Now he tightened down his mouth, looked over at her. 'Maybe that's why I recognize it, though. With Abe. How did we get on this anyway?' he asked.

'Abe dating. His possible crush on Elaine.'

Hardy gave it another minute. 'Whatever it was, it was serious. He wanted the kid to suffer. It was personal.'

'So what are you going to do now?'

'About Abe?'

'I don't suppose you'll have to do anything about Abe. He's got a way of taking care of himself. I was thinking about the boy. What's left for you to do? Are you in this?'

After a minute of consideration Hardy said, 'Let's say I'm not comfortable with the idea of defending the person who killed Elaine. I liked her. If Cole did it, I'll turn Dorothy onto somebody else, tell her I've got a conflict of interest.'

'You just said "if Cole did it".'

'He did, Frannie. He's confessed. That's usually a tip-off.'

'But you're going to want to find out a little more, aren't you? Make sure.'

Hardy's reluctance showed like a fresh bruise. His expression changed two or three times until it rested on a grimace. 'Probably, knowing me,' he admitted, 'although there's no such thing as sure. It just feels a little pat up to now, that's all. I'd want to talk to him at least, get his side of it. But if it seems like he did do it – strung out and screwed up or not – I'll let David or somebody else take him. I wouldn't want to be involved in defending him.'

'But what if-'

Hardy held up a hand. 'Let's not go there. Not yet, OK.'

'Abe would be pretty unhappy, though, wouldn't he, if you did?'

He nodded somberly. 'You know, my love, sometimes you show a remarkable talent for understatement.'

It surprised Hardy, but neither Jeff nor Dorothy Elliot had any real problem with his decision not to represent Cole. They even said they thought it was a smart one. As they talked, it came out that the boy had done a pretty good job of alienating everybody in the family.

When he'd first begun having 'problems', Jeff and Dorothy had tried to be understanding and supportive in his struggle. Cole told them that he'd come out to San Francisco because there wasn't any real empathy regarding his situation in the Midwest. He was trying but people just didn't understand.

So the Elliots invited him to stay with them and their children until he got settled in. In the next month, Jeff 'lost' a watch and they had a daytime break-in where the burglar got away with most of Dorothy's jewelry. Dinners became upsetting for the children when Uncle Cole's place would be set and he wouldn't show up. On top of that, Cole had two minor traffic accidents while he was driving Dorothy's car, both of them the other driver's fault – except that in both cases the other car had fled. Finally, when one of the girl's piggy banks that had held four hundred dollars turned up missing, they'd told Cole he had to go and not come back.

So they understood Hardy's decision. He was a friend to have gone to the jail in an emergency and make sure he got into the detox. They didn't expect him to do anything else.

But for his own peace of mind, Hardy did want to eyeball the man and get to the bottom of this confession. What had Cole said? Glitsky's behavior had stuck in his craw as well. It wasn't that he thought that Cole might be innocent, but the fact that everyone was treating him as though it had already been proven that bothered the lawyer in Hardy.

He didn't need certainty beyond a reasonable doubt. He was ready to cast Cole off in a heartbeat, but he couldn't let go completely until he'd at least totally satisfied himself that the man had actually killed Elaine.

Then let him be damned. Hardy wouldn't care.

In the women's room at Rand and Jackman Law Associates on Montgomery Street, Treya Ghent tried to fix her eyes, but she knew it was a losing fight. Between the horrible, senseless murder of her dear friend and boss Elaine Wager and the unrelenting demands of her wonderful but high-maintenance fourteen-year-old daughter Raney, she had averaged less than three hours of sleep for the past four nights.

She was at work this morning because she didn't want to use up any more sick days frivolously. She needed to keep a bank so that she would be available if her daughter absolutely needed to have her stay home to care for a real illness, or to counsel her during a real crisis. And Treya didn't kid herself. Raney was a teenager – she was desperately going to need her mother from time to time in the next couple of years, just as Treya had needed her own mom. And thank God Raney – like Treya had been – was the kind of child who would ask.

Certainly she wasn't going to waste any of those precious sick days on herself- she hadn't missed a day of work for anything related to herself in six years. They paid her to be here and contribute and she wasn't going to let her employers down. They counted on her.

But the eyes were going to betray the fact that this morning at least she was a functional zombie, and she hated to have anyone, much less Clarence Jackman, the firm's managing partner, see that. When she'd gotten the summons that Jackman wanted to see her in his office, she'd been sobbing quietly in her little cubicle.

And why not? How could somebody have killed Elaine? It had wrenched her heart when she'd first learned of it, and the pain hadn't let up much since. Elaine had been a friend and confidante; they often joked that they were sisters separated at birth. She and her boss had been the same age – thirty-three. Both were smart, neither of them entirely black or white. Intuitively, they both understood that the sometimes vast differences between their social standing, their jobs and their prospects were merely the products of background, education and – that greatest of all variables – luck.

She threw a last splash of cold water over her eyes, blinked hard, and patted them dry with a paper towel. She'd kept Mr Jackman waiting long enough, too long really. Staring at herself in the mirror for one last second, she willed a tiny spark of life into her tired eyes, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. 'OK, girl,' she whispered firmly to herself. 'No whining.'

Sixty-three-year-old Clarence Jackman was a power player. The company he'd founded with Aaron Rand thirty years ago was the most successful majority-black law firm west of Chicago. Though Rand and Jackman represented perhaps fifteen per cent of the Bay Area's minority-owned businesses, the rest of their receivables came from a mix of premier entities without any reference to ethnicities. The firm's client roster included banks, hotels, construction firms, HMOs, several Silicon Valley companies, dozens of sports and entertainment celebrities, and hundreds of other lower profile but high-income individuals and corporations. Imposing nearly to the point of intimidation, Jackman had been a star fullback at USC in the sixties. He carried nearly two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle on his six-foot, three-inch frame. He favored Italian suits, double-breasted in browns and greens, white shirts, conservative ties. Intensely black-hued, with an oversized head capped now in tightly trimmed gray knots, just two months ago he'd had a middle-aged applicant for the firm's CFO position walk out of the job interview before a word had been spoken while Jackman looked him over to see if he could take it.

Understandably, Jackman had not risen to his current eminence by having a soft heart. The law business was competitive enough if you weren't black. If you were, it could be startlingly brutal. Rand and Jackman had known this at the start. They'd felt that they had to build their firm on the assumption that if things ever went wrong with a client or a case, they would never under any circumstances get the benefit of the doubt. They could afford no mistakes. They had to be the best. Not just the best black – the best, period.