Nothing But The Truth

22

In San Francisco, there is summer, which is windy, harsh and damp, although it rarely rains. And then there is Indian summer, from late August into mid-October, when the days are warm, the skies cloudless, the breezes kind. For the rest of the year, it’s all fog and low clouds near the coast, clearing inland by afternoon, highs in the low sixties and winds from the west at fifteen to twenty.

When Hardy woke up on the Cochrans’ couch at a little after six, it was obvious that Indian Summer was over and the rest of the year had kicked in. He sat up stiffly and took a minute getting his bearings – it had been a while since he’d slept on a couch in somebody else’s living room. The dim outlines of morning bled through the Venetian blinds, but he somehow knew at once from the quality of the light that the fog had come in. Involuntarily, he sighed.

Ten minutes later he was on the road, lights on in the soup. It was going to be another long day and he needed some fresh clothes and a shower. Erin, of course, had already been up too, making coffee in the kitchen, and he told her he thought he’d go home, check his messages, clean up, and try to be back with them on Taraval before the kids awoke.

When he turned off Geary on to his block, though, he was struck immediately with a sense of foreboding – he’d lived on this street for most of three decades, and there was a familiarity to it that was deeper than anything rational. Something, this morning, was out of the ordinary. In the fog, he couldn’t see down to the end, where his house was, but it definitely felt wrong. There was a blinking red glow up ahead. He slowed down even further, on alert, equally reluctant and compelled to keep going forward.

Then, gradually emerging from the murk, the definable shapes, images from some horrible dream. Three fire trucks were still parked in the street, hoses trailing from them in the gutters like bloated serpents. A couple of black and white police cruisers – the source of the red strobes – their bubbles on. A half-dozen men in uniform were standing on the sidewalk, on his lawn, milling in the wet morning street.

In a daze, trying to keep the rising sense of panic at bay, he parked carefully, pulling straight into the curb. Getting out, he was aware of the crackling sounds of radio static and perhaps, of smoldering wood.

He moved forward without any awareness of it, transfixed by the still-smoking ruin that had been his home for over twenty years. The white picket fence had been trampled to bits by the firemen and their equipment. What had been a small, carefully maintained lawn was a mess of mud and charred wood. The front porch wasn’t there at all, and the ruined living room behind it yawned obscenely open in the gray dawn. His chair. The mantel over the fireplace. Their beautiful cherry dining set, destroyed.

He was on the property now.

‘Sir?’ A man in a white helmet was suddenly in the path, cutting him off. ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t…’

‘I live here,’ Hardy said. ‘This is my house.’

Miraculously, much of the house had been saved. Some late Hallowe’en revelers on their way home had seen the flames within minutes after the blaze had begun around four a.m. and called the fire department on their cell phone. As a result, the back half of Hardy’s home – kitchen, bedrooms and baths – had remained relatively unscathed, although the cleanup was going to take weeks, and the burned smell might never go away.

The incident commander – the man in the white helmet – had given him permission to survey the damage, but he was to be accompanied at all times by Captain Flores. They were talking about evidence and preservation of the scene and it struck Hardy that he was, at least for now, an arson suspect.

Flores and Hardy stood in the center of the kitchen and Hardy was trying to answer the captain’s questions. But his mind kept jumping. He noticed his black cast-iron frying pan on the stove where he’d left it. Looking down the now-gaping open hallway, he noticed that his front door was still on its hinges, perhaps salvagable. He would plane it and paint it again.

Their footfalls crunched over the glass and debris. ‘No. There couldn’t have been any fire left burning in the fireplace,’ Hardy was telling Flores. ‘I hadn’t been home since yesterday morning. We haven’t lit a fire in there in months.’

‘Well, pretty obviously that’s where it started, up front. You got any gas pipes in there? Do you smoke?’

‘No and no.’

Captain Flores was a sweet-faced young man with a drooping mustache. He followed Hardy back into the burned-out front area of the house and they stood in what used to be the dining room – the dusty rose drywall now mostly gone. The roof was open above them and water still dripped randomly. Hardy let out some air. ‘What do you do with this?’ he asked.

Flores saw similar scenes every day, but that didn’t make it any easier. ‘Do you have insurance?’

‘Yeah, but that’s not what I meant.’

‘I know.’

Hardy turned to him. ‘Somebody did this, didn’t they?’

The captain shrugged. He might have some suspicions but he wasn’t going to share them with a civilian. ‘That’s always a thought. It’s why we’ve got arson investigators.’ He indicated a couple of guys poking around by what used to be the porch. ‘At this point it’s a little early to make that determination. But if you know something I don’t, I’ll pass it along.’

Hardy had his hands deep in his pockets. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, referring to a lot more than the fire.

Flores scraped a toe along the burned hardwood floor and sighed. ‘You’re not going to want to hear this, but this might be somebody’s idea of a Hallowe’en prank.’ He paused. ‘It’s happened before.’

Hardy gave it a moment, shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

If anything, the morning fog had grown heavier.

One of the first things Hardy did after the incident commander stopped him was ask if he could get a patch through to Glitsky’s home on the patrol car radio. Next was his brother-in-law Moses McGuire.

Now the lieutenant sat on the hood of his car, feet resting on the front bumper, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his head down. Even with all his years in homicides, at terrible crime scenes, here Glitsky almost couldn’t bear to look.

Hardy had been silent, withdrawn with shock and rage, when Abe had arrived. Gradually, Glitsky had gotten him away from the arson people, from the house itself, where the effects of the fire weren’t so pervasive. Now he was coming out of it, beginning to pace. ‘I’ll tell you one thing – they think they’re warning me off? They think I’m going away now? They should have killed me instead.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Whoever did this, Abe.’

‘Somebody did this to get at you?’

Hardy nodded. ‘It’s a warning. It has to be this Beaumont thing.’ Hardy stopped in front of him. ‘You think it’s not?’

Glitsky was silent.

Hardy raised his voice. ‘Well what the hell do you think this was, Abe? Spontaneous combustion?’

Glitsky met Hardy’s eyes. ‘I don’t think it’s a great time to get in an argument with you, how about that?’ He slid off the car, and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

Hardy could only manage a nod. Glitsky gave his shoulder a last squeeze, moved off a few steps, then turned and with an almost visible effort, forced himself to look at the house. ‘If you need me, I’ll be downtown. I’m going to work.’

Flores was at his elbow, and Hardy was back in the house, in the little enclosed area behind the kitchen where he kept his safe. Flores didn’t want to let him back in – they might trample over more evidence. The captain made it very clear that until they were done with their investigation, this was the fire department’s house, no longer his. But the arrival of Glitsky – a highly ranked city cop who was obviously a personal friend – had given Hardy some credibility, and Flores cut him a little slack. They could go up through the back door, and Hardy could get what he needed, although he had to show Flores his license to carry, and even then, when Flores saw what he wanted, he could tell he was pushing it.

But this time he felt no twinge of the reluctance he’d felt the last time he’d gone for his guns. There was also an old badge from his days as an assistant DA. He didn’t think too hard before grabbing it. Then, tucking his Police Special into his belt, he pulled his jacket down over it and walked back into the desolation in the front-yard area.

Moses had finally arrived a few minutes after Glitsky’s departure, and now was standing at the front side of the house by the chimney, which was still standing. Moses had picked up something and held it out as Hardy and Flores mushed through the mud. ‘Start your new collection,’ Moses said somberly.

It was one of the exquisitely fragile Venetian glass elephants that had grazed, cavorted, and trumpeted on their mantel over the past decade, which Moses had rearranged with nearly every visit. Until last night there had been fifteen of them – Hardy had just recently acquired the latest one for their anniversary. And now against impossible odds at least one had survived, perhaps blasted out into the yard by the force of water.

Hardy took it and turned it in his hand, then handed it back to Moses, asking his brother-in-law to hold on to it for him.

After ten more minutes of surveying damage, he excused himself. Moses didn’t have to open the Shamrock for another four hours. He agreed that Hardy needed to go down to the jail and break the news to Frannie. Then to the kids. Moses would stay here with Flores and take care of the first round of details. He was glad to be able to help.

But Hardy wasn’t going to the jail. He pulled over at the first gas station he came to and called Phil Canetta’s home number.

A tired, worried woman’s voice answered. ‘Hello. Phil?’

Hardy told Mrs Canetta who he was, that he was working with her husband. Could he get in touch with him this morning? It was important.

‘I don’t know where Phil is. He went out after dinner and never came home. He always calls,’ she said. ‘If you do talk to him…’

Hardy promised that he’d have Phil call her, then hung up, frowning. This was unexpected and unpleasant. Canetta had left Freeman’s office, gone somewhere, presumably on this investigation, and hadn’t come home?

The wind gusted around the phone booth and he hunched himself further into his jacket. He dropped another quarter and punched some buttons.

‘This better be good.’

‘Jeff, it’s Dismas Hardy. Sorry to wake you, but I need to know where Al Valens stays when he’s in town.’

‘You need that, huh? How about I need some more sleep? What time is it anyway?’

‘Early, but I’ve got a hot item for you. Swing by my house sometime this morning.’

‘After I get up.’

‘Fine. That’ll be good enough. Valens, though?’

Jeff thought a moment. ‘I think the Clift. What do you got? Is this about Beaumont?’

‘Good guess,’ Hardy said, ‘though what isn’t lately?’

‘You’re right, everything.’ The reporter sounded truly exhausted. ‘What time is it?’ he asked for a second time.

‘I don’t know, Jeff. What’s the matter – you get home late last night?’

‘As a matter of fact, after you left I hung for a while, talked to a colleague about this very stuff, finally went home and had dinner, couldn’t sleep, and decided I had to pay a call on Damon.’

‘At his home?’

‘I’m a sympathetic reporter, remember. He’s a night owl. He’d see me. He has before.’

‘So when was this?’

‘Late, a little after midnight. I felt like I’d never get any sleep if I didn’t get an answer or two on all this stuff.’

‘And?’

‘And he wasn’t home.’

‘Until when?’

‘I left at one and he still hadn’t come in.’

‘And yet you got to sleep after all.’

‘Not enough. I’ll catch him today after-’ Jeff sighed. ‘This thing with you – you ought to be able to tell me about it now over the phone, don’t you think?’

But Hardy didn’t want to do that, knowing there was a lot more power in the physical reality. ‘Come by the house,’ he said. ‘You’ll be intrigued, I promise.’

It was against the rules, but the clerk was persuaded by the badge to give Mr Hardy of the DA’s office the room number of Mr Valens. He took the elevator to the fifteenth floor and walked the long hallway back to the suite at the end.

Hardy heard some muttering, ‘All right, all right, just a second,’ and prepared himself to move. It took all of his restraint not to draw the gun. When Valens cracked the door, he put his shoulder against it and kept coming.

‘What the…’ Valens was wearing slacks and shoes, but still was wrapped in one of the hotel’s white bathrobes, and now he clutched it in front of him.

Hardy quickly closed the door behind them. ‘Sorry to be so pushy, but we have to talk.’

‘Who the hell…?’

‘Dismas Hardy. Maybe you remember. We met briefly yesterday with Mr Kerry. You said you’d never called Ron Beaumont. Is any of this coming back to you?’

Valens was backing away, but got stopped by a chair. He nearly fell, then righted himself. ‘Sure. Mr Hardy. I remember.’ He grabbed at the robe, which had fallen open. He was getting his bearings back, tying the sash, but still obviously wary of the crazy man who’d crashed his door. ‘I called you just last night at your home to correct that. I had forgotten that I did in fact call Ron. With the press of yesterday’s events it temporarily slipped my mind. Didn’t you get that message?’

‘No, I didn’t. You know why? Because my answering machine went up in flames this morning with the rest of my house.’

The fiddling with the robe stopped. ‘Are you saying your house caught fire?’

‘Not all by itself. Somebody helped it.’

Valens drew a deep breath and spoke very carefully, still clearly unnerved by Hardy’s entrance, his continued presence. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m in a little bit of a bad mood about it myself.’

Valens sat against the back of the chair. He stole a glance at his watch, at the door.

‘Are you expecting somebody?’

A nervous shrug. ‘Damon’s got a breakfast meeting in an hour. I’m scheduled to pick him up.’

But Hardy shook his head. ‘Not until we clear up a few things between us. Bree Beaumont, the fire, like that.’

Valens straightened up, put on a face. ‘But I really don’t understand. What do those things have to do with me?’

Suddenly, Hardy’s adrenalin seemed to kick itself up another notch. He pulled the gun from his belt, took a step toward Valens and pointed it at him. ‘What do they have to do with you? I’ll tell you. I’m investigating Bree Beaumont and you lied to me yesterday. I’m getting close. The fire was somebody warning me to stay away and the only person I can think of who’s got any reason is you. How about that? Is that clearer?’

Valens spread his hands. Patent terror. ‘I didn’t set your house on fire, Mr Hardy. I was in this room all night. I’m in the last days of a political campaign that I’ve been waging for nearly a year. Bree Beaumont is not in my life. Damon Kerry is. I didn’t lie to you.’ Another empty gesture. ‘You don’t need that gun. What you’re calling a lie was a simple mistake. I forgot something, that was all.’

But Hardy’s blood was way up, his voice dripping sarcasm. ‘Oh yes, you forgot. You called the husband of a murdered woman who’d worked on your campaign, and it clean slipped your mind.’ He snapped at him, raised the gun. ‘You forgot that? I don’t believe you.’

‘It was only for an instant. By the time I realized I’d made a mistake, you were gone. So I called you last night.’

‘You called me last night? Although your focus, as you say, isn’t on Bree Beaumont, you’re telling me that in the final hours of this campaign, you called me at home, at night, to correct this insignificant detail?’

Valens swallowed.

‘Which, in any event, you know you can’t prove because my answering machine is a pile of ashes. Is that what you’re telling me?’

Valens shrugged. ‘No, but I-’

‘And while we’re at it here, Mr Valens, maybe you can tell me how you got my home number, which is unlisted.’ And here Hardy realized that one of the roundhouses he was throwing had finally scored. Valens cast his eyes around the room as though hoping to find an answer. None was forthcoming, and Hardy pressed at him. ‘Was it one of your campaign workers, maybe? The same guys who came by my house?’

‘No!’

‘No? What? Was it different guys?’

‘No. You’re twisting what I’m saying. I don’t have any guys. I didn’t do any of this.’

‘You didn’t call me? That’s your new story.’

‘No, I did do that. I admitted that.’

He had moved up to within a foot of Valens. Sweat had broken on the man’s face. It was all Hardy could do to not push him backwards over the chair and physically beat the truth out of him.

Hardy was in a genuine rage. He actually trembled with anger. ‘If you don’t say something I want to hear in the next five seconds, I’m going to shoot you in the face.’ He cocked the gun. ‘Give me one reason. Right now.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want why you called Ron and why you didn’t tell me.’

Valens didn’t waste any time making something up. Backing away, he blurted it out. ‘Bree’s got some files that could hurt Damon’s campaign. Some reports, changing her position again.’

‘Back to MTBE?’

‘No, still against that.’

‘Then what was the change?’

‘She got religion. She’d decided that all additives were unnecessary. Ethanol, too.’

‘And that hurts Damon Kerry?’

‘It could if it got out, if Damon went that way.’ Valens held up a hand. ‘Look, I can’t… that gun…’

‘It won’t go off by itself.’ But Hardy uncocked it. ‘Bree hurting Damon Kerry,’ he said, getting back to where they were.

Valens drew a shaky breath. ‘Damon gets a lot of lift from talk radio because his message is so clear. Bree didn’t understand that most people aren’t scientists.’

‘So you’re saying Bree didn’t tell him this earlier?’ Hardy lowered the gun slightly. ‘Why not? I thought she was his consultant on this stuff.’

‘She thought it might adversely affect the campaign, as I just told you.’ Lowered or not, Valens couldn’t take his eyes off the weapon. ‘Then when she died…’

‘Was killed.’

‘OK, was killed. Well, frankly, after that I wanted to get my hands on that report so I could get rid of it.’

‘So Kerry wouldn’t ever see it?’

Valens hesitated. ‘That’s right.’

‘Because you didn’t want Kerry to know what Bree thought?’

A nod. ‘She was turning into a zealot. She was dangerous.’

‘And had to be eliminated?’

Valens didn’t approve of the word. ‘She had to be managed.’

‘And you did that? How?’

‘By convincing her to wait until after the election before she told Damon. He wouldn’t do anybody any good if he didn’t first get elected, and I made her understand that. She agreed to wait. It was only after she… was killed, that I realized Ron might inadvertently let the report leak, not knowing what it was, not seeing its importance. So I called him to ask if he’d give it to me.’ He pointed at the gun. ‘You know, you don’t need that thing. I’m telling the truth. The call to Ron was straightforward, really.’

Hardy’s shoulders sagged. The rush of adrenalin had worn him out and he realized that Valens was right. He stuffed the gun back into his belt and backed up to the desk, sitting on the corner of it. ‘It couldn’t have been that straightforward,’ he said. ‘You lied to me about it.’

‘If you remember, Kerry was there with us. I wanted to keep it from him until after the election.’

Hardy shook his head. ‘You weren’t ever going to show it to him, were you?’

‘Maybe not,’ Valens replied. ‘Maybe someday. But Bree’s conclusions weren’t really the issue – it was that she was the source of them and she had such an influence on Damon. I mean, everybody in the industry knows you can formulate gas with low emissions. You don’t need additives. So what? Except if Bree gets messianic and Kerry makes it his new war cry…’

‘Then he looks like a fool, or a pawn, for having supported ethanol for so long.’

Valens nodded. ‘That’s the simple answer, but it’s close enough. If he sees the report and knows it’s from Bree, he moves on it now, he makes it a campaign issue. That’s who Damon is. So he confuses his voters, he looks like he’s waffling, all of the above. I couldn’t let it happen.’

‘How about if I say that sounds like a reason to kill her? How about if she changed her mind and was going to tell him and you had to stop her?’

Valens had a good answer to that. ‘Then I wouldn’t have had to call Ron to get my hands on the report last week, would I? I would have searched the house and just taken it after I killed her.’ He glanced furtively at his watch, spoke now as if asking permission. ‘Look, I do have this breakfast with Damon. And I really did leave a message last night that I’d made a mistake – it wasn’t a lie – and I did call Ron.

‘As to why I remembered to call you, it was what you said. I knew it wasn’t insignificant at all, a call to a murdered woman’s husband. You were an attorney. It wasn’t brain surgery figuring you wouldn’t go away if you thought I was lying.’

Hardy hated that it had gotten to here, to some sort of belief in the basic truth of what Valens was telling him. But there was one last question. ‘So how’d you get my phone number?’

A nervous smile. ‘I called the office and asked if somebody could find it. When I got back here, I had a message.’

‘Just like that?’

Valens shrugged. ‘I say I want something, somebody usually finds out a way to make sure I get it. I don’t ask how. That’s how politics works.’

‘Or doesn’t,’ Hardy said.

23

She’s checked out to…‘

The jail’s uniformed desk sergeant squinted at the log. ‘Glitsky, homicide, next door.’

Hardy wondered about this new development as he walked in the bitter fog around the corner to the main entrance of the Hall. Frannie was signed out to Glitsky? How did that happen and what did it mean?

He’d stowed the gun in the trunk of his car so he wouldn’t have to confront the Hall’s metal detector. It remained a miserable morning. Hardy checked the time, surprised at how early it still was for all that had gone on. He wasn’t entirely certain he’d done the right thing by letting Valens go about his campaign business, but he couldn’t imagine that the man was going to disappear, at least not until the election. If some real evidence of wrongdoing by Valens turned up before then, Hardy would bring it to Abe’s attention, but in the meanwhile, he had more important things on his mind.

His house, his wife, his life.

The Hall’s familiar lobby – on weekdays a perennial throbbing and vulgar mass of disgruntled humanity – was empty this early, and his footfalls echoed. Knowing he’d have no patience with the elevator, he took the inside stairway to the fourth floor, then walked down the long hall to the homicide detail – an open room with fifteen back-to-back desks and several square columns poking about, floor to ceiling, seemingly at random.

There wasn’t a body to be seen in homicide itself, although through the grimy, wired-glass windows, he could look across through the fog to the jail, where spectral shapes moved in the outer corridors.

The door to the lieutenant’s office was open. No one was inside, but Hardy noticed that Kerry’s water glass that he picked up yesterday was gone – a good sign. He knocked anyway. ‘Anybody here?’

‘Yo!’ Glitsky appeared in the doorway of one of the interrogation rooms.

Before he could say anything, Frannie appeared behind him. They met in an embrace in the middle of the room.

‘I had to tell her,’ he heard Abe say. ‘I didn’t know how long you’d be hung up back there and she had to know.’

The words barely registered. He was lost in holding her.

But Glitsky was still talking, explaining. ‘I’m on my way driving down here, I realize we bring witnesses over from the jail every day to talk to them. So I just went and signed her out into my custody. It’s Sunday, nobody’s here to question why I got her. It seemed like a good idea.’

‘It’s a great idea.’ Frannie said. ‘Plus Erin’s bringing the kids down.’

‘And I’m going out for some food,’ Glitsky said. He was already putting on his jacket. ‘It’ll be a party.’ He pointed a finger at Hardy. ‘While I’m gone, I’m leaving you in charge. Don’t let her escape.’

They were alone together in the homicide detail’s interrogation room, kitty-corner at the table. The fog was pressing tight up against the windows, the wind gusting audibly.

It wasn’t exactly warm inside either.

First was the house, Hardy’s assessment of how bad it was, what they were going to have to do about living in the next weeks, the somber details. It hit Frannie especially hard that, even after her expected release from jail on Tuesday morning, she wouldn’t be able to go back to her old life. ‘This is all because of me, isn’t it?’

It was difficult for Hardy to tell her it wasn’t. He couldn’t imagine that anything relating to Bree Beaumont’s death would have had any effect on their lives if Frannie had not become involved with Ron, hadn’t promised to keep his secrets.

‘You did what you had to do,’ he told her equivocally. ‘But at least I’ve got somebody scared and that’s always instructive.’

‘It’s more than just that.’

‘Maybe,’ he admitted.

‘Do you think something else could happen? To you?’

In truth, Hardy thought if he kept pushing, which he fully intended to do, that something else surely would happen. That’s even what he wanted – without an act there couldn’t be a mistake upon which he could capitalize.

And this, of course, was not without risk, even serious risk. But, answering her, he simply shook his head. ‘If I get any closer, I’ll give it to Abe. Let the pros run with it.’

Frannie tightened her grip on his arm. ‘You can do that now, Dismas.’

‘No,’ he said pointedly. ‘Not if I want to protect Saint Ron’s kids…’

‘I wish you’d stop calling him that.’

Hardy figured he’d earned the right to call Ron Beaumont anything he wanted. He waved the objection off. ‘The point is, if I want to protect his kids, that’s why I’m doing all this, isn’t it? That’s what I’m supposed to believe.’

‘What do you mean, “supposed to believe”?’

He tried to control it, but he heard his voice take on a harder edge. ‘I find who killed Bree by Tuesday and everybody’s life goes back to normal, right? Except ours now. Now ours is a mess.’ He’d gotten her to tears and he didn’t care. ‘And you want to know the real laugh riot here, Frannie? I’m not even sure Ron didn’t do this to us.’

‘That’s crazy,’ she said. ‘He would have had no reason to do that.’

He firmly grabbed his wife by the shoulders and turned her to him. ‘Listen to me. How about if he thought I was there alone, sleeping? The house burns down with me in it. Then he’s got you. Did that ever occur to you?’

‘No! That’s not it.’

‘So where is the son of a bitch?’

‘I don’t know, Dismas, I don’t know.’ She took his hands and held them in front of her. ‘But Ron and I… there’s nothing like that.’

Hardy hesitated. Although he was well into it, mention of Ron Beaumont was still personally fraught with peril for him. Still, he had to go ahead. ‘You know, Fran, I’ve really been trying to keep Abe from looking at him officially. But it’s beginning to look as if whoever killed Bree also killed Abe’s inspector half a mile from Ron’s house.’

‘That doesn’t mean…’

He squeezed her hand. ‘And just so you know, Ron apparently had a few different identities.’

‘What do you mean, identities?’

Hardy outlined Glitsky’s discovery of the previous night, which now seemed about a year and half ago.

When he was through, Frannie took a while to answer. ‘He must have thought he might have to run again someday to save the kids.’

‘I’m sure that’s what he’d like everybody to believe, and maybe it’s true, but he’s getting a hell of a lot of play out of saving his kids.’

‘That’s because that’s what he’s doing, Dismas! I believe that. You did too when you met him, remember that? He didn’t start any of this any more than I did.’

Hardy clucked. ‘I know. He’s just a poor victim.’

‘God, you can be mean,’ she snapped.

‘Sometimes it’s useful,’ he replied. ‘I’d just like you to consider the possibility that this guy is the great pretender.’

‘No.’

‘For two or three different reasons – insurance, credit cards, you name it – he kills Bree and sets you up as his alibi. When the cops start to get close to him, he cons me into muddying the waters digging up other suspects, giving himself a few more days to disappear. I don’t see much wrong with that picture.’

But she was shaking her head. ‘It’s not him. Listen to yourself, Dismas. He didn’t give himself more time to disappear and also stick around to burn down our house so he could have me. You can’t have it both ways. You think he had something going on with me, don’t you? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? The real one you don’t believe is me.’

‘You’ve never denied it, goddam it! How about that?’

‘You never asked!’

Hardy spun around and walked to the window, the fog. An eternity passed before he sensed any movement. He was afraid to turn. She came up and hugged him from behind. ‘He’s just a dad from the kids’ school, we got to be friends, this happened. That’s all.’

She continued talking quietly into his back. ‘I know you hate the whole victim mentality, Dismas. I don’t like it either. But sometimes people are in situations they didn’t create. Like us, now, too. We’ve just got to keep trying to do what’s right, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know what right is anymore.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘All I know is I want to hurt whoever did this.’

‘No, you want to hurt anybody right now. It doesn’t have to be who did all this. Maybe you’re so hurt…’

‘And what if it’s Ron after all? If we’ve both been conned.’

‘Is that the worst that can happen? That somebody took advantage of your good heart.’

‘I don’t have a good heart.’

‘Yes you do. And you’re risking it here and afraid somebody’s going to smash it and make you look like a fool in the bargain. But either way it’s over on Tuesday, isn’t it? If you don’t find whoever really did it.’

Hardy turned around to her. ‘And I’ve helped him escape.’

‘Except if he’s run away, then he didn’t burn our house, and vice versa. Think about it, Dismas. It’s not him.’ She brought a hand up to his face and rubbed it against his cheek. ‘More than anything, I just don’t want you to be hurt. Or us to be hurt.’ Her eyes pleaded with him. ‘Do you think you could stand to kiss me please?’

Frannie, Erin, Ed, and the kids were finishing their lunch – Chinese takeout was all Glitsky had been able to forage on a Sunday morning.

The opening minutes had been brutal, the kids’ emotions over finally seeing their mother again, then the double-whammy as they heard the news of the fire. By the time they were an hour into it, though, Hardy realized that it was as normal a family meal as you could have in a homicide interrogation room. Vincent was sitting on Frannie’s lap, Rebecca was nonstop chatter about school stuff. They were all making plans about logistics, moving ahead, solving problems.

Eventually, Hardy got up and wandered out over to Glitsky’s office. Over the course of the morning, he’d been tangentially aware of activity in the main room, the odd homicide inspector moseying on in for Sunday duty, maybe to write up some reports.

Hardy stopped in Glitsky’s doorway. The lieutenant was at his desk, hunched over paperwork. He knocked and Glitsky looked up, and waved him in. ‘Budgets,’ he said, and threw his pencil down on the desk. ‘Utilization percentage. Field efficiency ratios. Unit integration coefficient. I’ve been filling out these things for five years and I still don’t know what a unit integration coefficient is.’

‘Give it an eighty-seven,’ Hardy said. ‘That’s usually good for a coefficient.’ He sat down across from the desk. ‘I wanted to thank you for bringing her up here,’ he said.

Glitsky nodded. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it sooner. But with the crowds passing through here every other day of the week, somebody’d leak it to Sharron Pratt, who tells Marian Braun, who goes ballistic and takes it to Rigby. Then I’m fired and I hate it when that happens.’

‘Well, you did it today,’ Hardy said sincerely. ‘And I wanted to thank you.’

‘Thanks accepted.’ Glitsky leaned back, hooking his hands behind his head. ‘In other news, you’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve put Batavia and Coleman on alibis for the time of Griffin’s death.’ A short pause. ‘Also for early this morning. Maybe eliminate somebody.’

‘Maybe find somebody.’

‘Maybe that too. Also, I put in some calls – if Ron Beaumont used one of his credit cards, we know where he is.’

‘Or was.’

‘Close enough. Anyway, last thing is I took your glass to the lab, but nobody was on. It might be a day or two.’

‘Utilization coefficient difficulties?’ Hardy asked.

Glitsky shook his head in mock disgust. ‘I can’t teach you anything. It’s not utilization coefficient, it’s unit integration coefficient, but yeah, that’s probably it. Anyway, meanwhile I thought it was time I got a look at the crime scene myself. When the party’s over in there, I thought you might like to come along.’ He looked at his watch, made a gesture of apology, and lowered his voice. ‘Speaking of which…’

He still had the key to the penthouse, but Hardy couldn’t very well pull it out with Glitsky next to him. So they had to ring the building superintendent, David Glenn.

Glenn was in his early forties, handsome in a no-nonsense way. He wore a tonsure of buzz-cut blond hair around a lot of clean scalp. His body was trim and well defined in shorts and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt and he projected an easy and friendly can-do competence.

‘You guys getting any closer?’ he inquired as the elevator brought them up.

‘Any day now,’ Glitsky replied.

This seemed to satisfy Glenn somehow. ‘So it’s not Ron, after all?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Glitsky replied.

‘Yeah, I read it was, but if you’re still looking…’

Glitsky was firm. ‘That’s where it is, Mr Glenn. We’re still looking. It might be Ron when we stop.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I hope not.’

‘Why not?’ Hardy put in.

Glenn shook his head. ‘Ah, you know.’

‘Nope.’ Hardy said, playing cop. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’

‘Well, most tenants here, I couldn’t pick ’em out of a lineup. They park down below underneath, ride the elevator to their places, I never see ‘em. Ron, I got to know a little, that’s all.’

The elevator door opened and they were on the small landing in front of the Beaumonts’ door, although the view today through the one window was a gray blanket. Glenn stepped out with them, pulled a key from the ring he was carrying, and fitted it to the door. ‘You get a take on people, that’s all.’

‘And Ron…?’

The key worked, but Glenn just stood there a minute, thinking about the question. ‘The guy’s a miracle with his kids. I suppose that’s it.’

‘A miracle?’ Glitsky asked. Hardy didn’t ask because he knew what was coming.

Glenn shrugged. ‘You guys got kids?’

Hardy answered. ‘A handful between us.’

‘All right, then you know. I’m divorced myself, but I got a couple, and even the good ones try the patience of a saint, am I right?’ He waited, then answered himself. ‘I’m right. But Ron? Every day out to school, every day pick ’em up. Weekends with soccer and horses and who knows what else, and I’ve never seen him lose his patience with them. I mean, me, I get mine twice a month and I’m biting their heads off. Couple of times, me and Ron would take all of them to the park or something, and I’m pulling my hair-‘ A smile, acknowledging the baldness. ’Ron’s just cool. Always.‘

‘What about with his wife?’ Glitsky asked. ‘The word is they were having problems.’

A nod. ‘Maybe. Maybe disagreeing, who doesn’t? But I don’t see Ron fighting. He’d walk away.’

‘Did Bree walk all over him, Mr Glenn?’ Hardy asked.

The superintendent hesitated. ‘I didn’t know her so well. She worked long hours. I’d almost never see her. Sometimes in the elevator…’ He stopped again.

Glitsky. ‘What?’

Glenn shrugged. ‘I got the impression she was like an absent-minded genius – you know what I mean? Real inside herself with all this brilliant stuff, and then like she’d forget what floor she lived on. Sometimes she’d be just sitting in the lobby, like she was trying to decide what floor to get off on.’ He shook his head. ‘Too smart, really. Unconnected.’

Hardy had a hunch. ‘To the kids, too?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know I ever saw her go out with them. She kind of had a life of her own, I think.’

Glitsky pushed it. ‘And yet you got the impression that she and Ron were happy together?’

‘I don’t know happy. But times you’d see them together, they were… comfortable, I guess.’ He shrugged. ‘A family, you know. Comfortable.’

‘Phil Canetta?’ Glitsky’s face betrayed no trace of recognition. ‘Can’t say it rings a bell.’

‘The guy you sent over from Central Station the first time I came here,’ Hardy explained.

But Glitsky was still shaking his head, perplexed. ‘I called the desk, that was all. Said they might want to dispatch a body to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself, or more likely that you didn’t hurt Ron Beaumont if he turned out to be home. Did this guy Canetta say he’d talked to me?’

Hardy hesitated. Even though Glitsky was his friend, this was not a casual moment. ‘Not really. I just assumed it.’

‘And you were both inside here?’ Glitsky didn’t like this one bit. ‘How did that special moment come about?’

‘The door was open.’

‘Open?’

Hardy made a face. ‘Picky, picky. You’re too literal sometimes. Anybody ever tell you that?’

If Hardy thought this was going to side-track Glitsky, he was mistaken. ‘Was the door open?’

A shrug. ‘It wasn’t locked. I knocked, tried the knob, it turned. I walked in.’

‘You walked in? Had Canetta arrived yet?’

‘No. That was later. But if you’re wondering, I had plenty of time to plant evidence or steal anything I wanted, neither of which I did. You’re just going to have to believe me. Now how about if we talk about something else?’

Glitsky sighed heavily. ‘Someday, you pull stuff like this, I’m not going to be able to help you – you know that?’

Hardy kept a straight face. ‘It’s a constant worry. But you wanted to come here today, and here we are inside, legally and all with your warrant. What did you want to see?’

They’d already looked out over the balcony and now stood in the middle of the open kitchen, where Glitsky had been casually opening drawers, the cupboards, the refrigerator. ‘The usual,’ he said distractedly. ‘Everything.’

They began in the back, in the children’s bedroom. The room was just as Hardy had last seen it.

Across the hall, they moved to the master bedroom. Two steps in, Glitsky stopped so abruptly that Hardy nearly walked into him. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘You tell me.’

Hardy cast his gaze around the room. It was nearly a perfect square and quite large, perhaps twenty feet on a side. To his left, a door was open to a blue-tiled bathroom. Next along the wall were three paneled sliding doors, a long closet. On the back wall, a couple of high windows presided over a king bed neatly made up with blankets, no comforter or bedspread, with a reading table on Hardy’s right side. A darkwood chest of drawers with several pictures of Ron, Ron with the kids, Bree with the kids. None of Ron and Bree.

Along the right wall, some hunting prints hung over an exercise area – a stationary bike and some barbells. Then another doorway, leading to another bathroom, was slightly ajar. Finally, coming back around to where they stood, there was a comfortable-looking stuffed leather chair with matching ottoman, another reading lamp, and a Bombay & Company lion’s claw table which seemed to double as a writing desk, with its brass lamp, large green blotter, and ship in a bottle.

‘I like it,’ Hardy said. ‘I could use a room like this.’

‘You don’t feel it?’

Hardy took another second or two. ‘I don’t feel anything, Abe, except that this is a great room. I want a room like this.’

‘That’s my point,’ Glitsky said. ‘Every guy wants a room like this. You know why? This is a guy’s room.’

He crossed to the closet and pulled aside one of the paneled doors. Hardy was a step behind him and found himself looking at several suits, coats, shirts, a tie rack. On the floor were a dozen or more pairs of shoes, neatly arranged – dress, tennis, sandals, slippers. Glitsky nodded as though he’d found what he expected.

He walked to the other end of the closet and slid that door back. It was far less crowded. Glitsky started flicking the few hanging items aside. ‘Two dresses, three skirts, and four sweaters,’ he said, then went into a squat, reached around on the floor, arranging. ‘Three and a half pairs of women’s shoes, not to mention three more dresses on the floor. How in the world did even Carl miss this?’

‘Maybe he found something else that caught his attention and got him killed first.’

Glitsky stood slowly, grimacing, a hand on his back. ‘How do you get this old?’

‘Stubbornly refuse to die?’

Glitsky broke a small smile. ‘Words to live by. Bathroom?’

‘No, thanks, I just went.’

The smile vanished as mysteriously as it had come. ‘Hopeless,’ Abe said, and pushed open the bathroom door. Compared to the spaciousness of the master bedroom, it wasn’t much more than a utilitarian closet – six by eight feet with a double-hung window over a blue tiled sink, a towel rack with one orange towel, a toilet with the seat up. Significantly, Hardy thought, there was no tub, only a glassed-in shower.

Hardy reached around and opened the medicine cabinet, which was nearly empty – bottles of Tylenol, Nyquil, some Band-Aids, razor blades. ‘Lots of couples have different bathrooms.’

‘Happy ones don’t have different bedrooms, though,’ Glitsky replied. ‘I’ve done research. It’s a true fact.’

Glitsky was moving again, and Hardy tagged along. They passed back through Ron’s room and stopped at the dresser, which Glitsky opened with the same basic results – a few articles of women’s underclothes in two of the drawers. But four of the drawers out of six were packed, even overpacked, with Ron’s clothes – jeans, junk, polo shirts and T-shirts, sweaters, socks and underwear. When Glitsky closed the last drawer, he straightened up. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could take a million pictures of this room, and I bet the scene guys did, and you wouldn’t see any evidence of a crime.’

‘I don’t either. So they lived in different rooms, so what?’

‘This, to you, isn’t some evidence of marital conflict?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘It doesn’t mean he killed her. Besides, Frannie said they were having troubles.’

‘Don’t remind me. It does make me wonder, though,’ he said, ‘just how she got pregnant.’

Immersed in paper at the desk in Bree’s office, Glitsky was going through the hard copy file, folder by folder – propaganda by the armload on what Hardy thought must be every imaginable side of the additive issue. Legislative reports, news clippings, executive summaries from various think tanks, media alerts. MTBE, ethanol, reformulated gasoline. It ran the gamut from copies of faxed pages to four-color advertising pieces, from page fragments to small booklets.

‘Fascinating stuff,’ Glitsky said. He was going fast, to Hardy’s eye ignoring everything that wasn’t personal in Bree’s personal files, laying a slush pile of Bree’s professional work on the desk to his right, behind him. Hardy made some noise that might have sounded like asking for permission, got a grunt in reply, so grabbed a handful and walked out into the hallway, where he folded it all up and tucked it inside his jacket.

He then returned to Bree’s room.

Further evidence that Ron and Bree had lived separate lives, all right. Her bed was smaller, a double. It had a bright floral comforter and flounced pillows that matched. Even now, a month after her death, a woman’s scent of perfume and powder hung subtly in the air. Her bathroom was done in light salmon tones and was three times the size of Ron’s, with an oversized tub and make-up table, as much a woman’s bathroom as Ron’s was a man’s.

Back in the bedroom, Hardy stood at the bookshelves – floor-to-ceiling built-ins that covered half the back wall. Possibly it shouldn’t have surprised him after what he’d heard about Bree the ugly duckling from Damon Kerry, but the entire bottom shelf was filled with paperback romance novels. Next up was a half shelf of paperback commercial fiction, then a couple of shelves of hardbound literary fiction – almost entirely by modern women writers. Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Gates, Barbara Kingsolver, Laurie Colwin, Amy Tan – a scientist with good literary taste, Hardy thought. Then a surprise – what looked to be a full set of Tony Hillerman. So Chee and Leaphorn had been in her consciousness, too. Maybe helping to spark the idealism that had driven her so strongly in her last months.

On the top shelf, though, at the end of the large section on travel books, next to a new copy of What To Expect When You ‘re Expecting, was the one Hardy thought he recognized and knew he wanted. He took the oversized book down and brought it over to the small reading chair next to the bed.

Her high school yearbook. Passages 81, from Lincoln High in Evanston, Illinois.

There were the usual autographs: ‘To the smartest girl in the world.’ ‘Chemistry would have beat me without you.’ ‘Who needs boys when you’ve got brains?’ ‘Lab rats rule!’

And then, from one of her teachers, the one Hardy needed: ‘To Bree Brunetta, my best student ever!’

He quickly turned through the seniors and found her – Bree Brunetta. Without the maiden name, he never would have been able to find, much less recognize, the ravishing Bree Beaumont from the uninspired and formal cap-and-gown photograph.

Bree Brunetta, at seventeen, had been slightly overweight with dark unkempt hair, bangs down over her eyes, braces, clunky glasses. The ugly duckling indeed, Hardy thought. There was a recent picture of Bree with the kids next to the bed and he looked at the smiling face with the shining blond hair, the cheekbones, the perfect mouth – it was hard to reconcile the two images.

He flipped through the rest of the book quickly. Bree had been an active and seemingly well-rounded student, a member of the Debating Society, the Science Club, the Chess Club. She played clarinet in the band and was the ‘features’ editor of the student newspaper. She was voted the Smartest Girl.

Hardy happened to notice one other detail, one of those cruel high-school moments that scar a kid for life. Bree was voted ‘least likely to get a date with Scott lePine,’ the Most popular Guy, Best-looking Guy, and Most Likely to Succeed. Whichever kids dreamed up that category must have thought it was hysterical. Hardy guessed Bree wouldn’t have thought so.

There were some letters on three-ring binder paper folded over in the back, and he was just opening one when he heard Glitsky’s steps coming quickly down the hallway. He folded the letters back and put them with the literature into his inside pocket as well. Then he closed the book as Glitsky appeared at the door to Bree’s room. His eyes had a haunted look. ‘I just got beeped. I’ve got to go,’ he said.

‘You mind if I stay behind a few minutes?’ Hardy asked.

‘Sure, no sweat. Just lock up when you leave.’ Glitsky shook his head. ‘Get real, Diz. We’re out of here. We’re not arguing about it, either, OK? Or making one of our clever remarks.’ He let out a long breath. ‘Somebody just shot another cop.’

24

The two-man arson team was still at his house when Hardy drove up. He parked semi-legally and came up on to where the lawn had been before stopping to get their attention. They were huddled over an area near what had been the front bay window. ‘How you guys doing?’

They both looked over at him with no interest, then held a quiet conference before one of them straightened up, and jumped down on to the porch’s foundation. ‘Your friend said to tell you he went to work. Otherwise, we’re going to be here a while.’

‘You got any idea what a while is?’

A flat glare. ‘Hours, not minutes.’

This was pulling teeth, but Hardy needed to get some information. ‘You finding anything?’ At this, the arson investigator spread his hands in a futile gesture, and Hardy cut him off. ‘You can’t tell me anything, can you? I might have done it, right? Set fire to my own house.’

‘People do it all the time.’

Hardy knew this was true. The man was doing his job, actually protecting Hardy’s interests. ‘OK,’ he managed to say mildly. ‘I was wondering, though, if I could go into the back and get a few things – clothes, toiletries, like that? Check my phone messages.’

In spite of what he’d told Valens, Hardy didn’t think the answering machine in the kitchen had been destroyed. Driving over here, it had occurred to him that it might be instructive to see what the tape held.

But to this inspector, whether or not Hardy had friends on the police force, he was a righteous suspect. He remained all business. ‘No, sir. I’m afraid not. There’s no electricity in any case. I don’t know if the captain made it clear to you, but this house is fire department property until we clear it to you.’

There was nothing to be gained from antagonizing the man, although maintaining his demeanor took a serious coefficient of his resources. He forced a patient smile. ‘No, I understand that. But I’d like to be able to make some plans. Can you give me any estimate how long that will be?’

Maybe Hardy had worn the inspector down, but it seemed for an instant as if there was a tiny thaw. ‘Safest guess will be tomorrow morning sometime.’ He paused. ‘Maybe about the time your reporter friend runs his column.’

No, Hardy realized. It wasn’t a thaw after all. It was a way to tell him that Jeff Elliot had been by, another unwelcome interruption to their task. Jeff had probably bothered them to distraction. ‘If we get done by dark, we’ll get it boarded up for the night. Somebody’ll be here tomorrow to let you back in… if we’re ready.’ It was a dismissal.

There wasn’t anything he could do.

On his private stool, right up by the front window, behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, Moses McGuire was nursing his Sunday Macallan on his private stool. He allowed none of the other bartenders either to drink or to sit, even for an instant, when they were working. His belief was that professional bartenders got paid to stand while they waited on customers – it showed respect. If they wanted to sit, he invited them to come around to the bar side and take a short break at some risk to their job security, but if they were behind the rail, they stood. And on either side of it, during their hours of employ, they were dry.

McGuire himself, though, as the owner, could do any damn thing he wanted. When he and Hardy argued about the unfairness of how he applied his rules, he would explode. ‘I’m a noble publican, not some goddammed wage-slave bartender.’ And since McGuire owned three-quarters of the place, his word was the law.

He’d carefully drawn Hardy a tap Guinness and brought it to the bar after the foam had settled out to a perfect head. Now Hardy was down an inch or two into it. The time was a bit after two and the fog wasn’t going to burn off – not today, maybe not until Christmas. The trees at the edge of Golden Gate Park, no more than a hundred feet away directly across Lincoln Boulevard, were barely visible.

Three other customers quietly took up space in the oldest bar in San Francisco. On a couch in the dark far back, an obviously smitten young couple was possibly engaging in some kind of discreet sex. They had ordered Old Fashioneds – the most frou-frou drink that the purist McGuire allowed at the Shamrock. In the tiny side alcove, a lone, silent mid-thirties dart player with a shaved head and a camouflage jacket was working on his game, drinking Bushmills Irish, Bass Ale, and a raw egg for protein out of a pint glass.

A year before, Moses had picked up some recently released recordings done in the thirties – Stephanie Grappelli on violin and Django Reinhardt on guitar just swinging their brains out with the Quintet of the Hot Club de France – and whenever things were slow as they were today, he’d run them on the juke box.

McGuire twirled his glass around on the condensation ring that had formed on the bar. ‘You’re welcome to come stay with us, you know. The lot of you.’

‘Thanks, Mose, but Erin’s already got the kids. She’s got a bigger place.’

He twirled his glass some more. ‘And when is Frannie out?’

This was treacherous territory. Hardy couldn’t tell Moses that Ron had released Frannie from her promise without revealing that he’d talked to him. And that would, in turn, lead to the minefield of secrets, none of which Hardy could disclose.

And some of which he still, after everything, didn’t know if he believed.

So he sipped Guinness, taking a minute. ‘My bet is that Sharron Pratt lets her go Tuesday morning. She’s taking too much political flack.’

‘Why Tuesday?’

Hardy explained a little about the difference between the judge’s contempt ruling and the grand jury contempt citation. Two different animals with similar names. Fortunately, this seemed to satisfy Moses. But he twirled his glass a few more times and Hardy knew him well enough – he might have bought the latest explanation, but there was more he needed to talk about. ‘So what are you thinking?’ Hardy prompted.

‘How to say it.’

‘Just say it, that’s all.’

Moses drank Scotch, put the glass down, and looked his brother-in-law in the eye. ‘OK. How’s it all turn to shit so fast?’

Hardy found some humor in the felicitous phrase that McGuire had been struggling to conjure. The pickin’s were so slim in the rest of his life that he actually chuckled.

McGuire’s countenance took on a familiar dark tone – the Irish temper had always flared with the slightest friction. ‘It wasn’t a joke.’

Hardy realized he must be on his third Macallan after all, not his second. Well, he thought, it had been stressful couple of days for him, too.

‘I didn’t think it was a joke, Mose. It’s so true I wanted to cry, so I laughed. You hear what I’m saying?’

Moses sipped, nodded, an apology. ‘I mean, one day she’s taking the kids to school and baking cookies, and next day, bam!’ – he slapped the bar with his palm – ‘all of a sudden next day she’s in jail and her house is burned down. How does shit like this happen?’

What could Hardy say? That Frannie had taken a series of little steps, secret steps? That it wasn’t really anything at all like ‘all of a sudden?’

And it wasn’t only Frannie, either. Hardy had taken them, too, the tiny incremental steps away from intimacy. More, he’d felt the shift in the bedrock of their marriage, the first cracks in the faultline. They’d allowed things to change with the pressures of raising the children – the communication eroded, their respective daily lives on different planets.

This is where it had gone wrong, what had led them to here, but he wasn’t going to air all that now. He lifted his glass and killed another inch of Guinness. ‘I don’t know, Mose. I don’t know.’

McGuire leaned over the bar. Whispered. ‘Tell me she isn’t sleeping with him.’

‘She says no.’ Hardy made eye contact. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

‘She wouldn’t,’ he agreed quickly, but the relief showed. Her brother, at least, believed it. ‘She’d tell you first, before anything happened, even if she was only thinking about it. That’s who she is.’

‘OK.’ Talking about it wasn’t going to make it better or worse. It was just going to invite other people to participate in the discussion, and Hardy wasn’t doing that, even with Moses. He and Frannie might have their serious differences, but they were as one in a way that made them aliens in the modern world – they believed that their private lives were private.

‘But your house…?’ Moses asked. ‘This morning you were saying it was part of this, too.’

‘Part of who killed Bree, Mose. Not part of me and Frannie.’

‘And you’re close to finding that? Who did that?’

‘If I am I don’t know it, but somebody must think so. I’ve got to believe hitting my house was a warning to back off.’

Moses sipped his Scotch, then put it down carefully. ‘Unless whoever it was thought you were home, in which case it wasn’t just a warning.’

Hardy considered for a beat. ‘No. I doubt that. I’m not that much of a threat.’ He shook his head, the idea rattling around. ‘I don’t think so,’ he repeated, more to himself than to Moses.

‘Well you don’t have to think it for it to be true. If I were you, I’d put it in the mix.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘That somebody’s trying to kill you.’

On that cheery note, the front door banged open and a mixed six-pack of humanity flowed in, talking football, calling for beer. Moses shrugged at Hardy, gave them a welcome, and headed down the rail for the taps.

It was a signal for Hardy that he didn’t want to waste any more time philosophizing with his brother-in-law. Moses was right – there was far too much he didn’t know. He was vulnerable and couldn’t allow himself the luxury of letting his guard down.

So with neither plan nor destination, Hardy left two-thirds of his Guinness. He’d parked around the corner on 10th Avenue and pushed himself through the fog, hunched against the wind. Getting in behind the wheel, he hesitated before turning the key, then broke a thin smile as the engine turned over. See? No bomb. Flicking the heater up to high, he pulled out, got to the corner, and turned right. He had no idea where he was going.

All he knew was that the Little Shamrock wasn’t anywhere he needed to be just now. He needed to work. Time was running out. He couldn’t go back to his house – the fire department owned it. There were still his children, and Frannie. But he’d already seen them today. That would have to be enough.

Where the hell was Ron Beaumont? Or Phil Canetta?

What did he have? What could he work with?

The only thing that came remotely to mind was his paperwork, the lawyer’s constant companion and last refuge. At his office he had his copies of pages from Carl Griffin’s file, the notes he’d taken last night with Canetta, the propaganda he’d liberated from Bree’s office, and the letters from her high school yearbook. At some point, he reasoned, some part of all of that might intersect.

David Freeman believed that lawyers should work around the clock. He had had full bathrooms installed on each of the three floors of his building so that his associates would not be able to use the lame excuse after an all-nighter that they had to go home to freshen up and get ready for court.

In twenty-five minutes, Hardy was in his office – showered, shaved, and changed into the shirt that he’d stashed in his file cabinet a couple of months before.

When he got seated at his desk, he retrieved the four messages he’d received since last night, hoping against hope that one of them would turn out to be from Canetta, or even Ron Beaumont. If Al Valens had left a message Hardy hadn’t been able to get back at his home, then maybe either or both of the men he wanted to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterwards.

But no such luck.

Three of the calls were from clients in various stages of feeling abandoned and the last was Jeff Elliot. When Hardy called him back, he was himself on fire over the blaze at Hardy’s house, although he did pay a fleeting moment’s lip service to sympathy for Hardy’s loss. ‘Is there anything I can do to help you, Diz? You got a place to stay?’

‘Yeah, we’re covered, Jeff. Thanks, though.’

But back to the scoop. ‘And you think it was arson?’

‘I’d bet a lot on it. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out that it’s the MTBE people, the Valdez Avengers, all those jerks.’

‘If that’s true,’ Jeff said, his enthusiasm overflowing, ‘it’s a giant break in that story.’

‘That’s my goal,’ Hardy said drily. ‘Sacrifice my home for a good story. Maybe you’ll win the Pulitzer and I’ll be happy for you. We can have a party in my new house.’

Elliot apologized. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, Diz.’ He paused. ‘But don’t you want to get whoever did this, take ’em down?‘

‘You don’t know.’

‘I bet I do. All I’m saying is here, maybe we’ve got a real connection.’

‘Between who?’

‘That’s what I think I have, Diz. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Talk,’ Hardy said.

‘OK. After you left yesterday, I went with what you said – the guy from Caloco-’

‘Jim Pierce.’

‘Yeah, all right, Pierce. He’d told you that SKO funded these cretins, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, what if that were true? Where was the connection? So I started poking through among all the crap I showed you yesterday – that thick file of paper – and realized that a lot of the pro-ethanol stuff comes from this organization named the Fuels Management Consortium, FMC for short. It’s here in town. Familiar?’

‘No, but this stuff wasn’t my major until a couple of days ago. I thought FMC made tanks and stuff, big equipment.’

‘Same letters, different company.’

‘OK. Go on.’

‘Well, FMC produces pro-ethanol, anti-MTBE press releases. Tons of them. Sometimes the source of them is a little hard, like impossible, to recognize because they get picked up by intermediaries – syndicated as hard news stories in the dailies, also in industry publications, the Health Industry Newsletter, Environmental Health Monthly, like that. So I never put it together that it might be one source.’

‘And then you did?’

‘Right. Plus every time some more MTBE leaks into another well, we get the update before the ink’s dry on the EPA report.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘OK, so a few months ago, we – the Chronicle - we decided to do a big spread on the dangers of MTBE. I mean, this was a four-day, front-page feature. Lots of scary stuff – cancer clusters, birth defects, the usual. Even a lay person such as yourself might remember it.’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Well, Kerry had just taken the primary and suddenly this was news, and we ran it. Anyway, the reporter who wrote the article, as it happens, is a friend of mine named Sherry Weir. She shows up in the office last night on this water temple poisoning as I’m thinking about our discussion, yours and mine. She tells me that FMC was the prime source for her feature – it’s an impressive propaganda factory.

‘So yesterday, when Sherry hears about the Pulgas Temple, her first stop on the way to the office is the FMC offices in the Embarcadero Buildings. OK, she knows it’s Saturday afternoon, they’re probably closed up, but it’s a shot. And what does she find?’

‘An armed nuclear weapon?’

‘She finds that nobody’s there, all right, but out in the hallway for pickup is the day’s press releases, bound and labeled for distribution, all about the water poisoning, doomsday in San Francisco, sidebars on the dangers of MTBE pollution, like that. Anyway, she pulls a few off the top of the pile and brings them back for her article.’ A beat. ‘Get it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Jeff’s voice went down to an excited whisper, but it rang with triumph. ‘They had to be written and printed up before it happened.’

Hardy took a moment to let it sink in. If this were true, it appeared to link some of the eco-terrorist activity with FMC, but not necessarily to SKO, and certainly not to Valens or Kerry. How could it help him?

But Jeff thought he had the answer to that, too. ‘Because FMC is run by this joker named Baxter Thorne…’

‘Who works for SKO,’ Hardy guessed.

‘You’re too smart, except not so fast, Red Rider. Back when she interviewed him, Sherry couldn’t get Thorne to admit who paid him. He calls himself a public affairs consultant. According to him, he represents all kinds of environmental groups and other clients, but says his contracts demand confidentiality. She asks him specifically about some of these activist groups and he admits he’s given them some advice.’

‘Advice. That’s a nice word.’

‘I thought so, too. But even nicer is this. I call this buddy of mine, a colleague in Cincinnati, at the Sentinel-’

‘You’ve been a busy boy, Jeff.’

‘This could in fact be my Pulitzer, Diz. You’d be busy, too. Turns out that Baxter Thorne is not unknown in Cincinnati. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge, but my buddy knew – for years Thorne was the dirty tricks guy for Ellis Jackson.’

‘Who is…?’

‘You’re going to love this – Jackson is the CEO of Spader Krutch Ohio.’

Hardy felt a little tingle along the back of his neck and knew it wasn’t the cold outside leaking through his office window.

Jeff was going on. ‘So we’ve possibly got SKO paying for dirty tricks in San Francisco. We’ve got somebody who might put MTBE in the water, might kill Bree Beaumont…’

‘Might burn my house down,’ Hardy added evenly.

‘That, too,’ Jeff agreed. ‘But what we don’t have and we do need is how, if we’re on the right track, Baxter Thorne came to be worried about you.’

‘Somebody told him.’

‘I’m with you. But who?’

Hardy wracked his brain, trying to keep himself from the knee-jerk reaction for the second time today that it had to be Valens. But it might go higher – Hardy couldn’t rule out that a directive could have come from Damon Kerry himself, although Jeff Elliot wasn’t going to accept that.

But why stop with Kerry? The connection between SKO and him might even be Phil Canetta – cops who worked freelance security at conventions had also been known to provide muscle, to help with dirty tricks. Had Canetta ever done that kind of work with SKO, he wondered. Or with Baxter Thorne?

‘I really don’t have any ideas, Jeff,’ he said, ‘other than I’d like a few private moments with this Thorne fellow.’

‘Did you talk to Al Valens this morning, by the way?’ Jeff asked. ‘At the Clift? Since you woke me up for it.’

‘Didn’t I tell you all about that?’

He heard Jeff sigh. ‘No. I think you left it out.’

And suddenly, the morning’s information clicked with what he had just learned from Jeff. Bree’s report. She had changed her mind about ethanol and Valens had tried – successfully he said – to keep her from talking to Kerry about it. Who would this silence benefit even more than Kerry himself? SKO. And SKO’s operative in San Francisco Baxter Thorne.

What if Valens’ efforts to keep Bree quiet hadn’t worked after all? What if someone needed to shut her up?

Valens again, once removed.

Maybe.

But Hardy didn’t want to lead Jeff Elliot there. He had his own agenda and he figured he’d sure as hell earned the right to pursue it now. ‘I thought he’d told me a lie,’ Hardy said mildly, ‘and I wanted to talk to him about it.’

‘And had he?’

‘It was more a misunderstanding. It got straightened out.’ Deflection time. ‘You ever catch up with Kerry?’

‘Today’s agenda,’ Jeff promised, ‘if I get to it.’

‘What would stop you?’

‘One of the problems doing a daily column,’ Jeff said, ‘is you’ve got to write it. Kerry’s going to be impossible until Tuesday. Tomorrow I’m going for Thorne.’

‘How are you going to get to him?’

Hardy would bet Jeff’s eyes weren’t tired now – he was on a scent. ‘A little classic bait and switch. I’ve put in a call to FMC that I’d like an interview on the Pulgas story, which he’ll want to talk about. Once I’m in the door, I’ll ask different questions.’ He changed his tone. ‘I think we’re very close, Diz, really.’

‘I hope so,’ Hardy said, ‘but do me one favor, would you?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t go alone.’

After they hung up, Hardy immediately put in a call to Glitsky’s pager. Jeff Elliot might hate him for it, but from Hardy’s perspective, this was now a police matter, and that’s where it was going.

In fact, even without Bree Beaumont, the case could be made that the arson at Hardy’s house, if it had been started by the same people who dumped the MTBE, was related to a San Francisco homicide, and therefore in Glitsky’s domain. Even though the Pulgas Water Temple was in San Mateo County, it was city property and Glitsky could assert at least dual jurisdiction – he had authority to investigate the death of the middle-aged hiker who’d been killed there yesterday.

And now, with the new information Hardy could supply from his talk with Jeff Elliot, that investigation might lead him to Baxter Thorne, and perhaps all the way back to Bree.

Waiting for Glitsky’s call, he got up from the desk, stretched, and came around front to throw a round of darts. But he didn’t retrieve any of them. Instead, he walked to the window and looked down on to Sutter Street, then returned to his chair and pulled his collections of paper up closer to him.

Now that he knew he was looking for something specific – evidence of any relationship between FMC and Bree – he thought he might have a better chance of seeing it.

But the telephone rang.

‘Yo.’

‘Get a earphone, some kind of beeper, something, would you? I’ve been calling all over town trying to run you down.’

‘I’ve been here at my office. And I called you, remember?’

‘Yeah, well, I couldn’t imagine you’d be working on a Sunday so I didn’t think of there.’

Hardy ignored the bad attitude. Abe had gone to a murder scene and had spent the last several hours there. It was understandable that he was in a surly mood. ‘OK, so now we’re talking. You interested in what I called about? You will be.’

‘Not as much as why I want to talk to you.’

Glitsky’s tone wasn’t getting any better.

‘What?’ Hardy asked.

‘The cop who got shot.’

It suddenly hit him. If Glitsky needed to reach him on that matter, there could only be one reason. His stomach went hollow in a rash. ‘Phil Canetta.’

His friend’s voice was grim. ‘You heard it here first.’

‘Where are you?’

Glitsky told him.

25

Hardy was in the Muir Loop, just inside the Presidio. He’d driven through the urban forest many times before, and in his memory it was serene and lovely, a two-lane road overhung with boughs, winding through an expansive eucalyptus glade.

But today in the late afternoon it seemed that menace dripped from every branch. With the dense fog, visibility was no greater than fifty feet. He crept along at fifteen miles per hour, squinting into the nothingness. There were no curbs on the street here, no street lights, and twice he felt his tires leave the asphalt.

At last Hardy got a glimpse of some parked vehicles and slowed down even more. With the fog, the scene was etched in stark relief- the outlines of three squad cars, a couple of vans, some news trucks by now, the unmarked cars of inspectors. He pulled in behind the line of them, zipped up his jacket, and tried to pick Glitsky out of the milling group of spectral figures.

The lieutenant was at the back door of one of the vans, and as he got closer, Hardy recognized Glitsky’s companion – John Strout, the lanky, drawling coroner for the city and county. He was nearly on them before Glitsky noticed.

‘John, you know Dismas Hardy.’

‘Sure do.’ Strout had worked with Hardy before and testified at several of his trials. That Hardy was now a defense attorney made it odd that he was at this crime scene, at this stage, but Strout had been around the block many times, and very little surprised him. ‘How you doin’, Diz?‘ He extended his hand and Hardy took it.

‘I’ve been better,’ Hardy admitted. ‘It’s been a long day.’

Strout was his usual laconic self. ‘Wish I could say the same for our victim here. His day only lasted a couple of hours. I reckon, given the choice, I’d go for long.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Glitsky jerked a thumb. ‘Hardy’s house caught fire this morning.’

‘Not by itself,’ Hardy said sharply.

Strout caught something between the two men. ‘There some connection with that and this?’

Glitsky gave Hardy a shut-up look and said he wouldn’t rule it out, there was some possibility, but they had a ways to go on this one first, on Phil Canetta. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

Hardy got Glitsky’s message – the relationship between Canetta’s murder and Bree’s, to say nothing of Hardy’s house – wasn’t going to be part of the public debate. Not yet. It was not even immediately clear that Glitsky was overtly, officially pursuing the Griffin parallels.

‘So what did go down here?’ Hardy asked.

Strout took his boot off the van’s bumper, looked across the street, said, ‘Reckon they’re close enough,’ and headed out. Hardy and Glitsky followed.

The car had all four of its doors open. Strout walked around off the fringe of the road to the driver’s door, but Glitsky touched Hardy’s arm and the two of them stayed in the street, on the passenger side. They could see inside clearly enough in any event, and just as clearly, Glitsky wanted a private ear.

But the first sight of Canetta was more bad news. He was dressed as he’d been at Freeman’s last night, the last time Hardy had seen him. There was no way now that Hardy could pretend that his relationship to Canetta wasn’t relevant to Glitsky’s investigation, and that in turn was going to have to lead to further revelations, none of them even remotely pleasant.

The body was slumped against the back of the seat, canted slightly to its left. Strout spoke in the professorial drawl he adopted when reciting undisputed facts on the witness stand. Today, though, Hardy found the impersonal tone unsettling.

‘You can see if you lift that right arm’ – he was doing it – ‘ – rigor’s let up enough now – that the second bullet…’

‘The second bullet?’ Hardy asked quietly.

Glitsky nodded grimly. ‘He wasn’t shot here. First one was in the chest. He was facing the shooter.’

Hardy heard Strout over their conversation. ‘… probably fragmented into some ribs and ripped the heart into pieces…’

He shut that out and went back to Abe. ‘So you’re saying he was carried into the car and driven here?’

‘And pushed over to make it look like he drove out on his own. I’m not just saying it. That’s what happened.’

‘But why would somebody…?’

‘Because this is what Griffin looked like and they got away with that. Turned out, I’d say it was a bad idea.’

Hardy agreed. ‘It connects them.’

A nod. ‘Not only that, my guess is Canetta was shot with Griffin’s gun.’

Strout continued. ‘… time of death, but he’s loosened up enough, it had to be ten hours ago, maybe longer.’

‘So who found him?’

‘Couple of joggers.’

‘And Strout’s saying…?’

‘You just heard. Late night, early morning. The second shot’s in a closed car, pea soup outside. Nobody heard a thing.’

Before Hardy could ask, Glitsky expanded on it. ‘I know what you’re going to say, but don’t. This damn sure could’ve been Ron. We’ll get to that.’ He held up a hand, stopping Hardy’s reply. ‘But because I like to be thorough, I also put Batavia and Coleman out on alibis for all of your own personal heroes – Pierce, Valens, even Kerry. We’re talking between two and six a.m., but guess what?’

‘They weren’t all home in bed.’

Glitsky’s mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. ‘Insight like that is what keeps us friends. Maybe they were, but we haven’t been able to reach any of them. Pierce wasn’t around today. His wife said he was out on his boat from early this morning. Also, we’ve got Kerry’s schedule but he’s not sticking to it – he and Valens didn’t make his first banquet. Two days from the election, he’s in flex mode, I guess. Valens-’

Hardy had to cut in. ‘Valens was at Kerry’s until nearly midnight. After that, Kerry left home.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Jeff Elliot.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Only the shadow knows. But he lives like five blocks from here. And while we’re on it, Pierce isn’t much further and all of it’s downhill.’

Glitsky was silent for a couple of seconds. ‘I see you’ve done your homework. How do you know all this, hell, any of it?’

‘I’m motivated. I talked to Valens this morning…’

‘When was that? I was with you half the morning.’

‘Must have been the other half.’ He knew Glitsky wouldn’t let it go, so he continued. ‘It had to do with my house.’

‘Valens had something to do with your house?’

Strout finished his monologue and straightened up, looking over the car’s roof. ‘This boy’s been sittin’ here in the cold long enough, Abe. You needin‘ anything else here?’

Glitsky shifted his attention to the coroner. ‘Not me, John,’ he replied. ‘If crime scene’s done, you can tag him and bag him.’

Strout took a last look into the car, at the body of Phil Canetta, and clucked sympathetically. Again he straightened up. ‘Scene calls. I hate ’em, y’know that? They ain’t medicine out here, are they? It ain’t just a stripped body with something to tell you.‘

There wasn’t anything to say to that. Everybody there felt the same thing to a greater or lesser degree.

Glitsky gave Strout a gentle slap on the shoulders as he passed. Then he walked a few paces back to where the head of his crime scene unit was huddling with a couple of his team. Hardy heard him say, ‘If there’s enough lead left, get ballistics to check it against the slug that went through Griffin. I’m betting it’s the same gun.’

A short discussion ensued, after which Glitsky returned to Hardy. ‘Valens. This morning. Jeff Elliot. Bet you thought I’d get side-tracked, didn’t you?’

‘Never crossed my mind,’ Hardy said. ‘I know we’ve got to talk, but maybe someplace else.’

Hands in his pockets, the lieutenant took in the gloom around them. The body was on the coroner’s gurney and the tow truck started its mechanical cranking, getting ready to lift Canetta’s car and take it to the police lot.

Hunching his shoulders, Glitsky gave a last shudder against the cold. ‘Good call,’ he said.

In one of his brothers’ old rooms down the hall that led off the back of the kitchen, Orel Glitsky was sprawled on the floor, watching television and doing homework. Rita was with him, reading, her Spanish radio station playing softly on the end table next to where she sat on the sofa.

Hardy at his heels, Glitsky checked in with his household – letting them know that he was home now, sorry he’d been out most of the day, glad to see everybody was doing fine. Rita looked up from her book and told him she’d heated up some tortilla pie for a snack and it was probably still warm in the oven. Glitsky got Orel’s attention finally, and asked his son how his day had gone. He got a nod, though his boy’s eyes never left the TV ‘OK.’

‘What time did your grandfather go home?’

A shrug. ‘I don’t know.’

‘A little after twelve,’ Rita said. ‘When I got here.’

No one was trying to hide any displeasure about Glitsky’s working on a Sunday after having dumped Orel on his grandfather the day before.

‘So… anything neat happen today? You guys do anything fun?’

Rita just looked at him.

‘Orel?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Not much.’

Glitsky stood a moment longer in the doorway, then sighed heavily and headed back down the hallway. ‘So glad I asked,’ he muttered.

It was only a few steps to the kitchen, where they closed the door behind them against the competing sounds. Glitsky pulled around a chair and straddled it backwards. ‘They think I want to be gone working all weekend? They think going to murder scenes is my idea of a good time?’

Hardy let him stew, since there was no answer anyway. Sometimes people had to work – a bitch, but there it was. His kids hadn’t understood that he couldn’t go trick or treating last night. Now it was Abe’s turn to deal with it.

He grabbed a kitchen towel, opened the oven, and pulled out the flat pan that held the remains of the pie. Hardy grabbed plates from a cupboard, put them down on the table, and started serving himself.

‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how they can sit there and read and study and listen to music and watch TV all at once. I can’t think with all that other noise going on.’

Glitsky turned his chair around the normal way, and pulled the pan over. ‘That’s because you’re over forty. Nowadays they teach that stuff in school. Multi-tasking. Makes you a better person, more productive.’ He spooned out some food on to his plate and pushed it around a little. ‘It’s just one of the reasons the world is so much better now than it was when we were kids.’ He forked a bite and popped it. ‘So. You want to just start or would you prefer that I ask questions?’

Dark slammed down like a trap door.

An hour later, Hardy was in the tramped-down mud behind his house. Out here closer to the ocean, a fine drizzle had started to condense out of the fog. In the brisk, chill wind, he was impressed by how much the moisture added to the already substantial pleasures of the evening.

Up the backyard stairway, still outside, he turned his key in the back door and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened. He fully expected that the fire department’s security team would have provided their own locks for the various entrances, but though they’d tightly boarded up the front and posted the property with ‘No Trespassing’ signs, that seemed to be the extent of it.

So he was inside. From the lower shelf on his workbench, he grabbed a flashlight and passed on into his kitchen. He didn’t need the flashlight yet – the distances and angles were all second nature. He checked around – there was no dial tone on the wall telephone, no light in the refrigerator when he pulled it open. The neatly folded, heavy brown-paper shopping bags were where they always were, in the drawer at the bottom of the pantry. He grabbed one off the top.

In his bedroom, he risked a short beam. His tropical fish – seventeen of them, a collection that he’d nurtured through various permutations over twenty years – were all belly up on the surface of his aquarium.

A muscle worked in his jaw. He turned off the flashlight and crossed the room. The answering machine was on a small reading table. He unplugged it from the wall, disconnected the telephone jack, and placed it in the bottom of the paper bag on a corner of the bed. Next was his dresser – he threw in underwear and a couple of sweaters on top of the answering machine. In his closet, he gathered up a heavy jacket, a business suit, and some shirts, all of them smelling of smoke. A complete change of clothes for his wife, too. For when he got her out.

Something in him wished he didn’t need to do it, but he knew he had to. Leaving everything on the bed, he walked back up through the kitchen into the burnt-out front of the house and stood in the middle of what used to be his dining room.

He’d once represented a plaintiff who had suffered severe burns in an industrial accident. He remembered preparing the expert he was going to put on, who’d defined the various degrees of burn – first, a sunburn; second, a blister; or the worst, third-degree burns, causing irreparable loss of skin and terrible disfigurement. Any serious percentage of third-degree burns over the body was most often fatal.

But what he felt now seemed even worse – a fourth-degree burn to the core of him, one that charred the edges of his soul.

After a time he moved again – back through the kitchen, to the bedroom for the things he’d left there. He picked up the bag by its paper handles, the clothes by their hangers. At his workbench, he carefully replaced the flashlight, then let himself back out into the awful, awful night.

Hardy left his bag of clothes in the car, but brought the answering machine up to his office, where he plugged it in and found that Al Valens was, at least, not lying all the time. He was the first message – just what he’d said.

The second one stunned him.

No name, but immediately recognizable. ‘I’m sorry to have moved out of the hotel. I hope I haven’t caused you too much inconvenience.’

Hardy almost laughed out loud – not too much inconvenience indeed.

‘The only answer is that I’ve got to be very cautious. I know you will understand. If you could get to me so easily, so could the police. They might have been following you the next time you came down. I don’t know. The point is, I felt like I had to relocate. But I wanted you to know I’m still near by and appreciate what you’re doing, but very nervous about you coming to me. I hope you’re having some luck. Thanks.’

‘Sure, no problem,’ Hardy said, then punched at the answering machine’s button, sat back in his chair and tried to gather some thoughts.

But it was all a jumble. Just today his house had been burned, Canetta had been killed. He’d been running since first light and had one day left to discover any useful truth. He glanced up at his dart board on the wall around his desk. He didn’t remember throwing them, but his three custom-made darts were stuck haphazardly around the board.

He forced himself up, around the desk, and flicked on the bright room overheads. The darts were his worry beads, and he pulled them from the board, walked back to the tape line he’d marked on the floor at eight feet, turned and threw the first one. Triple twenty – a good start.

He threw the second dart, then the third. Walked to the board, pulled them down, and returned to his mark.

If Ron hadn’t left town, what did that mean?

The kind reading was to take him at his word. He was cautious, nervous, paranoid, all of these things certainly understandable. He wanted to be near by in case – as did not appear very likely now – Hardy succeeded in exposing Bree’s killer. If that happened, he and his children could return to their lives. And from what had already happened to the other principles in this drama, Ron was right to be worried.

But as Hardy threw his darts, a more sinister interpretation kept wanting to surface, and he had a difficult time keeping it down. Ron was still near by. Close enough to set fire to Hardy’s house. Close enough to kill Canetta.

If he’d only left a phone number on Hardy’s machine. Surely there was no danger in that. Then he could answer some of the questions that were fogging Hardy’s consciousness.

What was the truth, for example, about Ron and Bree’s marriage? The separate bedrooms, the infidelity? Ron might be a ‘miracle’ of a father, but he wasn’t the same as a husband. This was not the happy couple they pretended to be. At the very least, Bree was having an affair with Damon Kerry. And she had become pregnant, apparently by him. Although Hardy felt he couldn’t rule out Canetta, or even Pierce.

And if the father was anyone but Ron, this was a motive for murder. For Ron to kill.

Beyond that, if Bree were habitually unfaithful, might that mean… with Ron…

Hardy tried to shut out the thought, but finally it couldn’t be dismissed any longer. Of course it could mean Frannie. Although, finally, today, she had told him no, it hadn’t been like that. Or had she? Like what, exactly? He hadn’t cross-examined her. He hadn’t had the heart.

And why would he be fool enough to believe her in any event?

Freeman’s words from last night’s conversation echoed and picked at him – Hardy and Glitsky believing that Carl Griffin had gone to interview a snitch because he had said so. When in fact that’s not what he’d done. In fact, Griffin had lied.

To his boss. And for a lot less reason than Frannie had.

Nothing but the truth was a noble courtroom concept, but Hardy knew from a lifetime of trials that even there it was systematically abused. And in life it was much worse.

But he stopped himself before going too far down this road. Frannie wasn’t just another random person. She was the mother of his children, the wife he’d promised to love, honor, and respect. And if those three did not include trust, a basic belief not only in her honesty but in who she was, he was lost anyway.

Frannie had told him clearly. She had been attracted to Ron but had remained faithful to him. Ron was a good friend, but that’s all she’d let it be. Hardy really had no choice but to believe her, to take it on faith. She was telling him the truth.

And that was the only truth he could let himself act on. To do less would betray both of them.

26

Itwas Sunday night and Glitsky hadn’t spent enough time at home this weekend. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to anytime soon, either.

In his job, once in a very great while he called in a favor. Three years before, Glitsky had spoken up in defense of Paul Ghattas on one of the dozens of EEO lawsuits that were forever being filed among and between workers in the Hall of Justice. Ghattas, a lab tech whose first language was Tagalog, had made a comment to one of his female co-workers that she had interpreted as sexual harassment. The two had been discussing the location of a stab wound, and Ghattas had fumbled with language for a moment, then used the word tit, rather than breast.

Glitsky had been in the lab at the time, waiting for results on another case, and had been the only witness, hearing the whole thing, including Ghattas’ abject apology afterward.

The woman had screamed, ‘Don’t you piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining,’ and run out of the room.

Before Ghattas’ comment, the lab setting had been professional and neutral. But the woman had been offended to the point of being unable to continue coming to work for the following ten days. Then she’d filed her suit which, it turned out, had not been her first. She wanted Paul Ghattas – a ten-year veteran and father of four – dismissed. She wanted full pay for days missed. She wanted disability for the six months she estimated it would take her to get over the emotional trauma she’d had to endure.

Glitsky had worked with Ghattas many times. The man’s English was poor, but he was a competent workhorse in the lab. So, realizing even at the time that he was wading into troubled waters, Glitsky had stood up for him at the hearing, where – against all odds in an environment where to be accused was to be guilty – Ghattas was exonerated.

So Paul was happy to accompany Abe to the Hall at seven this Sunday night. Glitsky left him downstairs at the lab, then went up to his office. Checking Damon Kerry’s fingerprints against all the others found at Bree’s apartment was going to take Ghattas some time and Glitsky had a slew of his own work now to move on.

The litany of information that Hardy had recited earlier in the evening had been deeply disturbing, mostly because Glitsky hadn’t known any of it. And as head of homicide, to say nothing of being Hardy’s best friend, he should have. Batavia and Coleman weren’t brain dead by any means, and yet somehow between them they’d missed getting any kind of a toehold in this case.

He was half tempted to arrest Hardy for what he’d withheld from him just on general principles, for not mentioning diddly squat about what he’d found, what he had been doing. Like, he had been working with Canetta. He’d made the connection to Griffin. He’d talked with Valens this morning when neither of Glitsky’s inspectors could locate the campaign manager. Now he had Baxter Thorne, who had possibly been at least the brains behind dumping the MTBE into the Crystal Springs Reservoir and, more relevantly, had killed a man in Glitsky’s jurisdiction in the process.

But for all Hardy did know, Glitsky realized, he had a blind spot, and that was Ron Beaumont. It was a common truth in homicide that the spouse did it, and in spite of all the activity surrounding Bree’s oil interests, Ron still looked pretty good to Glitsky. He had fled the scene, using multiple identities. Judging from the bedrooms in the penthouse, he and Bree hadn’t been intimate recently, and since she was pregnant, this provided a pretty solid motive.

Glitsky hated to give the DA the satisfaction, but he could no longer ignore Ron as a suspect. In fact, from his perspective, the best suspect.

Abruptly, he sat up in his chair, coming to the unpleasant realization that his friend was still holding out on him – otherwise Ron would be on Hardy’s own short list, too. He would have to be. Therefore, Hardy knew something more and he wasn’t telling. He hadn’t told Glitsky even as he had pretended to bare his soul a couple of hours before, when they’d planned to meet again down here when Hardy got his belongings together.

Now Glitsky was in a slow burn, thinking that by God, friend or no friend he should arrest the duplicitous bastard when he got back down here after all. He started punching Hardy’s office number into his desk phone, give him an earful if he was still there, but he heard footsteps out in the hallway and stopped, replacing the receiver.

A minute later, Inspector Leon Timms, the crime scene specialist from Canetta’s murder, was in his doorway. ‘You asked me to put a rush on the ballistics check, Abe. Can you believe it? There’s somebody in at the lab.’

‘Paul Ghattas,’ Abe replied. ‘I dragged him down from his house. Fingerprints.’

‘Fingerprints?’ In spite of their exalted presence in books and movies, Timms knew that in real life, fingerprints were rarely a factor in police work. But he merely shrugged – if the lieutenant wanted to check prints, he was welcome to. ‘He ran the ballistics for me. The guy’s a one-man shop down there.’

This was good to hear about a man whose job he had saved, but Glitsky had his sights elsewhere. ‘So what did he find?’

Timms nodded. ‘Same shooter. Griffin’s gun. For sure.’

When Hardy arrived, he was happy but not surprised to learn that Glitsky’s surmise about Griffin’s gun was correct. He wasn’t as happy when his friend got up, closed the door to his office, and asked him what he knew about Ron Beaumont that he wasn’t telling.

‘What do you mean?’ But that effort at deflection went about as far as Hardy had imagined it would – nowhere.

Glitsky was propped on the corner of his own desk, hovering a foot or two over where Hardy sat in his hard chair, pressed back against the office wall. As Glitsky intended, this posture made Hardy uncomfortable. ‘What do I mean?’ he repeated with an edge. ‘Let’s see if I can explain it. You know the whereabouts and most of the life history of everybody who’s even remotely involved in the death of Bree Beaumont. You discover that Carl Griffin’s death is probably connected, too. And today Canetta makes that pretty much a certainty. We’ve got four or five suspects and no righteous alibis for any of them, but you don’t appear to have any suspicion at all about the one I feel the best about. If you’re keeping score here, that would be Ron.’ Glitsky had his arms folded, his game face on, and it wasn’t any kind of an act. The eyes were unyielding. He wasn’t going to be breaking out the peanuts in his desk drawer for a little philosophical chat.

Hardy sucked air and held it in, then let it out in a rush. ‘You won’t like it.’

‘I didn’t expect I would.’ Glitsky waited through another pause.

‘I’m in this for his kids.’

The eyes, so lately flat, narrowed. Glitsky’s nose flared and the scar in his lips went white. He took a breath or two and when he finally spoke, it was in a terrifyingly controlled voice. ‘You’ve seen him? You’re representing him?’

Hardy knew that any attempt to finesse this would only infuriate Abe more. ‘I’ve seen him once. Friday night, before things had gotten anywhere near here.’

‘So where was this?’

‘The Airport Hilton.’

‘So he was leaving town? Has he left?’

‘No. Neither. He was ready to if he had to. That was all.’

‘That was all. That’s nice. And then somehow you decided it wasn’t important to let me know about any of this?’

‘No. I never made that decision. You were specifically not looking for Ron at that point.’

‘Well, I am now. Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘My ass.’

Hardy shrugged. ‘I’m not lying to you. I haven’t ever lied to you, Abe. I’ve omitted what you didn’t need to know.’

‘Well thank you so much.’ Glitsky made a face of disgust, his voice now rising in indignation. ‘How about if that’s not your decision to make? How about if it’s my job to do this, not some hobby I can pick up and lay down when the mood strikes me? That ever occur to you, Diz? You ever think about any of this?’

But Hardy wasn’t about to go begging for mercy or forgiveness. He’d done what he felt he’d had to do. He believed it was defensible. ‘Look. Ron called me last night. The answering machine is still in my office with the message on it. You can come listen to it anytime you want. I don’t know where he is. or how to reach him and it pisses me off just a bit myself.’

‘But it’s not your job, Diz.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Abe. It’s a hell of a lot more than my job. First it’s my wife, then my house; next it’s maybe me, my life. If I had even the smallest suspicion any of this was Ron, you think I’d gamble all of that? You don’t think I’d give him up to you? Hell, I’d lead the parade.’

‘Not if he was your client.’

Hardy lowered his own voice. ‘He’s not it, Abe. You’ve known that all along. You go after him, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Yeah, but that’s what I do, bark up trees. Things fall out, I pick ’em up, and maybe it points me to another one.‘

‘Maybe it doesn’t.’ Hardy came forward in his chair. ‘There isn’t time, Abe.’

Glitsky glared, very little of the fury gone. After a couple of seconds, he stood up, walked back to the door, opened it, and left the room.

He was standing at the back windows of the homicide detail, arms folded, looking out through the black fog to the jail across the way.

Hardy came out of Abe’s office and walked up behind his friend. ‘I’ll tell you everything I can,’ he said to his back, ‘but there’s some things I can’t.’

Glitsky didn’t turn.

‘Ron has a situation that makes it awkward for him to get formally involved with the law or the courts. If he gets in the system, his kids suffer. That’s why Frannie couldn’t give him up. It’s what she couldn’t talk about. You heard what the supe in his building said, Abe. The guy’s a good father. Like you and me, right.’

Still no answer, but Hardy noticed that Glitsky’s shoulders rose and fell. He was listening.

‘I know, I know. Why didn’t I tell you sooner? Why’d I do things with Canetta? I don’t know. I didn’t know. I was trying to figure it out. If it’s any help, I paid my dues around it, wouldn’t you say? And the bottom line is Ron didn’t kill Bree.’

Finally, the lieutenant half turned. ‘Except if he did,’ he said.

‘He didn’t.’

Glitsky was a statue.

They both became aware of footfalls in the hallway, moving fast. Hardy turned just as an excited Asian man appeared in the doorway. He was slightly out of breath and tried to compose himself in the few steps over to them.

‘One of last ones I try, Abe. Sorry. But it match up.’

‘You got a match?’

‘Yeah. Same as on glass, whoever that was.’

‘From the prints in the penthouse?’

Ghattas nodded and nodded. ‘Definite sure.’

Hardy spoke up. ‘Kerry?’

Ghattas looked at him, then to Glitsky for permission. The lieutenant nodded. ‘Looks like.’

‘What is that?’ Ghattas asked. ‘The Damon Kerry?’

Glitsky nodded. ‘If you’re sure about the glass, he was at Bree Beaumont’s and said he wasn’t.’

‘Oh, definite sure.’

‘Then it was Kerry.’

‘Well, shit,’ Ghattas responded. ‘Very shit.’

‘My thought exactly, Paul. Good work. And thanks for coming down tonight. It was a big help. You need a lift home?’

‘No. I call my wife. Ten minutes, she’s here.’ He nodded and was gone.

Silence reigned again and Hardy waited. Glitsky chewed the inside of his cheek.

‘You’re probably remembering right now that it was me who picked up that glass,’ Hardy said.

27

Jim Pierce sat in the pilot’s seat on the flying bridge of his yacht, bundled against the weather. He was drinking rum neat from a metal cup and sucking on the butt of a Partagas cigar. The craft was plugged into the marina’s power source, and he had the small television going, although he wasn’t faced toward it – it was background noise, that was all. Laugh track. A brisk sea wind carried a load of wetness in through the open windshield.

He felt a movement in the boat, but didn’t turn.

‘Do you know what time it is?’

His wife was a vision as usual. Even more so now, as she was flushed from the cold and the slight exertion to get out to the boat. Her hair had gathered the fine drizzle and, backlit, turned it into a halo. ‘I would guess around nine o’clock,’ he said evenly.

‘What were you waiting for out here?’

‘You to come and get me? And look, now you have.’

‘The police have been around again.’

‘Well, when it rains, it pours. What did they want this time?’

‘There’s been another murder apparently. A policeman.’

‘And they came to see me?’

‘Apparently he was related somehow to Bree.’

Finally, he met his wife’s eyes. ‘Well, I’m not related to Bree.’ He took a pull of his liquor.

‘Don’t get hostile with me, Jim. Please. Where have you been?’

He kept looking at her. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘I told you. Waiting for you to come and get me.’

‘And you came down here last night?’

He nodded. ‘You weren’t home from your party. I got stir crazy. What did they want?’

She threw a glance behind her as if worried that someone would hear. Then back to him. ‘They wanted to know where you were. I told them. Didn’t they come by here?’

He pointed with his cigar in the direction of the water. ‘I was out.’

‘In this fog?’

He shrugged. ‘Living dangerously. What difference does it make? So what did you do all day?’

‘I was home until noon, waiting for you to get back. Then I had lunch with my mother and brother. Then there was the Library do – the Sponsors’ Dinner?’

Jim Pierce slapped at his forehead in mock consternation. ‘That was tonight? And I missed it?’ He tossed her a dismissive look. ‘See,’ he said, ‘you had a fine time without me.’

‘Everyone wondered where you were. They said they missed you.’

‘I’m sure they did. And I them.’

She had her arms crossed, and now leaned back against the railing. ‘I don’t know why you’re so cruel, Jim. I don’t know when that started.’

He took a beat, carefully lifted his metal cup, and took a slow sip. ‘Oh, I think you can figure it out. You get rejected enough, it makes you bitter. Some people, they get bitter, they take it out by being cruel.’

‘I never rejected you.’

A stab of staccato laughter. No, he thought, you just made it impossible to ask anymore. But he said, ‘That’s right. It was me.’

A long, dead silence.

One of the channel buoys at the mouth of the marina chimed deeply, followed almost immediately by the forlorn moan of a foghorn. Jim Pierce tossed his cigar butt into the bay and reached over to flick off the television.

His wife looked as though she were waiting for him to say something, so he obliged her. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Nothing matters.’

‘You can’t do this!’ Valens was actually near to screaming. He had pulled Damon Kerry out on to the roof of whatever goddam hotel they were in after his talk to whatever goddam group it was. ‘You can’t do this with two days to go! You’re alienating people, don’t you understand? And you can’t do that and win.’

‘I’m being myself,’ Kerry said. ‘I’ve never lost an election and I’ve been myself in each one.’

‘Yeah, but Damon, you’ve never run for governor before! This is not a city supervisor job. This is high office, and that’s why I’m on board, remember? I do this. I keep candidates from being themselves, especially with forty-eight hours to go. I’ll tell you what – you want to be yourself, be yourself on Wednesday.’ He paced off a few steps and swore succinctly.

Kerry came up behind him. ‘I am not alienating my electorate. I’m trying to reach people, to tell the truth. People respond to that, to me.’

‘No,’ Valens said. He turned around, despising the law of politics that the tall guy always wins. Kerry had him by half a foot, and this close, Valens had to look up at him. But he was going to say his piece – uphill, downhill, sideways – and Kerry was going to have to hear. ‘No no no. Listen to me carefully. You are not trying to reach people or tell the truth or be yourself or any of that. You are trying to get yourself elected. That’s all you’re trying to do right now. And we’re running behind all day, missing meetings, you’re deviating from the script…’

‘There’s no script. There’s-’

‘No, Damon. The script is all that’s left at this point. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Smile, smile, smile. And keep moving, keep moving, don’t miss an opportunity to repeat repeat repeat.’

‘Except we missed a few this morning, didn’t we, Al? And why was that? Because you were late picking me up.’

‘You overslept, Damon.’

‘I depend on you, Al. I was exhausted and I’m getting sick. And what about you? The job of the campaign manager is get the candidate where he needs to be. That’s what he does. He doesn’t keep the candidate from being himself.’ He put a couple of fingers up to his forehead. ‘I really am getting sick,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sick for weeks.’

Valens was at the edge of the roof. Below him, he was aware of the gauzy glow of the city’s lights through the fog. He’d been in similar situations in nearly every election with which he’d been involved – the schoolgirl squabbling during the last leg of a campaign.

Damon Kerry undoubtedly was feeling sick, and Valens didn’t really blame him. The pace was grueling, the pressures unrelenting. Valens might be frustrated and worried in his own right, but for the sake of the election, it was time to calm the waters. ‘Damon,’ he said gently, ‘we’ve got one more day and tomorrow starts early. Why don’t we get you back home, to get a good night’s rest if you can? We’re close now. We can still pull this out.’

‘It’s not just the election.’ Kerry was shaking his head. ‘You don’t know, Al.’

‘Yes I do, Damon, I really do. And what I know is that it is just the election.’

But Kerry wasn’t on that page. ‘All I know is that if I hadn’t started down this path, Bree would still be alive. If she hadn’t…’ He trailed off.

But they had covered this ground a hundred times, most often late at night when Kerry’s defenses were down. Valens laid an avuncular hand up on his candidate’s shoulder. ‘She did, though.’ He patted the shoulder gently to demonstrate his commiseration. ‘Let’s get you home, get some rest,’ he said. ‘It’ll look better in the morning.’

Thorne was at the kitchen table in his apartment halfway up Nob Hill, putting the finishing touches on a memorandum he’d print up tomorrow regarding the oil companies’ ten point eight million dollars in contributions to the country’s political campaigns this year. In the memo, he noted that Damon Kerry had not accepted one dime from this source. Thorne thought that if he got the news release distributed early enough in the day, it would certainly get into some of Tuesday’s papers, perhaps before many people had gone to the polls, and might even make a few late-breaking news shows looking for a filler by tomorrow night.

Every little bit helped, he believed, especially in light of the continuing MTBE poisoning story which was gratifyingly ubiquitous. Kerry’s opposition to big oil was going to play very well, possibly right up through election day.

He proofread his final copy, then placed the papers in his briefcase, opened a cold beer, and poured it into a chilled Pilsner glass. Then he went into his living room and turned on the television.

The late evening news didn’t let him down. It led off with the continuing followup on the Pulgas Water Temple story. The Water District had taken samples in the city’s drinking water and found levels of MTBE that were lower than the EPA standards, and so technically ‘safe.’ But the levels were still deemed ‘detectable,’ and residents were advised to ‘use caution.’

Thorne smiled at the language, and at the hysterical reaction of the public that the media play nearly guaranteed. MTBE was bad stuff, all right – an aspirin’s worth in an Olympic-sized swimming pool was toxic – but ten or fifteen gallons in a reservoir the size of Crystal Springs wasn’t going to make anybody sick, not immediately anyway. Nevertheless, over thirty people had sought medical attention in emergency rooms all over the city after drinking the water yesterday and this morning.

On-the-street interviews indicated that nearly everyone tasted ‘something funny’ in the water, a turpentine taste.

Thorne had made a point of drinking a few glasses in the course of the day and had tasted nothing.

There was a nice clip of several dozen dead trout floating near the dump spot. The location of this school of fish – where the concentration of MTBE was several million times greater than it was at the pumping station for the city’s water supply – was simple luck, but Thorne found it particularly pleasing. It gave the impression that the whole lake had been polluted.

Kerry got a couple of great sound bites calling for an immediate moratorium on MTBE use, and this was echoed by one of the state’s senators and the mayor, God bless him, who had even gone further. ‘There is no reason to tolerate even for one more moment this dangerous and insoluble toxin in our gasoline where there is an environmentally safe and effective substitute so readily available, and by this I mean ethanol.’

Kerry’s opponent, by contrast, spoke from a location in Orange County and sounded to Thorne like an idiot. ‘It is not MTBE that has caused this terrible crisis any more than it is guns that kill people. People kill people, and people – criminals – have poisoned the San Francisco water supply. Gasoline without any additives would have produced the same effect, and no one is talking about making gasoline illegal.’

Police had no clues as to the identity of the individuals or the location of the headquarters of the Clean Earth Alliance, who claimed responsibility for the act, although when found, they would be charged with the murder of 53-year-old…

Thorne hit the mute button, sat back, and enjoyed a sip of his beer. All in all, he had to consider this a resounding triumph. There was, of course, no Clean Earth Alliance. His operatives had scattered to the four winds. Life was good.

But his smile faded with the new image on the screen – the house – and he reached again for the remote, bringing up the sound. ‘… determined that the cause of the fire was arson.’

The serious male anchor nodded sagely. ‘What makes this so interesting, Karen, is that this house was the home of Frannie Hardy, wasn’t it? The woman who is still in jail for refusing to testify regarding the husband of Bree Beaumont, the expert on gasoline additives who was murdered nearly a month ago.’

‘That’s right, Bill.’ The camera closed in on Karen. ‘It’s hard to believe that there is no connection whatever between Bree Beaumont’s murder, the MTBE poisoning at the Pulgas Temple, and the arson this morning.’

Thorne hit the mute again, his frown pronounced by now. Last night he had been both wired and a little drunk; he’d had perfect cover in the thick fog. He was also feeling godlike after the Pulgas thing had gone so well.

When would he learn? You might want it and love every minute of it, but you didn’t do things yourself. You hired experts to take care of operations. That was the safe way. Otherwise it was you who got interrupted, who had to improvise, who perhaps left physical evidence at the scene.

He sat, scowling, ruminating over the possibility that he had personally exposed himself now, perhaps even gotten himself implicated with Bree Beaumont, and that had never been his intention. He tried to remember if he’d known that Hardy’s wife was the blasted woman in jail. He just couldn’t dredge it up – not that it mattered now.

And the last problem, maybe the biggest problem, with screwing things up yourself was then sometimes you had to fix them yourself.

28

Sunday night, and Glitsky sprung Frannie again for a couple of hours. It was going to be the last chance to get away with that before the work week began, and she considered any single second outside of her cell well worth the trouble.

They were all still pretending that Frannie was going to be free on Tuesday, but Hardy, at least, knew it might not be so simple.

If Scott Randall didn’t cooperate, if Sharron Pratt didn’t relent under the mounting criticism in the press, if Frannie discovered another reason why she couldn’t reveal what Ron had told her – for example, if Ron simply reneged on releasing her from her promise – any of these could and would prolong the nightmare.

And in any event, Hardy was going to have to get a hearing scheduled to vacate the contempt charge. He was all but certain that this would not be a cake walk.

For two hours, Glitsky fielded calls from the dispatcher trying to get a fix on Damon Kerry’s location, provided information on the day’s events to the police beat reporter, and organized his utilization coefficients. Hardy and Frannie were together alone in the interrogation room off the homicide detail, the shades drawn and the door locked by a chair propped up under the doorknob.

Hardy made up an excuse so he could stop by his car and pick up the gun. He had no plans to go unarmed until this had passed. He knew Glitsky would disapprove – he might get himself in big trouble, hurt someone, and wind up on trial himself. But he took solace in the old saying, ‘Better tried by twelve than carried by six.’

Then they took Glitsky’s car and parked across the street from Kerry’s house. The plan was to wait until the limo pulled away so they’d get the candidate alone. But the limo had barely stopped when a short, stocky form emerged and began crossing the street toward them.

‘That’s Valens,’ Hardy said.

Glitsky moved, opening the driver’s door, gun drawn. ‘Stop right there,’ he ordered, ‘right now. Police.’

‘Police? Jesus Christ! What are you doing here?’

Hardy opened his own door and got out, but let the car remain between him and the others. He felt for his gun, riding in the small of his back, hidden under his jacket.

‘Hey.’ Valens held his hands out in front of him. The fog had finally lifted somewhat, and the voices seemed to carry like the ping of crystal. ‘I’m coming over to see who you are, OK? Two guys, dark car, middle of the night, get it?’

Glitsky was advancing toward the man. ‘We get it. Are you Al Valens? Is that Damon Kerry’s car?’

Valens nodded. ‘Yeah. And he’s in it, trying to sleep. He’s the Governor of California in about two days, OK?’

‘Sure,’ Glitsky responded. ‘But right now today I’m Lieutenant Abe Glitsky and I’m the head of homicide. I’d like to have a few words with Mr Kerry.’

‘Not possible.’ Valens shook his head emphatically. ‘The man has been running all day. He’s got twenty appearances tomorrow. He’s not available.’

Glitsky allowed himself a tight smile. He spoke in a conversational tone. ‘I’m not asking.’ He started for the limo.

But Valens wasn’t giving up that easily. He side-stepped into the lieutenant’s path. ‘You got a warrant? I want to see a warrant.’

Hardy was amazed. He had never seen Glitsky this patient, taking the time to politely answer someone who refused to get out of his way. ‘I don’t need a warrant to talk to him on the street, which is what I’m hoping to do.’ Glitsky stopped, and tried another tack. ‘Mr Valens, are you trying to tell me that Mr Kerry doesn’t want to cooperate with a police investigation into the murder of one of his consultants? You might want to ask him about that.’

Valens thrust out his chin. ‘Hey, don’t pull that crap on me. We have already cooperated with you guys every time somebody came around to ask. We’ve answered questions ’til we’re blue in the face. Now it’s late at night and this is pure straight-up harassment. I want to know what Republican money is behind you on this.‘

‘Please move to one side,’ Glitsky said.

Valens pointed a finger. ‘This is a mistake, lieutenant, I’m telling you. In two days, Damon gets elected and I get your badge, you hear me?’

Glitsky stopped walking, glanced around to Hardy, and came back to the campaign manager. ‘Here are Kerry’s options. He can talk to me or refuse to.’ Glitsky paused. ‘Listen to me, Valens, the reason I’m here in the middle of the night is to save him embarrassment. Nobody knows. I don’t want to make it public. But I will if I need to. Do you understand me?’

This, finally, broke some of Valens’ bluster. ‘So does he need a lawyer present? What’s this about really?’

Glitsky brought his hand up and rubbed his eyes. ‘He’s always welcome to have a lawyer, but he’s not under arrest at this time. If he decides to call his lawyer, we’ll wait. If he doesn’t want to talk to us at all, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to read about it in the paper tomorrow, but that of course would be his decision.’

‘You son of a bitch. Who is behind this?’

Glitsky moved up a step closer. ‘That’s a very ill-advised choice of words and I wouldn’t continue in that vein if I were you. Now, as to who is behind this, I’m doing it alone. It’s police work. There is no political motive. I’m investigating a murder.’

‘That murder is almost a month old. What’s the hurry tonight?’

‘The hurry tonight is that there was another murder last night. A policeman.’

Valens narrowed his eyes. ‘Connected to Bree?’

‘That’s one of the things I’d like to find out. You have to understand, Mr Valens, that when police officers get killed, other cops get a little testy. And I’m there now, so don’t push me. I really am trying to maintain a low profile around this. If that weren’t the case, I could have pulled together a pretty good crowd by now, don’t you think?’

Glitsky let the simple truth of that sink in for a moment. ‘Now, is Mr Kerry going to consent to an interview or not?’

Valens hesitated for a number of seconds. Then, with a last furious glare, he turned and walked back to the limo.

There was another lengthy outburst after they got inside the house when Valens recognized Hardy. He wasn’t a policeman, so what the hell was he doing here? This was a man who had broken into Valens’ hotel room that morning, and had threatened him with a gun.

‘Did you file a report with the hotel? With the police? Do you now want to press charges?’ Glitsky asked the questions mildly, but they put an end to that.

‘I’ll be recording this conversation, by the way.’ Glitsky said it as casually as possible, allowing no opportunity for debate. He was positioning his portable recorder on the table and holding up a hand, forestalling any and all of Valens’ continuing objections.

He gave the standard introduction, identified those present, and had Kerry acknowledge that he was speaking of his own free will, that he was not under arrest, and that he did not want to have a lawyer with him.

‘But why is this man here?’ Valens asked, indicating Hardy, not wanting to let that issue go.

‘He’ll facilitate the discussion,’ Glitsky responded. ‘And Mr Valens, you are here as a courtesy. Don’t interrupt again.’ Valens had a legitimate gripe – there was no legal reason for Hardy to be there, but the campaign manager held no cards. What was he going to do? Notify the media and let the public know that his candidate was a murder suspect? No, he and Kerry had to cooperate, and as long as Glitsky allowed it, they had no choice but to tolerate Hardy’s presence.

But Glitsky did have a reason and it became apparent immediately. ‘Mr Kerry,’ he asked. ‘I’m sure you remember talking to Mr Hardy yesterday in the lobby of the St Francis? A rather lengthy discussion about Bree Beaumont, wasn’t it?’

‘I believe it was the bar, but yes.’

The candidate had a damp washcloth on his forehead. He was nearly reclining on the couch, his stockinged feet up on the coffee table in front of him. Although it was anything but warm – either out in the night or here in the house – his skin had a sheen as though he were sweating slightly. Glitsky thought he might have a fever and, if so, that would be to the good.

‘Well, the reason I brought Mr Hardy along, and the reason that we’re here talking to you at all, frankly, has to do with that conversation.’

Kerry might be tired and feverish, but he shifted slightly, summoning some reserves of energy. ‘All right,’ he said.

Glitsky nodded. ‘Do you remember telling him that you had never been to Bree Beaumont’s apartment?’

‘That was me!’Valens exploded, interrupting, pointing at Hardy again. ‘That’s what I called this guy about last night. I already told him all about that. I forgot, that’s all. And still that’s why he broke into my hotel…’

‘Mr Valens, please.’ Glitsky stilled him with a glare. ‘Mr Kerry?’

Kerry had by now straightened up to a sitting position. He mopped his brow with the washcloth. ‘Yes, I said that.’

‘And you stand by that now? That you’ve never been inside Bree’s place?’

Kerry crossed one leg over the other, and sighed deeply. ‘I suppose you’ve got somebody who saw me there? Took my picture? Perhaps Mr Hardy here?’

‘Damon, hold it!’ Valens again.

But Kerry seemed almost amused. A wry expression crossed his face. ‘It’s all right, Al. It’s all right. The lieutenant says he’ll keep this low profile – isn’t that true, lieutenant? So long as I didn’t kill Bree. We have your word on that, on this tape.’

‘If I can,’ Glitsky responded.

‘Yes, I went there.’

Glitsky and Hardy exchanged glances. ‘Why did you tell Mr Hardy you hadn’t?’

‘What difference does that make, lieutenant? Is that a crime? He might have been a reporter, trying to get some dirt on me and Bree. He might have been with my opponent, trying to smear me, make it look like I was having an affair with a married mother of two.’ He shrugged. ‘He said he was Ron’s attorney and it’s my belief that Ron killed her. He was building a case. So I lied to him. The easiest thing was to lie.’

‘You believe that Ron killed her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

A shrug. ‘She was his major source of support financially. She was going to change that arrangement. When he found out, he lost it.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘She told me the first two. The last I surmise.’ By now, Kerry had come forward on the couch. The signs of fatigue had vanished. Hunched over slightly, his elbows on his knees, the washcloth now bunched in his right hand, he struck Hardy as a man engaged in watching the last seconds of an extremely close football game. ‘Frankly, I’m amazed it’s taken you – the police – this long to get to him. Judging from this interview, you’re still not there, are you?’

‘He has an alibi for the time of the murder,’ Glitsky replied calmly, his patented non-smile making a minor appearance. ‘We’re still laboring under the law of physics that you can’t be in two places at once. But while we’re on the topic, where were you on the morning she was killed?’

Kerry actually chuckled. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘It’s a simple question.’

‘Yes it is, which doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. You’re implying that I am a suspect in this woman’s murder?’

But Glitsky knew how to interrogate, and the first rule is you don’t answer questions – you ask them. ‘I’m asking where you were when she was killed. Again, a simple question.’

‘All right. Here’s the simple answer. I couldn’t even tell you exactly the day Bree was killed, lieutenant. I’m in the middle of a thirty-million-dollar campaign for governor of the most populous state in the nation. I’ve had between ten and thirty appearances a day for the past six months or more.’

Glitsky nodded. ‘You’re on the record saying you were home, here, that morning. Alone. Do you remember that?’

‘I said it,’ Valens put in. ‘I told your inspectors. Hell, I’ve told them half-a-dozen times. Damon needs to sleep once in a while. He’d been out late the night before. We’d been shooting commercials that had to air the next week. The day she died he had to fly to San Diego at noon, so he slept in.’

‘Look.’ Kerry’s color had come up now. ‘It was a horrible tragedy that Bree was killed, and it is my most fervent wish that it hadn’t happened. Beyond that, I hope you find her killer. But I do wish that this city had a more competent police force, so that I would not have to be bothered with this grasping-at-straws stupidity on the penultimate day of my campaign.’

Valens took his cue and stood up. ‘That’s it. I’m calling the mayor. He’ll put a stop to this.’ He faced Glitsky directly. ‘You won’t have to wait for the election, lieutenant. You can lose your badge tonight.’

Hardy reached over to the tape recorder, snapped it off, and spoke before Glitsky could reply. ‘Good idea, Valens. You go ahead. Then I’ll call Jeff Elliot and we can see where that goes.’

‘You know Jeff?’ This was Kerry, all attention.

‘We’re buds,’ Hardy said. ‘He was here last night and you weren’t. How about that?’

Glitsky raised his voice. ‘That’s enough!’ He lifted the tape recorder and turned it on again, then whispered into the resulting silence. ‘This is my interrogation. I will ask the questions. Mr Kerry, I need five more minutes of your time, and then I will walk out the door with Mr Hardy. You’ve admitted you were at Bree Beaumont’s penthouse. What were you doing there?’

A disgusted shake of the head. ‘Visiting her. She was one of my consultants and beyond that, we were friends.’

‘Were you alone with her there?’

‘Yes. Is that sinister?’

Glitsky abruptly changed his tack. ‘What did you do after midnight last night?’

Kerry collapsed back on to the couch. He mopped his brow again with the washcloth. ‘Last night? What does last night have to do with anything?’

‘A policeman was killed about five blocks from here last night.’

Kerry cast a glance over at Valens. ‘They’ll stop at nothing,’ he said. Then, back to Glitsky. ‘And I killed him, too, I suppose. I’m not busy enough running for governor. I’ve got to premeditate several murders as well, among them a cop. I must have a low tolerance for boredom.’ He sighed. ‘Last night, I took a walk.’

‘You took a walk?’

‘That’s right. Al left at around – when Al, eleven thirty? – and I was wound up. The MTBE poisoning. Bree. Even Mr Hardy here. I decided to walk off some of the tension.’

‘Do you own a gun, Mr Kerry?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a basement full of Uzis and semi-automatics. AK-47s are my favorites. When I’m not killing women and policemen, I like to dress up like a postal employee and spray up some McDonald’s someplace.’ He forced himself to his feet. ‘This was a voluntary interview, as you noted: I would appreciate a copy of the transcript of that tape in my headquarters by tomorrow. And I assure you that I am going to speak to the mayor, and you can do any goddam thing you want about it, both of you.’

He was halfway across the room when Glitsky, a dog with a bone, spoke up after him. ‘Do you own a gun, Mr Kerry? You didn’t answer me.’

The candidate stopped and turned slowly. In measured tones, he answered. ‘I have a Glock nine millimeter in my bedroom for protection. I did not shoot your colleague with it. You have my word.’

Glitsky smiled and pounced softly. ‘How did you know he was shot?’

Kerry stood stock still. His eyes, for an instant stained with fear, darted to Valens. Then, recovering, he came back to Glitsky. ‘From your questions about guns, that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption. Now good night, lieutenant.’

Driving back downtown, for the first several blocks neither man said a word. At a red light on Geary, they stopped and Hardy half turned in the passenger’s seat. ‘Offhand,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t say that went too well.’

Glitsky looked over at him. ‘I don’t know. He has no alibi. He owns a gun. You notice he said “several murders”?’

‘When?’

‘Wait.’ Glitsky fiddled with his tape recorder, rewound a minute, got to the spot. And here was Kerry’s voice again: ‘I’m not busy enough running for governor. I’ve got to premeditate several murders as well, among them a cop.’ He flicked it off. ‘Several,’ he said, ‘is not two. Two is a couple – Bree and Canetta. No one knows about Griffin being part of this.’

‘But he didn’t say “among them some cops,” or “a couple of cops.” ’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Abe admitted. ‘I know he was being sarcastic. But still… it’ll be instructive if he does call the mayor.’ A pause. ‘He’s a lot quicker on his feet than I’d given him credit for. I might even vote for him.’

‘Assuming he didn’t kill anybody.’

‘Even then.’ Glitsky seemed amused. ‘You never want to underestimate the value of brains in your elected officials.’

‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘Our President’s got brains.’

‘Yeah, but they’re all south of his head.’ The light changed and they moved.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Hardy commented. ‘Kerry’s got brass balls if he did any of this.’

‘I think we just got a glimpse of them,’ Abe said. ‘The guy is no pansy. You get the impression he hasn’t talked to any cops before, that it’s all been Valens up to now?’

‘A hundred per cent.’

‘And here’s a last bit of five-cent psychology. To my mind, Kerry’s exactly the kind of guy that Griffin could have wound up handing his gun to. I could see him asking Carl for a ride in the cruiser. Wow, this is what it’s like being a cop. You mind if I just hold your gun for a minute? And it’s all loaded and everything?’

‘Or,’ Hardy countered, ‘he packed along his Glock and forced him.’

‘Or that, too.’

‘Griffin just drops by his house? Knocks at the door?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hard to see that.’

‘Do we know where he was when Griffin got it?’

‘It was the day of Bree’s funeral. He was in town. Valens says he was sick over Bree’s death. Canceled his appointments, but made the funeral.’

Another silence descended. After a few blocks, Hardy looked over at Glitsky again. ‘Lord,’ he said.

‘It’s interesting,’ the lieutenant admitted.

The two cars were parked next to one another in the cavernous city garage under the Hall of Justice. There was a guard trying to keep warm in a small booth by the back doorway, which was the main entrance. But otherwise, except for Glitsky and Hardy, the place was empty, which was not surprising after eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. Glitsky asked the guard to bring up the lights and in a moment the dark and grimy garage was lit up like a showroom.

Yellow crime-scene tape hung from traffic cones and this segregated the immediate area where Griffin’s and Canetta’s cars had been parked from the contiguous body shop and parking spaces for the city-issue vehicles.

All doors and the trunks of both cars were open. Under the car on the right, a dark blue Lumina, someone in the crime scene unit had written block letters in chalk: CANETTA. The car over GRIFFIN was a gray, mid-sized Chevrolet with minor body damage and a lot of years behind it.

But for the moment, their steps echoing as they navigated the garage, they were still on Kerry. ‘So you think your badge is really in trouble?’

‘For interrogating a righteous suspect?’

‘They’re going to claim it’s political.’

Glitsky snorted. ‘They don’t support much of what I do, but I’ve got to believe they won’t step on me for this. There’s probable cause here in spades. In fact, I’m going to put somebody on a warrant for the Glock tomorrow. See if it’s where he said it was, what it might tell us…’ He indicated the cars before them. ‘Maybe that Glock has spent some time in one of these, and picked up something for its troubles.’

They’d come up to Canetta’s car, on their left. Glitsky pulled some latex gloves from his jacket pocket, handed a couple to Hardy, pulled his on, and stood over the yawning trunk.

‘What are we looking for?’ Hardy came up beside him.

‘There shouldn’t be anything,’ Glitsky responded. ‘The theory is it’s all bagged and labeled at the lab, or if they’re done boxed up in the locker.’ And in fact, the trunk looked pretty well cleaned out. Still, they checked the wheel wells, under the rug, under the speakers – everywhere.

Hardy went up the passenger side, Glitsky the driver’s. The front seat had been removed, although there was still fresh evidence of the blood Canetta had spilled on the rug. The visors had nothing stuck under or in them. The glove compartment was empty. In the back, it was the same story.

Glitsky wasn’t saying a word and though Hardy still wasn’t sure why they were doing this, he was along for the duration. Over at Griffin’s car, as with Canetta’s, they started at the trunk. There was a little more evidence that Carl had lived and worked in his vehicle – beverage stains, tobacco burns – but it had evidently been sanitized by a team of professionals.

At least, until they came to the back doors. The back seat and the rug in front of it contained the usual, by now, stains and odors, and Hardy was about to stand up when Glitsky made a sign. ‘Last one,’ he said. And they lifted the back seat up.

Hardy whistled.

Glitsky looked for a moment, his expression fixed. ‘Don’t touch,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

They crossed back to the guard’s booth, and Glitsky picked up the telephone and punched in some numbers. ‘Get me operations,’ he told the dispatcher. ‘Is Leon Timms on call? Good. Page him. Yes, ma’am, right now. Have him call me.’

Glitsky gave his number and they waited two minutes or less. The phone rang.

‘Leon, Abe. I’m down here at the garage and just had occasion to lift the back seat of Carl Griffin’s car. Yeah. Uh huh. Well, they missed this. Uh huh. I know. I am, too.’

He rolled his eyes at Hardy. ‘Well, listen, the point is that we’re behind the curve on this investigation, you might have noticed. Right. Leon, listen up. Just so we’re clear, I expect all that waste paper, Kleenex, French fries, sugar cones, condoms, coins, bullets, shoelaces, boxtops, coupons, lottery tickets – everything – to be checked out, bagged, and catalogued, and up at the lab by the morning. Starting now. Uh huh. That’s right, it is. I know. I don’t care.’

Hardy had no confidence that he’d be able to stay awake on the ride across town to Erin’s. Freeman’s building was closer, and there were still things to do there.

Now, on his couch back in his office, he fought to keep his eyes open. He had his legal pad beside him and had drafted the motion he’d submit to the court – to Marian Braun in fact – on vacating Frannie’s contempt citation. He checked his watch – nearly one o’clock.

He read another line, nearly dozed, and started awake.

There on the low table in front of him, weighted down by his gun, was every scrap of paper he’d accumulated over the past four days. He was going to read them thoroughly when he finished his motion. He started to fade again.

The gun. He’d berated himself recently for allowing himself to fall asleep with the gun in plain view next to him, and this time he wasn’t going to do that.

His legs didn’t want to answer him, his shoulder throbbed, and his mouth was dust, but he made himself walk to his desk, open the drawer, put the gun in, and lock it.

It seemed a long uphill mile all the way over to the light switch by the door and then back to the couch, but he finally made it, pulled his jacket over him, and fell to the side, asleep before he knew what had hit him.

29

It was nominally a breakfast meeting in the mayor’s private suite at City Hall, but none of the participants, except one, seemed to have much of an appetite. The plate of sweet rolls sat unmolested in the center of the long, rectangular table.

By ten minutes past seven the mayor himself – Richard Washington – hadn’t made his appearance. But everyone else had assembled and gotten their coffee poured by seven a.m., the hour his honor had appointed for this emergency session.

It was the first time Scott Randall had ever been inside the mayor’s offices and typically, although by a wide margin the youngest person in the room, he was unimpressed. Someday, he thought it was entirely possible he might wind up here himself. He’d do the walls a different color – something that said power a little more distinctly, though still subtly. Maroon, perhaps.

He stood off by himself beside the vast sideboard under an ornately framed mirror at the far end of the room. He was on his second Danish – he’d wolfed the first – and now sipped at his coffee as he surveyed the other guests. Sharron Pratt, his boss, was in an intense discussion with Dan Rigby, the chief of police, and Peter Struler – Randall’s own DA investigator.

The attendance of Marian Braun was a surprise to Randall – Superior Court judges often liked to pretend they were above the political fray. But she had obviously come at the mayor’s bidding, although she was fastidiously ignoring everyone, and obviously unhappy. Pencil in hand, ostentatiously making notes on some thick document in a three-ring black binder, she’d already been sitting at the table when Randall had arrived.

The mayor’s major domo was unfortunately named Richard, too. Scott Randall suppressed a smile recalling that the common name led to the inevitable sobriquets of ‘Big Dick’ and ‘Little Dick’ for the mayor and his assistant. Little Dick was chatting with a couple of staff members that Randall recognized, although their names escaped him.

Finally – Randall checked his watch: seven thirteen – Mayor Washington burst into the room. Purposeful, overworked, impatient, he was talking at high volume to a middle-aged woman who trailed behind him scribbling non-stop in a steno pad. Washington wore a camel’s hair coat over his suit. He was reasonably tall and nearly burly. Broken nose, veins in the face, a lot of unkempt gray hair. Walking fast as he came through the door, he kept coming until he got to his seat at the head of the table, when he stopped almost as though surprised at where he’d come to rest.

‘All right.’ He nearly bellowed, eyes all over the room. ‘Everybody here? Let’s get going.’

Little Dick had appeared behind him and helped him out of the overcoat, an automatic operation the mayor did not acknowledge in any way. By the time Washington was down in his chair, the woman had poured and flavored his coffee – three sugars and cream, Randall noticed – and had disappeared.

The mayor slurped from the cup, swallowed, and waited an instant for one of the staffers to stop fidgeting in her seat. After another moment, Marian Braun looked up, put her pencil down, and closed her binder.

Washington nodded at her and looked around the table, coming to rest on the young man near the far end. ‘You’re Randall,’ he said, pointing a thick finger.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How old are you, son?’

Randall bridled slightly at the condescension, but what could he do? ‘Thirty-three, sir.’

‘You married? Children?’

‘No. Neither.’

Washington had him on the hot seat and seemed content to let him cook a minute. He slurped some more coffee. ‘Somebody pass those rolls down here, will you? Thanks.’ He randomly grabbed from the pile, took a bite, and chewed. ‘You know why we’re all here.’ He wasn’t asking.

Randall swallowed drily. ‘The Frannie Hardy matter, I believe.’

‘That’s correct.’

At this formal corroboration of the reason that this meeting had been called, Marian Braun spoke up. ‘Excuse me, Richard, but that being the case I can’t be here. I can’t discuss a case that’s before my court.’ She was already starting to get up.

But the mayor wasn’t impressed. ‘Why don’t you stick around anyway, Marian, in case the second half of this conversation concerns the court budget for next year. Maybe that will be worthy of your attention.’ He directed a fierce glare at her, and eventually, she yielded to it and settled herself back in her chair.

Richard Washington took another deep draught of coffee, and carefully replaced the cup in its china saucer. The silence was perfect.

The rage came from nowhere, which made it all the more effective. Suddenly the mayor slapped the flat of his palm on the table with enormous force. China rattled and some coffee spilled. Everyone jumped. ‘Do you have any idea the amount of trouble you’ve caused with this, Mr Randall?’ he exploded. ‘Any idea?’

It took a split second even for the quick-witted Randall to recover. ‘It was part of my investigation into-’

Washington interrupted again. ‘You think we’re all operating in a vacuum? Well, let me help you out…’

Pratt interrupted. ‘With respect, sir…’

The mayor didn’t seem any too happy with the DA, either. He faced her and snapped. ‘What, Sharron?’

‘The issue isn’t that it’s caused some political trouble. The issue is legal. Mr Randall did the right thing.’

Washington conjured with that for a moment. His voice with its normal inflection was almost more frightening. ‘I absolutely reject that,’ he said. ‘What he did – what Marian did, too, for that matter – might not be illegal, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was right.’

Pratt retained the serenity that only knowing that you are right can provide. ‘The woman refused to cooperate with the grand jury, Richard. She was belligerent and disrespectful.’

‘She was a housewife worried about picking up her children. That’s what the media seems to have settled on, that’s what Jeff Elliot wrote about yesterday. And now her house has been burned. Did any of you happen to notice that?’

‘That’s irrelevant,’ Pratt responded. ‘What’s your point, Richard?’

‘My point is that I’m taking a tremendous amount of flack for allowing this travesty to continue in my city. Mr Randall, in his inexperience, over-reacted. Folks, I want the woman released. Today.’

A collective gasp, then silence fell around the table.

‘I can’t do that, Richard.’ Braun was firm. ‘The first contempt citation expires tonight, and she has to serve that out. Mr Randall here can call her before the grand jury first thing tomorrow morning, at which point her continued incarceration will be up to her if she decides to talk or Mr Randall if she decides not to.’

The mayor made no effort to hide his sarcasm. ‘Thank you, your honor, but I want it clear that holding innocent citizens in jail out of personal pique doesn’t sit well with me.’

Randall finally found his voice again. ‘The woman is not innocent, your honor. She knows something.’

‘She knows something.’ Washington nodded, his mouth twitching at the corners. ‘I’m glad you brought that up, Mr Randall. Chief Rigby,’ he whirled, ‘has anyone been charged or indicted in the murder of Bree Beaumont to date?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So this Hardy woman knows something about somebody, but we don’t know what and we don’t know if it’s got anything to do with that murder?’

No one answered. Washington glared around the table. ‘And yet she sits in jail.’ He shook his mane of hair in disgust. ‘I called this meeting to acquaint all of you with my very strong feelings about this matter. I’m going to air those feelings at this morning’s press conference, and I wanted to do all of you the courtesy of a heads up. No one has more respect than I do, Marian – and you, too, Sharron – for the judicial process. But I’m hard pressed to believe that this woman knowingly holds the key to a murder. So this is mere pettiness.’ He pointed again at Randall. ‘And, son, for you, this is what we call overweening ambition. It’s not an admirable quality. If you hadn’t tried to end-run the police department, we wouldn’t be here now. Chief Rigby?’

‘Yes, sir.’ From his expression, he knew what was coming. The chief of police was the pawn of the mayor, appointed by him, accountable to him. And Rigby had just found himself on the wrong side of the fence.

‘Apparently you’ve been trying to make kissy-face with Ms Pratt so that her fear and loathing of the police would not too greatly interfere with the day-to-day workings of the department. I even applaud your intentions. But we’ve got a homicide department and it’s not run by Mr Struler here, or by Ms Pratt. If you don’t like Glitsky, get a new head of homicide. But the police department investigates murders and you back up your people. Clear?’

It was to Rigby. But Washington wasn’t through yet. ‘Sharron, Marian. You’re both elected officials. I’m just a layman in matters of the law, but this comes across as serious arrogance and the public seems to have a bad reaction to that particular trait. You might want to think about that.’

Hardy opened his eyes and for the second time in as many days had to take a minute to figure out where he was.

Down a floor, in the lobby of the Freeman Building, he put on a pot of coffee, then went in for a shower. In ten minutes, he was back in his office, dressed in his smoky clothes and drinking coffee from an oversized mug.

The fog remained. He put in a call to Erin, told her where he was, and spoke to the kids, who were polite and even solicitous. Was he all right? They missed him. He and Mom were coming to stay with them so they’d all be together at Grandma and Grandpa’s in two days, right? They really, really, really missed him and Frannie.

He believed them.

After he hung up, he went back to the couch and sat. His brief from the night before was ready to submit for typing downstairs, and he left it with the early morning staff at word processing, then took the stairs two at a time back to the work that waited for him.

The xeroxed pages of Griffin’s notebook.

Griffin had been working on a number of homicides at the time of his death. Snatches from each of them were scattered on each page - names, dates, addresses. Arrows for connections. Exclamation points. Phone numbers.

In his previous passes through the pages, whenever Hardy had run across a name that didn’t appear elsewhere in some other file on Bree Beaumont, he’d assumed it was from one of the other cases. It was tedious and inexact, but he had to eliminate on some criterion, and this had seemed as reasonable as any.

This morning, though, he resolved to read it all through again. Things had changed. And if Damon Kerry had a connection to Baxter Thorne that Griffin had been aware of, he wanted to know about it. Hardy hadn’t even heard of Thorne or FMC the last time he’d read the pages. Nor a lot else.

Carl had been shot on Monday, 5 October. Bree had died on the previous Tuesday, 29 September, so he started there. At least Carl tended to enter dates with some regularity.

It appeared that on day three of his investigation, 10 01, he’d slogged through the usual opening gambit of talking to people who lived in the deceased building. Suddenly the name O. or D. Chinn (or something in a smeared scrawl very much like it) popped up at him.

Hardy had assumed this was an Asian witness from one of Griffin’s other cases and hadn’t considered it at all, but now, suddenly, he remembered the superintendent in Bree’s building and consulted his own notes on his yellow pad. David Glenn. D. Chinn. Close enough.

But there wasn’t much Hardy recognized written under it. There was either a B or an R, then 805. A time? ‘NCD!!!’

Then, a new line. ‘Herit., TTH.!!!’ And a phone number.

Those damn three exclamation points – they clearly meant something significant, but Hardy for the life of him couldn’t figure out what NCD was. TTH could only mean Tuesday Thursday, but what, in turn, was that about?

Hardy checked his watch. Still too early, before eight o’clock, but he went to his desk and called the number next to ‘Herit. TTH!!!’ anyway.

It was a woman’s voice in a heavy Asian accent and Hardy nearly hung up, frustrated for even wasting this much time. This note must have referred to one of Griffin’s other cases after all. But Hardy heard out the recording. ‘Many thank you for calling Heritage Cleaning. Office hours are Monday to Friday, eight thirty to six. Please leave message and call back.’

‘And the case breaks wide open,’ Hardy muttered to himself as he hung up. ‘Now we know where Griffin did his laundry.’ He went back to the couch, to the notebook.

Still on 10 01, the inspector evidently spent part of the day talking to the crime scene and forensics people downtown. There were scribblings Hardy took to be about Strout, Timms, Glitsky. Then, further down, another maddening three exclamation points – ‘fab. wash,’ ‘r. stains!!!’

He shook his head, nearly getting all the way to amused at the prosaic truth. More laundry.

By Friday, Griffin was checking alibis. Apparently he had spoken to Pierce, JP, and perhaps his wife, CP. ‘Time checks?’ Evidently referring to Pierce’s alibi.

The weekend intervened.

Then on Monday, more alibi checking, this time with Kerry. And here Hardy consulted his own notes for corroboration. ‘SWA 1140, SD.’ Southwest Airlines to San Diego around noon. That checked. But what had Kerry done before being picked up to go to the airport? Griffin’s notes didn’t give a clue.

A few lines down the page, and apparently still under Kerry, there was another number: 902. If it were a date, it was over a month out of synch, so Hardy assumed it must be a time. And if it were a time, it would comport very closely with the hour of Bree’s death.

So what had Griffin discovered about Kerry’s whereabouts at nine o’clock? And why so precisely?

It had to be a phone call, Hardy reasoned, but where were the phone records? He flipped quickly through the few pages, but was sure he would have noticed them sooner if they’d been there, and sure enough, they weren’t.

He chewed on possibilities for a couple of minutes, then got up again, went to his desk, and picked up the phone.

‘Glitsky, homicide.’

‘Hardy, bon vivant, scholar, champion of the oppresse-’

‘What?’ Glitsky growled.

‘I’m guessing Kerry called Bree or vice versa on the morning she was killed.’

‘Great minds.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Kerry’s got both a residence and a cell phone. I checked already. I got a rush call in on both phone records this morning, to see if maybe he didn’t sleep in late like he said he did. I’m waiting for the fax.’

‘So what about Griffin? Did any phone records turn up under that back seat?’

‘Not yet. I stopped by the garage again coming in. They’d barely got it cleaned out, much less catalogued.’

‘But Griffin must have gotten the phone records, right? Don’t you guys do that?’

‘I would hope so,’ Glitsky said, ‘though I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.’

‘So where are they?’

‘They’d be with the stuff you have if he’d filed them.’

‘Uh huh. See if you can guess whether they are.’

Glitsky sighed. ‘His desk is cleaned out, Diz. It’s all somewhere. Stuff related to his cases supposedly got forwarded to the new teams.’

‘Maybe they were in one of the bags in the trunk, tagged already?’

‘Then they’d be downstairs in the evidence lockup’. Another sigh. ‘You think there’s some possible phone connection to Kerry?’

‘It’d be sweet if there was.’ Hardy hesitated. ‘I’m really starting to like the good candidate.’

‘I told you last night, I might even vote for him.’

‘That’s not how I meant “like.” ’

‘No,’ Glitsky said. ‘I know what you meant.’

After he hung up, Hardy went back to his couch and his notes. He had come now to the last full day of Griffin’s life, and under Sunday found what he’d been hoping for: ‘Box T, Embarc.2, 10/5, 830. Burn, or Bwn. $!! -??’

He had earlier assumed that this might be a reference to a post-office box in one of the highrises along the Embarcadero. Now he saw it in a different light. It wasn’t Box T. It was Bax T.

Baxter Thorne. As he read it now, Hardy realized that the note referred to an eight thirty a.m. meeting at Thorne’s Embarcadero office.

Hardy stared at the cryptic note. Here, finally, was Thorne connected to Bree in Griffin’s investigation. Had the inspector in fact gone to question Thorne on the morning of his death? Had they then taken a little drive?

Suddenly a detail kicked in. He bolted upright and checked his watch. It had at last gotten to eight o’clock, a little after. Jeff Elliot had told him he was setting a meeting with Thorne first thing this morning, and at it he planned to bait and switch him into a corner.

Half joking, Hardy had warned Jeff to make sure he didn’t go alone. Now there was no joke about it.

He called Jeff’s home and got no response. At the reporter’s personal number at the Chronicle, he left a message, then checked the general switchboard. No. Mr Elliot hadn’t come in yet. Would he care to leave a message?

In a flash, Hardy was grabbing his jacket. At the office door, he stopped still, then turned and went back to his desk.

In thirty seconds, armed, he was flying down the stairs, pausing for a second at the reception desk. ‘Is David in yet?’

Phyllis replied in her usual icy fashion. ‘Not as yet. I haven’t heard from him at all this morning.’

‘Is he at court?’

The gimlet eyes fixed on him. ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Hardy. I haven’t heard from him.’

‘Oh, that’s right.’ Hardy thought it was kind of sad that someday he knew he was going to kill Phyllis. ‘I think you said that.’

‘Twice.’

‘Right.’ He couldn’t help himself. ‘So I guess he’s not in?’

Although it was fifteen or twenty blocks from his office to the Embarcadero, there was no point in trying to drive. Between the morning traffic and parking when he arrived, it would take longer than walking.

So Hardy was breathing hard from the forced march. In spite of that, he was also chilled from the fog and painfully aware of a gnawing in his stomach – he hadn’t eaten since mid-afternoon yesterday, those tasty few bites of lukewarm tortilla pie at Glitsky’s.

The directory listed the Fuels Management Consortium on the twenty-second floor and the elevator had him there in seconds. The office was anything but threatening. Lots of glass – they were floating in the clouds up here. Modern furniture, partitioned workstations, piped new-age music. The hum and bustle of a busy workplace.

‘Can I help you?’The receptionist was a very young woman, perhaps even a teenager, with a warm smile.

Hardy returned it, fantasizing briefly about what it would be like to have a cheerful presence to greet people in place of Phyllis. ‘Is Mr Thorne available?’

‘I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting right now. I can take your name, though. Did you have an appointment?’

‘No, no appointment. Can you tell me, is he by any chance with Jeff Elliot? A Chronicle reporter?’

She looked down, biting her lip, clearly wanting to do the right thing, not knowing if she should give out this information. Hardy smiled at her, told her his name, and spelled it out. ‘I’m a friend of Mr Elliot’s. I’m sure he’d like to know I’m here.’

The streets on the walk over had been cold with the fog-laden wind, but Baxter Thorne’s large, corner office was positively Arctic. The executive director of FMC wasn’t a big man by any means, and seemed a shrunken, pugnacious, malevolent gnome behind the cluttered expanse of his desk.

In his wheelchair, Jeff Elliot simply turned his head when Hardy was announced. Thorne nodded at the nice receptionist and she withdrew silently, closing the door behind her. No pleasantries of any kind were exchanged.

From the feel of things, the bait had been taken and the switch had just begun. ‘As a courtesy, Mr Elliot, although I’m beginning to wonder why I would want to extend one, I’ve admitted your acquaintance. Now what?’

‘You don’t know Mr Hardy?’

Thorne threw a glance Hardy’s way, than came back to Elliot. ‘I’ve never seen him in my life.’ Hardy was taken aback by the voice – deep, quiet, cultured.

Elliot was shaking his head. ‘That’s not what I asked. I asked if you knew Mr Hardy.’

‘Should I?’

‘You seem unable to answer the question, Mr Thorne. I wonder why that is?’

Hardy, believing in his heart that Thorne was in some way behind the arson of his home, had to fight the urge to withdraw his weapon and end the cat and mouse right here. But he thought he’d let Jeff play the hand a while first. At the very least, he already seemed to have gotten under Thorne’s skin.

The gnome cast a gaze out toward the side window, where the fog was swirling past. To Hardy, it felt for a moment as though they were in an airplane. The wind moaned – keened really – just at the threshold of sound.

Thorne looked back at Elliot. ‘I don’t know Mr Hardy.’

‘Are you familiar with the name?’

‘I don’t know. It’s common enough. I may have heard it.’

Elliot seemed to be watching for some giveaway reaction, but if there was one, Hardy didn’t see it. ‘His wife is in jail now for refusing to testify before the grand jury about the death of Bree Beaumont. Have you heard of her? Bree Beaumont?’

Thorne’s face put his impatience on display. ‘What is this? Twenty questions? Who do I know? You’ve asked me about press releases on the Pulgas water poisoning. I’ve told you that you may check with my staff. The releases were not ours. They were not prepared here.’

‘One of my colleagues found them outside in the hallway on Saturday, bound for distribution.’

Thorne shrugged. ‘So what? I didn’t write them. I didn’t put them there. Obviously, someone is trying to make us look bad, connected to these people, as they tried with Mr Kerry over the weekend. There’s a pattern here, all right, but it’s not of my making.’ Disappointed in humanity, he shook his head. ‘If this is your smoking gun, Mr Elliot… well, there’s no story here.’

Spreading his hands, he assayed a cold smile. ‘My clients are good people, Mr Elliot. They’re not terrorists. They’re concerned with exposing the endless lies that the oil companies have foisted upon an ignorant public, lies that polluted our air for years and now threaten-’

‘How about Ellis Jackson? What’s your relationship with him?’

Having established what he thought was a plausible deniability, Thorne softened slightly, the voice become nearly avuncular. ‘What about him?’

‘Is he your client?’

A sad shake of the head. ‘I’ve told you I’m not at liberty to disclose the identities of my clients. I of course knew Ellis Jackson when I worked for SKO.’ Another reasonable smile. The last time I checked, there was no crime in that. He’s a great man. Now, if you’re…‘

‘Not quite.’ Hardy spoke up for the first time. ‘You never answered Jeff’s question about knowing Bree Beaumont. Did you talk with a Sergeant Griffin about her death?’

‘Yes, I believe that was his name.’

‘Then how could you not have heard of her?’

‘I never said I hadn’t heard of her. Of course I know who she was. She’s been one of the most vocal and recognizable names in the field over the last decade. She was extremely courageous to change sides and go up against Goliath as she did.’ He paused for emphasis, adding matter of factly, ‘And of course they killed her for it.’

‘The oil companies?’

‘Can you doubt it?’

Hardy snorted in exasperation. ‘I don’t think so.’

But Thorne remained infuriatingly unruffled. ‘I can’t really tell you what to think, Mr Hardy. But if you think people, individuals, don’t die over Big Oil, don’t get killed, I recommend that you catch up on your research. Have you been following events in Nigeria recently? There are literally millions of other examples. And that’s leaving out most of our wars from Kuwait going all the way back to World War Two. Oil and market share.’

The small, quiet, powerful man stood behind his desk. ‘Now, really, I’m afraid that’s all I have time for. I think you’ll be able to find your way out. Oh, and Mr Elliot,’ – a rictus smile – ‘the libel laws in this state are quite severe, as I’m sure you know. It’s one way my clients can combat an unscrupulous enemy. They have been quite aggressive in pursuing legal redress for unsubstantiated news stories.’

On the way out, Hardy pushing Jeff’s wheelchair, the sweet young thing at the reception desk wished them a good morning, and gave Hardy a little wave.

30

Frannie sat on the table in the attorney’s room at the jail, swinging her legs. She looked like a schoolgirl, the impression reinforced by the fact that she’d put her hair into pigtails. To Hardy, the jail’s jumpsuit was still jarring to see on her. But after yesterday’s two visits up in the homicide detail, he found the jail garb easier to accept. Soon, he told himself, it would all be behind them. Today was the last day. He prayed.

As soon as they got Ron’s note out of the way. But like everything else, this wasn’t going smoothly. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘You’re not sure you’re going to be OK with this? With telling about Ron?’

Her face took on a stubborn set that Hardy didn’t like to see. He forced himself to speak in a calm tone.

‘Frannie, listen. By the time it gets to the grand jury again, if it does, it won’t matter. He’ll be gone, if he isn’t already.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He doesn’t want to move the kids, start over someplace else. He’ll wait. Just like he said he would.’

‘But either way, he’s released you from the confidence.’ Hardy didn’t want to push too hard trying to convince her, but he felt he had to nail this down. If it came to it, tomorrow Frannie would have to disclose Ron’s secret.

It wasn’t sitting at all well with her. But she nodded. ‘I hate to give that creep Scott Randall the satisfaction. Besides, from all you’ve told me, it sounds like Ron isn’t anywhere near the best suspect anymore.’

‘No, I don’t think he is,’ Hardy admitted. ‘But until they have another one dumped in their laps, they’re going to pretend.’

‘But really, it still comes down to me, doesn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’re close. Abe’s close. Maybe it’ll only be another day…’ The legs had stopped swinging. Her hands were folded in front of her now, her eyes cast downward. ‘What I’m saying is that if I still don’t tell, maybe Ron gets some more breathing room.’

Hardy was sitting casually on one of the wooden chairs that surrounded the table. It was all he could do to remain in that posture. He felt the blood racing in his temples, and willed himself to keep his voice even. ‘Ron doesn’t want to you do that, Frannie. I can’t imagine why you’d want to do that.’

She raised her agonized eyes. ‘It’s not a matter of wanting, Dismas. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. But I know what Max and Cassandra have already gone through, and as soon as I open my mouth, their world is over – don’t you see that? If I can give you or Abe more time to save them…’

But Hardy was shaking his head. ‘That’s not what’s going to happen, Frannie. What’s going to happen is even if you don’t talk on Tuesday, your friend Mr Randall is going to get his indictment on Ron.’

‘But why? There’s still no evidence, is there? More than there was last week?’

Hardy agreed. ‘Very little. But that doesn’t matter. There’s probably enough for a grand jury. Ron’s flight alone, if it comes to it. Phony credit cards, fake IDs, consciousness of guilt. And as soon as Ron is indicted, it’s over for him and the kids. He’ll be in the system and from there that’s what will take over – the system. Regardless of what you do. That’s the good news, Frannie. It’s out of your hands.’

‘So you’re saying I have to tell.’

‘I’m saying it wouldn’t do any good not to.’ Suddenly his temper flared. ‘Jesus Christ, Frannie! It gets you out of here. What do you want?’

‘What I want,’ she yelled back at him, ‘is to go to our home which isn’t there anymore.’ She angrily shook away the beginning of tears. ‘And be able to hug our children.’

Hardy longed to reach for her, to tell her it was OK, that they were still all right. But he wasn’t sure they were all right. He didn’t miss the omission of himself as among those she wanted to hug. ‘You can do that, Frannie,’ he said evenly. ‘At Erin’s. We can all be there. Rebuild.’ He added hesitantly. ‘The house and us.’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

His stomach clutched at him, but he had to ask. ‘No what?’

‘You say it, but I don’t know if you really want to do that. What it might take.’

‘And what is that?’

Now Frannie paused, took a deep breath, and let it out. ‘Being each other’s lives again.’

‘But we are…’

Holding up a hand, she stopped him. ‘Dismas. Remember when we were first together. Remember that? You were working just as hard then. You had your trials and your cases and your career. But mostly you had us, remember?

‘And you’d come home as early as you could every day and I’d be on the front stoop with the Beck and Vincent, all of us waiting for you. And they’d come running to greet you, hugging your legs, so happy to have Daddy home again. And you so happy to see them, too. Remember that? And then you and I would go in and feed them and put them to bed and then go talk and laugh and wind up making love more often than not. Didn’t that used to happen? I’m not making that up in my memory, am I?’

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘No, that’s how it was.’

‘So what happened?’

He had come around on the chair now, hunched over. Elbows on his knees, his hands together. His shoulders slumped. ‘I don’t know, Frannie. Everybody got too busy. Certainly nobody cared what time I came home. Nobody even says hi anymore when I walk in the house. You’re doing so many kid things you’re always exhausted, and if it’s not about kids, you’re not interested. We don’t have date night anymore. Where’s any of our life together?’ He looked up at her. ‘Take your pick, Frannie. And OK, it was a lot me, all the things you say. But it was a two-way street.’

‘And you say you really want to go back to that?’

He thought for a beat. ‘No, maybe not to what we had a week ago,’ he said. ‘Something better than that, closer to what we used to have. But still with you and the kids.’

After a long, silent moment, she slid off the table and walked over to the door where the guard waited. For a second, Hardy was afraid she was simply going to ask to be escorted out. But she turned to face him. ‘The best thing,’ she said, ‘would be if I didn’t have to tell.’

Then she knocked for the guard.

Glitsky wasn’t in his office. Nobody was in homicide at all, which seemed a bit strange at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. Hardy sat himself at one of the inspector’s desks and opened his briefcase.

He thought he’d done pretty well with Griffin’s notes this morning, and now he was going to pull out his own notes and take a minute to go over what he’d written about Canetta’s findings. He stopped before he’d really begun.

He knew.

Marie Dempsey. Canetta had told him that he’d discovered she had been the secretary of the insurance guy, Tilton. That she’d actually been laid off in the wake of the claims adjuster’s decision to hold off payment on Bree’s life insurance until Ron had been cleared of any implication in the death.

So here was this woman without a job with the insurance company, calling Ron Beaumont twice – or was it three times? – in a two-day period. She wasn’t calling him to walk him through processing his claim. It seemed weeks ago now, though in fact it was days, and Hardy had been concentrating on Frannie when he had heard those calls at the penthouse, but he remembered coming away with the impression that Marie was personal, not business.

He reached for the telephone on the desk and punched for information.

‘This is Letitia. What city please?’

‘Yes. In San Francisco. The phone number please of a Marie Dempsey.’

‘How would you spell that, sir?’

He spelled it out, his patience all but eroded. Dempsey, after all, wasn’t exactly Albuquerque, spelling-wise. But Letitia eventually got it. ‘I don’t show any Marie Dempsey, sir. Do you know what street she lives on?’

‘No. How about just the initial?’

‘M?’

Hardy ground his teeth. ‘That would be the one, yes.’

‘I show ten, no eleven M. Dempseys.’

‘OK,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll take them all.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m only allowed to give out two numbers at a time.’

‘Please, Letitia, this is important. There may be lives at stake. I’m not kidding. Could you please just give me the numbers?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m really not allowed to give out that information. Would you like to speak to a supervisor?’

‘Can your supervisor read me the eleven numbers?’

‘No, sir. I don’t believe so. If you have access to a telephone directory, they should all be listed in there, though.’

‘Yes, well, you see, I don’t have a phone book handy, which is kind of why I called you.’

‘Well,’ Letitia said brightly, cheerfully, ‘let me give you the first number. It’s…’

Hardy wrote quickly, then found himself listening to a mechanical voice telling him that after he got his number, the phone company could dial his call direct for a charge of thirty-five cents. ‘Press one if…’

He slammed the receiver down. Glitsky was in the doorway, pointing at the telephone. ‘That’s city property,’ he said. ‘You break it, you buy it.’

‘You got a phone book around here?’ Hardy asked.

‘I doubt it,’ Glitsky said. ‘They’re harder to find than a cop when you need one. You want to guess how many homicides we got this weekend, Hallowe’en?’

‘Including Canetta?’

‘Sure, let’s include him.’

‘Three?’

‘More.’

‘Two hundred and sixteen?’

‘Seven. Average is one point five a week. And we get seven in two days. I’ve got no inspectors left.’

Hardy nodded, looking around. ‘And this would also explain your mysterious absence from your office all morning. I thought you might have gotten tired and decided to take some time off.’

‘Nope.’ Glitsky was terse. ‘The first part’s right, but that wasn’t it.’

In his office, though, Glitsky did find a three-year-old phone book and it had seven M. Dempseys listed. The first one had the same number Hardy had written down from Letitia and he took that as a good sign.

He was copying and Glitsky was talking, shuffling through a pile of paper from his in-box. ‘So if Kerry ever called the mayor as he said he would, I haven’t heard about it, although as you’ve noticed, I haven’t exactly been waiting by the phone.’

Hardy looked up. ‘He’s not going to call the mayor. That would only raise the profile around him. He just wants this – and by “this” I mean “you” – to go away.’

‘You think I gave him the impression last night that I was going away? That he scared me off?’

‘If you did, it was real subtle. What?’

Glitsky had stopped at a faxed page. He tsked a couple of times. ‘Mr Kerry, Mr Kerry.’ He held the page out to Hardy.

‘AT &T Wireless for the morning of 29 September. Here’s a conversation beginning at seven ten a.m., duration twenty-two minutes. Somebody called him.’

‘The day he slept in?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Maybe he only meant he slept in until seven and we just assumed he meant it was later.’

‘That’s probably it,’ Glitsky replied sarcastically. He was shoving paper around on his desk again. ‘You got Bree’s number anywhere on you?’

As it happened, Hardy still had it in his briefcase. It was the number from which Kerry had received his call. ‘Maybe I won’t vote for him after all,’ Glitsky said.

Hardy sat back, crossed his arms. ‘So they have a fight first thing in the morning-’

Glitsky sat up straight, snapped his fingers, truly excited now. ‘He’s the father. She told him she was pregnant. She was going to blackmail him.’

All right, Hardy thought with relief. He never had to break his vow of silence to Jeff Elliot. Glitsky had come to it on his own. ‘That’s a reasonable guess,’ he said mildly.

‘He waited till he knew Ron had taken the kids to school, strolled over…’

But Hardy was shaking his head.

‘Why not?’ Glitsky asked.

‘No. Not himself. He called Thorne. Thorne called one of his operatives.’

Glitsky glanced back down at the faxed page. ‘Not from his cell phone anyway.’

‘Damn,’ Hardy said. ‘Why is it never easy?’

‘It’s just one of the general rules. But why would Kerry calling Thorne make it easy?’

‘This is one slick bastard, Abe.’ Hardy explained about the leaflets that had been printed up before the MTBE dumping, and about Thorne’s explanation for it.

Glitsky was enjoying the recitation. He was paying attention, sitting back in his chair, his fingers templed at his lips. When Hardy finished, he spoke. ‘So these terrorists who were trying to lay the blame on Thorne, they somehow assumed that Jeff Elliot’s colleague would just happen to drop by on Saturday afternoon and find the flyers in the hallway?’ Glitsky was almost smiling. ‘Call me cynical, but that’s a stretch.’

‘We thought so, too. Jeff and I.’ Hardy moved forward, put his hands on the desk between them, and spoke urgently. ‘Abe, you connect Thorne to the MTBE gang and you win a prize.’

‘Really. Gee, that never occurred to me.’

‘I bet it did. But look, it gets better. Thorne wrote these leaflets, probably by himself at his apartment. So you get a warrant and have somebody search the place. You find a piece of paper, a computer file, and you solve a murder, maybe two or three.’

Glitsky cocked his head to one side, all interest. ‘I’m listening. What’s two or three?’

‘He talked to Griffin the morning he got killed. Griffin.’

‘Who did? Thorne?’

A nod.

‘Are you sure of this?’

Hardy explained his reading of Griffin’s notes – that the meeting with Thorne had been one of the last entries, 5 October, eight thirty a.m. ‘It was that day, Abe, count on it. And you’ll love this: Elliot thinks Thorne is bankrolling the good governor Damon Kerry through SKO. Somehow.’

‘How?’

‘Nobody knows, but if there’s anything to it at all, it connects dirty tricks to Damon Kerry, who we liked so much last night and maybe even more this morning.’

Glitsky was still sitting back, contemplating. ‘Thorne has erased any computer work, Diz. If not immediately, then for sure by now after talking with you and Elliot.’

‘OK. Still, there might be hard copy in the garbage cans? Some dumpster behind the building.’

‘I know, I know.’ Glitsky had come forward and was shuffling more pages on his desk. He spoke almost to himself. ‘But I’ve got no inspectors.’

Finally, he opened his desk and withdrew what Hardy recognized as a blank warrant form. He grabbed a pen from the middle drawer of his desk. ‘OK,’ he said, beginning to write. ‘We’ve got the leaflets. We’ve got Griffin on his last day. So. Help me here. What else are we looking for?’

Hardy considered for a moment. ‘The smoking gun connection to Kerry. Valens. Receipts, Thorne’s phone records, anything.’

‘I’m going to need some very serious physical evidence to get anywhere near Kerry. It’s going to take more than a phone call he forgot.’

‘Maybe get some DNA on him, and check it against Bree’s baby?’

‘That’ll take six weeks if he’s not elected, for ever if he is. And then, even if he is the father, nobody puts him at Bree’s place that morning.’ The scar between Abe’s lips stood out. He shook his head in frustration. ‘Even on a normal mortal, much less our popular politician, nothing remotely convictable.’

‘Not even indictable,’ Hardy agreed.

‘OK, then.’ Glitsky the strategist was back at it. ‘We go for Thorne and squeeze from that direction. You talked to him. Can you think of anything else on him?’

‘My house.’

The lieutenant met Hardy’s gaze and nodded somberly. As a salve to his friend, he made a pretense of writing that down. ‘I’ll check with the fire department. What else?’

Hardy wracked his brain but after nearly a minute still came up empty. ‘Nothing, Abe.’ He sighed. ‘Oh, except I did discover where Carl Griffin did his laundry.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Glitsky frowned. ‘Carl never went to a laundry in his whole life.’

After Glitsky left to go try and get his warrant signed, Hardy copied down the remaining numbers for M. Dempsey, then sat back pensively. Glitsky had closed the door when he’d gone, and now in the tiny cubicle, Hardy could work without distractions and he needed to concentrate.

It seemed that every answer he got raised another question. How wonderful, he’d thought, that Glitsky had found Bree’s lengthy call to Kerry on the morning of her murder. But something about the information had nagged at him, and now here it was again. On his copied pages of Griffin’s notes – the time 9:02. Or that had been his assumption, and it had led directly to Kerry’s phone records and his lie. But the phone call hadn’t been at 9:02. It had begun at seven ten.

So what was 902?

Then there was Heritage Cleaners, Griffin’s laundry. Hardy pulled the phone on Glitsky’s desk around and reached a woman who spoke English so poorly that he settled for what he hoped was the address of the place and politely thanked her, then hung up. He had no more strength this morning for disjointed conversations over that miracle of modern communication, the telephone. He would try to get time to stop by Heritage later in the day – when? when? – and maybe see what they did, why Griffin had put them in his notes.

It was all a mess.

He checked his watch. After eleven o’clock already.

And today was his last day to get it done. Frannie had told him that the best thing would be if she didn’t have to tell, and the only way that would happen was if Hardy provided some answers before they questioned Frannie tomorrow again in front of the grand jury.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, with his mind vacant and receptive, he came to understand precisely what Frannie had meant by her last cryptic, challenging remark. Hardy had been telling her he’d listen to her. They’d work things out. He’d try to care more about what she did, what she cared about. So she’d heard him out and turned at the door, telling him OK, this is what is truly important to me.

Fish or cut bait.

31

‘Your honor, if I may.’

J. Marian Braun looked up from her desk in her chambers. She wore wire-rimmed half-glasses under a barely controlled riot of gray hair and made no effort at all to conceal her displeasure at the interruption, or at the identity of the caller. ‘You may not. I’m at lunch. I’ll be back at my bench in forty-five minutes, counsellor. Talk to my clerk.’

Hardy didn’t budge. He was taking a chance, but felt he had no choice. ‘Your honor. Please. Time is short.’

Her scowl deepened. The mayor’s outrageous effrontery and reprimand, the DA’s arrogance and political posturing – all of this before she’d finished her morning coffee – still galled her deeply. To say nothing of the potential legal ramifications to which she’d exposed herself by allowing the mayor to bully her into staying for the duration of his meeting. She’d committed a serious ethical breach in this Frannie Hardy matter, and could only hope it wouldn’t come back to bite her.

And now here was the damn woman’s own husband, no doubt wanting more ex parte communication. Well, at least here was someone far beneath her on the pecking order. She could chew him up and spit him out with impunity and probably feel a little better after she did. If they were all trying to double-team her to subvert her ruling, she would pick them off one by one, starting with this meddling lawyer.

‘Time is short, Mr Hardy. You’re damn right. What do you want? And I’d better not hear one word of whining about the situation your wife put herself in.’ She ostentatiously consulted her wristwatch. ‘You have three minutes and I’m counting.’

Hardy wanted to strangle Marian Braun where she sat. At the very least he longed to try to make her understand the staggering difficulties to which she had subjected his entire family. But neither of those served his purpose here this morning. This would remain impersonal, a legal matter, nothing more.

He moved forward rapidly, placed his briefcase on the chair before her desk, and opened it. ‘I have here,’ he said, ‘a writ for a habeas hearing on my wife. I’d like you to grant an alternative writ for tomorrow morning.’

The frown remained, but Braun laughed harshly through it. ‘Are you joking? What are you doing here with that? If you’ve got grounds to vacate the contempt, submit your motion in the normal fashion.’

‘Your honor…’

The judge wasn’t listening. ‘And assuming you had grounds for this writ at all, do you expect the DA’s office to answer by tomorrow morning? What do you hope to accomplish by this?’

‘Quash the contempt charge before the grand jury.’

The judge drummed her pencil against the desktop. She observed him over the tops of her glasses. ‘I admire your nerve, Mr Hardy, although I can’t say the same for your wife’s.’

Hardy nearly had to bite his tongue off, but he wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion about Frannie. ‘I am specifically not addressing the judicial contempt, your honor. No one is arguing that. Only the grand jury citation.’

‘Well, there’s a rare and welcome display of good judgment.’ She drew Hardy’s piece of paper over to her, scanned it quickly, and repeated her initial response. ‘You don’t say she’ll talk and you don’t say why she doesn’t have to. All you say is it would be nice to let her go. This belongs with the DA. They make this decision, not me.’ She pushed the paper back over to him. He was dismissed.

But he didn’t move. Braun glared up at him, and pushed the document another time. ‘I’m going to lose my temper if you don’t…’

‘I don’t trust the DA,’ Hardy said. ‘I can’t take it there.’

Braun’s eyes narrowed.

Hardy pressed on. ‘It’s been my experience that this particular administration will take a convenient position in their offices, and when it’s on the record, suddenly it changes. In this case, they’ve abused the grand jury process-’

‘That’s a strong charge. How have they done that?’

‘Your honor, with all respect, you know as well as I do. The grand jury is a prosecutor’s tool. But it’s not supposed to be a blunt instrument.’

‘And that means?’

‘It means Scott Randall’s trying to make a high-profile case out of whole cloth and he’s using my wife to do it. How many times did you see his name in the paper this weekend?’

‘Not flatteringly.’

‘What does he care? In six months it’s all forgotten except the name recognition.’ Hardy was surprised Braun had let him argue even this much – he must have struck a chord with her. She knew that this DA’s administration had mostly a political, not a legal, agenda. As a judge, she’d no doubt run across her own examples of dishonesty and sleaze. Hardy played another variation on this theme.

‘Your honor, we’d all like to believe the DA is going to do the right thing. But even if they were convinced this wasn’t going anywhere with Ron Beaumont, there are folks down the Hall who would leave my wife in jail just to prove that they can.’

‘Except my understanding is that Ron Beaumont is likely to be indicted.’

‘If he is, there won’t be enough evidence to bring him to trial.’

Braun had just about reached her limit. ‘Well, that’s the system, Mr Hardy. Get used to it.’

‘The system’s broken, your honor. If they’re going to keep my wife in jail, at least make them do it out in the open.’

Braun put her elbows on her desk. ‘You know, Mr Hardy, this morning I had the mayor himself try to circumvent the judicial process. I’m tired of people who want to keep making this stuff up as they go along.’ She straightened up, pushing the paper away from her a last time. ‘You got your pitch; take it to the DA. Your three minutes are up.’

Hardy had one last shot and he hadn’t wanted to take it unless there was no alternative. But now he’d gotten to that. Still, it was a tremendous gamble. If it didn’t succeed, the consequences would be devastating to his credibility, to his entire career. ‘What if I can produce Beaumont at the hearing?’

Braun stared at him. ‘I’d understood he’d fled.’

Hardy elected not to answer directly. ‘Scott Randall doesn’t have anything, your honor. He jailed my wife to save his own face. If he’s got a case, let him make it in open court if he can.’

‘You’re telling me Ron Beaumont will testify at this habeas hearing tomorrow?’

Hardy nodded. His heart was stuck in his throat. ‘If he’s not in the courtroom, there’s no hearing.’

He saw her wrestling with it. Braun had a temper, and he was personally enraged at what she’d done to Frannie. But like most Superior Court judges, she prided herself on her basic sense of fairness. Hardy counted on that now.

It was no secret that this particular DA administration systematically abused the grand jury process. Finally, because of Scott Randall’s arrogance and grandstanding, Braun herself had just been squeezed and humiliatingly dressed down by the mayor.

She peered over her glasses, her mouth a grim pencil stroke. ‘I want you to understand that if I wasn’t so pissed off at your wife, I wouldn’t give you this hearing. But I’m not supposed to let my personal feelings get in the way, and if I don’t give you this hearing, I’m not going to be sure it wasn’t personal.’

She pulled the writ over and scratched an angry signature at the bottom. As Hardy reached for it, she held it back one last second. ‘If I take the bench tomorrow and Ron Beaumont isn’t in the courtroom, you don’t even get three minutes.’

Lou the Greek’s had a kind of Chinese version of paella as the special. Chunks of octopus (perhaps tire), sausage, maybe chicken – it was hard to tell – and some red stuff, all mixed into the rice with soy sauce. Since every day the special was the only item on the menu, Hardy ordered it. A wave of hunger had hit him in Glitsky’s office and he would gladly have ordered even some variant of spam musabi if it had been offered. It probably would have been better than the paella which, he had to admit, didn’t quite sing.

But he ate most of it, sitting in one of the window booths which, at the underground Lou’s, began at the level of the alley outside. As it was, he could have been eating tires for all he cared about the food.

Something far more compelling commanded his attention – the love letters of Jim Pierce to Bree Beaumont, the ones she’d saved in the back of her high-school yearbook. There were a dozen of them, all of them relatively short – half a page or a little more – and painfully, adolescently passionate. Hallmark poetry that made him wince: ‘Never have/I touched or felt/Never/Even knew/Oh, the craving/Touching/Wanting/ Only you.’

Three were on Caloco stationery. None were dated, although all of the paper had grown brittle, leading Hardy to conclude that the last of them had been written several years before.

So David Freeman had been right again, Hardy thought with awe when he put down the last letter. And why should that have been a surprise? Pierce might be married to a world-class beauty, as President Kennedy had been, but this was no guarantee that he wouldn’t have affairs. Human nature, Freeman had said. Men want a lot; women want the best one.

Just as Hardy felt they were finally closing in on some kind of Kerry/Thorne connection to Bree’s death, he didn’t need this complication. He could understand Pierce’s denials, especially in the presence of his wife. And judging from the age of these letters, the relationship might have ended years before, possibly before either of them were even married. But the discovery was unwelcome – he was trying to narrow his list of suspects, not expand it. And if Pierce and Bree had ever been lovers – now a foregone conclusion – it put the oilman back in the picture, at least tangentially.

‘How was it today, Diz?’

Lou the Greek himself hovered over the table, breaking Hardy out of his reverie. He smiled, indicating his nearly cleaned plate. ‘Maybe the best ever, Lou.’

The proprietor showed a lot of teeth under his thick gray mustache. ‘People been saying that all morning. I’m thinking we might go regular with it.’ He slid into the booth across the way. The dark eyes were not smiling anymore. ‘Hey, I hear some things. You, your wife, the house? You OK?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘Getting by, Lou, getting by.’

‘You need anything, you let me know.’ He brushed at his mustache, embarrassed. Lou hesitated another moment, then nodded. ‘OK, then.’ He extended his hand and Hardy took it. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘And today’s on me.’

Hardy thanked Lou and, struck by the unexpected kindness, watched him as he began to schmooze another table. It was one of the few personal interactions he’d ever had with the man in twenty-some years and he wasn’t at all sure where it had come from.

Their common humanity?

The thought brought him up short. Unexpectedly, the urge to goodness was still in the world. It wasn’t him alone, or Frannie alone. He came back to Ron Beaumont – if he was innocent, and Hardy was now willing to believe he was, he was living a nightmare as hellish as Hardy’s own, or Frannie’s.

And his wife was right – ‘the best thing,’ she’d said. The options were endless, but the best thing was if she didn’t have to tell. And for that to happen, they were all depending on him. On his judgment and skill, yes. But more than those, really, at the base of it, on his humanity.

Turning back to Pierce’s letters, he realized with surprise that he wasn’t going to go anywhere with them. At least not today. There was no time. For the moment, he knew all he needed about Pierce. He’d lied under duress. He had loved Bree. Maybe he’d even killed her – out of jealousy, rejection, his own despair.

But the trail to the truth did not lead through Pierce from where Hardy sat now. He had to choose his best course, and that led him back to Carl Griffin, who had died pursuing the same thing.

32

Heritage Cleaners ran its business out of an upstairs office overlooking a grimy, wet and – today – windswept alley in Chinatown. Hardy turned off Grant and into the narrow passageway. A thin trickle of some kind of effluent flowed down a narrow and shallow concrete trough that bisected the way. He passed several dumpsters rich with the odors of cabbage, rotten meat, and urine. The body of a small brown puppy lay pitiably against one of the buildings. Hardy couldn’t help himself – he bent over, closer, to be sure it couldn’t be saved. Then he gathered some newspaper, wrapped up the bundle, and placed it in one of the smelly dumpsters.

Checking the address, Hardy ascended the dark flight of stairs. If he were going to take his shirts to the cleaners, he thought this would be his last choice. But once inside, the office was a surprise. Though still a far cry from the modern antiseptic bustle of FMC’s headquarters, Heritage was well lit, apparently organized, a couple of computers at some workstations.

And – the big surprise – it wasn’t a laundry.

A frail-looking, elderly Chinese man sporting bifocals and a starched, white collarless shirt looked up and rose from one of the fours desks when the door opened. He spoke good if accented English. ‘I am Mr Lee. How may we help you?’

Hardy handed him a business card. ‘I am helping to investigate the death of a police officer and I wonder if I could have few minutes of your time.’

Mr Lee checked the card again. ‘Are you with the police?’

‘No.’ At the man’s frown, Hardy pressed ahead. ‘But I believe the officer may have come here and spoken to someone about a woman’s death.’

The man did the math in his head. ‘Two deaths now?’

‘Actually, three or more.’ He paused to let the fact sink in. ‘I’m working with the police.’ This wasn’t precisely true, and Hardy was about to tell Mr Lee he could call Abe to smooth things over, but saw that he was nodding, accepting. ‘The inspector was Carl Griffin.’

Again, a frown. Deeper this time. ‘A big gentleman, wasn’t he? Not too clean? He’s dead?’

Hardy felt a spark of hope. ‘Yes. He was killed a few weeks ago. I was hoping to find out what he questioned you about.’

The nodding continued, then Mr Lee motioned for Hardy to follow, and led him over to the desk he’d lately abandoned. The old man worked with the keyboard, nodded, and pointed at the screen. ‘Twelve oh six Broadway,’ he said. ‘Our customers.’

‘Do you clean the whole building?’

‘No. There are, I believe twenty-three or four units, all individually owned. We contract through the superintendent for the public areas, and many residents are happy with our service.’

‘And Bree Beaumont was one of them?’

‘Yes.’ Mr Lee shot a glance at Hardy, and ventured a personal comment. ‘It was very sad about her.’

‘Yes it was,’ he said. Sadness was all over this case. He gave the sentiment a moment. ‘So what is your schedule there, for cleaning? I gather you go on Tuesday and Thursday – is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you do each place twice a week?’

‘No. Generally, we clean once. Half the units on one day, the other half on the other.’

‘And which was Bree?’

‘Thursday. Every Thursday.’

Hardy saw the reason for Griffin’s earlier visit. If Heritage had come on Tuesday, possibly within an hour or two of Bree’s death and before the crime scene unit had arrived, then trace evidence might be found among the cleaning supplies, in the vacuum cleaner bags and so on. But evidently this had not happened.

Still, he wanted to be certain. ‘So you didn’t go to her apartment on the day of her death?’

‘No. That’s what Sergeant Griffin asked us.’

‘Did he ask if any of your staff saw anybody unusual in the hallways? Anything strange that they noticed?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Mr Lee was still seated, and now sat back, folding his arms patiently. ‘But – have you been there? Yes? – then you know. It’s really not that type of apartment building. There’s only two units on each floor, except for the penthouse, where there is one.’

Hardy remembered. At Bree’s twelfth floor, there was simply a landing with a window and a door. Residents weren’t exactly out wandering in the halls, loitering about in the locked lobby. ‘So there was really nothing to be found in any of your supplies. The crime scene had already been there by the time you came on Thursday?’

Mr Lee shook his head. ‘I don’t know that. But Inspector Griffin… just one minute.’ Pulling open the drawer again, Lee pushed junk around for a minute, found that he wanted, extracted it, and handed it up to Hardy.

It was a crinkled piece of paper. Hardy’s pulse quickened as he realized what it probably was – a sheet torn from Griffin’s notebook. In the by now familiar scrawl, Hardy read: ‘10 01. Received from Heritage Cleaners. One Gold and Platinum Movado Men’s watch, serial number 81-4-9880/8367685. Evid/case: 981113248. C. Griffin, SFPD Badge 1123.’

‘Where did you get this?’ Hardy asked. ‘Where is the watch?’

Mr Lee shrugged eloquently. ‘When the inspector came here, he said he still needed the watch. I should hold the receipt. If no one claimed it, eventually it might come to us.’

‘But how did you get the receipt in the first place?’

‘The inspector gave it to my supervisor in the building. They found the watch when cleaning.’

‘And this was when your people found the watch? On the Thursday?’

Lee considered a moment. ‘Yes. The date on the receipt is October first, see. A Thursday.’

‘And no one has claimed it since? Reported it missing?’

‘No,’ Lee said. ‘Not to my people.’

Hardy wasn’t surprised to hear this. If the watch inadvertently got left behind, say snapping off during a struggle at the crime scene, it would be the height of folly to go back and try to get it. But stranger things had happened.

Of course, Hardy realized, it might also be Ron’s watch. With the upheaval in his life since Bree’s death, he simply might not have missed it. But Griffin would have just asked Ron about that. Wouldn’t he?

Instead, he’d taken it as evidence, logged to the Beaumont case number. The problem was that by this time, Hardy knew the file backwards and forwards, and there wasn’t any watch in the evidence lockup or anywhere else.

Hardy asked if he might have a copy of the receipt. When Mr Lee returned from making one, he handed Hardy the copy, then clucked sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help more, but I haven’t even heard about Sergeant Griffin’s death until just now.’ Mr Lee wasn’t rushing him, but clearly he felt this investigation had little to do with him or his staff. It had taken enough of his time on a work day.

Hardy couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more here. There had to be. He’d referred again to the notes before coming and Griffin had included his maddening exclamation points.

But now they were moving toward the exit. The words ‘fabric wash’ came to him, so he stopped at the door. ‘Mr Lee, one last question. Do you do any clothes cleaning at all? Laundry work? Say one of your clients leaves a pile of clothes by a washing machine – would you dump it in for them? Or dry them?’

The proprietor considered this, then shook his head. ‘We remove window drapery occasionally, or upholstery fabric, but no. Generally, we don’t clean clothes.’

‘And what about Bree’s drapes or furniture? Did you remove either of those for dry cleaning? Were there any stains you needed to remove?’

‘No. That would have been a special order, and I checked into that with Sergeant Griffin when he came here. And again, I am so sorry to hear about him.’

Scott Randall heard the rumor from one of the other assistant DAs, who in turn had heard it from one of the forensic guys who’d worked with Sergeant Leon Timms, unhappily cleaning and cataloguing through the night under the back seat of Griffin’s car.

Although Glitsky had cautioned Timms and his staff not to discuss any possible relationship between the murders of Bree Beaumont, Carl Griffin, and Phil Canetta, by some inexplicable mystery of nature the word had leaked out.

Now Randall was at a hastily called late lunchtime strategy session with his boss and his investigator, Peter Struler. They had just taken their seats at Boulevard, an incredibly fine restaurant that was well off the beaten track of the rank and file of workers at the Hall of Justice.

Pratt, still smarting from her dressing down by the mayor, was inclined to dismiss the rumor, but Randall needed her support to move ahead, and he wasn’t going to let it go. ‘I think we have to assume it’s true, Sharron. It sounds right. It feels true, doesn’t it?’

Peter Struler was a fifteen-year, no-nonsense investigator and he spoke with a veteran’s confidence. ‘It’s true,’ he volunteered. ‘Everybody assumed Griffin got hit on some dope sting, but he was doing Beaumont. Ballistics confirms the same gun whacked Canetta.’

Pratt’s mouth hung open for a moment. ‘Is that a fact? You know that for sure?’

Struler nodded. ‘As soon as Scott told me what he’d heard, I moseyed on down to the lab, checked it out with some of the good guys. Same gun.’

‘The same gun.’ Pratt was trying to fit this information into her world view.

‘The same gun that killed Griffin,’ Randall explained again.

‘But what was Canetta’s connection to Beaumont?’

‘Well, isn’t that funny you should ask?’ Randall tried to control an arrogant smirk and wasn’t entirely successful. He leaned over the small table. ‘You know the Frannie Hardy we took such grief about this morning? Poor little innocent thing.’

Pratt’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, our old friend, her husband the lawyer? He’s up to his ears in this. Canetta was freelancing for him.’

‘For him? What do you mean?’

Struler butt in harshly. ‘Hardy was using Canetta’s badge to get information he couldn’t get on his own.’

‘On what?’

Randall gestured expansively. ‘All of this. Anything he could.’

‘But why?’

‘He’d probably tell you he wants to help his wife get out of jail, but that doesn’t hold up. Despite the mayor, she doesn’t get out until we let her go, and I’m not too inclined to go there.’ Randall tossed a conspiratorial glance at Struler. ‘I’ve got a theory on the real reason Hardy’s involved, and Peter here doesn’t think it’s too bad.’

Pratt took a sip of her sparkling water, nodded attentively. ‘Go on.’

‘Hardy is Glitsky’s best friend, right? You heard our good lieutenant in your office the other day, about what a true friend of his this Frannie is, what a great person. She took care of his kids when his wife died. Blah blah blah. Well, ask Marian Braun what a sweetheart Mrs Hardy is.’

Pratt waved that away. ‘So what’s your theory, Scott?’

‘All right, listen. We all agree Ron did this, right?’

Struler, if anything, was more certain than Randall. ‘Absolutely.’ He turned to Pratt and gave it to her one more time, so she would be clear on it. ‘Straight insurance scam, ma’am. Bree was heavily insured. She was also Ron’s support and had decided to throw him out on the street.’

‘Why?’ Pratt asked.

Struler continued. ‘He had another girl on the…’

‘Woman,’ Pratt quickly corrected him. They were talking about multiple murder, but some things just couldn’t be tolerated even for an instant.

The inspector made a quick face, fixed it, and moved on. ‘Another woman on the side.’

‘Not Frannie Hardy?’

‘No, ma’am. We don’t believe so. Anyway, I’ve got four witnesses from the building saying they’d seen Ron with another woman – same one – during the day when Bree was out working. They’d just walk out through the lobby holding hands, maybe sit on the bench out front.’

‘So who is she?’

‘That we don’t know. Yet. We’ll find her. Anyway, the point is, Bree found out about this.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s a reasonable conjecture,’ Randall interjected, ‘but maybe she didn’t. Either way it doesn’t matter. But you’ll see, it fits.’ He nodded back at Struler to continue.

‘So what finally happened was Bree got herself another boyfriend, got knocked up, and was going to marry him.’

Scott Randall whispered. ‘We’re hearing it was Damon Kerry.’ He exulted in his boss’s stunned expression – there was nothing, he thought, like a good surprise. And he was going to have a couple more for Frannie Hardy tomorrow.

‘Damon Kerry.’ Pratt’s eyes shone with excitement.

‘That’s the word on the street,’ Struler said.

‘It’s really pretty smart the way they’ve figured it all,’ Scott said.

‘What? Who?’

‘Hardy and Glitsky. Knowing Kerry would have to get involved…’

Pratt held up a hand. ‘I’m afraid you’re getting ahead of me. How is Kerry…?’

‘Why do you think the mayor wants us to pull back on this, just at this time? Democratic mayor. Democratic – now – front runner for governor.’

‘Yes, all right. But Damon…’

Scott Randall bulled on ahead. ‘Kerry was having an affair with a married woman, Sharron. During his campaign. He got her pregnant out of wedlock.’ He shook his head. ‘No no no. It just can’t come out.’

The DA still didn’t see it. ‘All right, but what about Lieutenant Glitsky? Where does he fit?’

This, to Scott Randall, was the easy part. ‘Hardy,’ he explained, ‘is Ron Beaumont’s attorney, right? Ron comes to him with this problem – he knows Bree’s going to dump him. So if that happens, he’s out two million dollars.’

‘Two million?’ The number was new to Pratt.

Randall smiled. ‘It’s a nice, round motive, isn’t it?’

Struler interjected again. ‘And Hardy’s not exactly hauling big coin. He hasn’t had a worthwhile trial in a couple of years. He’s doing scratch defense work. Meanwhile, the wife has no job, he’s got kids in private school. Money’s an issue – count on it.’

‘You want to go along that road a little further, Sharron,’ Randall added. ‘The smart bet says he set fire to his own house yesterday, to get some cash in.’

‘So you’re saying,’ Pratt was getting into the idea now, ‘that Hardy and Ron Beaumont conspired to kill his wife?’

Randall nodded, beaming. ‘With Hardy’s wife as the alibi.’

‘So where does Glitsky fit in?’

Struler and Randall exchanged glances, and the inspector took it. ‘What does Glitsky make – seventy, seventy-five? He’s the head of homicide and Hardy’s pal, so they cut him in and it’s a dead lock Ron’s never arrested. Glitsky never moves on it. Period. End of story.’

Randall picked it up. ‘Then they run a little squeeze on Kerry about the affair with Bree, which makes him go to the mayor, who in turn tells us to release Frannie for political reasons, yada yada – just make the whole thing go away.’

‘That son of a bitch,’ Pratt exclaimed.

‘Exactly.’ Randall’s Martini arrived and he lifted the olive out of it and chewed contentedly. ‘Every part of this fits, Sharron. And meanwhile, Beaumont’s killed two other people, both cops who were getting the picture.’

Pratt liked the scenario, but she had to raise an objection. ‘Except if Canetta was working with Hardy…’

But Scott had an answer for that, too. ‘Canetta was supposed to be digging up dirt on Kerry and Pierce, the Caloco guy. Classic muddy-the-waters lawyer shit, pardon the French. Some other dude did it. Then Canetta ran across something, got wise, and tried to cut himself in.’

‘And Ron had to kill him, too.’ Struler sipped his beer.

‘And, last but not least,’ Randall said, ‘then Glitsky lays down orders that nobody talks about Canetta or Griffin or anything else. He’s, quote, pursuing his own investigation and PS, Ron Beaumont seems to have dropped off his radar.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Pratt enthused, ‘if this is true…’

‘It’s the case of the decade,’ Randall concluded.

‘It’s true,’ Struler repeated. ‘It all fits.’

A silence descended briefly while the waiter brought their salads. Pratt played with hers for a moment, then put her fork down. ‘OK, another objection. If this was so well planned, why did this Hardy woman let herself get thrown in jail?’

‘Anytime you want,’ Struler answered, ‘I’d do four days for a million dollars.’

But Randall answered seriously. ‘That was just a dumb mistake like criminals make every day. She was nervous, and got pissy with Braun.’

That wasn’t good enough for Pratt. ‘But what about this secret she couldn’t tell?’

‘There’s no secret,’ Randall said matter-of-factly. ‘She got over-confident and was extemporizing. She got too cute and talked herself into a corner, saying she knew Ron and Bree had problems, but didn’t know what they were. It seemed an innocent enough question at the time. She didn’t see where I wanted to go with it, and when she found out, it was too late.’

‘So she…’

‘My prediction is she’ll back off on the secret tomorrow. Or make one up.’

Struler: ‘She does that, it locks up this theory.’

Randall chewed happily. ‘That’s my plan,’ he said.

‘And meanwhile, the man Glitsky’s protecting has become a multiple cop-killer.’ Pratt was firm. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to take these people down.’

From a freezing phone booth on Grant, checking back at his office for messages, Hardy learned that the fire department’s arson team had called and more or less urgently wanted to chat with him. So had three of his clients.

Finally, he was surprised at the relief that washed over him when he heard that David Freeman had, at last, come in. Back on foot, from Chinatown he made it to Sutler Street, the Freeman Building where he worked, in under ten minutes.

His old, crusty – and still apparently bullet-proof- landlord was scribbling intently on a yellow legal pad at his desk when Hardy opened his door.

‘I need a moment of your valuable time,’ he said. He had scandalized Phyllis by overriding her ‘He doesn’t want to be disturbed,’ by saying, ‘Oh, OK. I’ll leave him alone then.’

He never glanced back, walking directly past her station, over to Freeman’s closed door, knocking, and pushing it open.

The old man’s eyes betrayed him. He wasn’t really as annoyed as he sounded, although he did pull an hourly billing form over, make a note on it, and growl. ‘Valuable doesn’t begin to describe it. And I am on billable time here, Diz. You want input right now, it’s going to cost you.’

‘Everything does, sooner or later.’ Hardy closed the door. Freeman’s hair was doing its Einstein impression and the rest of him was decked in his usual sartorial splendor – dead cigar in his mouth, tie askew, wrinkled shirt unbuttoned, the coat of his shiny brown suit draped over his shoulders. ‘Phil Canetta’s been killed,’ Hardy said soberly. ‘You hear about that?’

The old man put his pencil down. ‘I saw something in the paper this morning…’

Hardy was a couple of steps into the large corner office when the door opened again behind him – Phyllis. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Freeman. I told Mr Hardy you didn’t want to be… he brushed right past me and…’

Freeman held up a hand. ‘It’s OK, dear. Emergency.’

She spent another instant perfecting her expression of displeasure, though Hardy didn’t think it needed much work at all. Then she made an appropriate noise of pique and backed back out.

‘Dear?’ Hardy said. ‘You call her dear?’

‘She is a dear,’ Freeman said. ‘Controls the riff-raff element. I couldn’t survive without her.’

Hardy shook his head. ‘You’ve got to get out more.’ He’d made it to Freeman’s desk, pulled around a chair, plopped his briefcase, and opened it. He picked up as though they’d been talking all morning. ‘You were right about Griffin. That we ought to start with him.’

‘I thought we were on Canetta.’

‘Both.’

Freeman’s eyebrows went up, another question, and Hardy sat down, telling him about the ballistics confirmation – both men shot with the same gun, the rest of what he knew. ‘It looks like it wasn’t more than a couple of hours after he left here,’ he concluded.

‘Where was he?’

‘Just inside the Presidio.’

‘I didn’t read anything in the article about Griffin. Or Bree Beaumont either.’

‘Glitsky wants it quiet for now. Damon Kerry is definitely involved, so there are, as they say, political ramifications.’ Freeman didn’t respond in any way, so Hardy went on, reciting the facts as he knew them.

By the time he finished, Freeman was sitting back in his chair, his hands linked over his comfortable middle, his neck rucked down into his ratty tie, his eyes closed. His chest rose and fell a couple of times. Slowly, he raised his head, and squinted across the desk. ‘So where are you now?’

Hardy reached forward and lifted the stapled and marked-up copy of Griffin’s notes from his briefcase. ‘Griffin found something. I’m convinced it’s right here.’ He passed the pages over the desk. ‘The yellow highlights.’

The bassett eyes came up, baleful humor. ‘I guessed that.’ After a moment’s perusal, he flipped back a few pages, nodded, came back to where he was, and looked up again. ‘So Griffin eliminated Ron?’

Hardy leaned forward himself. ‘Where do you see that?’

Patiently, Freeman went over it. ‘This first entry. R. at eight oh five, NCD, with the exclamation marks. “R” has got to be Ron, don’t you think? Eight oh five is when he left for school with the kids, too early to have done it. NCD is “no can do.” You got all this already, right?’

‘Sure,’ Hardy said, feeling like a fool. NCD, he thought. No can do. Just like WCB meant ‘will call back.’ But he’d never before run across the former. ‘Sure,’ he repeated. ‘Ron was out.’

‘OK.’ Freeman nodded. ‘I suppose the timing was right for him. Now what’s this “Herit.”?’

‘I just came from there. It’s the cleaning service that did Bree’s place.’ He leaned across the desk. ‘Tuesday and Thursday as it indicates. They do Bree’s on Thursday, so it was after the crime scene had two days there. By the way, it’s not there, but Griffin found a watch at the scene and tagged it into evidence.’

‘When?’

‘On Thursday. Heritage found it and gave it to Griffin.’

‘And crime scene didn’t on Tuesday?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘I guess not. Glitsky would say they’re overworked and underpaid. It’s gone now in any event.’

Freeman was nodding distractedly, his eyes never leaving the page. ‘Never mind, never mind. Here it is again. This fabric wash. “R. stains.” Did Ron…? What was this? Semen?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think she and Ron were sleeping together.’

Now, Freeman did look up.

‘They had separate bedrooms,’ Hardy went on. ‘Definitely Bree, and maybe Ron, too, were involved with other people. Sexually.’

‘Charming,’ Freeman replied. ‘The modern couple. So you read the autopsy. Was there any evidence of rape that morning? Intercourse?’

‘No.’

‘Hmm. Rug stains?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Crime scene would have them.’

‘Oh yes, those competent crime scene analysts.’ Freeman thought another moment, then pointed to the briefcase. ‘Do you have a copy of the police report in there?’

Hardy handed him another folder and sat while Freeman leafed through to the page he wanted. ‘She was wearing a dark-blue cotton-blend skirt and pullover powder-blue sweater. Panty hose. Black shoes, half-inch heels. Ah, here we go.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve got what you’d expect – blood and dirt, but there’s also a rust stain on the left hip and on the hem of the sweater. Rust.’

‘When she went over the balcony,’ Hardy said. ‘It’s an iron grillwork railing.’

‘Well, there you go.’ Freeman, pleased with himself, leaned back in his chair again.

‘So why does it say “fab. wash”? That’s got to mean forensics didn’t find anything on the fabric, right? But they did find blood, dirt, rust…’

‘Maybe it’s some kind of detergent. Maybe it just means there was nothing on the drapes, or the rug, or the upholstery, all of which was true. Those fabrics were a wash.’

‘Maybe.’ It still troubled Hardy. Griffin’s damned exclamation points were all over the place with the cleaners and this note, and he couldn’t make them mean anything.

But Freeman, on his billable time, wasn’t wasting any of it. To his satisfaction, he’d solved the mystery of what the ‘R’ stood for, so he was moving on, now down to the ‘902’ phone call.

So Hardy brought him up to date about Bree’s call to Kerry. When he finished, Freeman looked perplexed. ‘But you say the call wasn’t at nine oh two?’

‘No. It was earlier – it began at ten after seven.’

‘So what’s this nine oh two?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what I mean, David, about Griffin having it here, but I can’t see it. I figured it was a time that would lead us to Kerry, and it did, but then the time was wrong.’

‘So it’s not a time.’

‘No – look back. That’s how he writes his times, everything. Eight oh five, eleven forty-five, now nine oh two.’

Freeman gave it another minute, then waved a hand. ‘All right, let’s pass on that and go on. What’s “Bax T… 830”?’

‘The last person we know of to see Griffin alive. Maybe the very last.’ Hardy went on to explain about Thorne and Elliot and Glitsky’s probable warrant to look for printed materials. ‘If Abe finds evidence on any of about four fronts, I think we can stop looking.’

Freeman drummed his fingers a couple of times. ‘So why are we doing this, you and me?’ Before Hardy could respond, the drumming stopped. ‘Did Canetta by any chance work for this Thorne guy?’

‘Not that I know of. Sometimes Jim Pierce.’

‘In what capacity?’

‘Security at hotel conventions, like that.’

‘But not Thorne?’

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t connected Thorne to any of this before yesterday, so I never asked.’

Freeman pressed it. ‘Well, think about it. Wouldn’t the ethanol producers have conventions here too? I mean, this is Convention City, USA. And all of them need security, right? If Canetta was in that loop, one of a hundred cops doing freelance…’ A shrug. It was obvious. ‘And you know for a fact that Thorne is involved with Kerry, too?’

‘Through SKO, yeah, close enough.’

The old man cleaned an ear with his finger. ‘OK, so what’s this last thing – burn or brown and then a dollar sign?’

Hardy sat back. ‘This, old master, is why I have come to you. Although wait a minute, let me see that.’ He studied the scrawl for the tenth time. ‘Bree’s maiden name was Brunetta. This might say B-R-U-N. How’s that?’ He passed the pages back.

‘Not impossible,’ Freeman said. ‘Maybe Thorne was blackmailing her about something in her past, when she was Brunetta. In any event, it looks like Griffin found some kind of money connection, and maybe called Thorne on it.’

Hardy recalled the box of Caloco documents in Glitsky’s kitchen. Ron’s – or had it in fact been Bree’s? – talent for creating wealth, or at least substantial lines of credit. Had Thorne tried to get Bree under his control, and by extension under Valens’ and Kerry’s control, by threatening to expose her financial shenanigans? Or – even better – ruin her credibility and reputation with Kerry in the same way?

Hardy finally sat back. Freeman regarded him intently. ‘You think Thorne did your house, too, don’t you?’

It was Freeman’s first mention of that incident and, perhaps as he’d intended, it caught Hardy slightly off guard.

‘As you’d say, I don’t think it’s impossible.’

Freeman nodded sagely. ‘And when you went to see him this morning, were you packing then, too? I know the expression is lawyers, guns, and money, but guns don’t really belong.’

A sheepish grin flitted for a moment over Hardy’s face. David was truly terrifying. He saw everything. ‘I thought I might need some protection.’

But Freeman wasn’t laughing. ‘I don’t think so. I think if he had given you an excuse, he’d have a bullet in him right now.’

Now, unbidden, the grin flickered again.

The old man pointed a finger. ‘Listen to me, Diz. You’ve got every right to hate the man, but it’s up to the law to punish him, not you. You’ve already put this where it belongs – in Glitsky’s corner. Don’t get yourself killed over it. Too many people have already. Two of them carried guns and knew how to use them. Does that tell you anything?’

Hardy nodded. ‘They didn’t shoot fast enough.’

Again, there wasn’t any sign that Freeman thought this was funny. He checked his watch, looked down, and wrote something. ‘Thirty minutes at two hundred an hour comes to a hundred bucks. I’ll add it to the rent.’

Upstairs in his office, Hardy called the toll-free Movado number and gave the serial number of the watch to a helpful operator. All she could tell from the number was that the watch had been sold within the past five years in San Francisco, at the Jewelry Exchange. There was no record of the buyer’s name.

33

The administrative offices of the main fire station on Golden Gate avenue did not bear much resemblance to the Hall of Justice. Here the expansive lobby was open to the public without the benefit of metal detectors and police guards in the doorways. The milling crowds of discontented lowlifes that were a common feature in and for blocks around the Hall were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the marble walls – inscribed with the names of the heroic dead of the department – seemed to shine with pride. Well-appointed business persons came into the building and walked purposefully to the elevators, in which they were whisked to their destinations.

So Hardy had no premonition of dread as he walked through the fifth-floor office labeled ‘Arson Investigations.’

After leaving Freeman, he’d gone upstairs to his own office and returned phone calls for the better part of a half hour. He called Bill Tilton, the insurance agent, and pretended he was a potential employer of Marie Dempsey. She’d faxed him a resumé, he said, but he couldn’t make out the phone number or address too clearly. Tilton, inadvertently breaking every confidentiality law in the book, gave him what he needed.

In the next call, a secretary with the arson unit told him that they wanted to talk to him at his very earliest convenience. If he would give them a time he could drop by the main offices this afternoon, the investigators would be there for him. He’d made an appointment for one thirty, assuming that the urgency was that they wanted to assign liability back to him.

His first sense that things were not right came as the secretary directed him not to one of the investigator’s offices behind her, but to a small, empty office with a scarred metal table in the middle of it and four wooden chairs along one wall.

He’d been in enough of these, and immediately recognized this for what it was: an interrogation room.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out. He hadn’t even taken a seat. Walking to the one window, he looked down and out to the west. Visibility was a couple of blocks, and suddenly Hardy felt a chill of apprehension.

He turned quickly, intending to walk out and invite whoever wanted to talk to him down to his turf, to the Solarium. Freeman had counseled him to leave the police work to Glitsky, and it was good advice, but he knew more than Glitsky and he had a deadline. There was much he still had to do – he couldn’t afford to be detained here. But as soon as he looked, he knew he wasn’t going anywhere soon. Three men were standing in the doorway, in a pack.

‘Mr Hardy?’ ‘How you doing?’ ‘Have a seat.’ Friendly as undertakers.

The last one in closed the door.

Recognition kicked in. This was not the amiable Captain Flores, but the man who’d been so uncooperative and surly yesterday afternoon. He identified himself as Sergeant Wilkes, no first name. And, folder under his arm, he was running the show.

‘This is my partner, Sergeant Lopez, and this,’ he said, indicating a wiry young cowboy in a denim jacket, ‘is Sergeant Predeaux.’

Predeaux, leaning one shoulder against the wall opposite them, broke an icy smile over the toothpick he was chewing. ‘Rhymes with Pla-Dough,’ he said.

‘Sergeant Predeaux,’ Wilkes added, ‘is with the arson unit, too. He’s one of our police members. Sergeant Lopez and I, we’re with the fire department.’

‘Good.’ The antagonism was already thick in the room. Hardy, determined not to add to it if it could be helped, put on a face. ‘So what did you find?’

Wilkes made a show of opening his folder. From Hardy’s perspective as a lawyer, there wasn’t much in it – a schematic of the house, a couple of pages of notes, and perhaps a formal report. Still, Wilkes took his time, going over it silently while everyone else waited. Finally, he decided the moment was right.

‘We’ve got clear indications of accelerant, petroleum-based, probably gasoline, on the front porch. There is a lot of technical detail supporting our conclusion, but basically we have determined that this was in fact an arson occurrence. Both from the rate of burn and the initial call reporting the fire, we can pretty closely pinpoint the start of the blaze to about three thirty a.m. Sunday morning.’

This wasn’t any surprise to Hardy, but the next line of inquiry, though no less surprising given the circumstances here, was unpleasant. Lopez shifted next to Wilkes, as though he’d been restraining himself. He spoke up. ‘We understand you weren’t sleeping in the house that night. Is that correct?’

Hardy shifted his eyes from one man to the other. He made it a point to nod and answer in even tones. ‘That’s right. Did I mention that to Captain Flores? I was with my children at my in-laws’.‘

‘And why was that?’

‘Why was what?’

‘Why were you at your in-laws’?‘

‘Because my children were there. It was Hallowe’en night,’ Hardy said. ‘They were staying with their grandparents and I wanted to be with them.’

‘You’re married, aren’t you? Was your wife there?’

‘Yes, I’m married,’ he said evenly, ‘and no, she wasn’t there.’

‘You having marital problems?’ Lopez asked.

‘Mr Hardy’s wife is in jail,’ Predeaux said, although it didn’t seem to come as a shock to either of his colleagues.

Hardy paused. ‘That’s a long story.’

‘We’ve got time.’ Wilkes smiled insincerely.

Hardy returned it. ‘I’m happy for you, but as it turns out, I don’t.’

Predeaux moved a step forward. ‘Did you make it a habit of staying with your in-laws?’

This, finally, was enough of a press that Hardy straightened up in his chair, sat back, and crossed his arms. ‘I don’t believe this.’ He almost barked out a laugh, but stopped himself. ‘You guys talk to my in-laws? They’ll tell you I was there. I didn’t burn down my own house, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Were they awake at three thirty?’

‘Yeah,’ Hardy replied crisply. ‘We were all sitting up telling yarns around the campfire.’

‘There’s an interesting choice of words,’ Wilkes said.

‘Oh yeah,’ Hardy replied. ‘Very telling.’ He came forward in his seat. ‘Look, guys, I thought I was coming down here to get the lowdown on your progress, and maybe get my house turned back over to me so I could get to work rebuilding it.’

‘You got insurance?’ Wilkes asked.

He sighed wearily. ‘Yes, sir. I’ve got insurance. Thank God.’

Predeaux piped in. ‘Replacement value or loss value?’

Another aborted chuckle. ‘You know, you may be surprised to learn that I haven’t checked the policy lately. I don’t have any idea.’ He shook his head. ‘This is ridiculous. If we’re going to continue in this vein, I suggest we make another appointment and I’ll bring a lawyer.’

‘You think you need a lawyer?’ Lopez asked.

Hardy assayed a cold smile. ‘Here’s a tip, sergeant. Everybody needs a lawyer.’ He pushed his chair back and stood up, and squared off at Predeaux. ‘Am I under arrest? Are you seriously thinking of charging me with this, ’cause if you are I could use the money the false arrest lawsuit will bring in.‘

‘Funny you should bring that up.’ Predeaux pulled a chair around and straddled it backward. He transferred his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. ‘You a little short on money?’

‘Who isn’t?’ Hardy shot back. ‘What’s the matter with you people? I’m the one who got his house burned down. I’ve got at least two reliable witnesses who’ll swear I wasn’t anywhere near the place and guess what? I wasn’t.’

‘We’re looking into it, as you say,’ Predeaux responded.

‘Well, good luck with that. Or with finding any evidence, which by the way, guys, is generally one of the traditional steps in a criminal investigation.’

‘He’s pretty confident, isn’t he?’ Lopez asked.

‘Confident enough.’ Hardy had had all he could take of this. They had no grounds and no evidence and he had other places to be. ‘So Sergeant Predeaux, am I under arrest or not?’ The other three men started holding a silent conversation. Hardy butted into it. ‘Sergeant Wilkes, when do I get my house back?’

‘That hasn’t been determined.’

‘Well,’ Hardy snapped, ‘when you get finished wasting your time and do determine it, you know where to reach me. Sergeant Predeaux,’ he repeated, ‘am I under arrest or not?’ He stood by the door for a moment, waiting. ‘I’m taking your silence as a “not.” That makes this your lucky day.’

By the time he parked again in the Western Mission, he had gotten his anger under control to some degree. Although, considering the purpose of this visit, he didn’t think he’d be able to squelch it entirely. He did, however, derive some pleasure from David Freeman’s latest wisdom regarding his weapon.

Hardy, after some real consideration, decided to leave the Police Special in the trunk of his car for his visit to the fire department. This, he realized, turned out to have been a good idea. Driving out to the Mission, he imagined a scenario where Predeaux had, in fact, decided to place him under arrest. If Hardy had had his gun with him, he would have been sorely tempted to pull it out, get the drop on these three clowns and lock them in the room while he attempted to locate Ron Beaumont.

This, of course, would have ended his legal career and maybe killed him in the bargain. It certainly would have curtailed his mobility in the next twenty-four hours, what with the manhunt and all. But, because of Freeman’s little lecture, he hadn’t brought the gun in. He’d have to remember to thank the old man.

Marie Dempsey’s place was on Church Street about a block from Hans Spreckman’s, an authentic bierstube which Hardy considered to be on a par with Schroeder’s downtown, which in turn had a reputation as the best German restaurant in the city. The neighborhood had a certain friendly charm in spite of the overwhelming preponderance of pavement and stucco, and the lack of trees, lawns, and shrubbery. Maybe it was the scale of the buildings, or the trolley that passed on Church Street every half hour or so.

Today, though, a wet and heavy cloud still hugged the earth, and Hardy felt at one with it.

The address was the upper unit of a duplex in a square, gray two-story building with an internal stairway. From his experience at the Airport Hilton, Hardy thought there was little to no chance that Ron would open the door to a knock or a ring. This was the reason he’d finally opted not to try and call the various numbers he’d collected on the M. Dempseys of the city, but rather to discover the address on his own. He didn’t want to give Ron any warning of his visit.

So he walked up the stairs and stood by the door and listened. A man’s voice, singing quietly to himself, was barely discernible inside. There was definite movement, footsteps.

He pushed the doorbell, gave it very little time, then pushed it again. The footsteps had stopped. So had the concert. Whoever was in there was alone. He’d be very surprised if there were children. After another short wait, he knocked desultorily.

Walking back down a few of the steps, making his footfalls as heavy as he could, he then crept back up to the landing and waited. About two minutes later, the doorknob turned and Hardy hit the door hard, leading with his shoulder. There was a satisfying bit of resistance and then he was inside, hovering over the man he’d knocked to the ground.

‘Hi, Ron. How’ve you been?’

Struggling to get up. ‘Mr Hardy.’

‘Dismas, please. After all we’ve been through together, I think we’re on first names by now.’

Ron was on his feet again and broke a nervous smile. ‘All right, Dismas.’ He let out a long breath. ‘You may not believe this, but it’s good to see you.’

Hardy was brusque. ‘It’s better to see you. Where are the kids?’

‘They just went to the store for a minute.’

‘With Marie?’

After a beat, Ron offered a resigned shrug, another attempt at an ingratiating smile. ‘You’re pretty good,’ he conceded.

‘I have my days,’ Hardy admitted. Closing the door behind him, when he turned back again to Ron, this time he was glad he had it – he’d taken his gun out from his waistband, holding it so Ron could see.

‘You don’t need anything like that.’

‘Maybe not,’ Hardy said. ‘But then again, maybe I do. So I figured I’d be prepared either way.’

The gun had Ron’s attention, no doubt about it. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. ‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Not me, us.’ They were in a small foyer. Hardy motioned over to the living room, visible behind them. ‘Now we’re going to wait for a little while and you’d better hope your kids come back with Marie in a reasonable amount of time. Or else you and I are going to take a ride downtown.’

‘And do what?’

‘And tell a DA named Scott Randall anything he wants to know.’

Ron took a seat on a low leather couch. Hardy, still pumped up, remained standing. ‘My understanding,’ Ron said, ‘was that you were going to wait until tomorrow. Then Frannie was free to tell anything, everything. And the children and I would be gone.’

He clipped out the words. ‘Yep. That was it.’

‘But?’

‘But now she’s not sure she can do it.’

‘Why not? I’ve…’

Hardy raised his voice. ‘It’s not you, god damn it! It’s not anything you forbid or allow. It’s her.’ He shook his head, reining in the emotion, and got his voice under control. ‘The way she sees it, as soon as she tells them your situation, your kids suffer. They’ve got to move and start over.’

‘But that’s not Frannie’s doing.’

It still galled Hardy to hear this man refer to his wife so familiarly, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He bore some of the responsibility for that himself. ‘No,’ he said, ‘and as soon as they indict you, which is tomorrow, it’s going to happen anyway.’

‘So what’s her problem with it?’

Hardy suddenly felt stupid holding the gun. Tucking it back into his belt, now invisible again under his jacket, he stepped across to a wingback chair and sat on the edge of it, across from Ron. ‘She doesn’t see it as a problem,’ he said. ‘She’s willing to trade a few more hours in jail, to give me a few more hours…’ He stopped.

‘To find who killed Bree?’

Hardy leaned forward and eyed him coldly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To find who killed your sister.’

Ron didn’t give it up right away. He put on a quizzical expression, as though he really didn’t understand what Hardy had just said. ‘You mean my wife. Bree.’

‘I mean Bree all right,’ Hardy replied. ‘But she wasn’t your wife. She was your sister.’

34

For the third time since they’d arrived, a cable car rattled by outside on Mason, shaking the floorboards of the apartment. The conductor had a heavy hand with the famous bells, too.

Ding ding ding ding ding!

Glitsky had always been under the impression that sounds were muffled by heavy fog, but this clanging, certainly, was an exception to it. He decided it must affect only the lower register.

The shaking under him increased and for an instant the lieutenant thought it might be a real earthquake. Thorne’s work area was a desk in his living room, up against the front window overlooking the street. Glitsky had been going through a stack of computer printouts, and now pushed the ergonomic chair back a couple of inches, ready to bolt for a doorway if things began to fall around him. ‘It’s hard to believe that people pay real money to live with this experience.’

On the couch behind him, Jorge Batavia patiently lifted another page of printed matter from a suitcase he’d placed on the coffee table. He scanned it quickly, and set it on the pile of rejected paper next to him. ‘It’s new-age therapy,’ he said. ‘Every fifteen minutes you get to wonder if your building is going to fall down.’ The sergeant put aside another page. ‘You think you’re going to die four times an hour, you squeeze what you can out of every minute. Your life experience is enriched.’

The shaking had stopped, punctuated by a last burst of clanging. ‘Good theory.’ Glitsky pulled forward again, and went back to his stack of paper.

There was also a computer on the table, but Glitsky didn’t dare even turn the thing on. He thought there was a reasonable likelihood that the thing was booby-trapped, so he had placed a call back to the Hall to have one of the cyber-specialists come down and unplug it, then bring it downtown for examination.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to look at. Thorne put out a prodigious amount of paper, and Glitsky and Batavia had been at his hard-copy files for almost an hour.

Batavia and Coleman had been checking in at homicide after Glitsky had returned to the office with his newly signed warrant. He had asked Batavia to accompany him on the search of Thorne’s place while Coleman went to talk to Jim Pierce again about his activities on Saturday night.

While Glitsky and Hardy thought they might be closing in on Damon Kerry – perhaps through some agent of Baxter Thorne - Coleman and Batavia had moved Pierce up a notch or two on their possible suspect list. This was mostly because a review of the business calendar he’d provided for them had revealed another questionable alibi – a two-hour gap after Bree’s funeral, during which he’d had lunch alone at a crowded Chinese counter restaurant. This was when someone had killed Griffin, and made it three out of three for Pierce’s squishy alibis. That in turn piqued the inspectors’ curiosity.

But Glitsky had developed a personal hard-on for Thorne. As Hardy had pointed out, even a tenuous connection to the weekend’s water poisoning at Pulgas was going to make life very difficult for Mr Thorne. If they found any tie-in to Bree Beaumont, it would even be worse.

Between him and Batavia, they’d already done a thorough job on the kitchen, the waste baskets, and garbage cans. In the bedroom, there was nothing in or taped under any of the drawers of the dresser or night table, nothing tucked between the box spring and the mattress.

Glitsky went to the computer table while Batavia checked the bedroom closet and found shoes and hanging clothes and the suitcase filled with propaganda. Batavia brought the suitcase into the living room, but thus far, they’d found nothing at all – no longhand drafts or fragments of the damning press release, no final or proof copies, no printing or copying bills.

The rest of his records were similarly disappointing. His bills and check register revealed nothing unusual – phone, electric, rent, credit card payments. If he hired operatives, he kept no records of them here. There weren’t any random keys. Apparently he didn’t own a gun.

When Glitsky could free up another inspector or two, by Christmas, he intended to do a similar search on the offices of FMC, although he’d believed that his best hope on Thorne was an unexpected search of his apartment.

But maybe he was wrong.

After another few minutes, he heard Batavia move behind him. ‘Well, that was a slice.’ Glitsky turned around and saw the sergeant returning the large stack of pamphlets, letters, and other reading material back into the suitcase. ‘All of these are older. Weeks, even months. Nothing on Pulgas.’

He closed the suitcase and stood up. ‘I’ll keep looking.’

Glitsky heard a key in the front door. He pushed the chair back and stood up as a short, well-dressed man appeared in the alcove. He wore a hat with a small feather in it, gloves, and a tweed overcoat. Behind him stood the building manager who’d let Abe into the apartment and then, apparently, called Thorne at his work.

The dapper man stared at Glitsky with a dead expression, then transferred it to Batavia as he entered the living room from wherever he’d been. His tone was completed uninflected. ‘What is the meaning of this outrageous intrusion?’

‘You’re Mr Thorne I presume.’ Glitsky had his search warrant in his pocket. He extracted it and held it out to the man, who glanced at it contemptuously, making no move to examine it. Glitsky shrugged and in a few words introduced himself and explained the basic situation. ‘I’m afraid,’ he concluded, ‘that I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises while we continue here.’

Thorne didn’t even blink. ‘No, sir. I refuse to do that. I’ve called my attorney and he’ll be here shortly and put an end to this.’ He was taking off his overcoat, hanging it on a peg in the alcove, planning to stay.

‘He won’t be able to do that, sir.’ Glitsky held all the cards here, and he knew it. ‘This is a legal search conducted pursuant to a murder investigation…’

‘Baxter?’ The manager interrupted, shifting from foot to foot in the still-open doorway. ‘If everything’s all right here, I’ve…’

‘Sure, Daniel.’ Thorne thanked him courteously and he backed out on to the porch, closing the door behind him. But the suspect hadn’t lost the thread. He came back to Glitsky, asking quietly. ‘Whose murder?’

‘James Allen Browning of Pescadero.’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘He was the victim of the Clean Earth Alliance attack on the Pulgas Water Temple the other day.’

‘That again.’ This time he allowed a tone of suppressed anger. He rolled his eyes.

‘Again?’ Glitsky asked.

Thorne ignored the question. ‘And you think I had something to do with that? On what grounds?’

‘Justifiable grounds, Mr Thorne,’ Glitsky replied. ‘A judge signed the warrant. That’s all you need to know. Now I’m not letting you into this apartment until we’re finished here. As a courtesy, we’ll bring a chair over and I’ll let you remain in that alcove. With your lawyer when he shows up. But nobody’s touching anything here until we’re done. Do you understand?’

The men were standing two feet apart. Thorne huffed, replying. ‘Perfectly.’

Glitsky crossed the room, said a few words to Batavia, and went back to the desk. The cable car went by again as Batavia brought two chairs from around the kitchen table through the living room and into the alcove. Then he lifted Thorne’s overcoat from its peg, as Glitsky had instructed him.

‘Hey! What do you think…?’ For the first time, Thorne’s voice rose.

Glitsky was up as if shot out of his chair, his own voice harsh with authority. ‘You stay right where you are. Jorge, make sure he does. While you’re at it, have him give you his wallet and check his identification.’

‘I won’t…’

‘You damn well will,’ Batavia said.

Glitsky took the overcoat from his sergeant and now held it up to his face. He’d smelled a strong odor as Thorne had removed the coat and hung it up. It hadn’t been there when Glitsky and Jorge had entered the apartment and then, suddenly, with Thorne’s arrival, there it was – gasoline.

Reaching into the pockets one by one, his hand closed around what felt like some kind of charm. Extracting it carefully, he instantly placed the piece. It was at least an exact replica, but Glitsky would bet it was an original, of one of the hand-blown Venetian glass elephants that he’d last seen dancing across the mantel over Hardy’s living-room fireplace.

Sergeant Coleman was having trouble getting through to Jim Pierce, whose patience had all but run out. Coleman’s had as well. He’d been kept waiting for nearly a half hour, and now, as he’d finally been admitted into the vice president’s office, had been told by Pierce’s secretary that the next meeting started in ten minutes.

Pierce was behind his desk. Distracted. No hand shake. Papers to be signed, decisions to make. He looked up at Coleman. The inspector, he said, could talk but he’d better talk fast. These continual interruptions were far beyond reasonable, getting near to the point of official harassment. If they continued, there were likely to be consequences.

The power play had its effect on the young inspector. The corner office was vast, ornate, intimidating. Windows and views, high enough to be over the fog. Coleman squirmed in the ultra-modern wooden chair – really more a stool with sides than anything a body would choose to sit in or on.

It crossed Coleman’s mind that this might, in fact, be a special chair positioned in front of Pierce’s desk for unwelcome visitors, to keep them from getting too comfortable. To make sure they wanted to leave soon.

Homicide inspectors are not a particularly reverent bunch. Most of them had seen everything at least twice, and Coleman was no exception. But sitting in Pierce’s office, he found it next to impossible to imagine that the man who presided here would ever need to have recourse to murder. Coleman didn’t really believe it, but he did at least want to nail down the facts, if for no other reason than that he wouldn’t have to be in this position again.

‘I realize you have cooperated up to now, sir, and we’re grateful for that cooperation…’

‘Well, this is a fine way to show it. What more could you possibly have to ask me that you haven’t asked already?’

‘We tried to reach you yesterday, sir, about Saturday night.’

‘I know.’ He reached for a fountain pen, signed something, put the pen back, blew on the signature, and moved the paper to one side. Then, immediately, he started reading the next one. He didn’t look up. ‘My wife told me you had come by. Again. About a police officer this time?’

‘Sergeant Canetta, yes sir.’

‘I do know that name. Where do I know…?’

‘He had worked security for Caloco at several events.’

Finally, Pierce stopped fidgeting. ‘That’s it. He was the man who was killed?’

‘Yes, sir.’

This seemed to affect Pierce somewhat. He sighed deeply and his mouth grew compressed, his brow furrowed. ‘I’m sorry, inspector. I’m sorry for my rudeness earlier. I’m under some pressure here but that’s every day and it’s no excuse. I can understand how you feel when your colleagues are…’ He straightened in his chair. ‘All right. Go on. What do you need to know?’

‘I’d like to know where you were on Saturday night.’

In spite of the apology, impatience thrummed under the surface. ‘May I ask why that would be important? What did my wife tell you?’

Coleman said nothing.

And Pierce got the message, although it didn’t make him any happier. He sighed again. ‘I was home until early morning, perhaps dawn. Then I went down to my boat in the Marina.’

‘But you were home during the night?’

‘I just said that, yes.’

‘Alone?’

Pierce nodded. ‘Is that so strange, sergeant? My wife had gone out to a party that I didn’t want to attend.’

‘Did your wife see you when she got home?’

A short laugh. ‘What did she tell you?’ Then, ruefully. ‘I doubt it. I spent the night in my study.’ He met Pierce’s eyes. ‘We fought about the party, that I wasn’t going. When it was over, I heard her come home, but wanted to see if she’d come to me and apologize. When she didn’t… well, I got my back up.’

‘So you slept in your study?’

‘Not much. I was pretty mad and couldn’t sleep most of the night. I watched some television.’

‘Do you remember what?’

‘I don’t know, really. Some pay-per-view sports I guess. Mindless junk. Whatever was on. I dozed on and off.’

‘Do you know offhand the company that provides your television service?’ Coleman asked.

‘No,’ Pierce said. ‘No idea, sorry. Do you know yours?’

‘Do you mind if I check?’

‘I don’t know, I…’ But then Pierce brightened slightly, although the smile didn’t exactly light up the room. ‘Oh, I see. Sure, of course. Whatever you need to do.’

Coleman, with relief, pushed himself out of the chair from hell. ‘Thank you for your time, sir. I hope we won’t have to bother you again.’

Pierce sat still for a long beat, then shook his head in disbelief. ‘Before you go, inspector, maybe you can answer me one question?’

‘If I can.’

‘All right. Is there any reason on God’s earth why I might have wanted to kill Sergeant Canetta? Since that’s what I presume this has been all about. He did some security work for Caloco, OK. Where? What type of security work? And then what? I didn’t even know the man. I doubt if I could pick him out of a crowd.’ He paused and spread his hands, appealing to reason. ‘I just don’t understand. Is he related to me in some other way?’

Coleman heard him out. He really couldn’t blame him for being angry and frustrated, but he wasn’t going to give away anything that his boss had told him to withhold. ‘It’s a routine investigation,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is. Thanks for your time.’

‘That is a coincidence,’ Baxter Thorne was telling Glitsky, ‘but these little elephants are widely available. You can buy one at any quality gift store. It’s my lucky charm. I’ve carried it with me for years.’

Another question, another simple answer. ‘As I have already told you, Dismas Hardy was, I believe, the name of the gentleman who came by my office this morning and made some threatening remarks.’ Glitsky still hadn’t let Thorne enter the apartment proper. He sat on one of the chairs in the alcove and the lieutenant hovered above him. ‘Beyond that, I can’t say I know anything about him.’

Thorne was completely unruffled, going on again, answering Glitsky’s next question in his maddeningly even voice. He even produced a reasonable facsimile of a heartfelt chuckle. ‘I filled my tank, lieutenant, then I’m afraid I committed the cardinal sin of topping off. It got on my coat.’

Glitsky was coming around to a profound appreciation of just how slick this bastard might be when the telephone rang behind him. Batavia picked it up, listened for a moment, then held it out to Glitsky. ‘It’s for you. Vince.’

Glitsky told Thorne to stay where he was and crossed to the desk.

‘Pierce is clean at last,’ Coleman began and went on to explain what he’d learned at Caloco. Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Can you still hear me?’

‘Barely.’

‘That’ll have to be good enough. We got people here.’

‘OK.’

‘OK, so I’m writing up this Pierce thing at my desk and guess who drops by? He just left like five ago. Ranzetti.’

Glitsky frowned. Jerry Ranzetti was with the office of management and control, a department which used to go by the name of internal affairs. If Ranzetti had come to homicide, he was on the scent of a bad cop, and this wasn’t good news for Glitsky. The homicide unit was small – thirteen men and one woman – and Abe felt he could personally vouch for the integrity of each one of them. ‘I gather it wasn’t a social call.’

‘Well, he pretends. I pretend back. Then he says, oh yeah, maybe there is something, maybe I heard something about it, maybe I could tell him something.’

‘Maybe,’ Glitsky said. ‘About who?’

Coleman paused and the voice when it picked up again was nearly inaudible. ‘That’s why I called, Abe. The guy he’s sniffing around? It was you.’

35

‘When did you know?’ Ron asked.

‘I had a pretty good idea by the time I saw your bedrooms, but I really didn’t put it all together until I realized you must be having a sexual relationship with Marie. Bree’s having an affair. You’re having an affair. But somehow you were a happy couple, comfortable together? Contented? It didn’t make sense. The only thing I don’t understand is why you went to all the trouble? Why couldn’t she just have remained Aunt Bree?’

‘At the time, that option just seemed to leave us with a lot more to explain to everybody we met. Nobody questions a man and his children and his new wife. But a man, his sister, and the man’s kids? That’s different – it’s a weird set-up, with a way better chance of striking somebody as funny, and we couldn’t have that. You’ve got to understand – I’m wanted for kidnapping, maybe child pornography. This is serious shit. They are on me. We had to look exactly like a normal couple. Not mostly, exactly. And for a long time, we did.’

‘Except for the affairs.’

Ron shook his head. ‘OK, we had to keep the affairs secret. But since that’s generally the nature of affairs with people who are really married, it’s worked out all right.’

‘So you and Marie. How long has that been going on?’

‘A couple of years.’

‘And she’s OK with that? She didn’t push you to get married?’

He sat back on the couch, crossing one leg over the other. ‘No. To get divorced from Bree – we’ve had a few discussions about that, let me tell you. But that was before Bree died. Since then, I think she’s waiting for an appropriate time to pass. My mourning period,’ he added uncomfortably. ‘So marriage hasn’t come up yet.’

‘Are you telling me she didn’t know about Bree?’

‘She still doesn’t. Nobody does.’

Hardy sat back himself, giving that a minute to sink in. ‘The kids?’

Ron Beaumont shook his head no. ‘They were two and three when we moved out here. Maybe they’d heard of Bree as their aunt but they didn’t remember. So after awhile, she was just Bree, their step-mom. A far better life than what they were used to.’

‘So what about Dawn?’

This brought Ron’s defenses up. Suddenly, he was all the way forward on the couch, by his body language ready to spring at this threat to his children, even if it was at a man with a gun. ‘What about her?’

‘That’s my question.’

He stayed forward, tensed, his hands clenched in front of him. Hardy waited him out. Gradually, the words started to come. ‘I had never met anyone like her, even remotely like her. I was a junior at Wisconsin. I met her in the library of all places – she was working on her master’s thesis. Sociology.’

‘So she was an academic, too?’

Ron laughed. ‘No. Although she was smart, I suppose. No, I know. Very smart. Too smart.’

‘What does that mean?’

He drew in a breath and blew it out heavily. ‘She didn’t feel anything, or – no, that’s not precisely it – more like she decided what feelings were rationally defensible and the others she just didn’t acknowledge. She wasn’t going to live a pawn to her weaker emotions.’

‘Which ones were those?’

‘Oh, you know. The conventional ones that hold us all back, but especially women. At least according to Dawn. Love, need, compassion. Anything that stood in the way of her getting what she wanted.’

‘Which was?’

A shrug. ‘Pretty simple really. The usual. Money, power, excitement.’

Hardy almost laughed at the absurdity he was hearing. ‘And she was getting all this as a sociology major?’

Ron shook his head. ‘No. She started as a topless dancer. By the time I met her,’ he paused, ‘she called herself an actress.’ He sighed. ‘When I think back on it, what drew me to her was this sense of… I guess I’d have to call it danger.’ He fell silent again.

‘Go on,’ Hardy prompted him. ‘Do you mean physical danger?’

Another empty laugh. ‘Yeah, I suppose, even that. Or at least it seemed that way to a sheltered kid from suburban Illinois. She was four years older than me and really nothing was off-limits physically.

‘At the time, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I mean, here’s this totally unconventional free spirit in an unbelievable body and she’s in love with me and of course, we’re both invincible, immortal. Nothing can touch us. We can mix and match with other couples, do every drug known to man, hang out in places I wouldn’t go near today.’

He stopped, and seemed again almost to ask Hardy’s permission to continue. ‘I look back on that now and it seems impossible, like I was another person.’

‘How long ago was all this?’ Hardy asked. ‘Twenty years?’

‘Something like that.’

A nod. ‘You were another person.’

This seemed to soothe Ron somewhat, and he went on. ‘I think what I regret most is that both my parents died during this time, in the first phase when Dawn and I were together.’

‘And how long was that, that phase?’

‘Five years, maybe a little more.’

‘Did they ever know what she did?’

‘Oh no. She was a student, like me. But my dad, especially, saw through her, saw what she was. He tried to tell me, but I wasn’t ready to hear anything critical from my hopelessly unhip father. I mean, he sold insurance for a living. He was in the Rotary Club, the Holy Name Society. What in the world could he tell me?’

‘Only everything,’ Hardy said seriously.

The comment made a connection. ‘Exactly. But I was out on the sexual frontier and he didn’t have a clue. I even thought he was jealous of me.’ Again, that distinctive hollow laugh. ‘So of course I gave up on them, not her. And then Dad died. And then two years later, Mom.’ He looked down at his hands.

‘So you were married five years?’

‘Not yet. We were free. We didn’t need the piece of paper.’

‘So what did you do? Were you an actor, too?’

‘No.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I still don’t know why. Chicken, maybe. Screwing on film was too far for me to go. Like some part of me knew I’d outgrow all of that someday. I didn’t want any record of it.’

‘That wasn’t dumb.’

‘No. But it wasn’t something I planned either. I can’t take any credit for it, that I was this virtuous guy. It just happened.’

‘So what did you do?’

The question seemed to embarrass him. ‘Not much, to tell the truth. Dawn made sporadic but pretty decent money and I had majored in finance, so I managed it. We had enough to get by, and the main thing was we didn’t want to be tied down to jobs. We had to live.’

‘So what changed?’

‘I guess I did.’ Hardy didn’t want to admit it, but there was a charming, self-effacing quality to Ron Beaumont. As everyone else who knew him said, he seemed to be a great guy. ‘It wasn’t any increase in wisdom,’ he admitted candidly, ‘just age. Maybe my conventional background started to catch up with me, I don’t know, but I figured we’d done the bohemian thing, and it was time to move on. Frankly, the scene was getting old, not to mention us.

‘So she got pregnant. We got pregnant. Then she decided to have an abortion. We had a huge fight over it. She was going to do it anyway. And she did. And I moved out.’ He sighed. ‘Then I think for the first time she couldn’t handle… the emotions. She was thirty-one years old. The biological clock was ticking pretty good. The whole thing just tore her up. She was shocked that she couldn’t rationalize some way to handle it, but she couldn’t.’

‘And you got back together?’

He nodded. ‘We got married. I started working as a teller in a bank. We had Cassandra. A year later we had Max. She hated it.’

‘What?’

‘The whole thing. Babies. Crying, puking, diapers, no sleep. But mostly the boredom, being with them all day. She hated what I was doing, my job. She hated that we had no money. But you know the funny thing?’

‘What’s that?’

Hardy recognized serenity in the man’s face. ‘I loved it. I loved them. It was as though somebody just flicked a switch and suddenly I saw everything differently. It made sense. This was what we were here for. Certainly it was what I was here for.’

This was an incredibly difficult thing to hear. Ron was describing Hardy’s own feelings at the birth of his first son Michael, who had died in infancy. That tragedy had plunged Hardy into a cold and dark void from which he thought he’d never escape.

But nearly a decade later, the births of Rebecca and Vincent had rekindled a flame that had burned brightly for several years. More recently, though, it had dimmed to where it now mostly felt to Hardy as if there was no light or heat, only ash covered by other stuff that didn’t burn at all. He wondered if under it all, the last embers had truly died and if not, if there was a way to coax a new flame to life. When this was over, he promised himself, he was going to try.

‘So what happened next?’ Hardy asked.

‘About what you’d expect up to a point,’ Ron replied. ‘Fights, more fights, still more fights. She wanted to go back to work and we fought about that.’

‘Doing what she’d been doing?’

He shrugged. ‘She said it was all she knew. I told her to learn something else, she was a mother now, think of the kids. Did she want them growing up in that environment?’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said there was nothing wrong with that environment. It paid well and provided a valuable social service.’ He rolled his eyes in frustration. ‘I was being inconsistent. I was becoming too conservative. I was a hypocrite. You name it, I was it.’

‘So she went back to it?’

‘Not right away. Not for a while.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’d like to believe that it was my strength of will.’ A dry chuckle. ‘I didn’t give in. But she really couldn’t stand being at home, and I wasn’t putting the kids in full-time daycare, so we switched. Big mistake on my part, as it turned out.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because she was then the good working mother, and I was the nearly unemployable dad. The courts like mothers best anyway for custody, and when the dad doesn’t have a real career…’ He shrugged. ‘He’s dead meat.’

‘So she went to work?’ Hardy had to know what had happened.

Ron nodded. ‘Some office job, which of course was incredibly boring and didn’t pay anything like she was used to. She wanted out, but I kept wanting to make the family thing work.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, we made it a couple more years with me not working – bad, bad mistake – but finally I had to get another job, too.’ Ron’s eyes grew hard. He was sitting on the front inch of the couch again, his hands clenched so hard the knuckles were white. ‘Which is when,’ he said, ‘she started selling the kids.’

Marie and the children finally arrived back at the duplex which, truth to tell, was a great relief to Hardy. Belief in Ron Beaumont and his idealistic, over-the-top, melodramatic, perhaps heroic story had grown in him over the past days. To have it revealed now as false just when he’d come to accept it as the truth would have seemed a joke almost too cruel to endure.

They spent a few moments explaining Hardy’s presence and involvement to a skeptical Marie. But Ron and the kids – Cassandra particularly – convinced her that Hardy was on their side. He could be trusted absolutely. He was Cassandra’s hero. Clearly, she was thrilled to see him again, and so glad it was she who’d finally convinced him to help them. He told her he’d made a lot of progress. He’d give her a final report tomorrow. She loved that.

Otherwise, they were the well-mannered children they’d been at the hotel, although Hardy was delighted when Ron had to tell them to stop bickering over whose turn it was to get to choose the video. They were regular kids, after all. Much like his own. It continued to be a relief.

Marie – a handsome, physically confident yet soft-spoken woman in her late twenties – put on a brave front, but Ron’s situation with the children here was precarious enough without the added bonus of a stranger. Even if that stranger was presented as their savior.

And, because life was never simple, Hardy got the strong impression, picking up on the household banter, that the near future of Ron and Marie as a couple was in doubt. If it turned out that Ron decided to relocate tomorrow with the children, it wasn’t at all clear to Hardy that Marie would be joining them. Or that she even knew this was a contingency plan.

But after the kids had retired to the television, the two of them unpacked the bags with the practiced efficiency of a long-term couple. When they’d finished, Marie broke out a beer for each of the men.

Hardy stopped her. ‘Oh, Marie? Excuse me. Have you all been here all weekend?’

Marie looked to Ron. ‘Except just now, to go get groceries.’

‘But yesterday? The day before?’

‘What is this?’ Ron asked. Hardy motioned for silence, then backed him off gently with a palm.

‘Marie? Were all of you here all weekend?’

She met his gaze frankly. ‘Yes. Ron got here midday Saturday and we all got settled. Then Sunday you remember was so bad, the weather. We just stayed inside and played games and watched videos.’

‘What about Saturday night?’

‘What about it? Did we go out? Why would we go out?’

‘I don’t know. I’m asking.’

‘No.’ She threw a quick glance at Ron, a small prideful smile. ‘Definitely not.’ The satisfied lover. ‘Then last night Max had night terrors. We were up half the night.’ She crossed her arms. ‘Ron tells me tomorrow he’ll be able to go home. We’ve kind of been making a game out of this. Is that what you wanted to know?’

‘Exactly,’ Hardy said.

Marie nodded, the worry back on her face. She spoke to Ron. ‘If you need anything, just yell, all right?’ She closed the door to the kitchen on her way out, telling Hardy it was nice to have met him.

He didn’t completely believe her.

Although he did tend to believe what she’d said about Saturday night. And if Ron had been here with her, he hadn’t been out shooting Phil Canetta.

But the questions had ruffled Ron’s feathers. ‘What was all that about?’

Hardy was matter-of-fact. ‘That was about proving you didn’t kill Bree, which is an issue to more people than you’d like to believe. By the way, do you now or have you ever owned a Movado watch? You know, the museum timepiece, little dot at twelve o’clock?’

Ron was getting sick to death of all the questions. ‘By the way, isn’t this getting a bit much?’ Hardy didn’t respond, waiting him out, wearing him down. ‘No,’ he answered finally.

‘Did Inspector Griffin ever ask you the same thing? About a Movado watch?’

‘No. Why?’

‘No reason,’ Hardy said. ‘Now, the day of Bree’s funeral – tell me about that.’

‘Jesus Christ, I don’t see…’

‘Ron.’ Hardy was firm. ‘Humor me.’

Frustration showed in his face, but resolve must have shown more clearly in Hardy’s. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I want to know what you did, what the kids did, where you were.’

For Hardy, it was a fundamental recital. At eight o’clock, Ron and Father Bernardin had hosted a breakfast at the St Catherine’s rectory for the pallbearers – four of the other soccer dads – and he’d of course kept the children out of school so that they could be with him. The funeral mass had been at ten. At around eleven fifteen, accompanied by Marie, the children, the priest, the pallbearers, and a couple of other acquaintances from Ron and Bree’s limited social circle, he drove down to Colma, where she was buried.

Both Kerry and Pierce had been to the funeral. Neither had attended the burial.

There was a short graveside service, after which Ron took Marie, Bernardin, and the kids to lunch at the Cliff House. He dropped Max and Cassandra back at Merryvale at around two, about the time Carl Griffin’s body was discovered.

There could no longer be any doubt. Ron hadn’t shot Carl Griffin, which meant he hadn’t used the same gun to eliminate Canetta. And finally, at long last, it was a near certainty he hadn’t killed his sister. As he’d sworn all along, as Frannie had believed, as Hardy had hoped, Ron Beaumont was innocent.

It was a huge load off.

It was galling for Hardy to realize he could have known all this on Friday night, Saturday evening at the latest, if only Ron hadn’t felt the need to bolt. But there was nowhere to go with that. Ron had in fact called him on Saturday, had tried to cooperate. He hadn’t known what Hardy was going through. The only thing for Hardy to do now was get his remaining questions answered while he could.

He willed a neutral tone and began. ‘All right, Ron, here we go again, OK? Tell me about Bree and Damon Kerry.’

‘You’ve gotten to him, huh? I’m not surprised.’ Ron sat back and tipped up his beer.

‘Do you think he killed her?’

Ron had given this question a lot of thought, and he gave it some more now. ‘The problem I’ve always had is pure logistics. How could he have done it?’

‘That’s not so hard. He comes by your place after you’ve taken the kids to school. They talked that morning, you know. Kerry and Bree.’

‘I know.’

This was a surprise. ‘Do you know what they talked about?’

‘No. Not specifically. I think they just talked. They did all the time. But look, the man’s running for governor. He doesn’t just stroll down the street and kill somebody.’

‘Maybe he drove, parked in the basement…’

Ron was shaking his head. ‘And what if somebody sees him down there or in the elevator? And why?’

‘She was pregnant.’

‘No. They loved each other. They were talking about getting married. That’s what Bree and I were having our problems about.’ Ron spun his bottle nervously on the formica table. ‘This wasn’t my finest hour,’ he said at last. ‘I was upset enough with her when she started hitting the newspapers in connection with Kerry.’

‘Why was that, though, exactly?’

‘Because Bree isn’t the most common name on earth. If Dawn ran across it…’

‘How would she do that? Isn’t she back in Wisconsin?’

‘Why wouldn’t she? She reads the paper. California news plays everywhere.’

‘I thought she hated the kids.’

‘When they were babies. After she saw how lucrative they could be…’ He trailed off. ‘Certainly she fought like hell for the custody judgment. She thought they were her property.’

‘And after she got the judgment? After you’ – Hardy still had trouble with it – ‘took them? I’d think Bree would be the first place she’d look.’

‘That’s right. But it wasn’t as though the court’s judgment came as a surprise. Bree and I had months to prepare. When we got out here to California, I was Ron Beaumont, recently widowed. For over a year the kids and I lived in an apartment in Oakland, keeping a low profile.’

‘What did you do? For a living, I mean.’

‘What I do now. Computer-based financial work. I work from home.’

‘So you stayed in Oakland until the investigators stopped coming around to Bree?’

‘Right. Then we started “dating,” and had a small, private wedding.’

‘And no one knew you?’

‘Not as Bree’s brother, no. We’d lived completely separate lives since I went away to college. At that time, Bree was like fourteen. Then she came out here for grad school while I was living in Racine. None of her friends even knew of me, not that she had that many.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a perfect fit.’

‘It was also a hell of a risk.’

Another shrug. ‘High risk, high return. It was the best option. There was no way I was letting the kids go back to Dawn.’ He struggled to try and make it clear. ‘See, she really believed there wasn’t anything wrong with what she wanted to do, what she did. Society’s just too puritanical. Sex is natural. If some people are uptight, that’s their problem.’

‘Not kids, though. Nobody thinks it’s OK with kids.’

Ron appeared at a loss. If Hardy didn’t know this… ‘Well, check it out. Somebody’s taking ten million pictures a year.’

A short silence fell. Both men reached for their bottles.

‘Anyway,’ Ron continued, ‘back to it. Say Dawn sees Bree in the paper, something clicks. Same name, same field. She checks into it even a little and finds out Beaumont used to be Brunetta, my name. I’m dead. The kids are dead.’ He sighed. ‘So, yeah, we had some words about it.’

‘So what did she say? Bree?’

‘It wasn’t just saying,’ Ron said. ‘It’s hard to explain, but it was like, all of a sudden, she just… became an adult.’

‘The ugly duckling,’ Hardy said.

‘Right. I’m not saying she hadn’t been an unbelievably generous sister – all for the sake of my kids. She never told me anything about her other men, though I knew she had them. It was kind of tacitly understood between us that none of them could ever be serious because her first duty was’ – he motioned to the back of the duplex – ’to those guys in there. That’s what she’d signed on for.‘

‘But why did she ever agree to do that? I mean, it was so unusual…?’

‘I think that was part of it. If I thought I’d been raised conventional, at least I broke out of that at about twenty. Bree was twenty-eight. She had her doctorate and her new job, but she’d really never experienced anything in the real world. So suddenly this gave her a purpose. She had no social life and she loved the kids. She was saving their lives. You know when you’re young, you’ve got all the time in the world. You make lifetime decisions like it’s picking a pair of shoes.’

Another silence. They both knew all about that.

‘So what happened?’ Hardy asked finally. ‘Why did it start to unravel?’

Across the table, real anguish spilled over into Ron’s face. ‘The most natural thing in the world,’ he said ruefully. ‘She fell in love. She wanted her own life, her own family.’ He hesitated, then went on. ‘And I didn’t want her to have it. I didn’t want to have to change. I was furious when I found out she’d gotten pregnant.’

‘By Kerry.’

He nodded. ‘She was going to tell him. I don’t know if she ever did. It was another issue between us.’

‘Wait a minute. You had your identity established, so why didn’t you just pretend to get a divorce, then she marries Kerry?’

Ron was shaking his head. ‘The next governor? I don’t think so. Anybody but him, maybe, but if she’s the new first lady of California, people are going to be pretty damn curious about her past. It would have come out.’

‘So what did you suggest? What was your solution?’

‘I don’t know. I thought we could split up now, OK, then wait a year or two. Put some distance between me and her. If she would only have waited…’

‘But she was already pregnant. She’d waited enough, hadn’t she?’

To his credit, Ron wasn’t proud of any of this. ‘She really blew up at me. When was I going to let her live her life? How could I be so selfish after all she’d done for me and the kids?’ He met Hardy’s eyes. ‘And, of course, she was right.’

They came, at last, to the nub.

Ron’s initial reaction was a shocked disbelief that Hardy would even ask. Surely he could see that it was impossible? Ron couldn’t do it. He got up, crossed the kitchen, went to the sink and threw some water on his face, wiping it dry with a dish towel. He stood for a moment leaning on his hands. Hardy spoke to his back. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a negotiable invitation, Ron. You’re going to be there.’

He turned around. ‘How can you ask me to do this?’

‘Because it’s the only way.’

‘It can’t be. They’ll arrest me. I can’t let that happen. This is precisely what I’ve gone to all these lengths to avoid.’

‘Ron, listen to me.’ Hardy stood, his jaw set. ‘This isn’t the grand jury. The deliberations aren’t going to be secret. No prosecutor is going to be able to sandbag you. And besides, I need you to be there. For Frannie.’

‘I don’t understand why.’

‘The simple answer is because there won’t be a hearing if you’re not sitting in the courtroom. I promised the judge.’

‘But that…’

Hardy held out a hand, and snapped it out. ‘Listen up, Ron. The real answer – and I really don’t think it’s going to get to that, but if it does – is you’ve got to be there to tell her she can talk.’

The conflict played in his face. ‘But I wrote her that note that she…’

‘I know what you wrote her,’ Hardy snapped. ‘That won’t play, I told you that. She’s got her own ideas on the timing of this thing, and nobody but you is going to change her mind.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You owe her this, Ron. You know you do. Hell, you owe it to me.’

Ron walked away again. The room was too small. At the window end, he stood staring out at the gray for nearly a minute, which seemed a very long time. Finally, he turned back. ‘Do you know who killed Bree?’

‘I know it wasn’t you. I can prove it wasn’t you.’

‘I’ve always heard you couldn’t prove a negative.’

Hardy had always heard that, too. But with Glitsky’s corroboration, he could make a convincing argument that the same person had killed Griffin, Canetta, and Bree. Therefore…

‘That may be true,’ he said. ‘But sometimes you get a good enough lawyer working on it, you can create the impression.’

But Ron kept up the challenge. ‘And that would be you?’

Suddenly, Hardy had had enough. Marie and Ron and the kids might be playing all of this as some game that would end tomorrow, but it wasn’t a game, and Hardy believed with all his heart that it wasn’t going to end until he made it happen. His mouth turned up, though he’d gotten beyond smiling.

‘That’s right, my friend, that would be me.’

Ron stood by the window. Outside, Hardy could make out the little boxes on the hillside of Twin Peaks rising behind them. He was surprised to note that it was still light out. The fog had lifted to a low cover, smudged and dirty.

‘Ron.’

Another long moment. ‘I don’t have any choice, do I?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

He stared out the window in front of him, then turned and walked back to the kitchen table. He sat down heavily, spun his beer bottle again, and looked up at Hardy. ‘I’ll be there.’

Hardy studied him for a beat. ‘You’re sure?’

Ron bobbed his head distractedly. There was no more hesitation. He’d made up his mind. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ He raised his eyes and offered a smile. Hardy had wedged him and then beaten him. He’d be there. Of course. He had to be. There was no other choice.

Hardy exhaled in apparent relief. ‘OK, then. I’ll pick you up here at eight fifteen? How does that sound?’

‘All right,’ Ron repeated. ‘Eight fifteen. That’s fine. I’ll be ready.’

‘Great.’ Hardy again produced a victorious sigh. He extended his hand over the table. ‘Sorry this has been so difficult,’ he said, ‘but it’s going to work out, believe me. And thanks for all the cooperation today.’

Their discussion was over. Ron shook Hardy’s hand again, keeping up the chatter. When they’d gotten to the front door, Hardy paused. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘one last small thing. Could I have a word alone with Cassandra for just a sec?’

Ron’s visage clouded over. But Hardy, expecting the negative reaction, gave him a man-to-man smile, laying a hand on his arm. ‘She’s my pal, remember?’ he said. ‘She’s the one who got me into this with all of you. It’s only right we let her in on the plan, don’t you think?’

They went just outside on the landing by the front door.

Ron and Marie and the kids were treating it as a game, and Hardy made it just another part of the game for Cassandra, their own personal secret. Her father had told her she could trust Mr Hardy, didn’t he? If she wanted to double check with him, they could call him out here and ask, but then there was a chance that Max would hear.

The reason Hardy wanted to talk to her by herself, why they were alone out here on the landing was because her dad didn’t want to have Max get all upset that she was the only one he was letting go to the sleepover at Rebecca Hardy’s.

Her eyes were bright with excitement. ‘Rebecca’s having a sleepover? I love sleepovers.’

And Max would have been invited, too, except her dad had told Hardy he needed a good night’s rest after last night’s terrors. Vincent was going to be disappointed, but he’d understand.

No. She didn’t have to go back in. Rebecca had extra toothbrushes. She could borrow some of her pajamas. It would be a blast.

But they had to hurry to get to Mr Hardy’s car, OK? They needed to get away before Max found out. Otherwise she’d have to stay here and miss the sleepover.

He stopped five blocks away and put in a gallon or two while Cassandra waited in the car. Inside the station, never taking his eyes off her, he dropped a quarter into a pay phone.

Marie’s voice was choked with tension, but he allowed her no time to speak, either. ‘I’ll be out front at eight fifteen as Ron and I discussed. Cassandra’s fine.’

Erin Cochran was as mad as he’d ever seen her, and Hardy thought it likely that compared to her husband Ed, when he got home from work, her anger would appear mild as the driven snow. But his concern for people’s feelings weren’t in his mix anymore. He was running on instinct and adrenalin, and if the people he loved had a problem with that or with him, they’d have to get over it. He didn’t have time.

‘I borrowed her,’ he said. ‘Just for one night.’

‘It’s not funny, Dismas.’

‘I don’t think it’s funny. I know it’s pretty damn serious.’ She had all but taken Hardy by the earlobe and dragged him inside from the backyard. The children, oblivious to any intrigue, were engrossed with a contraption they’d made up of an oversized cardboard container, ropes, some plastic lawn chairs, and a blanket. Erin threw an eye at them, making sure the adults hadn’t drawn their attention. Then back to Hardy. ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me and Ed to be part of this.’

‘It was the only way, Erin.’

‘I find that hard to believe. And if the police-’

‘Ron won’t call the police,’ Hardy replied, cutting her off. ‘He was going to run again and I need him tomorrow to get Frannie free.’ Now he looked out at the children. ‘Cassandra’s my guarantee he shows up.’

‘But you can’t-’

‘Erin!’ He put his hands, not quite roughly, on her shoulders. The harshness he heard in his own voice surprised him. But that, too, couldn’t be helped. ‘Erin, listen to me! I did it. It’s done. It’s one more night.’

He brought his hands down. Erin’s mouth trembled as she fought for control, couldn’t speak.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

36

Hunched over, he sat on the low upholstered chair by the balcony in the penthouse. The drapes were open and when he raised his head he could see off to his left the sunset bleeding a bruised orange into the purple sea. Suddenly, visibility had returned between the cloud cover and the earth. Up at the north end of the Bay, he thought he could even make out individual cars on the Richmond Bridge.

What had he done? What had he done?

The thought assailed him. Ron had agreed. He was going to do it. He would be at Marie’s tomorrow morning so that Hardy could pick him up and they could go to the hearing. Hardy had convinced him that this was what he had to do. It was a done deal.

Except…

Hardy had no doubt at all. The conversion had been too swift and too unencumbered. Ron had made a decision, all right, but it wasn’t to show up in court. Instead, Hardy would arrive at the appointed hour in the morning and Ron and his children would be gone with no trace.

He needed the leverage of his daughter. There hadn’t been any other choice.

But if he were wrong.

His insides churned and his skin felt clammy. In front of him, his hands were clenched – the only way he could keep them from shaking.

Pushing himself up from the chair, he stood still, trying yet again to envision the struggle that must have occurred here. But nothing spoke to him. He crossed over to the French doors, unlocked them, pulled them open, and stepped outside.

It was all the same. The planters with their meager shrubbery. The small table and chairs, exactly as they’d been when he’d first come here. Three steps brought him across the slippery tiles of the balcony to the rough iron grillwork.

He tested its strength and found it solid. He wasn’t tempted to lean his body into it, but again, hands on the rail, he was drawn to peer over and down to the enclosed rectangle of garden below. The sensation – the height itself – was mesmerizing. It held him there while seconds ticked until finally the vertigo straightened him up.

Backing away, he shuddered, wondering at the primeval power of the urge to fall – death’s easy, frighteningly inviting availability with one instant of weakness.

Or assent.

It was unnerving.

The railing was wet from thirty hours wrapped in fog and he went to wipe his hands on his jacket. A foghorn boomed from down below and suddenly he stopped himself.

Rust stains. Fabric wash.

He turned his palms up. With the sun just down, the dusk had rapidly advanced, but there was still enough natural light to make out the faint striations.

For another long moment, he stood without moving. The switch for the light over the balcony was behind him and he turned around and flicked it. The rust wasn’t dark on his hands, but it had come off the grillwork sufficiently to be easily identifiable.

Again he crossed to the railing, but this time he squatted so that the top of it was at his eye level. Where he’d stood, the condensation had of course been cleared; but beyond that he thought he could make out where his hands had taken the rust. Swiping the arm of his jacket strongly over the area, the smooth and rugged Gore-tex caught in a couple of places, and then when he pulled it away, the railing had left a line of rust on it.

But far more importantly, the metal itself reflected what he’d done. The top thin layer of rust had wiped away. It was subtle, but unmistakable.

And it led to a similarly unmistakable and startling conclusion. If Bree’s body had been dumped over this railing with sufficient friction to leave rust stains on her clothes, two things should have been immediately apparent to even an inept and overworked crime scene investigator. The first was there would have been a noticeable if not obvious spot on the railing where the rust had been disturbed.

And the second, Hardy thought, would have even been more telling. His own space-age jacket had caught a couple of times when he’d swiped at the railing. Bree had been wearing cotton and wool, the threads of which would have snagged all along on the rough ironwork of the railing.

His brain was spinning as he stood again and looked down over the lights coming on in the city below. He didn’t have to go back and check any of his folders, the contents of his briefcase. He’d memorized most of that long ago anyway.

One of the most perplexing aspects of the crime scene investigation into Bree’s death had been its inability to produce even a shred of physical evidence to tie any suspect to events in this room, on this balcony. And now Hardy understood why that had been.

Fabric wash.

No trace of fabric on the railing.

David Glenn, the building superintendent, remembered him and said he could come in, but they had to keep it short. Glenn had to keep working. His friends would be showing up any time for cards and Monday night football and if the food wasn’t laid out, the shit hit the fan.

So they went to the clean, brightly lit kitchen where Glenn continued to arrange the cold cuts and cheeses, the breads and pickles and condiments. Hardy, who by now had pretty much given up on the idea that he’d ever eat regularly again, stood by the counter and tried not to notice the food.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Glenn was saying. Hardy had asked him how many people resided in the building, and if Glenn was familiar with all of them. ‘There’s only a couple of places – the Beaumonts and then the Mahmoutis on four – that have kids. Then mostly couples, three or four singles. Say forty, give or take, altogether.’

‘Full-time tenants?’

‘Well.’ Glenn studied an olive and popped it into his mouth. ‘Owners. I told you before. Some of these people I never see.’

‘Never?’

Glenn considered. ‘Almost, some of them. I could pass them on the street.’

‘How can that be?’

‘Easy, really. The place is designed for privacy. You got your parking space under the building. You take the elevator to your room. Some units, nobody’s ever home. You ask me, nobody lives there, but we get the checks. Couple of them are companies. You know, hold the places for their executives when they’re in town.’ He must have seen Hardy eyeing the food. ‘Hey, you hungry? You want a bite?’

‘That’s OK, thanks. Do you know who the companies are offhand?’

‘Sure. There’s just two of ’em. Standard Warehousing – I think they’re out of Phoenix. And some Russians. Diamond merchants, they say. Talk about never here.‘

‘So, other than those, how many units don’t have regular tenants?’

He chewed another olive. ‘It’s not something I give much thought to. Maybe two, I’d say, maybe three.’

‘Is one of them nine oh two?’

He stopped chewing, stopped fussing with the food, and gave Hardy his full attention. ‘Is this still about Bree?’

Hardy nodded. ‘Would nine oh two have a balcony directly under hers?’

A slow nod. ‘Yeah. All the twos are the back units. Rita Browning.’

‘And who is she? Do you know her?’

‘Not from Eve.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s one of ’em.‘

The last person Hardy wanted to see was Abe Glitsky.

And now, carrying a brown paper bag, here he was, being shown into the Solarium by one of Freeman’s young associates. Aside from Hardy and Freeman, two other associates labored at the table drawing up subpoenas for the hearing in Braun’s courtroom the next morning.

Freeman whistled happily, tonelessly, annoyingly, but none of the worker bees joined in. This was not volunteer overtime. Freeman had knocked on office doors, interrupting, recruiting. And they’d barely begun – after the subpoenas were prepared, they were going to serve them well into the night.

‘We need to talk,’ the lieutenant said.

Hardy gestured apologetically to the people working for him. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’

Glitsky wasn’t so sure. He faced down the impatient stares and responded calmly. ‘Maybe a little more.’

The frustrated comments of the young associates were not quite inaudible as they’d trudged up the stairs. Hardy closed his office door behind them, and turned on the lights. Glitsky wasted no time. ‘We’re being set up.’ As he explained it, Hardy went over and sat down heavily on the couch. His papers and research materials were still spread all over the coffee table in front of him, but they seemed somehow unimportant anymore – old news, irrelevant. Kind of like himself.

‘From what I can gather,’ Glitsky concluded, ‘the DA’s new theory is that we’re running a coverup, protecting Ron Beaumont. You’re his attorney, I’m your friend. We’re all going to make a lot of money on Bree’s insurance.’

‘That’ll be fun,’ Hardy said grimly, ‘when that happens.’

‘I think so, too.’ Glitsky wasn’t smiling either. ‘I hear you’re pretty strapped for cash. I wouldn’t even put it past you to burn down your house. How about that?’

‘Just as a stop-gap measure before I collect on Bree.’ It was a small relief to understand the grilling he’d taken with the fire inspectors that afternoon. Somebody had pointed in his direction as the arsonist, and now he knew who it was. ‘This boy Scott Randall is a menace, Abe. You put him with Pratt and they start doing the tango together – watch out.’

‘I’m watching. But they do have me thinking I’ve got to release the information about Griffin and Canetta being tied to Bree Beaumont.’

‘Why is that?’

‘To prove that…’

‘You’re trying to find who killed them? What do they have on you? What could they have on you?’

‘I haven’t arrested Beaumont.’

‘You know where he is?’

‘No.’

Hardy almost laughed. ‘Well, there you go. That’s a pretty good reason.’

‘Yeah, but they’re getting me on appearance. They cast Ron as the obvious suspect and I’m not looking for him. I’m covering for him.’

‘You’re looking at the facts instead. How about that? That’s how it’s supposed to work.’

‘I know. I know.’ Glitsky heaved a great sigh. ‘You’re right.’

‘Not often enough,’ Hardy said, ‘but every once in a while and this is one of those times.’ Although this was pure bravado.

In fact, the situation was worse than Glitsky suspected. Would anyone – Randall or Pratt or the internal affairs people – believe that Hardy had known of Ron Beaumont’s whereabouts and hadn’t told his friend the lieutenant? It was unlikely.

Further, if Hardy did tell Glitsky where Ron was now – and he had no intention on that score – what was his friend supposed to do? Become an accessory to the federal crime of kidnapping? Place Hardy under arrest? Or – even if Hardy could somehow downplay what he’d done with Cassandra – was Glitsky supposed to put Ron into the system, the very result Hardy had struggled to avoid at such great cost?

He couldn’t tell him. There was no way.

But by not telling him, he was leaving Glitsky vulnerable to the charges that Randall and Pratt were asserting against him, and that could cost him his job, his credibility, his honor.

‘What?’ Glitsky asked.

‘Nothing. I don’t know. Maybe an idea.’ Hardy pretended to search through the pages laid out on the table in front of him. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘right here. Bree’s funeral.’

‘What about it?’

Smoothly deceptive, hating himself for what he had to do, he began to walk Glitsky through it. He said – it had just occurred to him – that maybe Ron had an alibi for the time of Griffin’s death after all. Maybe the priest at – what church was it now? St Catherine’s? – maybe he’d been with Ron for most of the day, or at least some reasonable portion of it, the important times, taking care of the myriad details.

Abe remembered, didn’t he? When his wife Flo had died, he’d been at the synagogue from early morning until late in the day. Had anybody ever checked with Ron what he’d done? It was, after all, his sister’s funeral.

‘What do you mean, sister?’

Hardy felt the blood drain out of his face. ‘Did I say “sister”? I meant his wife. His wife’s funeral. The point is, if Ron’s got an alibi for Griffin, he didn’t kill Bree, did he? If you got that, you rub it in Randall’s face that you’re not covering up anything. Why doesn’t he get out of your way and let you do your damn job?’

Sitting on the corner of Hardy’s desk, Glitsky made a swift decision and pulled the phone over. ‘Does it have the number there? St Catherine’s.’

It did, and when five minutes later he replaced the receiver, the lieutenant was close to actually smiling, the scar between his lips standing out white. ‘Everything should be that easy,’ he said. ‘Ron was with the priest all day. His kids. A couple of other people.’

‘That’s what it sounded like.’ Hardy feigned satisfaction, leaned back in the couch, and broke his own smile. ‘That’s great.’

‘It’s at least good.’ Glitsky didn’t skip a beat. ‘So that brings us,’ he said, ‘back to Baxter Thorne, who as you point out is one slick-’

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Hardy got up to answer it. David Freeman stood in the hallway, hands in his pockets. ‘Five minutes are up,’ he said pointedly.

‘One more,’ Glitsky said.

Freeman looked at him, nodded, and came back to Hardy. ‘If nobody’s left down there when you make it back, don’t blame me.’

‘I’ll be right there. Promise.’

Freeman shrugged – he’d tried – and started back down the stairs. Hardy turned back to Abe. ‘You heard that,’ he said.

‘OK.’ Glitsky handed the paper bag he’d been carrying over to Hardy. ‘More stuff for your private collection. Photos from Griffin’s car, the back seat, and what they’d tagged earlier. Only the so-called significant stuff is inventoried, but you can check the photos. Canetta. Couple of interview transcripts you might have missed.

‘Also, Kerry does have a Glock. It’s where he said it was and hasn’t been fired since it was last cleaned – my guess is maybe a year, maybe never. Of course, he wouldn’t have had to fire it if he pointed it convincingly enough.

‘Finally, I know you’re wanted down below, but here’s the short version on Thorne. You’re going to want to know, trust me.’ When he finished with the damning but completely unprovable information on the gasoline and one of Hardy’s elephants in Thorne’s coat pocket, Hardy asked if they had found any evidence of his connection to SKO, to the MTBE dump, or any other terrorist acts.

The answer was no, but Glitsky was pulling another warrant tomorrow, sending a couple of teams of search and cyber specialists back to the apartment and to the FMC offices. It was going to be the full press, with full phone-record followups and data searches for palimpsest disks, forensics teams.

‘Where are you getting the staff?’ Hardy asked. ‘I thought you had seven new homicides, no troops.’

‘I’m reassigning people,’ he said simply. They started back toward the stairway. ‘It’s a new management tool I’m working on, called do what your boss asks and see if it improves your life.’

‘I like it,’ Hardy said.

‘Me, too. I think it’s going to work. And in case it doesn’t,’ he said, ‘there’s always the FBI.’

As it turned out, in the Solarium no one had gone home, although Hardy’s return to the conference room didn’t occasion the warmest reception he’d ever encountered. Still, the guys finished the work and left the office, spreading out to deliver the bad news to Kerry, Valens, Pierce, Thorne, David Glenn. Everyone Hardy could think of.

After much debate, Hardy and Freeman decided to serve both Randall and Pratt with subpoenas as well. They would have to appear in Judge Braun’s court for Hardy’s hearing, and wouldn’t that just fry them?

He wasn’t sure he would call all of these people as witnesses – or even most of them. But he wanted to keep his options open, and the turns in this case had surprised him often enough already. He was damned if he was going to be taken unawares in court.

This strategy, though, wasn’t without some peril. The shotgun approach was an abuse of the subpoena power and might even earn Hardy a reprimand from the state bar, a contempt citation of his own, but he was beyond those considerations anymore. If his strategy failed, contempt would be the least of his problems.

And then, finally, at a little after nine, even Freeman packed up and went home, leaving him alone again up in his office, his pages spread out before him, his mind numbed by the gravity of his decisions, the impossibility of what he was considering.

If Ron’s got an alibi for Griffin, he didn’t kill Bree, did he?

Hardy’s own words to Glitsky came back to torment him. He’d used them earlier to convince himself, believing them absolutely. It was so logical that it had to be true – Griffin was investigating Bree’s death and Griffin had been killed. Same with Canetta. Therefore they were all, somehow, connected.

Except if they weren’t.

Except if Carl Griffin, in the course of poking into lives as he did, had discovered an unpleasant truth about the last documented man to have seen him alive – Baxter Thorne. And except if Phil Canetta, stumbling upon the Thorne/Valens arrangement after he’d left Hardy and Freeman on Saturday night, had gone alone after the glory – to deliver a cop killer to all the suits downtown in homicide. And he’d underestimated his man. Thorne.

A dangerous, decisive, quietly confident man of action, already armed with Griffin’s gun, his adrenalin high from torching Hardy’s house. Or had that been when he was feeling truly invincible, after he’d killed Canetta?

And that, of course, left Bree. And another killer entirely. David Glenn’s friends had begun to arrive. He said he wanted to help Hardy with 902, but he couldn’t just let him in to a tenant’s apartment. He could be fired for that. Why didn’t Hardy just come back with the lieutenant, with a warrant, as he had before?

But again, agonizingly, Hardy couldn’t come to Glitsky. And the reason was more personal, more compelling than anything else he was likely to encounter. It was Frannie.

If Rita Browning – the invisible Rita Browning – was another of Ron Beaumont’s credit card identities, if Griffin had discovered the Movado watch in 902 and not in Bree’s apartment after all…

Hardy could not let Glitsky get to Ron. There could be no arrest, no police interrogation. Because if Ron continued to deny any involvement in the murder – and there was little doubt that is what he would of – then Frannie would always believe him. Worse, she would also believe that the system had betrayed Ron. Her friend Abe had betrayed her.

And her husband, too.

So if Ron had killed Bree after all, Glitsky wouldn’t be any help – he couldn’t be any part of it.

Ron would have to say it himself. In front of Frannie. In open court.

Hardy had to leave here, go see his children, make sure Cassandra was safe. Slumped, nearly reclining on the couch, he held his right hand over his eyes, shielding them from the overheads. His left hand fell on the photos Glitsky had left with him – extreme close-ups of the items under the back seat of Carl Griffin’s car. Then there were the written forms – Canetta’s autopsy report, his car. Interviews, interrogations.

Forcing himself up, he carried all the stuff over to his desk and went down the hall to throw some water in his face. When he returned, he had a moment of indecision – there was no chance that he could analyse any significant portion of all this material. What was the point of even starting?

But this, he knew, was the devil.

So he began, but after a quick scan knew that he wasn’t equipped now to see anything in the photos of the junk, food wrappers, and French fries that had been under the back seat of Griffin’s car. He’d try again in the morning, but expected nothing. Instead, he turned to the tapes, putting one of the micro-cassettes into his hand-held machine.

He listened to an understandably impatient but finally cooperative Jim Pierce talking in his office with Vince Coleman – again. Next was Glitsky, Hardy, Kerry, and Valens from last night.

Hardy realized that this case – these cases? – must have gotten inside Glitsky as well. He’d put a rush on getting copies made of everything he’d delivered to Hardy, and then sat on his people to make sure it all got done.

Canetta’s autopsy, especially. The morgue was backed up with bodies, but the coroner did his work on Canetta first. Hardy realized grimly, though, that this might not have been Glitsky’s influence after all, but a final show of respect for a policeman killed in the line of duty.

He’d been at it for over an hour and the effects of the cold-water splash had long since worn off. And here before him now was the technical sheet from the autopsy of Phil Canetta. Entry wounds, exit wounds. A fresh wave of exhaustion rolled over him and he closed his eyes against it.

And against the other painful reality – if he hadn’t recruited Canetta, the man would still be alive. The image floated up at him – Canetta enjoying the hell out of his mortadella sandwich just a couple of days before, his cigar on Saturday night at Freeman’s. The sergeant had been very much alive – in tune with tastes, buffeted by the storms of love, hamstrung by his responsibilities. So much like Hardy, and now in a day gone to dirt.

Clothing. Powder burns. Next to the medical/chemical analysis of sugars, starches, and carbon compounds, someone from the coroner’s office – maybe under Glitsky’s questioning – had written down in the margin the layman’s version of Canetta’s stomach contents. Cop food. His last fast-food burger with a coffee and a candy bar – chocolate, beef, potato, almond, bread, pickle. Hardy passed over it, and went on to blood levels for alcohol, nicotine…

He closed his eyes and saw Canetta’s face again on the bench in Washington Square, his eyes lit up with the memory of Bree Beaumont, the simple joy in his deli sandwich.

Enough enough enough.

He flipped desultorily through the rest of the pile, which seemed to go on and on. His office closed in around him, and he shut his eyes again, just for a second. Then, starting awake, realized that he must have dozed. Still, he couldn’t quit. He didn’t know yet…

Frannie, still in jail…

He turned another page, trying to will himself to focus. It was no use. He could barely make out even the letters, and those he saw formed words that had lost all meaning.