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?"