Coffey leaned forward.

Punctuality‘? Where was that coming from?

Perhaps Hafner had seen Mallory’s computer room after all, and more. Hafner could have accessed Mallory’s psych evaluation, which had been mandatory following the discharge of a weapon in the line of duty. This was not about the suspect. This pumped-up twit thought he was going to play with Mallory, to bait her like a lab animal.

Coffey looked to Mallory’s face, and he could see that everywhere he had gone with this idea, she had been there before him. Coffey sat well back in his chair and well out of the loop. Let the twit fend for himself. Whatever she did to Hafner, he had it coming. He communicated all this to her with the slight inclination of his head.

Sick him, Mallory.

‘Perhaps a visual aid would be useful,’ she said, her voice assuming the soft, deceptive notes of a civilized member of society.

Coffey watched her gun slide easily from the shoulder holster, and then he ceased to see it in the lacuna which was part of the cop’s blue wall of silence. He was blind to the gun – no, the damn cannon – not a police-issue revolver, but something that made substantially bigger holes.

‘Listen, fool,’ said Mallory, bringing her chair closer to Hafner’s, closing for the kill, and not a neat kill either. The gun that Coffey could no longer see was in her hand. ‘This was a spontaneous act,’ she said in even syllables. ‘The weapon was a rock. You had that information.’

She raised the gun, touched the metal with one long red fingernail, and the revolving chamber swung out of the armature. Her voice rolled on in velvet octaves which contrasted sharply with the deadly thing in her hands.

Hafner was a study in rigidity. A black fly whined past his head. He seemed not to notice. The glasses slid down his nose. He did not correct them.

‘He didn’t bring a weapon to the crime site,’ said Mallory. ‘He didn’t plan to kill Bosch that morning. When he did kill her, he panicked and ran. It took him more than thirty minutes to get his nerve back. You would have known that if you’d read the ME note on the body being moved.’

She emptied the bullets into her lap, and then inserted one bullet back into the gun and swung the chamber into place with a click.

The fly landed on Hafner’s cheek. He never moved to swat it, he never moved at all.

She smiled.

Coffey was fascinated by Hafner’s new role as Mallory’s mouse.

The fly whined off and landed on the wall beside Hafner’s head.

‘I figure he was more your type, Hafner – comfortable in a controlled situation. Prone to panic when things got out of his control. Like when he used that rock.’

She pointed the gun at the fly crawling about on the wall; the barrel was aiming over the bridge of Hafner’s nose.

She fired.

Hafner jerked backward. The click of the empty chamber had the effect of an exploded bomb. A wet stain was spreading out from his crotch. It took seconds for the man to adjust to the fact that he had not been hit and need not fall down, that he had merely wet his pants.

The fly was gone.

Coffey stared at the bare wall with wonder. Had the fly winged away, or was it lying at the baseboard, dead of a heart attack?

She dangled the gun for a moment and slowly brought it back to rest in her lap, the barrel carelessly pointing toward the sweating man in the chair close to hers.

Coffey could hear the man breathing. The glasses, greased with sweat, slid further down Hafner’s nose, off his face and landed on the floor at his feet.

‘He didn’t stalk her – he knew her well,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s why he came back to destroy her fingers, her prints. He figured it would buy him the time he needed to clean the apartment, to get rid of his own prints. A learning disabled twelve-year-old could have worked that one out.’

She leaned forward now, holding the gun casually, her arms propped on her knees. Her gun seemed only incidentally pointing toward the doctor’s crotch.

‘You’re an inept jerk, aren’t you, Hafner?’ She was nodding her head slowly, and he mimicked the motion, nodding his own head in agreement. His eyes twitched back and forth between her face and her gun.

‘And you’re not going to submit a bill for this crap, are you?’ She shook her head slowly from side to side, and in this way, she worked Hafner’s head in the same motion.

‘Good. You can go now.’

Hafner never moved or blinked.

‘Thank you for coming by, Dr Hafner,’ said Coffey in the manner of a wake-up call, rising, dismissing the mayor’s close personal friend. He was averting his eyes from the dark stain on Hafner’s trousers. He was not seeing the gun, which he had never seen, sliding back into the holster.

Now Coffey was smiling at Hafner’s back. Mallory was going to get clean away with this. What were the odds that Hafner would ever tell anyone she had made him pee in his pants?

The man was not quite out of the door when Mallory was rising to her feet saying, ‘I’m getting my own shrink. The department’s paying for it with what I just saved you on that idiot.’

‘Sit down. I’m not done with you yet.’ Before she could give him any grief, Coffey said, ‘I don’t care what kind of a busy day you have planned. Sit!’

She sat.

He had learned a lot from Riker. Anything passing for a polite request would have been considered a sign of weakness.

‘Let’s start with the cap gun Heller found in the trash. If it’s tied to the perp, then he might have premeditated the act. It’s possible he used it to threaten her into a private location to kill her.’

‘It was a – ’

‘Shut up, Mallory. You only take the bits and pieces that support your pet theory. You can’t know for a fact that he didn’t plan to kill her. The real facts are barer bones.’

‘Hafner doesn’t know – ’

‘I have no use for Hafner. I’ll sign off on your own shrink. But you open up to the possibility that the perp planned the kill, and maybe he’s killed before. And what about motive? She caught him out in some kind of a scam? Is that the story you want me to take to the district attorney?’

‘She was a researcher. If you’ve got the skills to check out the father of your baby, you do it. She got something on him. If she could find it, I can find it.’

‘You don’t even know that he was the father of the baby. You see what you’re doing?’

No, she didn’t see, didn’t hear. He was talking to the air.

‘You underestimate a perp and you’re dead. You’re hanging out there on your own.’ And that took guts, or maybe not. Perhaps she was merely fearless, and it was that which would get her killed – the lack of a healthy sense of fear.

‘Are we done?’

‘No, there’s just one more thing. Be careful you don’t shake out the wrong tree, Mallory. You may have more than one of them coming after you. I can see the lawsuits piling up now.’

Charles sat back in his chair and waited out the family ritual of Robert Riccalo admonishing the boy and the woman.

He didn’t like Riccalo.

The man craved a spotlight and a stage so he could strut up and down all morning and display his mind, his maleness, his ruthlessness. And then, after lunch, he would want to rule the world. The man’s eyes were black water. God only knew what was really under the surface, and God had probably shuddered and looked away quickly, only checking briefly to maintain His reputation for omniscience.

Now the man was leaning close to Justin, denying the child any possession of personal space. The boy turned to the woman. No help there. Sally Riccalo always avoided looking directly at Justin. And that was interesting.

‘Justin, this nonsense will end!’ the man was saying, booming, threatening.

The cat was backing away to a corner of the room. Nose didn’t like Robert Riccalo either. Charles smiled at Justin, and the boy seemed to take a little heart from that.