“You want the truth?”

“Always.”

Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and kept the ball in his mitt, signifying the end of the catch. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Hunt met his girlfriend, Gina Roake, for a late dinner at Sam’s Grill. Sam’s was a hopping power room during the lunch hour, but settled into a more intimate groove as the evening wore on. Now, closing in on nine o’clock, Roake and Hunt sat in one of the booths back by the kitchen. Their waiter had pulled the curtain on them after he’d left their dinners, and there might as well have been no one else in the restaurant.

Roake was older than Hunt, closing in on fifty, but as an inveterate exerciser and outdoors person, she was in excellent shape. After twenty-five years in the practice of law, she’d just recently had her first legal thriller, Brief Deception, accepted for publication, and she was thinking about her next one.

Most of the dinner, they’d talked about what that one might be about, and of course the marketing for the first one. Would they want her to go on tour? What about her law practice when she was out of town? Should she spend her own money on advertising? Did she want to use the same character in the second book, or break in an entirely new one? Maybe she should go to nonfiction, write up one of the real cases she’d seen or worked on? God knows, there had been some good ones. Did she have a big enough theme? Did it have to be a murder case?

Hunt nodded. “Got to be murder.”

“They’re always murders, though. All these books.”

“Right. You know why? Any violent crime that’s not a murder has a living victim. And the victim can tell you what happened. You could write a book, but it would probably be pretty short, and it wouldn’t be much of a mystery.”

She smiled.

“Besides, people don’t care so much about bicycle theft, or other lesser crimes. Except maybe rape, now that I think of it. You could probably do a rape case, but you’d have to kill people in it eventually anyway. And if you’re going to be knocking people off, might as well make it a murder case to begin with.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She put her fork down, reached across the small table, and took his hand. “Have I been monopolizing the conversation?”

“Very charmingly.”

“But that means yes. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s all been interesting.”

“And yet, in spite of that”-she broke a smile-“you seem slightly distracted.”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

“Maybe a little,” she repeated. Then, “What?”

“Actually, it’s been a hell of a day.”

“Good? Bad? I was thinking bad, and didn’t want to ask. You’d get to it.”

“Well, in fact, in a remarkable and unexpected change of pace, it’s been nothing but good. Pretty amazingly good, in fact.” He ran down the events for her, from Tamara’s appearance in the office this morning, to Mickey’s idea and the miraculously ever-growing reward, the reprieve on his business, short-term at least. Ending it with Ellen Como and the tragicomic relief of Virginia, now and forever to be known as the Blimp Lady. The victim’s fall from the sky into the lagoon, “which,” he concluded, “we’ve pretty much discounted as improbable.”

“Good decision.” Gina shook her head in gentle amusement. “This town.” But after another minute, her expression grew serious. “So in effect you’re investigating this murder?”

“Not exactly. Passing what we find, if anything, along to Juhle, is all.”

“He’s talking to you again? I’m glad to hear that.”

“Me too.”

“I felt a little guilty, I still feel a little guilty, about driving you guys apart. Does he know you’re still seeing me?”

“I assume so. He’s a cop. He knows everything. But that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t you and him. It was me and him. Although he’s not too thrilled that people seem to be coming to me now and not him.”

“Is he offering them money too?”

“That’s what I told him. It wasn’t much consolation.”

Gina sipped wine, put her glass down, something obviously still on her mind.

“I can hear the gears turning from over here,” Hunt said.

A fragile smile. “I just worry about you getting in the face of these murder suspects. That’s not exactly the same thing as surveillance, or rounding up witnesses, or subpoena service.”

Hunt downplayed it. “I’m not really getting in anybody’s face, Gina. Just passing along information.”

“Didn’t you just tell me you went and saw Ellen Como?”

“Well…”

“And isn’t she a suspect? Isn’t she, in fact, like, the prime suspect even as we speak?”

Hunt couldn’t reply.

“All I’m saying,” Roake went on, “is that the thing about people who have actually murdered someone, there’s always some small chance they’ll feel the need to do it again.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Most victims don’t, babe, that’s kind of the point. Until that last little ‘uh-oh, I should have seen this coming’ moment. After which, ‘Oh, well, too late now.’ ” She picked up a piece of sourdough, looked at it, put it back down. “I don’t mean to sound paranoid, Wyatt, and maybe I wouldn’t if all this wasn’t around Dominic Como, but since it is…”

“Since it is, what?”

Stalling, Gina moved a few more items around-twirled her wineglass, adjusted the placement of her knife. Finally, she raised her eyes. “I really don’t want to slander the dead, especially a dead well-respected and apparently well-loved community leader, but let’s just say you don’t get to be a power broker in this town on Como’s level if you don’t have a whole lot more going on than meets the eye.”

“Like what, specifically?”

“I can’t give you specifics. I don’t know any. Which is how he wanted it. All I can tell you is that things just happened because Dominic Como laid his hands upon them. Or didn’t happen if he didn’t. Do you know Len Turner?”

This got all of Hunt’s attention. “I do. He’s handling the reward. What about him?”

“He’s handling the reward? That’s perfect. What about him is that, cutting to the chase, he’s ruthless and unethical, as well as all but invisible to the general public. He’s also counsel, or was, to Como and several other of our most successful service- oriented nonprofits. Some have been known to call him consigliere. Want to hear a story?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Twenty years ago, Len Turner’s a young attorney with Dewey, Cheatham and Howe-not their real name…”

“I got it,” Hunt said.

“I thought you would. Anyway, Turner’s got a client who owns this tiny little four-acre parcel of land down by China Basin that would be worth about a zillion dollars except for the slight problem that back in World War Two and through the fifties it was a U.S. Navy munitions and fuel storage facility, which means that now it’s essentially a toxic waste dump down to about a hundred feet. But now there’s starting to be talk that the Giants are going to move to China Basin, which, as you’ve noticed, they have, and the whole area’s going to be a redevelopment gold mine. You with me so far?”

Hunt nodded. “Sí.”

“Okay, so Turner gets hired to change the zoning and get it approved by the Board of Supervisors. This turns out to be not as difficult as you might think, because Turner’s clients had a lot of money to begin with. So he simply found experts and hired them to write fraudulent environmental impact reports. He then paid off one of the supervisors, Frank Addario, to support it and shepherd it through the board. But, and this is my favorite part, the best move he made was anticipating resistance from the Conservancy Club, which coincidentally had about forty-nine other questionable sites all over the state they were fighting to save. He bribed them-their president, actually-to the tune of a million dollars, to forget this one spot in what was already a severely polluted city environment. So what would it hurt?”