’

‘There’s nothing on them. They came to us and gave us a case of documents,’ Struler said hotly. ‘And we got Ron implicated.’

For a long moment, nothing moved in the room. Finally, Scott Randall whispered ‘shit’ under his breath. Even Rigby the politician – there to steamroll Glitsky into official compliance – frowned. Into the well of silence, Batiste dropped a little echoing pebble. ‘What documents?’

Glitsky picked it up. ‘I haven’t seen any documents.’

‘They weren’t any part of the original investigation.’ Pratt was hustling to put her finger in the dike, but the water was spraying all around her. ‘Caloco came to us, voluntarily.’

‘With what, exactly? And when?’ Glitsky, suddenly, was glad he’d come in on this lovely Saturday afternoon. But he had to give it to Pratt, she didn’t break.

Boosting herself on to the desk again, she gave a little apologetic smile. ‘Ms Beaumont had been a valued employee and a couple of weeks after she was killed, when no suspect had turned up, Caloco called my office and offered all the files they had related to her.’

‘And naturally,’ Glitsky said, his voice thick with sarcasm, ‘because they related to a murder, you informed my detail immediately so we could evaluate all the information.’

‘You’d already dumped the case,’ Randall said.

For another moment, Glitsky stood in the doorway. He had straightened up from his slouch long ago. This was not just petty politics, but a serious breach of legal ethics. Formal obstruction of justice out of the DA’s office. Glitsky was having trouble accepting it.

But he knew what he was going to do with it. ‘I’ll expect that box and all its contents on my desk within the hour.’

Glitsky hadn’t received the box from the DA by the time Dismas Hardy appeared at his office minutes after leaving his wife at the jail. ‘Working on the sabbath?’ he said from the doorway.

Glitsky, slumped over bunches of paper, gave him the evil eye. ‘Don’t start. Really.’

‘OK. Meanwhile, while I’m not starting.’ He tossed a bag on to the desk in front of him. ‘I figured I was here, I’d see if you were and give you the leftovers.’

‘Today’s my day for leftovers.’ He pulled the bag over to him. ‘What is this?’ Glitsky’s face didn’t exactly light up – Hardy thought that would be impossible – but Hardy was gratified by the expression. ‘Is this lox? Tell me this is lox.’

‘Your favorite. There’d be more except the desk sergeant at the jail ate the first two pounds.’

Glitsky had ripped the bag open and was spreading out the contents on the brown paper. ‘You got this into the jail?’

‘Technically, the answer to that would be no, though they do love me down there, I can tell. But no food inside, so they held it at the desk while I visited Frannie. Can I come in?’

‘Since when do you ask?’

Hardy shrugged, moving forward. ‘New policy. Ask first. I’m trying it out.’ He sat on the wooden chair across from Glitsky’s desk. ‘While you’re eating,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you about these three leprechauns.’

Glitsky rolled his eyes. Hardy’s jokes were a constant torture. ‘You ever wonder why it’s always three?’ But his mouth was full and he was chewing happily.

‘So they’re all standing outside the Guinness Book of World Records building and the first one says he’s got the smallest hands in the world and he’s going to show them to the Guinness people and get in the book. A couple of minutes later, he comes out, all thrilled-’

‘OK.’ Glitsky was between bites. ‘Second guy’s the feet, third guy’s the dick. What’s the punch line?’

Hardy was used to this, Glitsky’s perennial cut to the chase. ‘Third leprechaun comes out and he looks depressed and his friends ask him what’s the matter – does he have the smallest dick in the world or what?’

‘I can’t wait.’ Another bite of lox and bagel.

‘Guy shakes his head, looks at his friends and says, “Who the hell is Abe Glitsky?” ’

With the expected reaction – that is, none – Glitsky sat back. ‘I had a good time recently. Want to hear about it?’ He outlined the events from his recent meeting with Pratt and the rest of them, and the withholding of Caloco’s documents.

By the time he’d finished, Hardy was sitting back in a kind of shock. ‘You’re telling me Dan Rigby was in on this, too? Do you realize you could have a good shot at taking down Pratt’s office? In fact, I know a local lawyer who’d be happy to help you. Get yourself promoted to chief.’

Glitsky made a face. ‘I don’t want to be chief. Sometimes I don’t even want to be head of homicide. I just want to be a cop again. Catch bad guys.’

‘You might be doing that here. What do you think’s going to turn up in the box?’

‘Whatever’s in there.’ He’d find out soon enough. ‘Can you believe the arrogance, though? It never occurred to any of them that they didn’t have every right to that evidence. It came to their office so it was theirs and whatever they should legally do be damned.’

‘You better watch out,’ Hardy said, ‘You’re starting to sound like a lawyer.’ He pushed back his chair a couple of inches. ‘So that’s what brought you down here today?’

Glitsky nodded. ‘More or less.’

‘And here I thought it might have been your two inspectors – checking into Carl Griffin’s investigation as your best friend had suggested – had stumbled on to something.’

‘Well, since you mention it.’ Glitsky bunched the brown paper bag and tossed it into his wastebasket. The papers he’d been studying before Hardy’s arrival didn’t appear to be in any order, but he started picking through them as though he’d arranged them in some way. ‘Here’s copies of some notes from Griffin’s notebook. He was working the building where Bree lived. No sign he’d gotten anywhere with witnesses, but it was Carl and he didn’t write any follow-up’ – he glanced up at Hardy and shrugged – ‘so who knows?’

Glitsky picked up another stapled group of pages. ‘Crime scene. Zip. No glass anywhere to match what was in her scalp.’

‘Which was what?’

A flip of a page. ‘The theory is that it was from a leaded crystal wine or champagne glass. The Beaumonts didn’t have anything to match on hand.’

Hardy was into Griffin’s notes. ‘Here’s Jim Pierce again. Damon Kerry. Al Valens. How’d Griffin get these guys?’

‘The grieving husband, your friend Ron. Wanted to help find whoever killed her.’

‘And he thought one of these guys…?’

But Glitsky was shaking his head. ‘He just gave Carl a bunch of names, Diz. People Bree had hung out with.’ A pause. ‘Why did you say Jim Pierce again?’

‘What?’

‘You said “Here’s Jim Pierce again.” ’

Hardy smiled. ‘That wasn’t me. It must have been somebody else.’ Then, relenting. ‘It’d be neat if the odd slip of the tongue got by you once in a while. Anyway, I just visited him – Pierce – and his wife a couple of hours ago. You’ll be gratified to know that your inspectors had already been there.’

A nod. ‘Rattling his cage is all. He’s got a decent alibi.’

‘Just decent?’

‘Driving to work. Left home around eight, at the Embarcadero office forty minutes later.’

‘Forty minutes? I just did it in fifteen.’

‘This is Saturday afternoon. Try it on a weekday morning, rush hour. Coleman and Batavia did it last night and it took ’em an hour. And he was at his desk forty minutes later.‘ Glitsky shrugged. ’OK, anything’s possible as we know, but nobody’s put him anywhere near her place. He told my guys he hadn’t seen her in four months. They’re checking, but so far they hear the same thing. No contact.‘

‘What about Damon Kerry?’

This time, Glitsky’s mouth tightened. ‘He’s running for governor, Diz. I just don’t think so.’

‘I don’t either, but was he around at least?’

Glitsky nodded. ‘He was in town, shooting TV spots.’

‘Seeing her?’

‘Sometimes. Often.’

‘Were they sleeping together?’

This almost brought a true smile, which for Glitsky was a rarity. ‘What a quaint way to put it. Let’s just say that for a married woman, she spent a lot of time with him, but it’s not like Kerry’s such a hot item that reporters are on him around the clock. His people quote resent the implication. She was a technical adviser on environmental matters. That’s the story.’

‘On the payroll?’

‘No. Another committed volunteer, which is what makes this country great.’ He held up a hand. ‘I know, but Griffin never got to him and here four days before the election, without any physical evidence, you don’t just send two inspectors down to grill him.’

‘Why not? I would.’

Glitsky liked that. ‘I’m sure you would, which is why you don’t work for the city anymore. No, what you do is what we’ve done – ask him to come down and give a statement and of course he’s promised full cooperation. As soon as he’s got a free minute, which ought to be by Christmas, he’s going to give it top priority.’

A weary sigh. ‘You know, Diz, you and I might have our good reasons for hoping it isn’t Ron, but it still might be. Really. He looks a lot better than Kerry, or Pierce for that matter, and that’s even before what’s in the mystery box.’

Hardy didn’t want Glitsky thinking this way. He was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think so. I like it that Kerry’s in election mode, he’s stressed to the max and this lady hits him with something that’ll derail his campaign. He’s got no time to think so he does the first thing that occurs to him and she winds up dead. Oops. Makes perfect sense to me.’

‘He’s at her house?’

‘Could have been. Do we know? You find his prints?’

‘Prints, please.’ Fingerprints were useful when they could be cross-checked against those of known criminals, but if someone hadn’t ever committed a crime, their prints would not be in the database. ‘We got prints from the door to the balcony and some dishes in the sink. Ron’s prints and the kids, which we didn’t need to run ’cause we knew who they were. Then we’ve got a dozen, fifteen more, unidentified. Could be other kids, family friends, anybody. But no known criminals.‘

‘Maybe Damon Kerry, though.’

‘We may never know and even if he was, so what?’

‘It puts him at the scene.’

Glitsky rolled his eyes, his patience with amateur detective work growing thin. ‘Why wouldn’t he be at the scene at some point in the last few months? He knew her. So he went to her house? So what?

‘Listen,’ he continued, ‘I’ll tell you what. You get to Kerry, borrow his shoes, and find some lead crystal residue on them. Then find somebody who can put him at Bree’s place or better yet, can prove they were doing each other, or stopped doing each other, or anything…’ His voice wore down, his eyes came up. ‘The more I think about it, Diz, and I hate to say it-’

Hardy held up a hand. ‘Then don’t.’

17

The Pulgas Water Temple sits in a peaceful and picturesque location among low rolling hills about twenty miles south of San Francisco. A semi-circle of high white Ionian columns rises behind a reflecting pool and forms an elegant structure that commemorates the completion of one of the most famous (or infamous) engineering feats in California history, the Hetch-Hetchy Project. This marvel of architecture and city planning captured the plentiful water and snowmelt of the Sierra Nevada mountain range at Yosemite and delivered it, mostly underground over nearly two hundred miles, into a shallow valley that had once been an Indian prayer grounds.

This once-holy spot is now the Crystal Springs reservoir, the source of San Francisco’s drinking water and, in fact, one of the principle reasons that naturally dry San Francisco is a major metropolitan center and not a quaint tourist destination with nice views and bad weather.

The sculpted grounds of the Temple is a popular picnic destination and this bright, warm afternoon held a typical Indian summer scene – family blankets with food and drink spread on the grass, boats in the reflecting pool, dogs and kids and couples and a handful of bicyclists and solitary readers. Occasionally a Sheriff’s patrol car from San Mateo County would cruise the lot, but there was no regular security presence at the site. There had never been any need of one.

The parking lot was nearly filled and the nondescript Chevy Camaro that pulled off the main road and into it had to park at the far northern end, nearly three hundred yards from the Temple.

The two middle-aged men got out of the front seat and the two women from the rear. All of the eventual witnesses agreed that the group was dressed too warmly for the day, the women with scarves over their heads, the men with hats pulled low, but as they got out of the car, they attracted no attention. Without exchanging a word, they congregated at the trunk, then two men and one of the women began walking toward the Temple with a large picnic basket. The other woman got back into the car in the driver’s seat and rolled down the window.

From where they had parked, the three carriers hadn’t been able to hear a thing except the twittering of the birds and the casual noise of the picnickers, but as they got closer, a low roar gradually became audible, then undeniable.

‘Either of you guys ever jump in here when you were a kid?’ the first man asked. He didn’t want an answer, was babbling out of nervousness, and neither of his two companions said a word. In any case, his story was drowned out in the sound of the water pouring out of the input pipes into the temple, but he kept right on talking. ‘When I was growing up, this was the thing to prove your manhood, let me tell you. I knew a guy broke a leg and almost drowned, but I rode it halfway down to the lake.’

He was referring to what had once been a popular rite of passage for teenagers on San Francisco’s peninsula. For years, males with testosterone poisoning would come down here with other guys or their girlfriends, mostly at dusk, and jump over the low wall of the temple down fifteen feet into the churning, ice-cold water, which surged at thousands of gallons per second into a circular, tiled pool. The flow would pick these kids up – or occasionally push them down and not let go – and shoot them out a fifty-foot submerged tunnel, then to the canal that led to the reservoir.

Now, in response to the occasional drowning, the state had installed a wide-meshed steel grate to cover the pool and jumping in was no longer an option.

As the three conspirators got to the low wall, the woman – she was by all accounts the leader – looked back and made sure that their car had pulled out of its space and was now idling, ready to take them out of here. There was a young couple on the platform with them, the boy’s arm around his girl, both of them mesmerized by the rushing water, unlikely to move away in the next five minutes.

A solo man, mid-fifties, in shorts and hiking boots, was climbing the low steps to the temple even as she waited, and behind him a family of four were getting up from their blanket, looking like they were walking this way.

The shorts and boots man caught her eyes for an instant, and she too quickly – stupidly – looked away. Guilt, guilt, guilt. He kept looking at her. She’d caught his attention, a critical mistake. He seemed to notice the picnic basket on the ground at her feet. His brow darkened, perhaps at the basket’s unlikely presence there, perhaps at the somewhat odd trio in scarves and pulled-down hats, jackets, and heavy pants.

She cast another quick glance to the family behind them. Yes, they were coming here, too, up to the temple. Their car was in place now, waiting. She couldn’t wait any longer, even if it had to get a little ugly. They’d planned for this contingency. They were ready.

She nodded to her two partners, jerked her head indicating the middle-aged solo hiker. In their planning meetings, they had decided that if fate handed them a situation like this, they would take full advantage of it. This would increase the profile of what they were doing. The public outcry was always vastly more satisfying if people got hurt or dead. That possibility made the game that much more meaningful. It also gave it a greater edge of excitement.

One of her men lifted the picnic basket to the edge of the railing while the other strolled casually over behind the man, who was now – apparently – transfixed by the show beneath them, the crashing water and noise and simple power of the spectacle. But then he looked up again and saw the picnic basket in its even more unlikely place. He started to raise a hand, began to speak so she could hear. ‘Hey, what’s…?’

It was time to move. Another nod and both men went into action. Her partner, who had once jumped into this temple to prove his manhood, caught the solo hiker from behind and flipped him over the edge as if he were a sack of flour. At the same time, her other partner had opened the top of the basket and taken out one of the five-gallon buckets, dumping it whole on to the grate while she did the same with the other one.

And then they were running, the basket left behind, the teenage lovebirds left flat-footed, unable to decide whether to help the older hiker or chase the bad guys.

They skirted the approaching family on a dead run, piled into their waiting Camaro, and sped with squealing tires from the parking lot.

Hardy heard about it on the radio on the way to his office after his talk with Glitsky. The emergency news report was warning citizens of San Francisco to avoid using their tap water until the actual substance that had been dumped into Crystal Springs could be positively determined.

‘… although the labeling on the buckets recovered at the Pulgas Water Temple led authorities to suspect that it is the gasoline additive MTBE…’

Suddenly Hardy reached forward and turned up the volume. He’d never heard of the stuff before this week and now suddenly it was everywhere. The announcer was continuing. ‘A group identifying itself as the Clean Earth Alliance has faxed a communiqué to this station and other local news media claiming responsibility for the poisoning.

‘Damon Kerry, the candidate for governor who has been running on a platform to outlaw the use of MTBE as a gasoline additive in California, is in San Francisco today. In a just-concluded press conference at the St Francis Hotel, he responded to critics who have accused him of some kind of complicity in this attack. He had this to say about this latest escalation in what has been called the gasoline additive wars.’

Hardy had arrived at the entrance to the parking lot underneath his building, but he waited out in the street, not wanting to lose any of the transmission. An angry-sounding voice came over his speakers. ‘The people who have tried to poison San Francisco’s water supply are terrorists. They say that the purpose of this poisoning is to call the bluff of the oil companies who contend that MTBE is not a significant health hazard in drinking water. They say that this vile act will dramatize their position. But I say that what they have done is unconscionable and criminal. No one associated with my campaign has anything but contempt for these people and their actions.’

The emergency bulletin switched back to the station’s DJ, again cautioning citizens about the hazards of drinking the water, and giving some more details about the attack itself, the man who’d been pushed over into the temple and who was now in critical condition with a broken back, and the spotty descriptions of the terrorists.

Hardy heard it all in a kind of trance, then looked at his watch, slammed his car back into gear and pulled out on to Sutter Street. Whatever he’d been planning to do in his office could wait. He wasn’t a dozen blocks from the St Francis and that’s where he was going.

Al Valens was in charge in the lobby. He was short, energetic, well dressed and powerfully built. Hardy stood on the sidelines for a moment inside the revolving doors of the hotel’s famous clock lobby, taking the lay of the land.

Valens was smiling, frowning, slapping backs, nodding sagely – whatever the minute demanded. Reporters, the curious, and the usual press of clueless tourists were still milling about. Cameras and lighting equipment were being packed up and put away. ‘Hey,’ he heard the short man say to a small knot of reporters, ‘You heard Mr Kerry say it, and now you’re going to hear Al Valens say it. We had nothing to do with this. Nothing. This is awful. These people are cretins.’

Valens threw a worried glance up the stairs to the Compass Rose Bar. Hardy and Frannie had met there a hundred times. He knew where Kerry was hiding.

There was, of course, still some security around him – four uniformed hotel guards, a plain-clothed bodyguard, and a man in a tuxedo whom Hardy recognized as the room’s maitre d‘. Kerry himself was in an area cordoned off behind a velvet rope. He sat forward, alone, on a low couch. Occasionally, he would reach for the glass of water that rested next to an iced pitcher on the table in front of him.

The name and face of Damon Kerry had been familiar in San Francisco for the better part of the past twenty years. He’d made his debut as a city supervisor. There he served two fairly distinguished terms that gave the lie to the initial impression that he was a spoiled rich kid whose daddy had bought him the office as a toy. Kerry was always a Greenpeace, Save the Whales for Jesus kind of guy – in San Francisco that always flew politically – but he also actually put in time cleaning up oily bays and beaches, serving in soup kitchens, doing things.

When he moved up as an assemblyman in Sacramento, he continued with his activism – especially in environmental areas – and his San Francisco constituency never abandoned him. He was their boy, liberal to the bone, sincere and electable, but always before in a low-key way. He was about to be forced to leave office under California’s term limit laws, and this – some said more than any personal ambition for higher office – got him rolling on the MTBE bandwagon and into statewide exposure. Also, of course, Al Valens got involved.

Kerry was one of the perennially and effortlessly young-looking, and Hardy wanted to hate him for it. He was in his mid-forties, but he passed for less. There wasn’t a line marring the ruddy, healthy skin of his face. He was trim in a dark-blue suit, neither small nor over-imposing. Sitting on the couch, he was the boy next door grown up and made good. An open face, appealing without being too handsome. Clear blue eyes, a strong nose, one perfectly chipped tooth. On looks alone, on the vibe he projected, you wanted to like the guy.

But it was a passive scene up the stairs here in the bar. All the action was in the lobby below them. Hardy thought he could take some advantage.

Walking confidently over, he nodded easily at the bodyguard, and put a bright tone to his voice, a decent volume. ‘Is that Damon Kerry?’

The nearest hotel guard did his job, moving into Hardy’s way. ‘Hey, no interviews. He’s done that. You missed it, too bad.’

It wasn’t Hardy’s intention to threaten or bluff. He stepped a little to one side, holding up a hand as though apologizing. ‘I’m not a reporter.’ His voice went up another notch as he faced Kerry behind the velvet rope. ‘I’m Ron Beaumont’s attorney. Bree Beaumont’s husband?’

‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England. I said no interviews and you’re not-’

But Kerry’s head had jerked up and now he was on his feet. ‘No, no, it’s all right.’ The politician’s smile, hand outstretched. ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated to the security troops. ‘I’ll talk to this man.’ Then, to Hardy, up at the rope. ‘Hi. Damon Kerry. What can I do for you?’

‘I don’t know for sure. I’m trying to clear my client before they decide to arrest him. When I heard you were down here, I thought I’d take a chance, see if you’d talk to me. Maybe it’s my lucky day.’

Kerry threw a look over Hardy’s shoulder, perhaps expecting Valens to come and take him away from all this. But help wasn’t on the way and he came back to Hardy, and offered another weak smile. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

Hardy was tempted to get sarcastic – tell him he’d seen him on television and wanted to know who did his hair. There was only one topic that Hardy could be here about, and Kerry had to know it, which was the reason he’d gotten this far. He motioned to the rope separating them, to the couch Kerry had just left. ‘Maybe back there?’

Reassuring his guards for the third time that it was OK, Kerry moved the rope aside and let Hardy come through, then followed him to the couch where they both sat. Kerry put on an interested face and they spent a minute on the familiar topic of Hardy’s first name – how Dismas had been the good thief on Calvary and was the patron saint of murderers.

‘But what I’m here for,’ Hardy concluded, ‘is maybe you can give me a better take on Bree. People say you two were close and I wondered if she ever mentioned any enemies, or that she was afraid for her life?’

Kerry reached for his water glass and took a quick drink. ‘Honestly, no. Her death alone was a big enough shock, but when I heard that someone had killed her…’ He shook his head. ‘I thought it was impossible. Nobody could have hated her, not personally. She was the sweetest person alive.’

‘So you think it was related to… what? This gas stuff?’

Another shake of the head. ‘I don’t know. A burglary, maybe. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He lapsed into a short silence. When he spoke again, Hardy had an impression of greater directness. ‘I can’t imagine, really, although after what happened today, I sometimes feel I’m at a loss to explain anything anymore. I mean who would poison drinking water? What twisted logic makes these people do anything? If they could do that…’ He trailed off. ‘How about her husband? Your client? Doesn’t he have any thoughts on this? Didn’t I read that he’s disappeared?’

‘He just knows it wasn’t him. I don’t think it was either. What do you think?’

Kerry looked out beyond his security perimeter, then back to Hardy. ‘I don’t suppose he’d be under suspicion if there wasn’t some evidence, would he?’

‘It happens all the time. Do you know Ron?’

‘No. We’ve never met, not personally.’

Hardy frowned.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I guess I’d just assumed you’d been to their place socially.’

‘No. Bree was a consultant and friend – a good friend, even – but she kept her family separate. I never even met her children. Still, you understand I’m not saying anything accusatory about her husband. I’m sure he’s devastated by this as well.’

Hardy leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘He really didn’t kill her.’

The intensity seemed to startle Kerry. ‘All right.’

‘But somebody did, Mr Kerry. Please, I have to get a take on who she was, out in the real world, not with her husband and family. You say she had no enemies, she was the sweetest person on earth, but I know Caloco wasn’t happy with her, for example. Maybe somebody else wasn’t either. Somebody killed her. I’ve got to see who she was. Can you help me at all here?’

Kerry’s reaction was surprising. Notably, he didn’t look up for the saving arrival of the cavalry. Instead, his eyes turned inward for a beat, and then he sat back on the couch, Hardy thinking man-oh-man, here’s another one.

He didn’t come up with it immediately – Hardy had obviously caught him off guard by moving away from specific questions. Kerry had probably been expecting the kinds of questions Hardy had been expecting to ask about motives and opportunities.

But now it was clear that whatever Kerry said, he wanted to get it right. At length he came back forward, hands clasped in front of him, but easily this time, far more relaxed than he’d been. He met Hardy’s eyes for the first time. ‘She was the ugly duckling.’

This seemed to contradict everything Hardy had heard about Bree to this moment – her beauty, charm, brains, persuasiveness. His face must have showed his confusion, because Kerry jumped in to explain. ‘What I mean by that is if you want to know who she was, you’ve got to start with that.’

‘With what, exactly?’

Kerry drew in a breath, thought for a moment. ‘The fact that while she was growing up, she was a nerd, a brain at a time when you didn’t want to be smart if you were a girl. Well, she was a really smart girl, with glasses and goofy hair and no style at all and this kind of absent-minded “what’s going on around me” feeling…’ He trailed off.

‘You knew her as a child?’ Hardy asked.

A really genuine smile. ‘No, no, I don’t mean that. I only met her – knew her – for a few months, but we got to know each other pretty well.’ A pause that Hardy elected not to interrupt. Kerry was talking, which was what he wanted. He’d start again. And after a sigh, he did.

‘Anyway, that’s where she came from. She wasn’t very popular. She had no friends, no social interests. Just studying and chemistry.’

‘But she was so pretty. She must have had dates? In high school?’

‘No,’ Kerry said. ‘Guys didn’t think she was pretty, if you can believe that. She told me she didn’t have one date. She went to school dances with her brother, it was that bad.’ He wanted Hardy to understand. ‘You know those movies where this really plain girl takes off her glasses at the end and suddenly she’s the prettiest girl in town? Well, that was Bree, except that her movie didn’t end until she was in her mid-twenties and by then she was so used to being plain and ignored by men that she just couldn’t accept any other view of herself. Plus, her brains still made her threatening as hell to a lot of guys.’

Plus, Hardy was thinking, she was married, which meant she wasn’t in the market. Or did it?

But Kerry, obviously still in thrall to her memory, was going on. ‘The thing about her, and maybe it seems funny or contradictory or something because she was so smart, but the self-image stuff I think really slowed her down in how fast she grew up… I’m trying to think of the right word. She was just very naive, I’d say, insulated. Almost unaware of anything in life, anything except her studies, which translated into her job. I mean, until…’ Now Kerry really was at a loss.

‘Until you?’ Hardy prompted.

Kerry lifted his shoulders, an admission. ‘It was starting to happen before we met. She was ready for it.’

‘For what?’

‘The change, the conversion. Well, it wasn’t really that.’

‘OK. What was it?’ Hardy became fleetingly aware of a buzz out in the room, a rush of convivial laughter from a gaggle of young couples pulling tables together. Afternoon drinks after shopping in a different world than that inhabited by Hardy and Frannie. He came back to the candidate for governor, with whom he seemed to be having a genuine communication. It was almost surreal, but he was going to keep it going if he could. ‘What was the big conversion all about then?’

‘It was her whole life, really.’ He fixed Hardy with a thoughtful expression. ‘This may sound presumptuous…’ Again, he stopped and Hardy waited. ‘It wasn’t so much that she grew up all at once as the fact that she realized she had grown up. She was a beautiful swan. She could fly.’

‘OK.’ This didn’t make all the sense in the world to Hardy, but he’d sort it out later. ‘But this conversion was public, right, on some radio show? And had to do with you?’

A shrug. ‘I don’t know how much of it had to do with me. But the debate we had seemed to mark a shift. She realized we had the same goals and we’d been set up to be on different sides. Actually, she’d been set up. She got bitter about her employers and I can’t say I blame her.’

‘Jim Pierce?’ It was a guess, but from Kerry’s reaction, a good one.

Kerry nodded. ‘He was the one who first recognized her for what she could do, I mean politically. He groomed her into a mouthpiece, but as I say she was naive. She bought his line because she bought him. He was Big Oil, but he cared about the world just like she did. Ha. But he was her father figure at the same time. He loved her when she was still the ugly duckling and that carried a lot of emotional weight.’

‘He loved her? You just said he loved her.’

‘I don’t know about that. What he did do was keep her nose to the grindstone, reward her handsomely for doing what he wanted, pat her on the head when she did good, and tell her not to worry about other things she might be hearing or thinking. She wanted to please him and she didn’t look up.’ He hesitated. ‘I was really just the catalyst, I think. It would have happened without me eventually. She was ripe for it. She’d grown up.’

‘And started seeing you.’

This suddenly brought Kerry back to where he was, what he was in fact doing, which was talking to a lawyer about a murder case. His public persona – always open and charming – was especially unnerving to Hardy as it fell like a shroud between them. ‘Not the way I think you mean, Mr Hardy. She was married, after all.’

‘But you’re not.’

Kerry favored him with the candidate smile, went back to his watch, and decided that if reinforcements weren’t going to come and rescue him, he’d go to them. ‘Well, no. Never been married. Never found the right girl.’

He slapped his knees and stood up. ‘It’s been very nice talking to you, but I’ve got to get my campaign manager back out on the trail. This water poisoning today.’ He scowled. ‘Terrible, just terrible.’ Then the smile was back, the hand outstretched again. ‘Don’t forget to vote now. Take care.’

He walked over to his security retinue and Hardy sat back down on the couch, watching the party coalesce around Kerry as it began to drift down into the main lobby.

When they were good and gone, Hardy reached over and, using the cocktail napkin that the hotel had thoughtfully provided, lifted the water glass Kerry had been using. He poured the remaining water back into the pitcher and slipped the glass into the pocket of his nylon windbreaker. ‘Take care yourself,’ he thought.

But, feeling smug about the glass with fingerprints, he suddenly realized he’d forgotten the main question he’d wanted to ask the Kerry camp. He nearly jumped up from the couch and caught up the candidate and his entourage as they arrived at where Al Valens had just finished up with a reporter.

‘Excuse me, Mr Kerry.’

The security detail moved to keep Hardy at his distance, but Kerry again told them it was OK. He was a candidate, it was election time, you talked to people.

‘I had one last question, this time for Mr Valens if you don’t mind. It won’t take a minute.’

Kerry broke a seemingly genuine smile. ‘OK, Colombo, sure. We’ve always got a minute. Al. This is Mr Hardy. He’s Ron Beaumont’s attorney.’

Valens cast a quick glance between Hardy and Kerry, then thrust his hand out. ‘Nice to meet you. What’s your question?’

‘I was wondering why you called Ron Beaumont last week – something about Bree’s files?’

The smile flickered briefly. ‘I don’t think that was me,’ he said. He looked at Kerry. ‘Did we call Ron?’

‘Not that I remember.’

‘You didn’t call Ron Beaumont and leave a message last Wednesday, Thursday, something like that?’

Valens made a little show of thinking about it for a moment, looked again at Kerry, then shook his head. ‘I think you must be mistaken. Isn’t he out of town? I heard he was out of town?’

Hardy was sincerely contrite. ‘I’m sorry. I must have been misinformed.’ A broad smile. ‘Mr Kerry, thanks again.’

Kerry waved him off. ‘Don’t worry about it. Any time.’

‘Shit.’ Valens’ voice was unnaturally shrill in the telephone.

‘He knows something. This guy Hardy. Who is he? What’s that about?’

Baxter Thorne spoke to Valens in his calmest tones. ‘Al, it’s always better to tell the truth. Especially in front of Damon. Tell him you forgot. You’ve been consumed with these terrorist accusations against him today. Your head was spinning and you couldn’t recall for a minute. In fact, you remember now that you did call Ron – here, this is good – to see about some memorial words he wanted to include about Bree if, no when, Damon gets elected. In his acceptance speech, that is if Ron wouldn’t object, if it wouldn’t be too painful. That’s why you called.’

‘But how did this guy Hardy know…?’

Thorne was sweet reason. ‘You left a message. He must have heard the message.’

‘But how?’

‘Well, he must have been there then, mustn’t he? At Bree’s place?’

‘Looking for the report?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. Certainly looking for something. But you said he was Ron’s attorney, right? It might not have had anything to do with our problem. Don’t worry. I’ll look into it. You’ve got a campaign to run.’

‘All right, all right. But it worries me.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Al. It’s nothing. And if it’s not nothing, I’ll take care of it.’

18

The evening remained clear and warm with no fog and Hardy felt he’d picked up a scent. People were evading and lying, and this juiced him up.

He wished he had a set of Al Valens’ fingerprints as well as Damon Kerry’s. He had no explanation for why Valens would lie about calling Ron. Still, he did have Damon Kerry’s cleverly purloined water glass and he dropped it off on Abe Glitsky’s desk with a cryptic note that it contained crucial evidence in the Bree Beaumont case and should be dusted and checked against prints that had been found in the penthouse.

Hardy added that if Glitsky didn’t do this he’d be sorry, a statement Abe would enjoy. The note also mentioned that Kerry had denied ever having been there and this was a new development.

It was still early – Hardy had time before his scheduled seven o’clock meeting with Canetta at his office. He could zip down to see Ron and his well-behaved children, deliver his update, and make everybody feel better.

He’d also filled a page of legal pad with questions that Ron would be able to answer for him, mostly to do with the names Canetta had copied from Ron’s answering machine.

Who was Marie? Kogee Sasaka? Tilton? What did all these people want? What about Valens and Kerry and Pierce? How well had Ron known them? Or had Bree known them?

Then, the harder questions: Did Ron think or know that Bree was having an affair? If so, with whom? What about the baby she’d been carrying? Had she and Ron planned it? What had her last morning been like? What, if anything, had she been worried about? How involved, if at all, had Ron been with her professional life? Did he know what she was working on now?

And, most importantly, what was Ron’s explanation for the fact that of all the men Hardy had talked to – Pierce, Kerry, even Canetta – why was it that her own husband seemed the least affected by her death?

Driving south on the freeway, heading for the hotel where Ron and his children had holed up, Hardy almost let himself believe he was beginning to make some progress. He would get answers from Ron, and maybe learn more about MTBE and ethanol and today’s reservoir poisoning which, he reasoned, had to be related to Bree’s murder. He was really getting somewhere.

‘Mr Brewster has checked out.’

‘Checked out?’ Hardy repeated it as though it were a foreign phrase he didn’t understand.

The concierge was a pleasant-looking young woman with a brisk and efficient manner. ‘Yes, sir.’ She punched a few keys at her computer. ‘Early this morning.’

‘You’re sure?’ An apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I thought we had an appointment and I’m a little surprised.’

She punched a few more keyboard buttons and noticing his obvious concern softened visibly. ‘Maybe you got the day wrong?’

Hardy nodded. ‘Must have,’ he said.

So it was still early and he had noplace to be for a couple of hours.

Ron Beaumont was beginning to remind him of several clients he’d had in the past – they tended to lie and, when not held in custody, to disappear. It made him mad and crazy, but at the same time this behavior was so predictable among suspects that it didn’t necessarily force him to believe they were guilty of anything. They were just scared, confused, misguided. Except for those who were, in fact, guilty and on the run.

As he drove by Candlestick Point, Hardy was trying his hardest to stick with the rationalization that Ron had his children to protect. There was the further point that if Hardy had been able to locate him at his hotel, others with less benign intents – the DA’s investigators, for example – might be just as successful. And Ron hadn’t promised Hardy that he’d stick around for continued consultation.

Nothing had changed, he kept telling himself. He had until Tuesday to find who had killed Bree. And Frannie would remain locked up until then anyway.

By the time he took the 7th Street off-ramp by the Hall of Justice downtown, though, his pique had progressed into a fine fury. Ron Beaumont, the son of a bitch, had a million answers at his fingertips, and now Hardy was going to have to find them on his own, if he could. And meanwhile the clock kept ticking. He didn’t have the heart anymore for this cat-and-mouse nonsense. And especially not from someone who’d put Frannie where she was.

Force of habit almost led him to park across from the jail where he would visit Frannie and check back in with Abe’s office. At this time, late on a Saturday afternoon, there was actually a spot at the curb.

But he kept driving. He wasn’t going to leave any messages now with Glitsky to accompany his note on Damon Kerry’s fingerprints. The way he felt about Ron would spill over somehow and muddy the waters. He didn’t want Glitsky even glancing in Ron’s direction as a viable suspect if he could help it.

And Frannie? She was the reason he was doing any of this in the first place. And sure, he could go hold her hand again but it would use up two more precious hours. Frannie wanted him to save Ron and his kids and the price of that – for her -was going to be that her husband couldn’t come and console her every time he was in the neighborhood.

Truth be told, Ron’s disappearance had kicked up a renewed dust storm of anger at Frannie, too. And a smaller zephyr at his own gullibility, his continuing efforts in a cause in which he had at best a manufactured faith. He was doing all this for his wife, at her urging. He’d let her deal with the consequences. See how she liked them apples.

But he had to admit that there were developments in this case that didn’t depend on Ron Beaumont, that had piqued his interest on their own. The three men – Canetta, Pierce, and Kerry – who were in mourning over Bree’s death. Today’s MTBE poisoning. Al Valens lying. And always – three billion dollars.

Hardy was on automatic, some non-rational process having determined that he should go to his office. He still had two hours until Canetta was due to show up to trade information. The odds were in favor of David Freeman being around, working on Saturday. Hardy could bounce his discoveries and hunches off his landlord, a practice that was nearly always instructive.

If Freeman wasn’t there, he’d pore over the copies of Griffin’s notes that Glitsky had given him and see if some new detail caught his attention. It was a backup plan, but at least it was some plan.

And then suddenly the open curb at 5th near Mission called to him. One legal parking space downtown on a weekday qualified as a miracle, but seeing an entire side of 5th Street nearly empty was nearly the beatific vision. Fresh snow or a morning beach without footprints – you just ached to walk on it. He pulled over and came to a stop directly across from the Chronicle building.

It was a sign.

Jeff Elliot was the Chronicle columnist who wrote the ‘Citytalk’ column on the political life of the city.

When Hardy had first met him, he’d been a young, personable, fresh-faced kid from the Midwest who walked with the aid of crutches due to his ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis. Now, although still technically young – Hardy doubted if Jeff had yet turned thirty-five – the baby-faced boy sported a graying, well-trimmed beard. His chest had thickened and his eyes had grown perennially tired. Here in his office just off the city room, the old crutches rested by the door, almost never used anymore. Now, Jeff got around in a wheelchair.

But he was still personable, at least to Hardy, who over the years had been the conduit of a lot of good information and the subject of one or two columns. He and his wife had even been to parties at Hardy’s house.

Jeff had undoubtedly come downtown today after the water poisoning. Barring an assassination of the President or an eight-point earthquake, this was going to be tomorrow’s headline and there were political elements all over it.

But now that Hardy had stuck his head in his door, first things first. Jeff swung away from his computer and motioned him in. ‘Big D,’ he said. ‘¿Que pasa?’ Then he remembered and grew suddenly serious. ‘How’s Frannie holding up?’

Hardy made a face. What could he say?

Jeff shook his head in disgust. ‘I’d sue Braun, Pratt, Randall, the whole lot of ’em. Or kill them. Maybe both.‘

‘No options are out of the question.’

‘So you got my call at home?’

‘No. I’ve been out all day.’

This surprised Jeff. ‘Well, the message was that I was going to give this Frannie thing a couple of graphs on Monday, maybe get somebody’s attention. I thought you could give me a good quote.’

Hardy smiled thinly. ‘Nothing you could print in a family newspaper.’

Jeff looked a question. ‘So you didn’t get the message and yet you’re here?’

‘I saw a free parking place at the curb. Hell, the whole street. What could I do? I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “why don’t you have a little off-the-record chat with your good friend Jeff Elliot?” ’

This brought a smile. Long ago, Hardy had neglected to preface some remarks to Jeff that they were off the record. It hadn’t worked out too well, and since then Hardy had made it a point to include the words ‘off the record’ in every discussion he ever had with Jeff, even purely social ones.

Jeff smiled. ‘I was waiting for that.’

‘Plus,’ Hardy continued, ‘I thought it was possible you might know something I don’t.’

‘Probably. I’m good on the Middle Ages and Victorian England.’

‘Dang.’ Hardy snapped his fingers. ‘Neither of those. I was thinking more about Frannie, Bree or Ron Beaumont, this MTBE business.’ Hardy thought a minute. ‘Damon Kerry. Al Valens.’

Jeff cracked a grin. ‘You done? I think you left out my wife and a couple of senators.’

Hardy spread his palms in a frustrated gesture. ‘I can’t seem to get much of it to hang together.’

The columnist swung his wheelchair around to face Hardy. ‘In return for which I get the exclusive of the big secret Frannie’s gone to jail about?’

‘Nope, but you might get Bree’s killer before anybody else.’

‘Are you close to that? Everybody’s saying it’s the husband. Ron, is it?’

A shake of the head. ‘Abe Glitsky, whom you may remember is head of homicide, is definitely not saying it. And Abe be the man on this stuff.’

‘He’s not on Ron?’

Pause. ‘It’s not Ron.’

He’d almost said that Glitsky was affirmatively saying it wasn’t Ron, which wasn’t true. But if that’s what Jeff Elliot heard, he wouldn’t correct the impression.

‘So who’s your guess? You got one?’

In his chair, Hardy drew a deep breath. He’d gathered a lot of information. But in spite of feeling as though he’d gotten somewhere in his investigation, he realized that he couldn’t precisely define where that was. When he asked Elliot to tell him about Damon Kerry, it surprised him almost as much as it did Jeff. Where had that question come from?

Jeff was shaking his head. ‘That’s got to be a big negatory, Diz.’

‘Maybe. But I’d sure like to know more than I do about the two of them, Bree and the good candidate.’

For a response, Jeff sat all the way back in his wheelchair behind his desk. He pulled at his mustache, scratched his beard, and brushed at the front of his shirt.

‘No hurry,’ Hardy prodded, shooting Jeff a hopeful grin. ‘It’s only Frannie doing hard time for keeping a promise.’

Finally, the reporter sighed. ‘You know, the connections,’ he said. ‘You don’t put them together.’ But Jeff wasn’t quite ready to spill anything, not yet. The impish smile from his youth fleetingly appeared as he came forward, his hands together on the desk. ‘You know that off-the-record thing we do? This is one of those, private and personal.’

‘Done. Understood.’ Hardy was beginning to feel a little like a Catholic priest in a confessional. A couple more days like the last few and he’d know every secret in the world and wouldn’t be able to tell any of them. But if that was the price for knowledge, he had to pay it.

Eve’s bad trade. He could only hope it wouldn’t turn out as badly for him as it had for her.

Jeff underscored it. ‘So this is personal, your ears only. If it doesn’t directly help Frannie, it stays here.’

‘Deal.’ Hardy got up and they shook hands over the desk. ‘So what connections?’ he asked.

‘What you just said. Frannie in jail. Kerry in another file in the brainpan – the election, the water poisoning today, all that. I didn’t put them together.’ His eyes shone with interest. ‘But they are together, aren’t they? They’re all Bree.’

‘That’s my guess.’

Jeff fidgeted in his chair, came to his decision, and nodded.

‘Have I mentioned the off-the-record thing?’

Hardy was dying to learn what Jeff knew, but it never helped to show it. He broke an easy smile. ‘Once or twice.’

He waited.

‘The thing about Kerry is that he’s really a good guy, especially for a politician. I’ve been with him more than a few times, in press rooms, after the odd banquet, off the record -much like you and me right now, and he’s decent. Plus he plays straight with us.’

‘Us?’

‘Reporters, media, like that.’

‘OK.’ And…?

‘OK, so a guy like that, sometimes a guy like me finds out a fact and kind of unofficially decides it doesn’t have to be in the public interest.’

Hardy’s eyebrows went up. ‘Excuse me. I thought I just heard you say that the media could show some restraint.’

Jeff acknowledged the point with a wry face. ‘I’m talking personal here. Me. It’s not something I brag about, but it happens. Sometimes.’ At Hardy’s skeptical look, he spread his palms wide. ‘OK, rarely. But the point is, Kerry’s not married, he can date anybody he wants. As our President has pointed out, it’s his private life. It’s not news.’

‘But Bree was married.’

‘And maybe they didn’t do anything let’s say carnal. Maybe she just hung around a lot and it was purely the campaign and business.’

Hardy leaned forward. ‘But you know otherwise?’

‘Did I catch them inflagrante? No. But I know. My opinion is they were in love with each other.’

This took a minute to digest, although Hardy had come to suspect it.

But Jeff was going on. ‘She only lived a half-dozen blocks from him, both of ’em up on Broadway, you know.‘

‘No, I didn’t know about him. I knew she did.’

‘Well, Kerry, too. His place is that little thirty-room shack just up from Baker. You’d remember it if you saw it, and you have.’ Jeff seemed almost relieved to be able to let his secret out. If he’d promised not to print it, telling somebody who in turn couldn’t tell was next best. ‘Anyway, couple of months ago I was pushing Damon for an interview – as I said, we go back a ways, too – and he said meet him at his place after hours, he’d dig up something for me. He was coming in from Chico or someplace, and was going to be alone, which meant without Valens. Except when I got there, who opens the door but Bree Beaumont.’

‘Dressed?’

Jeff chuckled. ‘You’ve got a dirty mind. Let’s go with casually attired. Casually and very, very attractively.’ He paused, remembering, then blew out a rush of air. ‘Very. Low green silk blouse, linen pants, barefoot. I distinctly remember she forgot her underwear on top. Believe me, it was the kind of thing you noticed, especially on her, even if you weren’t a trained reporter like me, alive to every detail.’

Hardy wanted to keep him going. ‘I keep hearing how pretty she was.’

‘A couple of miles beyond pretty, Diz. In any event,’ he continued, ‘here’s a bottle of champagne in a bucket on the coffee table, and otherwise the house is empty. So ask me, do I feel like I’m intruding? Moi?’

‘So what was it?’

‘Evidently she was planning to surprise him with a little welcome homecoming after the road trip. So he shows about ten minutes after I arrive, opens the door and it’s like, uh, “Hi, Bree, fancy you being here. Now, how ’bout them gas additives?” Call me a genius, but I saw right through it.‘

‘You’re a genius.’

Jeff nodded. ‘Somebody has to be. So anyway, they were together, and I knew it, and they knew I knew it. And I told them I’d keep a lid on it.’

‘I’m just curious, but why would you do that?’

He shook his head as though mystified himself. ‘I don’t know, Diz. I like the guy. I like his politics. It meant a lot to them.’ He met Hardy’s eyes. ‘Bottom line is I just decided. It shames me to say it, but I might even do the same for you.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Hardy replied. ‘I wasn’t sleeping with Bree. But after she was killed, weren’t you tempted to talk to the police?’

‘Why? Nobody’s saying Damon’s a suspect.’

Hardy looked a question. ‘At the least, Jeff, she’s murdered and you know he’s her lover. That’s got to be relevant to the homicide investigation. Maybe even crucial.’

‘It’s also relevant to Damon’s campaign, maybe even crucial. He didn’t kill her, Diz. There is no way. Plus, I want to see him get elected, and I sure as hell don’t have to tell the cops what I know. Maybe if some inspector had come and made some connection, asked me directly… I don’t know, I might have been tempted. But nobody did. Nobody has.’

‘But as you say, Jeff, it is all connected. It’s got to be.’ For emphasis, Hardy patted the desk between them. ‘So today’s bonus question is who did the water? What’s the Clean Earth Alliance?’

Jeff shifted again in his wheelchair, brought a hand to his tired eyes and rubbed them. Glancing at his watch, he looked up suddenly to see that outside a sepia dusk had settled. ‘When am I going to learn not to work on weekends? Why did I come in here on a Saturday?’

Hardy leaned forward. Jeff knew something else and was wrestling with how much to reveal. Hardy kept it low affect. ‘You were going to write some graphs on Frannie.’

Which brought it all back home. Jeff sat still a moment, then wheeled himself around to a low file cabinet. Back at the desk, he laid open the thick file folder and began turning pages. ‘The Yosemite Militia. The Valdez Avengers. Earth Now.’ He looked up. ‘And today’s Clean Air Alliance. Get the picture?’

‘They’re all related?’

‘Let’s say I’d bet their headquarters is some cabin in Montana.’

‘So who runs them?’

‘Well, this is a matter of some debate.’ Jeff pulled pages and ran down a synopsis of damage these groups had done, most of it in the realm of nuisance – vandalisms and graffiti -but in two cases something much more serious.

The Valdez Avengers had claimed responsibility for a pipe bomb explosion at an Exxon Gas Station in Tacoma, Washington, that had killed four people and injured twelve. Jeff looked up from the page. ‘They didn’t want people to invest in Exxon. That daring raid killed a little girl, six years old. Boy, that showed her.’

More recently, at the huge refinery in Richmond, just across the Bay, three guards had been severely beaten in a thus-far unclaimed attack. The refinery’s statement was that nothing had been taken, and that the rest of their security team had driven off the five assailants, although they’d been unable to capture them. ‘But you want my opinion,’ Jeff concluded, ‘that’s when these clowns got their hands on the MTBE.’

‘But couldn’t they just as well have gone to the gas station and pumped it out at a buck twenty-nine a gallon?’

‘Sure, but what’s the fun in that? Diz, these people are thugs. They get their rocks off shaking things up, making the Big Statement. Like today.’

Hardy leaned back, crossed a leg. ‘And you’ve got all this stuff in one folder.’

‘Right. Like Bree and Frannie and Damon, it’s all connected somehow. And now this stuff,’ he motioned down to his pile of paper, ‘it’s part of that, too.’

‘So who’s behind it? I had a Caloco guy today tell me that SKO funded this kind of activity.’

But this didn’t fit Jeff’s world view. ‘No, I’d be surprised at that. SKO’s big. These independent bozos seem to hate big.’

Hardy pointed at the folders. ‘You got any stories about attacks on ethanol producers or distributors?’

Jeff didn’t have to look. ‘No, now that you mention it. And that’s a good point.’

‘Maybe these groups don’t know who’s bankrolling them. Maybe SKO’s got a front.’

Jeff nodded. ‘But that means…’ He stopped, the idea germinating. ‘Why would they…?’

‘I’ve been using this mantra all day,’ Hardy said. ‘You ought to try it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Three billion dollars. Say it a few times. It’ll grow on you.’

19

David Freeman was not asleep and he wasn’t reading anything. But he was completely still, his feet propped up on the table in his Solarium, which was the nickname for the conference room just off the main lobby in his building. He wasn’t wearing shoes, and one of his Argyle socks had a hole in the toe. His cigar spiked the room with its rich odor and left the air with a blue tint, although there was no sign that Freeman was drawing on it, or even was aware of it, stuck there in the front of his face.

Hardy tapped once on the open door.

Not a muscle moved. Freeman sighed. ‘I was just thinking about you. How you doing?’

‘I’ve been better.’ Hardy pulled a chair and dropped himself into it. For a long moment, neither man said anything. Eventually, Hardy started. ‘I just called home for my messages. Did you know it’s Hallowe’en?’

‘What is?’

‘Tonight. It’s Hallowe’en.’

For the first time, Freeman favored him with a glance, went back to his cigar, and blew a long plume. ‘You forgot. Your kids are upset.’

It sounded like a chortle, but there wasn’t any humor in it. None at all. ‘What the hell am I…?’ He laid a hand on the table with exaggerated calm, drumming his fingertips. Da-da-dum, da-da-dum. ‘I’ve got a meeting here in ten minutes, David. It’s possibly even an important meeting, having to do with my wife being in jail, trying to get her out. Maybe I’m wrong, but this seems like something I ought to spend some of my time on.’

Another moment. Freeman had nothing to say, which was just as well. Hardy needed to vent.

‘So we got a killer I’m trying to find without any help from the police. We got the city’s water supply on hold for a couple of weeks. We got their mother rotting over downtown – have I mentioned that? And all these are somehow related and I’ve got no idea how. And do you know what the real problem is? I mean, the really big god damn most important thing wrong with the world right now tonight?’ The drumming had picked up in tempo. ‘You want to know?’

Humoring him, Freeman nodded imperceptibly. ‘Sure.’

‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s that I am such a shitty father and care so little about my children that I forgot the most important holiday in their young and precious lives. It never hit my radar all day. Can you imagine? What else could I possibly have been thinking about?’

Freeman nodded again. ‘It’s the Nineties. Guy like you, you can’t not be an insensitive cretin. Nothing to do but ignore it.’

Freeman was right. There wasn’t any point bitching about Hardy’s priorities. They were what they were.

He was that nineties’ pariah, the linear, logical, fact-burdened, classically trained human. Even worse, some wiring flaw had predestined him to be more oriented toward justice than mercy. The rest of his San Francisco world was sensitive and child-centered and politically correct and of course the children’s fun on Hallowe’en was much more important than any work Hardy might ever have to do.

He would just have to get over it.

In some countries, say Kosovo or Rwanda, Hardy was pretty sure many fathers didn’t take time out every day to play with their children. Their goal – and he felt the same about his own – was simple survival. He wondered if kids in these countries considered their fathers insensitive.

The soul-wrenching truth of it was that Hardy cared more about his wife and children than about any job. Than about anything, for that matter. But this – today, what he was doing, was not some job. This was real life – his and Frannie’s and the kids’ real lives in a real crisis. Just like Ron Beaumont’s kids and their lives.

And yet somehow both of his kids had assumed he’d zip on back to the Avenues and take them out trick or treating. It frustrated him beyond his ability to articulate. Young they might be, but could they really be unaware of the gravity of this situation? Of how much he treasured them? Of the reason behind every breath he took? Could they be that blind?

If they were, where had he failed them?

The old man swung his legs down to the ground, put his elbows on the table. ‘What did you mean? You know they’re related but don’t know how? This water poisoning and Frannie? Is that what you’re saying?’

Hardy was accustomed to Freeman’s brain – it tended to take leaps in any direction that looked promising – but even so, it took him a second. And the segue, though abrupt, was just as well. It put him back on his work, on what he had to do, and the feeling part of it be damned.

When he’d made everything safe and secure again, it would have been worth it, and they could either understand why he’d done it and the way he’d done it or not. But either way, it would be done.

He nodded at Freeman. ‘And while we’re on it, possibly the election this Tuesday.’

Out in the lobby, they heard a harsh buzzing sound. ‘That would be Canetta,’ he said. ‘My appointment. You want to stick around, I won’t kick you out.’

‘Are you kidding me? You couldn’t if you tried.’

‘Bill Tilton was, in fact, listed.’

They had gotten settled back in the smoky, dim room. Introductions made. Freeman brought up to speed. The landlord’s presence, Hardy sensed, only grudgingly accepted by Canetta. But the sergeant had information and he wanted to show off what he’d found. ‘This isn’t so tough,’ the sergeant said. ‘I could do this.’

‘Sounds like you already did, Phil.’ Hardy would give Canetta all the strokes he needed to keep him pumped up.

But Canetta seemed to be motivated on his own. ‘He’s an agent with Farmer’s Fund Life Insurance. I called from the station so when he called back he’d know I was legitimately the police.’

‘Smart,’ Hardy said. He raised his eyes to Freeman, silently telling him to shut up. ‘And he did call back?’

‘Wasn’t even an hour. So I asked him direct. Told him this was a murder investigation and we needed his cooperation. What’d he call Ron about? He said the company was a little sticky with the payout on Bree, her being murdered and all. On the side, Tilton tells me the claims guy doesn’t want to send a check – we’re talking two big ones – until it’s pretty damn clear Ron didn’t kill her. So I kept him yakking and he said it’s the first time he’s had this situation and it’s made things ugly around his office. Now, this next, you’re going to like this.’

Hardy waited, then realized Canetta needed some response. ‘I give up.’

Another second of suspense, then a smile. ‘His secretary quit over it. Marie couldn’t believe Tilton could be such a shit to Ron, who was the nicest-’

‘Marie?’ Suddenly Hardy heard it.

Canetta smiled. ‘That’s what I said. And Tilton goes, “Yeah, Marie Dempsey.” ’

‘The Marie from the phone messages?’

‘As it turns out.’ Canetta was almost beaming with childlike pride. ‘Marie is, was, his – Tilton’s – secretary.’

Hardy nodded in satisfaction. This was good. Two names to cross off. Insurance business. ‘You know, Phil, you really can do this. You want I’ll put in a plug to Glitsky.’

‘Naw. Fuck Glitsky and the suits. I don’t want to join ’em, but I wouldn’t mind beating ‘em.’ Suddenly Canetta pointed to Freeman, who’d been uncharacteristically silent, to his cigar. ‘By any chance, you got another one of those things?’

Freeman nodded, said sure, got up and disappeared back into the dark lobby.

‘You sure he’s cool?’ Canetta asked.

Cool was about the last word Hardy would ever use to describe Freeman, but he knew what Canetta meant. ‘He’s the smartest guy you’ll ever meet, Phil.’

Canetta threw a glance over his shoulder. ‘Maybe the ugliest, too.’

Hardy, keeping his voice low, had to grin. ‘Well, all of us can’t have everything. But you can trust him, that I guarantee. You don’t have to kiss him.’

A shudder traveled the whole length of Canetta’s body. ‘I’ll try to restrain myself. I bet I can.’

‘Can what?’ Another of Freeman’s many talents was his ability to appear out of nowhere. He had a handful of cigars, a bottle of red wine and glasses, all of which he kept a supply of in his office. He laid the cigars on the table. ‘Help yourself, sergeant. I should have offered sooner. What did I miss?’ He put down the glasses, and started to pour all around.

But Hardy had a hand out. ‘None for me, David. I’m working.’ And Canetta took the same road.

Freeman shrugged. He was working, too, but it was Saturday night. He could have a glass of wine – hell, a bottle of wine – and his brain would still hum along nicely, thank you, maybe even a little better than it was now. So would Hardy’s and Canetta’s, but David had learned long ago that you couldn’t tell anything to baby boomers. They were working. Working was serious. They couldn’t mix any fun in or they might – what? die? Christ, no wonder they all burned out.

But he sipped his wine and listened as Canetta went back to what he’d found. At least he’d lit his cigar, Freeman was thinking, although that, too, of course, would kill him. The sergeant was reading from his spiral notebook. ‘Kogee Sasaka has a massage place. Hands On. That’s the name. I checked with some guys at the station. Legitimate. No busts, no complaints. She gives massages, if you can believe it. Anyway, that was the appointment she called Ron about.’

Canetta flicked at his pages. ‘That was it. Tilton, Marie, and Kogee, wasn’t it? And you did Pierce, right?’

‘And Valens, as it turned out.’ Hardy filled him in on the hotel interviews, ending with Valens’ interesting fib about having called Ron.

‘But Valens did call him.’

Hardy agreed. ‘Unless someone was doing a pretty damn fine impersonation.’

‘So why’d he lie about it?’

The question hung while Freeman swallowed his wine. Finally, he spoke up. ‘That’s where you push,’ he said simply. ‘Was the call about anything, or did he just leave his name?’

‘No. Some report,’ Hardy said. ‘Bree’s copy of something she was working on.’

‘That she was working on and that Ron knew about,’ Canetta said. ‘I still think that’s part of this. He realized it was important or valuable and he came back and got it.’

Hardy didn’t want the sergeant going off with a hard-on for Ron Beaumont. ‘I think Ron’s going to be hard to find, Phil,’ he said.

‘If he came back,’ Canetta countered, ‘then he’s still close by, am I right?’

‘If he came back.’

‘That’s all I’m saying. If. And if I find him…’

‘You’ll let me know. First. Before you do anything.’

A nod. ‘Absolutely.’

Canetta was gone. He told Freeman and Hardy that he thought he might see if Valens could be found tonight, and get this lie he’d told Hardy straightened out. Canetta knew the city’s hotels like the back of his hand – Saturday night like this three days before the election, Kerry probably had five different appearances in various banquet rooms downtown. Shouldn’t be too hard to catch up with the candidate. And his campaign manager would be with him, easy to talk to. This homicide stuff – a child could do it.

Meanwhile, the two attorneys had written down the names of every person in the investigation and now they had a bunch of yellow pages from legal pads strewn around the table with the by-now familiar names – Valens and Kerry, Pierce, Ron Beaumont. Even Frannie and Carl Griffin. The plan – Freeman’s, with his love of context, as he called it – was to fill in connections under each name and see if they could connect the dots.

‘OK,’ Hardy said, ‘you don’t know anything about this. Where do you start?’

Freeman didn’t hesitate. ‘Griffin.’

A smile flitted at the edges of Hardy’s mouth.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Only that it never fails. I would have picked him last.’

Freeman chomped on his cigar, long since extinguished. ‘He was the first horse at the trough, n ’est-ce-pas? That alone.‘

This, Hardy thought, was why Freeman was so valuable. His input always triangulated the evidence, bringing different targets into sharper focus. ‘OK, but Glitsky tells me he wasn’t working Beaumont the morning he got killed…’

‘It wasn’t his case, or he wasn’t working it.’

‘No, he drew the case, but he had some others, too. He was in the field on one of them.’

‘How did Glitsky know that?’

‘Griffin told him before he went out the morning he got it.’

‘He told him.’ Freeman snorted the word.

‘Why would he lie?’

The old man squinted across the table. ‘Because you have been working all day and you’re tired and stressed out, I’ll just pretend you didn’t ask that. Now, do we know what the other cases were?’

It continued like that around the daisy chain. Details about Griffin’s death – time, location – that might not jibe with the other cases he’d been assigned. Valens’ lie about Bree’s report. Hardy felt a little uneasy as Freeman, on his own, put Bree together with Damon Kerry. Also with Jim Pierce. ‘Assume the worst, Diz. Life won’t disappoint you so much. Bree slept around, maybe a lot with different guys. It gives us more to work with.’

Hardy wanted to avoid assuming the worst about women and their secret affairs. It was too close.

Forcing his attention back, Hardy listened as Freeman asked about Jim Pierce. ‘Assuming he was sleeping with Bree, too.’

But having met the stunning Carrie Pierce during the day, this was difficult terrain for Hardy to negotiate. ‘His wife is a world-class beauty, David. I can’t see it.’

Freeman took the soggy cigar from his lips. ‘You know, Diz, Jackie Kennedy wasn’t exactly chopped liver. You know the basic difference between men and women around sex?’

‘Equipment?’

‘No, wise guy. Men want as many women as they can get. Women want the best man they can get. A fundamental truth.’

Hardy nodded. ‘I’ll write it down when I get home. But there’s one other name we’ve left out here that I thought you’d enjoy.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Canetta.’

Hardy succeeded in surprising Freeman so rarely that when he did so, as now, he derived a disproportionate pleasure from it. Now the old man’s eyes narrowed with interest. ‘So how are you playing him?’

‘I’m thinking he might tell me a lie. I’m thinking he’s too involved too soon.’

A satisfied nod. ‘You know, just when I think you’re getting soft…’

‘It’s a long shot,’ Hardy admitted. ‘But he walked a beat near her place, he provided security at some functions for both Pierce and Bree, he let her off on a DUI…’

Freeman’s bushy eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s real.’

‘Real enough. They also had several curbside conversations.’

‘Several?’A beat. ‘All of them curbside?’

‘That’s what he says. But he wants me to believe he was truly infatuated with her. And maybe he was. I don’t know.’

‘And so you put him to work to find her killer.’

‘Or to lead me away from looking at him.’

Freeman leaned back, pulled the cigar from his mouth, looked it over critically, and popped it back in. ‘Sweet,’ he said. ‘You need me here, you know I’m in.’

Hardy nodded. ‘I appreciate it, David. But let’s remember that whoever this is, the guy’s serious.’

A dismissive wave. ‘Serious, schmerious. I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m bulletproof.’

‘I’ve told you a thousand times, I hate when you say that.’

Freeman grunted. ‘Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’

20

She was out again. Jim Pierce couldn’t face another society event, this one with adults wearing masks and other madness he didn’t even want to consider. Hallowe’en. He’d begged off, as he had nine times out of ten for the past half-dozen years, fed up to the teeth with these cock and tail parties whose function was to make sure that his friends knew he was their friend, and they would tell by the size of the check.

Friends? He was too rich. He trusted no one. He hadn’t a friend in the world.

The last one of these parties he’d attended – it had been a year before – had pretty much sealed his decision that he wouldn’t be part of that scene anymore. This one, even for San Francisco, had been revolting.

The financial and political elite of the city were in a big, open warehouse in the South of Market area. There was often some artsy-fartsy performance supposedly related to the fundraising entity at these affairs, and that night after everyone had had a few, the main event began.

A naked couple appeared suddenly on a black-lit stage. Awful, drum-pounding noise made conversation impossible. The woman began carving some kind of devil worship symbols into the man s back.

Pierce had been twenty feet away, trying to talk to the district attorney and the mayor before the drums took over. What they were witnessing wasn’t being done with mirrors. The blood flowed. And that was a mere preamble.

The woman had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon from which she drank. Then she poured it over the man’s new cuts and he screamed and screamed, writhing – but to the obscene beat – in real pain. The strobe lighting went red.

The drums increased. The man spread his legs and leaned over and – Pierce had trouble believing it still, though he had seen it with his own eyes – the woman shoved the neck of the Jack Daniel’s bottle…

Thank God Carrie hadn’t gone to that one – it might have given her a heart attack. But he’d gone, and that was enough. He was through.

The television droned in the small room under the stairwell. ESPN Sports Center. Twenty-four hours’ coverage. Weekends he’d catch a good percentage of it, though it mostly repeated every half hour, the same stuff and the occasional update. But it kept him up on sports, something he needed for his image – a regular guy at work.

Well, not a regular guy. One of the bosses, actually, but at least one of the accessible ones. He hit the mute button and stood up, unsteady on his feet.

He’d promised Carrie he’d get himself something to eat. She’d be home in less than an hour now, and all he’d done was drink – couple of Scotches and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. He’d better eat if he didn’t want to endure another round of the third degree.

Carrie had been going on and on lately – why wasn’t he eating? He ought to take better care of himself. This drinking every night wasn’t doing him any good either. What the heck was the matter with him? Maybe he should see a therapist. How come he wasn’t working out anymore?

How about a back rub, he wanted to say. A Lewinsky maybe. Ha! Never. Not even when they’d first started out and every single time had been such a precious meaningful gift of her beautiful self, back when she at least pretended she liked it. Not often, but if everything was perfect and he was romantic, whatever that meant. Then he might get lucky. Lucky with his wife. Somehow the concept seemed a little skewed.

In the bathroom, there he was in the mirror. He’d aged ten years in five weeks, he thought, although nobody else seemed to have noticed. He moved closer, slapped hard at his cheeks, but couldn’t feel them. Tugged a few times half-heartedly at his penis. Nothing.

They each had their own private boxes – Carrie’s jewelry safe in the floor of her upstairs closet, and Jim’s business safe, in his office where Carrie never went.

He went to it now. Behind the desk he lifted the corner of the Persian rug and pushed down on the two parquet tiles while he simultaneously held the button under the top right drawer. This freed the other six tiles so that he could pull them up.

In another minute he was sitting in his big chair at the big desk. He held the gun – butt and barrel – in both of his hands. After a minute, he turned the cylinder to make it click once, then spun it.

He brought it up to his face. Oil and cordite and something else. The potential to bring instant death. Could you actually smell that?

Closing his eyes, he was just going to feel it there with his senses – smelling, the cold metal, the power of it. A wave of dizziness then.

He leaned into it. With exaggerated slowness, he brought it up and around until no part of the weapon touched him except the end of the barrel, tight up against the center of his forehead.

Abe Glitsky was not having his best evening.

Of all holidays, Hallowe’en was his least favorite. But beyond that, as a cop, he sensed in his bones that this Hallowe’en – tonight – was shaping up to be a disaster. It had the big triple whammy going against it – a beautiful, almost balmy night; a Saturday; and, as an extra added bonus, a full moon.

Scientists might debate whether a full moon had an effect on human behavior, but no policeman ever wondered about it at all. It was an immutable fact, and when the moon was full and the night happened to be Hallowe’en, watch out.

Glitsky had listened to all the news reports about the Pulgas water poisoning, and still was more than half convinced that it had simply been a Hallowe’en trick. That’s the way Hallowe’en was – goofy little pranks involving razor blades and Ex-Lax and strychnine and now, in an exciting wrinkle for the new millenium, gasoline poisoning of the water supply.

So, although he would never be truly prepared for what the night might bring, Glitsky was in ready mode. He knew that every lunatic in the city was going to be in the streets tonight. Before morning he was going to be called on a couple of deaths.

It put him on edge.

That and his son Orel being out among the crazies. And Rita having gone for the weekend. And his judgmental (and right) father snoring on the living-room couch. And the irregular staccato of firecrackers, sometimes sounding enough like gunfire to fool even a veteran lieutenant of homicide.

As soon as Orel had gone into the night without a costume – which made Glitsky wonder why he was going out at all, but you picked your fights – he’d blown out the candle in the front window’s jack-o‘-lantern. Also in the front of the house, he had turned out all the lights, as well as unscrewed the bulb on the stairs to the front door of their duplex. He didn’t want little streams of kids in horror outfits ringing his doorbell all evening.

Now he sat at the kitchen table with a large bag of frosted cookies, a cooling pot of tea, and the box of documents that Sharron Pratt had finally delivered up to his office. His mood was not improving as he read, and got positively ugly when the doorbell, as he knew it would, rang.

He’d let it go. They’d get the message – no candy here – and go away.

They didn’t. The bell rang again.

They were going to wake up his father, that’s what all this ringing was going to do, if it hadn’t already. He pushed away from the table so violently that his chair crashed to the ground behind him. Uncharacteristically, he swore aloud.

Between the chair falling and the swearing, one of them succeeded in waking his father. ‘Abraham. All right in there?’

‘Just getting the door.’

‘So much noise.’

Tell me about it, Abe thought, striding to the blasted door. Whoever it was, he was going to give them an earful. He almost hoped whoever it was would try some cute stuff – break an egg against the door, leave a burning bag of dog-doo for him to stomp out, or any one of the ever-popular Hallowe’en standbys – so he’d have an excuse to chase them down and haul them in downtown.

God, he hated this night.

He flicked on the lights inside the entryway and jerked open the door.

Dismas Hardy was standing there. ‘Trick or treat,’ he said. ‘I think your porch light must be out.’

‘… so I thought since nobody’s home at my house, there’s no reason to go there. And it’s well known you’re the saddest, most pathetic bachelor slash widower on the planet. You had to be home, right? I mean, where else could you be?’

Hardy was rummaging in Glitsky’s cupboard, pulling out the occasional food item, giving it the once over, either replacing it on the shelf or putting it on the counter next to the sink. ‘Anyway, I figure the two of us could hang out here, solve Bree Beaumont, eat some canned food, drink too much. Just have ourselves a good, old-fashioned guys’ night out, except we’d be in. Sound good?’

Nat Glitsky had gone back to sleep on the front-room couch and his snores carried into the kitchen. Abe had pulled one of the chairs around and straddled it backwards. ‘I don’t have any alcohol in the house.’

Hardy pointed a finger, jumped all over him. ‘See? That’s exactly what I mean. Sad, pathetic, negative.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t drink, as you may have noticed over the past twenty years.’

Hardy was still rummaging. He noticed several California lottery tickets stuck to the front of the refrigerator with magnets. He pulled them off and held them up. ‘You realize that the lottery is the tax for people who aren’t good at math, don’t you? Did you win?’

‘Probably,’ Glitsky said. ‘I usually do. Couple of grand or so every week. I’ll check tomorrow’s paper and let you know.’

Hardy shook his head and went back to the cupboards. ‘OK, but while we’re on this, let me just say that I am appalled to find Spam in your larder.’

This finally got a rise out of Abe. ‘I love Spam. It’s the great unsung food of our time. And PS, you like canned corned beef hash.’

‘That’s because hash has flavor.’

‘Spam does, too. In fact, it has more.’

‘Yeah, but it’s a bad flavor.’

Glitsky shrugged. ‘It’s the number-one snack food in Hawaii.’

‘There’s a strong recommendation. You’re talking the same Hawaii where they actually eat poi? You ever eat poi? I wonder how they feel about Spam in Alaska, where they eat blubber?’

But Glitsky wasn’t to be denied. ‘They make it with seaweed and rice. It’s a sushi dish, called spam musabi or something.’

Hardy turned around in his best announcer’s voice. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in tonight’s entry on “Bad Food Ideas,” we’re hearing that perennial favorite Spam and – are you ready for this? – seaweed linked as a gourmet treat. We’re waiting for your calls to vote on whether this is, as it appears to be, a… Bad Food Idea.’ He focused on Glitsky. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘I didn’t make it up.’ He got off his chair, though, and crossed the small room in a couple of steps. ‘Come to think of it, though, I could eat something. What did you pull down?’

Hardy had selected two large Spaghettios with franks, an extra-large Chef Boyardee Ravioli. He was going to mix them, and was opening the cans. ‘You got anything green in the refrigerator that’s supposed to be?’

Glitsky went to check.

But now the dishes were in the sink and there wasn’t much good-natured anything going down in the kitchen.

Hardy had gotten the short version of the immensely relevant Caloco document from Glitsky and now was leafing through it on his own. It was a ‘Separated Employee’s Audited Statement’ and it did not make pretty reading.

While Bree worked for Caloco, it seemed she had a Platinum-Plus company Visa card with a credit limit of a hundred thousand dollars. When she quit the company, they had of course closed that account. But an auditor’s review of Bree’s records – routine after a certain level employee’s termination or resignation – had subsequently revealed the existence of a second name authorized to sign on the account – Ron Beaumont.

Ron didn’t work for Caloco and so this was unusual, but if it had stopped there, that would have probably been the end of it. According to the audit, Ron had never used the card and so the presence of his name on the account made no obvious financial difference to Caloco.

(Hardy couldn’t help but recall the object lesson in Caloco’s corporate culture that he’d learned earlier in the day when Jim Pierce, straight-faced, told him that some clerk in some department might notice a missing three billion dollars, but the corporate entity would never miss it. If three billion was a drop in Caloco’s bucket, a mere hundred grand was a molecule – invisible to the naked eye.)

But the audit had turned up something else that was very disturbing. The electronic superhighway created its own version of a paper trail, and Bree Beaumont’s card was linked going forward as the security instrument to another, Mellon Bank, Visa account. That account, with a credit limit of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, did show a regular history of purchases in San Francisco, all of them paid every month. The monthly accounts were sent to a Ronald Brewster at a post-office box. And nobody at Caloco had ever heard of Ron Brewster.

Hardy got to here and his stomach went hollow. He looked up. ‘Didn’t Caloco try to close the second account, the Brewster account?’

Glitsky had been sitting quietly, arms crossed, waiting for this. He shook his head. ‘That’s page three. The Mellon account had only used the Caloco account for security to open it. Far as Mellon was concerned, Ron Brewster was a great client with a five-year history of regular payments. No way are they closing the account. Plus the Mellon account, it’s not using any of Caloco’s money. So Ron’s got himself a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar line of credit.’ Glitsky leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘You’ll also notice that the Mellon account doesn’t include Bree as a signatory, only Ron. And guess what? Ron Brewster’s signature looks a whole lot like Ron Beaumont’s writing. We’re dealing with a white-collar whiz kid here, Diz, on the run with a phony ID.’

Even for Hardy, familiar with the purported excuse for Ron’s duplicity, it was difficult to remain neutral in the face of this. And he figured it would be impossible for Glitsky.

Which proved to be true. ‘I’m going to throw Coleman and Batavia on to him first thing in the morning.’

‘They working Sunday?’

‘They are now.’ A look. ‘Are you telling me this doesn’t make you sit up around Ron?’

‘No,’ Hardy agreed, ‘I’ll admit it makes him look a little weak.’

If Glitsky had a smile, he was wearing it now. ‘A little weak, that’s good. Weaker than a signed murder confession at any rate, but not by much. And that’s not all. Check out page five.’

Hardy turned the pages quickly, glancing over the information, and as he scanned, Glitsky kept up the color commentary. ‘That electronic linkage Caloco can access finds four other accounts connected to the Mellon Visa.’ Hardy read the names. Ron Black. Ron Blake. Ron Burns. Ron Blanda. ‘Guy’s got a million dollars in credit. Five phony identities. You gotta believe he’s got passports for all five.’

No argument there. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me at all. And you know how I hate to say this, but-’

Now Glitsky was smiling. ‘But that doesn’t make him a murderer. But I’ll tell you something. It doesn’t make him a boy scout either.’

Hardy had to agree. ‘No. But why would any of this make him want to kill his wife? You got a theory on that?’

Clearly, this was still unsettled water for Glitsky. The scar through his lips went white as he thought about it. ‘She must have been ignorant of the accounts. When she found out he was using them on her collateral from Caloco, she busted him for it, they fought, and it got out of hand.’

‘So it was just a fight?’ Hardy wasn’t grinding any ax, but he did have a point to make. ‘That’s not murder one. It’s not usually murder anything. At the most it’s manslaughter, maybe even self-defense, which is no crime at all.’

‘I don’t care what the lawyers call it. It gets me the guy who killed Bree.’

‘Maybe.’ In the longish silence Hardy was aware of Abe’s father’s regular breathing in the living room. ‘Maybe,’ he repeated. ‘But what about the guy who killed Carl Griffin?’

This brought Glitsky up short. ‘What guy is that?’

‘You’re homicide. You tell me.’

‘Are you telling me they’re related, Bree and Carl?’

Low-key, Hardy shrugged. ‘Are you telling me they’re not? Seems likely they could be, unless you’ve got a suspect with Carl.’ It was a question.

Glitsky took a moment before answering. ‘We’ve got nothing on Carl. I’ve told you this. He was going out to the Western Addition to talk to one of his snitches, who apparently got some kind of drop on him.’

‘And what?’ Hardy ladled on the sarcasm. ‘He asked the snitch to hold his gun a minute while they talked, and it went off accidentally? Is that what happened?’

‘Must have been,’ Glitsky replied sardonically. But Hardy had something and Glitsky, perhaps for the first time, was seeing it. ‘He was sitting in his car, Diz. Even Carl wasn’t that dumb.’

‘OK. So what do you think happened? You remember where the car was found?’

A nod. ‘A little cul-de-sac called Raycliff Terrace, just off Divisadero.’

Well, Hardy was thinking, strike that idea. Divisadero ran right through the heart of the Western Addition, so Griffin was where he was supposed to have been. But, being thorough, he asked his next question anyway. ‘What’s the cross street?’

Glitsky didn’t know offhand and in a minute they had a map spread out on the table between them. A loud silence ensued. Raycliff Terrace was off Divisadero all right, and on the map it looked close enough to the ghetto, but to anyone who knew the city at all, it was so far economically from the low-income housing units of the Western Addition that it may as well have been in Beverly Hills.

The cross street was Pacific, the eponymous artery of Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s most aristocratic neighborhoods. And, more tellingly, one block from Broadway.

Hardy spent an instant leaning over, making sure. With a kind of pang about his own incompetence, he realized that this had been David Freeman’s idea – his comment that Griffin had been the first horse at the trough. Was the old fart ever wrong?

Hardy straightened up and walked over to the refrigerator, where he pulled a magnetized pen off the door. Back at the map, he marked an X. Then another one. After a moment’s reflection, a final thought struck him, and he scratched out a third one. ‘Bree Beaumont,’ he said, putting the tip of the pen on the first mark, two blocks from Raycliff Terrace. ‘Broadway and Steiner. Damon Kerry, Broadway and Baker.’ Three blocks west of Bree, one block from Raycliff. He put the pen on the third X. ‘Jim Pierce. Divisadero and North Point.’ Eleven blocks north. Griffin had been killed surrounded by the players in the Beaumont case. Which, to Hardy, argued that he wasn’t killed in a drug sting gone wrong. His death was related to Bree’s.

Frowning, Glitsky was silent. Finally he put a finger on Hardy’s first mark. ‘Ron Beaumont, too.’

Hardy had to admit this unwelcome fact. But it wasn’t his point and in a minute he was fairly sure it wouldn’t be Glitsky’s. ‘Can you see Griffin coming up here with his snitch, Abe? I can’t. You see the snitch letting himself get driven this far out of the ’hood?‘

Glitsky shook his head. ‘You’re right. It didn’t happen. Not up here.’

Hardy ran with it. ‘It was somebody Griffin wasn’t afraid of, maybe even trusted.’

‘Enough to let him hold his piece? It’s hard to imagine.’ He had his fist balled over the Xs and he lifted it an inch, then brought it down with a great deal of force. ‘Damn,’ he said. He slammed the fist down again. ‘God damn it, Carl.’

From Glitsky, this was a violent explosion. He raised his eyes, the whites shot now with red. ‘Anybody else I’d say no chance. Carl? I’ve got to say maybe.’ He ran his palm over the entire top of his head. ‘Lord, Diz, how is it nobody saw this?’

But that wasn’t what Glitsky really wanted to know, so Hardy thought he’d spare him. Hardy had his own problems with this new information – there was another X, Hardy knew, that he hadn’t put on the map.

Phil Canetta had his own weapon. Griffin wouldn’t have had to voluntarily pass over his gun – the situation that Glitsky had found so untenable. Canetta could have simply hopped into the passenger seat of Griffin’s car, pulled his own piece, and moved things along right smartly from there. Relieved Carl of his gun, and had him drive to a secluded and quiet dead-end street. Made him dead.

But then, the more he thought about it, if any of his other suspects owned a weapon, they could just as easily have done the same thing.

The good news was that he had gotten Glitsky thinking, and not exclusively about Ron. It wasn’t a certainty, of course, and nowhere near proven, but suddenly now to Hardy the overwhelming probability was that Griffin’s murder was in fact linked to Bree’s.

‘When was he killed?’ Hardy asked. ‘Carl.’

Glitsky was still getting used to it, and Hardy couldn’t blame him. If this was what had happened, the proximity of Griffin’s murder scene to the homes of the suspects in Bree’s murder was an egregious oversight for homicide to have missed. Glitsky was back sitting down at the table. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and blew on them. ‘It was a Monday. Somebody reported the body mid-afternoon, say two thirty. Forensics had him dead an hour, an hour and a half.’

‘So. Lunchtime.’

Glitsky made a face. ‘He hadn’t eaten. Except some chocolate.’

Abe’s son Orel was just getting back from trick or treating, if that’s what he’d been doing, as Hardy was at the door on his way out. Glitsky had been on the phone for the past twenty minutes leaving messages with his inspectors to make it to the hall the next day, and with the crime scene unit to make sure that Griffin’s car got another careful going-over in light of what might be these new developments. If Hardy knew Abe, and he did, all of this was going to go on awhile, with the coroner, the various labs, and so on. He didn’t feel any great need to hang around. It was after ten by now and he was exhausted.

But he couldn’t go home yet – he really had to go by Erin’s and at least kiss the kids goodnight. So now he was in the Cochrans’ living room and his own son Vincent was asleep with his head on Hardy’s lap. Rebecca was curled up on his other side, still awake – Hardy was going to do an experiment someday and see how many days his daughter could go without any sleep, but for now he was contented enough with her quiet form snuggled next to him. At least she’d know he’d come by on Hallowe’en after all.

Both the kids had gone out in Erin’s sheets as ghosts. The elaborate costumes Frannie had made for both of them – Cinderella for the Beck and Piglet for Vincent were lost to the insanity of the past couple of days.

But at least they’d had their holiday night. Their respective caches of candy were already sorted in piles on the rug. The wonderful Erin had made it all work, and for this Hardy was more than grateful.

She’d also mixed a shaker of manhattans - it had been a long day for everybody, and they’d spent the last twenty minutes having a nightcap and catching up on Hardy’s progress, ending with the potentially blockbusting discovery about Carl Griffin’s death.

But Erin had a clear focus on her priorities – this might be a fascinating turn of events, but if it wasn’t about Frannie and getting everyone’s life back to normal, she wasn’t interested. ‘This policeman was before anything happened that involved Frannie, wasn’t it, Dismas?’

‘By a couple of weeks.’

‘Well, then, how can they keep her-’ A glance at the Beck, who was hanging on every word. ‘How can they keep her where she is?’

Hardy saw her point, but it wasn’t any help. ‘She’s in for fighting with a judge, Erin. That’s all it comes down to. My guess is whatever happens with the investigation, they’ll let her go Tuesday morning.’ He said it easily but harbored an uneasy fear that it might turn out not to be true. With Ron’s disappearance, all bets might be off.

‘She’s OK, though, isn’t she, Daddy?’ See? The Beck might be quiet, but she never sleeps.

Arm around her, he patted his girl. ‘She’s fine, Beck. In fact, maybe I can see… do you want to talk to her?’

‘Oh, Daddy, so much!’

Gently, he moved Vincent’s head off him on to the couch. The long shot had just occurred to him, but the idea might work. ‘Let’s give it a try.’

He got the jail’s number and called the desk, gently reminding the deputy about the deli lunch he’d provided for them that day – sure, the guy had heard about it. What could he do for Mr Hardy?

He could let his wife in Adseg use the phone and call out to talk for a minute to her kids. And after a brief hesitation, the deputy said he’d see what he could do.

Five minutes later, the phone rang at the Cochrans‘. Hardy was nervous as he picked it up. ’Frannie?‘

Hearing her voice, he realized he should have gone to see her again tonight when he’d passed right by on the way to Jeff Elliot’s. Twenty times a day wouldn’t be too much. He should forget all this faux police work. Glitsky was on it now and it would move along on its own. ‘How are you holding up?’

He heard her take in a breath, and knew she was summoning her strength to answer. ‘Pretty good,’ she said with a cheer so false it made him sick.

The Beck was unable to restrain herself, in her excitement pulling at his leg, the cord, whatever was near by. He figured it wouldn’t be a good time to reprimand her for it. ‘Listen, I’ve got somebody here who wants to talk to you.’

‘OK, but come back, please.’

Hardy handed the phone to the Beck and stood there listening to the details of the past two days, the questions she’d had to endure at school, when was Mom coming home, what were they doing to her down at the jail – all his precious daughter’s thoughts and worries that Hardy hadn’t been able to take time for.

Vincent woke up and was groggily leaning against him, sucking his thumb although he’d stopped doing that six months before. ‘Is that Mommy? I need to talk to Mommy.’ Too sleepy to cry, but leaning in that direction.

So the kids both got to talk. Then Erin – was there anything Frannie needed her to do tomorrow, for school on Monday? She shouldn’t worry, Grandma was on the job.

There wasn’t any criticism of Hardy stated or implied, but he knew. He knew. He was good at some things, and at others hopeless. And now he felt keenly that the father role, the one that perplexed and frustrated him so often if not always lately, had become a victim to his need to figure things out, to keep busy, to win.

The priority was wrong – he felt it in every bone.

But what else could he do? He could give lip service to David Freeman’s input, to Glitsky’s machine, but he knew and cared more about this investigation than Freeman and Glitsky combined. Like it or not, he was the prime mover. Lives – and not just his family’s – now depended upon him and what he did next.

Finally, his turn came again as Erin corraled both of the kids back to bedrooms, to bedtime.

He told Frannie that he loved her, but he couldn’t leave it at that. He might hate himself for it, but he had to find out more. ‘I’ve got to ask you, have you heard from Ron today?’

‘No. How could I? They’d don’t let anybody call me here.’

‘No, I know that.’

‘Well, then.’

Hardy told her. Ron had disappeared from his hotel.

He listened to her breathing for a minute. ‘Why would he do that? I thought – didn’t you say? – he asked you to help him. What does this mean?’

‘I don’t know. I was hoping maybe you could tell me.’

‘No, unless he just got scared for the kids again.’

‘But why wouldn’t he have left some message with me?’

‘I don’t know that either. Maybe he will.’

‘Maybe,’ Hardy said flatly. ‘I hope so.’

A silence hummed on the line. ‘Dismas?’

‘I’m here.’

‘I’ve told you everything I know. Really. I don’t know where he is, what he’s doing.’

If he didn’t completely believe it, he felt at least he had to accept it. ‘OK.’

Another silence preceded the tremulous voice. ‘Tell me you believe me, Dismas. Please. I need you to believe me.’

‘Of course,’ he said with deliberate ambiguity. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, OK? Bright and early.’

‘That would be good,’ she said. Then, ‘Dismas?’

‘Yes.’

He waited.

‘I love you,’ she said.

His knuckles were white on the phone. He knew he was being imprecise. ‘Me, too.’

He finished two solid manhattans with Erin and Ed and they talked about the water poisoning and the poor middle-aged hiker from the water temple who had finally died from his injuries. Erin got Hardy a blanket and a pillow and told him he should stay here on the couch and have breakfast with his children in the morning. They were missing him, if he couldn’t tell.

He was asleep in ten seconds.

21

Valens had left Damon Kerry up at his mansion an hour ago and back at his hotel he paced as though he were caged. His suite at the Clift was bigger than some apartments he’d lived in and the wraparound view of San Francisco was expansive, but none of that mattered.

It was now near midnight of what had been the longest and one of the most difficult days of his life. The only thing that made it even remotely worthwhile was today’s latest poll that put Damon essentially dead even for Tuesday’s election. Technically he was still two points back, but with the pollster’s margin for error, the campaign was neck and neck.

Finally, the buzz came and he walked over, looked through the peephole, and pulled open the door.

Thorne cast a last quick look behind him at the hallway, then stepped into the room. ‘This is just not smart, Al,’ he said in his softest tone as he pushed the door closed, twisted the deadbolt, and connected the chain. Turning, he faced Valens, his expression betraying nothing – a bland smile, rheumy eyes. ‘This isn’t a good idea. We must not be seen together.’

Valens barely noticed the rebuke. He was too wound up. ‘It’s midnight, Baxter. Nobody’s looking, trust me. It’s just this…’ He spread his arms, the enormity of it. ‘… today.’

Thorne nodded understandingly. ‘The election’s in three days. This always happens. It’s nothing unusual. It might even get worse.’

‘I’m not talking about the election. Christ, the election is the good news. I’m talking about a dead man at the bottom of the Pulgas Water Temple and this attorney Hardy going to Bree’s place and…’

‘Wait, wait.’ Thorne held up a palm. ‘Why don’t we sit down? Do you have anything to drink? You could use a cocktail. In fact, a cocktail might be just the thing.’ He crossed the room to the bar, motioning for Valens to sit on one of the suite’s brocaded sofas. ‘This is really a remarkable room.’ He admired the view for a moment, then turned, asking as if it were an afterthought, ‘What does the dead man at the water temple have to do with us?’

The question was an instruction and a threat and it caught Valens flat-footed, no doubt as Thorne had intended. He went back to pulling soft-drink and single-serving liquor bottles from the bar area. ‘But speaking of cocktails, in the light of all the frenzy around this unfortunate MTBE poisoning, it occurred to me that the candidate could make an extremely dramatic presentation in the next day or two that might put him over the top to stay.’

He’d arranged the bottles and some glasses on a little tray and brought it over to Valens, placing it on the coffee table, then sitting on the couch kitty-corner. He reached for his inside pocket and extracted a flask.

‘What’s in that?’ Valens asked.

Thorne loved a surprise. For an answer, he smiled and unscrewed the cap, then poured a half inch of the clear liquid into one of the glasses. Picking it up, he smelled it, then passed it across the table. ‘You tell me.’

A sniff. ‘It’s alcohol.’

Another smile, this one beaming. ‘Yes it is. Absolutely right. It’s ethanol, straight up.’ Thorne popped the top on a bottle of orange soda and reached over pouring it into the glass. ‘Bottoms up, Al. Really.’

‘You want me to drink this?’

‘I think that’s the idea. Go on, it won’t hurt you.’

But Valens couldn’t seem to force himself to move. After a second or two, Thorne said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ took the glass and drained it in a couple of swallows. ‘Since when have you been so timid, Al? Did you think I was going to poison you?’

‘No, of course not. I just…’ He met his employer’s eyes. ‘I don’t know, Baxter. I’m just fucking worn down.’

Thorne gave him an avuncular pat on the knee. ‘A couple more days and it’s over. You hang in there and it will all have been worth it. Now’ – back to business – ‘what do you think about my idea?’

‘I’m not sure exactly what it is. Make ethanol cocktails?’ Suddenly Thorne’s face showed some animation. ‘Actually, that might be even better. That’s just an inspired idea, Al. Really. Reporters will always take a free drink, won’t they?’ Valens felt some of his own tension break. ‘That’s been my experience.’

‘Exactly. You see, I was thinking of having Damon drink some ethanol – as I just did – at a press briefing. Think of the contrast…’ Thorne was getting wound up, although his voice never changed its inflection. ‘A few gallons of MTBE finds its way into the water supply and the whole city is shut down, the poisoned water smelling and tasting like turpentine.’ He paused briefly and held up his flask. ‘While the other additive, the natural additive, ethanol, is so safe you can drink it. In fact, people have been drinking it for ever. I love it,’ he said. ‘This could be very strong.’

But Valens wasn’t so sure. ‘If Damon will go for it.’

Thorne’s face clouded. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because he’s careful, Baxter. He’s not an idiot. He’s never specifically endorsed ethanol. He’s just opposed to MTBE.’

‘Which if my logic hasn’t failed me leaves only ethanol.’

‘True.’ Valens hated Thorne’s attempts to micro-manage – he’d done a damn fine job with the campaign, and controlling the candidate, to date. He turned to reason. ‘But our strategy, you remember, has always been to let the voters make that leap, which they’re doing by themselves. This other is a little… overt, don’t you think?’

‘Sometimes you need overt.’ The voice was eider down; the tone was cold steel.

Here was Thorne’s defensiveness, which he’d seen often enough before. It was a signal to Valens that he’d better walk softly, because the truth was that Thorne frightened him badly. He wasn’t fooling Valens that he wasn’t behind this water poisoning.

Sometimes, though, such as today, people died.

‘I agree,’ Valens said. ‘Sometimes overt is good. So how about I ask Damon, and get his take on it? If he’ll go, we go.’

‘All right,’ Thorne said mildly, ‘since that’s our only option anyway.’ He was pouring a couple of the airline portions of vodka into his glass. He added an ice cube, topped it off with more orange soda, slid back more comfortably in his chair, and took a long drink. ‘Now, about this Hardy fellow. I’ve done some research. It turns out he may be a bit of a problem.’

This was not what Valens needed just now. He came forward to the first two inches of the couch. ‘How’s that?’

In his low-key way, Thorne outlined what he’d discovered about Frannie, the grand jury, Ron Beaumont, a little of Hardy’s history, and that he was a meddling lawyer who wasn’t always loath to get his hands dirty.

‘We can only assume,’ he concluded, ‘since he buttonholed Kerry, that he’s made the leap – no pun – from Bree’s death to gasoline additives, which is not good news for us. I do wish we could locate Ron.’ A sigh. ‘We should have acted more quickly, I’m afraid. I blame myself, really. I should have just hacked into her system and deleted the damn thing instead of-’

But Valens was shaking his head. He didn’t want to get into another discussion with Thorne about the ‘instead of.’ ‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘she would still have had the hard copy and probably a backup disk. That’s what I was trying to get her to give me, to hold her off until after the election.’

‘Come on in, Al. Thanks for coming by.’

He took in the incredible penthouse at a glance as he came through the door. He ‘d never been here before and the grandness of it surprised him, although maybe it shouldn ’t have – everything about Bree Beaumont made an impression. He was, he believed, largely immune to the attractive power of her physical presence but he wasn’t fool enough to deny its existence.

She was Damon’s girlfriend and as such a campaign factor to control, so he tried not to think of her as a woman. He didn’t care that she was a woman. She was butting into his campaign and his business and he didn’t like her, period.

But this was the first time he’d ever been alone with her. As she led him through the ornate living room and back to the sitting area near the balcony, he was subliminally aware of the tasteful decorating, the fancy art, the panorama out the windows.

There was a better view close up, however. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Bree’s perfect ass, which she’d poured into a pair of designer jeans. He’d never before seen her in jeans. Or in a T-shirt with nothing under it. Or barefoot. Her blond hair cascaded halfway down her back. He thought he could encircle her waist with both his hands.

Somehow all of this made him vibrate with a dull anger – that she could walk around like this, around him, and that the vastness between them was so great that it was literally unthinkable for him to have any reaction to her. She was so far above him that he did not exist. This did more than simply piss him off.

She was making small talk as she led him back. ‘Sorry I’m such a mess,’ she said. ‘I’ve been working all afternoon on the computer and lost track of the time.’ He was half listening and all the way still looking when she suddenly turned – did she catch where his eyes were? – and motioned to one of the low, upholstered chairs. ‘Anyway, just to thank you again for coming. I wouldn’t have bothered you but I don’t know what to do. I wanted your advice before I burden Damon with anything else.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Valens said lamely. He was a few inches under six feet – about Bree’s height – and weighed in at near two hundred pounds. Brown hair, heavy shadow, under-starched white shirt and rack suit. His tongue wouldn’t work. ‘I appreciate your thinking of me.’

Perhaps sensing his reaction to her, she stood a moment, awkwardly, then motioned to one of the chairs. ‘Do you want to have a seat? Can I get you something to drink? I’ve got anything really.’

‘Yeah, I’ll take a beer, thanks.’

He watched her again, then forced himself to look out over the balcony to the city beyond. In a heartbeat, she was back with a bottle of some foreign beer, a chilled Pilsner glass, and a plastic bottle of Evian.

Valens thanked her politely. ‘This is a nice place,’ he said, pouring.

She was unscrewing the cap on the water bottle and she stopped, her face turning wistful. ‘Yes. Though I’m afraid it looks like we’re going to have to let it go pretty soon. But I shouldn’t complain – it’s been very nice, more than we ever thought we’d…’ She stopped. ‘The upkeep s just too much. And anyway, Ron and I – my husband? – well, you know.’

‘He’s not around, is he?’

She shook her head. ‘No. He and the kids went… well, it doesn ’t matter. They’re out now.‘

Valens took a deep draught, then tried to ask it gently. It wouldn’t do him any good to show anything. ‘So is this about him?’

The question seemed to surprise her. ‘No. Nothing about that really.’

He waited.

She looked out over his shoulder, absently bringing the water bottle to her lips. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, Al. And also a lot of research.’

‘OK.’

She brushed some hair away from her face. ‘You know, ever since Damon got me to start questioning my assumptions on my work on the petroleum side, looking in different directions as he’d say, it’s realty been… I guess you’d say an education.’

Valens nodded.

‘Which is funny, given that I’m considered an expert on all of these issues.’

A shrug and an attempt to smile. ‘Well, you saw the light, that’s all.’

But she shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I saw really. I think, other than just being so hurt that I’d been misled by people I trusted and mad at myself for being so stupid – I mean. Al, I am not stupid – anything else, OK, just not stupid.’

‘No,’ Valens said, trying to keep it light, ‘we could go with not stupid!

But the levity went by her. Impatiently, she brushed her hair away again. ‘But even more, other than that, Damon got me back to why I started doing all this… my work, I mean… in the first place!

‘Which was?’

She stopped. ‘This will sound stupid.’

Valens shook his head. ‘No, we’ve agreed we’re not going with stupid. So why’d you start working in the first place?’

‘I wanted to do good! She let out a breath in a whoosh. ’OK, there. I’ve said it.‘

‘OK.’ Big deal, he thought. ‘So you wanted to do good?’

‘And I did, too. I did what I set out to do, with MTBE. Do you know how great that stuff works cleaning up the air, Al? It cuts toxic emissions down to almost nothing. You go out to Pasadena now in August and you can see the mountains. Or even out there.’ She pointed to the window. ‘You can see it! It has made the world cleaner, do you realize that? Do you see what an incredible achievement that was?’

Now she was all wound up and had to stand to walk off some of it. Over to the balcony doors, pulling them open, letting in a blast of cool air. It seemed to calm her after a moment, and she turned around to face him again.

‘Anyway, in spite of its bad press now, the point is that it really worked, and I was part of it, a big part of it. The EPA loved it, everybody loved it. Can you understand how invested I was in it? How when the complaints started to appear, I didn’t want to look? I couldn’t look.’

‘Anybody could understand that,’ Al said, although he wasn’t sure that he could. ‘That was natural.’

‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘It was so natural.’ Sighing, she came back to the chair across from him and sat in it, their knees almost touching. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘then I saw it, what I was doing, because of Damon.’

‘And you did right.’

‘Well, as far as it went.’

Valens cocked his head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I guess I was angry. I’d been made to look like a fool and I didn’t want it to happen again. I realized that Damon was starting to look like he was pushing for ethanol, even if he wasn’t really doing it directly, and I wasn’t positive he wanted to go in that direction, either.’

For Valens, this was the worst possible news. His candidate wasn’t a scientist – he didn’t need to know the details. All he needed to know was that MTBE polluted the groundwater and ethanol didn’t. Therefore ethanol was better. But he couldn’t show his concern. Instead, he stalled for a minute with his beer, then smiled. ‘Well, Bree, as you say, he’s never made ethanol part of his platform.’

‘Except it’s there. You know it is, Al.’

‘And is that so bad?’

‘Well, it’s not a great fuel. It’s expensive to make, it’s not as efficient…’

He had to cut her off. ‘But it’s no danger in groundwater, and does make gas burn cleaner, right?’

Bree grimaced, hesitated.

‘What? Tell me.’

‘We don’t need either of them. The whole additive industry is basically just one giant, greedy scam. The oil companies, as we know, are making billions on MTBE. But that’s not all. Have you ever heard of SKO, the farming conglomerate?’

Valens felt his head go light. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, it’s making zillions, too, in subsidies for ethanol. They can’t make the stuff profitably, but somehow they’ve convinced the government that it’s in the national interest that we keep making it.’

‘Maybe it is. Maybe-’

But she cut him off. ‘No. No, it’s not, Al. Listen to this. Did you know that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the stuff generates as a fuel?’

‘I don’t think so, Bree. How is that possible?’

‘Tractor fuel, cost of shipment, storage, refining, like that.’

Well…‘

‘Well nothing. And since it has less fuel energy than gas, it guarantees worse gas mileage, which affects everybody who drives. Plus,’ she continued, having worked herself into a high dudgeon, ‘do you realize that every dollar of SKO’s ethanol profits costs the American taxpayer thirty dollars? And I’m leaving out all the science here. This is just the crappy business stuff. It’s just awful.’

Valens had no response to any of this. He didn’t know if any of it was true or not, and didn’t care, but it was clear that she had come to believe it and might take her message to Damon. That was the issue. That s what he had to deflect.

He kept his voice under control. ‘But Bree, almost all businesses-’

‘But Damon isn’t involved with almost all businesses. He’s involved with this one. And this ethanol thing isn’t even the worst of it.’

He waited, hardly daring to breathe. What could be worse than what she’d already come to? ‘So what is?’ he asked.

She leaned forward, and her zealot’s eyes locked into his. ‘We don’t need either of them.’

‘Either of what?’

‘Either MTBE or ethanol, or any other gas additives for that matter. The EPA has mandated them, but the whole thing is a scam. The whole thing, do you realize that?’ Her voice went up several decibels with her outrage.

‘I.. . I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ he managed to stammer.

‘No, no. I know you don’t. How could you? Nobody does. Wait a minute.’

Suddenly she was up, nearly running, disappearing into a hallway across the kitchen area. In another moment, she reappeared carrying a large handful of papers. ‘Look,’ she began without preamble. ‘I don’t expect you to understand the science,’ she said, ‘but let me try to explain some of this.’

He listened for what seemed an eternity as she went over the salient points of the report she’d been working on for the past month or six weeks. It contained a great deal of data – graphs, equations, analyses of comparisons in burn rates, emissions, efficiencies of gasoline – and gradually even Al Valens began to see what Bree had assembled.

Culled from patent applications, lawsuit transcripts, internal memos, executive summaries, and expert testimony of dozens of combustion engineers, Bree s report detailed a startling truth – that the oil companies had discovered a way to formulate gasoline so that it burned cleanly without the addition of oxygenates, without any additives at all. ‘So you see, Al, it’s what I was telling you. The whole additive question is a scam. Damon’s got to be made aware of this. I’ve got to tell him.’

When she finished, Valens gathered his thoughts. It wouldn’t do to alienate Bree now. If she did go running to Damon with this, if she convinced him to start talking about it, it would be a disaster. He sighed histrionically. ‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘Just awful. I wonder why it hasn’t made the news in a big way?’

But Bree knew the answer to that one. ‘It’s a bunch of individual papers, experiments, opinions. That’s how we scientists work – on small problems, little tweaks here and there, which are fascinating and challenging in themselves.

‘Like with me and MTBE. At the beginning, in layman’s terms, my job was to prove it made for cleaner air. And every way I tested it, it worked. And then somehow my job changed and gradually I wasn’t really a scientist anymore. I was a spokesperson defending what I’d done, what Caloco believed in, what I believed in. So I wasn’t interested in groundwater, in cleanup, even in this reformulated gas. My job, my life, was MTBE. The rest of it wasn’t my problem.’ She looked at him hopefully. ‘Do you understand at all?’

He nodded. ‘Of course. Of course I do.’

She squared the pages of her report, and sat back with it in her lap. ‘But I was wrong.’

‘No. I don’t think so. I think you trusted your employers.’ Valens reached across and touched her knee with his fingertips. Quickly. Even through the jeans, it burned. ‘Bree, you did the right thing calling me about this. I want you to know that.’

She let out a long breath. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. Part of me feels like I should tell Damon, but he has so much on his mind already….’

‘Exactly.’

‘But if I don’t…’

Valens interrupted with the answer she needed. ‘If you don’t, he’ll understand. In fact, after the election, he’ll thank you for it. The issue at this point in any campaign, much less a squeaker like this one, Bree, is focus. If he loses focus, the voters get confused, he s dead. And this stuff, you’ve got to admit, it’s a little complicated.’

She broke a small smile. ‘A little, I suppose.’

‘Don’t suppose. Believe me on this one! Now they were more than allies – they were really pals. It was time to make his pitch. ’Bree, that report, you got it on your computer too?‘

‘Yes.’

‘You know, it’s pretty volatile stuff. It gets in the wrong hands, maybe your husband’s…’

What?‘

‘He could delete it maybe. Shred the hard copy. And then where’s all your hard work? If he connects it with you and Damon…’

‘No,’ she said, ‘Ron would never do anything like that.’ She hesitated. ‘Ron accepts the situation.’

He shrugged. It wouldn’t do to push. ‘Well, it’s your decision, but I could take all that stuff – your disks, everything. Keep them someplace safe till after the election.’

But she was firm. ‘It’s safe here. I don’t want Damon to see it until I tell him, until we have time and I can explain it, and also why we decided not to tell him sooner.’

‘After the election?’ Valens wanted it nailed down, although what he really wanted was all copies of the report or, better yet, for Bree to disappear along with it.

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘As we’ve decided.’

But as the door closed behind him, Al knew he hadn’t pushed hard enough. He stood in the landing by the elevators, wondering whether he should knock again while she was still alone, and go in and take what he needed, personally and professionally.

Because if he knew Bree at all, and he did, she’d never be able to keep this to herself. She’d get cozy with Damon one night and just have to tell him, and then Damon would decide that the right thing to do would be to share it with the public.

And while it was one thing to be a White Knight crusading against an evil corporate polluter, it was quite another to be a paranoid left-wing fanatic who believed that the Environmental Protection Agency was part of the Great Government Gasoline Conspiracy. That, while possibly true, would not fly, and Valens knew it.

It would cost Damon the election. It would cost Al his potentially lucrative future relationship with SKO. It would infuriate the volatile and unpredictable Baxter Thorne.

No. It wouldn ‘t do.

From his endless bag of tricks, Baxter Thorne had produced Dismas Hardy’s telephone number and suggested that Valens call with an amendment to his earlier lie about not having called Ron.

When Hardy wasn’t home, Valens left a message, then came over to the couches again, where Thorne was on his fourth little bottle of liquor after his opening shot of pure ethanol. ‘That ought to help,’ Thorne remarked, his voice firmly under control. ‘But I don’t like him meddling in our affairs. He really doesn’t belong in this picture, does he? I don’t know where he’s come from.’

Valens found that he was afraid to reply. There was a glaze in Thorne’s eyes – maybe not all from the alcohol – that scared him.

Thorne leaned back, crossed one leg over the other, and took another long pull at his glass. ‘He’s got you telling a fib. He may know something of the report if he’s been to Bree’s.’ A silence settled which Valens took to be ominous. ‘And if that’s the case, he may decide to share it with Damon, or the press.’

A long moment passed. Suddenly, Thorne put his glass down, slapped his knees, and stood up. ‘Well, Al, thanks for the cocktails.’ He headed for the door. ‘It seems to me Mr Hardy has a little too much free time on his hands. I think perhaps a… distraction would be good for him just at this time. You say he isn’t home right now?’

‘He wasn’t when I called.’

‘Yes, that’s right, that’s right.’ Thorne checked the peephole, opened the door an inch, turned to face Valens, apparently came to some decision, then pulled the door all the way open and left without another word.