Another avuncular shake of the head. ‘I don’t have a story, sergeant. All I know about Bree Beaumont’s death is what I’ve read in the paper. I’m especially saddened because, frankly, she was starting to make a real difference in the public’s perception of the dangers of MTBE, which are substantial. Also, quite honestly, several of my clients stood to benefit from her recent work. As did Kerry and probably Valens. Not only is there no motive there, there’s a positive disincentive!’

Thorne was fairly certain he’d deflected Griffin again from pursuing his own relationship with Valens. But he thought he could push things even further. ‘Look, sergeant, I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but let me guess what Mr Pierce told you – he said that Al Valens hated Bree, didn’t he? That Al was jealous of all the attention Kerry was giving to Bree. Something like that, am I right?’

An ambiguous shrug.

‘And who’s the guy who tells you all this? Only the guy whose business is in the crapper if Bree succeeds, who by the way just got dumped by her personally!’

Griffin finally showed a spark. ‘You know that?’

‘Word on the street!’ Thorne returned Griffin’s open look – he’d answered his questions, been straight with the police. If there was anything more, he’d continue to cooperate. But his message was clear – Griffin was barking up the wrong tree here.

Finally, the sergeant straightened his body and grunted his way up out of his chair. ‘I know where to find you,’ he said.

A last smile. ‘I’m not going anyplace! Thorne extended a hand and after a beat Griffin took it.

‘Listen to me, Al. The man was here. I don’t know for sure what Pierce told him, but it wasn’t news to him that you hated the woman!’

Al Valens swore. Then. ‘Did he mention the report? Did he know anything about that?’

‘No. I don’t think he’d know what it was if it bit him. But he’d obviously been to her place and gone through her papers, some with my letterhead!’

‘How’d she get those?’

Thorne’s voice took on a mild tone of reproach. ‘Well, Al, I was going to ask you the same thing.’

Valens took it in silence. ‘So where’d you leave it?’

‘I sent him back to Pierce.’

Valens was silent for a long moment. ‘How close was he to us?’

‘Way too. But now he’s looking at Pierce, who had every reason. More than every reason.’ Thorne smiled thinly. ‘I think Sergeant Griffin will come to the conclusion that Mr Pierce must have done it. And with no physical evidence, he’ll have to go to the strongest motive.’

But Valens didn’t sound convinced. ‘What if he comes back to us, though? After all we’ve-’

Thorne cut him off. ‘Al, he wants to catch a killer. Our arrangement is not his area of interest. He won’t be looking this way.’

Valens’ voice betrayed the panic Thorne knew he must be feeling. ‘But what if he does, Baxter? What if he does?’

Thorne spoke in his most soothing tones. ‘Then he’ll have to be managed, that’s all.’

The limousine bearing the Democratic candidate for governor pulled up to where a crowd of perhaps a hundred citizens waited in the chill by the Union Square entrance to the Saint Francis Hotel.

In the back seat, Damon Kerry nodded appreciatively at the man next to him. ‘Good job, Al. Nice turnout.’

Valens wore a distracted air. There was no doubt that the crowd here would be satisfactory. You tell semi-indigents that you’ll pay them twenty bucks to go someplace and stand around for fifteen minutes, and you can generally get some good percentage of them to show up and do it. And since both sides did it, neither could snitch off the other to the media.

Five months ago, Damon Kerry had unexpectedly taken the primary after the two other Democratic contenders had vilified each other to death in a series of TV debates. Since that time, Valens found himself more and more coming around to the opinion that the system could be improved by simply eliminating the middle men and paying people directly to vote.

In a cynical moment – and there had been hundreds lately – he’d amused himself doing the math. He’d concluded that for about the same amount of money they’d already blown through on this campaign, they could have paid every registered voter in the state twenty bucks to go into the booth and mark the ‘X’ next to Kerry.

If he took the number of citizens who actually voted – somewhere near thirty per cent of California’s adults – and only wanted to ensure a simple majority of fifty-one per cent, he could up the ante to nearly a hundred dollars per vote. With that kind of incentive, people would take the whole day off with pay to ‘vote.’ That was the way to do it. Hell, they’d even make money on the deal.

‘What are you thinking about, Al? You’re not here.’

The limo had stopped at the entrance. He couldn’t very well answer honestly, but since that wasn’t an issue with him at any time, it didn’t slow him down now. A quick shift of the mental gears and he was back to strategy, the campaign, life, or his anyway. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said distractedly. ‘Bree, I suppose. This new angle with Bree. The woman in jail.’

The television news had broken the story about Frannie Hardy only hours before, and it was already clear it was going to become large. Anything to do with damn Bree Beaumont was going to continue to have an effect on the campaign. Valens couldn’t get away from it. It had surprised Al to see how Bree had come from out of nowhere to be such a focal point in the campaign. Certainly it had never been Valens’ intention to get Bree and Damon together. She had been with the enemy. But then, after a radio program they had both appeared to defend their respective positions, things changed.

Bree had always viewed herself as a pioneer against pollution. She took pride in the fact that her MTBE was really doing a great job of cleaning up California’s air. It wasn’t just science to her. She cared that she was doing good. She was, it appeared, altruistic. She wanted a better world. In this way, she was very much like Damon Kerry, more so than Valens could have ever imagined.

Valens didn’t understand principled people at all, but these two – the candidate and the scientist – connected to each other in a big way. Damon Kerry, passionate and personally charming, hadn’t attacked Bree on the program. He’d been either smart or lucky enough to zero in on their common concern – keeping poisons out of the environment.

And what he’d made Bree do, which even Valens at the time had thought was brilliant, was direct her attention down, into the ground.

Before this one radio show, Bree’s entire scientific life had been directed into the atmosphere. She had been cleaning up the air, defending how she did it. And that had kept her busy enough that she hadn’t looked too carefully at the ground. She assumed, and the corporate culture in which she’d been immersed had aided the assumption, that her stuff – MTBE – in the ground would act like regular gasoline. Eventually it would dissolve or evaporate out. Reports – even scientific reports – to the contrary were paid for by the ethanol industry, by SKO. Bree considered the source, and discarded the facts.

So in her mind she had always been on the side of the angels, doing good work.

And then, suddenly, Damon Kerry had made her see it all differently. And in the immediate aftermath of that conversion, she’d been the greatest thing for the campaign since the battle of the front-running mudslingers.

But soon afterward, from Al Valens’ perspective she became a substantial liability. Something personal started going on with Damon Kerry. Before Valens knew it, Bree was showing up everywhere with his candidate. Late dinners, early lunches, fundraising breakfasts.