Hardy pulled darts from the board – two bull’s-eyes and a 1. He was throwing pretty well, a good sign. ‘We don’t know that for sure. Farris says he was planning on it.’

‘But no one’s talked to her?’

‘Right. That’s her number there at the bottom. You’re welcome to give her a try.’

Glitsky did. He held the receiver for a minute, then hung up. Hardy sat at the corner of the desk. ‘You didn’t want to leave a message? Ask her to call you?’

‘I’d love to, but nobody answered.’

‘No, there’s a machine. I heard it.’

Glitsky thought a minute, then dialed again. ‘Okay, last time was four, I’ll give it ten.’

The sun reflected off the hardwood floors onto the bookcase. Hardy walked over and opened the window, a reasonable action only about ten days a year. The view to his north, up to Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower, was blocked from his office by Rebecca’s room, but overhead, the sky was clear. Hardy could see Oakland easily. The air smelled like grass, even out here in the concrete avenues.

‘Nope,’ Abe said behind him. ‘Ten rings. This listed? Where’s she live? Where’s your phone book?’

She wasn’t listed. Without going into it too closely, Hardy said he’d gotten the number from Farris. ‘So she’s home, I’d guess,’ Abe said. ‘At least she unplugged her machine in the last couple days, right? You going to work today dressed like that?’

Hardy allowed that he would probably take a shower and get dressed, and moved toward his bedroom, Abe following. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t get too red hot about this.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, the body turns up yesterday, but Nash was probably dead on Sunday, we go on that, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay, today’s Friday. One week, assuming he went down on Saturday.’

‘And after four days…’ Hardy knew what Abe was saying, understood the statistics. If you didn’t have a suspect within four days of a murder, the odds were enormous that you’d never get one.

‘All I’m saying is don’t get your hopes up.’

Hardy stripped off his shirt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got Mr Silicon Valley and you got May Shinn if you can find her.’

‘If she didn’t go swimming with Owen Nash.’

‘Then who unplugged her answering machine?’

‘I know, I know. I’m an investigator. I’ll investigate. I also thought we’d check out the boat.’

‘No, the boat’s clean.’ Hardy told Abe about his visit on Wednesday night.

‘You brought along a forensic team, did you?’

Hardy shut up and went to take his shower.

The case of The People v. Rane Brown was not going to be an easy one.

Back in late March, at around ten at night, two officers in a squad car cruising under the freeway heard a man calling for help. Turning into the lot, they saw one man down on the ground and another man going through his pockets. When he saw the cops, the suspect took off. The man on the ground was yelling, ‘Stop him! That’s the guy!’ The officers followed the running man as he turned into one alley, then another, a dead end. Getting out of their car, they proceeded cautiously down the alley, guns drawn, flashlights out, until they came upon a man crouched between two dumpsters.

This man turned out to be Rane Brown, a 5’8“, 135-pound, nineteen-year-old black male with four priors for mugging and purse snatching. When apprehended by the officers, he was wearing a black tank top and black pants that matched the clothes of the man who’d run from the scene. The officers found a.38 Smith & Wesson handgun under the dumpster next to Rane. The gun was registered to a Denise Watrous in San Jose.

What made the case especially difficult was that when the officers returned to the scene, the purported victim had disappeared, having evidently decided that the hassle of pursuing justice in this imperfect world was simply not worth the trouble.

But there was Rane Brown in custody, and the police didn’t particularly want to let him go and mug someone else.

So Hardy was in Department 11 with Judge Nancy Fiedler this Friday morning, trying to prove a robbery and knowing that he didn’t have a prayer of winning.

Which is what transpired. After a fairly stern lecture by Judge Fiedler on the advisability of producing some evidence before wasting the court’s time on this minor and unprovable transgression, she had granted the motion to dismiss and Rane Brown was a free man.

Hardy and the two arresting officers had been waiting by the elevator when Rane and his attorney came up and joined them. Everybody headed to the first floor, and Rane was in high spirits.

‘Man, you give me a turn when you walk in that courtroom,’ he said to Hardy.

‘Why’s that, Rane?’

‘You know, the man here’ – he cocked his head toward his attorney – ‘he tole me you ain’t got no witnesses, no victim, like that. So I be thinkin’ everything’s cool and you walk in and I thinkin‘ you the victim.’ He smiled, broken teeth in a pocked face. ‘I mean, you get it? You look just like the man I rob.’

Hardy stared at Rane a moment, letting it sink in. He saw the two cops that had arrested him, one on either side of him. Hardy allowed himself a small smile.

‘You’re telling me I look like the victim you just got let off for?’

Rane was bobbing his head. ‘Exactly, man, exactly.’ He just couldn’t believe the resemblance.

Hardy looked from one officer to the other. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he said, ‘we just got ourselves a confession.’ The elevator door opened and Hardy stepped out, blocking the way. ‘Take this guy back upstairs and book him.’

‘The boat was out when you got in? And what time was that?’

José and Glitsky sat on hard plastic chairs by the doorway to the Gateway Marina guardhouse. José was about twenty-five years old, thin and sinewy. He wore new tennis shoes with his green uniform, a shirt open at the neck. The day had heated up. Even here, right on the water, it was over eighty degrees.

‘I got here six-thirty, quarter to seven, and the Eloise, she was already gone.’

‘And nobody signed her out?’

‘No. They s’pose to, but…’ He shrugged.

‘Were there any calls on the intercom, anything like that?’

‘You remember Saturday? It was like nothing, maybe two boats, three go out. If anything had happen, I remember.’ José stood up and got a logbook from the counter. ‘Here, look at this. Air temp forty-eight, wind north northeast at thirty-five. Small craft up from the night before.’

‘So nobody was going out? What about the other boats? The ones that went out?’

José tapped the book. ‘These I write down.’ He ran a finger over the page until he got where he wanted. ‘The Wave Dancer, she goes out at ten-thirty, back at two. Then Blue Baby, she just clear the jetty’ – pronounced ‘yetty’ – ‘then turn aroun’ and come back in, like one-fifteen. Rough Rider leaves about the same as Blue Baby, like one-thirty. They no come back in on my shift.‘

Not bad, Glitsky thought. Every new witness didn’t double his work, it squared it. Here were only three boats to check, and maybe he could leave out the Blue Baby, Possibly one of them had seen the Eloise. If Saturday had been a day like today, clear and calm… He didn’t want to think about it. He started writing down names.

A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway. ‘Sergeant, the lab team is pulling up.’

As soon as he’d left Hardy’s that morning Glitsky had arranged to have the Eloise placed under the guard of a couple of officers. He stopped off downtown for an easily obtained search warrant, not even dropping into his office. After he and Forensics had gone over the Eloise, a prospect about which he entertained no great hopes -they’d cordon it off with crime-scene tape. But the boat was the place to start – it was more than probable that Nash had at the very least been dead on the boat and dumped from it. From there, he’d see where the trails led.