Hardy expected that the guys in blue would be first on the scene. He would likely know them from the Shamrock, where the police dropped in frequently enough to keep the presence alive. Sometimes your Irish bar will get a little rowdy and it helped to have the heat appear casually to remind patrons that a certain minimum standard of decorous behaviour would be maintained.

For the better part of nine years, Hardy had been the daytime bartender at the Little Shamrock. He’d only been back in the D.A.‘s office for four months now, since Rebecca had been born and he and Frannie had gotten married.

Hardy and his onetime boss, current friend, partner and brother-in-law Moses McGuire were both reasonable hands with the shillelagh of Kentucky ash that hung behind the bar under the cash register. McGuire, Doctor of Philosophy, in his cups himself, had twice thrown people through the front window of the Shamrock. Most other times, the forced exit was, Old West fashion, through the swinging double doors. Neither Hardy nor Moses was quick on the 86 – no good publican was – but both of them had needed assistance from the beat cops from time to time. The Shamrock wasn’t a ‘cop bar,’ but the guys from Park Station had trouble paying for drinks if they stopped in during off hours.

Hardy stood just inside the front entrance to the Aquarium. The black and white pulled up, the searchlight on the car scanning the front of the building. From the street to the entrance was a twenty-yard expanse of open cement at 2:15 of a pitch-dark morning. Hardy didn’t blame them for the caution. He stepped outside.

They walked back behind the tanks in the damp hallway. Bathed in a faint greenish overhead light, the two cops followed Hardy amid the burps and gurglings of the Aquarium. He did know them – Dan Soper and Bobby Varela, a fullback and a sprinter. Hardy thought the three of them made a parade: the give of leather, slap of holster, clomp of heavy shoes, jingle of cuffs and keys – beat cops weren’t dressed for ambush. It reminded Hardy of his days on the force, walking a beat with Abe Glitsky.

He had been a different guy back then. Now he felt older, almost protective of these cops. The beat was the beginning.

They came into what Hardy called the walking room. Pico had changed into a turtleneck and sportcoat, though he still wore his swim trunks. He stared emptily straight ahead, sitting on the edge of the pool next to the gurney that held the shark.

‘Find anything else?’ Hardy asked.

Pico let himself off the pool’s lip, withering Hardy with a look. After the introductions, Varela walked over to the hand, still lying where Pico had thrown it. ‘That what it looks like?’

‘That’s what it is,’ Hardy said.

‘Where’d you get this shark?’ Soper asked. ‘Hey, Bobby!’ Varela was poking at the hand with a pencil. ‘Leave it, would you?’

Pico told Soper how the shark had come to the Steinhart. Soper wanted to know the fishing boat’s name, captain, time of capture, all that. Hardy walked over to Varela, who was still hunched over, and stood over him.

‘Pretty weird, huh?’

Varela looked back over his shoulder, straightening. ‘Naw, we get these three, four times a week.’

‘I wonder if the guy drowned?’

Varela couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the thing.

‘You’d hope so, wouldn’t you? How’d you like to have been alive instead?’

Soper had passed them, going into Pico’s office to use the telephone. Pico came over. ‘He’s getting some crime-lab people down here. No way am I putting my hand in that guy again.’

Varela shivered. ‘I don’t blame you.’ He walked back to the shark and gingerly lifted the incision along its stomach with his pencil. ‘Can’t see much.’

There’s more in there,‘ Pico said. ’We’d just started.‘

Varela stepped back. ‘Dan’s right. I think we’ll just wait.’

Hardy stared down at the hand. ‘I wonder who it was,’ he said.

‘Oh, we’ll find out soon enough,’ Varela said.

Pico leaned back against the pool. ‘How can you be sure?’ he said. ‘It could be anybody.’

‘Yeah, but we’ve got one major clue.’

‘What’s that?’ Pico asked.

Hardy turned. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Fingerprints.’

Hardy lifted his red-rimmed eyes from the folder he was studying. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and last night had been a long one, ending around sunrise. He’d driven home from the Steinhart, changed into a new brown suit, looked in at Frannie curled up in their bed, at Rebecca sleeping in the new room he’d built onto the back of the house, and headed downtown where he now worked as an assistant district attorney on the third floor of the Hall of Justice on Seventh and Bryant.

The job wasn’t going very well. The case he was laboring over now, like the others he was currently prosecuting, came from the lower rungs of the criminal ladder. This one involved a prostitute who’d been caught by an undercover cop posing as a tourist wandering around Union Square. The girl – Esme Aiella – was twenty-two, black, two priors. She was out on $500 bail and was, even now, as Hardy read, probably out hustling.

Hardy was wondering what purpose this all served. Or the bust of a city employee, Derek Graham, who sold lids of marijuana on the side. Hardy had known guys like Derek in college, and very few of them went on to become ringleaders in, say, the Medellin cartel. Derek had three kids, lived in the Mission and was trying to make ends meet so his wife could stay home with the kids.

Still, this was Hardy’s job now – nailing the petty malefactors, the lowlifes, the unlucky or the foolish. This wasn’t the high drama of the passionate crime, the romance of big deals gone crooked, beautiful people desperately denying their libidos, their greed, their shallowness. No, this was down below the stage lights, where the denizens lived on the slimy border of the law, slipping over the line, not even seeing it, trying to get a little money, a little power, a little edge, maybe even some release, some fun in a life story that wasn’t ever going to make it past the footlights. Mostly, Hardy thought, it was sad.

Hardy had thought, perhaps unrealistically, that coming back to work as an assistant district attorney he wouldn’t have to deal with this level again. He was, after all, nearly forty now, and he’d done his apprenticeship with the D.A. ten years ago. Back when he started, he’d had to work through the issue of whether he could morally prosecute the so-called victimless crimes – hookers, casual dopers. Somewhere in his heart, he believed that these crimes weren’t as real as the ones that hurt people. He tended to believe that if grown-ups wanted to get laid or get high or get dead by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge, society should let them. God knows, it had enough truly bad things to correct. Why waste the time on this pettiness?

But this, he knew, wasn’t a good attitude. His job was to prosecute people who broke the law. Whether they had done anything he considered wrong was moot.

And he was a new hire, only brought on because he’d left with a few friends, like Chief Assistant D.A. Art Drysdale. Also, he suspected, although he didn’t know for certain, that his ex-father-in-law, Superior Court Judge Andy Fowler, had put in a good word for him.

He hadn’t actively practiced law in ten years. He’d been a bartender, was still part owner of the Shamrock, and he really couldn’t expect guys who’d made a linear career of criminal law to step aside while the new guy got the hot cases.

Of course, even if he were doing murders – the fun stuff- the majority of them were NHI cases – ‘no humans involved.’ It was a pretty apt term. Lowlifes killing each other for reasons that would be laughable – they were laughable – if they weren’t so tragic…