But the best bet was D'Anton's own insurance company, Pacific Doctors Mutual. If any complaints had ever been lodged against him, they would be in the files. But those were highly confidential, jealously guarded from outsiders.

Hacking was beyond his level of skill. But he knew just the person for the job, Tina Bauer. He called Tina and spoke with her briefly, arranging to stop by her apartment. The day had already been a long one, with the drive to Sacramento and back. But this was business that needed taking care of.

Larrabee locked up and walked through the old building's hall, ears attentive to familiar sounds, alert for possible intruders. It was zoned for commercial use only; legally, he was not supposed to be living there. But the owners were glad to have their own private security force and looked the other way. The building housed another dozen offices, mainly small shipping companies and wholesalers. It was a throwback to an older era, like a stage set of musty offices and aging personnel moving slowly in their little enclaves, oblivious to the frenzied digitized world outside their doors. By this time of evening it was deserted.

It was after eight and getting dark when he walked outside. He liked the night, and he always felt better when he got out on the street. The San Francisco sky was a shade of midnight blue he had never seen anywhere else, and the great buildings of the skyline glimmered with elegance and power. There was no place like it. Where he had grown up – Flint, Michigan – seemed like another planet. His name, Stover, came from his mother's maiden name of Stoverud, Norwegian loggers and farmers. His father had worked the assembly lines in Flint, until that bitter closing had cost the town the little it had. By the time Stover was twenty, there was not much else to do but leave.

Traffic this evening was relaxed; rush hour was over and the Giants were playing out of town. A few human shapes carrying garbage bags or pushing shopping carts were moving, with the deliberateness of having no destination. There were a lot of street people in the neighborhood, down toward the east end of Howard Street. Pac Bell Park, new and splendid, was a fine addition to the city. But the surrounding gentrification, blocks and blocks of upscale condo and office buildings, had pushed the homeless toward the older areas. Larrabee knew the ones who had been around a while and always kept a sheaf of folded dollar bills in his pocket to hand out when he met them. This maintained a respect for him and his property, and even a sort of loyalty between him and those denizens of a world that was like a halfway house to death.

But there were always newcomers, drugged to craziness or just not giving a shit. Confrontations were still rare, and the few times that violence had seemed likely, he had been able to head it off by opening his jacket to show his pistol. But the probability kept looming larger that a gang member with his own gun, or a junkie pulling a knife out of nowhere, was going to catch him unprepared. It was a no-win situation – if he defended himself successfully, he was probably in serious trouble with the law, and if not, he was dead – and while he hated to give in, he was thinking about moving. Growing up, he had hated the grimy industrial buildings that surrounded him, and wanted only to get away. But now they brought a strange comfort.

He got in his Taurus, pulled out onto Howard, and headed toward Castro Street. This was where he had started as a rookie cop, in the Southern District south of Market Street, flanking the Mission. In this heat, there were a lot of people out – a little world on each street corner and several in between, interacting and clashing, hookers, gangbangers, drunks, addicts, the halt and lame and many insane: a microcosm of predators and victims.

Larrabee had spent more than ten years wearing the SFPD's blue uniform, and another year and a half under cover. One night he had shot a particularly vicious mugger who was preying on tourists near Fisherman's Wharf. But it was dark; the mugger had managed to ditch his pistol so that it was never found; and his defense lawyer successfully argued reasonable doubt that Larrabee had shot the right man. He had been suspended without pay. He might have been reinstated eventually, but the beating he had taken at the hands of the system that he had risked his life to protect left him bitter and disgusted. Instead, he had decided to go private.

He worked mostly alone, without the sophisticated equipment or networks of the bigger agencies. His cases were rarely dramatic; most of his income came from investigating malpractice insurance claims for a doctor-owned company called ASCLEP. This was how he and Monks had met. Monks was a case reviewer and expert witness for ASCLEP, but his medical expertise was a help in fieldwork, too, and sometimes it was good to have another body. Larrabee paid Monks back in kind when he could. Once, it had almost gotten him killed.

But there was more to the partnership, and more than friendship. Monks fascinated him.

Larrabee was under no illusions about himself. He was smart, but not intellectual. He cared, but that caring was tempered by a hard edge, a self-preservation instinct that kept his brain in control of his feelings. It wasn't something he had to work at. It was built in.

But Monks – Monks was something else. He was a South Side Chicago mick who'd spent years laying his hands on damaged bodies and dealing with all the troubles that came with that. He was not shy about fighting, physically. But underneath, Larrabee sensed another quality, much harder to grasp, that showed through in glimpses. It was like some gentle thing that was trapped in a cruel cage, desperate to break free. Sometimes it came across as childlike, sweet, and clear, or hurt and incomprehending. But other times, that desperation turned destructive, even berserk, and he sensed, too, that Monks had spent a lot of his life fighting it, trying to channel that fierce energy. He had a hard time keeping going. And Larrabee, for reasons he himself did not fully understand, was determined to make sure that he did.

The heart of the Castro District was gay and trendy. But west toward Twin Peaks, there was a more conservative maze of curving hilly residential streets that seemed to lead only to others like them. As well as Larrabee knew the city, he still got lost in there. The houses were small and set close together, not fancy, but well kept. There was a sense of watchfulness about the area.

Tina Bauer let him into the house she shared with her partner, Bev. She was a small woman in her late thirties, bony, flat-chested, and mousy. Her hair was a neutral brown, bobbed, and she wore cat's-eye glasses. You could not call her pretty, although there was a certain girlish appeal. Bev thought so. Bev weighed over two hundred pounds, worked as the night dispatcher for a trucking company, and was insanely jealous.

Except that she was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, Tina looked like she could have been an accountant, and in fact, she had been. But she had the sort of mind that grasped things differently than other people's, especially in the realm of electronic information. Fifteen years earlier, married, recently graduated from UC Berkeley, and working for Pacific Gas and Electric – the epitome of straight – she had figured out a way to shave a tiny fraction off of pennies of the utility's incoming revenue and deposit it in her own numbered account. The missing amounts were so minuscule individually, and spread so thin, they were barely noticed. By the time they added up enough to catch the accounting department's attention, she had accumulated several hundred thousand dollars.

This had launched her on a road to self-discovery, starting with two years in prison. Not surprisingly, her marriage had collapsed, but she had not liked men all that much to begin with. Over the next years, she had refined her skills to the point where she could operate with near invisibility, and she kept it small-scale. Occasionally she was questioned, as when a bank discovered that funds had been electronically moved from a place they knew about to a place they did not. But nobody had been able to make anything stick.