The Oath

Her stupid, old American car wasn't working again. So now Luz Lopez was sitting on the bus with her sick son, Ramiro, dozing beside her. This time of day, midmorning, the streetcar wasn't crowded, and she was glad of that. Ramiro, small for eleven years old, had room to curl up with his head on her lap. She stroked his cheek gently with the back of her hand. He opened his eyes and smiled at her weakly.

His skin was warm to her touch, but not really burning. She was more concerned about the cut on his lip than the sore throat. There was something about the look of it that bothered her. He'd banged it on some playground bars on Monday and today, Thursday, it was swollen, puffy, yellowish at the edges. But when the sore throat had come on yesterday, Ramiro had complained not about the cut lip, but the throat. Luz knew her boy wouldn't make a fuss unless there was real pain. He was up half the night with gargling and Tylenol. But this morning, he told her it wasn't any better.

She had to take the day off so he could see a doctor. Time off was always a risk. Though she'd been halfway to her business degree when she'd left home, now she worked as a maid at the Osaka Hotel in Japantown, and they were strict about attendance. Even if the reason was good, Luz knew that every day she missed work counted against her. The clinic said they could see him before noon-a miracle-so maybe she could get his prescription and have Ramiro back at school by lunchtime; then she could still put in a half day back at the Osaka.

She had lived in San Francisco for over ten years now, though she would never call the place home. After the opponents of land reform in El Salvador had killed her father, a newspaper publisher, and then her brother Alberto, a doctor who had never cared about politics, she had fled north with her baby inside her. It had taken her husband, Jose´, almost three years to follow her here, and then last year La Migra had sent him back. Now, unable to find work back home, he lived with her mother.

She shifted on her seat on her way to the Judah Clinic, which was not on Judah Street at all, but two blocks before Judah began, where the same street was called Parnassus. Why did they not call it the Parnassus Clinic, then? She shook her head, these small things keeping her mind from what it wanted to settle on, which was the health of her son.

And of course the money. Always money.

Ramiro's tiny hand lay like a dead bird in hers as they walked from the streetcar stop to the clinic, a converted two-story Victorian house. When she opened the front door, she abandoned all hope that they'd get to her quickly. Folding chairs lined the walls of the waiting room. More were scattered randomly in the open space in the middle, and every seat was taken. On the floor itself, a half dozen kids played with ancient plastic blocks, or little metal cars and trucks that didn't have all the wheels on them.

Behind the reception window, four women sat at computer terminals. Luz waited, then cleared her throat. One of the women looked up. "Be just a minute," she said, and went back to whatever she was doing. There was a bell on the counter, with instructions to ring it for service, but the computer woman already had told Luz she'd just be a minute (although now it had been more like five), and Luz didn't want to risk getting anyone mad at her. They would just go more slowly. But she was angry, and sorely tempted.

At last the woman sighed and came to the window. She fixed Luz with an expression of perfect boredom and held out her hand. "Health card, please." She entered some information into her computer, didn't look up. "Ten dollars," she said. After she'd taken it and put it in a drawer, the woman continued. "Your son's primary care doctor is Dr. Whitson, but he's unavailable today. Do you have another preference?"

Luz wanted to ask why Dr. Whitson was unavailable, but knew that there would be no point in complaining. If Dr. Whitson wasn't here, he wasn't here. Asking about him wouldn't bring him back. "No." She smiled, trying to establish some connection. "Sooner would be better, though."

The woman consulted her computer screen, punched a few more keys. "Dr. Jadra can see Ramiro in twenty-five minutes. Just have a seat and we'll call you."

The words just popped out. "But there are no seats."

The woman flicked a look to the waiting room over Luz's shoulder. "One'll turn up any second." She looked past her. "Next."

While Ramiro dozed fitfully, Luz picked up a copy of the latest edition of San Francisco magazine. There were many of them in the room, all with the same cover photo of a strong Anglo businessman's face. Luz read English well and soon realized the reason for the multiple copies. The story was about the director of Parnassus Health-her insurance company. The man's name was Tim Markham. He had a pretty wife, three nice-looking children, and a dog. He lived in a big house in Seacliff and in all the pictures they took, he was smiling.

Luz cast a glance around the waiting room. No one was smiling here.

She stared at the face for another minute, then looked down at her sick boy, then up at the wall clock. She went back to Mr. Markham's smiling face, then read some more. Things were good in his life. His company was experiencing some growing pains, yes, but Markham was on top of them. And in the meantime, his patients continued to receive excellent medical care, and that was the most important thing. That was what he really cared about. It was his lifelong passion.

Finally, finally, a nurse called Ramiro's name. Luz folded the magazine over and put it in her purse. Then they walked down a long hallway to a tiny windowless room with a paper-covered examining table, a sink and counter, a small bookcase and shelves. Posters of California mountain and beach scenes, perhaps once vibrantly colored, now hung faded and peeling from the walls.

Ramiro laid himself down on the table and told his mom he was cold, so she covered him with her coat. Luz sat in an orange plastic molded chair, took out her magazine, and waited again.

At 12:22, Jadra knocked once on the door, then opened it and came in. Small and precise, completely bald, the doctor introduced himself as he perused the chart. "Busy day today," he said by way of apology. "I hope you haven't had to wait too long."

Luz put on a pleasant expression. "Not too bad."

"We're a little shorthanded today. Twenty doctors and something like eight have this virus going around." He shook his head wearily. "And you're Ramiro?"

"Samp2;´." Her boy had opened his eyes again and gotten himself upright.

"How are you feeling?"

"Not so good. My throat…"

Jadra pulled a wooden stick from a container on the counter. "Well, let's take a look at it. Can you stick out your tongue as far as you can and say 'ahh'?"

That examination took about ten seconds. When it was over, Jadra placed a hand on the boy's neck and prodded around gently. "Does that hurt? How about that?"

"Just when I swallow."

Five minutes later, Luz and Ramiro were back outside. They'd been at the clinic for over two hours. It had cost Luz ten dollars, more than she made in an hour, plus a full day's wages. Dr. Jadra had examined Ramiro for less than one minute and had diagnosed his sore throat as a virus. He should take Children's Tylenol and an over-the-counter throat medication. He explained that the way viruses work, symptoms go away by themselves within about fourteen days or two weeks, whichever came first.

A joke, Luz supposed, though it didn't make her laugh.

Two days later, Ramiro was worse, but Luz had to go to work. Last time they'd warned her about her absences. There were a lot of others who would be happy to take her job if she didn't want to work at the hotel anymore. So she had to take Ramiro into urgent care at night, after she got off.

On the bus, she gathered him in next to her, wrapped her own coat over his shivering little body. He curled up and immediately fell asleep. His breathing sounded like someone crinkling a paper bag inside his lungs. His cough was the bark of a seal.

This night, the clinic was less crowded. Luz paid her ten dollars and within a half hour, full dark outside now, she heard Ramiro's name called. She woke her boy and followed a stout man back into another tiny office, similar to Dr. Jadra's except there was no art, even faded.

Ramiro didn't notice. He climbed onto the paper-covered examining table, curled his knees up to his chest, and closed his eyes. Again she covered him with her jacket, and again she waited. Until she was startled awake by a knock at the door.

"I could use a nap myself," the woman said gently in good Spanish. She wore a badge that said DR. JUDITH COHN. She studied the folder, then brought her attention back to Luz. "So. Tell me about Ramiro. Where did he get this cut?"

"At school. He fell down. But he complains of his throat."

The doctor frowned deeply, reached for a tongue depressor. After a longer look than Dr. Jadra had taken, Dr. Cohn turned to Luz. "The throat doesn't look good, but I really don't like the look of this cut," she said in Spanish. "I'd like to take a culture. Meanwhile, in case it isn't a virus, I'll prescribe an antibiotic."

"But the other doctor…"

"Yes?" She reached out a hand reassuringly. "It's okay. What's your question?"

"The other doctor said it was a virus. Now it might not be. I don't understand."

Dr. Cohn, about the same age as Luz, was sympathetic. "Sometimes a virus will bring on a secondary infection that will respond to antibiotics. The cut looks infected to me."

"And the drug will take care of that?"

The doctor, nodding, already had the prescription pad out. "Does Ramiro have any allergies? Good, then. Now, if for some reason the cut doesn't clear up, I might want to prescribe a stronger antibiotic, but I'll let you know when I get the results of the test."

"When will that be? The results?"

"Usually two to three days."

"Three more days? Couldn't we just start with the stronger antibiotic now? Then I would not have to come back for another appointment."

The doctor shook her head. "You won't have to come here again. I can call in the other prescription if we need it."

Luz waited, then whispered, "There is also the expense, the two prescriptions."

Dr. Cohn clucked sadly. "I'm sorry about that, but we really don't want to prescribe a stronger antibiotic than Ramiro needs." She touched Luz on the forearm. "He'll be fine. You don't need to worry."

Luz tried to smile. She couldn't help but worry. Ramiro was no better. In fact, she knew that he was worse. Despite her resolve, a tear broke and rolled over her cheek. She quickly, angrily, wiped it away, but the doctor had seen it. "Are you really so worried?"

A mute nod. Then, "I'm afraid…"

The doctor sat down slowly and leaned in toward her. She spoke in an urgent whisper. "Everything will be all right. Really. He's got an infection, that's all. The antibiotics will clear it up in a few days."

"But I feel…in my heart…" She stopped.

Dr. Cohn straightened up, but still spoke gently. "You're both very tired. The best thing you can do now is go home and get some sleep. Things will look better after that."

Luz felt she had no choice but to accept this. She met the doctor's eyes for a long moment, then nodded mechanically and thanked her. Then she and her bundled-up and shivering son were back out in the cold and terrible night.

1

At around 6:20 on the morning of Tuesday, April 10, a forty-seven-year-old businessman named Tim Markham was on the last leg of his customary jog. Every weekday when he wasn't traveling, Markham would run out the driveway of his mansion on McLaren within minutes on either side of 5:45. He would turn right and then right again on Twenty-eighth Avenue, jog down to Geary, go left nearly a mile to Park Presidio, then left again back up to Lake. At Twenty-fifth, he'd jog a block right to Scenic Way, cut down Twenty-sixth, and finally turn back home on Seacliff where it ran above Phelan Beach.

In almost no other ways was Markham a creature of habit, but he rarely varied either the route of his run or the time he took it. This morning-garbage day in the neighborhood-he was struck by a car in the intersection just after he left the sidewalk making the turn from Scenic to Twenty-sixth. The impact threw him against one of the trash receptacles at the curb and covered him in refuse.

Markham had been jogging without his wallet and hence without benefit of identification. Although he was a white man in physically good health, he hadn't yet shaved this morning. The combination of the garbage surrounding him with his one-day growth of beard, his worn-down running shoes, and the old sweats and ski cap he wore made it possible to conclude that he was a homeless man who'd wandered into the upscale neighborhood.

When the paramedics arrived from the nearby fire station, they went right to work on him. Markham was bleeding from severe head trauma, maybe had punctured and collapsed a lung. He'd obviously broken several bones including his femur. If this break had cut an artery, it was a life-threatening injury all by itself. He would clearly need some blood transfusions and other serious trauma intervention immediately if he were going to have a chance to survive.

The ambulance driver, Adam Lipinski, was a longtime veteran of similar scenes. Although the nearest emergency room was at Portola Hospital, twenty blocks away in the inner Richmond District, he knew both from rumor and personal experience that Portola was in an embattled financial state right now. Because it was forbidden by law to do otherwise, any hospital would have to take this victim into the ER and try to stabilize him somewhat. But if he was in fact homeless and uninsured, as Lipinski suspected, there was no way that Portola would then admit him into the hospital proper.

Lipinski wasn't a doctor, but he'd seen a lot of death and knew what the approach of it could look like, and he was thinking that this was one of those cases. After whatever treatment he got in the ER, this guy was going to need a stretch in intensive care, but if he didn't have insurance, Lipinski was all but certain that Portola would find a way to declare him fit to move and turf him out to County.

Last month, the hospital had rather notoriously transferred a day-old baby-a baby!-to County General after she'd been delivered by emergency C-section in the ER at Portola in the middle of the night, six weeks premature and addicted to crack cocaine. The mother, of course, had no insurance at all. Though some saint of a doctor, taking advantage of the administration's beauty sleep, had simply ordered the baby admitted to Portola's ICU, by the next day someone had decided that the mother and child couldn't pay and therefore had to go to County.

Some Portola doctors made a stink, arguing that they couldn't transfer the mother so soon after the difficult surgery and birth-she was still in grave condition and transporting her might kill her, and the administration had backed down. But it countered that the baby, Emily, crack addiction and all, would clearly survive the trip across town. She would be transferred out. Separated from her mother within a day of her birth.

At County General, Emily had barely held on to life for a day in the overcrowded special unit for preemies. Then Jeff Elliot's "CityTalk" column in the Chronicle had gotten wind of the outrage and embarrassed Portola into relenting. If not for that, Lipinski knew that the poor little girl probably wouldn't have made it through her first week. As it was, she got readmitted to Portola's ICU, where she stayed until her mother left ten days later, and where the two of them ran up a bill of something like seventy thousand dollars. And all the while politicos, newspaper people, and half the occupants of their housing project-whom the administration accused of stealing drugs and anything else that wasn't tied down-generally disrupted the order and harmony of the hospital.

In the wake of that, Portola put the word out-this kind of admitting mistake wasn't going to happen again. Lipinski knew beyond a doubt that once today's victim was minimally stabilized, Portola would pack him back up in an ambulance and have him taken to County, where they had to admit everybody, even and especially the uninsured. Lipinski wasn't sure that the victim here would survive that second trip and even if he did, the ICU at County was a disaster area, with no beds for half the people who needed them, with gurneys lining the halls.

But there was still time before he had to make that decision. The paramedics were trying to get his patient on a backboard, and the police had several officers knocking on doors and talking to people in the crowd that had gathered to see if anyone could identify the victim. Even rich people, snug in their castles, unknown to their neighbors, might recognize the neighborhood bum.

Because the body was so broken, it took longer than he'd originally estimated, but eventually they got the victim hooked up and into the back. In the meantime, Lipinski had decided that he was going directly to County. Portola would just screw around too much with this guy, and Lipinski didn't think he'd survive it. He'd just shifted into gear and was preparing to pull out when he noticed a couple of cops running up with a distraught woman in tow.

He knew what this was. Shifting back into park, he left the motor running, opened his door, and stepped out into the street. As the cops got to him, he was ready at the back door, pulling it open. Half walking, half running, the woman was a few steps behind them. She stepped up inside and Lipinski saw her body stiffen, her hands come up to cover her mouth. "Oh God," he heard. "Oh God."

He couldn't wait any longer. Slamming the door shut behind her, he ran back and hopped into his seat. They had their identification. And he was going to Portola.

2

In the days long ago before he'd hit the big four-oh, Dismas Hardy used to jog regularly. His course ran from his house on Thirty-fourth Avenue out to the beach, then south on the hard sand to Lincoln Way, where he'd turn east and pound the sidewalk until he got to Ninth and the bar he co-owned, the Little Shamrock. If it was a weekend or early evening, he'd often stop here to drink a beer before age wised him up and slowed him down. Later on, the beverage tended to be a glass of water. He'd finish his drink and conclude the four-mile circuit through Golden Gate Park and back up to his house.

The last time he'd gotten committed to an exercise program, maybe three years ago, he'd made it the first week and then about halfway through the second before he gave up, telling himself that two miles wasn't bad for a forty-seven-year-old. He'd put on a mere eight pounds this past decade, much less than many of his colleagues. He wasn't going to punish himself about his body, the shape he was in.

But then last year, his best friend, Abe Glitsky, had a heart attack that turned out to be a very near thing. Glitsky was the elder of the two men by a couple of years, but still, until it happened, Hardy had never considered either himself or Abe anywhere near old enough to have heart trouble. The two men had been best friends since they'd walked a beat together as cops just after Hardy's return from Vietnam.

Now Glitsky was the chief of San Francisco 's homicide detail. Half-black and half-Jewish, Glitsky was a former college tight end. No one among his colleagues would ever have thought of describing the lieutenant as anything but a hard-ass. His looks contributed to the rep as well-a thick scar coursed his lips top to bottom under a hatchet nose; he cultivated a fiercely unpleasant gaze. A buzz-cut fringe of gray bounded a wide, intelligent forehead. Glitsky didn't drink, smoke, or use profanity. He would only break out his smile to terrify staff (or small children for fun). Six months ago, when he'd married Treya Ghent, the administrative assistant to the new district attorney, several of his inspectors had bet that the new lifestyle would mellow him out considerably. They were still paying the installments.

Hardy was a successful defense attorney. Though he and Glitsky were on opposite sides of the fence professionally, there was also most of a lifetime of history between them. When Glitsky's first wife, Flo, had died some years before, Hardy and his wife, Frannie, had taken his three boys in to live with them until Abe could work his way through some of the emotional and logistical upheaval. Last fall, Hardy had been the best man at Abe's wedding.

They didn't talk about it-they were guys after all-but each was a fixed point of reference in the other's life.

The heart attack got their attention.

Since a month or so after Abe's marriage, they'd fallen into some semblance of a regular exercise program, where a couple of days a week one would goad or abuse the other into agreeing to do something physical. After the macho need to demonstrate their awesome strength and breathtaking endurance to each other in the first few weeks had almost made them quit the whole thing because of all the aches and pains, they finally had arrived at a brisk walk a couple of times a week, or perhaps throwing some kind of ball on the weekend.

This morning they were eating up maybe three miles an hour walking on the path around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. It was a cool and clear morning, the sun visible in the treetops. A mist hung over the water, and out of it at the near shore a swan with her brood of cygnets appeared.

Glitsky was talking work, as usual, complaining about the politics surrounding the appointment of two inexperienced inspectors to his detail of elite investigators in reaction to the unexplainable renaissance of hit-and-run accidents in the City by the Bay. In the past twelve months, Glitsky was saying, ninety-three persons had been struck by motor vehicles within the city and county. Of these, twenty-seven had died. Of the sixty-six injury accidents that didn't result in deaths, fourteen were hit and runs.

"I love it how you rattle off all those numbers," Hardy said. "Anybody would swear you knew what you were talking about."

"Those are the real stats."

"I'm sure they are. Which is why I'm glad we're on this path and not the street where we could be senselessly run down at any moment. But how do these numbers affect your department? I thought hit and runs weren't homicides."

Glitsky glanced sideways at him. "Technically, they are when somebody dies."

"Well, there you go. That's why they come to you. You're the homicide detail."

"But we don't investigate them. We have never investigated them. You want to know why? First, because there's a separate detail cleverly named 'hit and run.'"

"That's a good name if they do what I think," Hardy said.

"It's a fine name," Glitsky agreed. He knew, although the police department would deny it as a matter of course, that no hit-and-run incidents-even the homicides-were more than cursorily investigated by inspectors. What usually happened was that a couple of members of the hitand-run detail would take the paperwork at the Hall of Justice the day after the incident. Maybe they would go to the scene of an accident and see if they could find a witness to provide a description or license number of the vehicle. If that failed, and there were no good eyewitnesses in the report, that was essentially the end of the investigation. If they had a license number, they punched it into their computers to see if they had a street address associated with the vehicle. Sometimes, if the accident got a lot of press and they had a vehicle description, they would call a body shop or two and see if any cars matching the hit-and-run vehicle had surfaced. Usually the answer was no. "It's a fine department, even. But it doesn't do what we do, which is investigate murders."

"In spite of your detail's name, which indicates an interest in all homicides."

"Hence the confusion," Glitsky said. "Some of our civic leaders remain unclear on the concept."

They walked in silence for another moment. "What's second?" Hardy asked.

"What's second what?"

"You said you don't investigate hit-and-run homicides, first, because there's a separate hit-and-run detail. When you say first, it implies there's a second."

Glitsky's pace slackened; then both men stopped. "Second is that hit-and-run homicides tend not to be murders. In fact, they're never murders."

"Never say never."

"This time you can. You want to know why?"

"It's hard to ditch the murder weapon?"

"That's one reason. Another is that it's tough to convince your intended victim to stand in front of your car when there are no witnesses around so you can run him over. Most people just plain won't do it."

"So what's the problem?"

"The problem," Glitsky said, "is that with twenty-seven dead people in twelve months, the citizenry is apparently alarmed."

"I know I am," Hardy commented. "Perpetually."

"Yeah, well, as you may have read, our illustrious Board of Supes has authorized special funding for witness rewards and to beef up the investigation of all vehicular homicides."

"And a good idea it is."

"Wrong. It's a bad idea," Glitsky said. "There's no special investigation of vehicular homicides to begin with, not even in hit and run. Ninety percent of 'em, you got a drunk behind the wheel. The other ten percent, somebody's driving along minding their own business and somebody runs out from between two cars in front of them-blam! Then they freak and split. They probably weren't even doing anything wrong before they left the scene. These are felony homicides, okay, because the driver is supposed to stick around, but they are not murders."

"And this concerns you because…?"

"Because now and for the past two months I've had these two new politically connected clowns-excuse me, inspectors-in my detail that I've been telling you about, and they seem to be having trouble finding meaningful work. And let's say that this hasn't gone exactly unnoticed among the rest of my crack staff, who by the way refer to them as the 'car police.'"

"Maybe they mean it as a compliment," Hardy said.

Glitsky shook his head in disgust, then checked his watch. "Let's walk."

Hardy could imagine the plight of the new inspectors, and knew that their treatment at the hands of the veteran homicide cops wouldn't be pretty. Despite all the scandal and controversy that had ravaged the self-esteem of other details in the police department over the past few years, the twelve men and women inspectors who served in homicide considered themselves the elite. They'd worked their way up to this eminence, and their jobs mattered to them. They took pride in what they did, and the new guys would not fit in. "So abuse is being taken?" Hardy asked.

"Somebody painted 'Car Fifty-four' on their city issue. Then you know the full-size streetlight we've had in the detail for years? Somehow it's gotten plugged in and set between the two guys' desks, so they can't see each other when they sit down. Oh, and those little metal cars kids play with? Six or eight new ones every day on their desks, in their drawers, everywhere."

"I guess we're moving into the abuse realm."

Glitsky nodded. "That would be fair to say."

At a little after nine o'clock, Glitsky sat behind his desk in his small office on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice. The door was closed. His two new men-Harlen Fisk and Darrel Bracco-had so far been called out on injury hit and runs about ten times in their two months here, and in theory they should have been rolling already on this morning's accident involving Tim Markham. But this time, they were seeking their lieutenant's guidance before they moved.

Glitsky blamed neither Fisk nor Bracco for being upset with the conditions they'd endured to date in the detail, but until this morning, he couldn't say he'd lost any sleep thinking about it. They were political appointees and they deserved what they got in their brief stops up the promotion ladder, hopscotching over other inspectors who were smarter, more qualified, and worked harder.

Harlen Fisk was the nephew of City Supervisor Kathy West. He went about six three, two fifty, and was self-effacing almost to the point of meekness. Darrel Bracco was trim, crisp, clean, ex-army, the terrier to Fisk's Saint Bernard. His political juice was a little more obscure than his partner's, but just as potent. His father, Angelo Bracco, had worn a uniform for thirty years, and now was Mayor Washington 's personal driver-Bracco would have the mayor's ear whenever he wanted.

So these men could just as easily have gone whining to their supporters and Glitsky could right at this moment be getting a formal reprimand from Chief Rigby, who'd heard from the mayor and a supervisor that he was running his detail in an unprofessional manner. But they hadn't gone over his head. Instead, they were both here in his office, coming to him with their problem. The situation gave him pause and inclined him to listen to what they were saying, if not with sympathy, then at least with some respect for their position.

Bracco was standing at attention, and Glitsky had been talking for a while now, reprising many of the salient points of his earlier discussion with Dismas Hardy. "That's why our office here in homicide is on the fourth floor," he concluded, "with the lovely view of the roof of the medical examiner's office, whereas hit and run has a back door that opens into the alley where the waste from the jail's kitchen comes. Murderers are bad people. Hit-and-run drivers have made an unfortunate life choice. There's a difference."

Bracco sighed. "So there's no real job here, is there?"

Glitsky came forward in his chair, brought his hands together on the desk before him. "I'm sorry, but that's how it is."

The young man's face clouded over. "So then why were we brought onboard?"

This called for a careful response. "I understand both of you know some people. Maybe they don't really understand some technical matters."

Fisk was frowning. "What about the man who was hit this morning, Markham?"

"What about him?" Glitsky asked.

"He wasn't dead at the scene, but if he does die, then what?"

"Then, as I understand it, you get the case from H and R."

"And do what with it?" Bracco asked.

"Try to find the driver? I don't know." Glitsky-nothing he could do-spread his palms, shrugged. "Look, guys," he said, "maybe I could talk to the chief and see if he can arrange some kind of move. You both might want to think about transferring to gangs or robbery or someplace. Do some good work on some real cases, work your way back up to here, where you'll get some real murders, which this is not."

Bracco, still in the at-ease position, wanted to know his assignment. "In the meanwhile, we're here. What do you want us to do, sir? On this morning's accident?"

The entire situation was stupid, but in Glitsky's experience, stupidity was about the most common result of political solutions. Maybe these boys would learn some lesson. "You want my advice? Go out there yourselves. Look a little harder than H and R would. Maybe you'll find something they missed."

They weren't happy about it, but Bracco and Fisk thoroughly canvassed the immediate neighborhood. Although they found no witnesses to the event itself, they did not come up completely empty-handed.

At very near to the time of the accident, a forty-fiveyear-old stockbroker named John Bandolino had come out of his house on Seacliff just west around the corner from Twenty-sixth to pick up his newspaper. He was on his way back inside when suddenly he heard a car with a bad muffler accelerate rapidly, then squeal around the corner. Since this was normally a serene neighborhood, Bandolino ran back down to the street to see if he could identify the troublemaker who was making so much noise so early in the morning. But the car was by then too far away to read the license plate. It was green, though, probably American made. Not a new car, certainly.

The other corroborating witnesses on the car were George and Ruth Callihan Brown, both retired and on their way to their regular Tuesday breakfast with some friends. They had just turned off Seacliff onto Twenty-sixth, George driving, when Ruth saw Markham lying sprawled in the garbage up ahead. After the initial shock, both of them realized that some kind of a medium-size green car had passed them in the other lane as they were coming up. They both turned to see it disappear around the corner, heard the muffler noise, the acceleration. But they didn't even think to pursue it- Markham was unconscious, and bleeding where he lay. They had their cell phone and he needed an ambulance.

The crime scene reconstruction expert had trouble pinpointing the exact location on Twenty-sixth where Markham had been struck. The force of the impact had evidently thrown him some distance through the air, and there were no skid marks to indicate that the driver had slammed on the brakes in panic, or, indeed, applied the brakes at all.

3

Lunchtime, and Lou the Greek's was hopping. Without any plan or marketing campaign, and in apparent defiance of common sense or good taste, Lou's had carved its unlikely niche and had remained an institution for a generation. Maybe it was the location, directly across the street from the Hall of Justice, but there wasn't any shortage of other bars and restaurants in the neighborhood, and none of them did as well or had hung on as long as the Greek's. People from all walks of life just seemed to feel comfortable there, in spite of some fairly obvious drawbacks if one chose to view the place critically.

The entrance was through a frankly urine-stained bail bondsman's corridor, which led to an unlit stairway-six steps to a set of leatherette double doors. The floor of the restaurant was five feet below ground level, so it was dark even on the brightest day and never smelled particularly, or even remotely, appealing. A row of small windows along one wall was set at eye level indoors, though at ground level out. This afforded the only meager natural light. Unfortunately, it also provided a shoe's-eye view of the alley outside, which was always lined with garbage Dumpsters and other assorted urban debris, and often the cardboard lean-tos and other artifacts of the homeless who slept there. The walls had originally been done in a bordello-style maroon-and-gold velveteen wallpaper, but now were essentially black.

The bar opened at 6:00 for the alcohol crowd, and did a booming if quiet business for a couple of hours. There'd be a lull when the workday began across the street, but at 11:00 the kitchen opened and the place would fill up fast. Every day Lou's wife, Chui, would recombine an endless variety of Chinese and Greek ingredients for her daily special, which was the only item on the menu. Lou (or one of the morning drinkers) would give it a name like Kung-Pao Chicken Pita or Yeanling Happy Family, and customers couldn't seem to get enough. Given the quality of the food (no one would call it cuisine) and the choices available, Lou's popularity as a lunch spot was a continuing mystery even for those who frequently ate there themselves.

The party at the large round table by the door to the kitchen fit in this category. For several months now, in an unspoken and informal arrangement, a floating group of professionals had been meeting here on most Tuesdays for lunch. It began just after the mayor appointed Clarence Jackman the district attorney. At the time, Jackman had been in private practice as the managing partner of Rand & Jackman, one of the city's premier law firms, and the previous DA, Sharron Pratt, had just resigned in disgrace.

Jackman viewed himself mostly as a businessman, not a politician. The mayor had asked him to step into the normally bitterly contested political office and get the organization back on course, prosecuting crimes, staying on budget, litigating the city's business problems. Jackman, seeking different perspectives on his new job, asked some colleagues from different disciplines-but mostly law-for a low-profile lunch at Lou's. This move was startling enough in itself. Even more so was everyone's discretion. Lunch at Lou's wasn't so much a secret as a nonevent. If anyone noticed that the same people were showing up at the same table every week, they weren't talking. It never made the news.

Jackman faced the kitchen door. The coat of his tailored pin-striped suit hung over the back of his chair. His white dress shirt, heavily starched, fit tightly over the highly developed muscles in his back. His face was darkly hued, almost blue-black, and his huge head was perched directly on his shoulders, apparently without benefit of a neck.

Lou the Greek must have gotten a good deal on a containerload or so of fortune cookies, because for the past couple of weeks a bowl of them, incredibly stale, was on every table for every meal. The DA's lunch today had been consumed with the serious topic of the city's contract for its health insurance, and when Jackman cracked one of the cookies open and broke into his deep, rolling laughter, it cut some of the tension. "I love this," he said. "This is perfect, and right on point: 'Don't get sick.'" He took in his tablemates. "Who writes these things? Did one of you pay Lou to slip it in here?"

"I think when they run out of license plate blanks at San Quentin…" This was Gina Roake, a longtime public defender now in private practice. Despite the thirty-year age gap, she was rumored to be romantically linked to David Freeman, another of the table guests.

"No way." Marlene Ash was an assistant DA on Jackman's staff. She'd taken her jacket off when she sat down, too, revealing a substantial bosom under a maroon sweater. Chestnut shoulder-length hair framed a frankly cherubic face, marred only by a slight droop in her right eye. "No way a convict writes 'Don't get sick.' It'd be more like 'Die, muthuh.'"

"That'd be an unusually polite convict, wouldn't it?" Treya Ghent asked.

"Unprecedented," Glitsky agreed. "And it's not a fortune anyway." The lieutenant was two seats away from the DA and next to his wife, who held his hand on top of the table. "A fortune's got to be about the future."

Dismas Hardy spoke up. "It's in a fortune cookie, Abe. Therefore, by definition, it's a fortune."

"How about if there was a bug in it, would that make the bug a fortune?"

"Guys, guys." San Francisco 's medical examiner, John Strout, held up a restraining hand and adjusted his glasses. A thin and courtly Southern gentleman, Strout had crushed his own cookie into powder and was looking at the white slip in his hand. "Now this here's a fortune: 'You will be successful in your chosen field.'" He looked around the table. "I wonder what that's goin' to turn out to be."

"I thought you were already in your chosen field," Roake said.

"I did, too." Strout paused. "Shee-it. Now what?"

Everybody enjoyed a little laugh. A silence settled for a second or two, and Jackman spoke into it. "That's my question, too, John. Now what?"

He surveyed the group gathered around him. Only two of the other people at the table hadn't spoken during the fortune cookie debate: David Freeman, seventy-something, Hardy's landlord and the most well-known and flamboyant lawyer in the city; and Jeff Elliot, in his early forties and confined to a wheelchair due to MS, the writer of the "CityTalk" column for the Chronicle.

It was Freeman who spoke. "There's no question here, Clarence. You got Parnassus sending the city a bill for almost thirteen million dollars and change for services they didn't render over the last four years. They're demanding full payment, with interest, within sixty days or, so they say, they're belly up. It's nothing but extortion, plain and simple. Even if you owed them the money."

"Which is not established," Marlene Ash said.

Freeman shrugged. "Okay, even better. You charge their greedy asses with fraud and shut 'em down."

"Can't do that." Jackman was using a toothpick. "Shut 'em down, I mean. Not fast anyway, although I'm already testing the waters with some other providers. But it's not quick. Certainly not this year. And the Parnassus contract runs two more years after that."

"And whoever you're talking to isn't much better anyway, am I right?" Hardy asked.

"Define 'much.'" Jackman made a face. "Hopefully there'd be some improvements."

Treya put a hand on her boss's arm. "Why don't we let them go bankrupt? Just not pay them?"

"We're not going to pay them in any case," Marlene Ash answered. "But we can't let them go bankrupt, either. Then who takes care of everybody?"

"Who's taking care of them now?" Roake asked, and the table went silent.

The way it worked in San Francisco, city employees had several medical insurance options, depending on the level of health care each individual wanted. It seemed straightforward enough. People willing to spend more of their own money on their health got better choices and more options. In theory, the system worked because even the lowest-cost medical care-provided in this case by Parnassus -was adequate. But no surprise to anybody, that wasn't so.

"Couldn't Parnassus borrow enough to stay afloat?" Glitsky asked Jackman.

The DA shook his head. "They say not."

Gina Roake almost choked on her coffee. "They can get a loan, trust me," she said. "Maybe not a great rate, but a couple of mil, prime plus something, no problem."

"What I've heard," Jackman said, "their story is that they can't repay it, whatever it is. They're losing money right and left every day as it is. And, our original problem, they don't need a loan anyway if the city just pays them what it owes."

"Which it doesn't," Marlene Ash repeated. "Owe, I mean."

"Can you prove that?" Glitsky the cop wanted to see the evidence.

"I intend to," Ash said. "Go back to the original invoices."

"Grand jury." Hardy cracked a fortune cookie.

Ash nodded grimly. "That's what I'm thinking."

"How can they say they'd run up thirteen million extra dollars and never saw it coming?" Roake asked. "That's what I'd like to know."

Jackman turned to her. "Actually, that was fairly clever. They say their contract with the city covers outpatient AIDS treatment, mental health and drug abuse counseling, and physical therapy, and they've been providing it all along without being reimbursed. The key word is 'outpatient.' They're out the money, they've already provided the service, we owe it to them." He shrugged. "They distort the hell out of the contract to get to that position, but all the unions want to read their contracts to cover those services, so Parnassus has some political support."

"So it's a contract language dispute," Freeman said. "Tell them to sue you in civil court."

"We would," Jackman said, "except that we're starting to think-"

"We know," Ash interrupted.

"We're starting to think," Jackman repeated, giving his ADA a reproachful glare, "that they didn't provide the care they allege. It was all outpatient stuff, after all. The record keeping appears to be uneven, to say the least."

"Grand jury," Hardy repeated.

Jackman broke a professional smile. "I heard you the first time, Diz. Maybe. But I'm also thinking about freezing their accounts and appointing a receiver to keep 'em running, which is the last thing Parnassus wants, but if they think it might get them paid…and they do need the money."

"You're sure of that?" Freeman asked.

Jackman nodded. "They're not paying their doctors. I'm taking that as a clue. We've received a couple of dozen complaints in the last six months. So finally we wrote a letter, told them to straighten up, pay their people or maybe we'd need to get involved, and sent a copy to each of their board members, still being paid, by the way, at an average of three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year."

"A year?" Glitsky asked. "Every year?"

"A little more, I think," Jeff Elliot said.

"Every year?" The lieutenant couldn't get over it. "I'm definitely in the wrong business."

"No you're not, dear," Treya told him. "You're perfect where you are."

Hardy blew Glitsky a kiss across the table.

"Anyway," Jackman forged ahead, "the threat got their attention. In fact, if you want my opinion, that was the proximate cause of this demand for the thirteen mil."

"So what happens if we let them go bankrupt?" Glitsky asked. "How bad could it be?"

Freeman chuckled. "May I, Clarence?" he asked the DA, then proceeded without waiting for any response. "Let me count the ways, Lieutenant. The first thing that happens is that every city employee, and that includes you, loses their health insurance. So instead of paying ten dollars to see your doctor, now you're paying sixty, eighty, a hundred and fifty. That's per office visit. Full price for prescriptions. So every union in town sues the city because you're guaranteed insurance as part of your employment contract. Then the city sues Parnassus for not providing the service; then Parnassus countersues the city for not paying for the service. So now everybody in town has to go to County General for everything and there's no room for anyone this side of multiple gunshot wounds. If you only have cancer, take two aspirin and call me in the morning. Bottom line is, if it turns out to be a bad year for the flu or AIDS or earthquakes, letting Parnassus go bankrupt could bring the city right along with it." Freeman smiled around the table. Bad news always seemed to stoke him up. "Did I leave anything out?"

"That was pretty succinct, David, thank you." Jackman pushed the remains of his fortune cookie around on the table. "In any event, Parnassus must be close to broke if it's resorting to this."

"We've got to charge them with something," Ash said.

Freeman had another idea. "I like bringing an action to freeze their accounts and appoint a receiver to investigate their books and keep the business going." The old man gave the impression he wouldn't mind taking on the job himself.

Jackman shook his head. "We'd have to go a long way to proving the fraud, David. We can't just walk in and take over."

"Even if they haven't paid their doctors?" Roake asked. "I'd call that a triggering event."

"It might be," Jackman agreed. From his expression, he found the idea potentially interesting. "Well," he said, "thanks to you all for the discussion. I'm sure I'll come to some decision. Jeff," he said across the table, "you've been unusually quiet today. I seem to remember you've written Parnassus up for a few items recently. Don't you have some advice you'd like to offer on this topic?"

The reporter broke a cynical smile under his thick beard. "You've already heard it, sir. Don't get sick."

4

Though he was nearly fifty years old, Rajan Bhutan had only been a nurse for about ten years. He'd arrived with his wife in the United States in his mid-twenties. For some time, he had made do with a succession of retail jobs, selling women's shoes and men's clothes in chain stores. This was the same type of work he'd done in Calcutta, although it didn't suit his personality very well. Small of stature, moody, and somewhat introspective by nature, he had to force himself to smile and be pleasant to customers. But he was efficient, honest, intelligent. He showed up for work every day and would stay late or come in early without complaint, so while he wasn't much of a salesman, he tended to keep his jobs-his first one at Macy's Herald Square, where he stayed six years. Then at Nordstrom for five more.

His wife had augmented their income by giving piano lessons and for about ten years they had been reasonably happy in their little apartment in the Haight, the only major disappointment in their lives the fact that Chatterjee was unable to get pregnant. Then, finally, when they were both thirty-five, she thought that the miracle had occurred, but it turned out that the something growing in her womb was not a baby, but a tumor.

After Chatterjee died, Rajan no longer found smiling, or sales, to be tolerable. During the months he'd nursed his wife, though, he'd discovered that giving physical care appealed to him in some important way. Over the next four years, he used up most of his savings going to nursing school full-time, until he finally received his RN from St. Mary's, and took a full-time job at Portola.

And true to form, he stayed. The doctors and administration liked him for the same reasons his bosses in retail had always kept him on. But he had few if any friends among the nurses. Dark and brooding now to an even greater degree than he'd been before when he'd worked in sales, he made little effort to be personable. But he was good at giving care. Over time, to his shift partners he became almost invisible-competent and polite, albeit distant and with his hooded demeanor, somewhat ominous.

Now he stood over the bed of James Lector. After checking the connections on all the monitors, he smoothed the blanket over the old man's chest, and turned to look behind him, across the room, where Dr. Kensing was with his partner today, Nurse Rowe, adjusting the IV drip on Mr. Markham, who'd only just been wheeled in from post-op.

Rajan looked back down at Lector, on life support now for these past couple of weeks. He had recently stabilized but who knew for how long? Looking at the old man's gray, inanimate face, he wondered again-as he often did-about the so-called wonder of modern medicine. The memory came back fresh again-in the last days, they had kept Chatterjee alive and supposedly free from pain with life support and narcotics. But as the years had passed, he'd come to believe that this had really been a needless cruelty-both to him for the false hope and to her for the denial of peace.

He believed in helping the sick, in easing pain. This was his mission, after all, after Chatterjee. But the needless prolongation of life, this was what bothered him now, as it always did when he worked the ICU.

He looked down again at Mr. Lector's face, then back over to Dr. Kensing and Nurse Rowe, working to save another person who might be permanently brain-damaged at best, should he survive at all.

Folly, he thought, so much of it was folly.

Shaking his head with regret, he sighed deeply and went to the next bed.

Dr. Malachi Ross stopped at the door to the intensive care unit and took a last look to make sure everything was as it should be. The large, circular room had seven individual bed stations for critical cases, and all of them were filled, as they were at all times every day of the year. The odds said that five of the patients in them, and possibly all seven, would not live. Ross knew that this was not for lack of expertise or expense; indeed, the expense factor had become the dominating element of his life over the past years. He was the chief medical director and CFO of the Parnassus Medical Group and keeping costs under control while still providing adequate care (which he defined as the minimum necessary to avoid malpractice lawsuits) was his ever more impossible job.

Which was, he knew, about to enter another period of crisis. In the short term at least. For occupying one of the beds here today was his colleague and chief executive officer, Tim Markham, struck down on his morning run, an exercise he practiced with religious zeal in an effort to stay vigorous and healthy to a ripe old age. Ross supposed there was irony in this, but he had lost his taste for irony years ago.

The monitors beeped with regularity and the other machines hummed. All around the room, white shades had been pulled over the windows against the feeble spring sun.

Markham was in the first bed on the left, all hooked up. He'd been up here for three hours already, the fact that he'd lived this long with such serious injuries some kind of a miracle. Ross took a step back toward the bed, then stopped himself. He was a doctor, yes, but hadn't practiced in ten years. He did know that the bag for the next transfusion hung from its steel hook next to the bed, where it ought to be. The other IV was still half-full. He had to assume everything was in order.

Exhausted, he rubbed his hands over his face, then found himself looking down at them. His surgeon's hands, his mother used to say. His face felt hot, yet his hands told him he wasn't sweating.

Drawing a deep breath, he turned and opened the door to get out.

He stepped out into the hallway where three more ICU candidates, postsurgery or post-ER, lay on their own gurneys attached to monitors and drips. They'd arrived since Markham had been admitted; now, as the beds in the ICU became available, these patients would be transferred inside for theoretically "better" intensive care.

Dr. Eric Kensing was supervising the unit this morning, and now he stood over one of the beds in the hallway, giving orders to a male nurse. Ross had no desire to speak to Kensing, so he crossed to the far side of the hall and continued unmolested the short way down to the ICU's special waiting room. Distinguished by its amenities from the other spaces that served the same basic purpose, the intensive care waiting room featured comfortable couches and chairs, reasonably pleasant art, tasteful wallpaper, shuttered windows, and noise-killing rugs. This was because a vast majority of the people waiting here were going to hear bad news, and the original architects had obviously thought the surroundings would help. Ross didn't think they did.

It was just another waste of money.

At the entrance, he looked in, noting with some satisfaction that at least Brendan Driscoll had left the immediate area for the time being and he wouldn't have to endure his reactions and listen to his accusations anymore. Driscoll was Markham 's executive assistant and sometimes seemed to be under the impression that he, not his boss, was the actual CEO of Parnassus. He gave orders, even to Ross, as though he were. As soon as he'd heard about the accident, Driscoll had evidently left the corporate offices at the Embarcadero to come and keep the vigil at Markham 's side. He'd even beaten Ross himself down here. But now, thankfully, he was gone, banished by an enraged Dr. Kensing for entering the ICU for God knew what reason, probably just because he wanted to and thought he could.

But, disturbing though he could be, Driscoll was nowhere near as serious a problem to Ross as Carla Markham, Tim's wife. Sitting at one end of the deep couch as though in a trance, she looked up at him and her mouth formed a gash of hostility and sorrow, both instantly extinguished into a mask of feigned neutrality.

"He's all right," Ross said. Then, quickly amending it. "The same."

She took the news without so much as a nod.

He remained immobile, but his eyes kept coming back to her. She sat stiffly, her knees pressed together, her body in profile. Suddenly, she looked straight at him as though she'd only then become aware of his presence. "The same is not all right. The same means he is near death, and that is not all right. And if he does die…"

Ross stepped into the waiting room and put up a hand as though physically to stop her. "He's not going to die," he said.

"You'd better hope that's true, Malachi."

"We don't have to talk about that. I've heard what you said and you're right, there were troubles. But no crisis. When Tim comes out of this, we'll talk it out, make some adjustments, like we have with a thousand other issues."

"This is not like any of them."

His mouth began to form a knowing smile. She was so wrong. Instead he cocked his head and spoke with all the conviction of his heart. "Don't kid yourself," he said. "They've all been like this." He stared down at her, watching for any sign of capitulation.

But she wouldn't hold his gaze. Instead, shaking her head once quickly from side to side, she reached some conclusion. "He wasn't going to make adjustments this time. The adjustments were what kept tearing him apart. If he doesn't live, I won't, either."

He couldn't be sure if she was referring to living herself-she'd threatened suicide the last time Markham had left her-or to making the kind of adjustments her husband had learned to live with. "Carla," he began softly, "don't be-"

But she wasn't listening. Suddenly, she was standing up in front of him, the semblance of neutrality dropped for now. "I can't talk to you anymore. Don't you understand that? Not here, maybe never. There's nothing to say until we know about Tim. Now excuse me, I've got to call the children." She walked by without glancing at him on her way out of the room.

Ross sat in one of the leather settees and pushed himself back into the chair. He gripped the edges of the armrests to keep his surgeon's hands from shaking.

Ross heard first the monitor alarm, then the code blue for the ICU. For twenty minutes, the commotion nearly reached the level of bedlam even out in the hallway, when almost as abruptly as it had begun all the activity and noise came to a halt.

And then, suddenly, Tim Markham was dead.

Ross had gotten up out of his chair and was waiting outside the ICU, standing there when Doctor Kensing appeared from inside, his handsome face stricken and drawn. He met Ross's eye for a moment, finally looking down and away. "I don't know what happened," he said. "I thought we might have got him out of the woods, but…" The words trailed off and the doctor shook his head in defeat and misery.

If he was looking for commiseration, Ross thought, he was barking up the wrong tree. In fact, Ross found himself fighting the urge to say something spiteful, even accusatory. The time would come for that. Kensing had been Ross's particular nemesis for a couple of years, questioning his medical and business decisions, defying his edicts, crusading against his policies with the rest of the medical staff. Kensing's presence on the floor now, in the ICU directing Markham's ultimately failed care, was from Ross's perspective a bitter but not unwelcome act of fate that he would exploit if he could after the initial impact of the tragedy had passed. But it would have to wait.

Now, Ross had business to which he must attend. He didn't wait for Kensing to reappear in the hallway with his no doubt self-serving postmortem analysis of what had gone wrong, as if he could know by now. He had no stomach for the condolences, hand-holding and-wringing that he knew would attend the next hours at the hospital. Instead, he left the floor by elevator and got out in the basement parking garage, where he got in his Lexus and contacted his secretary, Joanne, on his cell phone. "Tim didn't make it," he said simply. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

5

David Freeman and Gina Roake, straight-faced, told Dismas Hardy that they were going to continue their walk from Lou's up to Freeman's apartment on Mason to look over some documents. Freeman would be back in the office later, if Hardy would be so kind as to tell Phyllis.

"I'd be delighted, David. Any excuse just to hear her sweet voice."

So, coming into the lobby alone, Hardy was congratulating himself for his restraint in not commenting on David and Gina's lame document-perusal excuse, when the dulcettoned Phyllis stopped him. "Mr. Elliot from the Chronicle would like you to call him as soon as you can."

"Thank you. Did he say it was important?"

"Not specifically, but I assume so."

Hardy walked up and leaned against the top of the receptionist's partition. Phyllis hated when he did that. But then, she hated when he did anything. He smiled at her. "Why?"

"Why what?" Obviously thinking evil thoughts, Phyllis stared at his arms, crossed there on her shelf.

"Why do you assume it's important?"

To Phyllis, trained by Freeman, everything to do with the law was intrinsically important. Hardy was untrainable, and try as she might to remain the complete professional, she couldn't seem to maintain her composure when he started in on her. She sighed in exasperation, tried to smile politely but didn't entirely succeed. "I assume all calls to your office are important, Mr. Hardy. Mr. Elliot took time out in the middle of his workday to call you in the middle of yours. He asked you to call as soon as you could. It must have been something important."

"He might have just wanted to talk. That happens, you know."

Clearly, Phyllis believed it was not something that should happen. "Would you like me to call him and ask?"

"Why, Phyllis." Hardy stepped back, took his arms off the shelf, looked at her approvingly. "I think you've just told a joke. And during business hours when you should have been working. I won't tell David." She remained silent as he turned and got to the stairway up to his office. "Oh, and speaking of David, he won't be in for a while. He's with Ms. Roake working on some documents, though I've never called it that before."

"Called what?" Phyllis asked.

Suddenly he decided he'd abused her enough, or almost enough. He pointed up the stairs. "Nothing. Listen, I've enjoyed our little chat, but now I've got to run and call Mr. Elliot. It could be important."

Hardy worked in stark, monklike, even industrial surroundings. Gray metal filing cabinets hunched on a gray berber wall-to-wall carpet. The two windows facing Sutter Street featured old-fashioned venetian blinds, which worked imperfectly at best-normally he simply left them either up or down. Rebecca and Vincent, his two children, had painted most of his wall art, although there was also a poster of the Giants' new home, Pac Bell Park, and a Sierra Club calendar. His blond wooden desk was the standard size, its surface cleared except for his phone, a photo of Frannie, an OfficeMax blotter, a sweet potato plant that reached the floor, and his green banker's lamp. Under four shelves of law books and binders, the dried blowfish and ship in a bottle he'd brought from home livened up a Formica counter with its faucet, its paper towel roll on the wall, and several glasses, upside down, by the sink. The couch and chairs were functional Sears faux leather, and the coffee table came from the same shopping trip about six years before. His dartboard hung next to the door across from his desk-a piece of silver duct tape on the rug marked the throw line at eight feet. His tungsten blue-flight customs were stuck, two bull's-eyes and a twenty, where he'd last thrown them.

The phone was ringing as he opened the door, and he reached over the desk, punching his speakerphone button. "Yo," he said.

Phyllis's voice again, but giving him no time to reply. "Lieutenant Glitsky for you."

And then Abe was on. "Guess what I just heard. You're going to like it."

"The Giants got Piazza."

"In the real world, Diz."

"That's the real world, and I'd like it."

"How about Tim Markham?"

"How about him? Is he a catcher? I've never heard of him." Hardy had gotten around his desk to his chair and picked up the receiver.

"He's the CEO of Parnassus Health," Glitsky said.

A jolt of adrenaline chased away the final traces of any lunch lethargy. Glitsky usually didn't call Hardy to keep him up on the day's news, unless homicide was in the picture, so he put it together right away. "And he's dead."

"Yes he is. Isn't that interesting?"

Hardy admitted that it was, especially after all the talk at Lou's. But more than that, "Did somebody kill him?"

"Yes, but probably not on purpose. You remember our discussion this morning about hit and runs?"

"You're kidding me."

"Nope."

"Let's remember not to talk about nuclear holocaust on our next walk. Somebody really ran him over?"

"More like plowed into him. They kept him alive at Portola until a half hour ago, then lost him."

"They lost him at his own hospital? I bet that was a special moment."

"It was another thing I thought you'd like. But evidently they couldn't do much. He was critical on admit and never pulled out."

"And it was an accident?"

"I already said that."

"Twice now," Hardy said. "You believe it?"

"So far."

Hardy listened to the hum on the line. "The same week he tries to shake down the city? His company's threatening to go bankrupt? They're not paying their doctors and they're screwing around with their patients, and suddenly the architect of all this winds up dead?"

"Yep."

"And it's a coincidence? That's your professional take on it?"

"Probably. It often is, as I mentioned this morning."

"Except when it isn't. Lots of things happen that never happened before."

"Not as often as you'd think," Glitsky replied. This time, the pause was lengthy. "But you've answered my question. I just wanted an opinion from the average man on the street."

"You'll have to call somebody a little dumber than me, then," Hardy said, "but I'll send you a bill anyway."

Jeff Elliot's call turned out to be about the same thing, but he wasn't interested in Hardy's coincidence theory, dismissing it even more definitively than Glitsky had with one line. "You don't murder somebody with a car, Diz, not when guns cost a buck and a half and knives are free."

"I'd bet it's been known to happen, although Glitsky says not, too."

"See? And even if it has, it also has been known to snow in the Sahara."

"Is that true? I don't think so. But if it is, it proves my point."

A sigh. "Diz? Can we leave it?"

Hardy was thinking that all of his friends had lost their senses of humor. He didn't really think it was probably a murder, either, but it was interesting to talk about, and so much else wasn't. "Okay, Jeff, okay. So how can I help you?"

"Actually, you can't. This is just a mercy call, see if you'd like to take the rest of the day off, which I noticed at lunch you might be in the mood for."

"That obvious, huh?"

"I'm a reporter, Diz. Nothing escapes."

Hardy looked down at the massive pile of paperwork on the floor by his desk-his own and other lawyers' briefs, which were anything but. Memoranda. Administrative work that he'd been neglecting. Billing. A couple of police incident reports from prospective clients. The latest updates of the Evidence Code, which it was bad luck not to know. He had an extremely full workload at the moment. He was sure he ought to be glad about this, although the why of it sometimes eluded him.

Elliot was going on. "I'm thinking the shit's got to be hitting the fan over at Parnassus. It might be instructive to swing over and check things out. See if anybody'll talk to me and maybe I'll get a column or two out of it. So what do you say? You want to play some hooky?"

"More than anything," Hardy said. "But not today, I'm afraid."

"Is that your final answer?"

He pulled some of the papers over in front of him, desultorily flipped through the stack of them. A trained reporter like Elliot, if he'd been in the room, would have recognized some signs of weariness, even malaise. Certainly a lack of sense of humor. Hardy let out a heavy breath. "Write a great column, Jeff. Make me feel like I was there."

It wasn't the kind of thing Glitsky was going to talk about with any of his regular professional associates, but he couldn't keep from sharing his concerns with his wife.

Jackman let Treya take a formal fifteen-minute break sometimes if she asked, and now she and Abe stood in the outside stairway on the Seventh Street side of the building, sipping their respective teas out of paper cups. An early afternoon wind had come up and they were forced to stand with their backs against the building, the view limited to the freeway and Twin Peaks out beyond it.

"And here I thought you brought me to this romantic spot so we could make out in the middle of the day."

"We could do that if you want," Glitsky told her. "I'm pretty easy that way."

She kissed him. "I've noticed. But you were really thinking of something else?"

He told her about Markham, how intensely uncomfortable he was with coincidences, and Markham 's death fell squarely into that category. "But I wasn't lying when I told Diz that probably it wasn't an intentional homicide. That was the voice of thirty years' experience whispering in my ear."

"But what?"

"But my other guardian angel, the bad one, keeps on with this endless, 'Maybe, what if, how about…"'

"You mean if somebody ran him down on purpose?"

He nodded. "I'm trying to imagine an early-morning, just-after-light, lying-in-wait scenario, but I can't convince myself. It just couldn't have happened in real life. Well, maybe it could have, but I don't think it did."

"Why not?"

She was about the only person he ever smiled at, and he did now. "How good of you to ask. I'll tell you. The first and most obvious reason is that the driver didn't finish the job. Markham lived nearly four hours after the accident, and if he hadn't been thrown into the garbage can, he might have pulled through it. The driver couldn't have known he'd killed him. If he'd planned to, he would either have backed up over him or stopped, got out of the car, and whacked Markham 's head a few times with a blunt object he'd been carrying for just that reason."

"Sweet," Treya said.

"But true." He went on to give her the second reason, the one he'd given Hardy. A car was a stupid and awkward choice as a murder weapon. If someone were going to take the time to plan a murder and then lie in wait to execute it, with all the forethought that entailed, Abe thought even a moron would simply buy a gun, which was as easy if not easier to purchase, far more deadly, and simpler to get rid of than any vehicle would be.

"Okay, I'm convinced. He probably wasn't murdered."

"I know. That's what I said. But…"

"But you want to keep your options open."

"Correct. Which leads me to my real problem. Did you get the impression at lunch today that my friend and your boss Clarence Jackman is going to get considerable political heat around anything to do with Parnassus? The death of its CEO isn't going to hide out in the Chronicle's back pages and then disappear in a couple of days when it isn't solved."

"No, I don't think so," Treya agreed.

"So who gets the case, which is definitely a homicide and might conceivably be, but probably isn't, a murder?"

Treya had been living with the problems within the homicide detail and had a good sense of the dilemma. In the normal course of events, Abe would never have anything to do with this case. It was a hit and run. Someone from that detail would be assigned to locate the vehicle, they probably wouldn't, and that would be the end of it. Now, because he had Fisk and Bracco, he'd have to give the case to them-in fact, he already had. If he tried to pass it to one of his veteran inspectors, first his guy would be insulted and laugh at him; then the mayor and the supervisor would demand his head, and probably get it.

And then if-wonder of wonders-it turned out to be a real-live, politically charged, high-profile murder after all, he'd have given it to his two rawest players, who would probably screw it all up, and that would not only infuriate Jackman, it might harm the district attorney's relations with the police department for a good portion of this administration.

"I'd say you've got to let the new boys keep it."

"That's what I've come to myself. But it's lose-lose."

"Luckily," she said, touching his cheek gently, "with all the practice, you've gotten so good at those."

But he had Fisk and Bracco back in his office at the end of the day and gave them the best spin he could put on it. "…an opportunity to give you guys some quality time. You do good on this, people here might be inclined to think you might turn into good cops after all." He paused, and purposefully did not add "and not just political stooges."

Darrel Bracco was as he'd been this morning, and as he always was in here-standing almost at attention behind the chair where his partner sat. "We never asked to get moved in here, Lieutenant. Neither one of us. But we did jump at the chance. Who wouldn't?"

"Okay." Glitsky could accept that. "Here's your chance to make it work."

A few minutes later, he was reading from a notepad he'd been filling with ideas as they struck him on and off for most of the afternoon. "…girlfriends? And if so, did they just break up? Then his children. How did he get along with them?"

"Excuse me." Fisk had a hand up like a third grader.

Glitsky looked over his notepad. "Yes?" With exaggerated patience, "Harlen?"

"I thought this was about all the problems Markham was having with his business? And now you're talking about his family?"

Glitsky pulled himself up to his desk and placed his pad flat upon it. His blue eyes showed little expression. "I want you both to understand something. The odds that Mr. Markham was killed on purpose, and hence this is a murder investigation at all, are not large. Harlen, you and I and Inspector Bracco were talking this morning about the fact that you didn't have much to do here in the detail. I thought you might enjoy taking a look at this thing from the ground up. And the ground is a victim's family."

"It's got nothing to do with the car, you're saying?"

The lieutenant kept his impatience in check. "No, I'm not saying that. The car is what hit him. And if somebody he knew was driving it, then it starts to look a lot more like a murder. Which, I repeat, and you should, too, it probably isn't."

"But it will keep us out of the detail," Bracco said. "Is that what you're saying?"

Glitsky nodded. "It might do that. And that is to the good, I think you'll agree."

When the inspectors had returned from their morning's exertions, they discovered a Tom Terrific beanie on the center of each of their desks. The detail didn't appear to be moving toward acceptance, or even tolerance, of the new crew. It was a drag to have to deal with, Glitsky thought, but he wasn't going to get involved in disciplining the hazing activities. That wasn't his job, and if he tried to move in that direction, he'd lose whatever authority he did have before he knew it.

So, yes, it would keep Fisk and Bracco out of the office. A good thing. Glitsky picked up the notepad again and read from it. "Do any of his children have friends with a green car? What about the wife's social life, if any? Beyond that, everybody you talk to needs an alibi, and remember the accident happened at six or so in the morning, so anybody who says they weren't sleeping should be interesting."

"What about his work?" Fisk asked. " Parnassus?"

"We'll get there. It's a process," Glitsky said evasively. This was, after all, mostly a charity mission for his new inspectors, and he wasn't inclined to let them get in the way and muddy the waters in case Jackman did decide to convene a grand jury over business irregularities at Parnassus, which may or may not have involved Markham. "Let's see where it takes us," he said. But then he did remember a detail. "You'd better take a look at the autopsy, too."

The guys eyed each other, and Bracco cleared his throat. "He died in the hospital, sir," he said. "We know what he died of."

"We do?" Glitsky replied. "What was that?"

"He got run over. Thrown about thirty yards. Smashed into a garbage can."

"And your point is? Look, let's assume we find somebody who wanted to run over Mr. Markham and in fact did a pretty good job of it. So we arrest our suspect and somehow we've never looked at the autopsy. You know what happens? It turns out he died of a heart attack unrelated to his injuries in the accident. Or maybe somebody entirely different from our suspect stuck an ice pick in his ear, or poisoned his ice water. Maybe he was a spy for the Russians and the CIA took him out. The point is, somebody's dead, we check the autopsy first. Every time, capisce?"

He looked up and gave them his terrible smile. "Welcome to homicide, boys, where the good times just keep on comin'."

6

Eric Kensing still wore his blood-spattered green scrubs. He was slumped nearly horizontal in a chair in the doctors' lounge on the ground floor, his long legs stretched straight out before him, his feet crossed at the ankles. The room was otherwise empty. A lock of gray-specked black hair hung over his forehead, which he seemed to be holding up with the heel of his right hand.

He heard the door open and someone flicked on the overhead lights. He opened his eyes. It was his soon-to-be ex-wife Ann. "They said I'd find you here." Her voice at whisper pitch, under tight control.

"Looks like they were right."

She started right in. "At least you could have called me, Eric. That's what I don't understand. Instead I find it out on the goddamn radio. And with the kids in tow," she added, "thank you very much."

He got to his feet quickly, not wanting to give her the edge. "Where are they now? Are they okay?"

"Of course they're okay. What do you think? I left them at Janey's. They're fine."

"Well, good." He waited, forcing her.

"So why didn't you call me?"

He backed up a step, crossed his arms. He had an open, almost boyish face in spite of the worry lines, the bags under his eyes, a puffiness at his once-proud jawline. But around his wife he'd learned, especially in the past year or two, to suppress any animation in his face. Not that he felt any conscious need to do that now anyway, but he was resolved to give Ann nothing. He might have been molded from wax, and could easily have passed for someone in his early fifties, though he was fifteen years short of that. "Why would I call you? His wife was here, his family. Besides, the last I heard you'd broken up again. For good."

She set her mouth, drew a determined breath. "I want to see him," she said.

"Help yourself. As long as Carla and his kids are gone. I'd ask you to try and be sensitive if they're still around."

"Oh, yes. Mr. Sensitive. That's your role, isn't it? Bedside manner, comforting the bereaved?"

"Sometimes." He shrugged. "I don't care. You do what you want. You will anyway."

"That's right. I intend to." Her nostrils flared. "How did he die here? How could that happen?"

"He got smashed up, Ann. Badly."

"People get smashed up all the time. They don't die."

"Well, Tim did."

"And you don't care, do you?"

"What does that mean? I don't like to lose a patient, but he wasn't-"

Her voice took on a hysterical edge. "He wasn't just a patient, Eric." She glared at him. "Don't give me that doctorspeak. I know what you really think."

"Oh, you do? What's that?"

"You're glad he's dead, aren't you? You wanted him to be dead for a long time."

He had no ready response. Finally, he shook his head in resignation and disgust. "Well, it's been nice talking to you. Now excuse me-" He started to walk by her.

But she moved in front of him. "Where are you going?"

"Back to work. I've got nothing more to say to you. You came here to see Tim? You found me easy enough. You won't have any problem. Now please get out of my way. I've got work to do."

She held her ground. "Oh yes, the busy doctor." Then, taking another tack. "They said you were on the floor."

"What floor?"

"You know what one."

He backed up a step. "What are you talking about?"

"When he died."

"That's right," he said warily. "What about it?"

He'd had long experience with her when her emotions took over, with the sometimes astounding leaps of logic of which she was capable. Now he saw something familiar in her eyes, a kind of wild lucidity that he found deeply unsettling. "I should tell somebody," she said. "I'll bet I know what really happened up there."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes you do, Eric. I'm the only one who knows what you're really capable of. How unfeeling you can be. How you are."

"Oh please, Ann, don't start."

"I will start. You killed him, didn't you?"

He thought she'd been going there, and now that she had, the depth of his rage allowed for nothing but pure reaction. Summoning all of his control, he turned to make sure no one else was within earshot, then leaned in toward her, inches from her face. He forced a brutal smile. "Absolutely," he said with all the cold conviction he could muster. "I pumped his IV full of shit as soon as I could get away with it."

She backed away and froze.

He had her. Her delicious panic impelled him to continue striking. "I kill people here all the time. It's one of the unsung perks of the job."

She stared at him with real fear for a long moment. But he'd shocked her back to herself. Her shoulders relaxed; she gulped a few breaths. "You think that's funny?" she asked. "You think it's something to joke about?"

"You think I'm joking? Were you joking when you asked me?" But then, suddenly, it had gone far enough. "Get a grip, Ann. Did I kill him? Jesus."

"You were there and you hated him."

"So what? Maybe you didn't understand the message. He got run over."

"And brought here."

"It was the closest ER, Ann. I didn't somehow arrange it."

"You should have taken yourself off his case."

"And why is that? So I wouldn't have a chance to kill him? Maybe you don't get it-how about if I wanted to kill him? How about that?" He stared at the total stranger with whom he'd lived a dozen years, who'd borne him three children. For an instant, he wanted to get another rise out of her.

But that gambit had played itself out. She shook her head finally. "You didn't kill him," she said. "You don't have the guts."

"You said it, not me. But whether I did or not, he's gone, isn't he? That's going to be tough on little Annie, isn't it?"

He'd hit her again where it hurt. She set her jaw, then suddenly reached out and pulled violently at a sleeve of his scrubs. "You son of a bitch. What am I supposed to do now, Eric? Tell me that. What am I supposed to do?"

"Whatever you were going to do, Ann. I don't really care. He wasn't coming back anyway." Then, a last thrust. "Don't tell me you don't have a fallback boyfriend?"

She came forward now in a wild fury, her fists flailing at him. "You bastard!" She kept coming, pounding at him, spewing obscenities, until finally he'd gotten ahold of both of her wrists. He gripped them tightly in front of him.

"Ow! Let me go. You're hurting me."

"Good."

"Let me go, damn you!"

"Don't you dare swing at me again. You hear me?" He held on for one more moment, squeezing with all of his strength. She continued to struggle against him, making little inhuman cries with the exertion, trying to pull her arms away, to twist her body, but he had her and wasn't letting her go. Finally, he pulled her close in to him and locked her in his gaze. She wasn't ready to give it up, not yet, but he kept her in an iron grip, until at last he felt the fight go out of her. "Do you hear me, goddamnit?" he whispered.

"Yes. Let me go."

He stepped back and pushed her away as he released her. "I'm leaving," he said. "Get out of my way."

She was rubbing her arms, then holding them out. "Look what you've done," she said. "You've hurt me."

"You'll live," he said.

She stepped in front of him, all but daring him to go another round.

But leached out of the hurt and rage, he had no more stomach for fighting her. "Why don't you go home, Ann? Back to the kids. You don't belong here."

But she stared obstinately up at him. "I need to see him. Where is he now?"

He knew what she meant. She wanted to view Markham's body. But fuck that, he thought. "Best guess right this minute," he said. "Somewhere close to the center of hell."

Then he pushed past her and made it out of the room.

Little League was playing havoc with the Hardys' schedule. Vincent practiced on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Hardy was coaching. So he and Frannie had had to change their sacred date night to Tuesdays for the duration of the season. Tonight, at a little after 7:00, Hardy pushed open the door of the Little Shamrock where they were supposed to rendezvous, but she hadn't yet arrived.

Her brother, Moses McGuire, though, was behind the rail, talking to a young couple who were decked out in a lot of black leather. In one of his manic phases, McGuire's voice boomed enough to drown out Sting on the jukebox, who wasn't exactly whispering himself.

Hardy pulled up a stool by the front window, half turned so he could watch the cypresses bend in the stiff wind at the edge of Golden Gate Park across the street. Moses glanced at him and began to pull his Guinness-an automatic call for Hardy nine times out of ten. The foam in the stout would take several minutes to fall out, and this way Moses could keep talking until it had. No point in breaking up a good story.

Which continued. "…so the guy'd had a stomachache for like nine months, they'd already taken out first his appendix-wrong-then his gall bladder-whoops, wrong again. Nothing helps. And they don't find anything and finally send him on his way, telling him he's stressed out. Well, no shit. So he starts doing acupuncture, seeing a chiropractor, taking herbs, getting massages-nothing helps. And meanwhile"-here McGuire turned to Hardy, pointed at his pint, almost ready-"meanwhile, the guy's trying to go on with his life, he's supposed to be getting married in a few months."

The couple asked almost in unison, "So what happened?"

"So two weeks ago, he wakes up doubled over. Can't even get out of bed. They cut him open again, but this time close him back up and say they're sorry. He's got a month. They must have missed it."

"A month to live?" the girl asked. "Is that what they meant?"

"Yeah, but it wasn't a month, either," Moses concluded. "Turns out, it was five days."

The guy was staring through his drink, shaking his head. "Five days?"

McGuire nodded in disgust. "I served him a drink in here three weeks ago and went to his funeral on Monday." He grabbed Hardy's pint and walked it down the bar.

Hardy drank off a mouthful. "That was a fun story. Who were you talking about?"

"Shane Mackey. You didn't know?"

From his own days as a bartender, Hardy had known Mackey when he'd played on the Shamrock's softball team for a couple of years. He couldn't have been much beyond forty years old. Hardy remembered buying him and his fiance´e a drink at the New Year's party here, four months ago. He carefully put his glass on the bar and swirled it. "Was that a true story?"

"The good parts, anyway. The wedding was going to be next month. Susan and I had already bought them some dishes."

7

At 9:30, Malachi Ross was in his office, in his leather Eames chair, a cup of coffee grown cold on the glass table in front of him. Across from him, in his wheelchair, a yellow notepad on his lap and a tape recorder next to Ross's coffee, sat Jeff Elliot. Through the vertical blinds, Ross was looking past the reporter, out over downtown from the seventeenth floor. But he noticed neither the lights of North Beach dancing below him nor the stars clear in the wind-swept sky above. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, yet felt no hunger.

They'd been at it for almost a half hour, and Ross had brought the discussion around to himself, his background. How he'd joined the Parnassus board as a doctor whose original job was to provide medical legitimacy for the company's profit-driven business decisions. This was back in the first days of aggressive managed care, and Ross told Elliot that he had come on as the standard-bearer for designating a primary care physician, or PCP, for each patient as the gatekeeper of the medical fortress, a concept which by now had pretty much become the standard for HMOs everywhere in the country.

"But not a popular idea," Elliot observed.

Ross came forward in his chair and met the reporter's eyes. "Give me a better road and I'm on it tomorrow," he said. "But basically it works."

"Although patients don't like it?"

A resigned shrug. "Let's face it, Mr. Elliot, people are hard to please. I think most patients appreciate the efficiency, and that translates to satisfaction." He wanted to add that in his opinion, people were overly concerned with all the touchy-feely junk. The body was a machine, and mechanics existed who knew how to fix it when it broke. The so-called human element was vastly overrated. But he couldn't say that to Elliot. "It's really better for the vast majority of patients."

"And why is that?" the reporter asked. "Doesn't it just remove them from any kind of decision loop?"

"Okay, that's a reasonable question, I suppose. But I've got one for you, although you won't like the sound of it. Why should they be in it?" Again, he held up his hand, stopping Elliot's response. "It's hard enough to keep this ship afloat with professionals who know the business. If patients had the final say, they'd sink it financially. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't keep patients informed and involved, but-"

"But people would demand all kinds of expensive tests they don't really need."

Ross smiled with apparent sincerity. "There you are. Healing takes time, Mr. Elliot, and you'd be surprised at how many health problems go away by themselves."

He stood up and went over to the small refrigerator at the corner of the room and got out a couple of bottled waters. He gave one to the reporter and sat back down.

"Look," he said, leaning forward and speaking, ostensibly, from the heart. "I know this must all sound pretty callous, but nobody's opposed to losing the money on tests if they're necessary. Hell, that's what insurance is all about, after all. But if fifty guys show up month after month, and each one gets his test when only five really need it, then instead of Parnassus losing twenty-five grand, which is covered by premiums, we lose a quarter mil. To cover that, we'd have to increase premiums and copays by a factor of ten, which nobody can afford. So the whole system falls apart, and no one gets any health care."

Elliot drank some water. "But let's say out of the fifty guys who want their tests, ten in fact need them. Not five. What happens to them?"

"They get identified, Mr. Elliot. Maybe a little late, which is regrettable. Nobody denies that. They're tough choices, I admit. I personally wish nobody had to go through any pain ever, honest to God. That's why I became a doctor to begin with. But it's my job now to keep this ship afloat, and if we tested every patient for everything they wanted as opposed to everything they truly needed, we'd sink like a stone, and that's the cold, hard truth. Then nobody would get any tests because nobody could afford them. You think that would be better?"

"Let me ask you one," Elliot replied. "I've heard a rumor you haven't paid some of your doctors. Would you care to comment on that?"

Ross kept on his poker face, but Elliot's awareness of this fact startled and worried him. He also thought he knew the source of it-the always difficult Eric Kensing, who'd admitted Baby Emily and then, he suspected, been Elliot's source on the breaking story. But he only said, "I don't know where you would have heard that. It's not accurate."

This evidently amused the reporter. "Is that the same as not true?"

Ross sat back in an effort to appear casual. "What we did was ask our doctor group to loan a sum to the company, with interest, that would come out of the payroll reserve. It was entirely voluntary and we've paid back everyone who's asked."

Jeff Elliot had been sitting listening to Malachi Ross's apologies and explanations for over an hour. Now the chief medical director was talking, lecturing really, about the rationale for the Parnassus drug formulary, maybe hoping that Jeff would spin the self-serving chaff into gold in his column, get some PR points for the group in Ross's coming war with the city.

"Look," Ross said, "let's say the Genesis Corporation invented a cancer-curing drug called Nokance. The budget to research and develop the drug and then shepherd it through the zillions of clinical trials until it got FDA approval comes in at a billion dollars. But suddenly, it's curing cancer and everybody wants it. Sufferers are willing to pay almost anything, and Genesis needs to recoup its investment if it's going to stay in business and invent other miracle drugs, so it charges a hundred bucks per prescription. And for a couple of years, while it's the only show in town, Nokance gets all the business.

"But eventually the other drug companies come out with their versions of Nokance, perhaps with minute variations to avoid patent disputes-"

"But some of which might cause side effects?"

A pained expression brought Ross's eyelids to half-mast. "Rarely, Mr. Elliot. Really. Very rarely. So look where we are. These drugs also cure cancer, but to get market share, they're priced at ten bucks. In response, Nokance lowers its price to, say, fifty dollars."

"That's a lot more than ten."

"Yes it is, and you'd think that once we educate people, tell them all the facts, everybody would stop using it and go for the cheap stuff, wouldn't you?"

"They don't?"

"Never. Or statistically never. Given the choice, the patients almost always choose Nokance. It's the brand name people recognize. There's confidence in the product."

"Like Bayer aspirin."

"Exactly!" Ross silently brought his hands together, as though he was applauding. "So-and here's the point-although it costs us forty dollars more per scrip to supply the Nokance, if we approve it and keep it on the formulary, it costs the patients the same amount it always has, which is ten bucks, the drug copay. So we delist it."

"The Nokance?"

"Right."

"But-this is still hypothetical now-you're saying it's good stuff and you don't let your patients get it."

"They can get it, but we won't pay for it. If we did, it would wipe us out. We're dealing with extremely small margins for the survival of the company here. You've got to understand that. The point is that Nokance isn't the only stuff that works. That's what I'm trying to get through to you. The generics do the job."

Elliot had his own very strongly developed ideas about drug formularies. He had been suffering from multiple sclerosis for over twenty years, and on the advice of his doctors, he sometimes thought that he'd tried all the various generics in the world for his different and changing symptoms. Not invariably, but several times-at least enough to have let him develop a healthy skepticism-he'd experienced side effects or discomfort with the generics. When he'd gone back to the brand name, the problems vanished. So Ross would never sell him on the universal benefit of generic drugs.

"So just to be clear on your position," Elliot said, "your view is that this gatekeeping and cost cutting, from managed care to generic drugs, is essentially consistent with your Hippocratic oath, for example. Where the emphasis is first to do no harm, then to heal."

"Basically, yes." Ross seemed pleased with this take on it, but Elliot knew he wouldn't be for long. "We're in medicine, Mr. Elliot," he continued. "The goal is maximum wellness for the most people."

"And there's no conflict between your business interests and the needs of your patients?"

"Of course there is." Ross was leaning back in his chair comfortably, his legs crossed. "But we try to minimize it. It's all a matter of degree. The company needs to sustain itself so it can continue doing its work."

"And also make a profit, let's not forget. You've got to show earnings, though-right?-to please your investors?"

Ross smiled and spread his hands in a self-deprecating way. "Well, we're not doing too well at that lately."

"So I hear." Elliot came forward in his wheelchair, spoke in a friendly tone. "Do your investors ever express displeasure with the salaries of your officers and directors?"

Ross blinked a few times, but if the question bothered him, he covered it quickly. "Not often. Our board members are skilled businesspeople. If the pay weren't competitive, they'd go elsewhere. Good help is hard to find, and when you find it, you pay top dollar for it."

"And this good help, what does it do exactly? Run the company?"

"That's right."

"And yet you're close to bankruptcy." It wasn't a question, but Elliot let it hang for a beat. "Which makes one wonder if lesser-paid help could do any worse, doesn't it?"

Fisk and Bracco may have come across as a matched pair to their fellow homicide inspectors, but they really couldn't have been much more different from each other as human beings. And this meant they were different kinds of cops, too.

When it got to be five o'clock, Harlen Fisk asked his partner if he'd drop him off at Tadich's, the city's oldest restaurant. In spite of his pregnant wife and baby boy waiting at home, he'd be meeting his aunt Kathy and several of her supporters for dinner and schmoozing well into the night. He didn't invite Bracco to join them, and there were no hard feelings either way. The fact was, Fisk was a political animal with his eye someday in the distant future on political rewards.

By contrast, Bracco was the son of a cop, but even so, until he got the promotion to homicide, he hadn't clearly understood how much his father's connection to the mayor was affecting his career, how much the regular guys resented him. And he'd never asked for special treatment-it had simply come with the territory. Political people in the department thought they could make the mayor happy by being nice to the Bracco boy, and they weren't all wrong.

But when Fisk had told him that he was thinking about going to his aunt, the city supervisor, to complain about their continued ill-treatment on the fourth floor, Bracco had talked his partner out of it. One thing he'd learned from his father was that cops didn't whine. Ever. The thing to do was talk to Glitsky, he'd said. Ask straight and deal with the answer, which was that there was probably no intentional homicide here with the hit and run, and hence nothing to look into.

Bracco believed that this was the truth. But what else was he doing with his time?

So after he dropped Harlen off downtown, he spent a few hours checking leads that they'd picked up on the car during the course of the day. He didn't expect any results, but you never knew. His experience in hit and run had taught him that most of the time, the drivers would wait until they thought nobody was looking for their car anymore. They'd park it out of sight, keep the garage door closed. After a month, they would take it to a car wash or body shop. And that would be the end of it.

But maybe this time-long odds, but possible-it would be different. They'd gotten eleven patrol call-ins during the day. These were vehicles fitting the description that were parked at the curb or in driveways around the city, reported by patrolling cops. Fisk hated this kind of legwork. Bracco, on the other hand, put in a couple of hours checking out each and every one. The impact that had thrown Markham would have left a sign even on an old, thick-skinned American car, and a quick walk around with a flashlight would tell him if he would need to come back with a warrant. But none of the cars had anything close.

Not exactly knowing why, he killed another half hour walking through the parking garage at Portola Hospital, but there wasn't one old green car. So, feeling like an idiot, he sat in his car and wrote some notes to jog his memory tomorrow-check the Rent-A-Wrecks, don't forget the call-ins to H &R from citizens interested in the reward from the supervisor's fund (ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction, et cetera).

Finally, on his way home after a piroshki gut-bomb he bought at a place on Nineteenth Avenue, he decided to head back up to Seacliff, to Markham's house. Start, as Glitsky said, with the family. Look at the cars parked outside. After all, he reminded himself wryly, he was the car police.

"Can I help you?"

Bracco straightened up abruptly and shone his flashlight across the hood of the white Toyota he was examining. It was the last one of what had been twenty-three cars parked on Markham's block. The beam revealed a man of above-average height, who brought a hand up against the glare, and spoke again in a harsh, strained voice. "What the hell are you doing?"

Bracco noted with alarm that he was reaching into his jacket pocket with his free hand. "Freeze. Police." It was all he could think to say. "Don't move." Bracco didn't know whether he ought to flash his badge or draw the gun from his shoulder holster. He decided on the latter and leveled it at the figure. "I'm coming around this car." His blood was racing. "Don't move one muscle," he repeated.

"I'm not moving."

"Okay, now slowly, the hand in your jacket, take it out where I can see it."

"This is ridiculous." But the man complied.

Bracco patted the jacket, reached inside and removed a cell phone, then backed away a step.

"Look, I'm a doctor," the man said. "A patient of mine who lives here died today. So I come out after paying my condolences and somebody's at my car with a flashlight. I was just going to use the cell to call the police myself."

After a moment, Bracco handed the phone back to the doctor, and put his gun back where it belonged. If he'd felt like an idiot before walking the parking lot at the hospital, now he was mortified, although he wasn't going to show it. "Could I see some identification, please?"

The man turned to look toward the house for a moment, then came back to the inspector. "I don't see…" he began. "I'm…" Finally he sighed and reached for his wallet. "My name is Dr. Eric Kensing," he said. "I was the ICU supervisor today at Portola Hospital."

"Where Mr. Markham died?"

"Right. He was my…boss, I guess. Why are the police out here now?"

Bracco found himself coming out with the truth. "I'm looking for the hit-and-run vehicle."

Kensing blew out impatiently. "Could I please have my wallet back?" He slipped it into his pocket, then suddenly asked, "You're not saying you really think somebody Tim knew hit him on purpose, then came here to visit the family?"

"No. But we'd be pretty stupid not to look, wouldn't we?"

"It sounds a little far-fetched to me, but if that's what you guys do…" He let the thought go unfinished. "Listen, are we done? I'd like to go now. My car didn't hit him. You see any sign that I hit him? You want to check again and make sure? I interrupted you in the middle of it."

Something about the man's tone-a mixture of arrogance and impatience-struck Bracco. He knew that people reacted to cops in all kinds of different ways. Every once in a while, though, he believed that the reaction revealed something unusual, perhaps a consciousness of guilt. Kensing was reaching for the door handle, but Bracco suddenly and instinctively wanted to keep him for a few more words.

"You say Mr. Markham was your boss? I didn't realize he was a doctor."

Kensing straightened up at the car door and sighed again. "He wasn't. He ran the company I work for. Parnassus Health."

"So you knew him well, did you?"

A pause. "Not really." He shifted his gaze back over Bracco's shoulder again. "Now if we're done here…"

"What's in the house?" Bracco asked.

"What do you mean? Nothing."

"You keep looking back at it."

"Do I?" He shrugged. "I wasn't aware of it. I suppose I'm worried about them. It's been a real tragedy. They're devastated in there."

Bracco was picking up an off note that might have been fatigue but might be something else. He could turn his questions into an interrogation of sorts if he could manage to keep the right tone. "I thought you said you didn't know him well."

"I didn't."

"Yet you're worried about his family?"

"Do you have some problem with that? Last time I checked, it wasn't a crime to care about a victim's family." Kensing swiped a hand across his forehead, cast a quick look up and down the street. "Look, Officer, are we going somewhere with this that I'm missing?"

Bracco didn't answer. Instead, he asked a question of his own. "So, you didn't have any strong feelings about him?"

The doctor cocked his head to one side. "What do you mean? As a boss?"

"Any way."

This time, the doctor paused for a long moment. "What's your name, Officer, if you don't mind? I like to know who I'm speaking with."

"Bracco. Sergeant Inspector Darrel Bracco. Homicide."

As soon as Bracco said it, he knew it was a mistake. Kensing nearly jumped at the word. "Homicide?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you're investigating Tim's death? Why? Does somebody think he was murdered?"

"Not necessarily. A hit and run that results in death is a homicide. This is just routine."

"Routine. Checking the cars coming to his house?"

"Right. And you just called him Tim."

"Does that mean something? His name was Tim."

"You didn't know him very well, and yet you called him by his first name?"

Kensing was silent, shaking his head. Finally, he let out a long breath. "Look, Inspector, I don't know what I'm supposed to say. The man died in my unit today, while he was under my care. I've known him for fifteen years, and I came by here to pay further condolences to his wife and family. It's almost ten o'clock and I've been up since six this morning and I'm the walking dead right now. I don't see where calling the man by his first name has any meaning, and if you don't mind, I've got an early call again tomorrow. I'd be happy to talk to you at the hospital if you want to make an appointment."

Bracco realized that maybe he'd pushed his spontaneous interrogation too far. Everything Kensing said, tone or no tone, made perfect sense. There was no real point in harassing this probably decent doctor who had, in fact, voluntarily opened the door to another interview tomorrow. The inspector knew he'd overreached.

"You're right. But I may call you in the next few days."

"That'd be fine," Kensing said. "I'm not going anywhere."

They both stood in the street for another beat; then Bracco told him good night and turned for the house. Glitsky had told him it started with the family, and maybe he'd find something inside, get some valuable first impressions. But he hadn't gone two steps when he heard Kensing's voice again. "You're not thinking about going up to the house, are you?"

He stopped and turned. "I thought I might."

The doctor hesitated, seemed to be considering whether to say anything. Finally, he spoke up. "Well, you'll do what you're going to do, Inspector, but you might want to consider giving them a break tonight and coming back tomorrow. They've had a bad day. They're wrung out. I guarantee none of them drove your hit-and-run car. What are you going to ask them that can't wait?"

Bracco had had a long day himself. He looked back at the house, still lit up. It struck him that his need to find something, anything, to do with Tim Markham's death, and thereby prove his worth to Glitsky, was pushing him too far too fast. He'd invented phantoms and made some interrogation mistakes here with Kensing, just now.

And he was about to do it again with the family when he had no plan and there was really nothing to ask. He should leave them to their exhaustion and grief. Tomorrow was another day.

Bracco nodded. "That's a good call, but you and I might be talking again soon."

"I'll look forward to it," Kensing said, and opened the door to his car.

8

Glitsky had lived in the same upper duplex for twenty years and now, between the blessing of rent control and the latest surge in San Francisco real estate, he knew he would be living there when he died. Even if the owner sold it, a new owner could never make him leave unless he wanted to move in himself, and that would take forever and cost a fortune. Glitsky's rent could never go up beyond a piddling percentage. And with converted condo one-bedroom fixer-uppers now going for half a million dollars anywhere in the city, he knew he could never afford to buy something else. As it was, he paid rent of less than a thousand dollars a month for the place, which was on a quiet dead end, a really beautiful tree-lined block north of Lake. His backyard opened onto a greenbelt and running path at the border of the Presidio, so he often woke up to birds chirping rather than sirens wailing. Deer and raccoon sightings were common. He didn't kid himself-he knew he was one of the very fortunate.

Still, it wasn't as though he lived in ducal splendor. Ducal splendor, he felt, was hard to come by in thirteen hundred square feet, especially when that area was subdivided into three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. Still, with Flo he'd raised his three boys here; the lack of room had never really been an issue then, and it wasn't now. For the past several years, a housekeeper named Rita Schultz had lived with him and Orel, and she had slept behind a screen in the living room. Rita was gone now, which made the living room seem gigantic. Treya's sixteen-year-old daughter, Raney, had taken over what had for a short while been the television room down the hallway behind the kitchen. They had plenty of room.

It was now 7:30 and both kids had gone off to school. Glitsky and Treya were both drinking tea, reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, which wasn't big enough to spread out the sections, so they played a quiet game, covering a portion of each other's pages whenever they turned their next one. When Treya had done this for the fourth time, covering the lengthy article Glitsky was reading about the latest news on the ancient water flows on Mars and what they all might mean, he put down his mug, reached over and, quite gently, ripped the offending page down the middle. He then dropped it on the floor.

"You are such a fun person," she said. "I don't care what everybody says."

"Are there people who don't think I'm fun?"

"Some, I think."

Glitsky shook his head. "This is very hard to believe. Hardy told me the same thing just last year." He made a caricature of a smile, which his scar rendered grotesque. "But put another page over mine before I finish this article and I'll rip your heart out. Okay?"

"We need a bigger table."

He was trying to get back to reading, but stopped again and looked across at her. "Yes, we do. But we'd need a bigger kitchen to hold it, and then where would we be?"

"Maybe we could knock down a wall here…no, I'm serious. And then-" The doorbell interrupted her and she looked at her watch. "Who could that be?"

"One of the kids forgot something." Abe was up and moving. "Nope," he said. "Business." He opened the door. "Good morning, Darrel. You're up early. Where's Harlen?" Then, "How'd you find out where I live?"

Harlen Fisk had known from somewhere, Darrel explained-politicians always knew-and had pointed the place out to him. So this morning, heading downtown from Seacliff, Bracco had to pass Glitsky's duplex and he decided to stop and maybe save himself the trip back.

Now as they drove, his lieutenant sat beside him, clearly exercising his patience. "So let me get this straight. You were out in the street in front of Mr. Markham's house until nearly ten last night, then decided it was too late to go in and start asking questions. And why were you going to do that again? Ask questions?"

"You said it started with the family."

"That's true."

"So I was going to talk to them if I could. But a lot of people had come by for condolences and so on and I realized that the family must have had a long hard day, so I thought I'd let them get some rest. It could wait until today."

"And you were there again by when? Six thirty?"

"Closer to seven. I figured the kids would still have school and I wanted to catch them if I could. I didn't think any of them were going to sleep very well anyway."

"But nobody answered?"

Bracco flicked a glance across the car seat. "Nothing the first time when I just knocked, so I'm thinking they're still sleeping. So I gave it another twenty and rang four or five times and waited." He hesitated. "They were in the house when I left, Lieutenant. Dr. Kensing had just come out from visiting them. I'm ninety-nine percent sure that they went to sleep there. I don't know why they didn't answer. I think I would have woken them up at least."

Arms crossed, Glitsky merely nodded. He didn't know what, if anything, was going on at Tim Markham's house. He did consider it entirely possible that the household had slept through Bracco's knocking and ringing. He'd seen families of murder victims, physically exhausted and emotionally depleted, sleep around the clock and then some.

Or they might have decided just not to answer the door to some unknown man at the crack of dawn.

But on another level, Glitsky was glad to see his inspector showing such initiative, even if it might turn out to have been misdirected. They'd know soon enough.

It was another clear, cold morning. They parked directly in front of the two-story mansion and walked to the front stoop, an expanse of flagstone broader and wider than Glitsky's living room. Bracco knocked, then pressed the bell, a booming three-tone gong easily audible outside the door. "I don't think they'd sleep through that, do you?"

Glitsky reached around, pressed the button again. And they waited. After one more try and another minute, Abe told Darrel to stay where he was and went to check around the house. The plantation shutters in the front windows were closed, but through the garage windows, he saw two cars parked where they should have been. Opening the gate through the fence to the backyard, he was struck by the silence, and walked more briskly to the window in the back door. A large dog, apparently asleep on the floor, was visible at the far end of a kind of mud room, and Glitsky knocked forcefully several times. The dog didn't move.

Jogging now, coming back around to the front of the house, he saw that a woman had joined Bracco on the front porch. He checked his watch and saw that it was just eight o'clock. Slowing down now, walking back up to the stoop, he had his badge out and introduced himself. She was Anita Tong. As he'd guessed, the maid, arriving at work for the day.

"Were you expecting Mrs. Markham to be home this morning?"

Ms. Tong nodded. "Mr. Markham just died yesterday. Where would she go?"

"I don't know," Glitsky said. "I was asking you."

There was no answer.

"Do you have a house key? May I see it, please?"

Nervous now, nodding, she was biting her lower lip. She rummaged in her purse, extracted a set of keys, and dropped them onto the flagstone. "I'm sorry," she said, picking them up. "Here. This one."

Glitsky turned to his inspector. "Darrel, I want you to stay here. Ms. Tong, you should wait right here, too, with Inspector Bracco. Do you understand? Don't go inside."

Glitsky then opened the door and found himself in a large, bright, circular foyer. A spacious room opened off to his left and he walked a couple of steps into it and looked around. All seemed in order. Across the foyer, a dining room complete with formal table and chandelier was also as it should be, as was the breakfast nook beyond that.

Silence, though. Everywhere dead silence.

He went back through the dining room to the kitchen and hadn't gone a step into it when he saw the woman's body lying on its side, a gun on the floor by her head. Crossing to her in several long strides, he avoided the pool of drying blood and knelt by her for a second. He saw the source of the blood, a hole in the scalp low and behind the right ear. Although there was no doubt, he touched the cold skin of her neck, then pulled out his gun and started to check the rest of the house. Two minutes later, he walked to a wall phone upstairs in the master bedroom and punched in the number he knew best.

The crime scene investigation team had already been working the house for an hour and now its sergeant, Jack Langtry, was walking across the front lawn to where Glitsky stood with a small knot of medical examiner's people and police. The sun was out, but it hadn't warmed appreciably. Everyone standing around had their hands in their pockets.

Langtry hailed originally from Australia and was normally a hearty, rugby-type guy in his late thirties. Today his face looked somehow crooked and blotchy and he seemed to lurch from side to side as he walked, almost as if he were drunk. Glitsky separated himself from the general and subdued mass and met him in the middle of the lawn.

Langtry let out some air and squeezed at his temples with one hand. He kicked at the ground, raised his eyes, looked out at the horizon. "You know one of the things I loved most about this country when I first came here? No restrictions on who can own guns. But I think I'm getting to the point where I'm changing my mind. You put guns in a house with distraught people…I've just seen this too bloody often. Stupid sods."

Glitsky thought he understood what Langtry was implying, but this wasn't a time for guessing. He wanted to be clear on the crime scene investigation unit's position. "What do you think happened in there, Jack?"

Langtry scratched under the collar of his shirt, looked again at the bright blue sky. When his eyes got back to Glitsky, he was back in professional mode. "It was Markham's gun. We found the registration in the same drawer where he probably kept it, in his office off the kitchen. It was right by her hand."

"All right. It was his gun in her hand. What's that mean?"

"By itself, I don't know for sure. The lab might tell us something we don't know."

"Other than what?"

"Other than what it seems like."

Glitsky took a beat. "We playing twenty questions here, Jack, or what?"

"You were asking them, Abe. You want to know what I think, we can go straight to there. She did them all, then killed herself."

"Carla?"

"Was that her name?"

"Yeah. She killed her kids, too?"

Langtry seemed to get a little defensive. "You telling me you've never seen it?"

"I've seen it a lot, Jack. Maybe just not like this."

"Not like what?"

But Glitsky discovered he couldn't quite put his finger on what nagged at him about this theory. "I don't know, Jack. Maybe I'm whistling through my hat. Faro come up with anything?" Faro was Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab technician.

Langtry nodded. "He's still in there. You can talk to him. You wanted my take, it's probably what it looks like. Unless you know something I don't."

It was a question, and Glitsky shook his head. "Just why? Why the whole family?"

But this wasn't a hard one for Langtry. "Her husband died yesterday, right? That's what I heard."

"Yeah. Hit and run."

"And maybe they were having problems before that?"

"I don't know. Did you hear that someplace?"

"No. But it's the profile. You know as well as me."

"Maybe not," Glitsky replied, though he thought he did. "Tell me."

Langtry squinted into the sky again, organizing his thoughts. "The world's too horrible to live in. There's too much pain and it all means nothing anyway. So she's sparing them from that. Doing them a favor, maybe."

Glitsky knew that this was the standard reading. In his career, he'd seen distraught women kill their families before. He'd read or heard about several others. It was always difficult to imagine or accept. But in his experience, those events-terrible though they had been-had a different quality to them, a more immediate and somehow more painful impetus than the simple death of the husband.

He remembered-years ago now-a family of five who'd escaped from Vietnam. The oldest boy, a young teenager, had died on the boat coming over, and then a few months after they'd arrived, they were packed into a one-bedroom place and one of the Chinatown gangs broke in, took some stuff, and then-possibly angry that the family didn't have more stuff to steal-shot the husband dead. The next day, the mother had suffocated the two young kids, then cut her own wrists.

He'd seen another young woman in a so-called burning bed case. Her boyfriend had been beating her and finally she shot him in his sleep, then did the same with her baby and herself. About two years ago, a clinically depressed, suicidal woman named Gerry Patecik-for some reason, he remembered her name-overdosed herself and two out of her three kids with barbiturates in milk shakes after her husband walked out and filed for divorce.

So Glitsky had seen it-the bare fact of murder/suicide wasn't unknown or even terribly uncommon, given its heinous nature. But all the other cases he'd seen or heard about had a certain over-the-edge quality that seemed to be missing here. And he'd never before seen or heard of teenage victims-they'd always been younger children. This was an apparently comfortable family who'd simply lost their father. Tragic, yes-but could Carla Markham have been that close to the kind of complete and utter despair that would seem to be in evidence and still entertain a reasonable crowd here the night before? It was hard to imagine.

"Goddamnit, Abe," Langtry suddenly said. He turned back toward the house, as though looking to it for some answers. "Goddamn stupid stupid stupid."

Glitsky hated the profanity but he empathized with Langtry's fury. Four people were dead in the house, the woman and her three teenage children, shot in their beds upstairs. With the death of Tim Markham yesterday, this made an entire family wiped out in twenty-four hours. "I hear you, Jack," he said. "You got anything else I need to know?"

"Nah, it's all peaceful as a bloody tomb in there. It is a bloody tomb. Christ."

At that moment, a woman from the CSI team appeared in the doorway, carrying the rag doll body of the Markhams' dog, a large and beautiful golden retriever. Glitsky watched as, sagging under the weight, she crossed the flagstone stoop. Langtry took a step toward her, said, "Carol," and got stopped by her glare. Crying silently, she didn't want any help. At the curb, she placed the lifeless form in the back of one of the ambulances still parked there, then walked over to one of the patrol cars and sat down inside, closing the door behind her.

Glitsky laid a quick fraternal hand on Langtry's shoulder as he passed him, then went up across the lawn and through the front door.

Inside, he found Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab specialist, standing by the sink in the kitchen. Dark and wiry, with a thin mustache and a tiny gold cross in his earlobe, he had his arms and legs crossed in an attitude of casual impatience. The photographer was taking pictures and he seemed to be waiting until he finished up.

Glitsky stopped for a second at the entrance to the kitchen, took another glance at Mrs. Markham's body, then joined Faro at the sink. "Jack Langtry tells me she shot the gun," he said.

Faro turned his head sideways. "Maybe. There it is. Close enough."

The gun lay on the floor, about a foot from Carla's right hand. "She right-handed?" Glitsky asked.

A mirthless chuckle. "You'll have to ask her."

Glitsky thought he deserved that. "Why don't you tell me what you know? Keep me from asking more stupid questions."

Faro took a beat, then straightened up. "You mind if we get out of here? The view pales after an hour or two." He crossed the kitchen, back out to the grand dining room, then into the foyer, where the front door was still open, fresh air coming in. "Okay. The gun's a twenty-two revolver, holds six slugs, although we've recovered only five casings, which fits. As I see it, she started upstairs with her son."

"Why do you say that?"

"It's the only one she tried to silence. The shot was through the pillow."

"Okay. Then what?"

Faro pointed upstairs. The dining room was expansive and open, its ceiling over twenty feet high, with a large skylight at the roof. Midway up, around the sides of the room, a banister marked the walkway to the rooms on the second story. "The next room over, at the end," Faro said, "is where the girls slept. Twins. It looks like she went in there next. No point in trying to silence the first shot, so she probably just did it quick."

"Then went downstairs and killed herself?"

Faro corrected him. "The dog first."

Suddenly the niggling detail he couldn't place earlier when he'd been talking with Langtry struck Glitsky. Even if Carla Markham thought the world too cruel for herself and her children, why would she shoot her dog? Certainly not to spare it the pain of going on. Much more typical would have been a note leaving the pet in the care of a relative or close friend.

"Sir?" Faro asked. "Did you say something?"

"Just talking to myself, Len. How about her own wound?"

"Back of the ear, right side, which fits again. But no exit wound, so I can't hypothesize about the trajectory. Strout ought to get all that."

"I'm sure he will," Abe said. "But let me ask you this, Len. You're going with Jack on murder/suicide, I take it?"

But the analyst shook his head. "We're not done here by a long shot, sir. I don't see anything that rules it out, let's put it like that. It looks like she fired the gun. No sign of any struggle anywhere." He raised his shoulders, let them down. "But I don't know. You got a better idea, I'll look anyplace you want."

"I don't know if it's a better idea," Glitsky said, "but I'd ask Strout to double-check for the trajectory and find out if she was right-handed." With his own right hand, Glitsky pointed to a spot at the back of his right ear. "It seems a little awkward, don't you think?"

Harlen Fisk had been dispatched out from downtown and had joined his partner here at the house, where Glitsky had assigned to them the task of interviewing Anita Tong. Now the lieutenant joined the three of them, who had gathered around the table in the breakfast nook.

The maid was still visibly shaken. When Glitsky had first come outside after discovering the bodies, she'd all but collapsed onto the stoop upon hearing the news, which had seemed incomprehensible to her. For the first several minutes, she kept returning to the same questions, then arguing with the answers.

What did he mean, dead? Glitsky must have been wrong. He didn't mean that they were all dead, did he? They couldn't all be dead, that wouldn't be possible. Not Ian, at seventeen the eldest child. He was too big, too strong and competent, almost a man now. Certainly, he would have heard someone coming into his room and woken up, wouldn't he? Was Glitsky sure he saw both of the girls, Chloe and Siggy? Maybe he hadn't. He might want to go back up and check again. Someone could still be alive.

Anita Tong was a petite and well-spoken woman. She'd been part of the Markhams' household for seven and a half years. They were her only employers. She lived a couple of miles south in the Sunset District, and worked in the house five days a week-Mondays and Tuesdays off-from 8:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M.

Now, pulling up a chair, Glitsky straddled it backward. He picked up on Ms. Tong's story as she was telling the inspectors that she'd offered to stay on for the night-he assumed she meant last night-and thank God she hadn't. "But Carla-Mrs. Markham-said she and the kids could handle things, I should go. They didn't expect many more people."

"How many were there when you left?" Bracco asked.

Ms. Tong considered a moment. "Her coffee group, mostly. Which is six other women. They meet every Friday morning. I think when they heard about Mr. Markham…anyway, they brought some casseroles and things like that, so I thought she might have wanted me to stay and heat them up and serve them. But no."

Fisk was nodding as though this was all somehow relevant. Bracco was taking notes on a yellow legal pad. At least, Glitsky noted with some surprise and relief, his new guys had put a tape recorder on the table. But he could see how they hadn't gotten very far if all of Tong's answers had gone this way. He decided to speak up, keep things on point, maybe give a little instruction while he was at it. "So, Ms. Tong," he said gently, "what time did you wind up leaving?"

"Mrs. Tong," she corrected him. "A little before seven."

"And there were only Mrs. Markham and her six friends in the house when you left? Nobody else?"

She turned to face him. "Well, the kids and a couple of their friends, too. Ian's, really, not the girls'."

"Two of them?"

"I think so. Teenagers. They sat in here."

"Two of Ian's friends, then," Glitsky said. "Do you know their names?"

"One was Joel Burrill. He's here all the time. The other one, I think Mark, but…" She shook her head.

"How about the names of the coffee group women?" Glitsky asked.

This was more promising, and Mrs. Tong brightened up slightly. "Well, there's Ruth Fitzpatrick, I know. And Jamie Rath. Oh, her daughter Lexi was here, too. She's in Siggy and Chloe's grade. Jamie lives right around the corner. I could show you."

Glitsky made a little writing motion, signaling Bracco that he should be jotting down these names. To Mrs. Tong, he continued, "That would be good when we're finished here, if you don't mind. Now, as to the rest of the guests, was anyone else here when you left, or just the coffee group and Ian's friends? And Siggy and Chloe's classmate."

"Well, of course Mr. Markham's assistant was here the whole time. Brendan, just crying and crying, worse than Mrs. Markham sometimes. Then there was Frank Husic next door. He's a very nice man. He heard about Mr. Markham on the radio and came right over to see if there was any way he could help." Mrs. Tong closed her eyes for a moment, then nodded to herself. "That's all when I was still here. After that I don't know."

"So you didn't see Dr. Kensing?" Glitsky asked.

Mrs. Tong's expression was instructive. She reacted visibly with recognition and, Glitsky thought, shock. "Dr. Kensing coming here surprises you?"

It took her a moment to phrase one syllable. "Well…" She stopped. The inspectors waited. Finally she shrugged. "Yes, I guess," she said.

"And why is that?"

Mrs. Tong was starting to close up. She drew her head down slightly between her shoulders.

Glitsky kept at her. "Did you know Dr. Kensing, Mrs. Tong? Was he a friend of the family?"

"Not exactly a friend, no. I didn't know him, but the name…the name is familiar."

Glitsky hadn't moved his chair, but he somehow seemed to have gotten closer to her. "And you wouldn't have expected him to come by? Why is that?"

Before Mrs. Tong could frame an answer, one of the inspectors interrupted. Bracco, eager to show off what he'd learned, pumped in, "He was on call at the ICU when Markham died. He probably felt he should."

Glitsky's gaze would have frozen flame. He turned mildly, though, back to his subject. "Mrs. Tong, I'm sorry. What were you going to say? Why you wouldn't have expected Dr. Kensing to come and visit?"

"I just…" She'd picked up the tension between Glitsky and his inspectors, and it didn't increase her comfort level. "I don't know," she said finally.

In some ways, Glitsky knew, this interview and their interruptions might someday prove instructive to Fisk and Bracco, but it wasn't any solace at the moment, as a willing and cooperative witness was clamming up before his eyes because he couldn't establish a rhythm, which was halfway to rapport.

But he wasn't through trying yet. She'd opened a different door a crack, and maybe he could get her to open that one. "All right," he said, "but you did say that Dr. Kensing wasn't exactly a friend. I believe those were your words. Didn't you say that?"

"I think so. Yes."

"Could you tell us what you meant by that?" He threw another, apparently benign look at his rookies, but it delivered the message loud and clear: Shut up and let her answer.

"Well, he worked for Mr. Markham."

"So you meant he wasn't exactly a friend because he was more an employee?" When she appeared to be considering that, Glitsky clarified it further. "As opposed to not exactly being a friend because he was more an enemy."

They waited, and this time Mrs. Tong's check around the table revealed a universal and hopeful expectation that prompted a more open response. "His name came up sometimes," she began, "with Carla and her friends. I couldn't help but hear, serving them, you know? Actually, not so much his name as his wife's." Suddenly another thought struck her, though. "Should I be saying any of this? Do I need to have a lawyer with me?"

Glitsky put his finger in that dike immediately. "I don't think so, ma'am. You haven't done anything wrong. You're not in any trouble." Having said that, he came right back at her, hoping a new question would trump the lawyer issue. "Why did Dr. Kensing's wife come up at this coffee group?"

"She talked about divorcing him."

The antecedents hung in the air in an unidentifiable jumble. "Dr. Kensing's wife?" Glitsky asked. "Was divorcing him?"

"No." Mrs. Tong shook her head impatiently. "Carla. Mrs. Kensing was…I think everybody knows this…Mr. Markham had an affair with her."

Fisk brought his baby face forward. It was alight with excitement and possibility. "With Dr. Kensing's wife?" he asked avidly.

No, Glitsky wanted to say with his deepest sarcasm, with the golden retriever. But he bit it back. One more time, though, and he really was going to have to tell them to leave. He kept his own voice uninflected. "Are you saying that Dr. Kensing's wife-"

"Ann."

"Okay, Ann. She and Mr. Markham were having an affair? You mean it wasn't over?"

"It was supposed to be. When it all blew up-"

"When was that?"

"About five or six months ago, just before Thanksgiving. That's when Carla found out. She kicked him out for a couple of weeks then. I didn't think he was ever coming back. But he did. She asked him back. If it were me, I don't think I'd have forgiven…well, but that's me."

"But Mr. Markham did come back?"

Mrs. Tong nodded. "Swearing it was over, of course."

"But it wasn't?"

"I don't know." Now, a shrug. "Carla wasn't sure, I don't think. But she thought…She told the coffee group she was getting a private investigator, and if he was seeing her again, she was leaving him." A silence settled for a long moment, after which Mrs. Tong turned to Glitsky and picked up the thread. "So when I heard Dr. Kensing had been here last night, you're right, I was surprised."

Feigning a nonchalance he didn't feel, Glitsky leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. The information about Ann Kensing and Tim Markham made him reconsider two contradictory possibilities: first, that Mrs. Markham might have been depressed for a long while before last night, which would strengthen the argument for murder/ suicide; but second, here was an apparent possible motive for a murder.

He would consider each more carefully when he got some time, but for now he had one more line of questioning for the maid. "As far as you know, Mrs. Tong, did Dr. Kensing know about the relationship between Mr. Markham and his wife?"

"I think so, yes. When Carla heard that they were getting divorced-"

"Kensing and Ann? They're divorced now, too? Over this?"

"I don't know if it's final yet, but I understood that they'd separated. At least when Carla heard they'd started the proceedings, she tried to make sure Mr. Markham wouldn't get named in any of the papers. So Dr. Kensing, he must have known, don't you think?"

9

Dismas Hardy was standing on the sidewalk on Irving Street talking with another lawyer named Wes Farrell. The two men had only met once or twice before, but the most recent time had been at Glitsky's wedding last September, where they'd independently and then together explored the limits of human tolerance for champagne. It was, it turned out for both of them, pretty high.

Last night, Frannie had eventually shown up at the Shamrock, and she and Hardy had gone on their date-Chinese food at the Purple Yet Wah. When they got home, he couldn't get McGuire's story about Shane Mackey out of his head. This morning, he'd called around and discovered that Mackey's family had indeed hired an attorney-Farrell-to explore malpractice issues surrounding his death. After all the medical talk recently, then Tim Markham's death yesterday, he was curious to know more. Farrell would be a good source of information. He could also, he knew, be a hell of a good time. So when Wes got to his office at a little after 8:30, Hardy was standing outside on the sidewalk, holding a bottle of bubbly with a ribbon around it.

Farrell greeted him like a long-lost brother, but then, seeing the offering, backed away in mock horror. "I don't think I've had a sip of that stuff since Abe's wedding, which is okay since I had about a year's worth that day if I recall, which I'm not sure I do."

"It's like riding a horse," Hardy said. "You've got to get right back on after it bucks you off. Churchill drank it every day, you know? For breakfast. And he won the Nobel Prize."

"For champagne drinking?"

Hardy shook his head. "Peace, I think. No, wait a minute. Maybe literature."

"It would have been good if it was peace." Farrell turned to let Hardy in past him. "I love how they wind up giving the Peace Prize to these world-class warriors. Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho. Yasser Arafat. Churchill would have fit right in. These guys aren't exactly Gandhi, you know."

"Statesmen," Hardy said. "If you're a statesman you can kill as many people as you want as long as you're in a war, and then when you stop, everybody in Sweden is so grateful they give you the Peace Prize."

"Except for the fact that Sweden doesn't give the Peace Prize."

"It doesn't? Who does?"

"Norway."

"When did that start?"

"Pretty early on, I think. All the other Nobel's come from Sweden, but Norway gives the Peace Prize. Don't ask me why?"

"They're probably better statesmen," Hardy said.

"I could be a statesman," Farrell said. "I'd like to kill lots of people." He was sitting now, rearranging the pens on his blotter. "Maybe then I could defend myself, which would mean I had a client."

Hardy sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. "Things a little slow lately?"

Farrell waved a hand vaguely at their surroundings. "Barely worth opening the office every day." He sighed. "If I didn't care so much about a couple of my clients…"

"The Mackeys, for example?"

Farrell's shoulders fell. He wagged his head back and forth a couple of times in despair, then looked up through bassett eyes. "Don't tell me they came to you?"

Hardy barked a note of laughter, then checked it. Losing business wasn't a laughing matter. "No," he said. "I promise. I'm not stealing your clients, Wes. But it is about the Mackeys."

"What about them, besides that they've not only lost a son, but are screwed to boot?"

"Screwed how?"

"Because our great Supreme Court recently ruled, as you may have heard, that individuals can't sue their HMOs for medical malpractice because they don't practice medicine. They're business entities, not medical entities." He spread his palms, lifted, then dropped them in frustration. "Unfortunately, Diz, this rejects more or less exactly the argument I'd filed in behalf of the Mackeys and my other five clients. And master of timing that I am, I hitched my wagon pretty much full-time to this issue, figuring it was the wave of the future. Anyway, so now I've got to rewrite all the pleading on some new cause of action. Failure to coordinate care, general negligence, the admin of the plan caused the P.I., like that. But meanwhile, there's no billings."

All the way back in his chair, Hardy sat with his arms crossed, halfway enjoying the rave. He knew the realities of billing. If you couldn't handle them, you didn't belong in the business. "So what happened with Shane?"

"Shane is like textbook." Farrell shot up and went to his file cabinet, from which he pulled a thick folder. "Look at this. Check this out."

Hardy stood and came over to the desk. Farrell had the medical records of everything that Moses McGuire had described in the Shamrock the previous night, but they went over it in a lot more detail, and with a final twist that made Shane Mackey's death even more tragic. One of Shane's doctors suggested that he might, possibly, have "something" that could respond to a new treatment being performed at Cedars-Sinai in L.A. But Shane's HMO had determined that this treatment was "experimental," so they would not cover him. Which meant the cost to Shane would be about three hundred thousand dollars out of pocket. "And after months of agony, trying to decide if he should incur the cost, he went for it. He and his parents sold their houses, basically cashed out, and he went down to L.A., where guess what?"

"He died," Hardy said soberly.

"He died," Farrell repeated. "But I've got a witness down there who says that if he would have come in three months earlier, they might have saved him."

Hardy whistled. "If he's credible, that could be worth a lot of money for you."

"Yeah, but it's not coming in tomorrow, let me tell you." Farrell closed the folder. "Anyway, the bad part for me is that it's all omission, very hard to prove. Stuff somebody might have or should have done, but didn't because Parnassus doesn't allow-"

Hardy straightened up, nearly jumped at the word. "Parnassus? That's the group here we're talking about?"

A nod. "Sure. Shane worked for the city, so they covered him."

"And what about your other clients? Were they with Parnassus, too?"

"Sure. They're the biggest show in town, after all."

"And with these other clients, somebody died every time?"

"Yep."

"Were they all omission cases, like with Shane?"

"Not all. There was one little girl-Susan Magers. She was allergic to sulfa drugs and the doctor she saw forgot to ask. I mean, can you believe that? You'd think they'd have allergies flagged in the computer when they call the patient's name up, but they elected not to load that software about five years ago, save a few bucks." He shook his head in disgust. "But let me ask you, Diz. If you don't have a client, what's your interest in all this?"

Hardy sat on the corner of the desk. "I'm not sure, to tell you the truth. I heard about Shane just last night and got to wondering if his fiance´e or his family needed any help, which brought me to you. But when I hear it's all Parnassus…"

"What's all Parnassus?"

Hardy frowned, reluctant by habit to disclose information he'd been given in relative confidence. Instead, he temporized. "The name's just been coming up a lot lately. You heard about Tim Markham, didn't you?"

"What about him?"

Hardy looked a question-was Wes putting him on?-but apparently not. "He got killed yesterday. Hit and run."

"You're kidding me!" Farrell's face went slack. "I've really got to start watching some nighttime television, reading the paper, something. When did it happen?"

"Yesterday morning. They got him over to Portola, where he died."

"God, in his own hospital. I love it. They must be shitting over there." Farrell broke a smile. "Maybe I could call his wife and see if she wants to sue them. Wouldn't that be sweet?"

"Sue who?"

"Portola, Parnassus, the usual suspects."

"Except that they didn't kill him, Wes. He got hit by a car."

Farrell sat forward, still grinning, his elbows on his desk. "Listen to me, Diz. Did you know Tim Markham? Well, I did. He gets admitted to a hospital filled with the doctors he's been screwing for fifteen years, he's not getting out alive no matter what. I guarantee it."

Hardy was smiling, too. "It's a good theory, Wes, but I don't think it happened."

Farrell pointed a finger. "You wait," he said.

Hardy sometimes wondered why he had a downtown office. He'd stopped in for an hour after seeing Farrell. Then he and Freeman had eaten a long lunch in Belden Alley. At a little after three o'clock, he had finally settled into the brief he was writing when he was interrupted by a call from his friend Pico Morales, who didn't want to bother him, but it was an emergency, having to do with one of his friends. He needed a criminal lawyer. Could Hardy please come down to the Steinhart Aquarium and talk to him? The guy, Pico said, was one of his walkers. Hardy knew what that meant. When Pico went on to say that the friend was a doctor named Kensing with Parnassus, that clinched it. Hardy was going for another drive, back to the Avenues.

As the curator of the Steinhart, Pico's long-standing ambition was to acquire a great white shark for the aquarium in Golden Gate Park. Four, six, nine times a year, some boat would haul up a shark and Pico would call his list of volunteers. A lifetime ago, Hardy had been one of the first. He would let himself in to the tanks in the bowels of the aquarium where, his mind a blank, he'd don a wetsuit and walk a shark for hours, round and round in the circular tank. In theory, the walking would keep water moving through the animals' gills until they could breathe on their own. It had never worked yet.

Half-hidden by shrubbery, the back entrance was all the way around behind the aquarium, down six concrete steps. In the dim hallway someone had left on a small industrial light. Hardy pushed at the wired glass door, which opened at his touch.

After all the years that had passed since he'd last been here, he was surprised at how familiar the place felt. The same green walls still sweated with, it seemed, the same humidity. The low concrete ceiling made him want to keep his head down, although he knew he had clearance. He heard muffled voices, sounding as if they came from the inside of an oil drum. His footfalls echoed, too, and he became aware of the constant, almost inaudible hum-maybe generators or pumps for the tanks, Hardy had never really learned what caused it.

The hall curved left, then straightened, then curved again right. At last it opened into a round chamber dominated by a large above-ground pool filled with seawater, against the side of which leaned the substantial bulk of Pico Morales. Under an unruly mop of black hair, Pico's face was a weathered slab of dark granite, marginally softened by a large, drooping mustache and gentle eyes. He held an oversize, chipped coffee mug and wore the bottoms of a wetsuit, stretched to its limit by his protruding bare stomach.

In the tank itself, a man in a wetsuit was dealing with the shark, one of the largest Hardy had seen here-over six feet long. Its dorsal fin protruded from the water's surface and its tail fanned the water behind him. But Hardy had pretty well used up his fascination with sharks over the years.

The man who was walking the shark, however, was another matter.

"Ah," Pico said in greeting. "The cavalry arrives. Diz, Dr. Eric Kensing."

The man in the tank looked up and nodded. He was still working hard, and nearly grunting with the exertion, step by laborious step. Nevertheless, he was close to the edge of the tank himself, and he nodded. "You're Hardy?" he asked. "I'd shake hands, but…" Then, more seriously, "Thanks for coming."

"Hey, when Pico calls. He says you're in trouble."

"Not yet, maybe, but…" At that moment, as Hardy and Pico watched, the fish twitched and broke himself free from the man's grip, and he swore, then turned to go after it.

"Let it go," Pico snapped.

The man turned back toward the side, but paused for another look behind him. It was only an instant, but in that time the shark had crossed the tank, turned, and was heading back toward him, picking up speed. Pico never took his eyes off the shark and didn't miss the move. "Get out! Now! Look out!"

Kensing lunged for the side of the pool. Hardy and Pico had him, each by an arm, and hoisted him up, over, and out, just as the shark breached and took a snap at where he'd been.

"Offhand," Hardy said, "I'm thinking that's a healthy fish."

"Hungry, too," Kensing said. "Maybe he thought Pico was a walrus."

Hardy nodded, deadpan and thoughtful. "Honest mistake."

They were all standing at the edge of the tank, watching the shark swimming on its own.

Pico kept his eyes on the water, on the swimming fish. He'd had his hopes raised around the survival of one of his sharks before, and didn't want to have them dashed again. "You guys need to talk anyway. Why don't you get out of here?"

The Little Shamrock was less than a quarter mile from the aquarium. After the doctor had gotten into street clothes, they left Pico to his shark, still swimming on his own. Hardy drove the few hundred yards through a rapidly darkening afternoon. Now they had gotten something to drink-Hardy a black and tan and Kensing a plain coffee-and sat kitty-corner in front of the fire on some battered, sunken couches more suited to making out than strategizing legal defense.

"So," Hardy began, "how'd you get with Pico?"

A shrug, a sip of coffee. "His son is one of my patients. We got to talking about what he did and eventually he told me about his sharks. I thought it sounded like a cool thing to do. He invited me down one night and now, when I really can't spare the time, I still come when summoned. How about you? I heard you used to volunteer, too. I didn't think Pico allowed people to quit."

"I got a special dispensation." The answer seemed inadequate, so he added, "I got so I couldn't stand it when they all died."

A bitter chuckle. "Don't go into medicine."

"No," Hardy agreed. "I figured that one out a long time ago." He killed a moment sipping his pint. "But rumor has it you need a lawyer now." For the first time Hardy noticed a pallor under the ruddy complexion, the fatigue in the eyes.

"You know who Tim Markham is?"

Hardy nodded. "He got hit by a car yesterday, then died in the hospital."

"That's right. I was staff physician at the ICU when he died. And he was fucking my wife."

"So you're worried that the police might think you got an unexpected opportunity and killed him?"

"I don't think that's impossible."

"But you didn't?"

Kensing held Hardy's gaze. "No."

"Were you tempted?" Trying to lighten things up.

He almost broke a smile. "I used to fantasize about it all the time, except in my version, it was always much more painful. First I'd break his kneecaps, maybe slash an Achilles tendon, cut his balls off. Anything that would make him suffer more than he did." He shook his head in disappointment. "There really is no justice, you know that?"

Hardy thought he maybe knew it better than Dr. Kensing. "But justice or no," he said, "you're worried." It wasn't a question.

He nodded somberly. "If the police start asking about Tim. I can just hear me: 'Yeah, I hated him. You'd hate him, too. I'm glad he's dead.' I don't think so."

Hardy didn't think so, either, but all of this was really moot. "Let me put your mind to rest a little. It's my understanding that Markham died from his injuries, and if that's the case, you're not involved in any crime."

"What if somebody says I didn't do enough to save him? Is there such a thing as malicious malpractice or something like that? As a homicide issue?"

Hardy shook his head. "I've never heard of it. Why?"

"Because some homicide inspector named Bracco came by yesterday. And they're doing the autopsy today."

"I wouldn't worry about that. They autopsy everybody."

"No they don't. Especially if you die in the ICU after surgery. We did a PM at the hospital and I signed off on the death certificate-massive internal trauma from blunt force injury-but they hauled him off downtown anyway."

"He died of a hit and run," Hardy explained. "That's a homicide, so they do an autopsy. Every time."

But the doctor had another question. "Okay, but last night I met Bracco, checking out my car at Markham's place."

"Bracco?" Hardy shook his head, perplexed. "You sure he's San Francisco homicide, not hit and run? I don't know him."

"That's what he said. He had a badge."

"And he was checking out your car? Why were you at Markham's house anyway?"

"I knew Carla, his wife. I thought it would be appropriate to go by and give my condolences, to see if there was anything I could do." He let out a sigh. "You can't help it. You feel somehow responsible."

"So what was this cop doing with your car?"

Staring around the bar as though wondering how he got there, Kensing considered a moment, then came back to Hardy. "I think he was checking to see if it looked like my car had been in an accident, if I'd hit Markham. There were some other people there, too, before I left, visiting with Carla, other cars. I got the impression he had checked every one of them."

This seemed unlikely on its face. But then Hardy flashed back to the talk he'd had with Glitsky during their latest walk. The car police. This Bracco must have been one of the new clowns that was taking so much abuse in the homicide detail. "Well, in any event, from what I'm hearing, it doesn't sound like you've got any real problem here. You didn't kill him."

"But he died under my supervision, and it wasn't any secret I hated him."

"So, one more time, did you kill him?"

"No."

"He died of his injuries, right? Did you make them worse? No? So, look, you're fine." Clearly, the message still wasn't getting all the way through, so Hardy continued.

"Let me ask you this. What were the odds Markham was going to die even if you did everything right?"

"Which I did."

"Granted, but not the question."

The doctor gave it some real thought. "Statistically, once you're in the ICU, only maybe two in ten get out alive."

Truly surprised by the figure, Hardy sat back on the couch. "That's all? Two in ten?"

Kensing shrugged. "Maybe three. I don't know the exact number, but it's not as high as most people think."

"So the odds are, at best, you'd say thirty percent that Markham would have survived, even if you did everything that could have been done."

"Which I did. But yes, roughly thirty percent."

"So that leaves it as a seventy percent chance that the hit and run would have killed him, no matter what any doctor did or didn't do, am I right?" Hardy came forward on the couch. "Here's the good news. Even if you made a mistake-not saying you did, remember-whoever ran him down can't use malpractice as a defense in his trial. Someone charged with homicide is specifically excluded from using the defense that the doctor could have saved the victim."

Kensing's eyes briefly showed some life. "You'd think I would have heard that before. Why is that?"

"Because if it wasn't, every lawyer in the world would begin his defense by saying that it wasn't his client shooting his wife four times in the heart that killed her. It was the doctors who couldn't save her. It was their fault, not his client's."

Kensing accepted this information with, it seemed, a mixture of relief and disbelief. "But there wasn't any malpractice here." He spoke matter-of-factly. "Really," he added.

"I believe you. I'm just saying I can't see where you've got any kind of criminal charge looking at you. What put Markham there in the first place was someone running him down in a car. That's who this guy Bracco's looking for, the driver of the car." But an earlier phrase that had nagged suddenly surfaced. "Did you say you knew Mrs. Markham?"

Kensing's shoulders slumped visibly as the world seemed to settle on him. He looked down at the scarred hardwood floor, then back up. "You don't know? That's the other thing."

Hardy waited.

"Apparently something happened last night." He paused. "She's dead. And the rest of her family, too."

"Lord." Hardy suddenly felt pinned to the sofa.

Kensing continued. "It went around the offices sometime late this morning. I was seeing patients and didn't hear until about noon. Then, a little after that, Bracco called to make sure I'd be around. He wanted to come by and talk about it."

"So you talked to him today, too?"

Kensing shook his head. "It might have been a mistake, but I had my receptionist tell him I wasn't in. Pico called about the same time with his shark. I don't see patients Wednesday afternoon anyway, and I didn't want to talk to the police until I could sort some of this out. So I came over here, to the aquarium, and essentially hid out, walking Francis-"

"Francis?"

"The shark. Pico named it Francis. So I just hung out until I'd come up with a plan, which was get a lawyer. And Pico knew you." He made a face, apologetic and confused. "So here we are. And now what?"

Hardy nodded and sat back. Remembering his pint, he reached for it and took a drink. "Well, you're going to talk to the police, whether you want to or not."

"So what do I tell them about my wife if they ask?"

Hardy had already answered that, but this was the beginning of hand-holding time. "I'd just tell the truth and try not to panic. But if they look at all, they'll know about Markham and your wife, right? So be straightforward and deal with it. It doesn't mean you killed anybody."

Kensing let the reality sink in. "Okay. It's not going to matter if they're looking for the driver of the hit-and-run car anyway, right?"

"That's how I see it." Hardy looked across into Kensing's face. His eyes were hollow with fatigue. "Are you all right?"

He managed a weak chuckle. "I'm just tired, but then again, I'm always tired," he said. "I've been tired for fifteen years. If I wasn't exhausted beyond human endurance, I wouldn't recognize myself."

Hardy leaned back into the couch and realized he wasn't exactly in the mood for dancing, himself. "But still, you're out on your afternoon off walking sharks for Pico?"

"Yeah, I know," Kensing said. "It doesn't make any sense to me, either. I just do it."

"That was me, too." Hardy had walked his own sharks at the low point of his life, at the end of a decade of sleepwalk following the death of his son Michael, his divorce from Jane. It made no more sense to him then than it did to Kensing now. But for some reason walking his sharks had seemed to mean something. And in a world otherwise full of nothing, that was something to cling to.

Both men stood up. Hardy gave Kensing his card and along with it a last bit of advice. "You know, they might just show up at work or your house. They might knock on your door with a warrant or a subpoena. If any of that happens, say nothing. Don't let them intimidate you. You get the phone call."

Kensing's mouth dropped a fraction of an inch. He blew out heavily, shaking his head. "This is starting to sound like serious hardball."

"No. Hardball's a game." Hardy might be all for client reassurance, but he didn't want Kensing to remain under the illusion that any part of a homicide investigation was going to be casual. "But from what I've heard, we're okay. You weren't driving the car, and that's what killed him. His wife has nothing to do with you, right? Right. So the main thing is tell the truth, except leave out the part about the kneecaps."

10

John Strout worked through his lunchtime conducting the autopsy on Tim Markham. The damage done to the body from its encounter with the hit-and-run vehicle and then the garbage can was substantial. The skull was fractured in two places and multiple lacerations scored what the medical examiner thought might have been an unusually handsome face in life-a broad brow, a strong jawline with a cleft chin.

Markham had been struck on the back left hip bone, which broke on the impact, along with its attached femur. Apparently, the body snapped back for an instant against the car's hood or windshield, and this might have accounted for one of the skull fractures. The other probably occurred, Strout surmised, when the body ended its short flight. The right shoulder had come out of its socket and three ribs on the right side were broken.

Among the internal organs, besides the digestive tract, only the heart, the left lobe of the lung, and the left kidney escaped injury. The right lung had collapsed, and the spleen, liver, and right kidney had all been damaged to greater or lesser degrees. Strout, with forty years of medical experience, was of the opinion that it was some kind of miracle that Markham had survived to make it to the emergency room. He thought that blood loss or any number of the internal injuries, or the shock of so many of them at once, should have been enough by themselves to cause death.

But Strout was a methodical and careful man. Even if Tim Markham hadn't been an important person, the medical examiner wasn't putting his signature on any formal document until he was satisfied that he'd as precisely as humanly possible identified the principal cause of death. To that end, he had ordered the standard battery of tests on blood and tissue samples. While he waited for those results, he began a more rigorous secondary examination of the injuries to the internal organs.

A particularly impressive hematoma on the back of the liver was commanding his complete attention, but he was subliminally aware of his assistant Joyce making her way back through the length of the morgue. When she stopped next to him and hovered, he continued with his examination for a moment, then drawled, "This here could'a done it by its lone self." Then, looking up and seeing her expression of worried concern, he pulled away from his work. "Is something wrong, darlin'?"

Joyce was new to the staff, but not as new as the equipment they'd recently bought to upgrade the lab. For the past few days, Strout had been supervising Joyce as she conducted tests to calibrate these machines, which ran sophisticated scans on blood and tissues. Since he had Tim Markham's body on the slab this afternoon, he'd given Joyce samples from his body.

Now she appeared extremely nervous, and for a moment Strout thought she must have broken one of the expensive new toys. "Whatever it is, it can't be that bad," he told her. "What's the problem?"

She held up a slip of paper, the results from the lab tests she'd been running. "I don't think I could have done this test right. I mean, the machine…" She let the thought hang.

Strout took the paper and squinted at the numbers, saw what she was showing him, and pulled off his sanitary gloves. "That the right number?"

"That's what I wanted to ask you. Could that be right? I ran it twice and I think I must have done something wrong."

His eyes went to her face, then back to the paper, which he now took in his hand and studied with great care. "This is from Mr. Markham's blood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Dang," he whispered, mostly to himself.

From the morgue, Strout walked down the outside corridor that connected his office with the back door of the Hall of Justice. A biting afternoon breeze had come up, but he barely noted it. After passing through the guards and the metal detector, he decided to bypass the elevators. Instead, he turned directly right to the stairs, which he took two at a time. Glitsky wasn't in his office. As was the norm in the middle of the day, there were only a couple of inspectors pulling duty in the detail, and neither had seen the lieutenant all day. Strout hesitated a second, asked the inspectors to have Abe call him when he got in, then turned on his heel and hit the stairway again.

One floor down, he got admitted to the DA's sanctum-hell, he'd come all this way, he wanted to talk to somebody-and in another minute was standing in front of Treya Ghent's desk, asking if Clarence Jackman was available in his room next door. Somethin' pretty interestin' had come up. But even before she answered, her look told him he guessed it wasn't going to be his lucky day. "He's been at meetings all morning, John, and then scheduled at other ones all afternoon. That's what DAs really do, you know. They don't do law. They go to meetings." Strout considered Ms. Ghent-or was it Mrs. Glitsky?-a very handsome, dark-skinned mulatto woman with a few drops of Asian or Indian blood mixed in somewhere, and now she smiled at him helpfully. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

He thought a minute. "Do you know where Abe's got to?"

She shook her head no. "He left the house this morning with one of his inspectors. I haven't heard from him since. Why?" Although she knew the answer to that. Strout wanted to see her husband because he was head of homicide. There was no doubt that the "somethin' pretty interestin'" he'd referred to wasn't a hot stock tip.

The lanky gentleman sighed, then sidestepped and, after asking her permission, let himself down onto the waiting chair by the side of the door. "Got to catch my breath a little. I came up by the stairs, which at my age ain't always recommended."

"It must have been important," Treya said, she hoped with some subtlety.

Not that Strout needed the prompt. He was fairly itching to get it out. "You recall the discussion we all had the other day over to Lou's about the Parnassus Group?" Of course she did. Mr. Jackman was still mulling over his options. "Well, you just watch. It's goin' to get a lot more interestin' in a New York minute."

In a few sentences, Strout had brought her to the crux of it. When he'd finished, she said, "Potassium? What does that mean?"

"It means the hit-and-run car didn't kill him, 'tho he might'a died from those injuries eventually if they'd just left him alone. But they didn't."

"It couldn't have been an accident? Somebody grabbing the wrong needle?"

He shrugged. "Anything's possible, I s'pose. But on purpose or not, he got loaded up full of potassium, and the thing is, that can look pretty natural even if someone does an autopsy. So I'm thinkin' you might know where your husband might be. He's goin' to want to know."

When Jackman got the news about the potassium, he asked Treya to patch Abe in his car and have him come to his office as soon as he arrived back downtown. Then he'd called Marlene Ash and John Strout, both of whom had replied to the summons and were here now, too.

It was 6:45, and the freshening afternoon breeze had transformed itself into a freezing gale, the howl of which was easily audible even in the almost hermetically sealed DA's office.

As Jackman stood at his office window looking down at the still-congested traffic below him on Bryant Street, the first large drops of rain, flung with great force, seemed to explode onto the glass in front of him. Unconsciously, he backed a step away.

He was aware of the hum of urgent shoptalk behind him. The discovery about the potassium had been extraordinary enough, but when Glitsky had finally responded to Treya's call and told her where he'd been all day and what had happened to the Markham family, a sense of impending crisis seemed to wash through the Hall of Justice like a tsunami. At almost the same moment that Abe told Treya about the Markham family, word of the tragedy hit the streets and the calls started coming in to Jackman's office from all quarters-newspapers, television, radio, the mayor's office, the Board of Supervisors, the chief of police.

Just as Jackman turned away from the window, Glitsky appeared in his doorway. "Abe, good. Come on in."

The lieutenant touched Treya's arm, nodded around the room. Jackman sat on the front of his desk, facing them, and wasted no time on preliminaries. "So we got a whole prominent family dead in a twelve-hour period. The man's company has the city's contract for health care, and it's damn near broke. I'm predicting media madness short term, and long term? God knows what chaos if Parnassus can't recover. Anybody disagree with me?" He knew nobody would, and he clearly expected the same unanimity with his next question. "Does anybody here have any ideas about how we're going to characterize these developments? I'm going to need some good answers when people start asking."

The scar through Glitsky's frown was pronounced. He cleared his throat. "We say we're looking into it. No further comment."

"I thought that would be your position."

"It's the only position, Clarence." Glitsky, still slightly shell-shocked from his day at Markham's home, didn't know where the DA was going with this meeting, why it was being held at all. "It's also the truth," he added.

"As far as it goes, yes it is. But I'm thinking we might want to help people decide how they want to think about this. All of it. I think we want to say right up front that Tim Markham was murdered."

Glitsky glanced at the faces around the room. At this point, the conversation seemed to be about him and Jackman. "Do we know he was murdered?"

"We know what happened, Abe," Marlene interjected. "It's obvious."

"I hate obvious," Glitsky replied evenly. "Couldn't it have been an accidental overdose? Was he on potassium anyway for some reason?" He faced Strout. "Couldn't somebody have just made a mistake in the hospital?"

The coroner nodded. "Could've happened."

But Jackman didn't like that answer and he snorted. "Then why'd the wife kill herself?"

"Who said she killed herself?" Glitsky asked.

"That's the preliminary report I heard," Jackman said.

"You know why they call it 'preliminary,' Clarence? Because it's not final. It might not be true. We really don't know anything yet about the wife and kids, that whole situation-"

"Sergeant Langtry told me it was clearly a murder/suicide, Abe. Just like many he'd seen before. And you, too, isn't that right?"

"There might be some similarities, but there are also differences. It's just plain smarter if we don't say anything until we know."

But Jackman was pacing in front of his desk, commanding the room with his presence. "I may know what's plain smarter, too, Abe. I may even agree with you. But humor me. Other inquiring minds are going to want to know-the press, the mayor's office, you can guess-and they're going to ask me. I'm concerned that if we don't say anything, it looks like we don't know anything-"

"We don't know anything! It's okay if it looks like that."

Jackman ignored the interruption, repeating his earlier statement. "We know Markham was murdered. We believe his wife was a suicide."

"I don't know if I believe that at all, Clarence. John here hasn't even done an autopsy on her yet." Glitsky reined himself in a notch. Jackman was playing devil's advocate, he knew, but he would hate it if the DA committed his office to a public stance when it wasn't necessary. It would be more politics messing with his job. "All I'm saying is that it's possible somebody could have gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like a suicide. I know Langtry thinks it might be, but we haven't eliminated any possibilities yet, and I'd be more comfortable-you'd be more comfortable, Clarence-if we could eliminate a few before we start talking to the press."

Jackman frowned. "You're saying maybe somebody killed her and her family and tried to make it look like a suicide? They find anything at her place that supports that?"

"Not yet, no, sir. But there's still a lot of lab work to be done." Glitsky pressed on. "I'll go with suicide the minute we can prove it, Clarence. I promise you. But for now we've got a theory that looks squirrelly to me, which is Markham gets to the hospital all banged up, nearly dead in fact, and somebody decides, spur of the moment, to take the opportunity and kill him?"

Jackman wasn't backing down. "I honestly believe it will look just precisely like that to some reporter somewhere."

"Okay, so tell him you've got a problem with that. Like why take the risk if he was probably going to die anyway?"

Jackman went back to Strout. "He wasn't necessarily going to die, was he, John?"

Conjecture wasn't Strout's long suit, but the DA had asked him a direct question and he felt he had to say something. "Maybe not. Especially once he's out of the ER." He stopped, lifted his shoulders, let them drop. "He could have survived."

"So," Jackman took Strout's answer as a ringing endorsement, "somebody, maybe even his wife-"

"Maybe even the wife!" This was new and, to Glitsky's mind, completely bizarre. "You're saying Carla killed her husband at the hospital?"

Jackman backed off. "All right, maybe not. But somebody at the hospital came to the conclusion that Markham was going to pull through and, for some reason, couldn't have that."

"All I'm saying then, Clarence, is let's find the reason."

The exchange was threatening to grow heated and Treya stepped in. "Maybe there needn't be a rush on the wife, Clarence? You only need to make the point that somebody killed Mr. Markham. And I think we'll all agree," Treya added quickly, turning to her husband, "that the potassium points much more clearly to a murder than an accident at the hospital. Wouldn't that be true, Abe? Could you agree to that?"

Glitsky understood what she was asking him. More, what she was doing. And while now with the potassium overdose Glitsky believed it likely that Markham had indeed been murdered, belief wasn't certainty and never would be. "Okay," he said to his wife. "Let's for the moment agree Markham was murdered in the hospital. So you tell whoever asks that we're investigating. That's what we do. What's the rush to go public?"

From Treya's expression, Glitsky realized that finally he'd asked the right question. Jackman raised himself off his desk. "Just this, Abe. If Markham was murdered, it goes to the grand jury. I can legitimately use an investigation into his death as a way to get into the books and business practices at Parnassus. We've got every reason to look in his files, take the place apart, see if we can find out why. And who's gonna complain? Somebody killed their top guy. Why wouldn't they want to cooperate in every way?"

Jackman let his words hang in the air, then continued. "If we begin any kind of inquiry on the billings and their lawyers get into it, we're talking months, maybe years, delay on subpoenas, delay delivering records that they may have shredded by then anyway, or forged new ones. Plus all the public bickering, loss of faith in the city's institutions, blah blah blah. This way, we're in. It's a murder, Abe, and even in this town a solid majority of the voters oppose murder. Nobody will see it as more complicated than that, at least for now. The grand jury's looking into the murder of Tim Markham. There is every justification in the world to probe his relationships and even business practices. And since he was killed in Portola Hospital, there's a demonstrable link there."

But Glitsky was shifting in his seat again. It was a bad idea to get the DA's office involved in his investigations, particularly if Markham's murder was just the cover for a financial probe of Parnassus. "What if we find Markham's killer before you get finished?" he asked.

Marlene answered. "We'll leave the grand jury impaneled. We just keep going on the financial stuff."

Abe frowned at this, but he knew that technically, Marlene could do just that. The grand jury was not crime specific-Jackman and Ash could simply use it to go fishing.

"But I'll still have your support for the murder investigation as the priority?" he asked. "I don't want to get a suspect close to the net and not be able to bring him in."

"That won't happen, Abe," Marlene said.

"Couldn't happen," Jackman repeated. "We're on the same team."

Glitsky smiled all around, fooling no one. "Well, with that assurance," he said as he stood up, "I'd better get to work."