The receptionist came to the door. “The boy’s awake,” she said.

At least he wants to be home, Big Ed was thinking. That’s something. Being back home. He’d said it. Daddy, take me home. Daddy. Nobody’d called him that in ten years. It was always either Dad, Pop or Ed. Well, if Steven wanted Daddy now, Daddy was taking him home. There he and Erin might be able to figure out if and where they’d screwed up so he wouldn’t want to run away again.

He looked around to the back seat where Steven lay, sleeping again, strapped down by the seat belts.

“He okay?” Hardy asked.

Ed nodded.

Muñoz and Hardy had thought it’d be better if Ed didn’t have to drive back alone with his son, so they arranged that the sheriff’s one deputy would drive Hardy’s car back to the city later.

Ed again glanced into the back seat. He couldn’t look enough at his son, couldn’t really believe yet-after the fears of last night sitting up with Erin, his daughter Jodie and Frannie-that Steven, along with Eddie, wasn’t dead and gone forever. Whatever had happened, whatever he’d been through, at least he was still with them, breathing. He must’ve sighed with relief, because Hardy looked over at him.

This guy Hardy was driving well-slow and careful. No bumps on the kid. And it was a good thing he was driving-Ed was pretty sure he couldn’t have kept his mind on the road.

They were up to San Mateo. The sun was behind the mountains already. Where had the hours gone to? In another half hour they’d be home.

Maybe sometime today Erin had gotten some sleep. He hoped so. She hadn’t slept now in almost a week.

Erin. His thoughts, as always, were never far from his wife. He didn’t know how they were ever going to get over this time, though something told him they would. Well, almost. They’d never be the same, of course. The wound-losing Eddie-was too deep to ever heal completely, but there would be something- some new challenge that would get things into a new perspective. At least, he hoped so.

Why had his boy run away?

“You have any proof somebody killed Eddie?” he asked suddenly.

“Nope.” But then Hardy told him what Cavanaugh had said about Sam Polk-the drug thing.

“That’s something,” Ed said. “I knew something was going on with Polk. Eddie and I kind of argued about it.”

“That’s what Cavanaugh said-that Eddie wanted another opinion.”

“When did you talk to Jim?”

“Yesterday. Last night. He thought he might have something of a lead. I was going to check around a little today, but then this morning…” He ticked his head toward the back seat.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but thanks.”

Hardy kept his eyes on the road. “I knew Ed and Frannie pretty well. Her brother’s my best friend.”

Turning west up the 380 now as dusk deepened, passing the huge cemetery with its thousands of white squares, gridding the grassy fields, marking the graves of military dead.

Ed reached behind the seat and rested a hand on his son’s leg, feeling the warmth of it through the blanket. Steven stirred and moaned softly, but didn’t open his eyes.

“Almost there,” Hardy said.

He’d made a dumb turn coming up this way, even though it was the most direct route. The cemetery was closing Ed up, and Hardy swore at himself-he should have remembered it. Maybe he could distract him a little, get his mind off it. “Your friend Father Cavanaugh is some kind of character.”

“Jim? Yeah. He’s a great guy.”

“Only thing I can’t figure is why he’s not a cardinal or something-at least a bishop.”

Ed smiled. “I know. He’s got that flair, don’t he?” He paused. “But if he were a bishop, he’d have to leave Erin, and I don’t think he’d like to do that.”

That remark surprised Hardy. He must have shown it. “It’s no secret he’s in love with my wife,” Ed said, but then held up a hand. “No, no, not like that. He’s one of us. Erin’s his best friend. He’s hers. Except maybe for me.” He smiled again. “Except sometimes I’m not sure of that either.”

“I think that’d make me nervous,” Hardy said.

“Well, after thirty years, I figure Erin’s my gal. We’ve talked about it, but she says the physical thing just never was there with Jim.” He shook his head. “How do you figure that? She prefers a galumpf like me, she says. I figure it’s her one flaw, but believe me, I’ll take it.”

Hardy glanced over at him. He said it in such a self-effacing way, you almost missed the serene confidence. This man knew, without a trace of doubt, that he knocked his wife out.

“It’s good to know they don’t always go for the movie stars, not being one myself,” Hardy said, relieved they had finally gotten by the cemeteries, into Daly City and all the little boxes on the hillsides.

“I don’t think they’d let Jim be a bishop anyway.”

“Why not?”

Ed shrugged. “He’s not political enough. Done a few unusual things. For a priest.”

Such as coming to me for his confession, Hardy thought, but asked, “Like what?”

“Oh, nothing serious. Just stuff.”

Okay, they weren’t going to talk about it. But then… “It took him about twice as long as anyone to get out of the seminary. They kicked him out twice.”

“Kicked him out?”

Ed shrugged. “Well, it was the fifties, early sixties. The Church thought it had a lock on these guys. Any little thing, they’d say you didn’t have a true vocation and boot you. Not like now, where if you’ve got a history as a gunrunner to Nicaragua you still got a pretty good chance, they need priests so bad.”

“So what did he do?”

“Jim?” Ed laughed, remembering. “I should know. I went with him. He got about two weekends off a year, and so this one time we got plastered and took in some strip shows-Erin was at school so the two of us were ripe for some hijinks. But the problem was, the next day he showed up back at the seminary hung over and confessed everything. Bad scene. They put him out for a semester to rethink his vocation.”

“What was the other time?”

“That was different. I don’t know I ever got the story right. Erin and I were on our honeymoon. It was maybe a month before his ordination. We’d already received the invitation. Anyway, Jim had decided he wasn’t worthy, or something like that. He wanted to be a priest, but didn’t feel he was holy enough. Can you imagine that? If Jim wasn’t holy enough, there was no hope for anybody else. I mean, where it counted.”

Hardy looked across the front seat. By now it was nearly dark. The streetlights in the lower Avenues had come on.

“See, they tried to tell him everybody had those doubts. Priests weren’t supposed to be saints-they were humans like the rest of us. They weren’t about to let him drop out. He was the president of his class, was going to be the speaker at the ordination. They’d invested too much in him.”

“So? What happened?”

“So he stole the dean’s car, crashed out through the front gate and disappeared for three days.”

“Cavanaugh did that?”

“And then showed up looking like a bum, and without the car. He never talks about those three days, except to say it was his time in the desert. Whatever that meant. Anyway, he pissed everybody off pretty good. Now those same guys, his classmates, are becoming the bishops, and they all like Jim, probably, but think he’s a flake. Or at least a little bit of a flake. For sure too unstable to move up in the hierarchy.”

“But he did finally get ordained?”

“Yeah, two years later, he’d done his penance. But he wasn’t valedictorian.”

They turned onto Taraval. In the back seat, Steven moaned gently.

“Almost home, son,” Ed said. “Almost home.”

Frannie looked much better, Erin much worse. Hardy sat drinking his second scotch, waiting for the opportune moment to make an exit. Everybody here was tired-hell, exhausted. Jodie was already asleep, her gangly frame draped over the love seat. Erin and Ed, sitting together like statues, holding hands, kept looking at each other as if wondering what was going to happen next. But there was a toughness Hardy noticed in Ed.