‘But Ron does, is that it? You’ve got hopes and fears you can share with Ron, but not with me?’ He was hurt and mad and starting to swing pretty freely, maybe rock her with a roundhouse. ‘So what kind of dreams did you and Ron share and talk about?’

‘I didn’t have any dreams with Ron, Dismas. I only have dreams with you.’

That stopped him. Her eyes were beginning to well up. He reached over, pulling her to him. ‘I don’t want to yell at you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this right now. I’m trying.’ He pulled back so he could look at her. ‘I’ve been trying with our whole lives, too, you know. I do try to be there for you and the kids. I haven’t been distant on purpose.’

‘I know. I shouldn’t have let Ron even be friends, not that way. That’s all it was, really, but I… it seemed innocent, really, starting out. You know, connecting finally to somebody.’

Hardy knew. Just before Vincent had been born, he’d had the same experience – connection, infatuation. Fire that he had ducked away from before it had burned him and Frannie. He knew.

‘I shouldn’t have let him get important,’ she said. ‘I should have seen it and stopped, but we were just talking. It didn’t seem it would hurt anything.’

‘Except it’s put you here.’

That brought them back to where they were, although of course they hadn’t gone anywhere. It was almost midnight and the next morning their own children would be waking up at Grandma’s with neither of their parents around.

Frannie, shivering now, looked down at her orange jumpsuit. This time the tears did well over.

‘I’m so sorry, Dismas. I’m so sorry.’

He pulled her back to him, and moved his hand up and down over her back, feeling pretty damn sorry himself.

Glitsky was at his desk, sipping from a mug of tepid tea, trying to get a take on what Frannie had told him, which wasn’t much that he hadn’t already known. Bree and the oil wars. But so what? He’d been a homicide inspector for a long time and the idea that this was some sort of business-related slaying was, for him, almost too far-fetched to consider.

When he got back to basics and asked himself who stood to benefit from Bree’s death, he came up with Ron. So regardless of how much he’d prefer Sharron Pratt and Scott Randall to be wrong, he was thinking he’d be wise not to forget entirely about him. It might be nice to find an alternative suspect, but if homicide took the road less travelled and found no one on it after the DA had shown them the way, he had a hunch he’d be hearing about it for a decade or two.

He was vaguely aware of two inspectors writing reports out in the open homicide detail. Suddenly there was a shadow in his doorway and he looked up.

‘I was half expecting you not to show.’

‘Which half?’ Hardy asked. He stepped into the office and crab-walked around the desk, which barely fit into the room, to one of the wooden chairs wedged into the tiny space that was left. ‘Frannie told me you two had a nice talk.’

The lieutenant was twirling his mug around and around, wrestling with something. ‘I’m not too happy about what I heard, Diz. I’m thinking it may be Ron after all.’

Hardy was poker-faced, keeping it casual. ‘How could he have done it? I mean like when and where?’

‘I know. There are problems with it.’

‘Like he wasn’t there? Would that be one of them?’ Low-key. But the last thing he needed now was to get homicide on Ron. Because they would have a good shot at finding him, which would put him and his kids back in the system. It would eliminate Hardy’s own private agenda – the only one, he believed, that could produce a satisfactory conclusion to this mess. So he asked, ‘What do you have on Bree? What did Griffin get?’

The mug stopped halfway to Glitsky’s mouth, then came back down. Glitsky’s normal expression was something between a frown and a scowl, and now it moved a few degrees south. ‘Carl might have had the case closed in two hours if he hadn’t died. Or he might have been nowhere. Either way, he didn’t get to writing up his reports. Paperwork wasn’t his strong point.’

‘What was?’

Glitsky narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Well, he must have done something. Just because there’s not much in the file doesn’t mean there’s nothing.’ He had Glitsky’s interest now and he kept going. ‘Was Griffin married? Did he talk to his wife? Anybody in the office here? Who supervised at the crime scene? They must have gotten some kind of physical evidence at Bree’s place. I mean, Griffin was in this, right? He had to have something.’

Hardy found it a lot easier getting into the penthouse with the key that Ron had given him.

Once inside, he turned and locked the door behind him, then switched on the lights. Nothing obvious had changed since he and Canetta had walked out together last night, but Hardy felt a dim charge as he started for the office with the answering machine.

What was it?

Stopping completely, telling himself that it was probably the difference between being merely tired, which was last night, and semi-comatose, now, he still took a minute getting his bearings, casting his eyes around the periphery of the rooms.

While he’d been visiting downtown with Frannie and then Glitsky, he’d left his gun stowed in his trunk. When he got back to his car he’d tucked it back into his belt. Now, feeling stupid about it for the second time in five hours didn’t stop him from pulling it out again.

The paintings, the view, the dining area, all the same. It was nothing, he concluded. He was the walking dead at the moment, seeing ghosts, maybe playing with them.

But suddenly there it was.

He’d gone out to the balcony last night, and to do that he’d pulled the drapes aside a foot or two. He remembered it specifically because from the inside of the house, where he stood now, he hadn’t been able to see the French doors leading out to the balcony from which Bree had been thrown. He hadn’t known that the doors were there.

And now they were covered again, the drapes pulled closed.

He crossed the living room again, the dining area with its seating nook, trying to remember, growing more sure of it. Neither he nor Canetta had come anywhere near this area last night. And as Hardy was leaving, he’d glanced back at the room one last time – the French doors stuck in his mind, and that meant the drapes hadn’t been pulled closed.

Moving them aside again, he pushed open one of the doors and stepped back out on to the balcony, over to its edge. It still was a long way down. Fighting vertigo, he backed up a step. Nothing had been moved, nothing had changed.

So somebody had pulled the drapes against the unlikely event that he would be seen moving around twelve floors up at the scene of a murder.

A last glance and Hardy was inside, this time pulling the drapes behind him. He still had the gun in his hand. ‘Hello,’ he called out. ‘Anybody here?’

Silence.

Flicking the hall and room lights on before him, he took a tour of the back rooms, as he and Canetta had done last night. Nothing looked disturbed. Even the office, presumably the location of Bree’s important files, was as he’d last seen it.

Except for one thing. The counter on the answering machine, which last night had read ‘8,’ now was a zero.

All the messages had been erased.