Hardy suddenly noticed the pallor under Pierce’s ruddy cheeks – lack of sleep, time spent indoors. The darkened house. He put it together that, like Canetta, Pierce was in a kind of mourning. Another guy laid out by Bree’s death.

The woman certainly had cut a swath.

‘If you had to guess, Mr Pierce, why was she killed?’

A blank look, his mind no longer on Hardy. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I realize that you can’t talk about what you told the grand jury…’

Suddenly Pierce seemed to realize they were still in the doorway. ‘I’m sorry. Where are my manners, keeping you standing out here? Come on in.’

Hardy stood a minute inside, his eyes adjusting. Now that he’d asked him in, Pierce seemed uncertain what to do next. He motioned to a large bowl on a table next to the door. ‘Help yourself to some candy, if you’d like. Almond Roca. The best.’

Hardy thanked him and took a couple, unpeeling the gold wrapper on one of them as Pierce led him back through the foyer. It wasn’t just the Almond Roca – ‘the best’ seemed to be the underlying theme of the place. Formal living areas, one-of-a-kind furniture, ten-foot ceilings. They bypassed the winding staircase. The television droned in a small room and Pierce poked his head in. ‘Halftime,’ he said, and kept walking.

The last door on the right opened into a modern kitchen, where a woman sat at the island counter. Facing away from them, reading a magazine, she half turned as they entered.

‘Excuse us, Carrie. Mr Hardy, my wife.’ Then, explaining. ‘He’s not with the police after all. Mr Beaumont’s attorney.’

She got off her stool and stood, extending a cool, firm hand. A nod of the regal head, holding on to Hardy’s hand an instant longer than was customary. Mrs Pierce was no child, no recent trophy wife – she appeared to be just to either side of forty – but Hardy decided immediately that she was not just very attractive, but almost disturbingly beautiful. Widely set, startling blue eyes dominated the face of a northern Italian goddess. He estimated she was wearing two thousand dollars’ worth of tailored casual wear that emphasized the slim waist. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe style that highlighted the sculpted bones of her face. Simple designer gold earrings dangled from what seemed to be designer earlobes and a wide gold necklace graced a flawless expanse of finely pored, honey-toned skin over the rise of a deep and dangerous cleavage. ‘Have they charged Mr Beaumont?’ she asked in her cultured voice, a pretty frown clouding her perfect brow.

‘Not yet.’ Hardy hoped he wasn’t stammering. ‘I’m trying to keep that from happening. I was just asking your husband why he thought Bree Beaumont was killed.’

‘Or why he’s a suspect?’ Carrie Pierce said it matter-of-factly. ‘He was Bree’s mentor from the beginning, that’s why. They worked closely together and of course people talked. People tend to be jealous, not to believe that men and women who work together can be friends without…’ A brief look of distaste. ‘I mean, the world doesn’t really turn around sex, after all.’

Hardy thought it was good coloration for Carrie Pierce to believe that. He doubted that any man had ever looked at her and not thought about sex. But if she wanted to retain a sense of her value as a person outside of that context, she’d better believe that there was more.

‘The point is,’ Pierce said, ‘that evidently someone – one of my colleagues perhaps – had told the police that I’d been furious at Bree for leaving Caloco, especially so abruptly.’

‘And were you?’

Pierce looked at his wife, then nodded. ‘Pretty mad, yes. Betrayed, hurt, all of it. But that was personal.’

‘But her leaving? Changing sides in these gas additive wars I keep hearing about. That was business.’

Pierce wore a look of amused toleration. ‘And you think that the big bad oil companies got together and, because she’d had a philosophical change of heart, we decided to kill her?’

Hardy had to smile himself. ‘Actually, hearing it out loud it doesn’t sound too plausible.’

‘It’s completely absurd,’ Carrie said. ‘Regardless of what you may hear on the radio, murder isn’t really one of Caloco’s business tools. Or any of the seven sisters.’

‘Seven sisters?’

Pierce explained. ‘That’s what they call us, the spin-offs of Standard Oil after antitrust broke up the mother company. But none of the sisters would have any reason to kill Bree or anybody else. Frankly we don’t need to.’

Hardy said it mildly. ‘Even for three billion dollars?’

Pierce had on his tolerant face, the one Hardy supposed he used for the public. ‘And what is that figure, three billion dollars? Where does that come from?’

‘That’s the number I’ve been hearing. Isn’t that the yearly income from this gas additive everyone’s fighting about?’

‘MTBE?’

‘That’s the one.’

Pierce nodded. ‘That sounds about right. Three billion.’ He pulled out a stool, sat on it and indicated Hardy take one, too. Which he did. Carrie excused herself and moved over to the main counter to pour more coffee.

Hardy tried not to follow her movements, but it was not easy. He tore his eyes away, back to Pierce. ‘So my point is that that’s a lot of money. And if Bree led the charge against this stuff…’

But Pierce was shaking his head. ‘No.’ He lifted his hand, ticking off the points on his fingers. ‘First, Bree didn’t have anything like that kind of power. She wrote our drafts, she was a great and persuasive spokesperson, but Jesus Christ himself could come down and say MTBE was the devil and it wouldn’t just go away. The stuff has cleaned up the air unbelievably. It works, Mr Hardy. The EPA loves it. Hell, it mandates it – that’s a long way from being outlawed. It’s not going away because one woman says it might have side effects, which, PS, is nowhere near proved. Second, and this is always a tough one to sell, but three billion really isn’t all that much money.’

Hardy had to reply. ‘Three billion! We’re talking three billion dollars.’

Pierce nodded. ‘It’s all relative. It’s mixed into gas at eleven per cent. And basically the stuff’s only used in California, and only for half the year at that. So you do the math. Three billion represents about ten per cent of half of California’s gasoline bill. It’s a drop in the bucket.’

‘You’re telling me you wouldn’t miss three billion dollars?’

‘Somebody in some department might notice, but long-term? That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s nothing.’

Carrie came back over with an urn of coffee, china cups and saucers, sugar, and cream on a silver platter. ‘It’s the hardest part of Jim’s job, Mr Hardy. Making people see that this isn’t all about money. They think because we make a profit that we must be evil. But Jim hired Bree to do good, to find out how to make a better product, better for the world. No one seems to understand that. And that cost billions, too, to re-tool the refineries-’

Pierce reached over and patted her hand. ‘What Carrie’s saying is that it’s a complicated issue. It’s true that we’ve spent billions developing MTBE and for a while everyone was thrilled with it. It seemed to be doing the job. Now some questions have come up and we’re looking into them. But the point is that we’re committed to clean fuels and if it turns out that we have to develop some new refining tool, we’ll do that, even if it costs billions, which it will because everything costs billions. That’s the price of admission in this league.’

He took a sip of his coffee. ‘But the other point, Mr Hardy, is that Bree getting a case of the doubts is no reason on God’s earth for any oil company to do anything, much less have her killed. And that’s essentially what I told the police.’

Hardy picked up his own cup and took a drink. Most of what Pierce said made logical sense if he accepted the premise that three billion dollars wasn’t a lot of money, but that remained a bit of a leap. ‘I once figured out how long it would take to count to a billion,’ he said. ‘If you did nothing else. One number every half second, twelve hours a day. You want to guess?’